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Held in Baghdad’s sprawling Shiite Sadr City district, home to some 2 million Shiites, policemen and army troops stood aside as the parade’s organizers searched cars and kept the crowds at bay. Some of the cranes used for cameras recording the event belonged to the Shiite-controlled city council, along with some of the pickup trucks hauling missiles on their back beds.

Underlining the sectarian slant of the conflict, the parading men included clerics dressed in military fatigues and carrying assault rifles. At the reviewing stand, senior clerics with silver beards and flowing robes stood at attention, giving military salutes.

The Peace Brigades is the latest name for the Mahdi Army, a brutal militia loyal to anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada Al-Sadr, which took the lead in targeting Sunnis during the sectarian bloodletting nearly a decade ago.

That blood-stained history was not far from the mind of one militia commander who spoke on the parade’s sidelines.

“We can take Baghdad in one hour if we decide to do it,” he said boastfully. “This parade has one aim: To terrorize Sunnis,” added the commander, who agreed to be named only by his alias, Abu Zeinab.

The parades were the latest evidence that the Sunni-Shiite conflict carries the potential for a civil war that could herald the division of Iraq. It is a scenario that spells the most trouble for Baghdad.

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Baghdad’s Sunnis already are terrified.

Sunnis report the appearance over the past week in some of their neighbourhoods of plainclothes security agents with firearms bulging from under their shirts. In scenes harkening back to Saddam’s police state, the agents loiter in cafes and restaurants and outside Sunni mosques, according to the residents who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisals.

“Our politicians have so far succeeded in one thing: They have created an atmosphere of distrust between the city’s Shiites and Sunnis,” said Yasser Farouq, a 45-year-old retail businessman from Baghdad’s Sunni district of Azamiyah. Farouq said he already has a plan to flee the city with his family if the Islamic State fighters take it or if the Shiite militiamen turn against the city’s Sunni residents.

“Weapons are everywhere in the city. That tells me that instability is here and disaster is on the way,” he said.