War of the Mosques, 142 Dead on Tuesday
Juan Cole of Informed Comment continues his grim chronicling of carnage and chaos in Iraq. And, the Bush administration will continue its deceitful PR campaign as we lose at least two soldiers a day, and Iraq loses many times that shameful number.
142 persons were killed or found dead on Tuesday, and Wednesday morning two Sunni mosques in towns south of Baghdad were blown up.
On Tuesday, a huge truck bomb in Baghdad blew up a Shiite mosque dedicated to an important religious figure and killed 87 persons, wounding 214. This site was dedicated to Muhammad bin Uthman bin Sa`id al-`Amri, the second of at least four Deputies (wakil) who Shiites believe acted as intermediaries between the Hidden Twelfth Imam and believers during his first or "minor" Disappearance. Shiites believe that the Prophet Muhammad should have been succeeded by his close family and descendants. The 12th Imam, a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, they say, went into hiding as a small child in 874 AD after the death of his father, Hasan al-Askari, who had been put under house arrest by the Abbasid Caliphate. During the "minor disappearance" the Twelfth Imam was said to send letters to the Shiite community, and for many years sent them, they say, through Muhammad b. Uthman.
Many Iraqi Shiites, poor, bewildered, under siege by multiple political and military forces, have become millenarians and believe that the hidden Twelfth Imam will now come back any day as the Mahdi, the apocalyptic Guided One, who will restore the world to justice in preparation for the Judgment Day.
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