Sectarian tension flared anew in Iraq on Friday as 19 Shiites were brutally gunned down east of Baghdad while Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari appealed for calm.
In what looked like a sectarian attack, 19 workers from two brick factories in Nahrawan were shot through the head around nightfall Thursday by gunmen who also went on a rampage at a nearby power station.
An interior ministry official said the bodies of several more workers were still lying near the factories as local police were unable to collect them until they got back-up from US forces.
The latest killings took place in an area where 47 men were shot dead, for reasons still unknown, eight days ago.
As reports of the killings trickled in, security forces in Baghdad were enforcing a ban on vehicles traffic to guard against a resurgence in sectarian violence during the Muslim day of prayer. The ban was lifted at 4 pm (1300 GMT).
Hundreds have died in communal bloodshed since a revered Shiite shrine north of Baghdad was bombed 10 days ago.
Jaafari called on clerics to speak out during Friday sermons for peace and warned them against using inflammatory language that could spark a new outburst in sectarian strife between the majority Shiite and minority Sunni communities.
"We call on imams to adopt a language of peace and to insist on the unity of all Iraqis, rejecting violence and sectarian strife," Jaafari said on television.
"The government will be unforgiving with those who advocate violence," he warned.
"Imams must avoid sparking violent reactions from their flocks as that in turn would lead to counter reactions," he said.
For their part imams of different confessions variously attacked the United States, Iran and Jews for the latest wave of violence in Iraq.
"No Arab or Iraqi could have carried out the bombing of the Shiite Ali al-Hadi mausoleum in Samarra, or the recent bloody attacks in the capital," said Sheikh Ahmad Hassan Taha in his sermon at Samarra's main Sunni mosque.
"It's a plot by the Jews and by people from neighbouring Iran to foster sectarian strife," he said, adding that "nothing divides Sunnis and Shiites" in Iraq.
The imam of the Shiite Bayah mosque, Sheikh Hassan al-Jabiri, suggested that "Iraq is the theatre of an ideological war waged by worldly arrogance," a term used in Iran to finger the United States.
Jaafari, meanwhile, is under pressure after Sunni and Kurdish factions opposed his staying on to head the next government of national unity, yet to be formed over two months after elections.
The key factor against the doctor-turned-politician is his inability to curb violence since he became the premier last year.
A Sunni party spokesman warned that Iraq's dominant political group, the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, would run into trouble in parliament if it insisted on re-selecting Jaafari as premier.
"We hope our brothers in the Alliance will look objectively at our reservations concerning Jaafari," Thafer al-Ami, a spokesman for the National Concord Front, the main Sunni alliance, said.
"We think that in the end they'll understand our point of view and will be broad-minded enough, otherwise Jaafari's chances in parliament will be slim."
The prime minister comes from the leading political group but must win a confidence vote in parliament once he has formed his cabinet.
The Shiite alliance won 128 of parliament's 275 seats in the December elections, less than the absolute majority, and will have to form an alliance with other factions in order to govern.
Political leaders, backed by the United States, have called for a broad-based "national unity" government involving the minority Sunnis and Kurds to help end violence.
On Thursday the warring groups wrote to the Shiite Alliance to reject Jaafari.
"We are waiting for an official, written reply from the Shiite list and then we will see, but the key point is that even half the Shiite members of their alliance do not want him," Mahmud Othman, a senior Kurdish parliamentarian said.
"If the Shiites do not change him, he will find it difficult to form the next cabinet. Will he form it in the sky?," Othman asked.
Last month, Jaafari was re-selected by just one vote.
In other violence, an Iraqi soldier was killed Friday in the northern city of Kirkuk, while two policemen from Kirkuk itself were found dead after being kidnapped Thursday, security officials said.
Meanwhile, Iraqi border guards were hunting in the southern desert of Samawa for five men blamed for last week's foiled suicide attack on the world's largest oil-processing plant in neighbouring Saudi Arabia.
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