CAIRO, 2 March 2006 — A week after the bombing of Samarra’s Golden Mosque — one of the most important Shiite shrines in Iraq — there seems to be no will on either side to end the seven-day spate of attacks and counterattacks.
Sunni mosques have been burned in retaliation, while predominantly Shiite areas of Baghdad have been targeted by suicide bombers.
Nineteen died in yesterday’s attack on a crowded marketplace in the capital’s Al-Jadida neighborhood. Ten died in the same area the previous day when a bomb ripped through a queue of workers while Tuesday’s bombing of a petrol station in the Baghdad district of Amin killed over 20.
Almost every day brings new attacks and every bloodbath deepens the desire for revenge.
At least 379 people have been killed and 458 injured since Samarra’s Imam Ali Al-Madhi and Hassan Al-Askari shrine was destroyed last Tuesday, according to Iraqi government figures.
Over 70 people died in a series of attacks Tuesday, while yesterday’s provisional death toll stood at two dozen. Talks on the formation of a new government, which have been dragging on since parliamentary elections last December, are not making progress.
The mutual mistrust is also growing in political circles. Trouble was brewing Tuesday after interim Prime Minister Ibrahim Al-Jafari paid a surprise visit to Turkey.
President Jalal Talabani admitted that he had not been informed of the visit, while Al-Jafari’s own Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari conceded that he had only learned about the trip through media reports.
Every bomb perpetuates the wave of violence and draws Iraq closer to a civil war.
The current disintegration in the country certainly seems to be heading toward that end, bringing with it terrible consequences for the unstable but oil-rich Mideast region.
Neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Turkey with its historic claim on northern Iraq’s Kurdish region, could be dragged into an inconceivable religious and ethnic war.
Even for US officials it no longer seems taboo to speak about the unthinkable.
CIA chief and former US Ambassador to Baghdad, John Negroponte, told a US Senate committee Tuesday that chaos resulting from the fall of democracy in Iraq could have an impact on the rest of the Middle East and possibly on the rest of the world.
If it comes to that historians will be the first to examine whether the bombing of the mosque in Samarra was the prelude to war. But contemporary experts are cautious.
The International Crisis Group, an independent think tank, in its most recent report on Iraq published at the start of the week, noted a gradual decline in religious and ethnic differences, which were intensified last year by the election and referendum campaigns. The only way out of a potential civil war is to build a national unity government with strong Sunni representation and to modify the constitution adopted in last October’s referendum, which with its promise of extensive federalism, threatens to weaken the Iraqi state.
