Gunmen in Iraq shot dead 47 civilians and left their bodies in a ditch near Baghdad today as militia battles and sectarian reprisals followed the bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine yesterday.

Sunni Arabs suspended their participation in talks on a new government.

At least 111 people were believed killed in the fury unleashed by the attack on the Askariya shrine in Samarra, including three journalists working for Al-Arabiya television whose bodies were found on the outskirts of the city.

Al-Arabiya is viewed in Iraq as favouring the United States.

The hardline Sunni Clerical Association of Muslim Scholars said 168 Sunni mosques had been attacked, 10 imams killed and 15 abducted since the shrine attack.

The Interior Ministry said it could only confirm figures for Baghdad, where it had reports of 19 mosques attacked, one cleric killed and one abducted.

The sectarian violence threatens to derail US plans to form a new national unity government representing all factions, including Sunni Arabs, who form the backbone of the insurgency.

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, summoned political leaders to a meeting today. But the biggest Sunni faction in the new parliament, the Iraqi Accordance Front, refused to attend, citing the attacks on Sunni mosques.

“It is illogical to negotiate with parties that are trying to damage the political process,” said Tariq al-Hashimi, a leader of the Accordance Front.

Leaders attending the meeting agreed the best way to respond to yesterday’s attack is to form a unity government “whose top job should be getting the security situation under control and fighting terrorism,” Talabani told reporters.

“If the fire of internal strife breaks out, God forbid, it will harm everyone,” he said.

As the country veered ominously towards sectarian war, the government extended a curfew in Baghdad and Salaheddin province for two days. All leaves for Iraqi soldiers and police were cancelled and personnel ordered to report to their units.

Nineteen people, 11 of them civilians, died in two bombings north of Baghdad that appeared unrelated to the sectarian fighting.

The US military said four soldiers from the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, were killed yesterday when their vehicle hit a roadside bomb near Hawijah.

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr accused the Iraqi government and US forces of failing to protect the Samarra shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, and ordered his militia to defend Shiite holy sites across Iraq.

“If the government had real sovereignty, then nothing like this would have happened,” al-Sadr said in a statement. “Brothers in the Mahdi Army must protect all Shiite shrines and mosques, especially in Samara.”

The destruction of the gleaming dome of the 1,200-year-old Askariya shrine in Samarra sent crowds of angry Shiites into the streets across Iraq. The crowds included members of al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias that the US wants abolished.

A spokesman for the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars blamed the violence on the country’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and other Shiite religious leaders who called for demonstrations against the shrine attack.

“They are all fully aware that the Iraqi borders are open, and the streets are penetrated with those who want to create strife among Iraqis,” Abdul-Salam al-Kubaisi said at a news briefing.

Al-Kubaisi said US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad may also have enflamed the situation when he warned on Monday that the US would not continue to support institutions run by sectarian groups with links to armed militias.

Sunnis accuse Shiite militiamen operating in the ranks of the Interior Ministry, which controls the police, of widespread abuses.

“Without doubt, these statements mobilised all the Shiites,” al-Kubaisi said.

“It made them ready to go down to the street at any moment.”

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said today that he suspects Al Qaida in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was responsible for the devastating explosion at the Golden Mosque.

“There is not yet information about what caused this terrorist outrage, but al-Zarqawi and al-Qaida have been linked as it has the hallmarks of their nihilism,” Straw told a news conference in London.

He called on leaders of Iraq’s religious communities to defuse tensions caused by the attack.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the attack was “an act of desperation as well as desecration”.

In Diyala, a religiously mixed province northeast of Baghdad, 47 bodies were found in a ditch.

Officials said the victims appeared to have been stopped by gunmen, forced out of their cars and shot in an industrial area near Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.

Most were aged between 20 and 50 and appeared to include both Sunnis and Shiites, police said.

Dozens more bodies were found dumped at sites in Baghdad and the Shiite heartland in southern Iraq, many of them with their hands bound and shot execution-style.

Fighting broke out this afternoon in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad, between militiamen from al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia and Sunni gunmen. Two civilians were killed and five militiamen were injured, police Captain Rashid al-Samaraie said.

Gunmen fired automatic weapons and grenades at a Sunni mosque in Baqouba, killing one mosque employee and injuring two others, police said. Assailants also set fire to two Sunni mosques in eastern Baghdad, police said.

Thousands of demonstrators carrying Shiite flags and banners marched through parts of Baghdad, Karbala, Kut, Tal Afar and the Shiite holy city of Najaf in protest against the shrine attack.

US military units in the Baghdad area were told this morning to halt all but essential travel.

Commanders feared that convoys might be caught up in demonstrations or road blocks.

Also today, eight Iraqi soldiers and eight civilians were killed when a soup seller’s cart packed with explosives detonated as a patrol passed in the centre of Baqouba, police Major Falah al-Mohammedawi said.

At least 20 people were injured in the blast.

In Julula, 75 miles northeast of Baghdad, a parked car exploded in an area of car dealerships, killing three civilians and injuring three others, police said.

The bullet-riddled bodies of a prominent Al-Arabyia TV female correspondent and two other Iraqi journalists, who had been covering yesterday’s explosion in Samarra, were found on the outskirts of the mostly Sunni Arab city 60 miles north of Baghdad.

The dead were named as Atwar Bahjat and two colleagues from the local Wassan media company, engineer Adnan Khairullah and cameraman Khalid Mahmoud. Their employers lost contact with the journalists – all Sunnis last night.

Their bullet-riddled bodies were found near their vehicle, cameras and satellite dish, police Capt. Laith Muhammad said.

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