This is a bad sign:
No one knows who tortured and killed Hassan al-Nuaimi, a Sunni Arab cleric whose body was found in an empty lot here last week, with a hole drilled in his head and both eyes missing. But the various theories have a distinctly sectarian tinge.
The Shiite police chief investigating the death said he suspected Sunni Arab extremists who have driven much of the insurgency in Iraq, much of it aimed at Shiites. The Sunni family mourning the cleric pointed the finger at the Badr Organization, a Shiite militia. But with Mr. Nuaimi buried, the truth, as so often with killings in Iraq, seems to be lost in rumor and allegations.
The only sure thing is that Mr. Nuaimi and another Sunni man who helped write sermons were killed within 12 hours of their disappearance from a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood in northeast Baghdad.
Their deaths, amid violence that has taken more than 550 lives across Iraq this month, renewed concern that the bloodshed may be shifting ever more toward crudely sectarian killings.
Hard-line Sunni leaders have pressed the case. “The killing in Iraq now is according to religious identity,” said Sheik Abdel Nasir al-Janabi, a religious Sunni and a hard-line member of the National Dialogue Council, a Sunni political group that claims to have ties to the insurgency. “Now you’re killed because you’re a Sunni Arab.”
Shiite leaders, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most powerful Shiite cleric, have responded to such talk with calls for calm and renewed appeals to Shiites that they place their trust in Iraq’s fledgling democracy, not revenge killings.
Was this sort of widespread revenge killing inevitable?
Stormy70
I thought the revenge killings would have been more prevalent at this stage, and a few revenge killings were inevitable. I am glad they are trying to put a stop to it, since this kind of thing can spin out of control, easily.
Compuglobalhypermeganet
Agreed. The stunner is not that revenge killings might be happening, but that there haven’t been MORE attempts at mass extermination of the former-oppressor Sunnis by the Shiites. The Shiites have shown remarkable restraint (well, remarkable for what we normally see in that part of the world… if that isn’t damning with faint praise) and trust in democratic reforms thusfar. al-Sistani is the key to their restraint, I think.
Libertine
I feel the revenge killings will be on the increase. The Shi’ites and Kurds have major issues with the Sunnis. That why at this point I don’t see our military presence in Iraq being ramped down in the foreseeable future. If we leave now there will be civil war and atrocities that would rival Saddam’s.
jack
“widespread revenge killing”
Did I miss something? One person, with Shiite leaders calling for calm an denouncing revenge killing—measured against the word of someone who claims ties to the ‘insurgency’
The recent insurgent activity is aimed, as it always has been, at
unsettling Iraq’s fledgling democracy. The words of an insurgent-symp decrying this as ‘revenge killing’ should be ignored as if it were the opinion of Baghdad Bob.
Birkel
What jack said.