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The Samarra Bombing and Its Aftermath: A New Face on the Civil War?    [

    Toll in Iraq's Deadly Surge: 1,300
    By Ellen Knickmeyer and Bassam Sebti
    The Washington Post

    Tuesday 28 February 2006

Morgue count eclipses other tallies since shrine attack.

    Baghdad - Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.

    Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday - blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound - and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

    "After he came back from the evening prayer, the Mahdi Army broke into his house and asked him, 'Are you Khalid the Sunni infidel?' " one man at the morgue said, relating what were the last hours of his cousin, according to other relatives. "He replied yes and then they took him away."

    Aides to Sadr denied the allegations, calling them part of a smear campaign by unspecified political rivals.

    By Monday, violence between Sunni Arabs and Shiites appeared to have eased. As Iraqi security forces patrolled, American troops offered measured support, in hopes of allowing the Iraqis to take charge and prevent further carnage.

    But at the morgue, where the floor was crusted with dried blood, the evidence of the damage already done was clear. Iraqis arrived throughout the day, seeking family members and neighbors among the contorted bodies.

    "And they say there is no sectarian war?" demanded one man. "What do you call this?"

    The brothers of one missing man arrived, searching for a body. Their hunt ended on the concrete floor, provoking sobs of mourning: "Why did you kill him?" "He was unarmed!" "Oh, my brother! Oh, my brother!"

    Morgue officials said they had logged more than 1,300 dead since Wednesday - the day the Shiites' gold-domed Askariya shrine was bombed - photographing, numbering and tagging the bodies as they came in over the nights and days of retaliatory raids.

    The Statistics Department of the Iraqi police put the nationwide toll at 1,020 since Wednesday, but that figure was based on paperwork that is sometimes delayed before reaching police headquarters. The majority of the dead had been killed after being taken away by armed men, police said.

    The disclosure of the death tolls followed accusations by the U.S. military and later Iraqi officials that the news media had exaggerated the violence between Shiites and Sunnis over the past few days.

    The bulk of the previously known deaths were caused by bombings and other large-scale attacks. But the scene at the morgue and accounts related by relatives indicated that most of the bloodletting came at the hands of self-styled executioners.

    "They killed him just because he was a Sunni," one young man at the morgue said of his 32-year-old neighbor, whose body he was retrieving.

    Much of the violence has centered on mosques, many of which were taken over by Shiite gunmen, bombed or burned.

    In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, aides to Sadr denied any role in the killings.

    "These groups wore black clothes like the Mahdi Army to make the people say that the Shiites kidnapped and killed them," said Riyadh al-Nouri, a close aide to Sadr.

    Sahib al-Amiri, another close aide, said: "Some political party accused [Sadr's political party] and the Mahdi Army because they considered us as competitive to them. So they recruited criminals to kill Shiites and Sunnis."

    After Wednesday's mosque attack in Samarra, Sadr and other Shiite clerics called on their armed followers to deploy to protect shrines across Iraq.

    Clutching rocket-propelled grenade launchers and automatic rifles, the militias rolled out of their Baghdad base of Sadr City. Residents of several neighborhoods reported them on patrol or in control of mosques. U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces did not appear to challenge the militias, which are officially outlawed.

    Sunni leaders charged that more than 100 Sunni mosques were burned, fired upon or bombed in the retaliatory violence after the attack on the Samarra mosque.

    Iraqi officials, at the urging of Sunni leaders, imposed what became a round-the-clock curfew in Baghdad to try to quell the violence.

    Sunnis speaking at the morgue said many of the dead had been taken away at night, when security forces were supposed to have been enforcing the curfew.

    By Monday, the reported violence had subsided. Four mortar rounds hit a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, killing four people, news agencies reported. More mortar attacks boomed in other parts of the capital.

    Also Monday, Iraq's interim government lifted the round-the-clock curfew in Baghdad. The new curfew orders residents inside from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.

    Residents rushed out of their homes to refill gas tanks and kitchen shelves. Lines at gas stations stretched for miles and sometimes clogged both sides of highways. One motorist in the line was seen clutching a blanket and pillow, apparently anticipating an overnight wait for gas.

    Making their way through the traffic were a few cars with plastic-wrapped corpses in crude wooden coffins strapped to the roofs.

    During two hours at the morgue on Monday, families brought in two more victims of the violence to receive death certificates. Other families carried away 10 dead. Most of the victims were Sunni.

    At the blue steel doors of the morgue, dozens more bloody bodies could be seen on the floor or on gurneys. Two hundred were still unidentified and unclaimed, morgue workers said.

    Claiming the dead has become automated. Morgue workers directed families to a barred window in the narrow courtyard outside the main entrance. A computer screen angled to face the window flashed the contorted, staring faces of the dead: men shot in the mouth, men shot in the head, men covered with blood, men with bindings twisted around their necks.

    Men and a few women in black abayas pressed up to the window's black bars as the reek of the bodies inside spilled out.

    "What neighborhood?'' a morgue worker asked one waiting man.

    "Adhamiyah,'' the man said, naming a predominantly Sunni neighborhood.

    Tapping at the keyboard, the morgue worker fast-forwarded through the scores of tortured faces.

    "Criminals. How can you kill another human for nothing?" someone clutching the bars asked.

    "Good news, we found the body," another man called out. "We found him."

    --------

    Special correspondents K.I. Ibrahim in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Najaf, staff writer Nelson Hernandez and other Washington Post staff contributed to this report.

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    The Samarra Bombing and Its Aftermath: A New Face on the Civil War?
    By Phyllis Bennis and Erik Leaver
    The Institute for Policy Studies

    Monday 27 February 2006

    It remains unclear who was responsible for the attack on the golden-domed Askariya Shi'a mosque in Samarra. In the two days following the bombing over 200 Iraqis were killed, and the country was put under a day-and-night curfew.

    The spike in sectarian violence does not reflect a sudden danger of civil war. Rather, if it continues to escalate it may lead to a shift from the existing low-intensity political civil war between supporters (reluctant or not) of the U.S. occupation and opponents of that occupation, to a civil war identified largely along sectarian lines.

    The bombing and the spike in violence afterwards provides the latest proof of the failure of the U.S. military occupation to bring security, let alone "democracy," to the people of Iraq. The declared U.S. strategy of training an Iraqi counter-insurgency military force to replace U.S. and "coalition" troops (not to mention the U.S. effort to enforce "security" in Samarra by surrounding it with a huge earthen wall) is a failure. A Congressional decision to pass the administration's latest supplemental spending bill authorizing about $62 billion for the Iraq war (especially for training Iraqi troops) would represent a complete acquiescence to this utterly failed policy.

    The presence of U.S. occupation troops in Iraq remains an aggravating provocation to all sides and continues to foment more violence. In recent polls 82% of all Iraqis want an end to the U.S. occupation; 47% of all Iraqis support attacks on U.S. troops. Much of the popular anger following the bombing of the Askariya shrine, among both Sunni and Shi'a, targeted the U.S. occupation. Shi'a cleric and militia leader Moqtada al Sadr, speaking on al Jazeera television, called on the new Iraqi parliament, which includes 32 of his followers, to vote on a request for "coalition" forces to leave Iraq.

    The undemocratic political process imposed by the U.S. occupation has exacerbated sectarian divisions in Iraq, a country with a long history (despite ethnic and sectarian tensions) of secularism and strong national identity. Negotiations over creation of a new Iraqi government have now collapsed, as has any potential interest in eliminating sectarian militias or bringing them under government control.

    U.S. military officials and the Bush administration are all eager to deny that this escalation heralds a "civil war" in Iraq because that would undermine their claim that only the presence of U.S. troops is preventing such a civil war. A top U.S. general said "we're not seeing civil war igniting…. We're seeing a capable Iraqi government using their capable forces…." President Bush said it was not a civil war, and claimed those responsible for the Samarra bombing were "not internal" to Iraq, but were those from outside who were "trying to stop the advance of freedom" in Iraq. Britain's Tony Blair, similarly, denied this was a civil war, but rather "democracy versus extremism and terrorism." Congressman John Murtha, who has called for U.S. troops to be withdrawn from Iraq, said it is a civil war, and that "our troops are caught in between."

    While the Askariya bombing has engendered a serious escalation in sectarian divisions and violence, and some sectarian militias seem to be gaining renewed power, there have also been significant cross-sectoral, unitary and secular responses. Influential religious leaders have called for calm, while urging their followers into the streets to protest the violence. In largely Shi'a Basra, for example, a large joint Sunni-Shi'a protest called for defending Iraqi national unity, opposing sectarian violence, and an end to the U.S. occupation, chanting "No to America."

    This is a new moment. U.S. and global anti-war forces should respond to the latest escalation of violence in Iraq with renewed energy for demanding an end to the occupation and bringing all the troops home now. The deteriorating conditions in Iraq and escalation in Iraqi deaths, along with the approaching third year anniversary of the U.S. invasion and especially the current congressional debate over the new multi-billion dollar supplemental spending bill, require new urgency for mobilization, education and advocacy on local, national and international levels. While incremental U.S. troop withdrawals may be announced soon after the current spike in violence subsides, we must be very clear that partial withdrawals (even if large scale) are not sufficient. Rather, our priority demand must be for a complete end to the occupation including withdrawal of all U.S. and "coalition" troops as well as foreign mercenaries, plus the closing of all U.S. military bases in Iraq.