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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rrufff who wrote (8161)	3/11/2004 3:43:55 PM
From: tsigprofit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

who is condoning this rruff? It is a military attack - just as napalm, carpet bombing, atomic weapons are. No one is happy to be on the receiving end of any of them...

To: rrufff who wrote (8161)	3/12/2004 5:01:31 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 20773

Re: This has evoked concerns that this morning's massive train explosions in Madrid could have been the result of Al Qaeda's actions, rather than the Basque separatist ETA movement... He who sows the wind.... Now the Shias It was supposed to have been the day when Iraq's Shia Muslims celebrated their main religious festival in the freedom of a post-Saddam Iraq. It ended in carnage. Graham Usher* reports from Karbala* At first it was a dull thud and a blank look of fear on people's faces. Then another. Then came a third. Then a wall of flame so high it licked the tiles of four-storey hotels. People -- hundreds of them -- ran in panic. Some crouched behind market stalls. Some fled to mosques. In one surreal image two pilgrims, freshly bloodied from the tutbir ritual in which devout Shia Muslims lacerate themselves with swords, stood amid a fresher pool of blood and flesh next to a wrecked ceremonial coach. It was not the only moment in Karbala on Tuesday when the present of the majority Shia Muslim community in Iraq seemed to fuse irredeemably with its history. Four suicide and mortar bombs hit Karbala, leaving over 100 dead and 200 wounded, many of them Iranians. The bomber detonated on a busy market street; two of the mortars struck people milling near the Hussein and Abbas mosques; the last mortar cratered a main rod ferrying pilgrims. With Najaf, Karbala is the Shias holiest city in Iraq. Ashura is their holiest holiday. There could be no worse event, no greater sacrilege, said Hussein Shahristani, a Shia analyst in Karbala. "Shia pilgrims from all over the world came to Karbala to celebrate a religious occasion. After so many years of persecution the very least we expected in the new Iraq was to worship in peace. Yet we were exposed to these attacks." Tuesday was supposed to mark the climax of Ashura, 10 days in which Shias everywhere re-enact the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the grandson of Prophet Mohamed. For the last 36 years in Iraq it represented a muzzled assertion of Shia identity and resistance against the might of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime and the violence it inflicted on them. This year Saddam's army was replaced by Polish soldiers on the outskirts of Karbala and militias from the Shias main religious parties in and around its shrines. "It feels like an act of God's mercy," said one woman on Monday. [...] weekly.ahram.org.eg