Religious leaders summoned Iraq’s Shi’ites and Sunnis to joint prayer services on Friday amid an extraordinary daytime curfew aimed at halting a wave of sectarian violence that has killed nearly 130 people since the bombing of Askariya one of Shi’ite Islam’s holiest shrines.The curfew was aimed at preventing people from attending the week’s most important Muslim prayer service, which officials feared could be both a target for attacks and a venue for stirring sectarian feelings.Such sweeping daytime restrictions indicated the depth of fear within the government that the crisis could touch off a Sunni-Shi’ite civil war. Police and soldiers blocked major roads and surrounded Baghdad’s two main Sunni mosques as streets throughout this city of nearly seven million emptied of people and traffic.Residents in Samarra, where the shrine bombing took place on Wednesday, were instructed to stay indoors “until further notice”. In the southern Shi’ite heartland, over 10,000 people converged on Basra’s Al Adillah mosque, where a representative of Iraq’s top Shi’ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, called another joint service with Sunnis.In Basra, where the curfew was not in effect, gunmen on Friday kidnapped three children of a Shi’ite legislator, police said. But there was little sign of the curfew in Sadr City, where militiamen loyal to radical Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have been out in force since Wednesday’s attack. —AP
