Iraqi Government warns of endless civil war

Iraq's Defence Minister warned yesterday of a "civil war" that "will never end" and said he was ready to put tanks on the streets as sectarian violence flared despite a second day of curfew in Baghdad.

Extending a traffic ban in the capital to Monday after battles around Sunni mosques and a car bomb in a holy Shiite city, leaders scrambled to break a round of reprisals sparked by a suspected al-Qaeda bombing of a Shiite shrine on Wednesday.

The gravest crisis since the US invasion in 2003 threatens Washington's hopes of withdrawing its 136,000 troops from Iraq.

"If there is a civil war in this country it will never end," Defence Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi, a minority Sunni Muslim in the Shiite-led interim government, told a news conference.

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This was all predicted. Its the very reason George Bush Sr. didn't invade Iraq after booting Saddam from Kuwait. Instead of listening to his father, Junior took his lessons from the neocon assholes actually running the White House and the country. We are in very deep trouble.