Word: samarra
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...compared with the one Nema had to make from al-Haswa last week. For months, Nema says, the mixed neighborhood's young Shi'ite men had been disappearing, their bodies turning up days later. Gradually, Shi'ites and Sunnis had stopped talking to each other. After the bombing of Samarra's al-Askari shrine two weeks ago and the wave of Shi'ite reprisals that followed, the atmosphere in al-Haswa turned toxic. The killings accelerated, and pamphlets began appearing in the street denouncing Shi'ites as "spies and betrayers" and demanding that they leave--or else. By the time...
...speaks from experience. Mohammed's family fled its home in Baladiat, in northeastern Baghdad, in the aftermath of the Samarra blast. Once a mainly Sunni enclave adjoining the Shi'ite district of Sadr City, Baladiat gradually turned into a mixed neighborhood after the fall of Saddam Hussein. "We made lots of friends among the Shi'ites," Mohammed says. "On their festivals, we would invite them to feasts at our home." The day after the shrine bombing, he was at work when his uncle called. "He said, 'Come home at once.' He sounded frightened." But Mohammed was on duty and could...
...been predicated on replacing them with Iraqi units. But the sectarian upsurge has also highlighted the troubling extent to which many of the men in the most capable Iraqi security units remain loyal to ethnic and sectarian agendas. Shi'ite leader al-Hakim, for instance, had initially blamed the Samarra bombing in part on Khalilzad's pressure on his party to relinquish control of the Interior Ministry, which controls some 110,000 police and paramilitary personnel-many of whom are drawn from Shi'ite militias and have been accused of doubling as death squads targeting Sunnis...
...Coalition officials have admitted. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that more than 1,300 bodies had been delivered to the Baghdad morgue, directly challenging the Iraqi government?s assertion that about 380 people had been killed around the country since the Wednesday bombing of the al-Askariya shrine in Samarra...
...events of the past week saw him take a major role in the parliament of the streets which rapidly eclipsed the tortuous negotiations of elected legislators: Sadr's followers are reported to have been in the forefront of attacks on Sunnis in the 24 hours that followed the Samarra bombing, while their leader was away in Lebanon burnishing his regional credentials...