Shiite Mob in Iraq Claims Newspaper Bias, Sets Alight Kurdish Party Office

By: Armed assailants ransacked and burned a provincial office of the Iraqi president's Kurdish party on Friday, accusing its official newspaper of unfairly criticizing a Shiite cleric, police said.

Also Friday, the U.S. military said the bodies of two American service members missing after a helicopter crash had been found in Anbar province west of Baghdad.

The raid on the Kurdish party office was further evidence of the sectarian and ethnic divisions in Iraq that have exploded into violence, mostly terrorizing Shiite and Sunni Arabs. The largely Sunni Kurds are a separate, non-Arab ethnic group.

The rising sectarian and communal violence is costing about 1,000 lives every month in the Baghdad area alone, raising fears of all-out civil war.

About 50 gunmen loyal to Shiite cleric Ayatollah Mohammed al-Yacoubi stormed the office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, headed by President Jalal Talabani, beat up the guards and destroyed furniture before setting the building on fire, said police Lt. Othman al-Lami.

The attackers fled after seizing three AK-47 rifles from the guards, one of whom was injured, al-Lami said. There were no officials in the office during the early morning raid.

The raid was further evidence of the sectarian and ethnic divisions in Iraq that have exploded into violence, mostly terrorizing Shiite and Sunni Arabs. The largely Sunni Kurds are a separate, non-Arab ethnic group.

The rising sectarian and communal violence is costing about 1,000 lives every month in the Baghdad area alone, raising fears of allout civil war.

The offending article in the PUK newspaper included a July 29 statement by al-Yacoubi in which he accused Kurds in the Kurdish-dominated Kirkuk province of attacking Arabs and Turkomans. The article said al-Yacoubi was spreading "hatred against the Kurds" and trying to "ignite a war between the Arab Shiites and Kurds."

In a statement Friday, Talabani acknowledged that some of the phrases used in his party newspaper's article were "inappropriate ... despite the bitterness that he and every Kurdish felt" over al-Yacoubi's statement.

He said he was not aware of the article's contents until it was published.

Al-Yacoubi, the spiritual leader of the Fadhila, or Virtue, party, which is part of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shiite alliance, was not immediately available for comment.

However, the Fadhila is demanding an official apology from the PUK, said party spokesman Sabah al-Saiedi. Al-Yacoubi is urging his followers not to resort to violence, al-Saiedi said, after a party delegation met Friday with Talabani.

The U.S. military gave no details of the recovery of the American soldiers bodies from the helicopter crash, except to say they had been recovered from the wreckage.

They had been missing since a UH60 Blackhawk helicopter went down Tuesday in an undisclosed body of water during a routine flight west of the capital. Four others were injured in the crash, which was not believed caused by hostile fire.

Confirmation of the deaths raised to 2,597 the number of U.S. military personnel that have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

On Friday, gunmen shot and killed three people in Baghdad and one in the northern city of Mosul in separate incidents, police said. Also, three unidentified bodies were found in Baghdad Friday.