Neocons Admit Slaughtering Shia Worshippers

Friday March 31st 2006, 10:11 am

According to .S. News & World Report, the slaughter of worshippers at a mosque in the Ur neighborhood of Baghdad was intended to serve as a message “to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr,” an influential force in post-Saddam politics. Earlier in the week deputy US commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, “dismissed reports that a mosque had been hit, or that the 50 Iraqi Special Operations forces, backed up by 25 US advisers, had chosen the wrong target. Besides capturing some weaponry, they released an Iraqi dental technician who had been kidnapped 12 hours earlier,” according to the Christian Science Monitor.

It would appear the life of one dental technician is more important than the lives of nearly 20 Shia worshippers. Of course, this explanation is nothing more than a flimsy excuse. In fact, the mosque was attacked and the worshippers massacred for a simple reason—it was part of a continuing effort to foment “civil war” in Iraq, as planned by the Straussian neocons. It should be noted that “U.S. officials had been quietly praising Sadr’s group in recent weeks because of its calls for calm in the wake of the bombing of a Sunni mosque in Samarra that sparked a wave of sectarian violence,” praise at odds with the plan to divide Iraq into at least three Bantustans based along ethnic and religious lines.

If the attack on the mosque accomplished anything, it increased support for Moqtada al-Sadr. “They came and killed the young people, and we want the Imam Mahdi Army to protect us, because they are from us, they are Iraqi people,” Souad Mohammad, a school director, told the Monitor. “When the Mahdi Army is here, it’s very quiet, no one is assassinated in this area, there are no car bombs, and at night there are checkpoints to protect us.” Naturally, if Iraq is to be dissolved and ethnic and religious animosity brought to the boiling point, a strong and bloody message will need be sent to the Mahdi Army and al-Sadr and this appears to be what happened earlier in the week. As expected, the corporate media characterized the victims as “insurgents” and the grisly aftermath of the attack as a scene set-up by deceitful al-Sadr loyalists.