Reuters reports: Iraq’s political crisis shows no sign of easing a month after the Shi’ite-led government sought the arrest of a Sunni vice president, triggering fears that Iraq, without the buffer of U.S. troops, could return to sectarian conflict.

Accused of running death squads, Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi is holed up in Iraqi Kurdistan as a guest of Iraq’s Kurdish president. The government of the semi-autonomous region has not responded to requests from Baghdad to hand him over.

The move against Hashemi, and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s attempt to fire his Sunni deputy, Saleh al-Mutlaq, prompted a boycott of parliament and cabinet by the Sunni-backed Iraqiya bloc.

This has put stress on the fragile coalition of Shi’ite, Sunni and Kurdish parties forming Maliki’s power-sharing government.

Some of the worst militant attacks against Shi’ites in the past year followed quickly on the heels of the political crisis, which threatens to unravel Iraq’s hard-won coalition government and to worsen the country’s sectarian divide.

Jack Healy reports from Baquba: The governor has fled this uneasy city. Half the members of the provincial council are camped out in northern Iraq, afraid to return to their offices. Peaceful protesters fill the dusty streets, though just days ago angrier crowds blockaded the highways with burning tires and shattered glass.

All of this because the local government here in northeastern Diyala Province recently dared to raise a simple but explosive question, one that is central to the unrest now surging through Iraq’s shaky democracy: Should a post-American Iraq exist as one unified nation, or will it split into a loose confederation of islands unto themselves?

A dire political crisis exploded in Baghdad this week, after an arrest warrant was issued against the Sunni Arab vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, accusing him of running a death squad. But years of accumulated anger and disenfranchisement are now driving some of the country’s largely Sunni Arab provinces to seek greater control over their security and finances by distancing themselves from Iraq’s Shiite leaders.

Many Sunni leaders have rallied to the cause while top Shiites in Baghdad have fought the efforts, aggravating the sectarian divisions among the country’s political elite.

“They feel that they have no future with the central government,” said Deputy Prime Minister Saleh al-Mutlaq, a prominent Sunni.

This development comes at a moment of rising tensions and could herald a near-breakdown of relations between the countryside and the leaders behind the concrete walls and concertina wire guarding Baghdad’s Green Zone. It has splintered communities within provinces along religious lines, while deepening the sense of political uncertainty pervading Iraq in the days after the American military’s withdrawal.

“We’ve reached a point where the exasperation with the entire political process is so big in Sunni majority areas,” said Reidar Visser, an expert on Iraqi politics and the editor of the blog historiae.org. “They are just fed up and disillusioned.”

On Friday, thousands of protesters marched through largely Sunni cities to condemn the warrant for Mr. Hashimi’s arrest. In Samarra, where the destruction of a Shiite shrine in 2006 set off waves of violence, 2,000 demonstrators filled the streets after Friday Prayer, waving signs that declared, “The people of Samarra condemn the fabricated charges against Hashimi.”

The schism is one thread of a growing battle between Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, and politicians from the political opposition and Iraq’s Sunni Muslim minority.

Security forces who take orders from Mr. Maliki — sometimes personally — have arrested dozens of people tied to opposition politicians in recent weeks. The government accused Mr. Hashimi, the Sunni vice president, of running a death squad from his offices in central Baghdad, a charge he denies. And Mr. Maliki has urged Iraqi lawmakers to unseat his own deputy, Mr. Mutlaq, who frequently inveighs against the prime minister.

A leading political coalition supported by many Sunnis and secular Iraqis has boycotted Parliament, refusing to attend sessions, and its ministers and lawmakers have threatened to resign en masse. An American-backed partnership government uniting Iraq’s three main factions — the Shiite majority, Sunnis and Kurds — appears poised to fall.

Foreign Policy reports: Shortly before a wave of 15 bombings ripped through Baghdad on Thursday morning, killing more than 60 people, Iraqi Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi warned that a simultaneous political crisis in the country could spiral “beyond control.” In an interview with Foreign Policy on Wednesday from Sulaymaniyah in Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region where the vice president has fled to evade an arrest warrant, Hashemi declared that the Iraqi political system is “drifting from building democracy to building an autocratic regime” — and implied that Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was becoming a new Saddam Hussein.

Earlier this week, Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, accused Hashemi, a Sunni, of running a hit squad targeting government officials during the height of sectarian strife in the country. In a press conference on Wednesday, Maliki went further, casting doubt on the sustainability of power-sharing in Iraq by threatening to replace the current unity government with a majority government if Hashemi’s largely Sunni Iraqiya bloc doesn’t end a boycott of parliament and the cabinet. The political crisis has sparked concern about sectarian violence returning to Iraq just days after the last U.S. troops withdrew from the country.

Hashemi has vehemently denied the charges against him, arguing that they are politically motivated and yet another effort by Maliki to consolidate power. When asked if Maliki has become a Saddam-like figure since assuming power in 2006, as fellow Iraqiya leaders Saleh al-Mutlak and Iyad Allawi have suggested, Hashemi noted that "many of Saddam’s behaviors are now being exercised by Maliki unfortunately." But he added that Saddam rebuilt Iraq in six months after the invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War in the early 1990s. In contrast, under Maliki’s leadership, Hashemi pointed out, the consulting firm Mercer ranked Baghdad the worst city in the world in terms of quality of life.

Patrick Cockburn writes: Iraqis are worried. The last American soldiers leave the country in the next few days and they are waiting to see how the outcome of the struggle for power in Syria will affect them. “We are afraid about the future,” said a businessman in Baghdad. “We are importing goods for two months ahead maximum, and not six months, as we usually do.”

The nervousness of Iraqis is inspired in part by memories of the traumatizing years between 2003 and 2009, when tens of thousands were slaughtered. Many were victims of “identity card” killings, when a Sunni or Shia caught at the wrong checkpoint or in the wrong area was routinely killed.

Baghdad today is quiet by its previous grim standards, but the old fears lie half-buried just beneath the surface. Not all the reasons for the lack of sectarian confrontation are encouraging. One woman journalist said, “There are less sectarian killings now partly because there are so few mixed areas [containing both Sunni and Shia] left in Baghdad.”

Could civil war erupt again? How fragile is the ramshackle coalition government of Shia, Kurd and Sunni led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki? Iraqi leaders I spoke to say the capacity to keep the present power-sharing agreement going is far more significant for the stability of the country than any enhanced security threat from al-Qa’ida following the departure of the last American soldiers. “The leaders behave like adversaries even when they are in the same government,” says Dr Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish member of parliament. “It would be better to have a government and an opposition, but nobody in Iraq feels safe enough to be in the opposition.”