WASHINGTON, Aug 3: Iraq is caught in the worst sectarian violence yet seen and faces the threat of civil war, two of the United States’ senior generals said on Thursday, three years after the US invasion.

“Sectarian violence probably is as bad as I’ve seen it, in Baghdad in particular,” Army Gen. John Abizaid, the head of US Central Command, told a Senate hearing. “If not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war.”

Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, the most senior US military officer, also said there was a ‘possibility’ of civil war in Iraq, where the violence has claimed about 100 lives a day.

Asked whether he would have seen a chance of civil war a year ago, he replied, “No, sir.”

Abizaid, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee with Pace and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said the violence in Baghdad hurts prospects for reducing troop levels in Iraq, now at about 133,000.

President George W. Bush and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have refused to call the worsening violence a civil war, but Rumsfeld, in often tense exchanges with senators, warned against pulling US troops out of Iraq prematurely.

He said that would be seen as a victory by extremists who want to control a region extending beyond the Middle East.

“If we left Iraq prematurely as the terrorists demand, the enemy would tell us to leave Afghanistan and then withdraw from the Middle East. And if we left the Middle East, they’d order us and all those who don’t share their militant ideology to leave what they call the occupied Muslim lands from Spain to the Philippines,” he said.

Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia, the committee’s chairman, suggested the Bush administration might have to come back to Congress for authorisation to remain in Iraq if the situation spirals into civil war.

Abizaid said, however, that Iraq’s slide into civil war could be halted because the Iraqi Army was holding together and the government remains committed to preventing it.

“I’m optimistic that slide can be prevented,” he said.

Democrats, trying to regain control of Congress from Republicans in elections in November, have made Rumsfeld a prime target of criticism over the handling of the war.

“Because of the administration’s strategic blunders and frankly the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding over a failed policy,” said Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, a possible 2008 presidential candidate.

“Given your track record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we believe your assurances now?”—Reuters