Baghdad crowds stone Iraqi PM
The curfew was imposed in Baghdad earlier this week
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Sunday, 26, Nov 2006 08:10
Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki's motorcade was pelted with stones by angry crowds in Baghdad this afternoon.
The unprecedented show of public feeling against the leading of the Iraqi government came as Mr Al-Maliki visited the Sadr City area of Baghdad where over 200 people died in bomb attacks on Thursday.
Crowds thronged around the motorcade, shouting and mocking the leader inside. The prime minister did not get out of his vehicle.
Earlier today Mr Al-Maliki attacked his country's politicians for their failure to provide the political unity necessary to prevent Iraq's ongoing bloodshed.
A key ally of Mr Maliki, cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, is threatening to withdraw his Shia group from the Iraqi government if a planned meeting between the prime minister and US president George Bush goes ahead this week.
Officials extended a curfew imposed on Baghdad until Monday, meanwhile, as part of an attempt to combat a wave of violence which has seen hundreds of people killed in the troubled nation within the past three days.
The curfew was imposed on Thursday, after more than 200 people were killed when a series of car bomb attacks rocked the Sadr City area of Baghdad, the capital's largest Shia district.
Meanwhile, violence has spread outside Baghdad, with security sources revealing yesterday that the bodies of 21 men and boys had been found in a Sunni dominated village within the Diyala province, north of the capital. Police said that the victims were killed after gunmen broke into two Shia homes and shot the men in front of their relatives.
Continuing instability forced Iraqi president Jalal Talabani to postpone a trip to Iran to discuss Iraq's security situation with his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the wake of the continued closure of Baghdad's airport.
US and Iraqi forces also said that they had killed more than 50 insurgents in raids within the same region, while the American military confirmed that a US serviceman was killed along with three Iraqi civilians, two of them children, after a suicide car bomber attacked a checkpoint in Iraq's central Anbar province, west of Baghdad.
News of the latest violence in the region follows the publication of details of a leaked US government report, which apparently warns that insurgency in Iraq is now financially "self-sustaining".
According to the New York Times, the classified report warns that groups responsible for insurgent and terror attacks are raising between $70 million (£36 million) to $200 million (£104 million) a year to sustain their efforts through illegal activities such as oil smuggling, kidnapping and fraud, often aided by ""corrupt and complicit" Iraqi officials.