THEY HAVE lived side by side for generations, but the small farming communities south of Baghdad are being split apart by a vicious sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shias that many Iraqis fear could be a step on the path to civil war.

As politicians in Baghdad struggle to bring the communities back from the brink, fresh accounts are emerging from the fertile area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers south of the capital of the latest cycle of violence.

Abu Yassin, 33, a labourer, is typical of a new class of Shia refugee. This year he fled his home in the southern Baghdad suburb of Dora after his brother was killed, and was told that he would be next if he attended the funeral. “(Sunni) gunmen announced that Dora was the new Fallujah, the terrorist headquarters,” he said from the Shia holy city of Najaf, where he has moved with his family. “Even the preachers in the mosques were encouraging people to attack the Shias. It was much too dangerous to stay on there.”

The Shias can rightly claim to have taken the brunt of the sectarian violence, which began last year with bombing attacks in packed mosques during one of their main religious festivals. In recent weeks scores of Shia bodies have been discovered near the town of Madaen, in the so-called “Triangle of Death” south of Baghdad. Over the past six months thousands of Shias are thought to have fled the area.

Until recently the Shias did not respond to the provocation, appearing to heed their religious authorities, who said that retaliation could plunge the country into civil war and jeopardise their political victory in January’s elections.

Now Sunnis say that restraint has ended. Last week around 50 bodies of murdered Shias and Sunnis, including 15 Sunni Arabs with links to the Muslim Scholars’ Board, were dumped in Baghdad. They included the body of Sheikh Hassan al-Neimi, a Sunni cleric who had been arrested by men in police uniforms.

His death was blamed on the Badr Brigade, an Iranian-trained force whose Shia leaders are ministers in the Government. It led to a three-day strike by Sunnis, who refused to pray in their own mosques, and to calls for Bayan Jabr, the Interior Minister, to resign.

“The Shias are taking over everything,” Kamel Daoud, 41, a taxi driver from the notorious town of Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, said. “They are seizing our mosques. They are preventing Sunnis from getting government jobs. They dominate the police and National Guard. They spy for the Americans. This is all part of their plan to eject us from our land.”

As fears grow that sectarian passions could spiral out of control, leaders on both sides appear to be pulling back from the brink. On Saturday more than 1,000 Sunni religious, political and tribal figures met in Baghdad to create a new umbrella organisation that will co-operate with the Shia-led Government and negotiate over a new constitution.

“The country needs Sunnis to join politics,” Adnan al-Dulaimi, a leading Sunni figure, told the conference. “The Sunnis are ready to participate. Iraq is not sectarian.”

This is exactly the language that Washington been waiting to hear. “They have peered over the edge and they do not like what they see. Now people are pulling back,” an American official in Baghdad said.

Nevertheless, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the fugitive Jordanian terrorist leader, and his followers have said that they will continue to use violence against Shias in order to inflame sectarian divisions.

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