{{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 on Saturday, raising fears of a return to civil war.}}<\/p>\n
“That is a sad record,” Martin Kobler, the U.N. envoy in Baghdad, said in a statement. “Iraqi political leaders must act immediately to stop this intolerable bloodshed.”<\/p>\n
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 neighboring Syria and by Iraqi Sunni discontent at home, seek to revive the kind of all-out inter-communal conflict that killed tens of thousands in 2006-2007.<\/p>\n
Just this week, multiple bombings battered Shi’ite and Sunni neighborhoods in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, where at least 70 people were killed on Monday and 25 on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The renewed bloodletting reflects worsening tensions between Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government and its Sunni minority, seething with resentment at their treatment since Saddam Hussein was overthrown by the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 and later hanged.<\/p>\n
Al Qaeda’s local wing and other Sunni armed groups are now regaining ground lost during the long battle with U.S. troops.<\/p>\n
An Iraqi army raid on a Sunni protest camp in the town of Hawija in April ignited violence that killed more than 700 people in that month, by a U.N. count. That had been the highest monthly toll in almost five years until it was exceeded in May.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
{reuters}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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