Violence continues after attack on shrine in Iraq

The reprisals and counter-reprisals for the attack on the Shrine of the Two Imams in Iraq have entered their second day:

After a day of violence so raw and so personal, Iraqis woke on Thursday morning to a tense new world in which, it seemed, anything was possible.

The violence on Wednesday was the closest Iraq had come to civil war, and Iraqis were stunned. In Al Amin, a neighborhood in southeast Baghdad, a Shiite man said he had watched gunmen set a house on fire. It was identified as the residence of Sunni Arab militants, said the man, Abu Abbas, though no one seemed to know for sure who they were.

“We all were shocked,” said Abu Abbas, a vegetable seller, standing near crates of oranges and tomatoes. “We saw it burning. We called the fire department. We didn’t know how to behave. Chaos was everywhere.”

Of the seven men inside, at least three were brought out dead, said Abu Abbas, 32, who said it would be dangerous to give more than his Iraqi nickname.

Everything felt different on Thursday morning. A Shiite newspaper, Al Bayyna al Jadidah, used unusually angry language in a front-page editorial: “It’s time to declare war against anyone who tries to conspire against us, who slaughters us every day. It is time to go to the streets and fight those outlaws.”

Many Iraqis, including Abu Abbas, blamed the militia loyal to the Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, for the attacks. The fighters are known as the Mahdi Army but they are little more than large groups of poor Shiites with guns. Indeed, the neighborhoods in eastern Baghdad on the edges of the vast Shiite slum, Sadr City, where most of those fighters live, seem to have been hit the hardest.

Opinion on the situation continues to be divided with Iraqi bloggers.  Truth About Iraqis characterizes this bluntly as the “Second Day of Civil War in Iraq”:

Day two is far worse than day one with the political crises widening as hundreds of Sunnis and Shia are killed and Sunni mosques continue to burn.

Efforts for Shia and Sunni to hold a joint demonstration protesting against the violence seen in the past two days were thwarted when a fake police checkpoint was set up by men in uniforms who then killed many Shia and Sunnis.

There’s lots more.  Zeyad of Healing Iraq has a follow-up to his post from yesterday that includes recent developments and background on the shrine.
Ali of Free Iraqi sees things a little differently:

I tend to see this as not as bad as it looks. The attack is definitely a terrorist act aims to inflaming sectarian divisions and creating a civil war, the She’at are over reacting and some of them are pointing the accusation directly or indirectly towards all Sunnis. This is all bad, but the good thing is the different reaction among She’at religious authorities, the ‘formal’ one represented by Sistani and the more radical represented by the Sadirists and the SCIRI. There’s no question that most She’at follow Sistani and that’s why those two strong radical organizations still need his blessings and support. Sistani being a religious man who believes in the She’at dogma sees that he needs the help of those two even if he disagrees with them and fear them to some extent in order to strengthen the role of She’at in Iraq and glorify what he stands for. Both parties put with so much from each other to achieve their own agenda, but recently the split started to widen not only between the formal and more radical side but also between the two radical ones. Power hunger has always served to blind people at one point or another and the struggle among the allies can be more bitter and worse than that between them and their common enemy.
If the radical She’at listen to Sistani and calm things down then we have no reason to worry that much about a civil war (Although we will have to worry about a dominant united religious front which I think can be worse), while if they don’t then they may take Iraq into a civil war which is not that unlikely now to happen given the strong Iranian interference and support for those radical components among She’at. But is that really that disastrous? Maybe, but I tend to think it won’t be for many reasons.

Read the whole thing.

This morning on ABC’s Good Morning America columnist Thomas Friedman returned to themes he’s dealt with before:  the complexity of the ethnic, religious, and political situation in Iraq and his apparent conviction that Saddam’s severe repression was a logical consequence of dealing with that complexity.  He also noted that, if a decent, (and at least a little) democratic government emerges in Iraq, it will strike a severe, possibly killing blow to Al-Qaeda’s program the region.  What’s going on in Iraq is already a setback for them and they’ll resort to increasingly desparate and horrific means to prevent that.

If Al-Qaeda prevails against the United States in Iraq, it will have repercussions for our policy in the Middle East and all over the world.  That, in a nutshell, is my reason for supporting our continued presence there despite my opposition for the invasion.