Doug Lorimer
In the aftermath of the February 22 bombing of the Shiite Golden Mosque in Samarra - a predominantly Sunni city 125 kilometres north of Baghdad - by four men wearing Iraqi interior ministry commando uniforms, the Western corporate media has whipped up a lot of noise about Iraq being on the "brink of civil war".
While rioting Shiites were reported to have attacked many Sunni mosques, there were also attacks against united demonstrations of Shiites and Sunnis protesting the destruction of Samarra's gold-domed mosque. For example, the February 24 British Independent reported that "gunmen at a makeshift checkpoint south of Baghdad murdered 47 people who had been demonstrating against the destruction of the Shia shrine at Samarra, bringing Iraq close to a sectarian bloodbath.
"The victims were Shia and Sunni returning from a demonstration in the town of Kenaan, when they were dragged from their cars and killed. Their bodies were left in a ditch by the side of the road ...
"A particularly worrying factor in the present wave of violence is that frequently the sectarian killers either disguise themselves as army or police officers or really are soldiers or policemen."
By February 25, the Western corporate media was claiming that the "threat of civil war" had been averted thanks to the calls for calm by top Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali Sistani. However, it was Sistani who called on Shiites to protest in the streets immediately after the news of the Golden Mosque's destruction became known.
Shortly after Sistani's call for demonstrations, tens of thousands of Shiites took to the streets in Baghdad, Samarra, Najaf, Karbala, Basra and other Iraqi cities, vowing to avenge the destruction of the mosque.
"We have up to 168 Sunni mosques burned, damaged or occupied", Sheikh Abdul Salam al Kubaisi, chief spokesperson of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), told a news conference in Baghdad on February 23. He said that 10 Sunni clerics had been killed and 15 others kidnapped.
"We blame the top Shiite authorities for calling people for demonstrations", Kubaisi said. His comments were widely interpreted as directed at Sistani. While noting that these authorities had called for peaceful protests, Kubaisi argued that it was easy for those who wanted to provoke sectarian strife to derail such protests into anti-Sunni riots.
Sunni appeal to Sadr
Kubaisi appealed to popular Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr, whose followers were reported to have participated in rioting in Baghdad, to protect Sunni mosques. "I call on Moqtada al Sadr and remind him that our blood was mixed in Fallujah, Sadr City, Karbala and Najaf", Kubaisi said, referring to the battles waged by Sunni resistance fighters and Sadr's Mahdi Army militia against the US occupation troops in 2004.
Kubaisi also noted that the Sadr movement's office in Basra had sent members of Sadr's Mahdi Army militia to protect Sunni mosques.
Later that day, Sadr read a message from the Iranian holy city of Qum on Aljazeera satellite TV denouncing attacks on Shiite and Sunni mosques. He warned that there was "a plan by the occupation to spark a sectarian war" in Iraq.
CNN reported on February 23 that in the southern, predominantly Shiite city of Kut, a stronghold for Sadr's forces, tens of thousands of Sunnis and Shias joined a mass rally that day, carrying Iraqi flags and chanting "No to America!"
The next day, Reuters reported that in Baghdad, "20,000 of Sadr's followers called for Shiite and Sunni unity during Friday prayers" and that in the southern city of Basra, "Sadr's representatives whipped up emotions by blaming the shrine attack on the Shiite-led interim government, from which Sadr has kept his distance".
"This happened with the blessing of the elected government, God's curse upon it, and because the government did not care because it follows what America wants and nothing else is important", said Karim al Ghizzi, at Sadr's office in Basra, where thousands of Shiites gathered for Friday prayers.
While the Western corporate press has carried reports that many of the killings of Sunnis were being carried out by men dressed in the black uniforms of Sadr's Mahdi Army, at a press conference in Baghdad on February 28 with AMS representatives Sadr denied his militia's involvement. He said: "Our Iraq is passing through a big crisis, insofar as our enemies are entering among our brethren and spreading turmoil among you. Do not forget the plotting of the occupation, for if we forget its plots it will kill us all without exception."
Reuters reported on February 28 that two of the main Sunni-based resistance organisations also blamed the destruction of Samarra's Golden Mosque and the sectarian killings that have followed on forces linked to the US-backed Iraqi government. The Army of Ansar al Sunna said that "forces affiliated to the government" had carried out the bombing and blamed it on Sunnis. The 1920 Revolution Brigades issued a communique stating, "If you want to know who is behind it, you should know who is the beneficiary from this strife, which is the government sitting in the Green Zone".
The March 2 Christian Science Monitor reported that on the previous day, AMS spokesperson Kubaisi "held an impassioned press conference - carried live by Aljazeera - in which he accused the US and the Iraqi government of complicity in Shiite militia attacks against Sunnis, and claimed the national police attacked the home of the association's chief cleric, Harith al-Dari".
Media civil war talk
Western media talk about Iraq plunging into civil war has been aired ever since the rise of the Iraqi anti-occupation forces shattered the White House's claim that its invading troops would be welcomed as "liberators". The implicit and often explicit message that has accompanied the "Iraq-is-on-the-brink-of-civil-war" stories is that only the presence of the US and other foreign occupation troops is preventing Iraqi Shiites and Sunnis from massacring each other.
An early presentation of this pro-occupation line was carried in the November 19, 2003, Sydney Morning Herald. Under the headline "US exit may lead to Iraqi civil war", Paul McGeough, the SMH's Baghdad correspondent at the time, warned against a US withdrawal from Iraq: "Lately, US President George Bush, who arrives in Britain this morning Sydney time for a state visit, has been spinning his wheels. He has slid from asking Americans to 'support our troops', a cover for the questionable means by which he landed an army in Iraq, to talking about thousands of troops coming home in the northern spring, a foil for the realisation that Iraq is not an easy land to tame.
"But there is a risk that Bush's plans for a quick getaway ahead of next year's US presidential election may set the scene for civil war in post-Saddam Iraq ...
"Nothing happening in Iraq at present could inspire any sensible discussion about pulling US troops out - the CIA reports that the insurgency is bolder and more effective, but the Pentagon says that US troops could be reduced by about 30,000 to 100,000 by May next year."
Of course, Bush had no intention of a "quick getaway" from Iraq. This was merely a foil for McGeough to suggest to his readers, known from opinion polls to be overwhelmingly opposed to the US-led invasion of Iraq, that a "premature" US pullout would lead to a Shiite-Sunni civil war.
'Iraqising' the US war
There certainly has been an attempt to create a civil war in Iraq - by the US military, which has been recruiting and training Iraqis, mostly Shiites, to fight for it against the anti-occupation guerrillas, whose base is largely among Sunnis in Baghdad and in Iraq's western Anbar province.
This is hardly surprising. Colonial powers have always recruited local fighters to supplement their occupation troops. What is surprising is the abject failure of the US rulers' attempt to "Iraqise" its colonial war to conquer Iraq and its vast oil resources.
Last September, General George Casey, the commander of US forces in Iraq, admitted to a US congressional hearing that out of 100,000 US-recruited and -trained Iraqi soldiers, only one battalion - 500-700 soldiers - was willing and able to engage in combat operations against the resistance fighters without US military support and "advisers". In testimony to Congress in February, General Peter Pace, the Pentagon's top military commander, confirmed this was still the case.
While the US-recruited Iraqi Army has proved singularly ineffective as a counterinsurgency force, leading Sunni clerics and politicians estimate that at least 1600 known Sunni sympathisers of the resistance have been killed by death squads organised through Iraq's interior ministry.
Up until February, the US-backed Iraqi government dismissed these allegations. But on January 22, irrefutable evidence emerged to support them when US troops stopped a 22-member death squad at a Baghdad checkpoint, and its members freely admitted they were on their way to execute a Sunni prisoner.
The February 16 Chicago Tribune, which broke the news of this incident, reported that allegations "that death squads targeting Sunnis are operating within the Shiite-dominated police forces have been circulating since last May, when the bodies of Sunnis detained by men wearing police uniforms began turning up in garbage dumps and waste ground around Baghdad. Most of the victims had been tortured, and many were shot execution-style.
"The killings started after the current Shiite-led government took office and appointed a new interior minister, Bayan Jabr". Jabr is a leading official in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the main Shiite religious party in the US-backed Iraqi government. This has fuelled Sunni "suspicions that the ministry's forces were waging a sectarian campaign against Sunnis".
Confirming these suspicions, John Pace, the UN's outgoing human rights chief in Iraq, told the British Independent on February 26 that up to three-quarters of the corpses arriving at Baghdad's mortuary show evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes. Most of the killings, he said, were carried out by Shiite militia groups under the control of the interior ministry.
From Green Left Weekly, March 8, 2006.
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