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BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Two bombs killed 22 people in northern Iraq on Friday as the government tried to tamp down violence and head off civil war a day after Sunni-Arab insurgents killed 215 people in an attack on Baghdad's Sadr City slum that intensified Shiite anger at the United States. The blasts in Tal Afar, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad, involved explosives hidden in a parked car and in a suicide belt worn by a pedestrian that detonated simultaneously outside a car dealership at 11 a.m., said police Brig. Khalaf al-Jubouri. He said the casualties - 22 dead, 26...

BAGHDAD, Iraq: The Association of Muslim Scholars on Friday called on Sunni politicians to quit the government and parliament, a day after the Shiite interior minister issued an arrest warrant for the association's leader. Association spokesman Abdul-Salam al-Kubaisi said the arrest warrant was a cover for "the acts of the government's security agencies that kill dozens of Iraqis every day."

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - 1123dv-iraq-sadr-attack Shiite militiamen doused six Sunni Arabs with kerosene and burned them alive as Iraqi soldiers stood by, and killed 19 other Sunnis in attacks on their mosques Friday, taking revenge for the slaughter of at least 215 Shiites in the Sadr City slum the day before. The mosque attacks came after the government, in a desperate attempt to avert civil war, imposed a sweeping curfew on the capital, shut down the international airport and closed the country's main outlet to the shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf. The Mahdi Army militiamen, armed with machines guns...

Who do you blame now?: The real question facing Iraqis by John David Powell Several years ago, a fellow proclaimed in a best-selling book that he learned in kindergarten all there is to know about life. I wonder if he had daughters, because life with daughters can teach lessons much darker than any found in kindergarten. The news over Thanksgiving reminded me of a column I’ve wanted to write for a few months. Sectarian violence in Iraq resulted in the fiery murders of more than 200 Shiite and Sunni Muslims. A radical legislator declared that the United States was to...

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=18521 Palestinians brutally targeted in Iraq, Palestinians face rape, torture, death in post-2003 Iraq, desperately in need of help to leave county.

AMMAN, Jordan -- Jordan's King Abdullah II called for renewed efforts to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a speech Tuesday, a day before he meets President Bush, but he warned that his country would not accept a deal that causes an influx of Palestinians.