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Iraqis See the Enemy Next Door

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Times Staff Writer

By Iraq’s standards, it wasn’t a huge attack: three dead, a mosque heavily damaged, a neighborhood shocked, mourning and recriminations all around.

But the blast early Tuesday at the Ahbab Mustafa Mosque in a working-class enclave illustrated the sectarian tensions that pose perhaps the greatest barrier to Iraq’s halting march toward a peaceful future. The war in Iraq is not just about Iraqis versus Americans: Just as often it is about Iraqis against fellow Iraqis, each side acting on centuries of resentment and ill will.

Although officials question what happened, Sunni Muslims living here immediately pointed the finger at the Shiite Muslim militias and political groups long repressed under Saddam Hussein.

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“It was the Shiites who did this,” cried one distraught worshiper inside the grounds of the battered mosque, a Sunni house of worship in the midst of a largely Shiite district. “The Shiites are worse than the Jews!”

Senior clerics attempted to calm down the hotheads -- many brandishing AK-47 rifles or semiautomatic pistols and clearly itching for a fight. The holy men pointed out that whoever did this act respected no religion.

Shiite neighbors tended to blame outside troublemakers -- perhaps linked to the old regime. Whoever targeted the mosque was keen to foment unrest and distrust and undermine reforms that inevitably would give a greater share of power to the Shiites, Iraq’s long-suppressed majority, they said.

“We must all live together as Iraqis,” said Iftikhar Shaban, a Shiite teacher and mother of two.

She stood on the roof of the nearby elementary school where, according to mosque worshipers, the attacker, or attackers, fired two rocket-propelled grenades into the mosque compound. The fire from the roof apparently ignited a barrel of fuel for the mosque generators, necessities in a country where power outages continue to be the norm.

The fuel barrel exploded. Shards of twisted shrapnel littered the school grounds. A bull’s-eye with an RPG gouged a hole in the mosque wall, shattering the structure’s windows. The explosion ignited two cars that were inside the compound. Both were reduced to charred wrecks.

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“This was a criminal, cowardly act that does not reflect the will of Iraqis,” said Shaban, off work for the day because the attack forced the shutdown of the school for its 700 students, both Sunni and Shiite.

Seething Sunni anger at what many see as a Shiite power grab -- in league with U.S. occupiers -- is a driving factor in the anti-U.S. campaign in the so-called Sunni Triangle in central and western Iraq. Some say Sunni leaders would rather see continued U.S. occupation than have to suffer the humiliation of bowing to Shiite politicians and their ayatollahs after hundreds of years of Sunni Arab domination in this region.

Rumors have even circulated indicating that Sunnis would be forced to relocate, victims of a new “ethnic cleansing” by any Shiite government.

A recent series of attacks at Sunni mosques in Baghdad has reinforced a kind of collective paranoia. Shiite mosques also have been targeted, possibly in retaliation. Tuesday’s bombing seemed certain to worsen the cycle of revenge attacks, though moderate voices endeavored to calm emotions.

“The people behind this [bombing] are aggressive ones who are trying to create some kind of sedition and division among Sunnis and Shiites,” said Mohsen Abdel Hamid, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council and head of the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Shiite institution. “I can tell you they will not succeed.”

Iraqis have many reasons to hate -- real and imagined -- and a seemingly limitless supply of arms and explosives. Throw in a general lack of law and order and a surfeit of gunmen, saboteurs and unemployed young men with nothing to do and lots of resentment, and you have the volatile mix that is present-day Iraq.

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Bombs go off regularly. No one claims responsibility. No one ever seems to know who did it or why. People mourn, express outrage, then go on with their lives.

Many Arab Sunnis feel they have been unfairly maligned as unyielding supporters of Saddam Hussein, himself an Arab Sunni, and therefore anxious to have the Baathists back. They too suffered under Hussein, the Sunnis often point out.

Defiant Sunni worshipers here -- many brandishing weapons, their faces wrapped in headscarves as they eyed passing vehicles warily -- vowed to get back at their perceived enemies.

“Who would do such a thing to a mosque?” said Saad Nayef, 20, a guard at the building who held his specially engraved AK-47 on the school roof, where he kept vigil. “We miss those who died, but they are martyrs. They are with God now.”

The dead were two of Nayef’s fellow volunteer guards, close friends, and the mosque’s muezzin, Abdul-Qudoos Dulaimi, known for his devotion to the Koran.

The death toll would have been much higher, everyone said, if not for the fact that the attack happened an hour or so after the completion of the dawn prayer, typically attended by about 80 worshipers. The explosion also happened before the children arrived for school across the street.

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Religious strife and power politics could be part of the reason for the assault on the mosque. Police and U.S. authorities said it was far from clear that Shiite radicals were behind the strike in a neighborhood -- Hurriya -- that had been notable for its relative calm.

“We were very surprised to see something like this here,” said Lt. Col. Frank Sherman, whose armored battalion patrols the zone. “It’s been calm around here.” The biggest worry, said Sherman, has been getting the sewer system up and running.

Authorities questioned the story that two RPG rounds caused the extensive damage. Officials suspect that some kind of explosive may have been stored on the mosque grounds, or perhaps in one of the two cars that were shattered in the blast.

By this theory, a grenade may have hit that cache and triggered a much larger explosion.

Still, U.S. officials said the mosque was not a hotbed of anti-occupation sentiment -- as some mosques have become -- and the Army said it would meet with the imam and finance repairs.

“We were making great progress down there,” Sherman said. “We’ll help him rebuild and hopefully things will go on as they did before.”

Back at the mosque, volunteers shoveled twisted shards of metal and broken glass into a cart hauling away the debris.

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Some passersby lingered and stared. Others averted their eyes and moved on.

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Special correspondents Suhail Ahmed and Salar Jaff contributed to this report.

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