BAGHDAD, 13 April 2006 — The drive from Nawal Hassan’s parents’ house to her own was already somber since the family was mourning her brother, who was mysteriously killed. Then she heard more grim news on the radio: The Shiite Buratha Mosque was bombed, killing dozens of worshippers. “Now, they’ll fight each other. The Shiite mosque was attacked, so a Sunni mosque will be attacked,” Nawal said she told her husband in the car. “Tit for tat.”
For Nawal, every blow in Iraq’s increasing sectarian violence hits home — she is a Sunni and her husband is a Shiite. In the midst of the attacks and reprisals that threaten to drag the country into a civil war, mixed households like Nawal’s offer a bright spot. But the rising heat at times seeps in, putting a strain on some such marriages.
The news of Friday’s bombing at the Buratha Mosque was far from uncommon. A Feb. 22 bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra sparked revenge attacks on Sunni mosques and a spiral of sectarian killings. But the killings were going on well before the Samarra attack. Nawal’s brother went out to put gas in his car in February and was never seen again. The family finally got word that his body turned up at a morgue in Baghdad’s Shiite Sadr City neighborhood. There, they were told that the body was found with three bullets to the head and was buried when no one claimed it.
“This is the most difficult part, that we couldn’t even see the body or bury it,” Nawal said. Nawal, 37, said she would never know for sure who kidnapped her brother, but she believes he was killed by Shiite militias because he is a Sunni. Her husband, 42-year-old Hassan Mohammed, dismissed the theory. “This could have been a theft or maybe it was the resistance,” he said, using the term that refers to Sunni insurgents. The brother’s death did not raise tensions between Nawal and Hassan — despite their differing views over it, she said.
“My husband was as sad as I was because they were close friends,” she said. But like many Sunnis, she sees a pattern. Last year, her cousin, a member of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, was kidnapped and has not been heard from since. She is convinced the Badr Brigade, a political organization that was previously a Shiite militia, was behind his disappearance. “They target Sunnis,” she said.
Hassan said these divisions were new. He blames the violence on the Americans and the Iraqi government for failing to provide security. His wife accuses Shiite Iran of fanning the flames of sectarianism and the Americans of sowing divisions. At her brother’s funeral, women mourners told Nawal a troubling story about a Shiite husband who divorced his Sunni wife in part because of the rising sectarian tensions. “They told me ‘Beware.’ I told them we don’t have such things at home.”
