The Liberal Avenger
At least 51 are dead and another 200 wounded as rival militias clashed in the holy city of Karbala. There appears to be many more casualties not yet reported, as local hospitals are being overwhelmed with casualties.
The fighting mars the pilgrimage of more than one million Shiites from Baghdad to Karbala in order to attend ceremonies marking the birth of Muhammad al-Mahdi, the 12th and last Shi’ite imam. Police have ordered all pilgrims to leave the city.
Details of what caused the violence are sketchy, but a picture is beginning to emerge. The violence has pitted the two major Shiite militias, Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council’s (SIIC) Badr Organization, against each other:
The Supreme Council controls the shrine and mosque of Imam Husayn in Karbala, among the holiest shrines in the Shiite world. Pilgrims give donations when they visit the shrine, worth millions every year, and being able to preach at its mosque lends prestige to the incumbent. Al-Zaman says that the Sadrists, which in 2003 for a while controlled the shrine, were using the cover of the enormous crowds to steal a march on the Badr Corps, seeking to occupy the shrine. Badr appears to have fought them off. A lot of Karbala police were recruited from Badr, so it is always hard to tell militia on militia violence from police on militia violence.
That the Shiite government of Nuri al-Maliki cannot maintain order in the supremely Shiite city of Karbala during a major holy rite is very worrisome. In a way, Karbala’s violence during the past two days reminds me of the Shiite on Shiite violence in Basra. The south seems less and less stable, as the Mahdi Army and the Badr Corps square off against one another, each seeking to control as many provinces as possible.
Leaders of the Mahdi Army and the Supreme Council in Karbala were said to be meeting urgently with the Shiite Grand Ayatollahs in an effort to find a way to get the two groups to stop fighting.
The violence is not confined to Karbala:
The Karbala clashes (which resumed today) quickly moved to Baghdad, in the form of violent clashes between the two competing Shi’a parties: The Sadrist Current and al-Hakeems Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC.) Az-Zaman reported that thousands of Sadrists attacked the headquarters of the SIIC in Kadhimiya, Sadr City and Habibiya. A source in the Sadrist Current told the paper that the pro-Sadr public was enraged by what he saw as the targeting of Sadrist pilgrims in Karbala by members of the SIIC and Badr militia (the military arm of the SIIC) who were allegedly among the police and the guards of the shrines.
Elaph said that two offices of the SIIC were burned in Baghdad during the confrontations. Az-Zaman linked the clashes to the ongoing turf war between the two Shi’a parties in Southern cities and provinces, and attributed the escalation to the fact that the local elections scheduled for next year are drawing near.
Some of the articles linked here contain more information and are still being updated, so they’re worth checking out:
(cross posted at appletree)
