with the U.S. occupation, the Bush administration concluded that elements associated
with the al-Qaida network had moved into Iraq.
The level of violence ebbed and flowed during 2003, 2004, and 2005, often in
response to political developments, such as the three elections held in 2005. Most
attacks were small in scale, primarily roadside bombs that each killed a handful of U.S.
or Iraqi soldiers. Massive car bombs or suicide bombs, often against such civilian tar-
gets as mosques or open-air markets, heightened the sense of insecurity, however, and
led Iraqis to wonder whether their country would ever again be safe.
The Samarra Mosque Bombing
The Bush administration hoped that elections in December 2005 would give all Iraqis
a sense of ownership of their new government and thus eliminate the incentive for
violence and any residual public support for those who committed violent acts. Even
before the newly elected government could take its place, however, a spectacular act
of violence in February 2006 flattened these hopes. Early in the morning of February
22, gunmen disguised as police took control of the Askariya mosque in Samarra, about
sixty miles north of Baghdad. As the burial site of two of the most important leaders
in the early years of Shiite Islam, the mosque with a famed gold dome was a revered
shrine for Shiites. The gunmen set off explosives that collapsed the dome into rubble
and destroyed most of the rest of the mosque.
Enraged Shiites responded to this bombing with violent rampages through Sunni
neighborhoods in Baghdad and other cities, and Sunnis attacked Shiites, establishing
a pattern of sectarian violence that would continue for the rest of 2006 and into 2007.
The Shiites formed militias that attacked Sunnis in a campaign of terror intended to
force them from mixed neighborhoods. Most of the Sunni violence took the form of
roadside bombs aimed at Iraqi and U.S. security forces or car bombs and suicide bombs
intended to kill large numbers of Shiites as they shopped or worshiped.
By the end of 2006, the UN mission in Iraq had compiled figures estimating that
at least 34,000 Iraqis had died from various forms of violence in 2006 and another
36,000-plus had been injured. Academic experts, human rights groups, and others esti-
mated that the total number of Iraqis killed since the U.S. invasion was at least 50,000
and possibly as many as a half-million. The United Nations also estimated that about
10 percent of Iraq’s 26 million people had fled their homes since 2003, most of them
taking refuge in neighboring Syria and Jordan, where they became a major burden
despite UN refugee assistance.
In the United States, the figure that captured attention was the number of U.S.
service personnel who had died since the invasion. That number grew steadily from
the toll of roadside bombings and other attacks specifically aimed at the U.S. occu-
pation. The total of U.S. deaths reached 1,000 in September 2004, then 2,000 in
October 2005, and 3,000 at the end of 2006. These numbers are small when com-
pared to U.S. casualties in other long wars, but the steady climb in deaths contributed
to a growing sense in the United States that Americans were dying in Iraq for a cause
already lost. The bombings also wounded thousands of U.S. personnel, many of them
with life-debilitating injuries. Roadside bombs proved especially effective weapons
against the U.S. military, which found itself spending billions of dollars to protect the
troops as they patrolled Iraq’s cities and countryside.
IRAQ AND THE GULF WARS 533