Samarra Mosque Attacked Again

13 June AP - Iraqi Police Say Famous Shrine Attacked by Qassim Abdul-Zahra.

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Suspected al-Qaida insurgents on Wednesday destroyed the two minarets of the Askariya Shiite shrine in Samarra, authorities reported, in a repeat of a 2006 bombing that shattered its famous Golden Dome and unleashed a wave of retaliatory sectarian violence that still bloodies Iraq.

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called for peaceful demonstrations and a three-day mourning period to mark the minarets' destruction. He appeared to take a conciliatory tone in a statement, saying that no Sunni Arab could have been responsible for Wednesday's attack...

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Got off shift this morning and went to bed around 0700. I came back on shift at 1400 and heard about this. My initial reaction was to want to go back to bed. This is going to get ugly. I can't wait to see the fallout from this.

SFC W

Multiple Sunni mosques attacked on Wednesday.

14 June Washington Post - No Drop in Iraq Violence Seen Since Troop Buildup by Ann Scott Tyson.

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Three months into the new U.S. military strategy that has sent tens of thousands of additional troops into Iraq, overall levels of violence in the country have not decreased, as attacks have shifted away from Baghdad and Anbar, where American forces are concentrated, only to rise in most other provinces, according to a Pentagon report released yesterday.

The report -- the first comprehensive statistical overview of the new U.S. military strategy in Iraq -- coincided with renewed fears of sectarian violence after the bombing yesterday of the same Shiite shrine north of Baghdad that was attacked in February 2006, unleashing a spiral of retaliatory bloodshed. Iraq's government imposed an immediate curfew in Baghdad yesterday to prevent an outbreak of revenge killings.

Yesterday's attack adds to tensions faced by U.S. troops, who are paying a mounting price in casualties as they push into Iraqi neighborhoods, seeking to quell violence that the report said remains fundamentally driven by sectarianism.

Iraq's government, for its part, has proven "uneven" in delivering on its commitments under the strategy, the report said, stating that public pledges by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have in many cases produced no concrete results...

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14 June NY Times - Efforts to Avert Sectarian Reprisals After Shrine Attack by John Burns.

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Two explosions on Wednesday that appeared to have been set by Sunni extremists with links to Al Qaeda toppled the twin golden minarets that were most of what remained of one of Iraq’s most revered Shiite shrines after a devastating bombing by Al Qaeda last year.

That bombing 16 months ago proved a watershed, engulfing the country in a wave of sectarian killing that pushed Sunnis and Shiites toward civil war. With American and Iraqi forces unable to restrain soaring levels of killing that saw as many as 3,000 Iraqi civilians dying every month by the end of 2006, President Bush ordered nearly 30,000 additional American troops deployed here, aimed at pulling the country back from the abyss.

But after Wednesday’s renewed attack on the shrine at Samarra, 75 miles north of Baghdad, appeals for calm by Shiite political and religious leaders, as well as by moderate Sunni politicians and the top two American officials in Iraq, appeared to have headed off the risk of a new sectarian convulsion, at least for now...

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- on bad days like this I say exit as fast as we got to baghdad and burn/detonate everything of ours left behind - lay and time the C4, start the fires, saddle up and convoy south to kuwait with the pedal to the metal - this is extremely depressing news as bad as when my cousin Effie Basharrd passed out drunk in the hog lot and was eaten alive.

goesh, sorry to hear about your cousin:wry:

well, needless to say those hogs were shipped off to market and not home butchered as usually is done by the kin. They were Chester White hogs as I recall and they even switched breeds, I do remember that. One time my brother got some new Engineer boots when he was a kid and was strutting around with them and a couple of big boar hogs treed him and were trying to gnaw on his boots. What's this got to do with the latest developments in Iraq you might ask? "up a tree" is the operative phrase here I reckon. Frankly I don't know what in the hell is going to be done with this latest insurgent/AQ escalation.

17 June Washington Post - As Sunni Mosque Falls, Sadr Issues a Call by John Ward Anderson and K.I. Ibrahim.

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Another Sunni mosque in the Basra area of southern Iraq was destroyed Saturday, as a leading Shiite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, called on his followers to march to the Sunni town of Samarra next month to a revered Shiite shrine that was attacked Wednesday.

The call for a pilgrimage to the Askariya shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, could draw tens of thousands of Shiites into an area north of Baghdad that is a stronghold of the Sunni extremist group al-Qaeda in Iraq...

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