Monday, Jun 27, 2005
Sectarian violence is shattering Iraq's hopes
Peter Beaumont
WHEN THEY killed Abdul Sattar Saffar al-Khazraji, he was waiting for the minibus that would take him to his work as a laboratory supervisor at Nahrain University. As the 30-year-old stood with other workers commuting from the Harriya district of Baghdad, two Opel cars sped up and blocked the road either side of him.
Two men on a motorbike roared into the gap left by the cars. The passenger fired at Sattar with a pistol as they approached, wounding him in the shoulder. As he collapsed in pain, the gunman delivered the coup de grace, putting a bullet into his head.
In a city where assassination is commonplace, one more killing goes unremarked. Yet Sattar's death is a reminder of Iraq's most critical question: whether, after two years of insurgency, the bombers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and their allies are succeeding in a central aim — pushing a bruised population towards civil conflict.
For, the significance of Sattar was his religion. He was a Sunni. His crime, friends say, was that he was pious and visible. In Harriya, to the city's north — occupied by both Sunnis and Shias — he was an obvious target. It is Shia gunmen that his friends blame for his murder. And they are most certainly right.
Low-level conflict
In mixed areas of Baghdad, a low-level, tit-for-tat, sectarian conflict has been going on, revolving largely around the city's mosques, a conflict that has waxed and waned as the fighting for Falluja and the Shia Sadrist uprising pulled the gunmen elsewhere. Its victims have been mosque guards, imams and other worthies, as well as gunmen and suspected terrorists. They have been the innocent and guilty, picked off by gun, grenade and bomb. It is a nasty little street war fuelled by the wider atrocities of Zarqawi's "Al-Qaeda in Iraq" — the suicide car bombings of Shia targets, all aimed at stoking the confrontation between the rival Muslim sects.
What is different now is that Zarqawi's provocations, along with the lethal ambition of some Shia groups, appear to be succeeding in driving Iraqis apart.
Only a year ago, U.S. and British officials dismissed deaths such as that of Abdul Sattar in the mosque wars as inevitable in Iraq's rebirth. Now, however, the sectarian violence is ringing alarm bells with many of those same officials. It is precisely on this issue, they fear, that the new Iraq will stand or fall. It is this that will decide how long coalition troops must stay. It is the issue, too, that has the power to demolish the reputations of those who ordered the invasion.
It is a fear rooted in the key determinant of civil conflict: that this cannot catch hold until the population accepts hatred and mutual division. The danger now is that Iraqi people's attitudes — which have fiercely resisted attempts by such men as Zarqawi to divide Iraq against itself — may finally be changing.
A Shia friend shows me a text message from his uncle. "I love you," it says, "as the Kurds love federalism; as the Shias love mourning Hussein, and as the Sunnis love terrorism." In a country where humour often has an edge of savage commentary, it offers a bitter insight into relations between Shias and Sunnis. Violent tensions have always existed, my friend explains. What worries him is the suspicion spreading among even those, like him, who have always enjoyed good relationships through friendship or marriage with the opposing confession, and who have tried to keep tensions suppressed and Iraqis united.
Once, he says, most Shias and Sunnis would blame "foreign fighters" for attacks, pointing out that suicide bombings were not part of Iraq's culture; now Shias are asking themselves, both privately and in public, why it is that the Sunnis turn a blind eye to terrorists in their midst. And why do they not surrender them? It may seem a subtle change, but it is still one of considerable significance. It represents the separation of attitudes among the great and silent majority who wish Iraq to prosper, and to prevent it sliding into civil war.
And the new sense of sectarian anguish is not limited to the majority Shias alone. On the Sunni side too, even among those who welcomed the fall of Saddam Hussein, violence — as those like Zarqawi have always hoped — is begetting more violence.
For, as the new Shia-dominated Iraqi Government has tried crudely to clamp down on "Sunni-backed terror," it has raided Sunni mosques and rounded up thousands of suspects, stoking up anger at Sunni "persecution" by the Shias.
Yet while the sectarian violence increases, its outcome is still not inevitable. Many people are determined to avoid civil conflict. Ali Mahmoud is a guard at the al-Bou Jumaa mosque, one of the targets of Thursday's bombing. He says the mosque was sized up for attack by men who had come the previous evening asking to borrow a coffin for a burial.
He is angry at the suggestion it was a sectarian attack. "Don't accuse our Sunni brothers," he says. "They came here to help us tidy up the damage. This has been done deliberately to stir up problems among us. Accuse the Arab mujahideen who have come to Iraq." His is the old voice of the Shias, holding to the idea of a unified Iraq as more important than the pain. —
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
Copyright © 2005, The Hindu.