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Some leaders of Iraq's warring sects are urging their followers to step back from the brink, but not everybody is listening. The violence that racked the country in the hours after the Samarra explosion subsided briefly after the imposition of a daytime curfew last Friday but soon flared up again. The radical Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr publicly called on his Mahdi Army militia, which perpetrated much of the anti-Sunni violence in Baghdad, to halt their attacks. But having endured so much pain at the hands of Sunni militants, many moderate Shi'ite leaders are reluctant to entrust security to government forces. A statement released by Grand Ayatullah Ali Husaini Sistani, Iraq's most revered cleric, called for nationwide demonstrations and seven days of mourning. It added that if the government was unable to protect religious sites, "then the believers will do it, with the help of God." Bush described Sistani's statement as "constructive and very important," but to Sunni ears, it sounded like a call for the Shi'ites to take the law into their own hands. A source close to Sistani told TIME that "he feels that the situation has become unbearable and says it has become too hard to control the streets."
The U.S. may have little choice but to try to take them back. The seeming inability of the U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces to quell the violence was especially worrying to U.S. commanders, since any U.S. withdrawal is predicated on Iraq's taking charge of its own security. Just as disturbing was the reappearance of Shi'ite militias on the streets, flaunting their weapons and often riding along with police and military patrols. A former high-level Bush Administration official told TIME that the violence may scuttle White House hopes of reducing troop levels this year. "It's unrealistic to think 2006 is a year of transition," he says. "What's holding things together and preventing this spark from turning into civil war is the presence of our troops in large numbers." But he doubts the White House is ready to concede publicly that it may not be able to bring substantial numbers of troops home. "I don't think they've come to terms with that yet. They need to see more of what they've seen over the last few days to come to terms with that."
However shocking in scale and ferocity, the eruption of sectarian violence last week was not totally unexpected. For months, hundreds of dead bodies have been turning up in streets, ditches and sewers in and around Baghdad--most of them bearing unmistakable signs of military-style execution. Almost all the dead are Sunni males, many of whom had been arrested by men wearing police uniforms. Sunni politicians have long blamed those deaths on Shi'ite death squads operating within Iraqi police and security forces. U.S. officials now privately concede that the death squads may indeed exist. In response to mounting allegations that Shi'ite militants were carrying out atrocities against Sunnis with the knowledge, if not the support, of the Shi'ite-run Interior Ministry, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad last week threatened to block U.S. funding to Iraq if the new government didn't turn away from sectarianism. "We are not going to invest the resources of the American people to build forces run by people who are sectarian."