Anti-Shiite Fervor Stuns Iraqi Community

"Jul 10, 2:38 PM (ET)
By HAMZA HENDAWI

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Salwa Jabr Saihoud wanted to grant her father's dying wish that she accompany his body on its journey to burial in Najaf. It mattered little to her that the road to the Shiite holy city is one of the most dangerous in Iraq.

The journey ended in horror.

Two of her brothers, three other close relatives and a family friend were kidnapped en route to Najaf. Their bodies were later found with gunshot wounds. Her father's body, in a rickety wooden coffin, was tossed into a river. It was all the work of Sunni Arab insurgents.

"We are Shiites. We must bury our dead in Najaf no matter what," Salwa Saihoud, 40, said at the family home in Sadr City, an eastern Baghdad district where some 2.5 million Shiites live. "I am the oldest of his daughters, and it was my father's wish that I go. He knew he was dying."

Such horrifying killings are becoming commonplace in Iraq, an ethnically and religiously diverse nation torn by crime and a two-year insurgency that followed the U.S.-led war to oust Saddam Hussein. Hundreds of men, mostly Shiites, have turned up headless or riddled with bullets.

What is unusual about the Saihoud family's case is the irreverence for the dead. Arab tradition still heeds ancient codes prescribing respect for the dead and for a family's grief. The depth of hatred exposed by these killings so alarmed Iraq's Shiite majority that the funerals were attended by senior Shiite legislators, including former Washington insider Ahmad Chalabi.

"What sin did they commit to deserve this fate?" shrieked Saihoud's black-clad widow, Riyasa Abdul-Kareem Taher, as she and other relatives recounted the May 9 killings to The Associated Press. "What have they done?"

Iraq's Shiites have for centuries buried their dead in Wadi al-Salam, or The Valley of Peace, a cemetery in Najaf that is thought to be the world's largest. They believe that burial there, close to the shrine of Imam Ali, a 7th century Shiite saint, will bless the souls of the dead and secure their passage to heaven.

The 12-member party had set off on the 100-mile journey to Najaf in a minibus with Saihoud's coffin strapped to the roof. Twenty miles south of Baghdad, in a mainly Sunni area, a dark blue Opel sedan blocked the road.

Gunmen yelled at Salwa Saihoud, the driver and four elderly passengers to get out. "Some of them were screaming 'shoot them! Shoot them now!'" she recalled.

The seven gunmen hurried into the minibus and drove off, taking with them the six men. They included the late Saihoud's two sons - Saad, 30 and father of two, and Adel, a 37-year-old who could not hear or speak and had two children.

It was the last time the family saw them alive.

A day later, police fished the coffin of 70-year-old Saihoud from the Latifiyah river. The next day, the six men were found with gunshot wounds to the head and neck. Some of the bodies were mutilated.

In the reception room at their one-story house on a dusty alley, mourners fell silent each time Saihoud's widow and Souriyah Mohammed, the mother of one of the murdered relatives, let out an anguished cry.

For months now, hardly a day has passed without the discovery of bodies, mostly of young Shiite males. The killings have helped poison Sunni-Shiite relations, already strained over the Sunni-dominated insurgency.

Sunni Arabs, embittered by the fall of Saddam, a fellow Sunni, say they are being targeted by the Shiite-led government. The Shiites say the Sunnis are unwilling to accept postwar realities.

The Saihouds were particularly distressed about the mutilation of the bodies, especially that of 30-year-old father of four Walid Khayoun. His right arm, bearing a tattoo of Imam Ali's sword, was cut off.

"By God, I hate them," an angry Salwa Saihoud said about Sunni Arabs before she added: "But I cannot judge them all."

The resentment has turned into defiance. Last month, about 70 of the Saihouds boarded four minibuses and braved the road to Najaf to visit the father's grave 40 days after his death, as prescribed by tradition.

"We were all armed, including the women," said Raad Saihoud, one of the late Saihoud's three surviving sons. "And we were looking for martyrdom." "
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