Rival Shiite Militias Clash in Southern Iraq

Washington Post ^ | August 17 2006 | Sudarsan Raghavan

[jmc1969]

Clashes between rival Shiite Muslim militias erupted Wednesday in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, when scores of gunmen stormed the governor's office after accusing his supporters of assassinating their tribal leader. Meanwhile, car bombs in Baghdad killed 25 people.

The gunmen in Basra, a predominantly Shiite city, laid siege to the office for two hours, lobbing mortar shells and barricading nearby bridges, before British troops and Iraqi police pushed them back. The fighting left at least four policemen dead, police said. Authorities imposed a curfew on the city.

Tensions also are rising between U.S. and Iraqi forces and the powerful anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who is emerging as the main Shiite obstacle to U.S. efforts to establish order and security in Baghdad as well as in the south.

In Karbala, fierce gun battles erupted Tuesday between the followers of radical cleric Mahmoud Sarkhi al-Hassani and Iraqi security forces who raided his office, leaving seven people dead. The clashes quickly spread to nearby towns. The crackdown on Hassani came after his followers apparently tried to take over several districts in Karbala, authorities said.

Wahab Razouki, a senior official of the Fadhila party, another Shiite group, accused Hassani's armed followers of planning to take over religious shrines in the city. The Iraqi army said in a statement that it had restored order to Karbala by Wednesday and had arrested 281 participants in the unrest. But Hassani's supporters gathered in several nearby towns and threatened to march on Karbala, police said.

The clashes Wednesday in Basra were sparked by the assassination of Sheik Faisal, the leader of the Shiite Beni Assad tribe, by unidentified gunmen on Monday, authorities said. His supporters, who reside in a neighborhood north of the city, accused the rival Fadhila party of orchestrating the attack.

[308MBR]

Sounds like a good place to open a gun store to me.

There is no peace in islam.

[Prokopton]

I support these clashes like I support prison hunger strikes.

[zarf]

Can I barge in on this thread and blame the Jews? Seems to be
in vogue these days.

[afnamvet]

Tensions also are rising between U.S. and Iraqi forces and the powerful anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who is emerging as the main Shiite obstacle to U.S. efforts to establish order and security in Baghdad as well as in the south.

Here's hoping that our troops will give al-Sadr and his militia an invitation to a dirt nap.

[GSlob]

More power to both of the rival militias: with any luck, may they reciprocally exterminate one another!

[WhistlingPastTheGraveyard]

Would that make this "intrasectarian violence"?

Islam sure does have a lot of violences.

[Berlin_Freeper]

This is a criminal problem that can only best be dealt with by due process and executions.

As Coulter points out in chapter 2 of her excellent book "GODLESS - The Church Of Liberalism", it can be seen that in the US from the time frame of 1954 to 1974 the Liberals controlled the US Supreme Court and made all kinds of lunatic rulings that made absolutely no social sense what-so-ever and went soft on crime thereby turning loose at least 100,000 criminals a year back on the street that in past times would have ordinarily been locked up. And so the US crime rate soared during those 20 years. But then starting in the 1980's America was getting tough on criminals again with more jails and executions and the crime rate fell.

In Iraq there is no noticeable system of justice dealing with these murderous criminal elements that cause suffering to the Iraqi society, and so their is not even the stigma of criminality associated with them. That needs to changed where people are rounded up on solid evidence, given legal process and executed in a timely fashion. And all that needs to be made public on an Iraqi Court TV station so the people can see justice in action and only then will the criminal element in that country be brought to heel. Otherwise the criminals have not thought or fear of the consequences of their actions and will continue their criminal activity unabated.

[Brad from Tennessee]

Yeah. If they didn't have Israel to fight--and to blame for their backward, flea-bitten existences--they would kill each other at a much faster pace. There are ancient blood feuds and newly invented blood feuds but they never run out of a reason to slaughter each other. If they didn't have knives, assault rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, they would throw camel or donkey turds at each other. And they are not the type to sit down at a conference table and negotiate.

[truth_seeker]

"Clashes between rival Shiite Muslim militias erupted Wednesday in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, when scores of gunmen stormed the governor's office after accusing his supporters of assassinating their tribal leader."

Muslim Peace Celebration.

A good strategy for freedom loving people would be preparation to fight all of islam. That is the current path of the world.