Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Tragedy can divide, and it can unite. In the first hours after the stampede that killed more than 1,000 Shi'ite pilgrims in Baghdad last Wednesday, many of the survivors reflexively blamed Sunni terrorists. Surely, they reasoned, it must have been a Sunni agent provocateur who had started the rumor?of a suicide bomber at large among the tens of thousands of Shi'ite pilgrims crossing the Bridge of Imams?that had sparked the stampede...
...wore on, it became clear that the tragedy had more to do with inadequate policing and haphazard crowd control than with sectarian animosities. If anything, many Shi'ites said, the Sunnis behaved honorably, both before and after the tragedy. After all, over a million Shi'ite pilgrims had passed unmolested through the Sunni stronghold of Adhamiya on their way to the bridge. And when disaster struck, its residents rushed to the rescue. Many jumped into the Tigris River to pull out pilgrims who had leaped (or fallen) off the bridge; others took injured and exhausted pilgrims into their homes, providing...
...succor was as surprising as it was welcome. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Adhamiya has turned into a safe haven for Sunni insurgents, earning the nickname "Baghdad's Fallujah." There's little love lost between Adhamiya and Sadr City, the giant Shi'ite slum whose residents made up the majority of the victims. At Adhamiya's ancient Abu Hanifa mosque, close to the Bridge of Imams, sermons routinely laud the jihadis who have been killing Shi'ite civilians and curse the Shi'ite-dominated government. Yet on Wednesday, the yellow-brick mosque became a makeshift triage station for emergency...
...Even Shi'ite and Sunni political and clerical groups, who had been at each other's throats for months, managed to find a modicum of solidarity. "This is not the time for politics," said Abdul Salam al-Qubaisi, spokesman for the radical Association of Muslim Scholars (A.M.S.). "This is the time to show that we are all of the same flesh, the same body." The A.M.S. and other Sunni groups were working with groups loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shi'ite leader and uncrowned king of Sadr City. In an unprecedented gesture, the A.M.S. even invited Shi'ites...
...good to last. A day after the tragedy, a brief gun battle broke out between Iraqi security forces on the bridge and some Sunni insurgents in Adhamiya. And al-Qaeda's Iraqi offshoot, led by Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, claimed credit for an earlier rocket attack on Kadhimiya, the Shi'ite district on the other side of the bridge. Drive-by shootings at Sunni mosques in southern Iraq last Friday suggested scapegoating by some Shi'ites. And calls for a peace march after the joint prayers in Baghdad proved futile: not enough people turned...