By Gong Shaopeng

The golden dome of the Askariyayn Mosque in Samarra, the holy site of Iraq's Shi'ite Muslims, went crashing down amidst a powerful blast on Wednesday last week. The event has pushed Iraq, which is already torn by political tumults and armed insurgency, to the brink of civil war.

The Shi'ite sect of Islam took form revolving around the nucleus of the clan of Ali, Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law.

Ali was revered as Imam and there were altogether 12 Imams who enjoyed the same supreme religious position as the Prophet. Making pilgrimage to the Imams' mausoleums is the compulsory obligation of the Shi'ite Muslims. The mosques which house the Imams' tombs are to the Shi'ites what Mecca is to the Sunnis.

There are only five such mosques in the world. Apart from the Alial-Rida Mosque in Iran's Mashhad, all the rest are in Iraq Karbala Mosque in Najaf, Husayn in Karbala, Kazimiyyah in Baghdad and Askariyayn in Samarra.

In Askariyayn is buried Alial-Hade, the 10th Imam and Hassan, the 11th.

The devastation of the Askariyayn Mosque angered the Shi'ites tremendously. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the supreme religious leader of the Shi'ite Muslims, went on television, calling on the Shi'ite masses to stage peaceful demonstrations against the evil assault on the Askariyayn Mosque.

Ibrahim al-Jaafari, prime minister of the Iraqi interim government, who had been nominated to organize a new cabinet, declared a three-day national mourning. Sunni and Kurd leaders also condemned the assault. Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, Iraqi national security adviser, pointed his finger at al-Qaida.

Despite the fact that both Sistani and Jaafari urged calm and restraint, massive sectarian and ethnic strife broke out, touched off by attacks on Sunni mosques. Several hundred people have perished in the bloody clashes. The media sounded the alarm: Iraq is now on the brink of civil war.

The tragedy, to a certain extent, is related to the forming of a permanent government in Iraq, which will take place shortly.

The results of the parliamentary elections, which were held on December 15, 2005, came out on February 10.

The United Iraqi Alliance, a coalition of Shi'ites won 128 seats in the 275-seat parliament while the two Sunni groups Iraqi Accordance Front and the Iraqi Front for National Dialogue obtained 44 and 11 seats respectively. The Kurdish coalition got 53 seats and the secular Iraqi National List Party, headed by former premier Ayad Allawi, secured 25. The remaining 14 seats were shared by small political parties and independent candidates.

The parliament seats are roughly distributed among the Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds by the ratio of 3:1:1, which basically accords with the three groups' population proportion in the country's general populace.

Although the United Iraqi Alliance is the largest party in the parliament and is, therefore, entitled to name its prime ministerial candidate, who is supposed to form the new cabinet, its parliament seats are just shy of a 50 per cent majority. Therefore, it has to form a coalition government with other parties. Judging from the parliament seat ratio between the major groups and dictated by the necessity of reality, it is ideal to form a national unity government.

On February 12, Jaafari, as the candidate of the Dawa Party, beat Adil Abdel Mahdi, the candidate representing the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, by 64 to 63 votes in the elections staged inside the United Iraqi Alliance. He was therefore delegated the power to form the cabinet as the new prime minister. It was said that Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador to Iraq, suggested that on February 20 all parities involved begin making preparations for negotiations aimed at establishing a national unity government.

In forming such a new cabinet, Jaafari is presented with two hard nuts to crack: constitution revision and power sharing.

Both of the Sunni groups push for the revision of the article in the constitution that deprived Saddam Hussein's Baath Party of political rights.

Influent Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, however, demands that the high-grade autonomy granted to the Kurds by the constitution be invalidated. Former prime minister Allawi says that the portfolios of defence and internal affairs should be given to independent personnel instead of Shi'ites.

Jalal Talabani, Kurdish leader and also president of the interim government, threatens that the Kurdish coalition would not join the new government if Allawi's secular Iraqi National List is shut out of the new cabinet.

After the Askariyayn incident and occurrance of sectarian strife, the Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front declared that it would pull out of the negotiations on forming a national unity government because some Shi'ite leaders had poured oil on the fire of the clashes.

The Askariyayn blast was by no means an isolated and accidental event. Paul Bremer, the former supreme US civilian executive in Iraq, ordered the disbanding of all Iraqi troops and police departments of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003, before the war had died down. As a result, arms became available, fuelling the insurgency. Iraq's security situation was therefore robbed of overall management power.

In addition, the post-war Iraqi economy was a shambles, with its vitality recovering extremely slowly, and the country was in desperate need of capital. The organization of new Iraqi troops and police forces is on a painfully slow track. All this has only contributed to the chronically deteriorating security situation in the country.

In today's Iraq, people seem to start at the mere rustle of the leaves. The Askariyayn incident signifies that the security situation in the country is going from bad to worse.

The mosque incident is a crisis, which has not only placed the country within a whisker of civil war but has also disrupted the process of setting up a national government.

But just as an old Chinese saying goes: "Misfortune may be good luck in disguise," the crisis, if handled properly, could be turned into a good opportunity for establishing a new government which exercises effective administration of the country.

All parties in Iraq maintain that Iraq should be administrated by Iraqis. But fulfillment of this goal requires that favorable environs be first created, free of sectarian divides. Only when all the parties representing different religious and ethnic groups participate in the administration of the country, can a win-win situation be brought about.

In the current crisis, all parties and all ethnic groups are losers. It is therefore imperative that leaders of all sects discard their hostility and rein in their subordinates from committing any excessive acts. They should also sit down at the negotiating table, and try to defuse the crisis and stabilize the situation. All this will help bring about a national unity government with universal participation, and lead the suffering country out of chaos and into prosperity.

The author is a professor from the China Foreign Affair University.

(China Daily February 27, 2006)