look at it like this - and you'll see what i'm saying:
In April 2004 the resistance went through a qualitative change, becoming for the first time a national popular uprising. The countdown started with the closing of a newspaper close to Muqtada al-Sadr and the arrest of a senior aide for the murder of a rival cleric. Sadr’s supporters mobilised across Iraq, and members of his Mahdi Army seized government buildings in several southern governorates. US officials’ timing of their move against Sadr was disastrous. On 31 March four American mercenaries were killed by a crowd in Fallujah. The US army demanded the city hand over those responsible. The local council refused. The next day troops stormed into the town, but the resistance held its ground. The siege of Fallujah had begun.
The political impact of US forces fighting a combined Shia and Sunni insurgency was immense.
Solidarity demonstrations across Iraq clashed repeatedly with troops and local police.
In Baghdad tens of thousands of Sunnis and Shias filled the Sunni Umm al-Qura’ mosque for joint prayers
and on 9 April 2004 over 200,000 demonstrated in Baghdad in the biggest protest for a generation.
Iraqis responded to Fallujah’s appeals for medical supplies, blood and money. Across the country armed men, most of whom were local lads, attacked coalition troops with stones and guns.
The Washington Post concluded that the occupation had spent all moral and political credit with ordinary Iraqis:
The Sunni-Shia divide, already narrower in Iraq that in some parts of the Arab world,
is by all accounts shrinking each day that Iraqis agree their most immediate problem is the occupation.
Many here say that, whatever the value there was in deposing Saddam Hussein, Americans have exhausted their goodwill.
The final blow to the American onslaught on Fallujah came when crowds confronted the 650-man 2nd battalion of the Iraqi Army heading towards Fallujah from their base north of Baghdad. Iraqis begged the troops not to join the attack. The soldiers, many of whom were Shias, were stunned. At a decisive moment shots were fired, wounding several soldiers. The battalion turned back to its base while preparations were made to airlift the troops into battle, but it was too late, the popular feeling had penetrated the ranks of the troops and they refused orders-the encounter with the crowds had stiffened their opposition to the mission.
here's some links:
http://www.maskofzion.com/2010/11/baghdad-cathedral-massacre-zionist.html
http://warisacrime.org/content/iraqi-christians
True, the situation in Iraq was difficult prior to the war. Having visited the country in 1999, I can testify to this. But the hardship suffered by many Iraqis, especially political dissidents, was in some way typically characteristic of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes.
Iraq could, at that time, be easily contrasted with other countries living under similar hardships. But what has happened since the war can barely be compared to any other country or any other wars since World War II. Even putting aside the devastating death toll, the sheer scale of internal displacement and forced emigration is terrifying. This is a nation that had more or less maintained a consistent level of demographic cohesion for many generations. It was this cohesion that made Iraq what it was.
Iraqi Christian communities had coexisted alongside their Muslim neighbors for hundreds of years. The churches of the two main Christian groups, the Assyrians and Chaldeans, date back to A.D. 33 and 34 respectively. A recent editorial in an Arab newspaper was titled "Arab Christians should feel at home."
As moving as the article was, the fact is, the fact remains that Arab Christians should not have to feel at home — they already are at home. Their roots dates back to the days of Jesus Christ, and since then they have maintained a unique identity and proud history under the most difficult of circumstances.
The plight of Iraqi Christians seems very similar to that of Palestinian Christians, whose numbers have plummeted and continue to fall following the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. The Palestinian Christian diaspora was a direct outcome of the Israeli occupation and the original takeover of historic Palestine in 1948. The Israeli government sees no difference between a Palestinian Christian and a Muslim.
But none of this was deemed worthy of discussion in much of the Western media, perhaps because it risked hurting the sensibility of the Israeli occupier. The troubling news coming from Iraq can now be manipulated by presenting the suffering of Christians as an offshoot of a larger conflict between Islamic militants and Christians communities in Iraq.
The fact is that Iraqi society has long been known for its tolerance and acceptance of minorities. There were days when no one used such references as Shiite, Sunni and Christians; there one Iraq and one Iraqi people. This has completely changed, for part of the strategy following the invasion of Iraq was to emphasize and manipulate the ethnic and religious demarcation of the country, creating insurmountable divides. Without a centralized power to guide and channel the collective responses of the Iraqi people, all hell broke loose. Masked men with convenient militant names but no identities disappeared as quickly as they popped up to wreak havoc in the country. The communal trust that held together the fabric of the Iraqi society during the hardest of times dissolved. Utter chaos and mistrust took over, and the rest is history.
read more here:
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20101111rb.html
