Now this will be interesting: if Sunni jihadists can distract the Iranians for awhile, free people might get a breather. Unless, of course, those free people decide (yet again) to try to calm Sunni/Shi’ite tensions. Condoleezza Rice expressed the Western intelligentsia’s incurable naivete and love for fantasy-based policymaking when she said in January 2007: “There’s still a tendency to see these things in Sunni-Shia terms. But the Middle East is going to have to overcome that.” Five years and counting, Dr. Rice, and for some odd reason they haven’t overcome it yet.
“Iraq Sunni insurgents have new target: Iran,” by Mohamad Ali Harissi for Middle East Online, April 12 (thanks to Twostellas):
Sunni insurgents who battled American soldiers in Iraq until their long-time enemy withdrew last year have turned their wrath on a new target: Shiite Iran….
The Islamic Group in Iraq, a coalition of 17 insurgent groups formed in 2010, said in a statement that “we will fight Iran with the same force that we fought their brothers, the Americans.”
The United States was “forced” to leave Iraq “to a worse occupier, the greedy Persian coward,” said the statement posted on jihadist websites.
“It has become clear beyond any doubt that Iran occupies Iraq through its traitor agents,” it added….
Another group of jihadists, the Banner of Right and Jihad, vowed to continue “fighting the enemy” and urged God to grant it victory over “America and its (followers) the Safavids,” in a derogatory reference to Shiites.
For its part, the Murabitun Jihad Brigades asked for God’s blessing in securing “a final victory over the (followers) of the occupation and its agents represented in the government” of Iraq.
And the Islamic Army in Iraq said the US left “behind them an uglier, more brutal and ignorant occupation, where the graves are full of the innocent bodies of Sunnis.”
The Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), Al-Qaeda’s front organisation, said that it had carried out 195 attacks against “the Safavid army and police” between December 28 and February 24….
Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, Saddam’s vice president and the highest-ranking member of his regime still on the run, poured oil on the fire in a video posted online last week,
Duri charged that that Iran plans on “taking over Iraq and then destroying the nation.”…