Thread: How much more of a pounding can the Shia's take?

uh...US doesn't want to. shia death squads and militias are already considered a bigger problem than the insurgency. the last thing the US wants is an outright civil war.

Originally Posted by astralis

uh...US doesn't want to. shia death squads and militias are already considered a bigger problem than the insurgency. the last thing the US wants is an outright civil war.

No wonder shia militias are popping up. Almost every other terror attack in Iraq this year has been on Shias/Shia mosques/Shia festivals etc.

Islam is a religion that is always in conflict with some idea or/and with every other religion.

The internecine conflict (Shia - Sunni) that was basically a Power struggle and a war over the division of the riches, so to say, is as ancient as the religion itself, and extraordinarily, it continues till date with no urgency towards coexistence and peace!

It seems that Peace stagnates the religion.

Huntington talks about Clash of Civilisations. Sadly, Islam is not civilisation per se. And Islam alone clashes! And clashes everywhere; amongst themselves and with every other religion in the world!

And they claim it is a Religion of Peace!

A History of the Shia — Sunni Divide

Two hundred and fifty years before the birth of Jesus, Hammurabi, the sixth king of the Amorite Dynasty of Old Babylon in southern Iraq issued the first known code of laws. Hammurabi, a polytheist, ruled over the whole of Mesopotamia with a code of laws he claimed to have received from Shamash, the Sumerian Sungod was believed to be able to see everywhere and was referred to as “Judge of the Heavens and the Earth”; Lord of Judgement”.[6] Shamash and his wife Aya were believed to have two children, Kittu who was justice, and Misharu who was law.[7] The code was straightforward and extremely severe. It empowered Hammurabi with divine authority to dispense justice as if he were a god himself. The code opened with the following preamble:

When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land, assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, God of righteousness, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi, they called Babylon by his illustrious name, made it great on earth, and founded an everlasting kingdom in it, whose foundations are laid so solidly as those of heaven and earth; then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, “to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.[8]

The code goes on to elaborate proper conduct and just adjudication and punishment over the whole of human affairs from the tending of crops to the drinking of wine to relations among men and women. Article 14 provided that “If any one steal the minor son of another, he shall be put to death.” Article 21 made theft a capital offense, one of more than a dozen others including for example, kidnapping a male son, harboring or assisting a fugitive slave, and incest between mother and son. Several crimes explicitly require death by burning.[9]

The code eventually lost its force as Mesopotamia fell to a series of conquests from abroad. One of those conquests began with the birth of Muhammad and with him the birth of the religion Islam. In Arabic, the word “islam” (الإسلام) literally means submission to a single god, Allah (الله) . A “Muslim” is literally one who submits.[10]

In 610 C.E., after a spiritual epiphany, a man named Muhammad, a prominent businessman in the city of Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula and a member of the then-polytheistic Hashimite clan of the Quraysh tribe of Arabia, declared himself the prophet of a new monotheism, and he set out to convert his fellow tribesmen and women. After failing to convert his fellow citizens of Mecca in present day Saudi Arabia, which was a prominent center of the then-reigning polytheism of the region, Muhammad and his followers established a new city, Medina, as the seat of the fledgling empire.

Muslims believe that Islam was revealed by God to all his messengers including Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and finally Muhammad, the last prophet….Muslims believe that Allah (the Arabic word for God) revealed the Qur’an to Muhammed via the angel Jibrail (Gabriel). In addition to Qur’an, Hadith - the sayings and practices of Muhammad, is the secondary source of Islamic beliefs and practices. [11]

“The heart of this revealed message is the affirmation that “there is no god but Allah (The God), and Muhammad is the messenger of God.””[12]

The “early life of the Muslim community began when Muhammad accepted an invitation from the people in Yathrib, an oasis north of Mecca, to serve as their arbiter and judge. In 622 Muhammad and his followers moved to Yathrib, and this emigration, or hijrah, is of such significance that Muslims use this date as the beginning of the Islamic calendar. The oasis became known as the City of the Prophet, or simply al-Medina (the city).”[13]

According to Muslim tradition, the “sociopolitical community that was created in Medina provides the model for what a truly Islamic state and society should be. In contrast to tribal groups, the new community, or ummah, was open to anyone who made the basic affirmation of faith, and loyalty to the ummah was to supersede any other loyalty, whether to clan, family, or commercial partnership.”[14]

Muhammad eventually converted his hometown of Mecca and the surrounding oases.[15] Upon Muhammad’s death, there was uncertainty about who should lead the community. Abu Bakr al-Siddiq was named caliph (literally “successor”) and began a campaign to create an Islamic empire. Eventually Bakr and his followers conquered and converted all of the Arabian Peninsula, and after his successor, Umar, continued the Islamic conquest towards what is today Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and Iraq.[16]

Throughout the early seventh century, Islamic armies from Arabia moved against the Byzantine and Sassanid empires which then occupied the Tigris-Eurphates river delta and the surrounding plains and highlands.[17] In 634, the army of general Khalid ibn al Walid (”The Sword of Islam”) defeated the Iranian Sassanids and forced the inhabitants of the delta into submission. “Khalid offered the inhabitants of Iraq an ultimatum: “Accept the faith and you are safe; otherwise pay tribute. If you refuse to do either, you have only yourself to blame. A people is already upon you, loving death as you love life.””[18]

In the years following the Prophet Muhammad’s death, a rift developed within Islam over the issue of legitimate succession. Abu Bakr, “who has been with Mohammed since the establishment of Medina, ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, a close and trusted friend; ‘Uthman ibn ‘Affan, an early convert; and ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law.[19]

Uthman assumed the caliphate upon Umar’s death, but he was unable to govern the growing empire and was assassinated. Ali ibn Abu Talib, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, who had challenged Uthman’s appointment as caliph, took over the caliphate and moved the seat of the empire to the heart of Iraq. Muawiyah, a kinsman of Uthman and the governor of Syria, then refused to recognize Ali and demanded the right to avenge his relative’s death.[20]

The conflict over succession divided the Muslim world along economic, tribal, and cultural lines, and the caliphate split in two, one in Damascus in present-day Syria, and the other at al Kufa in Iraq. In 661, while praying in a mosque in al Kufa, Ali was murdered. When Muawiyah tried to assume the caliphate, Husayn, Ali’s second son, refused to pay homage and led Ali’s followers in a revolt. At Karbala, in southern Iraq, Husayn’s militia of 200 men and women refused to surrender and were eventually slaughtered by 4,000 Umayyad troops.

The importance of these events in the history of Islam and for the future of Iraq cannot be overemphasized. “They created the greatest of the Islamic schisms, between the party of Ali (the Shi’a t Ali, known in the West as Shi’a s or Shiites) and the upholders of Muawiyah (the Ahl as Sunna, the People of the Sunna–those who follow Muhammad’s custom and example) or the Sunnis.”[21] Ali’s burial place at An Najaf, and his son Husayn’s at Karbala, both south of Baghdad, “are holy places of pilgrimage for Shias, many of whom feel that a pilgrimage to both sites is equal to a pilgrimage to Mecca.”[22]

Today, from Indonesia to Sudan, the vast majority of the Muslim world is Sunni, while the followers of Ali, the Shi’i, are concentrated in Iran and Iraq. Despite the fact that Iraq has long been more than sixty percent Shiite, the minority Sunni has been ruling the majority for centuries. Since the earliest days of Islam, the Sunnis of Arabia have represented a wealthy and elite aristocracy, and they consider themselves the followers of the “orthodoxy.” In contrast, the followers of Ali, the Shiites, believe that they are the true believers and have historically and still today framed themselves, and been treated by others, “as the opposition in Islam and the opponents dynastic privilege and power.”[23]

Islam, then, is and has always been at the center of Iraq, just as Iraq has always been at the center of Islam. When the caliphate was eventually moved back to Baghdad from Damascus in the wake of the overthrow of the Umayyd caliphate by the Abbassid dynasty a period of great progress and prosperity began. During this golden age, Baghdad became the center of the Islamic world, and Arabian and Iranian culture “mingled to produce a blaze of philosophical, scientific, and literary glory.” Eventually this period ended with the invasion of the army of Ghengis Kahn, the brutal commander who cut a path of destruction from China to western Azerbaijan. The Mongols destroyed much of Baghdad’s cultural monuments, books, as well as its extensive canal and irrigation system, and all of Iraq fell into a period of decay.

The Ottoman Empire annexed Iraq in 1534, but there was several centuries of conflict for control of what is today Iraq with the Iranian Safavid dynasty who were Shi’a and who thus desired control of the Shi’a holy centers at Najaf and Karbala in southern Iraq. In the beginning of the Ottoman occupation Sunni Arabs of Iraq were harshly persecuted under the Shi’a Safavids, but once the Ottoman Empire was firmly in control of Baghdad in 1638, and indeed ever since, the Sunni Arab minority has ruled Iraq without Shi’a participation of any kind.[24]

While Sunni and Shi’i are more alike than dissimilar, there are significant theological differences that implicate history, class, ethnicity, culture, and faith and have practical consequences for the relationship between politics and Islam. The two sects disagree on a deep level about the source and nature of temporal authority over the ummah, the community of believers. At the heart of Shi’i theology is the belief that Abu Bakr, the first caliph, was an interloper and that Ali was the first and only legitimate successor to Muhammad. Shi’i theology includes a rejection of the political authority of the Sunni Caliphate as a legitimate source of either political or spiritual authority over the ummah.[25] In place of the caliph, the shi’I used the term imam (literally the guide who knows the way) to represent the rightful source of the authority of Allah on earth. [26] In Shi’ism the Imam is THE leader in all earthly affairs. In Shi’I theology “al-imamah (Imamate) means ‘universal authority in all religious and secular affairs, in succession to the Prophet’ … al-Imam means ‘the man who, in succession to the Prophet, has the right to the absolute command of the Muslims in all religious and secular affairs ‘.” [27] ” The Imams are designated or appointed by God (mansus ), they are free from all sin or fault (ma’shum ), and they are the most perfect of humans (afdal an-nas ). But above all, the Imam is the one who teaches human beings the mystical truths of the universe; it is through the Imam that the esoteric, mystical aspects of God are transmitted to human beings. “[28]

In contrast, the first Sunni Muslims followed the Caliph, the ruling elite of the Umayyad dynasty, the first four of whom are considered “The Rightly Guided Caliphs”. Under their rule, the Quarn was finalized, and the Sunni empire began to expand outward from the Arabian peninsula. For a millennia, the Shi’i, the followers of Ali, have rejected the authority of the Umayyad Caliphate. It is this division within the Muslim ummah that defines much of the history of Iraq and the region as a whole. For over a thousand years Shi’i have resisted domination by a political and spiritual authority considered illegitimate by the followers of Ali. Saddam Hussein so feared the Shi’i Muslims of Iraq and Iran that he slaughtered hundreds of thousands of them throughout his 35 year dictatorship.[29]

Indeed, Iraq’s Sunni Arab ruling elite have long repressed any group it deemed a threat. For centuries the predominantly Sunni, non-Arab Kurds of Northern Iraq resisted occupation after occupation as they clung zealously to their tribal homelands in the face of systemic efforts of Arabization conducted in the name of Iraqi nationalism. Under the Ottomans the Kurds were granted broad autonomy which they still retain today. They have had to pay dearly for their small share of freedom, and throughout the history of Iraq they have suffered at the hands of people who consider them less equal than themselves.[30]

Likewise, the Assyrian Christians of Northern Iraq have also suffered terribly throughout the history of the region. During the Ottoman occupation in the 16th and 17th Centuries, Christians in the Middle East “numbered about five million. When the massacres finally ended in 1923, about 200,000 Greeks, 100,000 Armenians, and 200,000 Assyrians remained. The diaspora includes a community in Chicago that numbers as much as 80,000, more than in any other American city.”[31]

It was the Ottomans who first divided Iraq into formal provinces; Mosul, in the north near the ancient city of Nineveh; Baghdad in the center of the region near ancient Babylon, and Basra in the southern delta, where Sumer once thrived. By the time the British arrived in the early 20th Century, the three provinces were each inhabited predominantly by a different cultural group, Kurdish Muslims in Mosul, Sunni Arab Muslims in Baghdad, and Shi’a Muslims in Basra.[32]

The Ottomans wanted to weaken Iranian influence in Iraq, and so they installed a Sunni elite to manage the provincial governments. While Sunni men developed administrative, political, and military experience and social and cultural strength, the Shi’a majority was politically isolated and economically deprived. This dynamic continued throughout the Ottoman rule and through the Twentieth Century, all the way to the eve of the U.S invasion.[33]

When the British entered Baghdad in 1917, they expected to be welcomed as liberators for their support of the Arab resistance and for ending the rule of the Ottomans, but instead they entered a land fed up with occupation of any kind.[34] In events noticeably similar to those occurring under the American Occupation beginning in early 2004, the British expelled the Ottoman occupiers and declared their intention to liberate the population from tyranny. Relying on a network of local puppet administrators and brute force, the British rigged a national referendum so that the Empire’s chosen candidate the Sunni Hashimite Arab, King Faisal I won with 96 percent of the vote.[35]

Captain Arnold Wilson, the British civil commissioner in Baghdad, the role played today by Paul Bremer, warned of an impending political disaster. He predicted “that the deep differences between the three main communities - Sunni, Shia and Kurds - ensured it could only be ‘the antithesis of democratic government’. This was because the Shia majority rejected domination by the Sunni minority, but ‘no form of government has been envisaged which does not involve Sunni domination’”.[36]

In July 1920, the Iraqis overcame sectarian differences and revolted as a united people. Although the British were able to retain control, it was not without significant cost. [37] In order to quell the rebellion the British deployed indiscriminant air bombardments and “TE Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - wrote to the London Observer to say: “It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions.’” The British commander, General Sir Aylmer Haldane, “at one time called for supplies of poisonous gas.”[38] Internal British government documents question whether “peaceful control of Mesopotamia” was worth the cost if it “ “ultimately depends on our intention of bombing women and children.””[39] Arthur “Bomber” Harris, “said in 1924 that he had taught Iraqis “that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or wounded.”” [40] Iraqis have been learning that lesson over and over ever since.[41]

The costs over the long term were much higher. In an attempt to establish a stable elite bureaucracy to administer the country the British installed a government of the same Sunni aristocrats who had administered Iraq under the Ottomans. Much like the Ottomans before them, “”the British saw the Shi’a religious establishment in the 1920s as a direct rival for power, so they fled back into the arms of the Sunni elite.”[42]

In 1932, the British granted formal (but not substantive) independence to the government of King Faisl, but his government was weak and widely regarded as illegitimate. A year after the British withdrawl, the puppet King wrote that his government was “far and away weaker than the people,” who were “unimaginable masses of human beings devoid of any patriotic ideas … prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever.”[43]

The Faisl monarchy survived as a façade for the increasing influence of the Iraqi army until 1958 when the monarchy was overthrown in a military coup. Led by the Free Officers, a group of young aristocrat Sunni Arab nationalists from the Tikriti province committed to expelling Jews from the Middle East and to confronting western imperialism, the coup installed as prime minister General Abdul Karim Qasim, who was fixated over border disputes with neighboring Iran and Kuwait, a fixation Iraq’s military dictators have shared ever since.[44]

A rift developed between Qasim and his fellow revolutionary Abd-al-Salam Muhammad Arif. In 1963, the regime was overthrown by by Gen. Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, founder of the Free Officers, and his fellow members of the nationalist Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party (ASBP). Arif briefly retook power but when he died in a helicopter crash in 1968, his son took power and was quickly ousted by the Ba’athists. Gen. Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr became president and his cousin from Tikrit, a young Saddam Hussein, became vice-president of the new dictatorship.

Throughout the late 1960s and the 1970s, Bakr’s regime brutally oppressed anyone in Iraq who was not Sunni Arab, including Kurds in the northern provinces and Shiite in south. “In January 1969, it hung a group of Iraqi Jews in Liberation Square in downtown Baghdad in an effort, as British diplomatic correspondents reported at the time, to intimidate the populace.”[45] Thousands were slaughtered after a coup attempt in 1973. In 1979, after a decade of purging the Iraqi officer corps and Baath party of anyone who might challenge him and installing close family members and Tikriti clan members in key military and government leadership positions, Saddam Hussein, seized power by forcing Bakr’ to step down. “Saddam’s aims included the elimination of Israel, Arab unity under Iraqi leadership, and the rectification of previous wrongs - and he was a man with sufficient fire to try to put these aims into practice.”[46]

Over the next 35 years, Saddam Hussein maintained a stranglehold on the people of Iraq by using the country’s oil wealth to bribe his fellow minority Sunni Arabs and anyone else willing to do business his way and by exercising widespread and extreme brutality against anyone who didn’t. Following the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, Hussein “disappeared” thousands of Shi’a Arabs in southern Iraq who he accused of conspiring with the Iranian Ayatollah or otherwise opposing the Baathist regime, and hundreds of thousands more were killed throughout the reign of the Hussein.[47]

Throughout Iraq’s history the majority Shi’a population has been persecuted and oppressed by the Sunni minority.[48] Even though many Shi’a and Sunni Muslims share a common historical identity as Arabs, and today still share many cultural attributes, and while much of the strife that has existed and continues to exist between the two groups has more to do with political power dynamics than sectarian hatred, those dynamics have manifested themselves in horrific and brutal ways. When the Iraqi people rose up against the British in the wake of the Ottoman defeat, the Shi’a community collaborated with the Sunni Sharifaians, based in Syria and led by King Faysal. who were then based in Syria. According to one account,

The two groups agreed on a formula advocating an Arab Islamic state ruled by an Arab emir bound by a legislative assembly. Whereas the Sharifians considered this formula an opening for their rule, the Shi’i clerics hoped that it would enable them to oversee the legislative process once British control of the country was removed. The Shi’i tribes duly rose in revolt, but they were crushed by superior British arms. And then, to the Shi’i s’ dismay, the British brought in the Sharifians and a group of ex-Ottoman officers to rule. In subsequent years, Shi’i s would claim that their uprising had enabled the Sunni minority to attain power and enjoy all the fruits of office. The feeling among Iraqi Shi’i s that they were robbed of power back then is still strong today and explains their objection to any power arrangement that would again assign them a marginal role in Iraq’s politics.[49]

Throughout the Twentieth Century, the Sunni Elite “dominated economic and political life in Iraq. Sunni Arabs are at a distinct advantage in all areas of secular life, be it civil, political, military, or economic.”[50] Saddam Hussein government banned Shi’i literature, political speech, and religious exercises, and even “executed senior Shi’i Arab clerics, notably members of the Sadr and the Hakim families, to make sure that a strong and unified Shi’i religious establishment capable of playing a role in national politics did not emerge.” From 1977 until the United States overthrow of the Iraqi regime in 2002, the Shi’i were prohibited from practicing their religious rites in public and were targeted for systematic state-sponsored persecution and violence. During a period of more than 30 years, the Iraqi regime slaughtered an estimated 290,000 citizens, predominantly Shi’a and Kurd. Mass graves uncovered in Southern Iraq after the fall of the Hussein regime contain tens of thousands of Shi’i civilians, mostly men, who were rounded up and exterminated after the 1991 uprising, encouraged but not supported by the United States.[51]

Saddam Hussein also continued the centuries of persecution against the Kurds of northern Iraq. Originally of Persian ancestry, the Kurds are an ethnic group comprising over 20 million people dispersed throughout Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. As early as 849 C.E., Kurdish tribes clashed with the Islamic caliphate then based in Baghdad, and they have fought with their neighbors in every direction almost continuously ever since. Despite over a century of agitation for self-determination, the Kurds have never achieved complete political autonomy as a group, although they maintained quasi-autonomy under the protection of the United States following the first Gulf War.[52]

During the Iran-Iraq war the Hussein regime launched an all out assault on Kurdish Iraqis who were accused of assisting the enemy. Using chemical weapons and other methods of extermination, entire villages—hundreds of thousands of Kurdish men, women, and children—were murdered under what the regime called the Anfal campaign. “”Al-Anfal” is the name of a Koranic Sura, “the eighth sura, The Spoils,” a revelation to the Prophet Muhammad in the wake of the first great battle of the then-new Muslim faith at Badr (624 A.D.). … “Anfal” refers to the plunder or spoils of the infidel, and was used by the Iraqi government to give a religious justification to its attack against the Kurds of Iraq, although they too are Muslim.[53] The international community did little until it was too late.[54]

Today, the recognized borders of Iraq enclose an area the size of California inhabited by over 20 million people. Ninety-seven percent of the population is Muslim of whom sixty to sixty-five percent are Shi’i.

Shi’a Muslims–predominantly Arab, but also including Turkomen, Faili Kurds, and other groups–constitute a 60 to 65 percent majority. Sunni Muslims make up 32 to 37 percent of the population (approximately 18 to 20 percent are Sunni Kurds, 12 to 15 percent Sunni Arabs, and the remainder Sunni Turkomen). The remaining approximately 3 percent of the overall population consist of Christians (Assyrians, Chaldeans, Roman Catholics, and Armenians), Yazidis, Mandaeans, and a small number of Jews.[55]

The countries various ethnic populations are grouped in relatively distinct geographical areas that roughly mirror the three provinces that constituted Iraq under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The country’s northern third is predominantly Kurdish, while the central Baghdad region is known as the Sunni Triangle, and the southern region is made up predominantly of Shi’i Muslims. Other ethnic and religious groups are concentrated in small enclaves throughout the country.[56]


[1] Iraq: A Country Study

[2] British Relations with Iraq. BBC.com.

[3] Iraq: A Country Study

[4] Algaze, Guillermo “The Uruk Expansion: Cross-cultural Exchange in Early Mesopotamian Civilization” Current Anthropology, 1989.. Algaze, Guillermo, The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization. xii, 1993. See also the BBC’s coverage at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/ira...ities_02.shtml For on Mesopotamian proto-history see http://www.sron.nl/~jheise/akkadian/...ry.html#cities.

[5] Id.

[6] The Code of Hammurabi .

[7] Shamash .

[8] The Code of Hammurabi .

[9] Id.

[10] “Islam, Islamic Studies, Arabic, and Religion” University of Georgia.

[11] Islam. Wikipedia.com.

[12] Islam, Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, ed. Robert Wuthnow. 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1998), 383-393.

[13] Id.

[14] Id.

[15] Id.

[16] Iraq: A Country Study .

[17] Islam.

[18] Iraq: A Country Study .

[19] Id.

[20] Iraq: A Country Study

[21] Id.

[22] Id.

[23] Id

[24] Iraq: A Country Study.

[25] Ummah.

[26] Imamate .

[27] Shi’a .

[28] imam .

[29] See e.g., Up to 15,000 bodies in mass graves - MAY 15, 2003.

[30] History of the Kurds.

[31] Id.

[32] Id.

[33] Id.

[34] Id.

[35] See, e.g., Scott Peterson What the British learned in 1920 by not leaving Iraq, March 11, 2004 edition. See also, Hannah Allam and Tom Lasseter, Iraqi Whispers Mull Repeat of 1920s Revolt Over Western Occupation. Knight Ridder, Jan. 27, 2004

[36] Britains Role in Shaping Iraq.

[37] Id.

[38] Derek Hopwood, British Relations with Iraq .

[39] Id.

[40] Id.

[41] Id.

[42] Id.

[43] Id.

[44] Eric Davis, Why Iraq Might Be a Better Candidate for Democracy than You Think, History News Network, April, 2003.

[45] Id.

[46]

[47] The Iraqi Government Assault on the Marsh Arabs, A Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper
January 2003 . Human Rights Watch, “Justice for Iraq,” A Human Rights Watch Policy Paper, December 17, 2002.

[48] Id.

[49] C:\WINDOWS\Desktop\CurrentWriting\IraqConstitution \HTM\Foreign AffairsTheShitesandIraq.htm

[50] http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2002/13996.htm

[51] http://hrw.org/reports/2003/iraq0503/2.htm#_Toc41888352

[52] The Kurds.

[53] Anfal Campaign.

[54] Id.

[55] http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2002/13996.htm

[56] See, e.g., Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Anthony Shadid “Ethnic and Religious Fissures Deepen in Iraqi Society
Tensions Escalating Over Land, Power and Loyalties” Washington Post Foreign Service, Sept. 29, 2003; Page A01
Technorati Tags: Civil War history Iraq Islam Shia shiite Sunni

http://anewerworld.org/?p=275

How come the winks are coming into the script above? I didn't post them.

Originally Posted by Ray

How come the winks are coming into the script above? I didn't post them.

Maybe cause the machine realizes thats its pure bull.

Gee. Your wit is quite extraordinary.. Shia's are ofcourse not getting killed by your fellow sunni jehadis.. It's all a hindujoooo consipiracy!!

Originally Posted by sparten

Maybe cause the machine realizes thats its pure bull.

Islam is pure bull?

But you should know more than I.

I give way!

Originally Posted by srirangan

Gee. Your wit is quite extraordinary.. Shia's are ofcourse not getting killed by your fellow sunni jehadis.. It's all a hindujoooo consipiracy!!

Sparten is a Shia.

There are "government" Shias also in Paksitan!

No connection though.

His personal sect is not of any concern. Denying the attacks against shia's which are happening all across the Islamic world is foolshardy.

Originally Posted by srirangan

Gee. Your wit is quite extraordinary.. Shia's are ofcourse not getting killed by your fellow sunni jehadis.. It's all a hindujoooo consipiracy!!

My fellow sunni jehadis? I am a shia.

Originally Posted by Ray

Islam is pure bull?

But you should know more than I.

I give way!

Its (the text) got a highly simplified and innacurate portrayal of the Shia/Sunni divide.

Originally Posted by sparten

Its (the text) got a highly simplified and innacurate portrayal of the Shia/Sunni divide.

Okay, could you care to explain the killling of Shia's taking place all across the Islamic world a lil better?

Originally Posted by sparten

Its (the text) got a highly simplified and innacurate portrayal of the Shia/Sunni divide.

Then give us the accurate one!

Sure would like to know the truth!

Though I don't understand why complicate a simple issue!

Or is there no Sunni/ Shia divide?

What is all this killing about?

Just butchers sharpening their knives?