Amir Taheri Sees a Silver Lining -- Iraqis Helping Other Iraqis

The horrendous deaths of approximately 1,000 panic-stricken Shiite pilgrims in Iraq last week seemed to highlight the chaotic conditions we confront there, but Amir Taheri sees something else.

He writes:

[A]t 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."

In contrast to the pessimism that pervaded western press accounts of the tragedy, Amir notes the response from religious leaders, both Shiite and Sunni.

"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."

Taheri is optimistic. He sees a genuine coming together and the emerging acceptance of.

a political process in which matters are resolved through elections, in the parliament and the newly created media rather in the street. Even most Sunni Arabs now wish to pursue their political goals through this new process, rather than via the terrorist insurgency that falsely speaks in their name.

If he is right, and I certainly hope he is, Iraq may be well on the way to full recovery.

Read the whole thing here.