IRAQ: The bombing of the Askari Shia shrine in Samarra on Wednesday elicited precisely the violent Shia response the perpetrators of the outrage had sought and brought Iraq closer than ever to all-out civil war, writes Michael Jansen
The attack has also torpedoed the US effort to form a national unity government and reverse the takeover of Iraq's security forces by Shia and Kurdish militia.
Iraq suffers from an insurgency, a low-level civil war and rampant crime, all of which feed each other. The attack on Samarra boosted the insurgency, exacerbated ongoing communal conflict and dealt a sharp blow to the prospect of reining in criminal gangs which prey on hapless Iraqis and foreigners.
The bombing was a victory for its perpetrators and a defeat for US and Iraqi forces fighting the insurgency. The bombers demonstrated, once again, that US forces cannot provide security even for highly-sensitive sites such as the Askari mosque, the fourth-holiest Shia site in Iraq. The attack also exposed as impotent the outgoing Shia-led government, which failed to preserve the mosque.
The dominant Dawa party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) are being held responsible.
These parties were humiliated when the office of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most senior Shia cleric, issued a statement calling on the faithful to assure security if the Iraqi government proved unable to do so. Sistani's appeal amounted to a reversal of previous policy. After earlier attacks on Shia sites and pilgrims, he had called for calm and had urged his flock to rely on the authorities.
The bombing of the shrine and the Shia backlash brought to the boil the simmering civil conflict between Shias and Sunnis. A 1,300-year-old feud between these two communities could be revived by the slaying of dozens of Sunni civilians by Shia militiamen in police or army uniform or dressed in the black clothing of the Mahdi army commanded by the radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
In recent months, Shia death squads connected to the security services have been accused by Sunnis of wreaking revenge on innocent civilians for the actions of the largely Sunni insurgents.
Sunnis are under siege; mixed Sunni/Shia towns and urban neighbourhoods are undergoing sectarian cleansing. The Shia rampage sparked by the Samarra bombing could drive Sunnis into the arms of the insurgents.
The decision of the Iraqi Accord Front, a leading Sunni Arab party, to boycott consultations aimed at forming a national unity government could undermine and delay this effort or even bring it to the point of collapse.
There can be no unity without the participation of this group, which has joined with two secular parties in a front which controls one-third of the seats in the new parliament.
Certain personalities and powers are attempting to exploit the crisis.
SCIRI chief Abdel Aziz Hakim, who rejects US pressure to share power, blamed Washington, claiming that its attempt to bring Sunnis into the government gave a "green light to the terrorist groups". While calling for calm, Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his militia to deploy at holy sites.
In Iran, the world's sole Shia country, which considers itself the protector of the sect, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei claimed that the US and Israel were responsible. Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi, a high-ranking cleric at the Qom seminary, said that the atrocity would lead to civil war and prevent Iraq's Shia majority from ruling.
Iran is likely to show its muscle by bolstering its main Iraqi ally, SCIRI, in the contest for cabinet posts and control of security, making it all the more difficult for President Jalal Talabani to negotiate a power-sharing formula. His failure would amount to an important defeat for the US, Iran's main regional antagonist.
The most serious accusation made about those behind the Samarra blast was that they were fundamentalist Sunnis who were seeking to excommunicate heterodox Shias from the global Muslim community.
The relationship between Islam's two main sects has often been troubled. Purist Sunnis have argued that Shias do not adhere to one of the basic tenets of the faith - the belief that there are no intercessors between God and man. Shias regard as intermediaries the Prophet Muhammad's heirs, his adopted son Ali, his grandsons Hassan and Hussein, their successors ("imams") and revered clerics.
The targeting of the Askari shrine at Samarra, which houses the tombs of two imams, is seen by Shias as a demonstration of contempt for their beliefs and part of a campaign to deny them Islamic legitimacy.
During periods when neither was assertive, the two sects have coexisted comfortably, but the recent rise of Saudi-cultivated Sunni fundamentalism has put Shias in a defensive-offensive mode.
The danger is that, if Iraqi Shias overreact to the Samarra provocation, they could launch total civil war, risking intervention by neighbouring Sunni states determined to prevent a Shia takeover of Iraq, the core country of the eastern Arab world.
That, in turn, could possibly precipitate a regional war involving Iran.