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The grief hardened quickly into fury. Within 12 hours, Shi'ites across the country torched mosques, gunned down clerics and kidnapped Sunni families at gunpoint. As the violence escalated, it became less discriminating: among the victims were three journalists working for al-Arabiya television who were abducted and executed while reporting in Samarra. Gunmen then attacked the funeral cortege of one of the journalists, killing one person. On its way back from the cemetery outside Baghdad, the convoy was hit by a bomb, killing two others. On both sides, not all the stories of slaughter and desecration were immediately verifiable, since the violence and curfews--extended through last weekend--restricted the movements of journalists. But the authenticity of the allegations mattered less than their effect on a scared and sullen population. Omar Saad, 73, saw his Sunni mosque in the northern Baghdad district of al-Shaab being attacked twice on the same day by armed Shi'ite militias dressed in black--the uniform of the Mahdi Army. The mosque's guards fought off the attack until they ran out of ammunition. The militias then entered the premises and trashed it, torching everything inside. They returned in the evening with explosives and leveled the building. "Now there isn't a mosque anywhere near us, so we haven't heard the call for prayer for two whole days," said Saad. "It feels like something fundamental is missing from our lives."
The feeling of loss was shared by all Iraqis, who struggled to make sense of what their countrymen had wrought. Although the violence of last week may have been sparked by a single act of provocation, it came in the context of a history of Shi'ite-Sunni enmity. The roots of the sectarian divide lie in a schism that arose shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. Under Saddam, communal hostilities in Iraq were suppressed, their very existence denied. Beneath the surface, though, relations between the two sects have always been tainted by prejudice and discrimination. Although Shi'ites make up the majority in Iraq, the country was long ruled by a Sunni élite, often under the patronage of a foreign power, like the Ottoman and British empires. Sunnis historically had a monopoly on the best education and jobs, especially in government and the military. As a result, many Sunnis see themselves as Iraq's natural ruling class, and the Shi'ites as poor, superstitious rabble.
The U.S. invasion upended the "natural" order: in the past two elections, the Shi'ites have finally made their numerical superiority translate into political power, leaving many Sunnis bitter and resentful over their diminished status. It didn't help that many of the new Shi'ite ruling parties have ties to Iran, feeding Sunni suspicions about Shi'ite loyalties. In private, some Sunnis refer to Shi'ites as Iranians or Persians--in other words, traitors.