The Civil War Has Started

H. Thomas Hayden | February 23, 2006

military.com

The Civil War in Iraq has started and the US planners had better get used to it.

The bombing of the Shiite Askariya shrine on Wednesday and the reprisals that are continuing are a sure sign that there will be no accommodation of the three factions, Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis, in the political process for the new Iraqi government. The damage to the Golden Mosque in Samarra also undermined American political goals at a critical juncture when U.S. envoys were struggling to keep a delicate nation-building process from disintegrating. It has started to disintegrate.

The blast that blew the dome off one of the holiest Shiite sites in the world is expected to encourage Iraq's Shiite militias and totally negate the US Administration's trying to purge the radicals from the newly created national security services.

Within hours of the Askariya attack, tens of thousands of angry Shiites, many of them members of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, carrying AK-47 rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, took to the streets in Baghdad and many central and southern Iraqi cities. A spokesman at Sadr's main office in Baghdad said the militiamen were acting spontaneously, and had not been ordered out onto the streets.