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reconmike · 07-14-2007, 11:54 AM

[QUOTE=host

reconmike, isn't combat training about being taught to dehumanize the enemy, or, anyone?[/QUOTE]

Ah yes Host, first they show you countless vids of puppies being skinned alive to desensitize you, then they move up to skinning alive of all the unwanted Chinese female infants, by that time killing your own mother is cake.

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...who are "those savages" of whom you speak?

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Sunni mosques attacked after Shiite shrine bombing

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Jay Deshmukh
AFP
June 14, 2007

IN PROTEST: An elderly Iraqi Shiite demonstrator chants slogans during a protest against the bombing of Samarra's Golden Mosque, in Basra, south of Baghdad June 14.
(REUTERS)
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BAGHDAD -- Three Sunni mosques were bombed in Iraq Thursday in apparent reprisal for an attack on a revered Shiite shrine, sparking fears of fresh sectarian bloodletting despite appeals for calm.

Curfews were swiftly imposed in Baghdad and in Samarra, where suspected Al Qaeda militants Wednesday bombed the Askari mosque, but at least six Sunni mosques have been attacked, including one in the capital.

The destruction of Samarra's two gold-covered minarets came after an initial attack on the shrine in 2006, also blamed on Al Qaeda, sparked Sunni-Shiite reprisals that have claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Early Thursday, two Sunni mosques in Iskandiriyah and one in Mahawil, both south of Baghdad, were bombed, Lieutenant Kamal Al Ameri of Hilla police said.

One of the Iskandiriyah mosques had already been attacked Wednesday, along with two others in the town and one in Baghdad - the latter despite a curfew in the capital that was due to be lifted Saturday.

"Insurgents bombed the mosque again today at around 4.00 am and shrapnel from the bomb wounded a woman and girl in a nearby apartment," Ameri said of Iskandiriyah's twice-bombed Hatteen mosque. He said that unknown men had Wednesday launched a coordinated attack on the town's Grand Mosque using first bombs and then rocket-propelled grenades against the holy building.

The Samarra shrine attack triggered widespread protests among Iraq's Shiites with thousands Thursday taking to the streets of Baghdad's Sadr City and in the cities of Kut and Amara in the south.

"No! No! to occupation," young black-clad Shiites shouted in Sadr City, waving black banners and Iraqi flags inside the bastion of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr who has blamed the US for the Samarra attack.

Banners calling for a united Iraq and a fight against sectarianism were seen in the crowd alongside posters of Sadr, a witness said.

In Kut, angry Shiites protested in front of the local government building.

"We demand that the government works hard to protect shrines and prevent sectarian violence. We demand that Iraqi blood be protected," shouted protestor Dhiya Abdel Amir.

Hundreds more protestors took to the streets further south in Amara where Sadr representative Munshid Al Zurfi slammed the Samarra attack as "a conspiracy by the occupier."

US President George W. Bush, who ordered tens of thousands more US troops onto Baghdad's streets to stem brutal sectarian murders started by the 2006 Samarra bombing, blamed the latest attack on Al Qaeda. He said that the bombing was aimed at "inflaming sectarian tensions among the peoples of Iraq and defeating their aspirations for a secure, democratic, and prosperous country."

Bush called "on all Iraqis to refrain from acts of vengeance and reject Al Qaeda's scheme to sow hatred among the Iraqi people and to instead join together in fighting Al Qaeda as the true enemy of a free and secure Iraq."

The February 2006 attack destroyed the golden dome of one of the world's holiest Shiite shrines where the faithful believe that their 12th Imam, a messianic and mystical figure, disappeared in the 9th century. The mosque houses the remains of the 10th and 11th Imams - Ali Al Hadi and Hassan Al Askari - buried in the house where they died in the 9th century and around which the shrine was built.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki held the shrine guards responsible for Wednesday's attack.

"The guards present there had a role in this attack and they will be punished," Maliki told reporters during a visit to Samarra broadcast by Al Iraqiya. "Anyone who is involved or participated or played any role in this brutal crime will be punished," he said, adding that the government was close to signing a contract to rebuild the shrine before it was bombed.

The interior ministry said that an unspecified number of shrine guards had been arrested and were under investigation after reports that Samarra security forces were themselves involved in infighting shortly before the bombing.

In Samarra, a blanket curfew forced people to stay indoors Thursday as police snipers took up positions in the vicinity of the shrine.

"The curfew is total and Iraqi security forces have been deployed across the town along with US forces," said Major Ahmed Majid of Tikrit police, adding that two people had been wounded after being shot by snipers. "All entrances to the town have been blocked. We have also tightened security around the shrine."

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In December 2006, the Pentagon reported that violence in Iraq had hit at an all-time high. Between August and November, attacks against U.S. forces, Iraqi security forces and Iraqi civilians increased nearly 30 percent, to an average of 959 per week.

There were an average 93 attacks each day against Iraqi civilians -- more than three times the rate two years ago.

Overwhelmingly, strife between Sunni and Shiite Iraqis is driving the upsurge in violence. Sunni insurgent groups and Shiite militias carry out kidnappings and bombings in an ongoing cycle of violence and retaliation. In Baghdad, neighborhoods where Sunnis and Shiites once lived together are now being cleared of one group or the other, in what some are calling sectarian cleansing.

"Sectarian violence now presents the greatest immediate threat to Iraq's stability and future," CIA Director Michael Hayden told the Senate Armed Services Committee in November.

Saddam Hussein's Dec. 31 execution illustrated the deep sectarian divide -- Shiites taunted the former dictator in his last moments with chants of the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's name.

It wasn't always this way. Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere have a long history of conflict, but also, at many points over the past 14 centuries, of living together peacefully.

The religious divide between the two sects formed over many years, according to University of Michigan historian Juan Cole. It began after the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632, when his followers could not agree on who should succeed him. Some -- the predecessors of the Shiites -- thought Muhammad's son-in-law, Ali, should be the successor, while others -- the Sunnis predecessors -- thought the position should go to a community elder named Abu Bakr.

Abu-Bakr won, and became the first Caliph, or leader of the Muslims. Meanwhile, the predecessors of the Shiites began to call Ali and his descendents "Imams," and considered them their leaders. After the third Caliph was murdered, in 656, Ali did become Caliph -- but then he too was murdered five years later.

When the 11th Imam -- Muhammad's many-times-over great-grandson -- died in 874, a legend grew up among Shiites that his young son, the 12th Imam, had disappeared from the funeral. Many began to see the child as a messianic figure, furthering distancing the Sunni and Shiite forms of Islam.

"By the time you get to the 900s, you can really talk about Shiism as a separate movement," Cole explained. "From the Shiite point of view, history went wrong. The central rituals in Shiism are about mourning, in Sunnism there's no equivalent."

But, Cole and others have said, this religious aspect of the Sunni-Shiite split has little to do with the contemporary violence in Iraq.

"It's a struggle for political power," said Vali Nasr, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "Whenever you have identity divisions, there's always an identity marker. Sometimes it's race, sometimes language. But sometimes religious identity becomes the marker, and it has nothing to do with whether or not you're pious."

In Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the divide between Sunnis and Shiites simmered although it rarely erupted, according to Nasr. Saddam, a Sunni, filled the top ranks of his Baath Party with other Sunnis. So although Iraq was and remains about 60 percent Shiite, Sunnis were the ruling class.

"Some people say there was no sectarianism, but that's like saying there was no racism in South Africa under apartheid," Nasr said. "The state was racist. There was no sectarianism in the streets, but that doesn't mean there was no sectarianism."

Still, the Baath Party was a secular party, and on a day-to-day level Shiites and Sunnis could live together in mixed neighborhoods, work together and marry each other --particularly in cosmopolitan Baghdad.

"By and large the people were moderates, and the religious element was a small element in their lives," said Laith Kubba, the Iraqi-born senior program officer for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Endowment for Democracy, and a former spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. "You'd find more extremist Shiites in Pakistan and Iran, and more extremist Sunnis in Saudi Arabia."

What has occurred since the fall of Saddam to incite the violence is a power vacuum, said Kubba.

"You have 20 million-plus people, with no services to provide law and order. And this in a country that was so dependent on bureaucracy," he said. "When you pull out state and government, the only thing left is the mosque."

Insurgent groups -- many made up of Sunnis deposed from power -- began attacks against Americans and Iraqis almost immediately after Saddam's fall. Then, particularly after the February 2006 bombing of the al-Askari mosque in Samarra -- one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam -- retaliatory violence by Shiite militias began in earnest.

In the past several months, the violence has only gotten worse. A December article in the Washington Post, for example, told the emblematic story of a Sunni family about to flee their home in Tobji, a previously mixed neighborhood in central Baghdad where they had lived since the 1950s, as Shiite militiamen kidnapped and killed other Sunnis in the area.

"I am scared. I am Sunni," the father, Farouk, told the paper.

Meanwhile, many moderate, secular Iraqis have fled the country. "The people who intermarried were the first to leave," Nasr said. "Most of the class in which intermarriages happened--the middle class--they've left Iraq."

In politics, the parties that have replaced Saddam's Baath Party are all sectarian. The Iraqi parliament includes the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, the Shiite Sadr movement, and the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, among others.

Many of these political parties also have armed wings driving the violence on the ground, including Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution's Badr organization.

The Iraqi government has made some attempts to bridge the sectarian divide. In mid-December, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki organized a "National Reconciliation Conference" in Baghdad, intended to bring together Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to discuss how to end the violence. At the conference, al-Maliki invited former members of Saddam's Baath party to join Iraq's new army.

But most accounts deemed the conference a failure, particularly because many key groups, including the Shiite Mahdi army and the Sunni Muslim Scholars Association, refused to attend.

Meanwhile, the relationships among all these political and insurgent groups are complex. According to Cole, for example, Muqtada al-Sadr paradoxically has a better political relationship with some Sunni members of parliament than any other Shiite, despite the fact that his Mahdi Army and Sunni insurgents are at war in the streets every day.

That's because, Cole wrote in his blog, al-Sadr sees a difference between most Sunnis and those Sunnis who violently hate Shiites, and he believes his militia is fighting only the latter group.

But, according to Cole, a stable coalition between Sadr and Sunnis is unlikely. "I fear that ... if the U.S. left, the Sadrists and the Sunni fundamentalists would gradually fall on one another. Dislike of the U.S. presence is after all among the main things they have in common, and that would be gone," he wrote.

And that sort of stable coalition is the only hope for reducing sectarian violence, according to Kubba.

"Put the state back to business and you'll immediately pull back a huge chunk of Iraqis," he said, "and cut the religious zealots back to size

BAGHDAD (AP) — Gunmen shot and killed 23 members of an ancient religious sect in northern Iraq on Sunday after stopping their bus and separating followers of other faiths.
At least 20 people were killed in car bombings in the capital, most at a police station in a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told Egypt's leader to ignore widespread reports that the country is suffering a civil war. He also said he would halt the U.S. construction of a barrier that would separate a Sunni enclave from surrounding Shiite areas in Baghdad that had drawn sharp criticism from Sunni leaders and residents.

In the northern Iraq attack, armed men stopped the bus as it was carrying workers from a textile factory in Mosul to their hometown of Bashika, which has a mixed population of Christians and Yazidis. Yazidis are a primarily Kurdish sect that worships an angel figure considered to be the devil by some Muslims and Christians.

The gunmen checked the passengers' identification cards, then asked all Christians to get off the bus, police Brig. Mohammed al-Wagga said. With the Yazidis still inside, the gunmen drove them to eastern Mosul, where they were lined up along a wall and shot to death, al-Wagga said.

FIND MORE STORIES IN: Iraq | Baghdad | Sunni | Mohammed | Egypt | Maliki | United Arab Emirates | Iraqi prime minister | Nouri | Egyptian President | Hosni Mubarak | Sunni-Shiite
After the killings, hundreds of Yazidis took to the streets of Bashika. Shops were shuttered, and many Muslims remained indoors.

Bashika is about 80% Yazidi, 15% Christian and 5% Muslim.

Abdul-Karim Khalaf, a police spokesman for Ninevah province, said the executions were in response to the killing two weeks ago of a Yazidi woman who had converted to Islam after she fell in love with a Muslim and ran off with him. Her relatives had disapproved of the match and dragged her back to Bashika, where she was stoned to death, he said.

Elsewhere:

• In Baghdad, two suicide car bombs exploded within moments of each other. The first driver raced through a police checkpoint guarding a police station and exploded his vehicle just outside the two-story building. The second bomber aimed at the checkpoint's concrete barriers, police said.

Iraqi police stations often are the target of attacks by insurgents who accuse the officers of betraying Iraq by working in cooperation with its U.S.-backed Shiite government and U.S. military.

Police said 13 people died: five police officers and eight civilians. The wounded included 46 police officers and 36 civilians.

• In Fallujah, police found 24 bullet-riddled bodies, and two brothers who were shot to death a day after the chairman of the city's council was assassinated.

• The U.S. military also reported the deaths of three soldiers. Two were killed in attacks in Baghdad on Saturday, while the third died from an unidentified non-combat cause that was still under investigation, the military said.

Like I said these savages, will kill and blow up anyone that is not in their sect, doesn't matter who or what gets in the way.

Maybe we can pull back the troops, watch from the eye in the sky, and when we see a concentrated number of savages we could chuck a well placed cruise missle into the group of them.