Iraq returns to its Persian heritage --LA Times; Sunni struggle claims 4th Fallujah chief --Yahoo! News

Iraq returns to its Persian heritage

Its newly ascendant Shiites no longer have to suppress their Persian roots, which tie them closely to Iran.


By Borzou Daragahi, Times Staff Writer
April 16, 2007


NAJAF, IRAQ — Persian script laces and flows across the walls of Najaf's seminaries.

Shiite Muslim religious scholars in the ancient city's turquoise-tiled edifices bury their noses in Koranic texts illustrated with Persian calligraphy, in scenes that evoke Mesopotamia's rich history.

For centuries, Najaf has been a key shrine city and center of worship for much of Iraq's people. But for centuries, Iraq's Ottoman and Arab rulers rarely considered Najaf part of their own history. It was always considered a troublesome outpost of the enemy: Iran.

They were right, for the most part. Historically and culturally, Najaf has long been under Persia's sway.

But so has much of Iraq.

The reading of the Koran in this country differs from the rest of the Muslim world: The rhythm and cadence of Sunnis are unique to Iraq and the Shiites' are unique to Iran. Persian dishes such as fesenjan, a pomegranate stew, are a standard part of Mesopotamian fare. Even this nation's capital carries a Persian name, Baghdad.

The sectarian nature of the war between Shiite and Sunni Arabs in Iraq reflects a centuries-old battle between Persia and the Arab world.

It is a point often misunderstood by U.S. policymakers and ground commanders, who perceive the reemergence of Persian influence among Iraq's newly powerful Shiite Muslim majority as proof of meddling by the regime in Tehran.

Rising Persian influence is a sign of Iraq's ascendance, not Iran's.

"Iraq has been part of the Persian sphere of influence for more than 400 years," said Karar Dastour, an Iraqi Shiite intellectual who lives in southern Tehran and travels to Iraq. "But governments have always tried to crush anything that had the scent of Shiism or Iran. They were never accepted."

Violent Sunni Arab rejection of Iraq's Persian roots plays out daily on the streets of the capital. In February, three bombs went off in the Shorja market in central Baghdad, killing more than 70 people. It was the fifth time the place, whose name means "salty well" in Persian, was struck in less than a year. Shiite Muslims were the intended targets, but so too was a landmark established long ago by Iranian merchants.

When saboteurs blew up the Golden Mosque in Samarra last year, an attack widely viewed as the accelerant of the current civil war, they destroyed the handiwork of Iranian artisans.

In their Internet postings, Sunni Arab insurgents, many of them officers during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, describe their attacks on Shiites as settling accounts with "Safavids," a reference to the 16th century dynasty that embraced Shiite Islam as the official religion of Persia. Shiite Safavids and Sunni Ottomans fought for decades in a conflict that infused sectarianism into what had been a centuries-old ethnic and political conflict between Arabs and Persians.

"There has always been conflict between the Arabs and Iranians, and they always tried to involve Iraq," Sheik Humam Hamoodi, an Iraqi Shiite politician and cleric who lived in Tehran during Saddam Hussein's rule, said in an interview last year. "Both have wanted to use Iraq as the trench for their battles."

Ignoring the protests of many Shiites, the British forces who forged modern-day Iraq after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire placed a Sunni Arab tribal leader at the country's helm. They dismissed the quarrelsome Shiite clerics as Iranian-backed interlopers in their plans to create an Iraq dominated by Sunni Arabs.



Minority rule

Iraq's 20th century leaders tried to graft a Sunni-dominated Arab identity onto a country that was majority Shiite. Even during the relatively benign years before Hussein's rise in the late 1960s, Shiites visiting Sunni Arab towns such as Tikrit and Fallouja feared for their lives. Pilgrims visiting Samarra, which housed the famous Shiite shrine destroyed by Sunni insurgents last year, rushed to make it back to Baghdad by sundown.

The battle over Iraq's identity accelerated under Hussein, who brutally suppressed what he saw as the non-Arab elements of his country's character. Hussein equated Persians to "flies," invaded Iran and subsequently killed tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and Shiites, dubbing them Iranian collaborators.

Hussein banned ceremonies of Ashura, the annual festival-like holiday commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, revered by Shiites as a saint. He ordered the desecration of Shiite shrines and the silencing and execution of the sect's clerics, many of them of Persian descent or married into Persian families. Offices and banks were ordered to stay open on Nowruz, the Persian New Year that falls on the first day of spring and is celebrated by Iraqi Kurds as well as Iranians, Tajiks and Afghans.

"There was a sectarian dimension and there was an ethnic dimension to his hatred," said Musayeb Naimi, editor of Al-Wifaq, a Tehran-based Arabic-language newspaper. Hussein's downfall after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 ended the enforced separation between Iran and Iraq, much to the frustration and rage of Iraq's long-dominant Sunni Arabs. Industrially incapacitated, Iraq must import electricity, foodstuffs, appliances and automobiles from Iran and other neighboring countries such as Turkey and Syria.

Persian cultural influences, long suppressed, have reemerged in the last four years. After Hussein's ouster, Iranian and Iraqi Shiites embraced during mass commemorations of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, rites once banned under Baath Party rule.

Those rites have now become symbols of Shiite power. Sunni insurgents repeatedly attacked the pilgrims headed to Karbala last month, killing more than 200.

Persian has become common on the streets of Najaf and Karbala, as well as in Baghdad's Convention Center, where the Iraqi parliament convenes. Colorful posters of imams Ali and Hussein, of the kind found in pious Iranian enclaves, appear more frequently in Iraqi markets and homes.

Young Iraqi women have begun wearing the same Grace Kelly-style head scarves and short overcoats favored by Iranians.

Motorcycles, popular among youths in Iran but banned during Hussein's rule, traverse Baghdad streets, as do the heroin and opium that have become a habit for young Iranians.



Unease among Sunnis

To many Sunni Arabs, all those have been disturbing signs of a Persian ascendancy.

Brought up on a diet of Arab nationalist propaganda, Sunni Iraqis see their country's drift into the Persian sphere of influence as foreign. At first Sunni insurgents attacked mostly U.S. troops, whom they saw as an occupation force. But as the Shiite-dominated government took hold in early 2005, the attacks took a sharply sectarian turn. Seconds before his execution, Hussein cursed both the Americans who overthrew him and the "Persians" who shouted populist Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr's name as he stood on the gallows.

A bitter Jan. 2 television debate about Hussein's legacy on the satellite channel Al Jazeera underscored the ethnic underpinnings of Sunni Arab rage against Iraq's new Shiite order.

The debate pitted Mishaan Jaburi, a Sunni Arab politician, against Sadeq Moussawi, a Shiite journalist and supporter of the current government.

During the debate, which was posted on the Internet and rapidly became famous here, Jaburi waved sheets of white paper at Moussawi, screaming, "These are your documents! You are an Iranian citizen …. You are Persian."

"Your father killed Kurds," Moussawi snapped back.

"You are Iranian," Jaburi reiterated. "These documents show that [you] applied for Iraqi citizenship in May 2004."

Moussawi didn't bother denying the accusation. "We will settle accounts with all of you," he said instead.

Yet many of Iraq's Persian-influenced citizens are neither loyal to nor fond of the government in Tehran. Many Shiites fought on Iraq's side in the war against Iran. And most Iraqis who sought shelter in Iran during Hussein's rule experienced hardship and bigotry. But culturally and politically, they cleave toward Iran instead of Washington's preferred proxy powers — Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Iraqi Shiites have some leaders, including the cleric Sadr, who are Arab nationalists. In the last year, however, many of them have strayed from the Arab world, angered that Arab countries have shunned Iraq's newly crystallizing Shiite identity.

Persians and Shiism have become so intertwined that opposition to Tehran's policies across the region has taken on a Sunni character. Ethnic Baluchi separatists in southeastern Iran fight under the banner of a Sunni Muslim group linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist network. And in a growing number of cases, Iran's Shiite Arab separatists have converted to Sunni Islam.

Even as Sunnis fight Shiites, accusing them of being Iranians, Shiites have begun to whisper about the identity of Iraq's Sunnis.

"The Sunnis of Iraq aren't really Arabs," one Iraqi Shiite diplomat said recently. "They're Turks."



daragahi@latimes.com

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Daragahi, The Times' former Baghdad Bureau chief, first traveled to Iraq in September 2002. Times staff writer Raheem Salman in Baghdad and special correspondents Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf and Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran contributed to this report.



 
Copyright 2007 Los Angeles Times



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Sunni struggle claims 4th Fallujah chief --Yahoo!® News




By SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press Writer




BAGHDAD - The Fallujah city council chairman, a critic of al-Qaida who took the job after his three predecessors were assassinated, was killed on Saturday, the latest blow in a violent internal Sunni struggle for control of an insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad.



In the capital, U.S. and Iraqi officials defended plans to build a barrier around a Sunni enclave to protect its inhabitants from surrounding Shiite areas, while residents expressed concern it would isolate the community.

Sami Abdul-Amir al-Jumaili was gunned down by attackers in a passing car as he was walking outside his home in central Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, according to police.

His assassination came a month after he agreed to take the dangerous job — the only person willing to do so — with promises to improve services and work with the Americans to ease traffic-clogging checkpoints in the city with a population of an estimated 150,000 to 200,000.

The 65-year-old Sunni sheik was the fourth city council chairman to be killed in some 14 months as insurgents target fellow Sunnis willing to cooperate with the U.S. and its Iraqi partners. Abdul-Amir's predecessor, Abbas Ali Hussein, who was shot to death on Feb. 2.

Both men were strong critics of al-Qaida in

Iraq, which is battling a growing number of Sunni tribes that have turned against it in the vast Anbar province — a center for anti-U.S. guerrillas since the uprising in Fallujah in 2004 that galvanized the insurgency.

U.S. officials say tribal leaders and even some other insurgents are increasingly repelled by the group's brutality and religious extremism. The tribes also are competing with al-Qaida for influence and control over diminishing territory in the face of U.S. assaults.

The U.S. military confirmed the killing, and provincial officials condemned it.

"He was one of the many good people of the province who worked to help the city of Fallujah rebuild and regain life," the provincial government said in a statement. "This murder was a crime against all of the citizens of Iraq. We again strongly condemn this cowardly back-stabbing act."

Fellow councilmen and neighbors said Abdul-Amir had run for the office before and ignored pleas from friends not to take the job.

Gunmen also broke into the home of Najim Abdullah Suod, the city council chief who preceded Hussein, killing the lawyer and his 23-year-old son on Sept. 24, 2006, while Sheik Kamal Nazal, a cleric, was gunned down as he walked to work on Feb. 7, 2006.

The attack occurred despite U.S. optimism about efforts to tame Anbar, a vast desert area that borders

Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, as alliances have been struck with influential Sunni sheiks once arrayed against American-led forces.

At least 38 people were killed or found dead elsewhere in Iraq, including another top city official, the mayor of Mussayyib who died in a roadside bombing in the city about 40 miles south of Baghdad.

Three U.S. soldiers were killed and six were wounded Saturday in separate attacks in Baghdad and southwest of the capital, the military said.

A roadside bomb killed one U.S. soldier and wounded two while they were on a foot patrol southwest of Baghdad. Another died and three were wounded when their vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb, followed by small-arms fire in southwestern Baghdad, the military said. A combat security patrol also was attacked by small-arms fire, killing a soldier and wounding another in an eastern section of the capital.

A separate roadside bombing, in Diwaniyah about 80 miles south of the capital, killed a Polish soldier late Friday.

The U.S. military has said that the wall in Baghdad was meant to secure the minority Sunni community of Azamiyah, which "has been trapped in a spiral of sectarian violence and retaliation."

The area, located on the eastern side of the Tigris River, would be completely gated, with entrances and exits manned by Iraqi soldiers, according to the military.

A handout obtained by The Associated Press from a local official in Azamiyah who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns but said he was given the handout by the U.S. military said the wall will be 12 feet high, about 2 feet thick and topped with coils of barbed wire. The military earlier said it would run three miles.

Some residents and local officials in the neighborhood complained that they had not been consulted in advance about the barrier.

"This will make the whole district a prison. This is collective punishment on the residents of Azamiyah," said Ahmed al-Dulaimi, a 41-year-old engineer who lives in the area. "They are going to punish all of us because of a few terrorists here and there."

The military insisted its aim was only to protect the area and this was one of many measures being undertaken as part of a U.S.-Iraqi security plan to pacify the capital, which began on Feb. 14.

"The intent is not to divide the city along sectarian lines," said Brig. Gen. John F. Campbell, the deputy commander of American forces in Baghdad.

"The intent is to provide a more secured neighborhood for people who live in selected neighborhoods. Some of the people who I've talked to have had favorable comments about it, and they want us to build some of them faster."

Campbell also said several more gated communities are being erected in the Iraqi capital. He did not provide specific examples but noted that some Baghdad markets also have been encircled by concrete barriers to a degree of success.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, meanwhile, prepared to begin an Arab tour on Sunday that will take him to Egypt, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates and Oman, his adviser Yassin Majid said.