In late February 2006, al-Qaeda destroyed the Askariya Shiite shrine in Samarra. During the previous two months that my cavalry squadron had been operating in Iraq, my main focus was the technical training of the Iraqi national police and combined operations with them against Sunni insurgents in west Baghdad. Before Samarra, it did not seem important which areas of Baghdad were Shiite or Sunni or that the police battalions I operated alongside were almost completely Shiite. Before Samarra, I assumed that Iraqi citizens saw the national police as the security arm of the elected, and thus legitimate, government and that the officers had the people’s support against insurgents. It took about three weeks after the attack, in which time my combat patrols sprang from one Sunni mosque to another to protect them from Shiite militias that were at times supported by members of the national police, for me to realize what was really going on. For me, Samarra came to define the nature of the violence in Iraq: civil war. Some say that Iraq cannot be in a civil war because the country’s major institutions are not fighting each other with conventional military forces. But this is too […]