Fwd: [Peace-discuss] Who did the Ashura bombings?

[Alfred Kagan]

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>From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>
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>Subject: [Peace-discuss] Who did the Ashura bombings?
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>March 2, 2004
>A Convenient Carnage
>All This Talk of Civil War, Now This
>
>By ROBERT FISK
>The Independent/UK
>
>Odd, isn't it? There never has been a civil war in Iraq. I have never
>heard a single word of animosity between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq.
>
>Al-Qa'ida has never uttered a threat against Shias - even though al-Qa'ida
>is a Sunni-only organisation. Yet for weeks, the American occupation
>authorities have been warning us about civil war, have even produced a
>letter said to have been written by an al-Qa'ida operative, advocating a
>Sunni-Shia conflict. Normally sane journalists have enthusiastically taken
>up this theme. Civil war.
>
>Somehow I don't believe it. No, I don't believe the Americans were behind
>yesterday's carnage despite the screams of accusation by the Iraqi
>survivors yesterday. But I do worry about the Iraqi exile groups who think
>that their own actions might produce what the Americans want: a fear of
>civil war so intense that Iraqis will go along with any plan the United
>States produces for Mesopotamia.
>
>I think of the French OAS in Algeria in 1962, setting off bombs among
>France's Muslim Algerian community. I recall the desperate efforts of the
>French authorities to set Algerian Muslim against Algerian Muslim which
>led to half a million dead souls.
>
>And I'm afraid I also think of Ireland and the bombings in Dublin and
>Monaghan in 1974, which, as the years go by, appear to have an ever closer
>link, via Protestant "loyalist" paramilitaries, to elements of British
>military security.
>
>But the bombs in Karbala and Baghdad were clearly co-ordinated. The same
>brain worked behind them. Was it a Sunni brain? When the occupation
>authorities' spokesman suggested yesterday that it was the work of
>al-Qa'ida, he must have known what he was saying: that al-Qa'ida is a
>Sunni movement, that the victims were Shias.
>
>It's not that I believe al-Qa'ida incapable of such a bloodbath. But I ask
>myself why the Americans are rubbing this Sunni-Shia thing so hard. Let's
>turn the glass round the other way. If a violent Sunni movement wished to
>evict the Americans from Iraq - and there is indeed a resistance movement
>fighting very cruelly to do just that - why would it want to turn the Shia
>population of Iraq, 60 per cent of Iraqis, against them? The last thing
>such a resistance would want is to have the majority of Iraqis against it.
>
>So what about al-Qa'ida? Repeatedly, the Americans have told us that the
>suicide bombers were "foreigners". And so they may be. But can we have
>some identities, nationalities? The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld,
>has talked of the hundreds of "foreign" fighters crossing Saudi Arabia's
>"porous" borders.
>
>The US press have dutifully repeated this. The Iraqi police keep
>announcing that they have found the bombers' passports, so can we have the
>numbers?
>
>We are entering a dark and sinister period of Iraqi history. But an
>occupation authority which should regard civil war as the last prospect it
>ever wants to contemplate, keeps shouting "civil war" in our ears and I
>worry about that. Especially when the bombs make it real.
>
>***
>
>
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-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu