[Marxism] Sunni Insurgents Threaten to Kill 100 Shiites Hostages...just kidding!

["M. Junaid Alam" <mjunaidalam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/international/middleeast/17cnd-iraq.html?ei=5094&en=da82c737449152c9&hp=&ex=1113796800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&position=


   Sent to Rescue Shiite Hostages, Iraqi Troops Find None

*By ROBERT F. WORTH
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ROBERT%20F.%20WORTH&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ROBERT%20F.%20WORTH&inline=nyt-per>
*

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 17 - Anyone in Baghdad this morning could have been
forgiven for thinking the country was on the verge of civil war.

Three Iraqi Army battalions had surrounded the town of Madaen, just
south of the capital, where Sunni kidnappers were said to be threatening
to kill hundreds of Shiite hostages unless all Shiites left the town. As
the national assembly met, Iraq's top political figures warned of a
grave sectarian crisis. Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric issued a plea
for restraint. Even the outgoing prime minister released a statement
decrying the "savage, filthy, and dirty atrocities" in Madaen.

But as the army battalions arrived in Madaen, they saw streets full of
people calmly sipping tea in cafés and going about their business. There
were no armed Sunni mobs, no cowering Shiite victims. After hours of
careful searches, the soldiers assisted by air surveillance found no
evidence of any kidnappings or refugees at all.

By this afternoon, Iraqi army officials were reporting that the crisis
in Madaen, which had been narrated in a stream of breathless television
reports and news agency stories, was nothing but a tissue of rumors and
politically motivated accusations.

The hysteria over Madaen was one vivid illustration of the way Iraq's
daily violence and sectarian tension, which are real enough, can be
easily twisted into fantasy here. In a country where phones are
unreliable and roads between cities often blocked, facts can give way to
a fast-running engine of rumor. And most people have good reason to
believe the worst.

The wild rumors are also an index of Iraq's current political turmoil.
Some of the early reports about the Madaen kidnappings on Friday night
came from Shiite political figures who are bitterly angry at the
outgoing government of Dr. Ayad Allawi. In the past, some Shiites have
been quick to emphasize any hints that his government may be losing control.

The Shiites' anger at Dr. Allawi, a secular Shiite and former Baathist,
stems in part from his decision to rehire a number of other former
Baathists into the government and military. Like the Kurds, Iraqi's
Shiites were brutally oppressed by Saddam Hussein's Baathist government.

Dr. Allawi handed in his resignation as prime minister last week, but
the new Shiite-led coalition government has yet to take power, and many
of its members are impatient.

"We are in a political vacuum," said Sabah Kadhim, a spokesman for
Iraq's outgoing interior minister. "Politicians will be politicians, but
I blame them for not forming a government quickly enough."

The rumors in Madaen did not grow from nothing. A group of traveling
Shiites was kidnapped last week near the town, 10 miles south of
Baghdad, Iraqi Interior Ministry officials said today. That generated a
retaliatory kidnapping of a group of Sunnis by Shiites a few days later.

Sunni Arabs and Shiites have clashed often in the area south of Baghdad,
particularly the lawless zone known as the Triangle of Death, which is
northeast of Madaen.

On Friday night, Interior Ministry officials said the police in Madaen
were reporting that a group of Sunnis with roots in Anbar Province,
where sectarian tensions have risen lately, had kidnapped three Shiites
and were threatening to kill them unless all Shiites agreed to leave the
town.

The story, with its overtones of Bosnia-style ethnic cleansing, quickly
grew. On Saturday Iraqiya television reported that 150 hostages had been
taken. Western news agencies began reporting that Shiites were fleeing
Madaen and seeking refuge to the south, and that Iraqi army units were
preparing to sweep into the town.

Residents in the town played down the reports on Saturday. But a bomb
exploded in a Shiite mosque in Madain, fanning the notion of a sectarian
conflict. No one was injured in the blast, which left the mosque in ruins.

By this morning, the story had become the first agenda at the week's
first national assembly meeting. National Security Minister Qasem Dawood
briefed the assembly members on the crisis and the military's plan to
encircle and pacify the town.

"There is an attempt to drag this country into civil war," he said.

A Shiite assembly member, Jalal Adin al-Saghir, told the gathered
members of riots, and lashed out angrily at Dr. Allawi's government for
not protecting the people. Another influential member told of mines that
had been placed around Madaen by terrorists, and spoke of the events
there as "a kind of ethnic purge."

Not to be outdone, Dr. Allawi issued his own comment later in the day.
"These wild acts of destroying peaceful homes, kidnapping innocent
people, and assaulting properties and families will not go without
punishment," he said in a statement about the events in Madaen.

Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, made
phone calls to government officials and urged them to solve the crisis
in Madaen peacefully.

Before long, the reactions to the crisis took on a sectarian coloring of
their own. This afternoon a prominent group of hard-line Sunni clerics
held a news conference and issued a statement, saying the Madaen crisis
was a fabrication to stoke animosity against Sunnis.

Even Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who is Iraq's most
wanted man, weighed in. His network, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, issued a
statement on Islamist Web sites saying the kidnappings were a
fabrication by Iraqi and American authorities. The statement went on to
say it was the Iraqi army and police who rounded up people in Madaen,
and the victims were Sunnis, not Shiites.

In the end, the Iraqi army officers who searched Madaen delivered their
own, more balanced verdict.

"This issue was exaggerated for political reasons related to the
formation of the new government," said Maj. Gen. Mudhir Mola Abboud of
the Iraqi army. "We entered the city and did not find any hostages."


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