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The Iraqi Situation: Very Serious Threats of Civil War |
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Thursday, 09 March 2006 |
During all the months of watching the pain and agony our country has been going through after its occupation by the Americans in April 2003, and in spite of the great deterioration of the situation in all its aspects I have never imagined that things might drift so terribly into what looks now like a very likely civil war. I have always imagined that my country and people are unfortunate enough to face such a calamity but one deliberate very brutal and deadly atrocity is threatening to do just that. During the early hours of Wednesday February 22nd the Al-Askary Shrine in Samara one of the four most important religious shrines to all Muslims and the Shiites in particular was targeted by a small gang of criminals disguised as policemen and driving police who were able to gain access to the shrine immobilized its guards, laid down high explosives beneath its sky high golden dome which dominates the skylines and fled. The dome was in addition to its religious significance a piece of a most fascinating beauty, a first class piece of art, when the explosives were detonated a bit later the dome collapsed and the 72,000 pieces of gold which adorned it were left in the ruins of the damaged mosque that’s when all hell broke loose.
The situation in Iraq was already very tense especially between the Sunnis and the Shiites, the day before a mosque that belonged to the Sunnis was destroyed in one of Baghdad’s suburbs and left more than two-dozen dead. All the political groups were under intense pressure by the Americans and their allies to finish with the job of forming the long awaited cabinet now that it was more than two months after the end of balloting in the last general elections. Within a few hours after the attack on the holy shrine hundreds of thousands of enraged Shiites took to the streets in Baghdad and half a dozen other Shiite dominated cities in central and southern Iraq brandishing Kalashnikovs and hand propelled grenades and went into a frenzy of killing and destruction targeting the Sunnis and their mosques whom they blamed for the gory atrocity in spite of the fact that the damaged shrine was revered by the Sunnis as it was by the Shiites. The already very fragile truce between the two communities was shattered and was threatening to plunge the country in all out full blown civil war.
Iraq has witnessed during its long and very turbulent history and very often very serious manifestations of ethnic and inter-religious confrontations, the most important of which is the age long quarrel between the Shiites and the Sunnis which dates back to the 7th century [see my article about the sunni-shiite sects]. In the twentieth century when the Shiites revolted against the British rule and the Hashemite monarchy which they accused of being lackeys and puppets to the British, more recently and under Saddam’s regime the most noticeable was the brutal suppression of their 1991 uprising with the Kurds which followed his expulsion from Kuwait after his ill-fated adventure there. During the old regime the Shiites who represent a very big chunk of the Iraqi population and because of Saddam’s reliance on the Sunnis as the backbone of his regime, the Shiites were always suspect and the victims of very harsh repressions and brutality. Many Shittes were killed or imprisoned including some of their most respected religious leaders and scholars like the various members of the al-Sadr and al-Hakeem families. The Kurds with whom they rose up against Saddam in 1991 they were also treated very terribly and brutally at the hands of the dictator and his acolytes at the end of which hundreds of thousands were dead in many cities including the religious cities, Najaf and Karbala with millions of palm trees uprooted and burned. After the occupation the roles changed, the Sunnis were being increasingly marginalized because of their previous association with the dictatorship and the Shiites were becoming the dominant force, but the Sunnis proved to be a very hard nut to crack which forced the Americans to try to include them in the efforts at the forming of a new political structure a policy which alienated the Shiites and were becoming increasingly worried about their own supremacy. These tensions came to the surface after the results of the last elections were declared which showed huge gains by the Shiites which were described by the Sunnis as a result of rigging and fraudulence.
The attack on the holy shrine in Samara occurred at about 6:30 AM and was carried out by a group of men who were dressed in police uniforms and driving police cars. The Askary shrine is one Shiite Islam’s holiest places, it dates back to thousand years it has been destroyed and rebuilt several times during Iraq's turbulent history. The shrine's soaring gold dome was built in 1905, it is revered by all Muslims and is visited by thousands from all over the world, it contains the tombs of the 10th and 11th Imams, Ali al-Hadi and his son Hassan al-Alaskary, Shiites believe that al-Alaskary’s son Mohamed al-Mahdi the 12th Imam who disappeared in 878 will return to earth. In the 19th century the shrine became a center of Shiite theology and learning and encouraged huge conversions to Shiite in central Iraq. The outrage was condemned by many people from inside and outside the country there were also many messages from very sincere well wishers advising the Iraqis of restraint and advising them not to fall in the hands of the foreign sinister conspirators who were intent on destroying the attempts at reconciliation and trying to drive the country into a frightening inter religious strife.
The government which seems to have lost its balance and authority during the first two days of mayhem that followed the attack regained some of their lost balance. The president called for a meeting of the leaders of the main political parties and groupings but one of the main Sunni groups the Iraqi accordance front the boycotted he meeting and suspended their participation in the efforts which were aimed at forming a new cabinet. On Friday, the government announced a daytime curfew to end at 4:00 PM which was soon extended to Saturday and the Prime Minister reached out to the Sunnis promising to rebuild their destroyed mosques following his pledge to rebuild the Samara shrine. Abdul-Amazes al-Hakeem issued a statement regretting the death of all Iraqis and said that those who carried out the Samara attack do not represent the Sunnis in Iraq.
Supporters of the young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr met with some of the Sunni groups to discuss a charter of honor to prohibit killings amongst the Iraqis. The young al-Sadr had always had very good relations with most of the Sunni groups and shares with them a strong opposition to the United States occupation.
All these measures helped to partially diffuse the situation, but these are no more than attempts at treating the symptoms of the disease and not the dangerous pathology sickness. The differences and the potential for renewed confrontations are still there. Having said all that I think that the Iraqis and their leaders are still left with enough intelligence and rationality to understand that allowing the situation to degenerate into a full blown civil war is not in the interest of anybody and is fraught with terrible dangers for the future of their own country. In spite of the deepening bitterness and the widening of the divisions in the Iraqi society which were evident during the last few days, I am still cautiously optimistic that we might in the end be able to avert the perils of a civil war.
Dr. Najeeb Hanoudi
Baghdad, Feb. 28, 2006
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