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Shi'ite hits the fan in Iraq

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Archaic

Archaic

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Blast damages Shiite 'Golden Mosque'
CNN said:
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- An explosion ripped through a Shiite holy site in Samarra Wednesday, destroying the al Askariya "Golden Mosque," a U.S. military statement and a local security official said.

A photograph provided by the U.S. Army showed the dome on the mosque had been destroyed, with debris littering the area.

An official with the Salahuldin Joint Coordination Center said a group of men dressed as Iraqi Police commandos entered the shrine around 7 a.m. (11 p.m. ET Tuesday) and detonated explosives under the dome, collapsing it and damaging the entire mosque.

The site is sacred to Shia, because they believe Iman al Mehdi will appear at the mosque, bringing them salvation.

Al Mehdi is the 12th and final awaited Imam in Shia Islam. He is the son of Iman Hasan al Askari, the 11th Iman, buried in the shrine. His grandfather, the 10th Iman, is also buried there.

Al Mehdi is said to have disappeared in the Eighth Century during the funeral of his father and is believed by Shia to have been withdrawn by God from the eyes of the people. They are waiting for him to reappear as their leader, believing the event will take place in Samarra.

Samarra is located in southern Salah ad Din province, about 70 miles (110 km) northwest of Baghdad.

On Tuesday, a car bomb detonated in a marketplace in the southern Baghdad suburb of Dora, killing 20 people and wounding another 25, police said.

The Associated Press reported that the car appeared to be detonated by remote control and was aimed at a police patrol but missed its intended target.

The car bomb was parked near a police checkpoint, and an Iraqi suspected of setting off the blast has been arrested, AP reported.

The explosion left cars burning and nearby stores ablaze, according to AP. Children screamed while women wailed "Our children have died!" and "The terrorists, may God punish them!"

Witnesses told AP that at least four passing cars caught fire and some motorists were killed or seriously wounded in the blast. Ambulances hurried to the scene, while motorists helped ferry the injured to hospitals, AP reported.

Earlier Tuesday, a roadside bombing killed a policeman in central Baghdad and another wounded two civilians, Iraqi police said.

The blasts took place as British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw visited the region and a day after seven attacks killed 16 people and wounded 56.

Straw held talks Tuesday with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani about formation of a new Iraqi government, a Talabani spokesman told Reuters.

Tuesday's first Baghdad bombing took place about 8 a.m. (12 a.m. ET) and targeted a police patrol, taking the life of an officer, Iraqi Emergency Police said. No other details of the attack were available.

The second bombing occurred in Tahrir square as a U.S. convoy passed, according to police. The attack wounded two civilians. No one in the American convoy was hurt.

Also Tuesday, Iraqi police found an unidentified body in the capital with its hands tied behind its back and a bullet hole through the head. A note on the body said, "this is a terrorist who kills innocents."

A U.S. soldier was among those killed in Monday's spate of seven bomb attacks, officials said.

The day's most deadly attack -- a suicide bombing -- took the lives of 10 people and wounded eight others in Baghdad's mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhood of Khadmiye, Iraqi Emergency Police said. No other details were available. (Full story)
U.S.-Iraqi raid nets detainees

U.S. and Iraqi troops found a stash of weapons and arrested suspected terrorists Tuesday in the village of Owesat southwest of Baghdad, the U.S. military said.

A surprise nighttime air assault resulted in the arrest of more than 39 people, including five who are considered high-value targets, the military said.

The detainees included "men that we were specifically targeting based on a tip provided from local nationals," U.S. Army Col. Jeffrey Snow said.

"There was evidence that this particular village was used as an insurgent training base as evidenced by what we believe was [a homemade bomb]-making factory," Snow said. "And the reason we say that is we found evidence of gunpowder in the vicinity of a garage with welding instruments and so forth."

The soldiers found several caches in and around the village containing 200 155 mm artillery rounds, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, 23 rocket-propelled grenade rounds, 17 hand grenades, 200 blasting caps, four rolls of detonation cord, a mortar, a heavy machine gun, explosive powder and several hundred machine gun rounds, the military said.
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Iraq shrine bombing fuels protests
Reuters said:
SAMARRA, Iraq (Reuters) - A dawn bomb attack wrecked a major Shi'ite Muslim shrine in the Iraqi city of Samarra on Wednesday, sparking protests, some of them violent, and forcing an urgent government appeal to avoid sectarian reprisals.

Some Sunni mosques were damaged in revenge attacks, Shi'ite militiamen posted themselves on streets and Iraq's senior Shi'ite cleric called for peaceful protests.

The Iraqi president said the attackers wanted to derail efforts to form a national unity government. Iraq's national security adviser accused al Qaeda-inspired Sunni militants of blasting the Shi'ite shrine to foment civil war.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Gunmen burst into Samarra's Golden Mosque, one of Iraq's four holiest Shi'ite sites, and used explosives to bring down its 100-year-old gilded dome, among the biggest in the Muslim world, senior officials said. No casualties were reported.

An aerial photograph released by the U.S. military showed the 20-meter (33-foot) wide dome reduced to a shell of brown masonry and twisted iron, with nearby buildings also wrecked.

An Interior Ministry spokesman said the attackers wore police uniforms, tied up the mosque guards and set the charges.

National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, a Shi'ite, who blamed the attack on al Qaeda, told state television 10 suspects had been arrested. "They will fail to draw the Iraqi people into civil war as they have failed in the past," he said.

As gunmen attacked Sunni mosques, Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shi'ite, declared three days of mourning and called for Muslim unity. He said the interim government had sent officials to Samarra, 100 km north of Baghdad.

CITY SEALED OFF

Security forces sealed off the mainly Sunni city and police said they had fired over demonstrators' heads at one point as they chanted religious and anti-American slogans.

Iraqi troops patrolled streets in the Sunni Baghdad district of Aadhamiya. The Defense Ministry said it was considering deploying troops to prevent clashes between rival communities. The U.S. military said its forces had taken no special action.

Top Sunni political leader Adnan al-Dulaimi urged Jaafari to impose a curfew to protect Sunnis and accused Shi'ite gunmen of killing a Sunni cleric in Baghdad.

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, powerful leader of the Shi'ite SCIRI party, which has its own armed wing, said: "The great Iraqi people will not keep silent over this grave crime."

The leading Sunni religious body also condemned the attack, as did Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, a Sunni Kurd.

In the mainly Shi'ite city of Basra, police said gunmen fired on the office of the main Sunni political group, the Iraqi Islamic Party. Witnesses said rocket-propelled grenades damaged a Sunni mosque in the city. A Reuters reporter said Sunni and Shi'ite gunmen were trading heavy fire.

Police said an Iraqi Islamic Party office was burned on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Gunmen fired on a Sunni mosque in Baghdad's Ghazaliya district and burned its gate, police and witnesses said. A Sunni clerical group said three Baghdad mosques were fired on. A Sunni cleric said rocket-propelled grenades hit mosques in the eastern area of Baladiyat. Iraqi troops prevented journalists reaching the scene. Some similar reports turned out to be false.

SHI'ITE PROTESTS

Thousands of people marched in Shi'ite towns across the country and through the capital, condemning the Samarra attack.

Black-clad militiamen of the Mehdi Army, loyal to Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, were out in force in Shi'ite strongholds like Sadr City in Baghdad and the southern city of Samawa.

In nearby Diwaniya, a local government official said a Mehdi militiaman was killed in clashes with Sunni residents. Some shopkeepers closed their stores for the mourning period.

U.S. officials, most recently ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad on Monday, are pressing Jaafari to form a cabinet with support across the nation to avert the threat of a civil war that could thwart Washington's efforts to withdraw its 130,000 troops.

Jaafari angrily dismissed the envoy's intervention.

Sunni rebels are strong in Samarra and there have been attacks recently on Shi'ite pilgrims visiting the shrine to the revered 9th-century Imam Ali al-Hadi and his son, Imam Hassan al-Askari. Shi'ite Web sites said relics of the buried imams, including a helmet and shield, were damaged in the explosions.

In the holy city of Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, revered by millions of Shi'ites and a key force for restraint in the face of Sunni insurgent attacks, made a rare call for protests and declared seven days of mourning.

He insisted in a statement, however, that there must be no violence and in particular no reprisals against Sunni mosques.

Outside his office, where Sistani was meeting his most senior colleagues, 2,000 demonstrators chanted: "Rise up Shi'ites! Shi'ites take revenge! Rise up Shi'ites!"

"For the Shi'ites ... this is a major assault comparable to an attack on Mecca for all Muslims," said Hazim al-Naimi, a political science professor at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University.

"We will definitely see more sectarianism after this attack ... It could push the country closer to civil war."

Smaller protests erupted elsewhere and shopkeepers in some Shi'ite areas closed their stores for the mourning period.

Sectarian attacks by the likes of al Qaeda, led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on Shi'ite gatherings including suicide bombings that killed 170 people at a Shi'ite festival in 2004 have failed to spark all-out reprisals, although Sunnis accuse the Shi'ite-led government of condoning police death squads.

The symbolic attack on the shrine appeared to spark greater violent outrage than the many attacks on Shi'ite worshippers.

Ordinary Shi'ites were dismayed by the violence: "Whoever did this are not human beings. They are less than animals," said Wuroud Kathim, 29, a computer specialist, in central Baghdad.

Wednesday's attack followed bombings in Baghdad on the two previous days that killed 40 people and broke a month's lull.
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Now even O'Reilly is saying we should pull our troops out. We shoud have seen this coming before we even went to war.

Civil war. This is going to be a Arab-Persian war. They defiled one of the Shiite's most sacred structures. All Shiites are going to be dragged into this unless Bush can talk really fast.
 
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For those reading who don't understand the full religious significance of this....

What happened was basically that the place where Shi'ite Islam believes that their equivalent of the Christian second coming is supposed to happen at was bombed, in broad daylight, by terrorists in stolen Iraq police commando uniforms.

It'd be on the same sort of scale as going and dropping a bomb on the church of the nativity, or on the Vatican.
 
Hey, oil is up to $100 a barrel. Maybe if we nuke Iraq, we can get it up to $150.
 
Is oil really to $100? It's going to get higher if the other Arab ation get involved in this.
 
GrnMarvl13 said:
And THAT...is why FoxNews sucks. Well...one of many reasons.
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Or, mabye you were watching an opinion show that speculated a rise to $100 a barrel in the future...
 
And maybe you can just bite me. I made a mistake, I didn't argue the fact. LET IT GO.
 
However, what I find more distressing is the change. All of the futures were up more than two dollars and the last one was up nearly four.
 
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