Samarra’s dome rebuiltA PROMINENT Sunni preacher is describing how the demise of Islamic State could herald a new era of Sunni-Shia reconciliation, when a Shia soldier at the checkpoint outside his home town of Samara interrupts his musings. “Your people blew up our shrines,” he says, ordering the sheikh, Salah al-Taha, out of the car. Left to wait in the sun for a couple of hours while a commanding officer is roused from his rest, the sheikh’s resentment returns. Samarra, 125km (80 miles) north of Baghdad, is no longer his own, he says. Shia militias have taken over the old city, and chased out its Sunni inhabitants.
In place of Samarra’s past easy symbiosis—where Sunnis thrived from running hotels and restaurants for Shia pilgrims—the city is now divided in two. A seething outer new town of displaced Sunnis surrounds an inner pockmarked ghost-town manned by a conglomerate of Shia militias. Its centrepiece is the gold-plated dome over the shrine of the 10th and 11th Shia imams (rulers), which jihadists blew up in 2006. The shrine has been restored with even more glitter. The rare Sunni crossing its threshold...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2dOIWxG
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