Iraqis are defiant, but impatient

BAGHDAD --The wave of violence that has killed almost 300 Iraqis in nine days has left the country defiant toward insurgents, yet impatient with a new government that has not set a clear plan to stop the carnage.

The killings are also hardening divisions between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim factions about whether to overhaul the police and army by dismissing large numbers of former Ba'ath Party members, as many newly empowered Shi'ites demand.

The death toll continued to mount yesterday. A pair of suicide bombers targeting a US convoy in a busy central square killed 22 people, including two American contractors. One of the bombs ripped into a minibus full of schoolgirls, among the 36 wounded.

Against the violent backdrop, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari announced yesterday that he would submit to the National Assembly today six more names for his Cabinet, in an effort to end more than three months of bickering over the new government.

Jaafari did not reveal the names, but several politicians said Sunnis were in line for several of the posts, including that of defense minister.

As attacks surged after most of the new Cabinet was named on April 28, many Iraqis spoke of the violence, and how to combat it, in increasingly sectarian terms. That was a shift in rhetoric that Iraqi and US officials fear because it could turn the fight against the insurgency into a clash among ethnic groups.

Many Shi'ites last week attributed the violence to former members of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated Ba'ath Party, saying that hard-line Ba'athists plan the attacks and that former Ba'athists in the government do not stop them. They reserved harsh criticism for officials, especially Sunnis, who, they say, have not taken strong enough action against potential insurgent informers and sympathizers within the Iraqi security forces.

''All Ba'athists are criminals," said Ahmed Maithem Rasul, 19, a police officer who was shot in the stomach when gunmen ambushed police Thursday in Baghdad, killing eight.

From his bed at Yarmouk Hospital, surrounded by Shi'ite relatives who vowed to pursue his attackers ''even if we have to chase them to hell," Rasul said he believes the attack on his checkpoint, just as officers were changing shifts, had been aided by leaks from inside the police.

''The police institutions should be cleaned out," he said. ''Most of them [the officials] are from the former regime."

But Sunnis publicly expressed fears that the new Shi'ite-dominated government would use a purge against Ba'athists as an excuse to intimidate the Sunni minority. And Interior Ministry officials, holdovers from the outgoing government, argued that the recent violence showed that it would be a bad time to make radical changes in the security forces.

The wave of violence began the day after the 275-member National Assembly named a new Cabinet, more than three months after elections handed a majority of seats to a bloc of Shi'ite-led Islamist parties.

The attacks have sharpened disagreements over the future of security policy as Jaafari's Cabinet takes over from the government of the US-appointed interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi.

A secular Shi'ite and former Ba'athist, Allawi rehired many police and army officials who had served under Hussein's regime, saying he needed their expertise.

Now, at the Interior Ministry, which controls the police, employees say they are in suspense: The new minister, Bayan Jabr, is a senior member of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Shi'ite party that most vocally opposed Allawi's hiring policy. Several party leaders also vowed to give a major security role to members of the party's Badr Brigade, founded to fight Hussein from Iran in the 1980s. That prospect frightens many Sunnis.

But Shi'ite officials who campaigned on promises to aggressively purge the police and the army tempered that position last week, perhaps responding to pressure from US officials who argue that a purge could be disruptive.

''We are not going to fire everyone who is a Ba'athist Some are efficient," Ali al-Dabbagh, a senior Shi'ite bloc member, said in an interview Friday. ''We are against people who are not efficient."

Yet members of the Shi'ite rank-and-file police, low-level Interior Ministry officials, and political party workers -- called last week for a purge, in increasingly explicit terms.

At the headquarters of the Badr Brigade, Mohsen Yusef, a clerk, said yesterday that he believed 5,500 of the 6,000 employees at the Interior Ministry's central headquarters should be transferred to other jobs.

''This is a clean government, a pure government, not like the former one," said Yusef, who has handled dozens of appeals from Shi'ites who want the Badr group to help them get police jobs. He criticized the former interior minister, Falah al-Naqib, who had hired a largely Sunni force of commandos, many from the Sunni Triangle town of Samarra; the force has been called by turns effective and brutal. ''Naqib brought Sunnis close to him and hired anyone from Samarra and fired the Shi'ites," Yusef said.

Even as they tried to calm fears of an all-out purge, officials like Dabbagh aimed harsher barbs at the past government than they had before. ''All the security forces have people associated with the former regime. There was no serious action to stop such corruption," Dabbagh said.

At the Interior Ministry, General Ahmed Ali al-Khafaji, a deputy interior minister who was spent years in the Badr Brigades fighting Hussein, said he wanted to fire only the people who had not delivered good results. But his aides said the ministry was filled with tension as officials waited to see if all but ''pure and clean" people would be purged.

''This should have been done a long time ago," said one, who did not give his name because he was not authorized to speak.

Sunnis and secular Shi'ites say that they are uncomfortable with such talk, and that they worry that the Shi'ite Islamists will misuse their power over the police.

''The political language in Iraq has started to be similar to Iran in 1979 when Khomeini took power," said Jawad al-Rubaie, a Shi'ite who is part of a mainly Sunni alliance of tribal leaders. A Shi'ite ''takeover," he said, will lead to arrests of Ba'athists and other disorder.

Members of the Dialogue Council, an organization pushing to put more Sunnis in the government, expressed outrage when Interior Ministry forces raided their headquarters the day after the new minister was named. Shi'ite leaders, however, said the raid was carried out by ''people against us" within the ministry, in an attempt to make Shi'ites look vengeful.

In Baghdad's Liberation Square yesterday, the charred hulls of several sport utility vehicles lay smoking next to the burned-out school van, still littered with mathematics books.

Ahmed Nashmi, whose nearby camera shop was damaged in the blasts, declared, ''This is the terrorism which is brought to us by the coward Saddamists with no ethics, morals, or sense of national dignity."

Khafaji, the deputy Interior Minister, said the solution for the insurgency is to reach out to Sunnis. ''Iraq is a bird with three wings," he said, referring to the main ethnic groups, Shi'ite Arabs, Kurds, and Sunni Arabs. ''Now one of the wings is out of order."

The government must address Sunni unemployment and anger to beat the insurgency, he said. ''The Shi'ites were oppressed. But no, A thousand times no, we will not return the injustice."

Globe correspondents Sa'ad Al-Izzi and Asmaa Waguih contributed to this report. Wire service material was also used.