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Iraq's Burning Season

From: Open Democracy
Paul Rogers
23 - 2 - 2006


United States strategy in Iraq is increasingly powerless in the face of intensifying insurgency and sectarian violence.

Iraq's slow burn of the last six weeks has been occurring behind the backs of most of the western media. The bombing on 22 February of one of Shi'a Islam's holiest shrines, the al-Askari mosque (the "golden mosque") in Samarra, has reignited the world's attention. But how does this latest incident, and the retaliatory attacks it has provoked, fit into the unfolding story of Iraq's conflict and United States strategy for the country?

The Samarra assault, conducted by a dozen men dressed in paramilitary uniform who subdued the mosque's guards before detonating a bomb underneath the shrine's gold-plated dome, occurred on the third day of intense violence targeted both at the Iraqi security forces and at Iraq's majority Shi'a population.

On 20 February, a bomb in a Mosul restaurant frequented by police officers killed five people and injured twenty-one, and a suicide-bomb in a market in the (Shi'a) Khadamiyah district of Baghdad killed twelve and injured dozens more. A day later, the bombing of a market in the al-Doura area of southern Baghdad killed twenty-two people and injured thirty.

The Samarra attack, however, is especially significant, for two reasons. First, the potent symbolism of the target: the mosque contains the remains of two of Shi'a Islam's twelve revered imams, Ali al-Hadi (died 868 bce) and Hassan al-Askari (died 874 bce). (The latter's son, Mohammed al-Mahdi, is the famed "hidden imam" the idea of whose reappearance to deliver justice to the world – devoutly expected by Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, among others – plays a crucial role in Shi'a Islam's belief-system.)

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This article originally appeared on openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence. To view the original article, please click here.

posted by Annamarie at 11:17 PM