Shi'a - Tag Search

The hajj is supposed to be an annual display of Muslim unity, but this year it is rapidly becoming the latest fracture point in the tense relationship between the Arab world and Iran.

That's what Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported this morning (عربي), at least. The Saudi government reportedly sent a warning to the Iranian government -- especially president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- not to politicize the pilgrimage. Saudi officials accuse Iran of a campaign to "pit the Iranian pilgrims against Saudi Arabia."

The warning comes after Khamenei accused the Saudi government of insulting Shi'a Muslims and desecrating Shi'a holy sites in the kingdom.

Reuters video shows mourners carrying Al-Hakim's casket through Baghdad on Friday. He is scheduled to be buried today.

A controversial law aimed at Afghan women and supported by Shiite parliamentarians that President Hamid Karzai had promised to review has quietly gone into effect, ABC News reports.

Critics of Karzai's government said Karzai didn't send the law back to parliament, despite his promise, because he wanted to please "powerful Shiite clerics," ABC News said. Afghanistan is approximately 19 percent Shia, according to the CIA World Factbook.

Read on for the possible implications of the law (or not) and a money quote from Afghanistan's highest-ranking Shiite cleric.

More anti-Shi'a violence in Iraq:

Explosives-laden bags left among a pile of rubbish near a falafel stand at the market were detonated late on Sunday evening.

Police and hospital officials said five children were among those killed in the incident which also damaged several stores...

On a semi-related note, the Iraqi government pulled a Lebanon yesterday and announced that it will postpone the national census scheduled for October. The fear is that a new census will further inflame sectarian tensions: If it concludes that Ninewa province has become more Kurdish and less Arab, for example, it might become a target for additional Sunni Arab insurgent attacks.

The postponement is an unfortunate development, though; the war displaced millions of Iraqis, internally and externally, and the government could use better information about the country's current demographics.

Iraqi insurgents will probably increase their attacks ahead of January's national election, according to prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.

"Terrorists are increasing their attacks here and there because they recognize that we are about to have a political breakthrough," Maliki told Shi'a tribal leaders during a meeting in Baghdad.

Violence in Iraq has increased in recent days, much of it directed against the country's Shi'a majority. Voters will select 275 members of parliament and a new prime minister during the election; Maliki, who is running for re-election, has campaigned largely on a platform of increased security.

The New York Times this morning makes the same observation I made yesterday: Despite the huge amount of anti-Shi'a violence over the last two months, Iraq's Shi'a population has exercised tremendous restraint. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has cautioned against any violent retaliation; Shi'a militia groups have not surfaced.

Even Moqtada's counseling caution:

"Sayid Moktada al-Sadr has told us in his instructions that we have to follow the orders of the howza," said Sheik Jalil al-Sarkhey, the deputy head of the Sadr office in Sadr City, the huge Shiite slum in Baghdad. "We are all agreed; there will be no spilling of Iraqi blood."

Still, the pessimist in me wonders how long this will last. The Times mentions the 2006 shrine bombing in Samarra as a sort of spark that caused an explosion of sectarian violence. But tensions had been brewing for two years before the Samarra bombing -- they provided the fuel for this hypothetical explosion.

I can't help but wonder if we're building towards a similar tipping point.

More bombings in Shi'a neighborhoods in Iraq today, including two -- near a cafe and an apartment building -- that killed eight people and wounded at least 30.

I'm impressed that Shi'a groups haven't committed any reprisals so far, since more than 90 people have been killed in bombings in Shi'a areas since July 31. But you have to wonder how long that patience will last.

43 people were killed and "hundreds" wounded -- too early to put an upper limit on tha number -- according to The New York Times. All of the bombings targeted Shi'ites in northern Iraq and Baghdad, a continuation of a worrisome trend.

The worst attack was a double truck bombing in Khazna, a village east of Mosul that's home to a large Shi'a Shabak population, according to Al-Sharq Al-Awsat. The two trucks exploded early in the morning, while most people were still sleeping. That blast caused more than half of the casualties from this morning's violence.

The other bombs went off in Baghdad's El-Amal and Shurta neighborhoods. They're both Shi'a neighborhoods, though neither one has seen much violence in recent months.

Insurgents have stepped up their anti-Shi'a attacks this month -- they've staged large bombings at Shi'a mosques during the last two Friday prayers.

This time in Ninewa province, outside a Shi'a mosque, just as worshipers were leaving Friday prayers. At least 30 people were killed and 80 wounded, according to Iraqi police.

I'm digging through our database and the number of Shi'a attacks since June 30 is really alarming. There were two attacks on pilgrims on July 16; a bombing at a Shi'a leader's funeral on July 15; a half-dozen car bombings and IEDs in Shi'a neighborhoods; and, of course, last Friday's mosque bombings in Baghdad.

Especially worrisome is that these are high-profile, high-casualty attacks -- the kinds we've only seen infrequently since 2007.

Happy Friday morning. The big news in U.S. publications today: the report that Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud may have been killed in a drone strike on Wednesday. Mehsud is/was certainly a mass murderer and a force for instability in Pakistan -- but will his death really hurt the Taliban? I agree with Evan's analysis from earlier this morning.

Elsewhere around the region...

A series of roadside bombs killed at least seven Shi'a pilgrims returning from the holy city of Karbala in Iraq. The first bomb exploded around 9:10 a.m., targeting a minibus of pilgrims re-entering the Sadr City slum. Two others targeted a group of pilgrims walking past a stadium in eastern Baghdad.

Attacks on Iraq's Shi'a population have increased over the last few weeks -- most notably, insurgents staged a series of bombings outside Shi'a mosques last Friday.

Al-Arabiya is reporting a string of bomb attacks targeted at Shi'a worshippers as they left Friday prayers in Baghdad. 27 dead and 59 wounded, according to the report.

Quiet day in Iraq so far, except for an attack on a convoy of Iranian pilgrims returning home from this weekend's pilgrimage. 5 were killed and at least 37 wounded; the attack happened near Khaniqin, a town close to the Iran-Iraq border.

By the way, sorry if you had problems with our Iraq violence map yesterday. There was a problem with Google's mapping software, and for a few hours last night none of the placemarkers were appearing on the map. Google got its act together; the problem is fixed.

There has been a lot of violence in Iraq over the last 72 hours: At least 10 attacks that killed 14 people and wounded 28, by our count. But the Iraqi security forces deserve a lot of credit, because the Shi'a pilgrimage to Imam Moussa al-Kadhim's shrine passed largely without incident.

In previous years, pilgrims on the traditional walk to the gold-domed shrine in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad to commemorate the death of an eighth-century imam have been attacked by Sunni extremist groups. But as of early Saturday evening, millions of people had converged on the shrine without significant violence, Iraqi security officials said.

The level of violence against civilians has been quite low since the U.S. withdrawal on June 30. Most of the attacks have targeted Iraqi soldiers and police officers, or specific individuals (politicians and militia leaders).

Michael Totten is posting a series of optimistic and pessimistic interviews about the Iraq war that he did on his last trip over there. It's an interesting series, and he does justice to both perspectives. But I have to take issue with his central conclusion:

The United States has basically won the war in Iraq. No insurgent or terrorist group can declare victory or claim Americans are evacuating Iraq's cities because they were beaten. America's most modest foreign policy objectives there have been largely secured. Saddam Hussein's toxic regime has been replaced with a more or less consensual government. I doubt very much that Iraq will seriously threaten the United States or its neighbors any time soon. It isn't likely to be ruled by terrorists as it probably would have been if the United States left between 2004 and 2007. It's a relief.

I don't want to wade into the historical question of whether Iraq ever "seriously threatened the United States," because frankly that's an unanswerable question. I don't think it did; I'm sure Totten, an early Iraq war supporter, thinks differently.

I suggested earlier that Anthony Shadid's article on Iraqi nostalgia also tapped into some Sunni/Shi'a resentment in Baghdad. Via e-mail, Shadid tells me that's the wrong way to read the piece:

I actually didn't see it as a sectarian comment. In fact, it's probably a statement of how far we've come that we'd view it that way. I think Maysoon was talking as much about Anbari sheikhs as sheikhs from anywhere else. There is a powerful nostalgia here, and I think that nostalgia is one of the few things that crosses the sectarian divide these days. It's especially pronounced among the Shiite merchant class, which seems as full of hanin as anyone else.

It's indeed a sad commentary on the current state of Iraq that we see sectarian tension in just about everything. And the sectarianism fuels the nostalgia in Iraq; Baghdad's neighborhoods were much more tolerant a decade ago.

(Hanin is Arabic for "nostalgia", by the way.)

Anthony Shadid has an article in today's Washington Post that does a good job -- consciously or not -- tapping into Sunni resentment about the "new Iraq."

Baghdadis -- by which [Maysoon al-Damluji] meant the city's tolerance -- have gone. Migrants from the countryside, with the hard rules of hard men, have taken their place. In her day, a tribal sheik would forgo his headdress when he visited the capital.

"He would be too embarrassed," she said. "When they visited, they acted like Baghdadis. Now people living in Baghdad act like tribal elders from the countryside."

There seems to be a bias at work here: al-Damluji is a secular member of parliament from a prominent Sunni family; the tribal sheikhs she's criticizing tend to be Shi'a.

Several new attacks in Iraq today -- more than 50 people dead in 24 hours when you add in yesterday's Mosul bombings.

The biggest attacks were in Tal Afar, a city near Mosul of some 200,000 people, most of them Turkmen. It has become a volatile place after the ethnic cleansing that's happened in Iraq over the last few years. Juan Cole explains why:

US military operations in Tal Afar caused the Turkmen Sunnis to leave for the most part, leading to a take-over of the city by the Shiite Turkmen. The Sunni Turkmen were allied with a minority Sunni Arab community, and both had thrown in with the secular Baath regime. After the US overthrew the Baath, many Sunnis in the region turned toward vigilante fundamentalism or "al-Qaeda," provoking a fight between the Sunnis and the Shiites. The Shiites won, with the help of US and NATO fighter pilots, and turned Tal Afar into a Shiite place.. The angry Sunni guerrillas are the ones most likely behind the bombing on Thursday.

Also yesterday, two bombs went off in a market in Sadr City, a Shi'ite neighborhood in Baghdad.

This was a bloody week in Iraq: More than a dozen bombings, nearly 200 people dead, many more wounded. Seven bombings targeted police and soldiers around the country on Thursday; a bombing in a market in Sadr City killed 70 on Wednesday; seven more blasts ripped through Baghdad on Tuesday.

The violence is obviously timed to coincide with June 30, the deadline for U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraqi cities and towns. It's supposed to make Iraqis worry that their government can't protect them without U.S. help -- which certainly seems to be true.

And yet Iraqi prime minister Nouri Al-Maliki seems focused on scoring political points off the withdrawal, dubbing June 30 the Iraqi "day of pride" and declaring it a national holiday -- though I'm told he dropped the "day of pride" branding today.

At least seven bombings in Iraq today -- which brings us to fifteen bombings in the last three days. Most were in Baghdad, with one each in Mosul and Fallujah (both of which are Sunni cities, interestingly).

Many of the attacks targeted police and military patrols (American and Iraqi). The total casualty numbers were low -- less than a half-dozen killed, maybe 30 wounded.

Seven bomb blasts in Baghdad yesterday killed at least two dozen people.

They're the latest in a series of recent attacks: the Nasiriya bombing, the Harith Al-Obaidi assassination, and this weekend's horrific bombing in Taza.

Most news reports link this outburst of violence to the June 30 withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraqi cities. But that doesn't explain why these attacks are happening -- just why they're happening now.

Terror in Iraq was, for years, a tool for fighting Sunni-Shi'a battles. The Sunni have since lost many of those battles in the political arena. So are these attacks just revenge from an angry Sunni minority? Geography would suggest they are -- most of them happened in or around Baghdad, today an overwhelmingly Shi'a city.