A Sunni mosque in Yemen was bombed today, with initial reports indicating at least 8 dead, and possibly more. The mosque is located in the Saada region, a predominately Shi’a section of this small Arab country on the southwestern Arabian peninsula which neighbors Saudi Arabia.
SANAA (AFP) — At least eight pople were killed and 45 wounded in Yemen on Friday when a blast went off at the entrance of a mosque in the Saada region, site of a Shiite rebellion, police and witnesses said. […]
Some witnesses said a minibus parked outside the mosque in the town of Saada exploded, while others said the blast was caused by a booby-trapped motorcycle.
The blast came as hundreds of Muslim faithful were leaving the Bin Salman mosque after Friday prayers, the witnesses said. […]
Witnesses earlier spoke of dozens of casualties as ambulances rushed to the scene of the attack. Some said the target may have been the mosque’s imam, or prayer leader, an army officer who adheres to the rigorous Salafi school of Sunni Islam. Witnesses said he was not hurt.
Yemen’s government has been fighting with Shi’ite rebels in Saada seeking to restore the last Zaidi imanate. The country is primarily Sunni, but the government is officially a secular republic. The current President of Yemen is a Zaidi shi’ite. Recent clashes have included bombings targeting the military and government offices, and more direct confrontations in which both sides allegedly using “heavy weapons” such as artillery in recent clashes. Tuesday, a number of government soldiers were killed by a rebel ambush in a conflict that reignited in 2004, and which has seen thousands killed by the violence.
On Tuesday night, seven soldiers were killed and 20 wounded when a convoy of three troop transports was ambushed by rebels in Saada, a mountainous province which has been shaken by the on-off Zaidi insurgency.
It seems Iraq is not the only place plagued by Sunni/Shi’a religious conflicts. This makes the Bush’s decision to invade Iraq seem all the more nonsensical, especially when you realize that many in his administration had little if any understanding of the religious tensions between Sunnis and Shi’ites.
The US really did kick at a hornet’s nest of religious and sectarian strife when it invaded. Wherever the official authorities are weak, such as in Lebanon, Yemen and, thanks to the Bush administration, Iraq, we see similar outbreaks of violence along religious, ethnic and tribal lines. Our military presence in the region has only exacerbated these tensions. It shouldn’t come as a great surprise that both Lebanon and Yemen have had major eruptions of violent strife since our invasion of Iraq.
Bush went into Iraq despite the nature of the underlying hostility between the two major sects of Islam, and the ethnic tensions between the Arabs, Kurds and other minorities, in the vain hope that a secular democracy or other regime friendly to the United States, could be easily established to replace the dictatorial rule of Saddam Hussein. A goal that any knowledgeable person with prior experience in the region could have told him was going be extremely difficult to accomplish, even if he made all the right moves in securing the country. The conflict in Yemen provides us with a good example of the precarious nature of any period of peace in the region. And that conflict has occurred without a major Western power invading and occupying its territory and pouring billions of dollars and countless numbers of weapons into the country.
How crazy was Bush to invade Iraq, and how deluded were so many Americans to accept his “reasons” for attacking it in 2003? The answer is one you already know. We allowed an incompetent madman and his ideological fellow travelers to hijack our government. As a result, not only is Iraq in turmoil, but so is much of the Middle East, and it is likely remain that way for years to come.
We knew, or should have known, of the powder keg in the basement. We were just foolish enough to allow a crazy person to walk in with a lit match because he thought he might find a pony down there.
