Shia Mehdi Army militants patrol a Basra street. Radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr ordered his Mehdi Army militia to protect Sunni mosques in majority Shia areas in southern Iraq. (AFP)

Baghdad, Feb. 23 (Reuters): Sectarian violence killed more than 130 people across Iraq and left dozens of mosques damaged or in ruins as the US appealed today to Sunnis and Shias to step back from the brink of civil war.

Dozens of bloody revenge attacks caused the death toll after yesterday’s suspected al Qaida bombing of one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam.

President George W. Bush stepped into the worst crisis since the US invasion, one that threatens efforts to form a stable, unity government and bring US troops home from Iraq.

“The voices of reason from all aspects of Iraqi life understand that this bombing is intended to create civil strife,” Bush said as the military reported seven more US soldiers had been killed in two separate attacks yesterday.

The UN envoy Ashraf Qazi of Pakistan also stepped in, asking Iraqi leaders to join him in a meeting.

But the main Sunni political group said it pulled out of US-backed talks on forming a coalition after December’s parliamentary election and leading clerics traded unusually frank sectarian criticisms that may do little to calm passions.

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, pressed ahead despite the Sunni boycott with a meeting that he had called to avert a descent towards a civil war. After discussions with Shias, Kurds and leaders of a smaller Sunni group, he said that if all-out war came “no one will be safe”.

Many of the 27 million Iraqis stayed at home amid a security clampdown and three days of mourning for the destruction of the Shias’ cherished Golden Mosque in Samarra yesterday.

“I stayed home,” Nasser Ahmed, a Sunni shopkeeper, said in Baghdad. “I was expecting mass killings in the streets.”

Though bloodless, the bombing of the Samarra shrine has sparked greater fury than countless Sunni rebel attacks that have killed thousands of Shias since US forces overthrew Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime three years ago.

The main Sunni religious group said 184 Sunni mosques had been damaged, some destroyed; 10 clerics had been killed and 15 abducted, the Muslim Clerics Association said, accusing Shia religious leaders of stoking the anger by calling for protests.

The direct criticism of the revered Shia Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was unusual and prompted criticism in return from one of Sistani’s fellow religious authorities.