Mid-East Meets Midwest

Bombings of a Shia mosque and a bus full of pilgrims killed at least 36 people as Iraq’s Shia community celebrates one of its biggest feasts.

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Pilgrims have been swarming in and out of Karbala, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, to mark the birth of a historic religious figure, placing Iraqi and American security forces on high alert.

The first bomb went off as worshipers were leaving a mosque after Friday prayers near the northern city of Mosul, killing 30.   According to the BBC, police said at least 61 people had also been wounded in the blast, and the number of casualties was likely to rise.

City authorities are urging citizens to donate blood and appealed for construction vehicles to lift debris trapping victims of the attack, Rueters says.

“I was in the house when this explosion happened,” said 19-year-old Khalil Qasim through his tears.

“I hurried to the mosque to search for my father in the ruins… I found him seriously wounded, and took him to hospital, but he died.”

Meanwhile, a bus full of pilgrims returning to Baghdad was struck by a roadside bomb as it entered the Shia area of Sadr City,  The blasts killed six and injured many other returning pilgrims, police said.

An attack Thursday evening killed at least one person making their way to the festival and injured three.

Violence surrounding this festival is not uncommon.  According to the BBC, the hundreds of thousands of Shia pilgrims who gather in Karbala to mark the birth of Mohammed al-Mehdi – the 12th and last Shia Imam, known as the Hidden Imam – have often been targeted by attacks in the past.

Since the American invasion in Iraq in 2003, Iraqis have enjoyed many of the same freedoms from censorship that Americans have.  Uncensored media from scandalous Egyptian soap operas to romance novels to pornography have been widely available. But now, the Iraqi government is imposing new censorship laws to crack down on this behavior deemed improper by the standards of Islamic law.

The new censorship policy will require Internet cafes to register with the government and publishers to censor content in new books.  The laws are a continuation of Prime Minister al-Maliki’s attempts to censor sexual material coming into the country beginning in May.

Government officials say these uncensored materials are corrupting the minds of young Iraqis and encouraging sectarian violence. Iraq’s cultural minister Mufid Al-Jazairi told the New York Times, “Our constitution respects freedom of thought and freedom of expression, but that should come with respect for society as a whole, and for moral behavior. It is not easy to balance security and democracy. It is like being a tightrope walker.”

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In 2003, a Raed Jarrar watched American planes drop bombs on building after building near his home in Baghdad.  Now Jarrar is in Washington D.C. serving as the Iraq consultant for the American Friends Service Committee, as well as facilitating communication between Americans on Capitol Hill and Iraqi politicians and citizens.  When I spoke with Jarrar last week, he said he was frustrated by the misinformation being disseminated by the media about the violence on conflict in Iraq.

He said, “When I hear the U.S. coverage on Iraq, it’s similar to, for example, an Iraqi saying that the US Civil War was a religious civil war, or that it was a racial civil war that put some white people against some black people.”

He acknowledged that the Civil War was full of political intricacies like the desire to keep a central government and the question of whether individuals in newly inducted states should be allowed to hold slaves.  He emphasized that just as Americans would not stand for misinformation about our past, Iraqis should not have to hear misinformation about the present situation, saying “I think that the same way that Americans understand the Civil War with its complexity, and they will not buy any argument about it being a religious civil war or some other descriptions, I think Iraqis, including myself, think the US understanding of the current Iraqi conflict is really wrong.”

“It’s not a war based on ancient hatreds between Sunnis and Shiites,” Jarrar said. “It’s not a religious war.  It’s way more political and economic.  It has way more complicated layers than we hear in covered in the U.S.”