Theocratic Basra

George Packer's rather frightening article in the New Yorker alerted the editors at OTR to the rising menace of Shiite fundamentalism in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Now we have this lovely vignette from the Times UK of college students being beaten and shot to death by armed thugs loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr for the anti-Islamic crime of playing "immoral" music in a park. There is little doubt of the guilty party:

Far from disavowing the attack, senior al-Sadr loyalists said that they had a duty to stop the students’ “dancing, sexy dress and corruption”. “We beat them because we are authorised by Allah to do so and that is our duty,” Sheik Ahmed al-Basri said after the attack. “It is we who should deal with such disobedience and not the police.”

When one of the survivors of this sickening attack, Ali, attempted to rally protestors at the University, the students were informed :

When the students tried to organise demonstrations, they were broken up by the Mehdi Army. Later the university was surrounded by militiamen, who distributed leaflets threatening to mortar the campus if they did not call off the protests.
When the militia began to set up checkpoints and arrest students, Ali fled to Baghdad.

Sweet Christ! Mortar the campus! Sometime soon the Iraqi commandos who are successfully cleaning out insurgents north of Bagdhad need to spin south to flush out these theocratic bastards.