To Slaughter a Mockery of Islam
The ancient country of Mesopotamia has seen much in its long history. Its glory days have long since passed, like much of the fabled history of countries such as ancient Persia and Egypt. Where once their brilliance as centres of science and innovation, art and medicine, architecture and story-telling identified them as advanced for their times and uniquely forward-looking, they have all since regressed, failed to enter modernity, become mired in the bog of religious bigotry and tribal antipathies.Iraq was invaded by a modern army of a modern world power to rescue it from the malignant talons of a tyrant. That release from the regime of the Baathist Alawite Saddam Hussein who elevated the Sunni minority over a cringingly subdued Shia majority through brutal repression, did not create a society that was eager to live together in harmony, appreciative of new freedoms, eager to adapt to a vastly different kind of governance called democracy.
Some of the more obvious symbols of democracy were indeed adopted and adapted to use by an Arab country suffused with the social and religious and ideological trappings of a rigidly-observed religion, under the patient tutelage of the occupying Western powers who meant to leave expeditiously until they discovered to their horror that they had unleashed the devil's own zoo of unbridled sectarian hatred.
Having been more or less tamped down to far less atrocious levels of carnage over the years, but left with the searingly hateful presence of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the attacks of Sunni mobs against Shia, and Shia militias against Sunnis have subsided. The Iraqi Kurds have sensibly removed themselves from these morbid skirmishes to found at last an autonomous Kurdistan region of their own abutting Syria, Turkey and Iran.
But the majority-population Shia are now in a position of governing prominence, no longer repressed by a brutal dictatorship. And their rule has brought to the Sunni minority what the previous government inflicted on the Shia majority. They now live under a different dictatorship. They are all Muslim, but there are Muslims and there are heretics posing as Muslims, depending on which side of the Muslim divide one happens to be occupying.
Arab Iraq and Aryan Iran have progressed from fighting a no-holds-barred deadly war of many crippling years' duration to now representing neighbours who have much in common; mostly because they are both Shia-majority and clasped in a pure version of historical Islam. Shiite militias roam the country attacking Sunnis, spurred on by Iran. No fewer than 29 Sunni mosques have been attacked in several months, with 65 Sunni worshippers killed.
The U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq of 2011 returned total rule of the country to the Shia majority, despite an initial tripartite sharing of government between Shia, Sunni and Kurds. Sectarian strife has been given renewed life since Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki charged his Sunni presidential counterpart with terrorism crimes against Shias, launching the country back into a reasonable semblance of civil strife.
Sunni anti-government rallies since the single-sect rule of the country succeeded in reversing the democratic gains left by Western guidance have infuriated the Shia majority. "These attacks [on mosques] aim to terrorize the worshippers and they might be a reaction on some issues such as the protesters", claimed Mahmoud al-Sumaidaie, deputy head of Iraq's Sunni Endowment, overseeing Sunni holy sites.
And he is quite correct. Sunni homes in Baghdad receive threatening leaflets signed off by the Mukhtar Army, warning them to leave or face dread consequences. A senior official in Iraq's Hezbollah Brigade, Mathiq al-Batat, founded the Mukhtar Army whose purpose is the confrontation of Sunnis suspected of attempting to dislodge Shiites from government in Baghdad, as a reflection of the Sunni-led rebellion in Shia-minority-regime Syria.
Look under any rock in the Middle East and there, creeping about, are those who conspire to slaughter their co-religionists who happen to have aligned themselves with the incorrect theocratic founding ideology, thus forfeiting their right to life.
Labels: Atrocities, Conflict, Human Relations, Iraq, Islam
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, May 16, 2013
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