Curfew Takes Its Toll On Iraqis
Food Runs Short; Some Hospitals Lacking Supplies
By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 27, 2006; Page A09
BAGHDAD, Feb. 26 -- Mohammed Abbas opened his refrigerator and showed what it offered his family of six for dinner Sunday night: four tomatoes and four mandarin oranges.
Three days of a virtually round-the-clock curfew, imposed Friday to quell unprecedented Shiite-Sunni clashes in Iraq, have left families running short of food in Baghdad and three other provinces. Store shelves are going bare and, at some hospitals, officials said patients were dying for lack of medicine and supplies.
On Sunday, drive-by shootings, mortar rounds lobbed into residential neighborhoods and other violence killed more than 30 people, including three U.S. troops, in the still-roiling wake of a bombing Wednesday that blew the golden dome off a historic Shiite Muslim shrine in Samarra.
More than 200 people have been killed in the violence since Wednesday, some of it involving open deployment of the outlawed militias of the Shiite religious parties that now lead Iraq.
But the curfew -- along with a joint Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish condemnation of the violence Saturday night -- seemed to have pulled Iraq back, at least for now, from what U.S. and Iraqi leaders warned was the risk of full-scale civil war.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/26/AR2006022600078.html
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