On June 13, explosions destroyed the two 100-year-old minarets of the highly revered Shiite Askariya mosque in the largely Sunni inhabited city of Samarra, 100 kilometres north of Baghdad. "The Askariya shrine means a lot to us, the people of Samarra", Abu Abdullah, a Sunni who lives next to the shrine, told the June 13 Washington Post, adding: "To lose the shrine hurt us a lot, and made us afraid about what will happen next. Someone wants to create sectarian strife by doing this act."
In February 2006, bombs planted inside the mosque destroyed its golden dome. US officials, parroted by the Western corporate media, have claimed ever since that this act — attributed by them to "Sunni insurgents" — sparked a "sectarian civil war" between "Sunni insurgents" and "Shiite militiamen" that has cost the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
Shortly after the latest attack on the mosque and before any official investigation into it had even begun, Nuri al Maliki, Washington's puppet Iraqi prime minister, made a nationally televised address in which he blamed the bombing on "takfiris" — zealously anti-Shiite Sunni Islamists — and "Saddamists" — a pseudonym for secular nationalist Sunni opponents of the US occupation.
The Post reported that witnesses it interviewed said a unit of Interior Ministry police commandos, apparently from Baghdad, arrived at the mosque on the night of June 12, replacing the local, mainly Sunni, police unit that was guarding the mosque. The mosque's minarets were blown up the next morning.
The US Special Forces-trained police commandos are overwhelmingly made up of former members of the Badr Brigade militia of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC), the largest of the Shiite religious parties in Maliki's government. Their involvement led to immediate suspicions among Sunni political and religious leaders that the June 13 attack was a police commando provocation.
The Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), the main organisation of Sunni clerics, issued a statement condemning the attack and pointing the finger at the Maliki government and its US occupation forces. The AMS noted that the mosque and its surrounding area "had been completely closed with huge cement blocks since last year's bombing" and that "government forces were heavily deployed in the site and monitored it around the clock, the most prominent feature of which was the proliferation of snipers on the roofs of surrounding buildings from all directions".
The AMS statement also observed that "the bombing, with explosives placed under the two minarets, was similar to what happened to the golden dome of the Askari tombs more than a year ago, which implies the involvement of government apparatuses and forces".
While US officials and their puppet Iraqi government immediately blamed the February 2006 attack on "Sunni insurgents" linked to the fanatically anti-Shiite, Sunni fundamentalist al Qaeda in Iraq group, local witnesses and Mouwafak al Rubaie, Maliki's national security adviser, said that up to 10 men wearing police commando uniforms had overpowered the mosque's civilian guards before laying the explosives and escaping.
In January 2006, Newsweek revealed that the Pentagon chiefs planned to "send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers".
In the year after this report, Sunni religious and political leaders repeatedly complained that hundreds of Sunni civilians were being abducted, tortured and executed each month by the death squads run by Interior Ministry forces.
These complaints were dismissed as unfounded by US officials and their Iraqi government until January 22, 2006, when US troops stopped a 22-member Iraqi death squad at a Baghdad checkpoint and the squad's members confirmed that they were Interior Ministry police commandos.
The February 16, 2006, 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 paper reported that the killings "started after the current Shiite-led government took office and appointed a new interior minister, Bayan Jabr" — a leading member of the SIIC — "fuelling Sunni suspicions that the ministry's forces were waging a sectarian campaign against Sunnis".
Confirming these suspicions, John Pace, at the time the UN's outgoing human rights chief in Iraq, told the British Independent on February 26, 2006, that up to three-quarters of the corpses arriving at Baghdad's morgues showed evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes. "The Badr Brigade are in the police and are mainly the ones doing the killing", said Pace.
Immediately after the February 22, 2006, bombing of the Askariya mosque, US officials in Baghdad, began to publicly warn about Iraq falling into a "sectarian civil war" between "Sunni insurgents" and "Shiite militia-run death squads" that had "infiltrated" the Iraqi police.
However, they did not blame the death-squad campaign against Sunnis on members of the SIIC's Badr militia but on the SIIC's main political rival — anti-occupation Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr and his loosely organised Mahdi Army militia.
The second bombing attack on the Askariya mosque has come at a time when the US-orchestrated campaign to pit anti-occupation Sunnis against the anti-occupation Sadrists, the dominant political group among Iraq's Shiite poor, has begun to show signs of faltering.
On April 9, the Sadrists organised a half-million-strong demonstration in Najaf against the US-led occupation. Local police estimated the turn-out at around 500,000. MPs aligned with Sadr subsequently pulled out of Maliki's government, accusing it of serving "sectarian interests" and the interests of the US occupation.
On April 25, Sadr strongly condemned the US military's construction of a concrete wall around Sunni neighbourhoods in Baghdad, calling for demonstrations against the plan as a sign of "the evil will of the occupiers", who he said aimed to divide Iraqis along sectarian lines.
The May 20 Washington Post reported that Sadr "senses an opportunity in recent moves by Sunni insurgent groups to break away from militants influenced by al Qaeda, and in the threats by the largest Sunni political bloc to leave the government, which opens the possibility for a new cross-sectarian political alliance, his aides said ...
"Sadr's political followers have had informal talks with Sunni politicians and insurgent groups in the past month. 'We think there is some possibility to have a closer relationship', said Hussein al-Falluji, a legislator in the Iraqi Accordance Front, the largest Sunni political bloc."
Abu Aja Naemi, a commander in the 1920 Revolution Brigades, one of the main anti-occupation guerrilla formations, told the Post that Sadr's representatives have had informal discussions with his group.
Shortly after the June 13 attack on the Askariya mosque, Sadr issued a statement calling for three days observance of the event, in mosques "be they Sunni or Shia", and for the "organisation of peaceful demonstrations and protests so all can see that the only enemy of Iraqis is the occupation, and that's why everyone must demand its departure or scheduling [an end to] its presence".
The independent Voices of Iraq news agency reported on June 14 that Najaf residents staged a mass march to express anger at the mosque attack, blaming US forces and Maliki's government for sectarian violence.
On June 16, VOI reported that "gunmen wearing police commando uniforms" had used explosives to destroy the Sunni Ashra al Mubashra mosque in Basra earlier that day. It also reported that the AMS issued a statement saying that at least 20 Sunni mosques had been attacked since the June 13 Samarra mosque bombing.
The Inter Press Service news agency reported on June 20 that "many residents from Samarra who IPS spoke with in Baghdad blamed the occupation forces for allowing the mosque bombing to happen".
"We can feel Iraqis are becoming more inclined to violence against US forces each time things go wrong against sacred places in the country", a member of the municipal council of Samarra, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS.