I wish their country well. May the new year of 2016 bring them peace and prosperity. But I doubt very much that it will. Their constitution is a blueprint for a theocracy that also laid the groundwork for civil war aided by external agents.
Here is the Preamble to their Constitution from 2005:
"We the sons of Mesopotamia, land of the prophets, resting place of the holy imams, the leaders of civilization and the creators of the alphabet, the cradle of arithmetic; on our land, the first law put in place by mankind was written; in our nation, the most noble era of justice in the politics of nations was laid down; on our soil, the followers of the prophet and the saints prayed, the philosophers and the scientists theorized and poets created."
I get it about their pride in Iraqi history. They deserve it. Their land was a birthplace of civilization and a cradle of empires and monotheism when my ancestors tattooed their bodies blue, worshiped trees, and engaged in human sacrifice.
But with that phrase in the preamble: ”… resting place of the holy imams,…” they are advocating a single religious doctrine within what used to be a multicultural state (kind of like what the daesh caliphate is doing). The resting places they are talking about are of course six of what the Shia believe to be twelve divinely ordained and infallible leaders known as The Twelve Imams. Those six are resting in mosques in Karbala, Najaf, Samarra and Baghdad. Fundamentalist Sunnis consider those shrines an abomination.
All of those mosques have been bombed, mortared or otherwise attacked multiple times since 2003. The holiest of these to the Shia is the Imam Husayn Shrine in Karbala: From Wikipedia:
It was destroyed by Sunni Caliphs Harun al-Rashid and al-Mutawakkil in 787 and 850.
It was destroyed again in 886.
Wahabbis attacked it in 1801 and looted the sepulchre.
Sadaam’s Republican Guard damaged it as a reprisal for the Shia uprising of March 1991.
After Sadaam fled, at least 6 explosions occurred near it during the Ashura commemorations in March 2004, killing 178 people and wounding 500.
A bomb detonated near the gate of the shrine in December 2004, killing at least 7 people and injuring 31 others.
Suicide bombers at the shrine killed at least 60 people and injured more than 100 in January 2006.
A suicide attack 200 m from the shrine killed at least 36 people and injured more than 160 others in April 2007.
In March 2008 a female suicide bomber detonated herself in the market near the shrine, killing at least 42 people and injured 58 others.
In September 2008 a bomb was detonated 800 m from the shrine, killing one woman and injuring 12 others.
In February 2009 a bomb blast killed 8 people and wounded more than 50 others during the commemoration of Arba‘een.
In February 2010, again at Arba‘een, three bomb attacks were aimed at the shrine:
- on 1 February a female suicide bomber detonated herself, killing 54 and injuring more than 100;
- two days later on the 3rd a bomb blast killed at least 23 people and injured more than 147;
- two days after that on the 5th a double bomb-blast or a combination of a bomb-blast and mortar attack killed at least 42 and left 150 injured.
That is 15 attacks on one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam. Ten of them occurred in a seven year time window from 2004 thru 2010. And they will surely be attacked again. Maybe Iraq should be a Shia theocracy, or maybe they already are? But how could that work considering that the Shia only represent about 61 or 62% of the Iraqi population? They appear to be mimicking Sadaam, doing to the Sunnis what Sadaam did to them. Maliki and the DAWA Party (which was bought and paid for by Iran) brought that on.
Abadi is supposedly better. Here Abadi is seen greeting Sunni militiamen near Ramadi. But Abadi is also from the DAWA Party. So is the smile genuine or is he smiling while contemplating 'revenge-served-cold' after the Americans leave for good? And Maliki, although no longer Prime Minister is still in Government as Vice President. What are their options to keep the peace: forced conversion? forced expulsion? ethnic cleansing (or its religious equivalent)? partition?
And because of oil in the Sunni and Kurdish areas does anyone see them ever agreeing to partition? Wouldn't their big brother to the east back them up on rebuffing partition, especially for the Kurds? After Daesh is defeated will the Iraqi government go to war with the Kurds over Kurdish occupation of Kirkuk and its oil? Already there has been shooting between the Shia militias and Peshmerga in Kirkuk.
