Yahoo News reports that Sunni clerics have closed mosques as a protest to killings blamed on Shiite militias. Both Sunni and Shiite clerics have been targeted by the other side in a series of revenge actions.
The killings of two Sunni clerics — whose bodies were found Tuesday — helped spark the Sunni protests. Sunnis also complained that security forces had raided their mosques. On Friday, in the central city of Baqubah, three Shiites who owned stationery stores were shot to death, provincial spokesman Ahmed Karim Hasan said. Gunmen asked to see posters of Shiite religious leaders, then killed the store owners when they produced them, Hasan said.
Also on Friday, a car bomb exploded near a Shiite mosque in Baghdad, killing at least two people and wounding five, police said, according to the Reuters news agency.
The continued violence and bad blood threatens to continue a cycle that will be hard to end. The news story, however, does point out positive signs:
- Religious leaders on both sides are urging restraint to their followers;
- The closing of the Mosques is both a recognition that the lives of the people worshipping are more important than the building and a form of peaceful protest that is a great improvement over blowing things up; and
- Both sides recognize that the violence is aimed at splitting the Iraqi people and pitting them against each other. That recognition will help defray some hard feelings and assist in placing blame at the feet of the outsiders who are in all probability fomenting this trouble.