One of the holiest shrines for Shia Muslims, whose partial destruction last year helped provoke a wave of sectarian violence in Iraq, has been attacked again, raising fears of another outbreak of hatred between the country's warring communities.
Explosives brought down the two minarets of the Golden Mosque in Samarra at around 9am, local time, this morning. There was no report on casualties or how the attackers managed to evade a police guard at the site.
The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, declared a curfew in Baghdad and asked for American reinforcements to be sent to the mainly Sunni town, which has been under a military blockade in recent weeks, to contain any violence. Reprisal attacks against Sunnis began within minutes of last year's bombing.
This morning police at the mosque were seen firing into the air to prevent crowds from coming any closer. Hours later, the Interior Ministry said that members of "a terrorist group" had been arrested and were being questioned about the bombing.
Anticipating unrest, the radical Shia cleric, Hojatoleslam Moqtadr al-Sadr, called for restraint, declaring three days of mourning and peaceful demonstrations. The bloc of 30 MPs loyal to his movement walked out of parliament to protest against the attack.
Officials in Mr al-Maliki's office blamed the explosions on al Qaeda-linked insurgents, the same group that bombed the shrine last year. A White House spokesman later said the attack had "all the marks of al-Qaeda... in the sense that it seems clearly an attempt to inflame sectarian tensions."
Saleh al-Haidari, the chairman of the Shia Waqf, the government agency that looks after Shia mosques and religious schools in Iraqm, said: "The explosion targeted the two golden minarets. They have been damaged... This is a criminal act which aims at creating sectarian strife."
Witnesses in Samarra, a Sunni-dominated town in the middle of the Sunni Triangle north of Baghdad, said the two towers fell within minutes of each other. "I was near the shrine when I heard big explosions that sent a thick cloud of dust in the sky covering the entire area," said a resident who did not want to be named.
"I quickly ran to the street from where I could see the shrine clearly. I saw one of the minarets was down. Seven minutes later as I was watching the shrine, another explosion occurred and the second minaret came crumbling down," he told the AFP news agency.
Imad Nagi, who owns a shop 100 yards from the mosque, said: "After the dust settled, I couldn’t see the minarets any more. So, I closed the shop quickly and went home."
Security at the Golden Mosque, which houses the al-Askariya shrine, a sacred site of pilgrimage for Shias, had been tightened since the attack on February 22 last year when insurgents dressed in police uniforms laid a string of explosives that destroyed its signature, gold-plated dome but left the minarets largely untouched.
Within hours of the February blasts, Shia gangs raided Sunni mosques up and down the country, beginning a period of sectarian shootings, bombings and mass kidnappings that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and divided once-mixed communities into suspicious, separated neighbourhoods.
There will be fears that this morning's bombing will trigger another round of inter-community violence, which lessened at the start of the joint American-Iraqi security plan in February but has shown signs of renewing.
In Baghdad, Sunnis said they were afraid that the reprisals would begin tonight. Marwan Faleh, a 38-year-old broker told The Times: "We have gathered together the young men in our street, each one has a weapon. We told them to be ready if anyone attacks us we will all open fire."
"We expect an attack during the curfew because we don’t trust the checkpoint at the end of our road. I plan to stay at home over the next few days because I believe more people will be killed."
The al-Askariya shrine is so important to Shia Muslims because it holds the tombs of two imams -- direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad -- as well as being where the so-called "Hidden Imam" went into hiding in 878 to prepare for his eventual return among men.
According to Shia tradition, the Imam, or Mahdi, will reappear one day to punish the sinful and "separate truth from falsehood". For many years, a saddled horse and soldiers would be brought to the shrine in Samarra every day to be ready for his return, a ritual that was repeated in Hilla, about 100 miles to the south, where it was also thought that Mahdi might reappear.
Since last year’s bombing, the shrine has been guarded by about 60 US Federal Protection Service forces and 25 local Iraqi police who kept watch on the perimeter, according to Samarra town officials, which will prompt questions about how insurgents have managed to penetrate the site again.
There were reports today that a new force of Iraqi police, from the Interior Ministry in Baghdad, had taken over security at the mosque in April. Since mid-May Samarra has been virtually besieged by US and Iraqi army units after a suicide bombing that killed 12 police officers in the town.
Sunni MPs and local residents complained of "collective punishment" after US forces closed the main bridge into Samarra with concrete slabs and turned away three aid trucks carrying supplies from the Iraqi Red Crescent. Ten people, including seven children, reportedly died at the local hospital for lack of electricity and medicine.
It is not known whether today's attack was related to the local conditions although Reuters quoted an Iraqi Interior Ministry official saying that the police foiled an attempt to bomb the shrine two weeks ago.
The destruction of the minarets will renew calls for the shrine to be rebuilt. American and Iraqi officials promised last year that the dome, one of the largest in the Islamic world, would be repaired but work has not yet begun.
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