Jihad waged by Muslims against other Muslims tends to blow a hole in the usual theories of "underlying causes" for Islamic jihad outside of the imperative to wage jihad against unbelief and impose Sharia. That imperative includes variant Islamic beliefs. Who is "occupying" whose land here? "Suicide attack kills at least 24 at Baghdad mosque," by Muhanad Mohammed for Reuters, August 28 All of this goes to show celebration over the death of al-Qaeda's most recent second-in-command may be premature. http://news.yahoo.com/suicide-attack-kills-least-24-baghdad-mosque-211355109.html
This sort of attack shows the difference between radical Islam and Islamists. A suicide bombing implies that the targets are not muslims but instead heretics who are no better than Christians or Jews and in fact are worse because they are effectively apostates. There is only one real Islam and that is the Islamist version: those who have not strayed too far may be saved and those far removed must be cleansed so that Islam can be purified and strengthened. That is the Party Line, at any rate. So the Islamists have strayed from the words of the Koran by deliberately attacking civilians, and then strayed even further by deliberately attacking fellow muslims. It reminds me of Stalinist Russia, where the group that was purged the most often was the Communist Party and almost all former Mensheviks ended up in the gulag. The Islamists will end up killing a lot more Muslims than the West has or will, if they end up establishing their modern Caliphate.
Reuters reports that the Islamic Party of Iraq says the attack was carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq, a self-proclaimed Al Qaeda affiliate, and that the target was Mr. Fahdawi. He was the seventh member of the Sunni-based party to be murdered in the past month. "Al Qaeda has been distributing a lot of leaflets which say that there is no repentance for IIP members anymore, and killing them is allowed everywhere," party leader Rasheed al-Azawi told Reuters. The attack is a reminder that as US troop levels continue to dwindle (the US mandate expires at the end of this year), Iraq remains an inordinately violent place. Events at the mosque since the 2003 help illustrate the challenges Iraq continues to confront. After the attack, Samarrai blamed Al Qaeda for the deaths, but also called for religious tolerance. "Do not describe [the attackers] as Shiite or Sunni or Iraqis," AFP quoted him as saying at the mosque during funeral services for many of the dead today. "They are terrorists and terrorists have no religion." Perhaps. But the attack highlights the fact that there are still many in the country willing to kill and die in service of the Sunni takfiri ideology of Al Qaeda. The practice of takfir, declaring opponents to be infidels and apostates and therefore fair game for murder, is embraced by the group's fellow travelers in Iraq and elsewhere. To them, Iraq's Shiites are marked for death simply because of their beliefs, as are fellow Sunnis who reject their vision. That's one reason that the vast majority of Iraq's Sunni Arabs are opposed to the jihadis. Thousands of Sunni Arabs have been killed at their hands for the crime of participating in Iraq's political process or rejecting violence. But the strains of sectarian division remain with many of the country's Sunni Arabs suspicious of the Shiite-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki and afraid of the Shiite militias, like those loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr that ran death squads at the height of the sectarian civil war a few years ago.
It's a complex and problematical mix in Iraq made all the worse by the illegal invaders. The reality is, that the former brutal dictator, at least kept the lid on the pressure cooker that is modern sectarianism. The invasion merely resulted in the lid coming off. To deny that the invasion and occupation has not exacerbated the problems, is to live in cloud cuckoo land.
I agree, the problems with these types of countries all stem from the attitude of their general populace. Hussein, Ghadaffi etc. etc. were in one sense, merely symptoms of the disease, they, like all of their kind were simply representative of their own people.
