One of Ours

...I found it particularly interesting that while Al-Jazeera displayed most of the tape, it did not display the part where the masked men held knives to the neck of the wailing Japanese woman while screaming "Allahu Akbar!". What? too hard for Arab feelings?...

...hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites have already started marching to Karbala on foot. Under the present circumstances and with the absence of IP and security forces in the city, I fail to see how a major terrorist attack is going to be prevented this time, another large scale attack against the Shi'ite pilgrims will probably inflame the already deteriorating situation even further...

...a friend of mine told me today that he had been in contact with some clients who were members of Al-Mahdi Army, he said that they all received salaries from Sadr's offices throughout Iraq in US dollars. I asked him where he thought the money came from, he gave me a wry smile and said what do you think? "Iran?" I offered, and he nodded back in silence.

What troubles me is that the whole situation has so many parallels with the uprising against the British in 1920 (Thawrat Al-Ishrin)...Shi'ite Ayatollahs and Sunni Imams called for Jihad and several cities in the south were 'liberated'. It lasted for a few months and resulted in 2000 British killed and thousands more Iraqis dead. After the revolt was crushed, and King Faisal installed as monarch of Iraq, there were supposed to be elections for a National Assembly (sounds familiar?) to write a constitution. Of course, the Hawza issued fatwas for Iraqis to boycott the polls. Abdul Mohsen Al-Sa'dun, prime minister at the time, responded by arresting all the Ayatollahs and exiling them to Iran on the grounds that they were Iranian citizens and had no right to interfere with Iraqi matters (Iraqis were tough back then). Public outrage followed this in most Iraqi cities but the government stood firm against it, so in the end Iraqis went about their business. After a few months, the exiled Ayatollahs pleaded the Iraqi government to return to Iraq (because they were not up to the competition with the other Ayatollahs in Iran) and that they would keep out of politics from now on, the Iraqi government welcomed them back, and that was that...