Financial Times Editorial - Iraq's future hit by a perfectly aimed blow

Iraq's future hit by a perfectly aimed blow
Published: February 24 2006 02:00 | Last updated: February 24 2006 02:00. Copyright by the Financial Times

The bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra on Wednesday was a well- aimed blow designed to tip Iraq over the edge into a full-blown sectarian war between Sunni and Shia Muslims. So perfectly aimed, in fact, that there is a real danger it will succeed.

Until this week, there had been signs that the tide was turning against the ultra-violent jihadi wing of the overwhelmingly Sunni insurgency - most personified by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his local franchise of al-Qaeda - which was explicitly targeting the Shia in an attempt to start a civil war that would suck in Shia Iran and Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbours.

More mainstream insurgent groups - nationalist or neo-Ba'athist, tribal or Sunni supremacist - had in some cases turned against the jihadis, wary of their extremism and increasingly indiscriminate violence. Reports of shoot-outs between insurgent groups and jihadis had recently multiplied. If even half of them were true, the jihadis had reason to feel dismay.

Their tactical solution is classic. By destroying a shrine the Shia hold in particular reverence, they aim to polarise Iraq irrevocably between Shia and Sunni, and stampede everyone back into their sectarian ghettoes. The Sunnis, in this reasoning, will have to reunite if they all face being shot against the same wall anyway. In recent memory, this logic was employed by all sides in the Lebanese civil war and the wars of the Yugoslav succession. Unfortunately, it works.

Indeed, arguably the most remarkable feature of the Iraqi conflict is how the Shia have resisted being drawn into open warfare despite escalating provocations that have killed them in hundreds and then thousands. That stoic restraint may now have ended.

The Shia did not respond to the murder of their leaders, attacks on their pilgrims and markets, even the destruction of their mosques. But the importance of the golden-domed al-Askari shrine cannot be overstated. It housed the tombs of the 10th and 11th Shia imams, direct descendants of the Prophet Mohammed and grandfather and father to the 12th and last "hidden imam", who "disappeared" around 939 and, in Shia belief, survives supernaturally until he returns at the end of time as the Mahdi, or Messiah. This attack was on the Shia's very identity and, in an almost literal sense, apocalyptic.

Its consequences must not be so.

Amid the bloodshed and mosque-burning that has followed, there are some grim signs of hope. The massacre of demonstrators from a joint Sunni and Shia protest against sectarianism, for instance, would not have taken place if the jihadis did not fear Iraqis still have the will to live together.

Sunni leaders have, so far, only suspended their talks with the Shia majority and its Kurdish allies on a government of national unity. Yet all sides will be tempted to retreat behind their private armies, pulling the incipient national army of rebadged militia apart. US forces and their British allies can do little to prevent this.

This is the moment that will really test the mettle of Iraq's clerical and political leaders - in particular Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, spiritual leader of the Shia. Mr Sistani has held the Iraqi ring throughout the occupation and restrained the Shia with the promise of the political power the Sunni minority had denied them for centuries. They now have that power but he and they must decide whether to exercise and share it within a federal Iraq. Because the alternative is war.