Popular response to Samarra bombing has been to blame the U.S. occupation

[bigtree]

Exit without a strategy

The popular response to Iraq's latest atrocities has been to blame the occupation, not rival sects

Friday February 24, 2006
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1716754,00.html

It has not been Sunni religious symbols that hundreds of thousands of angry marchers protesting at the bombing of the shrine have targeted, but US flags. The slogan that united them on Wednesday was: "Kalla, kalla Amrica, kalla kalla lill-irhab" - no to America, no to terrorism. The Shia clerics most listened to by young militants swiftly blamed the occupation for the bombing. They included Moqtada al-Sadr; Nasrallah, leader of Hizbullah in Lebanon; Ayatollah Khalisi, leader of the Iraqi National Foundation Congress; and Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's spiritual leader. Along with Grand Ayatollah Sistani, they also declared it a grave "sin" to attack Sunnis - as did all the Sunni clerics about attacks on Shias. Sadr was reported by the BBC as calling for revenge on Sunnis - in fact, he said "no Sunni would do this" and called for revenge on the occupation.

None of the mostly spontaneous protest marches were directed at Sunni mosques. Near the bombed shrine itself, local Sunnis joined the city's minority Shias to denounce the occupation and accuse it of sharing responsibility for the outrage. In Kut, a march led by Sadr's Mahdi army burned US and Israeli flags. In Baghdad's Sadr City, the anti-occupation march was massive.

There was a string of armed attacks on Sunni mosques in the wake of the bombing but none of them was carried out by the protesters. Reports suggest that they were the work of masked gunmen. Since then there has been an escalation of well-organised murders, some sectarian, some targeting mixed groups, such as yesterday's killing of 47 workers near Baquba.

But as live coverage of Wednesday's demonstrations on Iraqi and Arab satellite TV stations clearly showed, the popular mood has been anti-occupation rather than sectarian. Iraq is awash with rumours about the collusion of the occupation forces and their Iraqi clients with sectarian attacks and death squads: the US is widely seen as fostering sectarian division to prevent the emergence of a united national resistance. Evidence of their involvement in Wednesday's anti-Sunni reprisals was picked up in the Times, which reported that after an armed attack on the al-Quds Sunni mosque in Baghdad the gunmen climbed back into six cars and were ushered from the scene by cheering soldiers of the US-controlled Iraqi National Guard.

full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1716754,00.html


photo:

Kashmiri Shia Muslims, with a banner which reads 'Down with the U.S.', shout slogans against the U.S. in Srinagar February 24, 2006, during a protest against the bombing of Samarra's Golden Mosque. Protests were held in Kashmir on Friday by Kashmiri Shia Muslims to denounce the bombing of Samarra's Golden Mosque. The protesters blamed U.S. soldiers for the bombing. REUTERS/Fayaz Kabli
Reuters - 2 hours, 29 minutes ago

[Benbow]

1. This Brit blames the US occupation (and American psyops), too n/t

[bigtree]

6. none of this would have happened without the invasion and occupation

chaos is Bush's game. Yesterday he was using the violence that he and others have caused to try and elect a fellow republican. He said the Samarra bombing justified our continued presence there.


Bush uses fundraiser to stress war on terror

"The president said news out of Iraq that the gleaming dome of the 1,200-year-old Askariya shrine had been reduced to rubble served as a reminder that there is much work to do on the other side of the globe."

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060224/NEWS02/602240425/1006/NEWS01

[malaise]

2. Contrary to the right wing propaganda nuts

Iraqis are not stupid. They know that chaos, death and destruction are the hallmarks of occupiers and thieves.

[Voice1]

3. Indeed, and no militant groups have claimed responsibility either

As far as i'm aware, I may have missed an admission of responsibility, from some previously unknown group though.

Interesting, as some of the reports yesterday stated, 4 men walked into that Mosque and planted the explosives, 1 in military uniform (none of the articles make clear which particular military uniform was worn), the other clad in black. I think someone said yesterday that the Spanish press was reporting that 3 of them were masked.

[malaise]

4. What bomb could four men walk into a mosque with

that would have created that level of destruction. I'm tired of having my intelligence insulted.

[Voice1]

5. Exactly malaise

Yet some of us are labelled "conspiracy theorists" for pointing out what is blatently obvious.

[phusion]

8. Sounds like CIA garb to me. n/t

[Voice1]

9. Remember the "Proactive Preemptive Operations Group"?

It's no "conspiracy theory", they actually want to "prod terrorists into action":

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/DK05Ak02.html

"The CIA executes the plans but they use Department of Defense assets," Schneider said. He emphasized that the board was not recommending any changes to long-standing US policies banning assassinations, or requiring presidents to approve in advance US covert operations. Nor, he said, was the panel advocating changes that would erode congressional oversight.
......
P2OG would launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction, meaning it would prod terrorist cells into action, thus exposing them to "quick-response" attacks by US forces. The means by which it would do this is the far greater use of special operations forces.

"Stimulating reactions among terrorists" - seems that Mosque bombing would certainly do that!

[phusion]

10. Britain does the same kind of thing...

Remember the British special ops thugs dressed as Arabs that were caught with explosives, etc? And then the response by the British military with the tanks at the prison (They story sadly fell off the face of the earth...How outrageous was that?!).

I have a Vietnam veteran friend who talks in detail about the crap the CIA was doing in Vietnam during the war. Same kind of shit.

[Voice1]

11. Yes, I posted about that on another thread

There was a media blackout here on the story of the Brits, I first heard about it from the BBC (which later removed all references to explosives) then read about it at the Washington Post. I think that's why it just fell away, there were a lot of rumours at the time that a D Notice had been issued.

[mom cat]

12. Michael Ledeen:"One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron"

"One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists. That's our mission in the war against terror." Michael Ledeen

http://www.irmep.org/dp_world.htm

[bigtree]

7. .