Iraq plagued by signs of looming civil war

"The events over the past few days are very alarming," Joost Hiltermann, Middle East director of the International Crisis Group, told AFP.

"To me it is a sectarian conflict in which people are being killed. It is a low-intensity conflict at the moment, or a low-level civil war. It can get much worse."

Sectarian violence in Baghdad hit an unprecedented low on Sunday with the cold-blooded massacre in a largely Sunni quarter of 42 people by masked men in civilian clothes, followed by a double car-bombing on a Shia mosque which killed 19 people and wounded 59.

And the killing continued on Monday.

A triple attack on the capital's most populous Shia neighbourhood of Sadr City claimed 10 lives, and was swiftly followed by a market bombing in the Sunni Sheik Omar district that wounded 14.

As in all civil wars, each community says it is being victimised by the other.

Shia MP Hamid Rashid Moala called the attacks on his community's places of worship "the worst crimes", and accused Sunni militants and loyalists of ousted president Saddam Hussein of wanting to plunge the country "into civil war".

Those in the opposing camp feel equally victimised. The main Sunni Arab parliamentary bloc, the National Concord Front, charged that Sunnis were being chased out of the largely Shia main southern city of Basra and that Sunni teachers were being "systematically targeted".

"If these divisions are allowed to spread they will burn the fertile and barren land alike," said the bloc's leader Adnan al-Dulaimi.

Another Sunni Arab MP, Iyad al-Samarrai, talked of a "conspiracy to divide Iraq by creating a civil war."

But for Nabil Mohammed Yunis, professor of international studies at Baghdad University, "this is not a civil war -- it is a war of the militias.

"It is the militias who are fighting each other and not common people who are neighbours or those walking on the streets of Baghdad who are killing each other.

"It is very difficult to get the common people involved in a civil war," he insisted, but "the militias are definitely pushing them into it".

Discussion forums on the Internet have begun dispensing advice on how to survive the sectarianism now plaguing the country.