Sacred Shiite mosque in Iraq bombed again (3rd Roundup)

Jun 13, 2007, 17:31 GMT

Baghdad - Bombers in Iraq destroyed two minarets of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra on Wednesday, mirroring a 2006 attack on the shrine that sparked a wave of sectarian violence that left thousands of people dead and brought the country to the brink of civil war.

The bombing of one of the holiest sites for Shiite Muslims in the northern Iraqi town was blamed by US and Iraqi officials on al-Qaeda extremists. The Iraqi government quickly imposed a blanket curfew in Baghdad following the attacks to curtail any eruptions of violence within the Iraqi capital, heavily populated by Sunnis and Shiites.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, speaking to reporters at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, said there are concerns the attack on the mosque could produce another round of sectarian strife.

'We have to be concerned, given what happened 15 months ago after the mosque was bombed the first time,' Gates said, adding that al- Qaeda bombed the shrine in February 2006 hoping to provoke violence to destabilize the delicate political process within the Iraqi government.

'My hope is that their intentions are so clear that people will refrain from violence because they understand that ... it would just be carrying out what al-Qaeda wants,' Gates said.

The attack on the minarets prompted a bloc of Shiite Iraqi lawmakers under the guidance of Muqtada al-Sadr, a powerful cleric strongly opposed to the US presence, to declare they were suspending their role in the coalition governing the country.

Al-Sadr issued a statement blaming the Americans for the bombing of the Mosque of Imams Hassan al-Askari and Ali al-Hadi.

'A Muslim would never dare to do such a thing,' al-Sadr said in the Shiite city of Najaf, 180 kilometres south of Baghdad. The perpetrators 'are the sly hands of occupation that want to do us harm,' the statement signed by al-Sadr added.

A spokesman for the so-called Sadrist bloc, Nassar al-Rubaie, announced that it would cease participation in the governing coalition until the shrine is rebuilt.

'The Sadrist bloc decided to suspend its membership until the two destroyed shrines are rebuilt, along with all other Sunni and Shiite shrines and mosques all over Iraq,' al-Rubaie told the Voices of Iraq news agency.

The bloc's 30 members in the 275-seat Iraqi parliament are part of the United Iraqi Coalition led by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

An attack on the mosque in February 2006 brought the imposing golden dome - for which the site is also often referred to as the Golden Mosque - crashing to the ground. Subsequent clashes that lasted until the end of last year claimed at least an estimated 15,000 lives and forced hundreds of thousands of others to flee their homes.

The sectarian fighting nearly crippled the Iraqi government and left Iraq on the edge of a full blown civil war, badly undermining US President George W Bush's domestic support for the war and stoking calls for an American withdrawal from Iraq.

The 68-metre-tall golden dome was completed in 1905 at the site of the mosque dating back to the 10th century.

Shiite clerics accused the government after the first attack of taking too long to repair the golden dome on top of the mosque, an accusation repeated by al-Sadr in his Wednesday statement. Al-Sadr said that the government was also to blame because it did not protect or restructure the two shrines.

US Ambassador Ryan C Crocker and General David Petraeus, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, condemned the 'vicious' attack on the minarets.

'It is an act of desperation by an increasingly beleaguered enemy seeking to obstruct the peaceful political and economic development of a democratic Iraq,' they said in a joint statement. 'We share the outrage of the Iraqi people against the crime.'

Top Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani urged Iraq's religious groups against violence and to not view the bombing along sectarian lines, his office said. The same position was taken by the chairman of the religions foundation of Sunnis in Samarra, Sheik Ahmed-al-Samarai.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon issued a similar warning, calling on all sides to 'avoid succumbing to the vicious cycle of revenge,' according to a statement released by his spokesperson.

The Golden Mosque contains remains of the imams al-Askari and of al-Hadi, two 9th century imans regarded by Shiites as the 10th and 11th imams after the Prophet Mohamed.