By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

Who is, or who are, behind the riots by anti-social elements in the holy city of Karbala, and why was the Iranian consulate attacked when an anti-government Iraqi activist was shot to death by unidentified assailants?
It is not too difficult to answer such questions in view of the strategic geo-political situation of Iraq and its rich resources.
Geographically, Iraq, which the US occupiers who failed to turn into an American base but still refuse to leave despite the demands of the Iraqi people and the unanimous decision of the parliament, is an oil-rich country sharing borders with Iran, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, with a narrow outlet to the Persian Gulf.
In demographic terms, its fertile south is heavily populated by Shi’a Arab Muslims, while its mountainous north is mostly made up of ethnic Kurds (following the Shafei Sunni school of jurisprudence), with pockets of Turkoman Shi’as and the Izadi non-Muslim creed.
Its arid west, is sparsely populated by the ten percent Sunni Arabs who used to rule all of Iraq during the 35-year reign of terror of the repressive Ba’th minority regime, (25 years under Saddam), which had left no stone unturned to make the southern Shi’a Muslims irreligious in order to serve as cannon fodder for its never-ending wars – against the Kurds, against the Islamic Republic of Iran for 8 long years, and the short-lived occupation of Kuwait.
Added to this, is the undeniable historical fact that ever since the end of Babylon over two-and-a-half millenniums ago, Mesopotamia and Persia, except for the brief Hellenistic occupation of Alexander the Macedonian and his Greek generals, as well as the couple of centuries of Ottoman occupation of Iraq that ended in 1917, have been part of a single realm and single government (the Achaemenids, the Parthians, the Sassanids, Islamic rule, the Abbasids, the, Buyids, the Seljuqs, the Ilkhanids, the Timurids, the Safavids, etc).
This means the people of the Iraq and Iran share inseparable ties of history, culture, and religion, which neither the Ottomans could break nor the Ba’thists, or for that matter the British and now the Americans.
Britain as part of its colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’, deepened ethnic differences, before passing Iraq on to the US, which with the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 under the leadership of Imam Khomeini, felt alarmed at the prospects of similar developments in the Land of the Two Rivers, and ordered the Baghdad regime to impose its destructive war.
Of course, if arms flowed freely to Saddam from the West including chemical weapons, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE felt no inhibitions in funding the Bat’hist war machine to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
All these plots failed to create bad blood between the Iraqi and Iranian Muslims, including the bid by Riyadh to turn Iraq into Takfiristan which was thoroughly defeated, thanks to the fatwa by Iraq’s senior-most religious authority, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Sistani, for mobilization of the Iraqi people into the popular Hashd ash-Shabi units, coupled with Iran’s timely help to the Iraqi people.
Now we better understand why the frustrated Americans, at the instigation of Israel (the tail that wags the dog), martyred in the most brutal manner the two leading anti-terrorist figures of the region, Iran’s General Qassem Soleimani and Iraq’s Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis last year.
Therefore, the riots that rocked Karbala and the attempted attack on the Iranian consulate, are part of a US-Zionist plot to defile the sanctity of the holy city in order to distract attention from the ongoing blasphemous attacks of the Israeli armed forces on the Palestinians at the sacred al-Aqsa Mosque.