U.S. troops killed the al-Qaida in Iraq mastermind of the bombing that destroyed the golden dome of a famed sacred Shiite shrine last year and set in motion an unrelenting cycle of sectarian bloodletting, the military said Sunday.
Haitham Sabah Shaker Mohammed al-Badri, the group's Salahuddin province emir, was killed in a U.S. operation east of Samarra on Thursday, the military said He also was responsible for the June 13 bombing that toppled the Askariya shrine's twin minarets, it said.
It is nice to see the press admit that the "civil war" strangely did not start until after February 2006. While those opposed to the war argue that the Sunnis and Shias are inherently furious with each other and eager to kill each other in a civil war, they never explain why the civil war didn't start up until about a year and a half ago.
Before then, the Shias had endured Sunni terrorism inflicted by al Qaeda and trusted the government and our troops to go after the enemy. Yon documents the jihadi violence still going on.
The Iranians are the other part of the civil war, of course, unleashing their local and infiltrated puppets of the Shia death squads that began killing in earnest after the Samarra bombing in 2006.
If our surge can gut the jihadis and blunt the Shia death squads, you will see that enough Shias, Kurds, and Sunni Arabs are willing to just move on with their lives, willing to see if the courts can provide justice for past crimes.
