Baghdad Is Quiet, But Defiant

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 3, 2006 — -- The ban on traffic made for a chilling silence throughout most of Baghdad today. But in the sprawling Shiite slum of Sadr City, there was defiance.

Residents there drove, and clerics at Friday prayers ignored the prime minister's plea to preach peace.

"The government asks us to preach unity," a clergyman said, "but they're the ones who spit on the Iraqi people."

The Iraqi government's extraordinary efforts -- the curfews, the traffic bans -- have not stopped the horrible cycle of violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

In a small town just south of Baghdad last night, at least 25 Shiite men were gunned down. Hundreds of civilians, both Shiites and Sunnis, have been killed since the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine last week.

Many Iraqis fear the recent bloodshed is particularly ominous because it divides mainstream Sunnis and Shiites who have coexisted peacefully, often intermarrying, as they have for generations in Zayuna, a mixed neighborhood in Baghdad.

"We are all Muslims," one woman said, "and we are all brothers."

Last week armed men came to a Sunni mosque in Zayuna where Sunnis and Shiites have prayed together for generations. They set fire to the mosque and killed three worshippers, transforming what had been a peaceful community into a place of gloom and terror.

And the violence feeds off itself. After a car bombing in Baghdad yesterday, Jabar Abded Taha, an Iraqi Shiite sheik and resident of Sadr City, told ABC News, "We will not allow for this to happen again, or we will return the attack doubled."

The director of the Baghdad morgue is busy these days. "The dead people we receive, Sunni, Shiites and Christians," he said, "they are all Iraqis, and you cannot distinguish which sect they belong to."