Iraqi Shi'ite, Sunni friendship meal ends in death

Baghdad, Apr 24: Just hours after Iraq's prime minister-designate promised to unite Iraqis yesterday, three Shi'ite brothers and two Sunni brothers went out to dinner together.

It was an uplifting gathering in a country where sectarian mistrust deepens after every bombing, shooting and kidnapping.

But the harsh reality of Iraq caught up with the group of friends just after they paid the check and left the restaurant.

Gunmen in cars pulled up and shot them dead in plain view of the public, police said. Relatives who washed the bodies for burial said their eyes had been gouged out and hands bound.

Friendships were forgotten the next day as vows of revenge whipped up an already emotional crowd at the funeral for the Shi'ite brothers -- Iyad, Ali and Mohammad Yazan.

There appeared to be no compassion for the Sunni Arab brothers -- Omar and Hakam Khudeir -- even though they were victims of the same hail of bullets.

Instead, memories of Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime, which oppressed Shi'ites, came back to haunt them as they mourned.

Rage then shifted to Sunni Wahhabis, Arab militants who cross over into Iraq to blow themselves up in suicide missions that have killed many thousands of Shi'ites.

There was no talk of the promised non-sectarian family of Iraqis that Prime Minister-designate Jawad al-Maliki said he would create after he was asked to form an administration.

''Since Saddam's time each Shi'ite house loses four or five people who are killed (by Sunnis),'' said Karim Salim, whose desire for revenge extended beyond Iraq's Sunnis.

''The Shi'ites call for revenge. We call on the government to open the borders so we can cross over and do what we need to do with all Sunnis.'' Mourners carried the three Shi'ite brothers and a relative who was with them at the restaurant in crude wooden coffins in Baghdad's Sadr City slum, named after a revered cleric believed killed by Saddam's agents in 1980.

Somewhere across Baghdad, the Sunni brothers were probably in their own coffins surrounded by weeping and angry relatives caught up in violence that has left hundreds of bodies on the streets since the February bombing of a Shi'ite shrine.

No one knows why the gunmen killed the group of friends or even if it was a sectarian slaying since both Sunnis and Shi'ites died.

Maybe it was personal? Those are questions often asked by grieving relatives in Iraq.

But in a land many fear will slip inexorably toward a civil war unless Maliki forms a government that can unite Iraqis, their questions are rarely answered.

Reuters