BAGHDAD, (Reuters) – More than 1,000 people were killed in violence in Iraq in May, making it the deadliest month since the sectarian slaughter of 2006-07, the United Nations reported yesterday, stoking fears of a return to civil war.
Nearly 2,000 people have been killed in the last two months as al Qaeda and Sunni Islamist insurgents, invigorated by the Sunni-led revolt in Syria and by Sunni discontent at home, seek to revive the kind of all-out inter-communal conflict that killed tens of thousands five years ago.
“That is a sad record,” Martin Kobler, the UN envoy in Baghdad, said in a statement. “Iraqi political leaders must act immediately to stop this intolerable bloodshed.”
This week multiple bombings battered Shi’ite and Sunni areas of the capital Baghdad, killing nearly 100 people.
Most of the 1,045 people killed in May were civilians, UN figures showed.
The UN toll is higher than a Reuters estimate of 600 deaths based on police and hospital officials. Such counts can vary depending on sourcing, while numbers often increase beyond initial estimates as wounded people die.
The renewed bloodletting reflects worsening tensions between Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government and the Sunni minority, seething with resentment at their treatment since Saddam Hussein was overthrown by the US-led invasion of 2003 and later hanged.
Al Qaeda’s local wing and other Sunni armed groups are now regaining ground lost during their battle with US troops who pulled out in December 2011 nearly a decade after the invasion that empowered the long-suppressed Shi’ite majority.
At the height of Iraq’s sectarian violence, when Baghdad was carved up between Sunni and Shi’ite gunmen who preyed on rival communities, the monthly death count sometimes topped 3,000.
Officials in Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government say al Qaeda’s wing, Islamic State of Iraq, and Naqshbandi insurgents linked to ex-officers in Saddam’s army, are now trying to provoke a Shi’ite militia reaction.
Security officials believe Shi’ite militias such as Mehdi Army, Asaib al-Haq and Kataeb Hizballah have mostly kept out of the fray. But militia commanders say they are prepared to act.
Since April, bombings and attacks have targeted Shi’ite and Sunni mosques and neighbourhoods in Baghdad and other cities, as well as security forces and even moderate Sunni leaders.
Many Iraqis, especially in Baghdad, fear a return of death squads, with shops closing early and extra security measures.
