Shiite Shrine in Iraq is Bombed Again Attack Last Year Led to Sectarian Strife

By Graham Bowley

John F. Burns, Damien Cave and Iraqi employees contributed reporting. *

One of Iraq’s most important Shiite shrines, the Askariya Mosque in Samarra, was attacked and severely damaged again Wednesday, just over a year after an attack on its famous Golden Dome unleashed a tide of sectarian bloodletting across the country.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered Shiite cleric in Iraq, appealed to Iraqis to show restraint while also condemning the attack, which destroyed the mosque’s two minarets. Moktada al-Sadr, an anti-American Shiite cleric, called for peaceful demonstrations and a three-day mourning period to mark the shrine’s destruction. The 30 national legislators affiliated with Sadr threatened to suspend their bloc’s membership in Parliament, threatening a deepened political crisis, The Associated Press reported.

It was unclear who carried out the attack in Samarra, a predominantly Sunni town north of Baghdad, although the U.S. authorities blamed Al Qaeda. Iraqi security forces secured the area around the mosque and were investigating, the U.S. military said.

The Iraqi police reported hearing two nearly simultaneous explosions coming from inside the mosque compound around 9 a.m. Local officials said two mortar rounds had been fired at the two minarets, the state-run television network Iraqiya reported

The shrine was badly damaged on Feb. 22, 2006, in an attack the government has blamed on Haitham al-Badri, a Sunni insurgent affiliated with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia who remains at large. The destruction of the remaining two minarets can be expected to have powerful symbolic importance to Iraqis.

The government announced a curfew in Baghdad. Before it took hold, The AP reported, arsonists set fire to a Sunni mosque in western Baghdad, and a Shiite shrine was blown apart north of Baghdad, the police said. Later police reports told of two Sunni mosques bombed south of the capital, one destroyed and the other with its minaret destroyed.

In Samarra, where a curfew was in place, there were scattered reports of demonstrations by protesters condemning the attack, although a U.S. military official in the area said that by afternoon the city of roughly 100,000 was quiet.

A curfew was also in place in Hilla, a mixed area south of Baghdad, where officials said they received word of a possible protest by Shiites.

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, and the top U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, issued a joint statement. “This brutal action on one of Iraq’s holiest shrines is a deliberate attempt by Al Qaeda to sow dissent and inflame sectarian strife among the people of Iraq,” they said.

Senior U.S. military commanders in Iraq have said recently that they feared an imminent dramatic attack from Sunni insurgents to refocus Sunni attention on the country’s struggle between Shiites and Sunnis, and to reunite Sunnis in the wake of U.S. attempts to consolidate Sunni resistance to extremist groups like Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia.

But they expected that if such an attack did occur, it would most likely come at one of Iraq’s three other most-sacred Shiite sites, not Askariya, which was already badly damaged.

Since the attack in 2006, the shrine had been under the protection of local guards, predominantly Sunni. But the U.S. military and Iraqi security officials had recently become concerned that the unit had been infiltrated by Al Qaeda forces in Iraq.

A move by the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad over the past few days to bring in a new guard unit, predominantly Shiite, may have been linked to the latest attack. The attack was depicted as sectarian by Abdul Sattar Abdul Jabbar, a prominent Sunni cleric, who told Al Jazeera television that the new Shiite guards had arrived at the shrine shouting sectarian slogans that may have provoked local Sunnis.

Gunfire was reported around the mosque Tuesday night, possibly related to the change of guards.

Attacks on Shiite holy sites by suspected Sunni insurgents have increased in Iraq in the past two months. In April, a car bomb exploded in Karbala near the Imam Abbas Shrine, the second-holiest site in Shiite Islam, killing at least 58 people and wounding 169. Two weeks earlier in Karbala, another car bomb exploded near the Imam Hussein Shrine, killing 36 people and wounding 168.

In both cases, a perimeter of security, with blast walls and Shiite guards, prevented the bombers from getting close enough to the mosques to damage them.

Tensions in Samarra have also risen recently. Last month, a suicide car bomber attacked a police battalion headquarters, killing the police chief and 11 others, the military said in a statement. The chief, Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Jaleel Hanni, a Sunni who had been a member of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service, was respected by the Americans for his ability to recruit officers and maintain discipline.

Before the attack on the Askariya Mosque in 2006, more than a million Shiites streamed into Samarra each year, visiting the graves of the 10th and 11th Imams. They also came to honor Muhammad al- Mahdi, who became the 12th Imam when he was only 5 years old, in A.D. 872.

Shiites believe that it was at the shrine that the Mahdi was put into a state of divine hiddenness by God to protect his life. Shiites believe that the Mahdi will return at the end of days, at a time of chaos and destruction, to deliver perfect justice.

(c) 2007 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.