Word: samarra
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...doggedly maintained that the Shi'ite-on-Sunni sectarian killings were one-offs, unlikely to spread across the community. That posture began to change when Shi'ite mobs went on a murderous spree in Baghdad's Sunni neighborhoods after the Feb. 22 bombing of the Shi'ite shrine in Samarra. By the time U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his latest visit to Baghdad last month, the assessment was more realistic. General George Casey, the U.S. commander in Iraq, told Rumsfeld that Shi'ite death squads were catalyzing a surge in sectarian violence. And General John Abizaid...
...militias, many of his partners in the government are blatantly sectarian. Political leaders express outrage over the atrocities committed against their own sect but won't acknowledge that the other side, too, is bleeding. They often dismiss those wounds as self-inflicted. After the bombing of the Samarra shrine, many Sunni leaders told me the blast was the work of Shi'ite agents provocateurs working in concert with Iranian intelligence operatives. Likewise, Mahdi Army commanders routinely accuse Sunni insurgents of committing atrocities against their own kind and then blaming the Shi'ites...
...failure two weeks ago when Bush and al-Maliki announced in Washington that more U.S. troops would be sent to protect Baghdad. But will that work? Probably not. When the full might of the U.S. military has been brought to bear in an Iraqi city--think Fallujah, Tall 'Afar, Samarra, al-Qaim--the enemy has simply melted away, taking its terrorist tactics to places that are inadequately defended. And when U.S. forces have eventually stood down, leaving the policing to Iraqis, the enemy has returned to the very places that had supposedly been cleaned up--at the cost of American...
...neighborhood are former members of the Mahdi Army, the violent Shi'ite militia loyal to the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The family didn't feel it could turn to Shi'ite neighbors for support, either. Since the Feb. 22 bombing of the Shi'ite mosque in Samarra, relations between Shi'ites and Sunnis in mixed neighborhoods have turned frosty. Omar stopped speaking with the Shi'ite friends who used to be his soccer teammates...
...Iraqi was standing in as the "emergency emir" in charge of al-Qaeda in Iraq (a.k.a., al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia). He has been a long-standing commander of al-Qaeda in Iraq, having had positions as the emir in charge of Anbar province and the emir in charge of Samarra, north of Baghdad, where the shrine bombing occurred in late February. (It is unclear if he had a hand in that in that incident, which brought Iraq closer to a Shi'a-Sunni civil war than ever before.) Lately, says Abu Bara, Abu Abdul Rahman al Iraqi had been...