Who is behind the Shiite killings?
8 Mar 2004
BY ROBERT FISK
IT’S odd, isn’t it? There has never been a civil war in Iraq. I have
never heard a single word indicating animosity between Sunnis and
Shiites in Iraq. Al Qaeda has never launched any threat against the
Shiites, even though its organization is exclusively composed of
Sunnis. Nevertheless for weeks the U.S. occupation authorities have
been advising us of a civil war and have even circulated a letter from
an Al Qaeda operative command referring to a conflict between Sunnis
and Shiites. Journalists who normally conduct themselves coherently
have returned with gusto to the theme: civil war.
For some reason, I don’t believe it. No, I don’t think that the
Americans are behind the butchery of March 2, despite the cries of
accusation from the Iraqi survivors. But I am concerned about the
Iraqi groups in exile who think that their acts could provoke
precisely what the Americans want: a degree of terror so great that it
would lead to a civil war that would make the Iraqis accept any plan
that the United States proposes for Mesopotamia.
I am thinking of the French agents in Algeria in 1962 who planted
bombs in the Algerian Muslim community in France. I recall the
desperate efforts of the French authorities who tried to set Algerians
Muslims against other Algerian Muslims – the FLN against the ALN –
which resulted in the death of one million people. And I am afraid
that I am also thinking of Ireland and the bomb attacks in Dublin,
Monaghan and Dundalk in 1974 which, as the years go by, would appear
to be increasingly linked (thanks to "loyal" Protestant
paramilitaries) to British army security agents. Pakistan has
antecedents of sectarian conflicts – for which Britain, historically,
is not exempt of blame – for which reason the slaughter in Quetta on
March 4 could very well have no connection whatsoever with Iraq.
But the bombs in Kerbala and Baghdad were clearly coordinated. The
same brain is behind both explosions. Is it a Sunni brain? When the
spokesman for the occupation authorities suggested that the bombings
were the work of the Al Qaeda, he obviously knew what he was saying:
that the network is a Sunni movement and that the victims were
Shiites.
It is not that I believe that Al Qaeda is incapable of such a
bloodbath. But I ask myself why the Americans are harping on so much
about the Sunnis and Shiites and why they are insisting on emphasizing
the danger of a civil war.
Let’s turn this supposition around. If a violent Sunni movement wished
to expel the Americans from Iraq – and there is certainly a resistance
fighting with much cruelty to achieve that – why would it want to turn
the Iraqi population, 60% of which is constituted of Shiites, against
it? The last thing that such a resistance, which is fighting the only
world superpower, would want is to have the majority of Iraqis against
it.
And what do they have on Al Qaeda? The Americans and the new Iraqi
police force trained by the Americans have told us that the suicide
attackers were "foreign." Maybe they are, but who can give us their
names, identities and nationalities?
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has referred to hundreds of
"foreign" combatants flowing over the "porous" Saudi Arabian borders.
The U.S. press has obediently repeated all this. But, who are the
attackers? What are their identities? What countries are they from?
Given that the Iraqi police are still announcing they have found the
attackers’ passports, could they provide us with the numbers of those
passports?
We are entering a murky and sinister period in the history of Iraq, in
which there will be murky and sinister events. But an occupation
authority exists that should consider a civil war as the last
eventuality that they would want to contemplate, and yet it is
insisting on shouting "civil war" in our ears, and that worries me.
Especially when bombs convert it into something real.
from: Independent UK
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