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Wed 22 Feb, 2006 10:42 am
The brewing civil war in Iraq can no longer be hidden by those whose U.S. political interests it damages. As sad as it is, we can at least deal with it openly now that it has erupted beyond denial.---BBBFebruary 22, 2006
Blast Destroys Golden Dome of Sacred Shiite Shrine in Iraq
By EDWARD WONG
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 22, 2006
Insurgents dressed as police commandos detonated powerful explosives this morning inside one of Shiite Islam's most sacred shrines, destroying most of the building, located in the volatile town of Samarra, and prompting thousands of Shiites to flood into streets across the country in protest.
The golden-domed shrine housed the tombs of two revered leaders of Shiite Islam and symbolized the place where the Imam Mahdi, a mythical, messianic figure, disappeared from this earth. Believers in the imam say he will return when the apocalypse is near, to cleanse the world of its evils.
The blast took place at about 7 a.m. and shook the city of Samarra, a Sunni-dominated area that is nevertheless sacred to Shiites. The gunmen entered the shrine and handcuffed guards in the building, then set about planting the explosives, an official of the provincial governorate said. There were no immediate reports of casualties, but the golden dome was entirely destroyed, as well as three-quarters of the structure.
Samarra has long been one of the most violent cities in Iraq, and American forces there have struggled to contain a virulent Sunni-led insurgency. The American military has tried various offensives, only to have insurgents regroup and carry out further strikes. The Americans have also had little success in propping up Iraqi security forces in the town.
Shiite protestors took to the streets shortly after the explosion. In Baghdad, militiamen loyal to radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who is a fervent believer in the prophecy of the Imam Mahdi, drove through the streets of Sadr City with Kalashnikovs, many accusing the Americans of carrying out the attack.
In the holy city of Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered Shiite cleric in Iraq, called for a period of mourning and asked that government offices be closed for the next three days.
The attack came after two days of vicious bloodshed and political turmoil. The Iraqi prime minister on Tuesday angrily denounced the growing American pressure to form an inclusive government, as a car bomb in a bustling market here killed at least 21 people and wounded dozens more, most of them women and children.
The explosion took place in the evening, with shoppers crowded into the Abu Cheer market on a Shiite block of southern Baghdad. Many women in flowing black robes had brought their children along. Hospital wards quickly filled with wailing victims, wiping blood from their faces or clutching limbs shredded by shrapnel.
"I noticed that a woman had lost her hand because of the explosion, and many of the bodies were burned," said Zuhair Ali Mudhair, 18, as he sat on the edge of a gurney in Yarmouk Hospital, with cloth bandages wrapped around his head and arm, and dried blood on his T-shirt. "Some of the kids were completely burned from the fire."
The violence on Monday, which killed at least 26 people, and the marketplace bombing and other attacks on Tuesday, which killed 28 people, signaled that a period of relative calm during political talks had come to an abrupt end.
Negotiations over the formation of a new government are taking place slowly and with much acrimony. Parties representing Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Kurds are jockeying for control of various ministries and making demands on several crucial issues, like changing the makeup of the population around the northern oil fields.
The volatility of the political process was exacerbated Monday by suggestions from Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Iraq, that the United States might decrease financial help to a government that excluded some sects and ethnic groups.
His comments were a veiled attack on Shiite leaders, some of whom have been accused of widening sectarian rifts in the past year by supporting government death squads that have kidnapped, tortured and killed Sunni Arabs.
On Tuesday, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the prime minister and a conservative Shiite, scoffed at Mr. Khalilzad's remarks. "When we are asked, 'Do you want the government to be sectarian?' our answer is 'no,' " Mr. Jaafari said. "Not because the U.S. ambassador says this and warns us, but because this is our policy."
He added, "We think that sovereignty means no one interferes in our affairs."
Mr. Jaafari's comments came at a news conference shortly after Iraqi leaders met with Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary. Mr. Straw, too, demanded that the Iraqis form an inclusive government. The Bush administration wants a significant number of Sunni Arabs chosen for cabinet positions, in the hope that political engagement will help defuse the Sunni-led insurgency.
A two-thirds vote by the 275-member Parliament, the National Assembly, is needed to form the government, and the Shiite and Kurdish blocs could muster enough votes to shut out the main Sunni Arab parties if they persuaded some independent legislators or just a handful of Sunnis to vote with them.
Mr. Straw expressed disapproval of that strategy on Tuesday. "We had the elections on Dec. 15," he said after meeting with Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president and a Kurd. "We've now had the final accredited results. What they show is that no party, no ethnic or religious grouping, can dominate government in Iraq."
Mr. Straw also noted that an investigation was under way into an episode in January 2004 in which British soldiers apparently abused young, unarmed Iraqi men. The beatings took place in the southern city of Amara during a protest and were made public earlier this month when a British newspaper released a videotape taken by a soldier.
Mr. Talabani said at the news conference with Mr. Straw that the Sunnis and Kurds were still discussing whether to form a supervisory council that would oversee the running of the government, operating parallel to the cabinet and acting as a check on the power of the Shiites. Shiite leaders have vociferously rejected the idea. "I think there is a serious and brotherly discussion, and I expect we will reach a result soon," Mr. Talabani said of the proposed council.
Iraqi politicians and American officials say they do not expect a government to be formed until the spring.
The marketplace explosion on Tuesday evening took place in the dangerous neighborhood of Dora, where criminal gangs operate at will and sectarian killings occur daily. A police commander said the explosives were in a pickup truck parked in a Shiite area.
Earlier, four Iraqi Army recruits were killed by gunmen in the northern city of Kirkuk. A roadside bomb killed two Iraqi commandos and wounded four in Baghdad in the afternoon, and another concealed bomb killed a policeman in the morning, an Interior Ministry official said. A civilian was killed by a bomb on Monday night in Iskandariya, south of Baghdad, the official said.
The police in Dora found a dead body on Tuesday morning with a letter in his pocket that said, "This is the destiny of the terrorists who kill innocents."
This is a disaster but it is also an opportunity. There should be a major effort in western countries to raise donations to help repair and replaces the shrine. Properly handled this could be turned into a moment of reconciliation.
Acquiunk
Acquiunk wrote:This is a disaster but it is also an opportunity. There should be a major effort in western countries to raise donations to help repair and replaces the shrine. Properly handled this could be turned into a moment of reconciliation.
That would be wise but it would only be blown up again.
Sadly, thousands of years of religious strife and tribalism cannot be repaired with bricks and mortar.
BBB
U.S. Warns Iraq It Won't Support Sectarian Goals
February 21, 2006
U.S. Warns Iraq It Won't Support Sectarian Goals
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ROBERT F. WORTH
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 20, 2006
The American ambassador to Iraq issued an unusually strong warning on Monday about the need for Iraq's political factions to come together, hinting for the first time that the United States would not be willing to support crucial public institutions plagued by sectarian agendas.
"The United States is investing billions of dollars" in Iraq's police and army, said the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad. "We are not going to invest the resources of the American people to build forces run by people who are sectarian."
Mr. Khalilzad spoke at a news conference on a day of fresh violence across Iraq. It was the bloodiest day in almost two months.
He was addressing allegations that Shiite death squads operate within the Interior Ministry. Such reports have grown in recent months, with accounts of hundreds of Sunni men being rounded up by men in police uniforms and found dead days or weeks later.
The deaths have infuriated the Sunni Arabs, whose radical fringe leads the insurgency here, and have sharpened their distrust of the Shiite-led government that swept into power last spring.
Bombing attacks on Monday, including one inside a crowded commuter bus in Baghdad and another in a restaurant in northern Iraq, left at least 26 dead and more than 60 wounded. One American soldier was also killed.
Iraqi political leaders are deep in negotiations over forming a government, more than two months after parliamentary elections.
American officials have long argued that new cabinet ministers should place the interests of their country over those of their sects. But by linking American financing to a fair, nonpartisan army and police force, even if not intended as a direct threat, Mr. Khalilzad pressed the American position more forcefully and publicly than before.
American officials are working to draw Sunni Arabs into the new government in an effort to build a stable society and begin bringing American troops home. Allaying Sunni concerns over overtly biased ministries is seen as an essential part of that effort.
The attacks on Monday, however, raised fresh fears of renewed violence.
The worst of the violence began in Mosul, in northern Iraq. Shortly after 7 a.m., a suicide bomber walked into the Abu Ali Restaurant and detonated his payload, spraying shrapnel into diners, killing at least six of them and wounding six more, the police and local officials said.
The attack was a clear strike against the police force: the restaurant is near a police station and is popular among officers, many of whom were eating breakfast.
"I could not hear anything, and there was heavy smoke," said Said Tharwat, a 30-year-old wounded in the attack.
Several hours later in Baghdad, a man wearing a suicide vest boarded a bus in Kadimiya, a bustling Shiite neighborhood, and blew himself up, killing at least 12 Iraqis and wounding 15, most of them Shiite commuters, a Ministry of Interior official said. One witness said the fiery blast, which ignited the bus, had scattered body parts and severely burned the wounded. A nearby traffic policeman was also killed.
The wounded, with burns on their hands and faces, were evacuated to Kadimiya Hospital, where an official reported a higher death toll: 17.
The violence came amid signs of serious disagreement over the shape of the government. The new Parliament is required by law to meet for the first time on Saturday, and Mr. Khalilzad's remarks seemed calculated to put pressure on Iraqis to overcome their differences.
He has sharply criticized Interior Ministry abuses in the past, echoing Sunni concerns about the ministry's failure to stop the killings. He amplified those concerns on Monday, urging the leaders to appoint interior and defense ministers who are "nonsectarian, broadly accepted and not tied to militias."
If Iraq cannot control the sectarian agendas within its government, Mr. Khalilzad said, it "faces the risk of warlordism that Afghanistan went through for a period." Mr. Khalilzad was born in Afghanistan and served as an American envoy there before coming to Iraq last year.
Tensions between Sunni Arabs and Shiite political groups are not the only obstacle to the kind of unity government that Mr. Khalilzad is advocating, and it is unlikely that a government will be formed soon, some Iraqi leaders said.
The British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, also arrived Monday to discuss formation of the new government, Reuters reported.
In more behind-the-scenes political negotiating, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari visited the leader of the Shiite majority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, in Najaf.
Mr. Jaafari, who was recently selected by the largest Shiite political bloc to remain prime minister in the next government, said Ayatollah Sistani had urged him to speed up the formation of the government "on the basis of high competence, integrity and transparency."
Across Iraq on Monday, insurgents engineered at least eight attacks. In central Baghdad, a homemade bomb went off near a group of Shiite day-laborers around 8 a.m., wounding 20 of them, an Interior Ministry official said.
North of Baghdad, in Nibai district, five truck drivers were killed and four wounded when their convoy supplying building materials to American forces came under attack, a provincial spokesman said. In Buhruz, another town north of Baghdad, an official from a hospital in Baquba was shot dead.
In the Diyala Bridge area south of Baghdad, a car bomb exploded near an Iraqi official's convoy, killing 2 of his guards and wounding 11 civilians, the ministry official said.
American forces faced fresh opposition in Karbala, a Shiite city in the south, when the governor of the province, Akeel al-Khazali, barred American troops from entering government buildings, according to the governor's press office. Mr. Khazali took issue with the Americans' bringing dogs into the building, but it was not clear if there was another, more serious disagreement behind the order.
An American soldier was killed when his vehicle struck a home-made bomb just southeast of Karbala, the military said in a statement.
Also on Monday, an Iraqi government official said the number of confirmed human deaths from the avian flu virus have been just two, fewer than previously thought.
----------------------------------------
Omar al-Neami contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Mosul, Najaf and Karbala.
Attack on Shia Shrine in Iraq Sparks Angry Protests
Attack on Shia Shrine in Iraq Sparks Angry Protests
By Gareth Smyth
The Financial Times UK
Wednesday 22 February 2006
An explosion in Iraq has destroyed the golden dome of one of the most revered shrines in Shia Islam sparking nationwide protests and sectarian reprisals against Sunni mosques despite appeals for calm from government and religious leaders.
Wednesday's early morning blast at the Askariya shrine in Samarra, 150km north of Baghdad, devastated the tombs of the tenth and eleventh of the 12 Imams believed by Shia to have been infallible successors to the prophet Mohammad.
Early reports suggested armed insurgents, possibly in Iraqi police uniforms, entered the shrine and left explosives. US troops and Iraqi police cordoned off the area and began house-to-house searches.
No one was killed in the attack on the mosque in Samarra. However a Sunni cleric was killed, police said, at one of 17 Sunni mosques in Baghdad fired on by militants.
The Samarra attack appears to be a deliberate provocation of Iraq's Shia community, who make up around 55 per cent of the population and comes after two deadly explosions targeting Shia civilians in Baghdad on Monday and Tuesday.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shia, declared three days of mourning and called for Muslim unity. He said the interim government had sent officials to Samarra.
Mouwafak al-Rubaie, national security advisor, blamed Sunni militants of Ansar al-Sunnah, a group linked to al-Qaeda that has been responsible for a trail of violence in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion. Mr Rubaie told Al Arabiya satellite television such militants intended to "to pull Iraq toward civil war".
There has been growing concern among Shia Muslims, in Lebanon and Iran as well as Iraq, at attacks by mainly Sunni insurgents on Shia civilians and religious figures in Iraq.
Ayatollah Sistani, Iraq's most senior Shia cleric, asked people to protest peacefully in their home cities rather than travel to Samarra, which has a majority Sunni population.
Ayatollah Sistani has consistently urged his followers to show restraint and not be goaded by attempt to incite sectarian war.
Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary, echoed the call for restraint, calling the attack "a criminal and sacrilegious act" that was "a blatant attempt to ingnite civil strife and disrupt the process of forming a new government in Iraq".
"This is a most shocking outrage against a holy shrine of the Shia community, so all of us have to understand the anger people feel when such defilement of their shrine takes place."
He was confident, however, that Iraqis would continue to demonstrate the "remarkable resiliance and determinination" that they had shown in the past to secure a peaceful and democratic future, as illustrated by high turn-out in the December elections.
The Sunni Endowment, a government body that maintains Sunni shrines, condemned the blast and said it would send a delegation to Samarra to investigate.
The Askariya shrine in Samarra is the tomb of both Imam Ali bin Mohammad, who died in 868AD, and Imam Hassan bin Ali, who died in 872AD and was the father of Imam Mohammad bin Hassan, whom Shia believe went into hiding in 941 and will return one day as 'the Mahdi' to inaugurate a period of just rule on earth before the Day of Judgement.
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