AP News, June 18th, 2007
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki fired the Basra police chief Monday over his force's failure to stop weekend attacks on Sunni mosques in Iraq's second-largest city, police said.
At least two major mosques were attacked in the Basra area over the weekend in retaliation for Wednesday's toppling of minarets at a prized Shiite shrine in Samarra.
A new police chief would replace Maj. Gen. Mohammed Hamadi al-Mousawi on Monday, a Basra police officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.
Al-Mousawi was "seen as incompetent, because he couldn't stop attacks by Shiite extremists against two Sunni mosques in the wake of the Samara attacks," the officer said.
An adviser to al-Maliki confirmed the report but would not elaborate. An official in the office of al-Maliki's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, confirmed it as well, saying only that the replacement came as part of the reconstruction of the police department.
Both men spoke on condition of anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak about the matter.
Wednesday's explosions brought down towering minarets at the Askariya shrine and stoked panic that Iraq could fall further into a spiral of sectarian killings.
In February 2006, Sunni militants blew up the same shrine's glistening golden dome, in an attack whose aftermath has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis.
On Saturday, bombers loaded into pickup trucks pulled up to the al-Ashrah al-Mubashra mosque in Basra at dawn and minutes after they left, a huge explosion tore through the building and leveled it completely.
It was unclear whether there were any guards present at the time, and why Iraqi security forces did not intervene, but witnesses in nearby houses said they saw no sign of any immediate response from police.
As they were leaving, the insurgents wrote graffiti on the mosque complex's outer wall with the names of revered Shiite saints, witnesses said. They also hoisted a green Shiite flag over a crumbling part of the mosque complex, they said.
On Friday, police said bombers posing as TV cameramen destroyed another important Sunni mosque near Basra, the Talha Bin al-Zubair shrine, prompting al-Maliki to order a curfew in Basra through Sunday.
