IRAQ - Resurgence In The Shiite World - Part 8 - A Sectarian War.

The Shiite Arabs of Iraq keep trying all means to avoid falling into the trap of sectarian strife with the Sunni Arabs. Whether or not they will succeed depends more on the Sunni Arabs than on any other factor, with the US trying to avert the war.

A troubling factor is neo-Salafism, a fascist, most fanatic and deadliest strain in Sunni Islam, influenced by non-Iraqi volunteers of Osama bin Laden's trans-national network al-Qaeda. Like the neo-Wahhabi radicals of Saudi Arabia, they want to see all current regimes in the Muslim world toppled and all Muslims united under a universal Sunni caliphate which will uphold the rule of God on earth. To these people, who will never hesitate to kill anyone on their path to that objective, all means justify their end, including tattarrus (a medieval concept - see news1cIraqSalafJul4-05), rape, sodomy, etc.

Despite the fact that Iraq is occupied by the mightiest military force on earth, the Salafi/Baathist alliance in the Sunni insurgency maintains a world of underground communications in a major part of this country. It is the same network as the one which, before his capture in December 2003, Saddam Hussein used: a secret mail network to stoke the Sunni insurgency against US-led forces and the Shiites.

This network was mentioned on Sept. 19 by the US weekly news magazine Time. Time said that, often switching locations in an attempt to avoid his enemies, Saddam "fired off frequent letters filled with instructions for his subordinates". Quoting "current and former" intelligence officials, it said some letters "were pathetic", adding: "In one, he explained guerrilla tradecraft to his inner circle, how to keep in touch with one another, how to establish new contacts, how to remain clandestine". Time said: "Of course, the people doing the actual fighting needed no such advice, and decisions about whom to attack, when and where were made by the [insurgency] cells", which it said were supplied with money, arms and logistical support by Saddam's minions.

The US intelligence will be making many such discoveries in Iraq, particularly in the Sunni Arab Triangle which keeps getting more lethal. The war in Iraq is between smart people. To be more precise, it is between the global smart and alley smarts; between a giant blinded by lack of planning and more nimble and armed mice, including suicide bombers.

The tragic aspect of the American project for Iraq, as APS Energy Group President Pierre Shammas put it to a recent conference, is that "the US forces descended on this country as a jumbo trying to land into the narrow alleys of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves... Once it has crash landed and without a road map, it has failed to find directions, to the extent that wherever it has gone it has fallen into more trouble... Now anything can happen, not just a sectarian war".

What made the American project in Iraq look particularly tragic, Shammas added, was the fact that the US "descended right into the land where the first conspiracy theory in history was born". Today extremists from all the moderate parties involved in the Iraqi government accuse the US presence in the country as being part of a "Zionist-American conspiracy". One notable example was a BBC debate on Sept. 23 during which each of the Iraqi and Iranian discussants had his own conspiracy theory, with one describing Iranian meddling in Iraq as being part of an ancient Safavid conspiracy against the Sunni Arabs of Iraq. Dr. Adnan al-Dulaimi, a Sunni Arab leader from the Triangle, went as far as accusing Iran of having sent to Iraq spies to cause a Sunni-Shiite war - a theory not far from the official Saudi view (see below).