Bus Stop Massacre Kills 20;
Sistani Aide Warns against Violence, Blames Arab T.V.
On Saturday morning, an empty fuel trucker slammed into people waiting at a bus stop in al-Wahada, 22 miles south of Baghad, killing twenty persons and wounding 15.
In his Friday prayers sermon, Shaikh Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, a key aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, warned against "violence and reprisal killings on both sides," saying that both Shiites and Sunnis lose from it. Speaking at a Friday prayers sermon in the holy Shiite city of Karbala south of Baghdad, he said, "If the country falls into Civil War, everyone without exception will lose, and there will be no winners." He affirmed, "Peaceful co-existence between the two branches of Islam will be threatened in a grave manner, and everyone's life will become an unbearable hell."
Al-Karbala'i seems to have been warning against a wider Sunni-Shiite struggle that could start from Iraq.
He blamed "Arabic television channels" for "issuing accusations," saying that they "share with us our Arabness and our Islam, but that do not share with us our anxieties and anguish, but rather want public turmoil to break out."
He said that if mutual hatred increased every day, at some point Shiite and Sunni government employees would simply not be able to work in the same ministry together, and the same would be true in factories and on farms. Life would become impossible and there would not be room on earth for all the graves that would need to be dug. He said that the ignorant among Sunnis and Shiites should not be allowed to call the shots.
Al-Karbala'i's ecumenical sermon, in an almost wholly Shiite city, probably reflects the fears of Sistani and other top clerics. It is interesting that the ecumenicism frayed quite a lot when he spoke of "Arabic channels" (presumably Aljazeera, though maybe others). These channels are often based in the largely Sunni Gulf and are perceived by Shiite Iraqis to be biased in favor of the Sunni Arab guerrilla movement, which the Shiites view as genocidal toward them.
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/02/2006 02:28:00 AM
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1 Comments:
I have questions rather than comments on the increasing violence in Iraq. No doubt about it, it has become an authentic civil war between political, religious, and ethnic factions. My questions are about the nature of the warring and the nature of the violence. As Americans, from our own conflagration, we think of a civil war as between politically organized armies with ultimate control over a national territory as prize for the victor. What's going on in Iraq has a much greater complexity which enables commentators like President Bush to continue to avoid the term "civil war" for his American audience. But what kind of a civil war is it? Is it a play for ultimate political control? Is it "ethnic cleansing?" Is is simply to establish states within a state? Much of the violence I read about seems to be none of these. These bombings of markets and bus stops, etc., killing dozens at a time--many, if not most of whom are non-combatant "innocent" women, children, and the elderly--are these bombings and strafings strategic in nature? Is the purpose to drive out the "other" population from a territory, or are they simply emotional reprisals, psychopathic in nature? Are a great many of the combatants in this civil war simply insane, without a sense of a true goal or purpose for their violence, simply now in love with creating horrific violence? Did the situation in Iraq necessarily descend into this type of mass murdering outside of battle? Are there peculiarities in Iraq that lead to this type of behavior? Or is this a contagion brought in by foreign elements? For instance, many of the early events of this type of violence were perpetrated by the psychopath Al-Zarquawi and his Al Qaeda in Iraq gang, and then the reprisals came forthwith. Is a disease of psychopathology more at work in the violence of this civil war than the vying for political power? Should the strategy for resolving this complex civil war lie less in trying to get the factions to negotiate and more in some kind of curing (by whom?) of a growing mass insanity which is not natural to the people of Iraq? Or is it natural? Is the region naturally impossible? Is the solution for this region's conflicts only a tyranny which is itself psychopathic? Is the solution simply a case of the psychopaths being controlled by the most powerful psychopath? Has it ever been any other way in Iraq?
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