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MITROVICA, Kosovo (AP) — Kosovo police fired tear gas and used batons to disperse hundreds of ethnic Albanians angry because minority Serbs reinforced a barricade separating parts of central Mitrovica.

At least seven police officers were injured and five cars set ablaze by protesters.

NATO armored vehicles staked out a downtown bridge. The alliance leads a 5,000-strong peacekeeping force in Kosovo.

Lt. Col. John Cogbill of Richmond, Virginia, who is in the U.S. contingent, said peacekeepers were called up Sunday to support police efforts to contain the crowd.

This week, Serbs used trucks and bulldozers to remove mounds of earth used to block ethnic Albanians from crossing the bridge and placed large flower pots instead.

Serbia rejects Kosovo's 2008 secession and backs the Serb minority's defiance of Pristina authorities. Most Kosovars are ethnic Albanians.

BAGHDAD (AP) — "Allah, please make our army victorious," rang out the despairing voice of a worshipper making his way through a crowd to reach the ornate enclosure of the Baghdad tomb of a revered Shiite imam. Others in the crystal and marble mosque somberly read from the Quran or tearfully recited supplications.

"We pray for the safety of Iraq and Baghdad," said Mohammed Hashem al-Maliki, a Shiite, squatting on the marble plaza outside the shrine of Imam Moussa al-Kazim in northern Baghdad. "I live close by, and I tell you I have not seen people this sad or worried in a long time," the 51-year-old said as his 10-year-old daughter, Zeinab, listened somberly.

While the Iraqi capital is not under any immediate threat of falling to the Sunni militants who have captured a wide swath of the country's north and west, battlefield setbacks and the conflict's growing sectarian slant is turning this city of 7 million into an anxiety-filled place waiting for disaster to happen.

Traffic is nowhere near its normal congestion. Many stores are shuttered and those that are open are doing little business in a city where streets empty hours before a 10 p.m. curfew kicks in. Arriving international and domestic flights are half empty, while outgoing flights to the relatively safe Kurdish cities of Irbil and Suleimaniya are booked solid through late July as those who can flee.

The number of army and police checkpoints has grown, snarling traffic. Pickup trucks loaded with Shiite militiamen roam the city, including in Sunni and mixed areas, chanting religious slogans. A climate of war reminiscent of Saddam Hussein's days permeates state-run television broadcasts dominated by nationalist songs, video clips of army and police forces in action and reruns of speeches by Nouri al-Maliki, the Shiite prime minister.

Interviews with Iraqis vowing to fight or declaring their readiness to die for Iraq are daily fare, along with footage showing young volunteers at signup centers or in trucks being ferried to army camps.

The Iraqi capital has seen little respite from violence for more than three decades, from the ruinous 1980-88 war with Iran, the first Gulf War over Kuwait in 1991, to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and subsequent years of turmoil that peaked in 2006 and 2007, with Sunni-Shiite bloodletting that left tens of thousands killed and altered the longstanding sectarian balance, turning Baghdad into a predominantly Shiite city.

Baghdadis, Sunnis and Shiites alike, are renowned for their resilience, but they fear the threat posed by the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, whose interpretation of Islamic Shariah law is similar in its harshness to the Moghul hordes that sacked the city in the 13th century, turning, tradition says, the water of the Tigris red with the blood of its slaughtered residents and black with the ink of the thousands of books they threw into the river.

Shiites fear they will be massacred if the Sunni militants take the city or even parts of it, while Baghdad's Sunni residents worry the Shiite militiamen, with the full acquiescence of the Shiite-led government, will target them in reprisal attacks if the Islamic State continues its battlefield successes.

"They are coming to destroy life and humanity," al-Maliki, the worshipper at the Imam al-Kazim shrine, said of the Sunni militants.

A government employee who was injured in a 2004 blast blamed on Sunni militants in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, he was one of several hundred Shiites seeking solace and peace at the shrine one recent evening. Around him in the plaza, families sat in circles as their children energetically ran about as the day's searing heat finally relented.

But reminders of the dark days that may be ahead were only a stone's throw away.

Across the plaza, a giant screen displayed the text of June 13 edict by Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shiite cleric, calling on Iraqis to join the security forces to fight the Islamic State fighters, and reminding them that the insurgents have threatened to march on Shiite shrines in Baghdad, Samarra, Najaf and Karbala.

Just outside the mosque gates, Shiite clerics addressed dozens of Shiite militiamen in ski masks and combat fatigues. Though unarmed, their presence near one of Iraq's most revered Shiite shrines added to the sense of impending war — and was a reminder of the quick erosion of government authority following the security forces' humiliating defeat in the north, where Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, fell after troops abandoned their positions and weapons.

Since then, tens of thousands of Shiite militiamen of the so-called "Peace Brigades" have staged parades in Baghdad and the predominantly Shiite south, displaying a range of heavy weapons, mostly Iranian-made but including some U.S.-made assault rifles, from field artillery and missiles to rocket launchers and heavy machine-guns.

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.

Baghdad's Sunnis already are terrified.

Sunnis report the appearance over the past week in some of their neighborhoods 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.

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Associated Press Writer Sameer N. Yacoub contributed to this report.

HONG KONG (AP) — Tens of thousands of Hong Kongers lined up to vote Sunday, joining hundreds of thousands of others who cast electronic ballots in the first three days of an unofficial referendum on democratic reform that Beijing has blasted as a farce.

Tensions have soared in Hong Kong over how much say residents of the former British colony can have in choosing their next leader, who's currently hand-picked by a 1,200-member committee of mostly pro-Beijing elites.

Beijing, which has pledged to allow Hong Kongers to choose their own leader starting in 2017, has balked at letting members of the public nominate their own candidates, saying they would have to be vetted by a Beijing-friendly committee.

Pro-democratic organizers of the Occupy Central with Love and Peace movement are offering voters three proposals on so-called public nomination. They've vowed to hold a mass protest if the former British colony's government, which has carried out a consultation on electoral reform, doesn't come up with a proposal that meets their standards. The plan involves rallying at least 10,000 people to shut down the city's central business district and has alarmed businesses in the Asian financial hub.

By 10 p.m. Sunday, nearly 700,000 ballots had been cast since voting started Friday, including about 440,000 through a smartphone app. About 200,000 more were cast online despite a massive cyberattack that left the site intermittently inaccessible and forced organizers to extend voting by a week until June 29. And about 48,000 people cast ballots at 15 polling stations, which organizers were operating on two successive Sundays.

The outlook for Hong Kong's democratic development "is quite pessimistic but we are also proactive and we will try our best to make miracles happen," said Chan Chi-chung, a teacher voting at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. "If many people come out to voice their opinion, but the Beijing central government ignores that voice, then it's over for Hong Kong."

Voters at one polling station were met by a small-group of protesters decrying the vote as a crime.

The central government's liaison office has called the vote "a political farce that overtly challenges the Basic Law," referring to the mini-constitution that promises a high degree of autonomy under the principle of "one country, two systems" for Hong Kong after it became a specially administered Chinese region in 1997.

Hong Kong's current leader, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, has also said the three options don't comply with the law. Justice Secretary Rimsky Yuen said there was "simply no legal basis" for the vote, which should be seen merely as "an expression of opinion by the general public."

BAGHDAD (AP) — Sunni militants on Sunday captured two border crossings, one along the frontier with Jordan and the other with Syria, security and military officials said, as they pressed on with their offensive in one of Iraq's most restive regions.

The fall dealt Iraq's embattled Shiite prime minister a further blow and brought the war to the doorstep of Jordan, a key ally of the United States that also borders embattled Syria to its north.

The blitz by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in Iraq's vast western desert take the al-Qaida-breakaway group closer to its dream of carving out a purist Islamic state straddling both Syria and Iraq.

Controlling the borders with Syria will also help it supply fellow fighters in Syria with weaponry looted from Iraqi warehouses, significantly reinforcing its ability to battle beleaguered Syrian government forces.

If they succeed in their quest, they could further unsettle the already volatile Middle East and serve as a magnet for Jihadists from across the world — much like al-Qaida attracted extremists in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

The Iraqi officials said the militants of the Islamic State took over the Turaibil crossing with Jordan and the al-Walid crossing with Syria after government forces there pulled out.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

The capture of the two crossings follows the fall on Friday and Saturday of the towns of Qaim, Rawah, Anah and Rutba They are all in the Sunni dominated Anbar province, where the militants have since January controlled the city of Fallujah and parts of the provincial capital Ramadi.

Rutba is on the main highway from Baghdad to the two border crossing and the capture has effectively cut the Iraqi capital's main land route to Jordan. It is a key artery for passengers and goods and has been infrequently used in recent months because of deteriorating security.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said he was opposed to any U.S. intervention in the Iraqi crisis, accusing Washington of fomenting the unrest. His comments appeared to quash recent speculation that the two rivals might cooperate in addressing the shared threat posed by the Islamic extremists.

The two crossings and the four towns are the first seized in Anbar since the Islamic State and its allies overran the city of Fallujah and parts of Ramadi. Government troops have not been able to dislodge them after months of fighting.

The capture of Rawah on the Euphrates River and the nearby town of Anah appeared to be part of a march toward a key dam in the city of Haditha, the destruction of which would damage the country's electrical grid and cause major flooding. The dam was built in 1986.

Iraqi military officials said more than 2,000 troops were quickly dispatched to the site of the Haditha dam to protect it. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Chief military spokesman, Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, acknowledged the fall of the Anbar towns, saying government forces had made a tactical retreat and planned to retake them. He provided no further details. There has been no official comment on the capture of the al-Walid and Turaibil crossings.

The Islamic State and allied militants have carved out a large fiefdom along the Iraqi-Syrian border.

Al-Maliki's Shiite-dominated government has struggled to push back against the Sunni militants, who have seized large swaths of the north since taking control of the second-largest city of Mosul on June 10.

Iraq has requested U.S. airstrikes to help halt the advance, but President Barack Obama has yet to order any. He has instead called on Iraqi leaders to form a more representative government in thinly-veiled criticism of al-Maliki.

Khamenei on Sunday said he was opposed to any U.S. intervention in the country.

"We strongly oppose the intervention of the U.S. and others in the domestic affairs of Iraq," Khamenei, who has the final say over state policy, was quoted as saying by the IRNA state news agency, in his first reaction to the crisis.

"The main dispute in Iraq is between those who want Iraq to join the U.S. camp and those who seek an independent Iraq," said Khamenei. "The U.S. aims to bring its own blind followers to power."

The U.S. has long accused Iran of meddling in Iraq, including organizing and backing Shiite militias following the 2003 invasion.

Al-Maliki, who has led the country since 2006 and has not yet secured a third term after April's parliamentary elections, has increasingly turned to Iranian-backed Shiite militias and volunteers to bolster his beleaguered security forces.

Thousands of Shiite militiamen paraded through Baghdad and other cities on Saturday, brandishing a massive arsenal in a show of force that promised to ramp up sectarian tensions.

Al-Maliki has come under growing pressure to reach out to disaffected Kurds and Sunnis, with many blaming his failure to promote reconciliation for the country's worst crisis since the U.S. military withdrew in late 2011.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most respected voice for Iraq's Shiite majority, on Friday joined calls for al-Maliki to reach out to the Kurdish and Sunni minorities.

The U.S. has been drawn back into the conflict. It is deploying up to 300 military advisers to join some 275 troops in and around Iraq to provide security and support for the U.S. Embassy and other American interests.

President Barack Obama, in an interview with CBS' "Face the Nation" airing Sunday, warned that the al-Qaida-inspired militants in Iraq could grow in power and destabilize the region.

He said Washington must remain "vigilant" but would not "play whack-a-mole and send US troops occupying various countries wherever these organizations pop up."

Iraq enjoyed several years of relative calm before violence spiked a year ago after al-Maliki moved to crush a Sunni protest movement against alleged discrimination and abuse at the hands of his government and security forces.

In a separate incident on Sunday, Sunni militants in control of a small northern town handed over to authorities in the northern oil city of Kirkuk the decomposing bodies of 15 Shiites, according to the city's deputy police chief Maj. Gen. Torhan Abdul-Rahman Youssef.

Residents of the town, Besher, said the Shiites were hung from street lights and a water tank for days. The circumstances of their deaths were not immediately known and the residents requested anonymity for fear of reprisals.

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Associated Press writer Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran contributed to this report.