Word: sectarianism
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There's nothing inevitable about civil war in Iraq, but whether or not the sectarian violence that has killed hundreds in the past week devolves into full-blown conflagration will depend on choices made by political leaders. As bodies continued to pile up, Tuesday, following a series of suicide bombings that killed at least 55 people, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad suggested the crisis had passed because Iraq's elected leaders had decided to work together to avoid a civil war. Khalilzad has been working behind the scenes to coax the main Sunni parliamentary parties back to the negotiating table...
Indeed, what makes the rise of sectarian violence so chilling is precisely the difficulty involved in carrying it out. Some Shi'ite mobs last week stopped people in the street and demanded to see their ID cards, looking for Sunni names. Each sect regards some names as taboo, usually because they are associated with hated figures from history. But that too is imprecise: the vast majority of Muslim names are used by both sects. In the end, as is often the case in sectarian wars, many of the victims of last week's violence were simply fingered by their neighbors...
...insurgency. In the end, the Mahdi Army was cornered, and Sistani ordered the fighters to go home. But taking a beating from an overwhelmingly superior force of foreigners is one thing. It is hard to see either Shi'ites or Sunnis backing down from a more evenly balanced sectarian fight, if only because the burden of history makes it impossible for either side to admit defeat...
Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shi'ite leader, doesn't like to miss out on the action. As Iraq convulsed in sectarian violence last week, al-Sadr was stuck in Beirut, on the final leg of a grand tour of Middle Eastern capitals. He was being feted by heads of state across the region, a remarkable achievement for a politician-cleric who has neither been elected to any office nor completed his religious education. After hearing news of the destruction of the Shi'ite shrine in Samarra, al-Sadr cut his trip short to return to Iraq to marshal...
...February 22, 2006: The bombing of a sacred Shi'ite shrine in Samarra sparks sectarian violence that leaves more than 200 dead, including a group of foreign Arab prisoners in Basra