The fissures between Shia and Sunni Muslims are nowhere more palpable than the districts of Kadhimiya and Adhamiya, which face each other across a bend in the river Tigris.
Locals say that under Saddam Hussein little love was lost between the two areas. Gangs of youths from the Shia side on the west bank would stage regular clashes with rival Sunni gangs from the east.
Their field of battle was the Imam’s bridge, so called because it leads from the Shia shrine of Imam Khadim — where so many lost their lives on Tuesday — to the capital’s main Sunni mosque, dedicated to Abu Hanifa. But in the wake of the carnage and widespread talk of sectarian strife, the Imam’s bridge has become an unlikely symbol of unity.
On Wednesday people on either side of it dismissed talk of civil war as thousands of Shia from eastern Baghdad walked peacefully through Sunni Adhamiya on their way to pay their respects across the river.
Some carried their dead over the bridge in wooden boxes, one draped with a bloodstained flag of Iraq, another with the Islamic green flag. Ranks of mourners chanted, banged drums and beat their chests in collective grief.
As they passed, Sunnis standing outside the Abu Hanifa shrine by the bridge expressed their solidarity.
‘They will find it impossible to provoke problems between Iraqi Shi’ites and Sunnis,” said Mohammed Jassim, a dental technician, who was handing out refreshments to thirsty mourners. ‘We have helped to organise traffic in our area and provide security for our Shia brothers.”
A day earlier the imam at the mosque had called for the Sunni faithful to go to the hospitals and give blood. That call was echoed by his counterparts in Ramadi and Falluja.
‘So many of us went that they ran out of bags,” Jassim said.
Behind him was a banner bearing verses from a local poet. It included the lines: ‘We have our symbol in Adhamiya. We have our symbol in Kadhimiya. If anything bad happens in Kadhimiya we will be their true supporters.”
Across the river, security was tight and the mood sombre at the Kadhimiya mosque as thousands of Iraqi Shia came to mourn. Black-clad men fanned out every 20m or so to conduct body checks.
The mosque’s large wooden doors were closed; its walls surrounded by barbed wire. A banner read: ‘The death of Hussein is symbol of our revolt against oppression.”
Mourners studied handwritten lists of the dead and injured posted on shopfronts. A fuzzy photograph of a young boy injured in Tuesday’s attack was pinned to a wall. His face was in bad shape but he was still recognisable. Underneath was written: ‘This boy is in hospital. He cannot speak. If you know him please come forward.”
Here, too, the talk was of unity.
Still shocked by Tuesday’s devastation, Sadik Jafar Abbas, an unemployed teacher from Kadhimiya, said: ‘I don’t think there will be conflict between Sunni and Shia because we are basically united.”
No Muslim would dare to do such a thing, he said, and ‘even if it was a Muslim then he has strayed from the path of the Prophet Mohammed. It was people from abroad who did these bombings, the Salafis or the Wahhabis, and they are against all Islam.”
Soon after the attacks, Iraq’s governing council pleaded with Iraqis to ‘maintain unity” to ‘cheat our enemies of the chance to inflict evil on the nation”.
The fear of reprisals uppermost in their thoughts, the call was echoed by Shia and Sunni leaders as they appealed for calm.
Abdul Rahman Taqki Askar, who owns a shop selling the black cloth for women’s abbayas (ankle-length outer garments), said: ‘Some of us are blaming the Americans for the attacks. I don’t think that is fair but blaming others will help us avoid fighting among each other and avoid a struggle between the different religious powers, each one of them trying to get people on through different means.”
However, it is clear that the attacks on their holiest places have fanned the fears and anger of some Shias.
A few hundred metres from the Kadhimiya shrine, supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand Shia cleric from east Baghdad, held a demonstration, calling for ‘justice and revenge” in the name of Allah and freedom for the Iraqi people.
‘If the occupiers can’t protect us we’ll take the law into our own hands,” one of his followers said. —