Newsweek: Love in a Time of Madness (strains in Iraq's mixed marriages)

[Pirate Smile]

Love in a Time of Madness

A Sunni and a Shiite fall in love in Iraq. They get married, have kids. Then Muslim extremists start a religious bloodbath. What should a mixed family do?


Without Refuge: After a car bombing outside a Shiite mosque in Baghdad

BY Babak Dehghanpisheh, Rod Nordland and Michael Hastings
Newsweek

March 13, 2006 issue - The two Iraqi teachers met as students at the University of Baghdad. They flirted between classes and hid the romance from friends and family. The furtive nature of their courting was partly because Mahir Murad, 26, is a Sunni man, and Hind al Yasseri, 25, is a Shia woman. "There was a love story between us," says Murad, wistfully. In three years of courtship, they had only one serious argument—about wodhu, the ritual cleansing before prayer, which their sects perform differently. The issue was whether to wash the soles of the feet with water, or merely wipe them. It erupted in a furious row, but then the couple caught themselves and broke up laughing—as they do now when Yasseri recalls that moment. "We agreed that we should never discuss such minor differences. We both are Muslims who believe in the same Qur'an and the same Prophet."

They married three years ago, in the heady days of the new Iraq, and until the past few weeks they might have said they lived happily ever after. Then terrorists, most likely from Al Qaeda, destroyed the Shiites' Askariya Mosque in Samarra, and Shia militants responded by attacking dozens of Sunni mosques, including two in the local neighborhood of Adhamiya. Militiamen from the Shia Mahdi Army even occupied the nearby Al-Nida Mosque. "We had no other choice but to protect ourselves," says Murad.
He now goes out at night to patrol the neighborhood with other Sunni men toting AK-47s, and he keeps a heavy machine gun at home. His wife stays inside with their 2-year-old daughter and other relatives. Both husband and wife blame extremists for fanning sectarian violence, but it's clear the tension troubles them. "I could say that maybe if I met my wife now, I would not marry her," says Murad.

As Iraq tilts toward a sectarian war, such strains are playing out in homes all over the country. Many of the differences between Sunnis and Shia are small enough to dismiss: how they wash their feet or fold their hands in prayer, and which religious figures they most revere. Despite years of discrimination against the Shia during Saddam's era, mixed marriages between the country's major groups, including the Kurds, have been very common. There are no official statistics, but prominent sociology professor Ihsan al Hassan, who has studied the subject, estimates that of Iraq's 6.5 million married couples, 2 million are Sunni-Shia unions.

Both sects have turned to militias for self-protection, and also for revenge. Murdered Sunni and Shia civilians have been dumped into one another's neighborhoods. In the 10 days after the Samarra bombing, insurgents and thugs killed 500 civilians, according to government estimates. In some neighborhoods, they drove minorities away from their homes—the apparent beginning of an ethnic-cleansing process that Iraqis call tahjir, forced emigration. So far the numbers are relatively small, given the violence in Iraq even before the Samarra bombing. But it's very worrisome. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the U.S. deputy chief of operations, said last week that "no one believes the crisis is over. We still got a thinking enemy out there who wants to create trouble."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11677916/site/newsweek/

[Pirate Smile]

1. more

"Manal Omar, who since 2003 has worked in Iraq as a women's rights activist, sees sectarianism as a new phenomenon. "Mixed families played a crucial role in preventing civil war," she says. "Iraqis, especially in Baghdad, were very proud of the mix in their communities and the fact that Sunnis, Shias and Kurds married so frequently. Now the barrier has significantly eroded and the wheels for the civil war have already begun to turn." She has experienced that personally, after marrying an Iraqi Shia last year. Some of her Sunni relatives boycotted the wedding, and a Sunni friend of 20 years abruptly stopped speaking to her. Her husband's brother was killed after being caught in the crossfire of a sectarian tribal dispute, increasing tensions between their families. "The sad reality is that most of us still don't believe we have seen the worst yet," she says.

The scariest factor is the rise of militias, particularly evident in the two weeks since the bombing of the Askariya Mosque. All the main political parties have activated their armed groups, and neighborhood outfits have been arming themselves. Insurgents keep stoking the hatred. And moderate Sunnis complain that the Shia-dominated military and police have stood by whenever Shia militias have rampaged in their neighborhoods. Even some Shiites are chagrined. "When we arrest people at the checkpoint, the militias from the party come, and say 'Release them'," says Capt. Mahmoud al-Ebady, a Shiite who directs the 21 checkpoints on roads leading into the capital. "They are well connected with the Ministry of Interior and sometimes the minister himself, and usually we have to let them go." A checkpoint commander, Maj. Ammar Zengara, summed up the country's three biggest problems: "Militias, militias, militias. Everyone has one."'

[Kagemusha]

2. Puts mixed marriage tension in the US to shame.

But man, almost a THIRD are mixed marriages? In this environment? Has to be both a speed bump against full scale genocide and a disaster waiting to happen...

Edit: I wrote the speed bump part before I read post #2 (probably was being posted while I was typing). I mean, that much is true. Normal people don't like civil war. That's a good thing about humanity in general. But, OTOH, you can just say, ok, the family is the male's religion, the female gets to shut up and submit. Then it's ok to go kill people of "other" religions in other families and towns and cities without a problem. It must seem a simple solution to a fundamentalist..