Breaking News: 78 Dead, Dozens Wounded in Shiite Mosque Attack
Deutsche Presse-Agentur reports that suicide bombers detonated their bombs at the Shiite Buratha in the northwestern Baghdad just after Friday prayers ended but before the worshippers began exiting. KarbalaNews.net says that Iraqi security forces report that the bombers were mingling with the worshippers. It says that one bomber was inside the mosque with the men praying, while another was dressed in women's clothing and detonated his payload outside the mosque among visitors.
KarbalaNews.net reported 78 dead, and 140 wounded, some of them badly. The mosque is affiliated with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a major component of the United Iraqi Alliance, the largest single bloc in parliament. The preacher at this mosque, Jalal al-Din al-Saghir, is also a member of parliament, and it is presumed that he was a target of the attack, but it appears that he is unharmed.
Courtesy KarbalaNews.net
KarbalaNews.net reports that a group of clerics in Najaf blamed the bombing on Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, insofar as he is the head of the armed forces, and on the American military (i.e. both should be preventing such attacks and aren't). They called on Jaafari to resign and let someone more capable take up the candidacy for prime minister in the next government. The unsigned communique reprinted at the site represents itself as coming from a group of clergymen, but gives no names. Presumably these clerics are affiliated with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which lost the internal UIA election by one vote. Its candidate, Adil Abdul Mahdi, has called on Jaafari to step down.
Buratha is over toward Karkh, and is an old mosque with value as an ancient monument among Iraqi antiquities.
Sunni Arab guerrillas continue to attack Shiite targets in hopes of provoking Sunni-Shiite civil war. They believe that the eruption of large-scale ethnic fighting will force the US out of the country and pave the way to a neo-Baath or Salafi coup. Shiites have largely refused to take the bait, but their patience is clearly wearing thin. After the Golden Shrine was blown up in Sammara in late February, angered Shiites attacked over 100 Sunni mosques, and mobs and death squads have probably killed well over 1,000 Sunnis in reprisals.
posted by Juan Cole @ 4/07/2006 04:26:00 AM
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15 Comments:
You say: "Sunni Arab guerrillas continue to attack Shiite targets in hopes of provoking Sunni-Shiite civil war. They believe that the eruption of large-scale ethnic fighting will force the US out of the country and pave the way to a neo-Baath or Salafi coup."
Do you really believe that minority Sunnis want a civil war with majority Shia? Do you believe they are so sure they could win it event though Shia outnumber Sunnis significantly and Kurds might be more likely to find common interests with Shia?
Juan, are you saying this is not a civil war?? If so, you're dead wrong. Iraq has been in a low grade civil war for months now. Shia and Sunni's will continue to kill each other. Why?? Shia want revenge for all the deaths Saddam caused during his murderous reign, and Sunni's feel their power slipping away, and will do anything to hang on to it.
Bush has so screwed up Iraq, that it will take years, if not decades to resolve. No wonder a couple of weeks ago he said he was basically leaving Iraq to future presidents Bush is a coward!!!
« Sunni Arab guerrillas continue to attack Shiite targets in hopes of provoking Sunni-Shiite civil war. They believe that the eruption of large-scale ethnic fighting will force the US out of the country and pave the way to a neo-Baath or Salafi coup »
Juan,
With all due respecting, lumping together neo-Baathism (whatever that means) and Wahhâbism looks like the clichéd simplification of a highly complex situation.
Informed Comment is a great blog: you’ve always been nuanced (a “French” word Neocons love to hate!) and I hope you’ll remain so.
As for systematically laying the blame on “Sunni Arab guerillas” for all anti-Shiite activities, well that’s a little excessive: what about the numerous Iranian and Israeli agents provocateurs now roaming freely throughout Iraq thanks to George W. Bush?
Cordially,
Dr V
I have to say that I'm with Bond, Jim Bond. The notion that these mosque bombings are the work of Sunni Arab guerillas bent on restoring the ancien regime seems preposterous. The Shiites have overwhelming military power, now that they control the shiny new army financed and armed by the U.S., and also have 3 or 4 times the population. I don't think the Kurds would get directly involved one way or the other, but they would certainly take advantage of the collapse of the incipient Iraq state to grab Kirkuk and expel the Arabs from that region.
It is conceivable that this is the work of religious fanatics who are not analyzing the situation rationally because they expect divine intervention, but as far as any possible rational motive, the perpetrators would have to be provocateurs bent on promoting violence against Sunni Arabs, not Sunni Arabs somehow trying to pursue what they see as their own interests.
Something very murky is going on here. I am not accepting these events at face value.
sunni iraqis are the military class. they are confident that they will take over in no time. Also, by sparking a sectarian war they hope to draw on the 90% of muslims who are sunnis, who may go to fight for their 'brothers' against the shia.
Assume that these attacks are indeed being carried out by neo-Ba'thists. The objective can't be anything like retaking Iraq as a whole in the near term.
If I were one of Saddam's generals, I would be looking to solidify territory that I could hold. In other words, the strategy is to carve out a statelet in the center of the old British-defined territory. From there, medium term, if they can consolidate power effectively (a major challenge without petroleum resources) they might possibly be able to make a move against the northern or southern principalities.
But even to get there, they have a big problem: the "ethnic"* cleansing of Baghdad. Central Iraq cannot hold together without Baghdad. The problem with Baghdad of course is that it has a large and venerable Shi'a population, including a very militant segment represented by Moqtada al-Sadr. From a strategic perspective, then, they really need to get Sadr and his militia out of the way.
* [one hates using terms like "ethnic" to refer to religious denominations, but it seems like the ignorant nomenclature of the U.S. neoconservatives is becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy]
So at this juncture, two thoughts. First of all, if they really want to prevent a neo-Baathist takeover, the Americans would be insane to try and undermine Sadr right now as they've been doing. They should be doing everything they can to moderate and coopt him, because if he goes down, then the exodus of the Shi'a constituency from Baghdad is that much closer to reality.
Second, The tug-of war between SCIRI and Da'wa is looking more and more like a battle between Najaf and Baghdad. I suppose that's implicit in the "loose" versus "strong" federalist positions of Jaafari and Abdel Mahdi, but it boggles the mind why the State Department would be actively trying to undermine the one prominent Shi'a politician who is consistently advocating for the unity of Iraq, with Baghdad as its capital, if they had any intention of keeping the country together.
Then of course you have the fact that the "secret" U.S. bases are all located in the desertified center of the country -- territory that is relatively far from oil production, easy to defend, and would not tread on sovereign toes if Iraq were really to break into three, with an anarchic and impoverished pariah state in the middle.
So I don't mean to sound too conspiracy minded when I suggest that we start talking about a scenario in which the American administration *wants* a breakup of Iraq at this point--including a neo-Baathist takeover of the heartland which would involve, inter alia, incremental ethnic cleansing of Baghdad's Shi'a community. From its point of view, this outcome would have a number of advantages, and perhaps bloody horrors like today's suicide bombing are OK so long as deniability is preserved.
food for thought: chances are a civil war will not remain contained within iraq... all the neighboring states will covertly (maybe overtly) fund and equip each side.
I agree with Jim Bond. A large number of Sunnis are angry at the Shia majority for a host of reasons, including Shia death squads. Neo-Baath? possible, but I doubt it. But the fighting is certainly not only the result of the remnants of Saddam's regime. It's irresponsible to refuse to see the fundamental underlying divisions which existed before Saddam, during Saddam, and now after Saddam.
It's this kind of blindness that lead the NeoCons to believe their own myth that Iraqis would receive the American forces with candy and flowers. There is no Iraqi nation, at least not in the sense of a homogenous, monolithic society. There never was. To believe otherwise is the ultimate in western self-indulgence...
Khalilzad -
Civil War - NOW He Tells Us!
In response to Jim Bond's question.
Kurds are predominantly clustered to the north, and because their particular area of Iraq is pretty stable and unaffected by violence, they will probably avoid getting involved with any fighting between the sunni's and and shia's.
This is speculation on my part, but due to the fact that the Sunni were the favoured bloc during Saddam's period, they are possibly carrying over a financial and material supremecy over the Shia, which might make it easier to win a civil war.
Well there are numerous examples of this kind of thinking, some of them quite recent:
- Serb leaders in Bosnia then Kosovo,
- White supremacists in South Africa
- Unionists in Ireland then Northern Ireland
to name just a few
The Sunnis have dominated the Shias and Kurds in all recent history although they are a minority. Some would think that this is the natural (God-given) state of things, and if they did 'lose', a seperate Sunni land would still be a enviable idea, better than dilution in a Shia/Kurd democracy.
'Democracy' is often percieved as a 'winner take all' system in societies not accustomed to the checks and balances needed.
I think this bombing was done for the same reasons (and by the same group of people) as the bombings at the hotels in Amman.
That is just speculation, but I think Americans vastly underestimate the effects of PTSD on Iraqi civilians.
The issue with who carried out this attack is to be seen in whether or not it was a suicide attack, said to be three, two dressed as women. Is this confirmed? Or is it simply part of the standard language describing these attacks? I haven't seen anything more than vague reports.
If it is true that it was a suicide attack (a contrast, by the way, with the Samarra attack on February 22), then it has to be attributed to people with religious motivations.
On one side, the local Sunni resistance and the Neo-Ba'thists are not generally ready to kill themselves. On the other side, if it were an American provocation, I find it difficult to believe that they would find it easy to recruit people willing to commit suicide. I suppose anybody, though, could conceivably deceive deluded Saudis or Yemenis or others.
I would have thought this one has to be extremist Sunnis, the so-called Salafis.
Completely different from the Samarra attack, which was a professional demolition. Also note the difference that in Samarra, it was the building that was targetted, and here, the people.
Let me add another comment from Zbigniew Brzezinski's recent talk at The American Progress Action Fund on Mar 16 that is relevant to this discussion of whether Sunnis in Iraq could really want a civil war:
"...how certain are we in the judgment that if we [the US]were to desist, the Shiites and the Kurds would not be capable of compelling an arrangement with the Sunnis. The Shiites and the Kurds together account for about 75 percent of the population and they have an overwhelming advantage. The Shiites then would be faced with a difficult decision and the Sunnis then would be faced with a difficult decision: whether to accommodate or to resist, to challenge. And I think a reasonable judgment is they will probably be divided.
Some will choose the path of accommodation and we know even some Sunni leaders who advocate that. And some will choose the path of resistance. But the outcome, I think, of such a confrontation is also predicable: namely, that the Kurds and the Shiites will prevail. Is that an outcome necessarily worse than staying on course if one makes the judgment that staying on course involves a more and more difficult war of attrition, not to speak of its international consequences, but focusing purely on the Iraqi context?"
Could the Iraqi Sunnis really be wanting Civil War when they are approximately 25% of the population and the Kurds to their north have a battle-hardened army and the Shia to the south have their own militia? This issue of whether there would be a civil war is crucial because even those who are against the war still fear that if we were to leave there would be a terrible civil war and this makes them equivocate about whether we should withdraw.
According to some of the pro-whatever forums, "they are not killing Shias for being Shias, but for being collabarotors, it doesnt matter whether they are Shia or supposedly Sunni."
However, there are numerous groups fighting in Iraq, nationalist, ethnic, sectarian, and lastly foreign. Who knows who this idea applies to.
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