A daytime curfew has been imposed in Baghdad as Iraqi authorities desperately try to quell sectarian violence and prevent the country going to the brink of civil war.


Iraqi state television announced that the extraordinary curfew would order people off the streets of the capital until 4pm on Friday, preventing many residents from attending the week"s most important Muslim prayer service.

The curfew will also apply to three other provinces including Samarra, where the bombing of a Shia shrine on Wednesday sparked two days of violence that has killed more than 130 people so far.



Suspected Al-Qaeda linked militants bombed the 1000-year-old Imam Ali al-Hadi mausoleum, provoking a wave of reprisal attacks on Sunni mosques nationwide and scores of brutal killings.


Appeal for calm

In one of the worst single incidents, gunmen killed 47 civilians at a makeshift checkpoint on a Thursday and dumped their bodies in a ditch.


Sectarian tensions remain high. Both Shia and Sunni leaders appealed for calm but blamed the violence on each other, each claiming they were the victim.


The hardline Sunni clerical Association of Muslim Scholars

said at least 168 Sunni mosques had been attacked, 10 imams

killed and 15 abducted since the Samarra attack.

The Interior Ministry said it could only confirm figures for Baghdad, where it had reports of 19 mosques attacked, one cleric killed and one abducted.

Sectarian tensions run high even
after two days of violence

Spokesman Abdul-Salam al-Kubaisi blamed the violence on the country"s top Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and other religious leaders who called for demonstrations against the attack.

Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia radical, told Aljazeera from Qom, Iran, that Sunnis should join Shiites in pledging not to kill fellow Muslims to distance themselves from "takfiris" - Sunni extremists who target Shias.

"Voices of reason"

Ibrahim Jaafari, Iraqi prime minister, had proclaimed three days of national mourning and decreed that Thursday would be a public holiday in a bid to get people off the streets.



Meanwhile, George Bush, the US president, denounced the bombing of the Shia shrine as a "political act" meant to sow "civil strife" and appealed for an end to the violence.



He said: "The voices of reason from all aspects of Iraqi life understand that this bombing is intended to create civil strife, that the act was an evil act."

Washington is keen to prevent an all-out sectarian war as it looks to extract around 130,000 US troops from Iraq.

Seven US soldiers died in a pair of roadside bombings north of Baghdad, during the recent violence according to US military sources.