We've opened the gates of hell

If this doesn't sound like civil war, I don't know what does:

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Salim Rashid, 34, a Shiite laborer in an overwhelmingly Sunni Arab village 20 miles north of Baghdad, received his eviction notice Friday from a man at the door with a rocket launcher.

"It's 6 p.m.," Rashid recounted the masked man saying then, as retaliatory violence between Shiites and Sunnis exploded across wide swaths of central Iraq. "We want you out of here by 8 p.m. tomorrow. If we find you here, we will kill you."

Walking, hitchhiking and hiring cars, the Rashid clan and many of the 25 other families evicted from the town of Mishada had made their way by Tuesday to a youth center in Baghdad's heavily Shiite neighborhood of Shoula. There, other people forced from their homes were already sharing space on donated mattresses.

With sectarian violence rampant since last week's bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, the families have become symbols of an emerging trend in Iraq: the expulsion of Shiites from Sunni towns.

New, deadly attacks -- many of them apparently retaliatory sectarian assaults -- surged Tuesday, with 66 people killed, according to Iraqi police. The decision to lift a curfew in Baghdad on Monday appeared to have opened the way for a resumption of intense bombings, including explosions at three Shiite mosques that killed at least 19 people. Some of Tuesday's other victims included 23 people killed by a suicide bomber in Baghdad as they waited in line to buy kerosene; five Iraqi soldiers killed in a car bombing in the capital's Zayona district; and one U.S. soldier killed by small-arms fire west of the capital, authorities and news agencies said.