Iraqi sheikh killed by al-Qaeda

Iraqi sheikh ‘killed by al-Qaeda’

A Sunni leader in the Iraqi province of Diyala, who encouraged his community to confront al-Qaeda in Iraq, has been killed by the group, police say.

The militants exploded a bomb in his house in the town of Kanaan, and fired mortars and rocket-propelled grenades at other houses and a Sunni mosque.
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Until a few months ago, al-Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni Arab insurgent groups were fighting side by side against Iraqi government and US-led forces.

But increasing numbers of the militants’ former allies in the Sunni community have turned against them, mainly because they dislike the austere form of Islam that they practise.

I believe that a bloody front between orthodox Sunni Muslims and their Salafi-Jihadist counterparts has opened up in several Iraqi provinces.

Other Sunni-Salafist flashpoints that might crop up in future include Algeria, Chechnya and Bosnia-Herzegovina, all of which have strong, indigenous populations of traditional Muslims who have had their nationalist problems monopolized by Salafi-Jihadists. For more on this phenomenon, read my earlier entry, Plotting Islamism’s success.

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