BAGHDAD, June 14 — A handful of Sunni mosques were attacked today in retaliation for the destruction of two minarets at one of Iraq’s most revered Shiite shrines on Wednesday, and there was scattered violence around the country, as has become the norm.
But for the most part, reaction to the devastating bombing of the Shiite mosque in Samarra, the second in a little more than a year, remained muted.
Four Sunni mosques in mixed Sunni-Shiite areas south of Baghdad were attacked, three in Iskandariya and one in nearby Mahaweel; some were destroyed and others severely damaged. There were less serious attacks on other Sunni mosques immediately following the Wednesday attack.
But in the southern city of Basra, Sunnis and Shiites marched together in a show of unity and to demonstrate against sectarian violence.
After the bombing Wednesday in Samarra, 75 miles north of Baghdad, Shiite political and religious leaders, as well as moderate Sunni politicians and the top two American officials in Iraq, appealed for calm.
By nightfall, with emergency curfews in Baghdad and several other cities, and Iraqi forces moving in to protect mosques across the country, there were only scattered reports of reprisal attacks.
In Basra, which has a heavy Shiite majority, representatives of radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and local Sunni clerics met at the offices of the Sadr party on Wednesday night and proclaimed their unity, accusing Al Qaeda of trying to foment sectarian strife.
In Baghdad today, more than a dozen mortar rounds struck the Green Zone, where the Iraqi parliament and the United States embassy are located, causing some casualties, Reuters reported, citing the police.
The mortar shells fell while Deputy Secretary of State John Nogroponte was in a nearby building urging Iraqi officials to make rapid progress to help restore stability, according to Reuters.
Separately, an Iraqi group linked to Al Qaeda said it had killed 14 abducted Iraqi soldiers and police officers after the government failed to respond to an ultimatum, Reuters reported. The group posted a video on its website that appeared to show the killings, but its authenticity could not be verified, the agency said.
The attack on the Samarra mosque appeared to have been the work of Sunni extremists with links to Al Qaeda. They toppled the golden minarets that were most of what remained of one part of the shrine after the devastating bombing last year, attributed to Al Qaeda.
The aftermath of that bombing engulfed the country in a wave of sectarian killing that has pushed Sunnis and Shiites toward civil war. With American and Iraqi forces unable to restrain soaring levels of violence, with as many as 3,000 Iraqi civilians dying every month by the end of 2006, President Bush ordered that nearly 30,000 additional American troops be deployed to Iraq, aimed at pulling the country back from the abyss.
American commanders acknowledged that the war here has reached a “now or never” point: if the addition of the extra troops and other elements of the current security strategy do not lead to significant progress in stabilizing and pacifying the country by September, when the top American military commander here is to report to the president and Congress, there would appear to be little prospect of holding off pressure at home for withdrawal.
The Samarra bombing appeared to be aimed at derailing the American hopes for a turnaround by setting off renewed Shiite reprisals and refocusing the conflict on sectarian tensions, away from recent infighting between Sunni tribal groups and the Sunni insurgents who have links to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
The explosions that destroyed the 120-foot-high minarets of the Askariya shrine occurred about 9 a.m. Wednesday. A statement by the American military command, quoting the Iraqi police, said that they “did not see any attackers in the vicinity,” suggesting that the bombings were an inside job.
Suspicion fell immediately on the guards protecting the shrine, a unit of a few dozen local men, almost all Sunnis, the population group that predominates in Samarra and has controlled the shrine since it was built in 1905. American and Iraqi commanders in the area had suspected the guard force of harboring Qaeda sympathizers.
Iraqis shopping in a local market said they heard the explosions, ran to look toward the shrine and saw as a cloud of dust and debris cleared that the minarets, used traditionally as the place from which Muslims are called to prayer, had vanished.
The bombings left the shrine, its soaring golden dome destroyed in the initial attack in February last year, with little left of its former grandeur but rubble overlooked by a blue-tiled archway and a golden clock tower. The mosque is located atop what is said to have been the burial site, in the 9th-century A.D., of two of the 12 imams, the apostles of the Shiite faith.
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