Religious Misunderstandings

More news out of Baghdad. Needn't ask whether it's bad or good, whether it augers well or ill for the Iraqi population. Since whatever news does come out of that sadly benighted country is universally dreadful, beyond horror. It's questionable whether this bloodletting and brutal psychodrama would have been unleashed had its iron-fisted dictator still been in power. But after him, what then? Another bloody dictator.

Who, once established, would have wrought his own version of evil for his own vicious ends, but would his dictatorship ever have sunk to this low level of violent anarchy? The aim of the dictator is to instill fear and 'respect' in those he holds captive to his needs. Insurrections are swiftly dealt with, the insurrectionists meeting their maker without recourse to charity or justice. Other than the justice meted out by tribal law.

Now, however, each and every day Iraqis are slaughtered. Lawlessness is endemic, fear is everywhere. The two irreconcilable sects, Sunni and Shia, are in continual battle against one another, but more so against the innocent civilians who count themselves in one camp or the other through religious conviction and the happenstance of fate. The psychopathic Islamists claiming direct guidance from Allah have no pity, their humanity long since vanished, abandoned to rampant fanaticism.

A Sunni woman made public the news she was detained in a Sunni area of West Baghdad, taken to a police garrison where most of the police are Shia and there was assaulted by three officers. In revenge the bodies of 14 policemen were found yesterday northwest of Baghdad. The Islamic State of Iraq Sunni terror group boasted of its "court" having ordered the "execution" of the men.

In the Anbar capital of Ramadi, ten gunmen selected two members of a local soccer club practising in a public field, accusing them of collaborating with a Sunni group. In front of horrified spectators the two men were shot to death, execution style.

Last week a truck bomb killed more than 50 people leaving a mosque near Ramadi after the imam of the mosque had preached against groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq. He died in the resulting attack, along with those to whom he had given his sermon which brought the wrath of Sunni insurgents down on the mosque.

"This blessed operation is a response to crimes carried out by those infidels in their fight against the Sunnis," the statement from The Islamic State of Iraq terror group read after the murder of the 14 police officers. "The latest of the crimes committed by these traitors was to rape our sister in religion."

Sunni terror groups identify Shia Muslims as 'infidels' for not practising their Sunni brand of Islam. Shia Muslims consider the Sunnis likewise to be targeted and there seems to be no end in sight and no surcease, no promise for the future of Iraq, and even less so for its embattled citizens.

It goes beyond understanding, let alone belief, that people with a common heritage and culture could permit a division in their belief in the inheritance of Muhammad's successors to allow them to viciously victimize one another to this degree.

This says something undeniably rabid about the religion, the region and those whose immoderate practise of Islam have caused them to forget very basic tenets of humanity, those very same tenets which the Koran bids its worshippers to adhere to.