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| Iraq | |
| Attacks on Iran reflect rift among Iraq Shiites | |
| 2006-08-20 | |
| TWO Shiite political parties have accused Iran of instigating violence in Iraq and trying to destabilise the country, exposing a growing rift within Iraq's largest sect that many fear will exacerbate the slide into full-scale civil war. "All of this violence is because of the Shiism in Iran," said the head of the the Islamic Allegiance Party, Adnan Aboudi. "There are external infiltrating fingers playing now throughout the Iraqi arena." The Islamic Allegiance Party is the political wing of the cleric Mahmoud Abdul Ridha al-Hassani, who is virulently anti-Iranian and anti-American. The denunciations of Tehran, among the most public attacks to date by Iraqi Shiite groups, echoed concern expressed by the US President, George Bush, and military officials over Iran's burgeoning influence in the Middle East. Iran, which is governed by Shiite Persians, has close ties to Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia that has been warring with Israel, as well as to several of the largest parties in Iraq's Shiite-led government. The pointed criticism of Iran followed a spate of violent clashes in southern Iraq between rival Shiite factions last week. The unrest served as a reminder of the bitter divisions between different parties in the governing coalition, made up of some factions closely tied to Tehran and others that bitterly criticise it. A senior official with the Fadhila bloc, a powerful Shiite party that controls the oil-rich city of Basra, said that "Iranian individuals are trying to depose Fadhila from the Government". "Iran has many tools and individuals in the country who are doing the things that are wanted by Iran," said the official, Abdul Wahab Razouti, who declined to name those individuals or the groups they belong to. A US academic and Middle East expert, Juan Cole, said the recriminations towards Iran were directed at two of the largest Shiite blocs in the Iraqi parliament, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Dawa Party. The Supreme Council was founded in Iran during Saddam Hussein's rule, and it and Dawa retain strong ties to Iran. "Those groups are often coded as Iranian puppets," said Professor Cole, the author of Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture, and History of Shiite Islam. Many Iraqis believed that the Supreme Council and its militia, the Badr Organisation, received substantial monetary support from Tehran, he said.
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| Posted by:lotp |
| #2 Interesting. Some are starting to notice that subordinating themselves to their co-religionists in Iran is against their best interests, which are rather in a successful Iraq. It seems to me this would logically make "full-scale civil war" considerably less likely, but then I'm not a trained journalist. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2006-08-20 17:46 |
#1 The Islamic Allegiance Party is the political wing of the cleric Mahmoud Abdul Ridha al-Hassani, who is virulently anti-Iranian and anti-American.Well, 1 for 2 isn't bad. |
| Posted by: JSU 2006-08-20 15:43 |