In the three days after the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February, some 1,300 people, mostly Sunni, were picked up on the street or dragged from their cars and murdered. The dead bodies of four suspected suicide bombers were left dangling from a pylon in the Sadr City slum.
Even inside Iraq’s spotless new schoolhouses, the freshly painted and refurbished pride of U.S. reconstruction efforts, Shiite children have begun to sit on one side of the class, Sunni children on the other. “My daughter came home and asked me, ‘Daddy, what sect do we belong to?’ ” said Shafiq Mahdi Jabouri, a Baghdad educator who belongs to a tribe with both Shiite and Sunni branches. “I was shocked. Sect used to be a joke in Iraq. Now it’s a dividing line.”
Sectarian politics and wealthy regional governments ensure a weak central government in Baghdad. Sunni and Kurdish resistance to Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s continued service as prime minister continues to slow progress toward the formation of that government. When central authority is weak, the state is vulnerable to manipulation–even intervention–from outside. Just as Syria dominated Lebanon’s politics for decades, Iran stands ready to exploit a divided Iraq. The centrifugal pull of sectarian politics and the absence of a strong national identity will leave Iraq open to many forms of Iranian interference–political, economic, even military–once U.S. troops have gone home.
The bloodshed of recent weeks exposed the waning power of Shia religious and political leaders to rein in the vigilantes. Even Mr Sadrs calls for restraint were ignored. Hadi al-Amery, the head of the Badr organisation, an arm of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the main Shia parties, told Reuters news agency that small armed groups were being formed in villages and towns to protect the population … More militancy among the Shia majority plays into the hands of the Sunni insurgents and could help them draw broader support from the Sunni Arab community … The enemy, which used to be described as the occupying forces, is now increasingly seen as the Shia sectarian government backed by Iran waging war against the Sunnis.
Muqtada [al-Sadr] was still publishing his original newspaper, Al Hawza, and it warned of an American plan to split Iraq and printed a cartoon of British Prime Minister Tony Blair saying, Hello, Bush, we succeeded in splitting Iraq. One article discussed the role of Islam in the Iraqi constitution and concluded that Islam could not be applied truly unless the Mahdi returned or his assistant appeared, suggesting the possibility that Muqtada was the Mahdis assistant. Another headline reported a study that showed that 25 percent of Europeans are insane.
In the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Egypt, voters have turned out in large numbers to support the militant group Hamas, Hezbollah guerrillas and the conservative Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, respectively. “War has increased the wave of Islamism,” said Essam el Erian, a spokesman for the influential Muslim Brotherhood, which is now Egypt’s leading opposition force. In the wake of Hamas’ victory, the United States is widely perceived to have muted its pro-democracy rhetoric, leading to a sense that American support for democracy is fickle.
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