ONITSHA, Nigeria (Reuters) – Christian youths burnt the corpses of Muslims on Thursday on the streets of Onitsha in southeastern Nigeria, the city worst hit by religious riots that have killed at least 138 people across the country in five days.

Christian mobs, seeking revenge for the killings of Christians in the north, attacked Muslims with cutlasses, destroyed their houses and torched mosques in two days of violence in Onitsha, where at least 85 people have died.

“We are very happy that this thing is happening so that the north will learn their lesson,” said Anthony Umai, a motorcycle taxi rider, standing close to where Christian youths had piled up the corpses of 10 Muslims and were burning them.

Dozens more corpses had been thrown into the back of pick-up trucks by security services overnight, residents said.

Uncertainty over the political future is aggravating regional, ethnic and religious rivalries in Africa’s most populous nation. Militants in the oil-producing south have waged a three-month campaign of attacks and kidnappings against the oil industry, which has cut exports and driven up world prices.

There was no fighting in Onitsha on Thursday morning but Emeka Umeh, of human rights group the Civil Liberties Organisation, called it “the peace of the graveyard”.

Some corpses were still lying on the streets and hundreds of Muslim men, women and children fled the city crammed into open-top trucks for fear of more killings. Thousands more were hiding in army barracks and police stations.

Umeh said most of the 85 bodies his group counted were Hausa, but some Ibo were killed too. The Hausa are the main ethnic group in northern Nigeria and most are Muslim, while the Ibo are dominant in the southeast and almost all are Christian.

Nigeria’s 140 million people are divided about equally between Muslims in the north and Christians in the south, but sizeable religious minorities live in both regions.

Elections are due in 2007 and many Nigerians believe President Olusegun Obasanjo will try to stay on after eight years in power. The prospect angers those who feel the time has come for their ethnic or regional group to get the top job.

Also at stake in 2007 are the positions of many of the 36 powerful state governors. In some states, rivalries for those jobs are further raising tensions.
reuters.co.uk

It is a measure of the degree of violence that seven American soldiers were killed by bombs on Wednesday in the separate struggle between the resistance and the US occupation. Although the presence of 130,000 American troops is justified by saying that they are preventing a civil war, it is not clear what they can do to prevent it happening.

Two days of bloodshed

WEDNESDAY 22 FEBRUARY

Dawn attack destroys the Golden Mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam. No one is injured but violent protests soon break out.

* More than 50 Sunni mosques attacked in Baghdad alone.

* In Basra, protesters set fire to Sunni shrine containing the remains of one of Mohamed’s companions. Sunni cleric is shot dead in the afternoon.

* 11pm: Eleven prisoners taken from a jail in Basra by unidentified gunmen and shot in the head.

THURSDAY 23 FEBRUARY

9am: Bodies of three al-Arabiya journalists sent to cover the Samarra bombing found dumped.

* 10am: 47 people dragged from their cars and shot while returning from a protest against the Samarra bombing north of Baghdad.

* Iraqi President Jalal Talabani summons political leaders to a meeting but the biggest Sunni faction, the Iraqi Accordance Front, refuses to attend.

* Numerous bodies, many with their hands tied, found in east Baghdad and Basra. Most victims are Sunnis.

* As night falls, more than 130 people are believed to have been killed.

The reaction worldwide

“They invade the shrine and bomb there because they oppose God and justice. These passive activities are the acts of a group of defeated Zionists and occupiers.”
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iranian President

“This bombing is intended to create civil strife… [it was] an evil act. I appreciate very much the leaders from all aspects of Iraqi society that have stood up and urged for there to be calm. The destruction of a holy site is a political act intending to create strife.”
President George Bush

“There is not yet information about what caused this terrorist outrage, but [Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi and al-Qaida have been linked as it has the hallmarks of their nihilism.”
Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary

“I tell the Americans, the Zionists and the criminals who committed the crime in Samarra that all your aims will fail. I tell them that this nation will not be torn apart… It will not fall for the tricks of the occupiers.”
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Lebanon’s Hizbollah chief

“We want a clear condemnation from the government which didn’t do enough to curb those angry mobs. There was even co-operation with the government in attacking the Sunni mosques.”
Salman al-Jumaili, Sunni politician in Iraq
independent.co.uk

JERUSALEM, Feb. 23 — Israeli soldiers killed three Palestinian gunmen and two civilians in heavy fighting Thursday in the West Bank city of Nablus, Palestinian hospital officials and the Israeli military said. Two Israeli soldiers and 22 Palestinians were wounded in the gun battles, which unfolded in stages throughout the day.

The clashes were some of the most intense since Israel and a dozen armed Palestinian groups agreed a year ago to abide by a cease-fire. They reflect intensifying Israeli military operations in the West Bank in recent days, particularly in the volatile north.

The fighting Thursday occurred in the Balata refugee camp on the city’s edge, witnesses and Israeli military officials said. The military has been operating for several days in the camp, a stronghold of the most potent Palestinian armed groups.

“We had a lot of alerts about terror attacks against civilians and soldiers that were coming from Nablus,” an Israeli military official said, adding that four explosive belts had been seized at a military checkpoint outside the city in recent days. “That basically caused us to decide that we had to operate more in the area.”
washingtonpost.com

Analysis: IDF operation comes as Fatah returns to terror in Nablus
The IDF’s Northern Glory operation in Nablus was born of the Palestinian parliamentary elections. But it didn’t take place as described by Hamas leaders, who view it as Israeli provocation aimed at embarrassing the PA government-designate. There are different reasons.

The declaration of calm in the territories in January 2005 involved two senior partners: Hamas, which forced members to abstain from terror attacks, and the Palestinian Authority, which bought off the heads of Fatah gangs with salaries and perks that removed them from the terror cycle. But since the elections, senior PA security personnel have lost the incentive to act, and left the arena open to Islamic Jihad headquarters in Damascus. Fed by Iranian money, Jihad headquarters are transferring greater sums into the territories to operate as many cells
as possible in order to carry out attacks against Israel.

Local Fatah leaders, some of whom have lost routine financial support from the security forces, are returning to terror given the incentive from Damascus. This is particularly true in Nablus, which had been dominated by Fatah military organizations over the past two years.
In the month since the PA elections, the IDF has seized four explosive belts that Fatah and Jihad members were trying to smuggle into Israel. In addition, a Jihad terrorist blew himself up in a restaurant at Tel Aviv’s old bus station. The IDF has begun to fear that the West Bank’s two terror hubs, Jenin and Tul Karm, are acquiring a third sister – Nablus.

Operation commander Yuval Bazak told Haaretz that the IDF came to the conclusion that defensive moves are no longer enough. “Like in tennis, when your opponent gets more aggressive, ground strokes aren’t enough any more.”

Israeli security officials assess that 2006 is the “target year” set by the global al-Qaeda network to carry out a mega-attack in the country, Israel’s leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported Thursday.

According to the report, Israeli intelligence authorities detected two years ago the shift in priorities of al Qaeda towards Israel, which has been “upgraded” to the rank of a major target. Recently, al Qaeda chief in Iraq Abu Musab al-Zarqawi declared his intentions to carry out an attack in Israel.

The report added Syria has been identified as a transfer point for al Qaeda members planning to carry out attacks in Jordan and Israel. It should be mentioned that on Wednesday Israeli Deputy Chief of Staff Moshe Kaplinski said that “global Jihad forces” maintain regular bases in Lebanon and Jordan.
albawaba.com

Tony Blair remained defiant last night in the face of a torrent of protests over Britain’s human rights record, accusing his critics of having “the world the wrong way round”.

The Prime Minister was under pressure over his support for US ” rendition flights”, his failure to call openly for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba, and over draconian anti-terror laws, after damning reports by the Labour-led Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and by Amnesty International. His comments on the state of Iraq came on another day of bloodshed in the country.

He even appeared out of step with his own Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, who warned his cabinet colleagues that terrorist suspects were entitled to the same legal protections as “law-abiding citizens”.

Speaking at the London School of Economics, Lord Goldsmith said: ” Determining if a particular person is, or is not, a terrorist requires more than mere assertion on the part of an authority, however genuine and well-intentioned that authority may be.”

In a combative performance, Mr Blair used his monthly press conference at Downing Street to reject criticism of the Government’s attempts to return terror suspects to countries such as Algeria and Egypt which have a record of torturing prisoners. “We hear an immense amount about their human rights and their civil liberties. But there are also human rights of the rest of us to live in safety,” he said.
independent.co.uk

WASHINGTON – Francis Fukuyama, best known for his post-Cold War essay proclaiming the historic inevitability of liberal democracy, “The End of History”, argued in the Times article that neo-conservatives so badly miscalculated the myriad costs of the Iraq war that they may have empowered their two foreign policy nemeses — realists, who disdain democracy promotion; and isolationists, who oppose foreign entanglements of almost any kind.

Even more provocatively, Fukuyama called the Standard’s editor, William Kristol, his ideological sidekick, Robert Kagan, and their neo-conservative comrades who led the drive to war in Iraq “Leninist” in their conviction that liberal democracy can be achieved through “coercive regime change” or imposed by military means.

“(T)he neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was …Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will,” according to Fukuyama. “Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States.”
commondreams.org

What Fukuyama advocates as an alternative is merely ‘a kinder, gentler machine gun hand.’ These people are stuck in a groove: if it can’t be naked aggression then it MUST be ‘hearts and minds’ sham ‘multilateralism’ with the threat of aggression to back it up.

When it comes to dealing with stress, a number of Americans turn to unhealthy behaviors such as overeating and smoking for relief and don’t exercise, according to a survey released today by the American Psychological Association (APA).

But those choices, researchers say, lead to increased health problems that ultimately make stress worse.

“What’s surprising and alarming is the fact that too many people weren’t taking active steps to do anything about the stress they’re feeling,” says Russ Newman of the APA. “People don’t really appreciate how detrimental stress is, and the ways they’re trying to manage stress can be as detrimental, if not more so.”
news.yahoo.com

There is never any discussion about the nature of this epidemic of anxiety and stress, never any reflection about what it might be in the way people live here that is so obviously detrimental to the human nervous system.

It’s a question that has dogged the nuclear industry since the 1970s: What can it do with spent fuel rods?

The radioactive waste, eventually slated for permanent storage at a still-unfinished site in Nevada, has been piling up, mostly at the nation’s 65 commercial nuclear power plants. Late Tuesday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) gave its blessing to a solution: a storage site on a barren patch of a reservation in Utah that’s home to some 25 native Americans, next to a proving ground for chemical and biological weapons, and near an Air Force bombing range.

The NRC licensed what would be the nation’s largest, and only private, nuclear-waste storage facility. A consortium of utility companies would store for up to 40 years some 40,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel for an industry rapidly running out of space.

But the plan has powerful opponents, including Utah’s entire congressional delegation and its governor, who have developed a multipronged attack plan to try to beat back this latest effort.

“Our position is this represents public policy at its absolute worst,” says Mike Lee, general counsel to Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. “What these people want to do is take spent nuclear fuel and put it above ground in casks in a valley that’s located 40 miles immediately upwind from Utah’s only population center. To make matters much worse, this aboveground, open-air facility lies immediately under the low-altitude flight path of 7,000 F-16s a year en route to a bombing range.”
cbsnews.com

Ahmadinejad says ‘defeated Zionists and occupiers’ destroyed golden dome

TEHRAN, Iran – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blamed the United States and Israel on Thursday for the destruction of a Shiite shrine’s golden dome in Iraq, saying it was the work of “defeated Zionists and occupiers.”

Speaking to a crowd of thousands on a tour of southwestern Iran, the president referred to the destruction of the Askariya mosque dome in Samarra on Wednesday, which the Iraqi government has blamed on insurgents.

“They invade the shrine and bomb there because they oppose God and justice,” Ahmadinejad said, referring to the U.S.-led multinational forces in Iraq.

“These passive activities are the acts of a group of defeated Zionists and occupiers who intended to hit our emotions,” he said in a speech that was broadcast on state television. Addressing the United States, he added: “You have to know that such an act will not save you from the anger of Muslim nations.”

The bombing set off a string of sectarian attacks in Iraq. Angry crowds thronged the streets, militiamen attacked Sunni mosques and at least 19 people were killed.
msnbc.msn.com

Sectarian Violence Rips Through Iraq
130 killed as Sunnis, Shiites trade accusations after mosque bombing
BAGHDAD, Iraq – More than 130 people, including dozens who joined a demonstration against sectarian violence, were killed in bloodshed across Iraq despite calls for calm on Thursday from leaders, including President Bush, fearful of civil war.

A day after a suspected al-Qaida bomb destroyed a major Shiite shrine, Iraq cancelled all leave for the police and army and minority Sunni political leaders pulled out of U.S.-backed talks on forming a national unity government, accusing the ruling Shiites of fomenting dozens of attacks on Sunni mosques.

Washington, which wants stability in Iraq to help it extract around 130,000 U.S. troops, has also called for restraint, reflecting international fears that the oil-exporting country of 27 million may be slipping closer to all-out sectarian war.

But the main Sunni religious authority made an extraordinary public criticism of the Shiites’ most revered clerical leader, accusing him of fuelling the violence by calling for protests.

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, pressed ahead despite the Sunni boycott with a meeting that he had called to avert a descent towards a civil war. After discussions with Shiites, Kurds and leaders of a smaller Sunni group, he told a televised news conference that if all-out war came “no one will be safe.”

Police and military sources tallied more than 130 deaths, mostly of Sunnis, around the two biggest cities Baghdad and Basra in the 24 hours since the bloodless but highly symbolic bombing of the Shiite Golden Mosque in Samarra. Dozens of Sunni mosques have been attacked and several burnt to the ground.

In the bloodiest single incident, officials said 47 people who had taken part in a joint Sunni and Shiite demonstration against the Samarra bombing were hauled from vehicles after they left and shot dead on the outskirts of the capital. The identities of the gunmen and the victims was not clear.

They were all dumped in a ditch beside the road, said Dhary Thoaban, deputy chairman of the Diyala regional council. Earlier, there had been conflicting accounts of the incident but police and military officials all confirmed Thaoban’s version.

The Interior Ministry said all police and army leave was cancelled, curfews were extended as the country locks down for three days of national mourning. Universities postponed Saturday’s start of the spring semester by nearly three weeks.

Four American soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division were killed when their vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, the U.S. military said Thursday. The soldiers were assigned to the division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team and were killed while on patrol Wednesday near Hawijah, 150 miles north of Baghdad, the command said in a statement.

A bomb blasted an Iraqi army foot patrol in a market in the religiously divided city of Baquoba, killing 16 people.

Three journalists working for Al Arabiya television were found shot dead after being attacked while filming in Samarra.

Iraqi police and army officials said at least 40 bodies were found in one spot just south of Baghdad. It was not clear if the number included 53 people already reported by police to have died in Baghdad since Wednesday’s bombing.

At least 25 people were killed in Basra, 340 miles southeast of Baghdad, police said. A bomb targeting an Iraqi army foot patrol killed 12 people and wounded 21 in the city of Baqouba, 40 miles northeast of Baghdad on Thursday, an army source said.

The golden dome of a celebrated Iraqi Shiite shrine was destroyed in a bomb attack, prompting warnings of sectarian conflict as thousands of enraged Shiites took to the streets.

There were no reported injuries, but tension was running high throughout the country after the two bombs went off in Samarra’s 1,000-year-old Imam Ali al-Hadi mausoleum, whose golden dome collapsed.

Waving the green flags of Islam and the national Iraqi colours, thousands of Shiites took to the streets of Samarra vowing to punish those responsible for the attack.

Aside from mass protests in Samarra, tens of thousands also rallied in Baghdad, 125 kilometres (80 miles) south of Samarra, and in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, in southern Iraq.

“A group of armed men attacked the mausoleum of Imam Ali al-Hadi at 7:00 am (0400 GMT), neutralized the policemen guarding the building before placing two explosives charges and blowing them up,” police said on Wednesday.

Shops closed and muezzins recited prayers from the loudspeakers of nearby mosques and blamed the United States for the turmoil, saying “God is Great, death to America which brought us terrorism.”

Demonstrators carried the turban, sword and shield said to have belonged to Ali al-Hadi, the 10th Shiite imam, shouting “Iman, we are your soldiers”.

Iraq’s top Shiite religious authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, told AFP the religious leader wanted seven days of national mourning but Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari announced on television a three day period.

“I proclaim three days of national mourning in the country following this hurtful attack,” Jaafari said.

He also called on Iraqis to denounce such attacks and “close the road to those who want to undermine national unity”.

The bombing aimed to provoke fighting between the majority Shiite and minority Sunni communities at a time when political factions bicker over the formation of a national unity government.

The attack on the shrine came a day after a car bomb killed at least 21 in a mainly Shiite market of Baghdad and two days after another bomb wounded dozens of Shiite daily labourers waiting to work in the capital.
turkishpress.com

Dozens of Sunni mosques attacked throughout Iraq
Shiite protesters attacked dozens of Sunni mosques throughout Iraq on Wednesday in retaliation for the bombing of one of Shiite Islam’s holiest shrines, police, witnesses and political groups said.

The Iraqi Islamic Party, the country’s largest Sunni political group, said at least 60 mosques were attacked, burned or taken over by Shiites.
They included more than 50 in Baghdad alone, three of which were completely destroyed with explosives, the party said. The rest were in predominantly Shiite areas on the capital’s southern outskirts and in Iraq’s southern provinces.

Armed Shiites attacked the mosques with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, holding Sunnis after taking over some of them, the party said.

Followers of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army militia took a major part in Wednesday’s attacks, said four of their supporters were killed and dozens wounded in a series of clashes with mosque guards.

Askariya Shrine Bombing: Black Op?
In Iraq, things are going swimmingly for the Straussian neocons. “A large explosion heavily damaged the golden dome of one of Iraq’s most famous Shiite shrines Wednesday, spawning mass protests and triggering reprisal attacks against Sunni mosques,” reports the Associated Press. “It was the third major attack against Shiite targets this week and threatened to stoke sectarian tensions. Shiite leaders called for calm, but militants attacked Sunni mosques and a gunfight broke out between Shiite militiamen and guards at the offices of a Sunni political party in Basra. About 500 soldiers were sent to Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad to prevent clashes between Shiites and Sunnis, Army Capt. Jassim al-Wahash said.”

It makes absolutely no sense for Sunnis to bomb Shia mosques; this would be akin to Baptists bombing Catholic churches. Sectarian violence, dividing Iraqi society, does not serve Iraqis, either Sunni or Shia. It does, however, serve the occupation forces and also begins to realize the plan sketched out in Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties” (the balkanization of Arab and Muslim society and culture), an objective shared by Jabotinsky Likudites and Straussian neocons.