Wed, Jun 29, 2005 page9

• War of mosques is shattering Iraq's hopes

  The gunmen are finally succeeding in pushing the sectarian tension between Shiite and Sunni toward the final abyss of all-out civil war

  • By Peter Beaumont / THE OBSERVER
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  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.

  At 8am, 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 Abdul 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.

  

  ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE

  In a city where assassination is commonplace, one more killing goes unremarked. Yet Abdul 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 Abdul Sattar was his religion. He was a Sunni. His crime, friends say, was that he was pious and visible, a community leader well known for his involvement in charity and other religious works.

  In Harriya, to the city's north -- occupied by both Sunni and Shiite -- he was an obvious target. It is Shiite gunmen that his friends blame for his murder. And they are most certainly right.

  TIT-FOR-TAT

  In mixed areas of Baghdad, a low-level, tit-for-tat, sectarian conflict has been going on, revolving largely around the city's galaxy of mosques, a conflict that has waxed and waned as the fighting for Fallujah and the Shiite 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 Shiite targets, all aimed at stoking the confrontation between the rival Muslim sects.

  What is different now is that Zarqawi's provocations, in tandem with the lethal ambition of certain Shiite groups, appear to be succeeding in slowly driving Iraqis apart.

  What has changed in the 14 months since I last investigated Baghdad's mosque wars is insidious and very dangerous -- a subtle transformation of how Sunni and Shiite in this city see each other. For suspicion has crept in where there was none before -- even among friends and colleagues who had previously worn their religious identities lightly.

  Only a year ago, US 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 Shiite friend shows me a text message from his uncle: "I love you," it says, "as the Kurds love federalism; as the Shiites love mourning Hussein, and as the Sunnis love terrorism."

  In a country where humor often has an edge of savage commentary, it offers a bitter insight into relations between Shiites 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 Shiites and Sunnis would blame "foreign fighters" for attacks, pointing out that suicide bombings were not part of Iraq's culture; now Shiites 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 Shiites alone. On the Sunni side too, even among those who welcomed the fall of Saddam, violence -- as those like Zarqawi have always hoped -- is begetting more violence.

  For as the new Shiite-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 Shiites.

  Meanwhile, "al-Qaeda in Iraq" is turning up the heat. Last Thursday morning, as three bombs targeted a Shiite mosque in the Karrada district, killing 15, the group claiming responsibility described the act as a "Sunni reprisal raid."

  The growing culture of suspicion among ordinary Iraqis has in recent weeks been mirrored by a more hardline stance among community leaders. Figures from both sides have been airing their accusations more brutally than ever before. Most devastating of all was the televised trading of charges of terrorism last month by two of Iraq's most prominent Shiite and Sunni leaders.

  NAME-CALLING

  The name-calling was between Harith al-Dhari, leader of the Muslim Scholars Association (an influential group of militant Sunni clerics) and Hadi al-Amri, commander of Iraq's largest Shiite militia, the Iranian-trained Badr brigade. It followed the assassination in Baghdad of a senior cleric from al-Dhari's group, Hassan an-Niami.

  "The parties behind the campaign of killings of preachers and worshippers are ... the Badr Brigade," al-Dhari said angrily during the broadcast of a news conference. "Badr forces are responsible for the escalating tensions."

  His comments reflected a marked change from a year earlier, when I had interviewed both al-Dhari and the late an-Niami after the murder of al-Dhari's brother Dhamir. Then, despite an-Niami's private comment to me that it was the Iranian-trained Badr Brigade that had carried out the killing, al-Dhari himself refused to speculate, saying that he had forgiven the killers to "preserve the blood of the Iraqi people."

  But whatever sensitivity existed a year ago was blown away by al-Dhari's televised accusations, and the later broadcast of a live interview in which an emotional al-Amri denied the charges and accused al-Dhari and his son, Muthanna, of supporting al-Qaeda.

  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. We found him by the scorched door of the little building that stands in an alley off a residential street.

  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. But 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 Shiite, holding to the idea of a unified Iraq as more important than the pain.
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