Iraq - Good News Story

With Katrina in all the headlines, here is a good news story from Iraq that may have been overlooked.

And, yet, on Wednesday, the Serene Imam, the Tamer of Anger, was unable to save his people from the worst. Before the sun had set, at least 1,000 people — mostly women and children — were dead, trampled under foot in a stampede or drowned in the Tigris River into which they had jumped from a bridge jam packed with pilgrims.

Then something unexpected happened: Sunnis watching from the neighboring Azamiyah district of Baghdad jumped into the river to save the screaming Shiites from drowning.

"Our Sunni neighbors saved hundreds of lives," Muhammad Jawad, a teacher in Sadr City (the Shiite slum on the river's eastbank), who was present on the scene, told Arab TV channels. "Many Sunni brothers also drove their cars to the river to take the wounded to hospital."

[...]

"This tragedy should bring all Iraqis, Shiite and Sunni, Arab and Kurd, closer together," a spokesman for Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani, the primus inter pares of the Shiite clergy, said Thursday. "We must not allow enemies of Islam and of Iraq to exploit this tragedy for their evil ends."

Similar sentiments came from Harith al-Dhari, the Grand Mufti of the Iraqi Sunni Arabs. "Those who died are martyrs of the Iraqi people as a whole," he said.

"Far from pushing Iraq towards civil war, as some in the West suggest, this tragedy could bring Shiites and Sunnis closer together," says Ghazi al-Yawar, Iraq's vice president and leader of the nation's largest Sunni Arab tribe. "The Shiites saw how many Sunnis risked their own lives by jumping into the river to save theirs. They saw Iraqis coming to help other Iraqis."

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