Will Shiite Plight Drive Iraq to Civil War?

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

LONDON – Shiite religious commemorations are usually filled with religious fervor, wailing, and bloodsoaked shirts caused by ritual self-flagellation. But yesterday the agony of Iraq’s Shiites was all too real.


Up to 1,000 died in a stampede on a bridge leading to the Kadhimiya mosque.


The crucial question being asked in Baghdad, Washington, and London is whether the Shiites will regard the carnage as yet another tragedy in their history of suffering, or an appalling provocation by Sunni insurgents that tips Iraq into a sectarian civil war.


For the past two years since the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the rise of Iraq’s Shiites from oppressed majority into the new power of Mesopotamia has been accompanied by rivers of blood.


In August 2003, a car bomb killed a major Shiite opposition leader, Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, and about 80 other people outside the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf. The following March, a series of coordinated attacks killed more than 180 people in Karbala and Baghdad as Shiites celebrated the festival of Ashura.


One of the leading terrorist masterminds in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, wrote in a letter to Osama bin Laden that the Shiites were “the lurking snake, the crafty and malicious scorpion, the spying enemy, and the penetrating venom.”


He said the Shiites had to be attacked mercilessly in order to “drag them into the arena of sectarian war” and arouse Sunnis in Iraq as well as the rest of the Arab world.


Mr. al-Zarqawi and his ilk have failed in this objective so far.


Instead, a coalition of Shiite parties won an overwhelming victory in last January’s elections, and installed a religious Shiite prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari.


The Kurds also won a large slice of seats. The biggest losers were the traditional rulers of Iraq, the Sunnis, who boycotted the election.


The Kurds and the Shiites last week forced through a new constitution over the objections of Sunni negotiators, who regard the provisions for federalism as an attempt to carve up Iraq at their expense – with the Kurds and the Shiites taking the lion’s share of Iraq’s oil wealth in the north and south.


Far from being a step toward a democratic future, many fear that constitutional talks will stir more Sunni resentment and feed the insurgency.


Yesterday’s Shiite commemorations for the anniversary of the death of Imam Musa al-Kadhim were an obvious flash point.


Indeed, insurgents fired mortars and rockets at the pilgrims, killing at least seven people, and Iraqi authorities say they prevented several suicide bombers.


In such a volatile atmosphere, and with the Iraqi police roadblock on the Aima al-Aaimmah Bridge creating a funnel into which the pilgrims were crushed, a catastrophe was almost inevitable.


The Iraqi interior minister, Bayan Jabor, tried to defuse tensions. He said that the deaths were an accident that “has nothing to do with sectarian sensitivities.” He drew parallels with repeated stampedes that have killed hundreds of pilgrims in and around Mecca.


However other officials blamed “Saddamists and Zarqawists” for spreading rumors of a suicide bomber that caused a stampede.


There have been worrying signs of Shiite sectarianism, with reprisals against former Baathists having degenerated into indiscriminate killings of Sunnis.


But Shiite anger has so far been limited by figures such as the senior Shiite cleric in Iraq, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who wants to avoid the mistakes of the 1920s when the Shiites rose up against the British occupation, only to be crushed and excluded from power for more than eight decades.


So when the American-led forces invaded in 2003, Ayatollah Sistani advocated a policy of pragmatic cooperation with the Americans.


But just as the Shiites close their grip on the levers of power in Baghdad, the violent chaos is escalating. Shiite groups such as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution have now adopted a fallback position, demanding an autonomous southern federal region mirrored on the northern Kurdish enclave.


This has enraged Sunnis and Shiite nationalists such as the fiery cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.


The New York Sun

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