US Official: Samarra Attack May Have Been Inside Job

CNN News

Wednesday 13 June 2007

Iran criticizes "negligence of occupiers to guarantee security."

U.S. official says 15 members of Iraqi security forces arrested in attack.

Two minarets destroyed at revered Shiite shrine in Samarra.

A 2006 bombing at the same site touched off a wave of sectarian attacks.

Baquba, Iraq - Authorities have evidence that Wednesday's bombing of Al-Askariya Mosque in Samarra was an inside job, and 15 members of the Iraqi security forces have been arrested, a U.S. military official said.

Two minarets were destroyed at the revered Shiite shrine, the military said, in a repeat of the 2006 bombing that sparked Iraq's current wave of deadly sectarian violence. There was no immediate word on casualties in the city north of Baghdad.

The U.S. military official, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Mixon, told CNN's Karl Penhaul that he believes members of the Iraqi security forces who were guarding the site either assisted or directly took part in helping al Qaeda insurgents place and detonate explosives at the mosque's minarets.

"He told me there was no evidence at all that this was an attack using mortars or anything of the like and said, in his words, that this was an inside job," Penhaul, who's embedded with U.S. troops in Baquba, told CNN's "American Morning."

Mixon said an additional Iraqi army brigade will be sent to Samarra. So far, there have been no reports of sectarian clashes in the city.

A U.S. military spokesman, who would not comment on specific operations, said American forces "continue to conduct the operations we do normally."

Within hours of the attacks, Iraqi state television announced that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had imposed a curfew for Baghdad until further notice.

A U.S. military official in northern Iraq told The Associated Press that Samarra appeared calm by Wednesday afternoon.

The explosions rocked the town and blew billowing dust clouds into the air, store owner Imad Nagi told the AP.

"After the dust settled, I couldn't see the minarets anymore," Nagi told the AP. "So I closed the shop quickly and went home."

The blast followed clashes between gunmen and Iraqi National Police, who were guarding the holy site. During the firefight, the insurgents entered the mosque, also known as the Golden Dome, planted explosives around the minarets and detonated them.

Iran Points to "Negligence of Occupiers"

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini called the bombing a "criminal and anti-Islamic action," characterizing it as the "continuation of spiteful attacks of enemies of Iraqi national unity," according to Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency.

Hosseini also referred to the "negligence of occupiers to guarantee security in holy sites." Iran, which borders Iraq, is predominantly Shiite. Around 60 percent of Iraqis are Shiite as well.

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr also called for three days of mourning to mark the destruction of the minarets, according to a statement.

"Let the next three days be mourning days, where we spread the black banners and a call to prayer and shouting God is great in our mosques, whether they are Sunnis or Shiites, and to organize peaceful demonstrations and sit-ins in order for everyone to witness that the only enemy of Iraq is the occupation and therefore everyone must demand its departure or a timetable of its occupation."

The anti-American cleric also said no rival Sunni Arab could have been responsible for the bombing, calling the development a "cursed American-Israeli scenario that aims to spread the turmoil and plant the hatred among the Muslim brethren."

US Blames al Qaeda

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the top U.S. military commander in the country issued a joint condemnation saying that this "brutal action on one of Iraq's holiest shrines is a deliberate attempt by al Qaeda to sow dissent and inflame sectarian strife among the people of Iraq."

"It is an act of desperation by an increasingly beleaguered enemy seeking to obstruct the peaceful, political and economic development of a democratic Iraq," said Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus in a statement.

"We share in the outrage of the Iraqi people against this crime, and we call on all Iraqis to reject this call to violence. We cannot allow these terrorists to work against the interests of the Iraqi people who are seeking peace and prosperity for all."

During the February 2006 strike on the mosque, attackers dressed as Iraqi police commandos bombed and heavily damaged the shrine, collapsing the top half of the dome.

Although Samarra is a predominantly Sunni city, Al-Askariya Mosque is one of the four major Shiite shrines in Iraq. Iraq's other major Shiite sites are in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. The fourth is in the Baghdad district of Kadhimiya.

Al-Askariya is sacred to Shiites, who believe Imam al-Mehdi will one day reappear at the mosque, bringing them salvation. Al-Mehdi is the 12th and final awaited imam in Shiite Islam. He is the son of Imam Hasan al Askari, the 11th imam, buried in the shrine. His grandfather, the 10th Imam, also is buried there.

Al-Mehdi is said to have disappeared in the eighth century during the funeral of his father and is believed by Shiites to have been withdrawn by God from the eyes of the people. They are waiting for him to reappear as their leader.

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CNN's Cal Perry, Mohammed Tawfeeq, Saad Abedine and Paula Hancocks contributed to this report.

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Minarets on Shiite Shrine in Iraq Destroyed in Attack
By Graham Bowley
The New York Times

Wednesday 13 June 2007

One of Iraq's most sacred Shiite shrines, the Imam al-Askari mosque in Samarra, was attacked and severely damaged again today, just over a year after a previous attack on the site unleashed a tide of sectarian bloodletting across the country.

Following the attack, which destroyed the mosque's two minarets, the Iraqi government announced a curfew in Baghdad starting at 3 p.m. local time today. Shiite leaders called for calm. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered Shiite cleric in Iraq, condemned the bombing, but appealed to Iraqis to show restraint.

It was unclear who carried out the attack in the predominantly Sunni town about 60 miles north of Baghdad. Iraqi security forces secured the area around the mosque and were investigating the cause of the explosion, the American military said. Iraqi police reported hearing two nearly simultaneous explosions coming from inside the mosque compound at around 9 a.m. today.

The official Iraqia television station reported that local officials said that two mortar rounds were fired at the two minarets.

The shrine was badly damaged in the February 2006 attack by Sunni insurgents, but the destruction of the remaining two minarets is expected to have powerful symbolic importance to Iraqis.

Radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr called for peaceful demonstrations and a three-day mourning period to mark the shrine's destruction.

In Samarra, where a curfew was in place, there were scattered reports of demonstrations by protesters condemning the attack, though an American military official in the area said that by this afternoon the city of roughly 100,000 was quiet.

A curfew was also in place in Hilla, a mixed area about 50 miles south of Baghdad, where officials said they received word of a possible protest by Shiites.

The American authorities in Iraq blamed the attack on Al Qaeda.

In a joint statement, the American ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, said: "This brutal action on one of Iraq's holiest shrines is a deliberate attempt by Al Qaeda to sow dissent and inflame sectarian strife among the people of Iraq."

Senior American military commanders in Iraq have said recently that they feared an imminent dramatic attack from Sunni insurgents to refocus Sunni attention on the country's struggle between Shiites and Sunnis, and to reunite Sunnis in the wake of American attempts to consolidate Sunni resistance to extremist groups like Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia.

But they expected that if such an attack did occur, it would most likely come at one of Iraq's three other most-sacred Shiite sites, not the al-Askari shrine, which was already badly damaged.

Since the attack in 2006, the shrine had been under the protection of local - predominantly Sunni - guards. But American military and Iraqi security officials had recently become concerned that the local unit had been infiltrated by Al Qaeda forces in Iraq.

A move by the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad over the last few days to bring in a new guard unit - predominantly Shiite - may have been linked to the attack today.

Speaking on Al Jazeera television, Abdul Sattar Abdul Jabbar, a prominent Sunni cleric, said the new guards had arrived at the shrine shouting sectarian slogans that may have provoked local Sunnis, in a sign that the attack was already being depicted as sectarian.

Gunfire was reported around the mosque last night, which may have been related to the change of guards.

Attacks on Shiite holy sites by suspected Sunni insurgents have increased in Iraq in the last two months.

In April, a car bomb exploded in Karbala about a third of a mile from the Imam Abbas shrine, the second-holiest site in Shiite Islam, killing at least 58 people and wounding 169.

Two weeks earlier in Karbala, another car bomb exploded near the Imam Hussein shrine, killing 36 people and wounding 168.

In both cases, a perimeter of security - with blast walls and Shiite guards - prevented the bombers from getting close enough to the mosques to damage them.

Tensions in Samarra have also risen recently. Last month, a suicide car bomber attacked a police battalion headquarters, killing the police chief and 11 others, the military said in a statement.

The chief, Lt. Col. Abdul Jaleel Hanni, a Sunni former member of Saddam Hussein's intelligence service, had been respected by the Americans for his ability to recruit officers and maintain discipline.

The attack in 2006 on the al-Askari mosque ravaged the mosque's dome, which had been the defining feature of the shrine.

Before that attack, more than a million Shiites streamed into the mosque each year, visiting the graves of the 10th and 11th Imams. They also came to honor Muhammad al-Mahdi, who became the 12th Imam when he was only 5 years old, in A.D. 872.

Shiites believe that it was at the shrine that the Mahdi was put into a state of divine hiddenness by God to protect his life. Shiites believe that the Mahdi will return at the end of days, at a time of chaos and destruction, to deliver perfect justice.

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John F. Burns and Damien Cave contributed reporting from Baghdad. Employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from elsewhere in Iraq.