Originally posted on Google+, 26 February 2012.
There is a reason I am posting this particular photo this week. Six years ago, the events unfolding under this dome changed an entire country overnight, in the most terrible way imaginable.
The building itself played a crucial role in these events. It all happened early in the morning of 22nd February 2006, when a group of men approached the entrance and overwhelmed the guards. They were wearing uniforms of the Iraqi Special Forces, but in fact belonged to the gang of Abu Musab az-Zarqawi, the most ruthless killer in the Iraqi conflict, leader of "al-Qaida in Iraq".
As they homed in on the golden dome, they knew they had picked a sensitive target. The dome adorned the al-Askari mosque in Samarra, where the remains of the 10th and 11th Shiite Imams are enshrined. Their tombs have become a focal point for Shiite worship, a place to ask for the blessing of the Imams.
That level of adoration for the Imams has always irritated followers of the Sunni mainstream of Islam. The extremists among them even call it blasphemy. Shiites, they claim, ascribe to their Imams a power and sanctity which is reserved for God alone. "There is no other god but God" is the fundamental tenet of Islam, and those muslims who break with it have become apostates, deserving death. For al-Qaida types, that verdict applies to Shiites – any and all of them.
The al-Qaida group moving into the mosque on that February morning was pursuing a more sophisticated goal, however. Rather than killing a limited number of Shiites directly, they figured that targeting an iconic building would create a level of mayhem far more destructive than anything they could do themselves. They loaded the place with explosives, hoping for a chain reaction throughout society.
When the detonation rocked the al-Askari mosque and blew the golden dome apart, people immediately realized the monstrosity of the event. The killing started right away. Shiites took revenge on their Sunni neighbours, and Sunni retaliation was just as swift and brutal. When the day of the blast had ended, up to a thousand people were dead already. And that was just the beginning.
The ethnic cleansing that started that day, pursued by both sides, has held Iraq in its grip for years. The plan of the attackers had worked out perfectly for them. For one, they achieved their goal of inflicting massive loss of life on the Shiite community – at the expense of a huge number of deaths among the Sunni population, which was a price the extremists were willing to let them pay.
But just as importantly, any prospect of stability in Iraq went out of the window. The local al-Qaida branch had hoped to turn the place into a hellhole for the American occupiers, and by that measure, their attack couldn't have been more successful.
Perhaps you shouldn't blink when you look at the dome.