Yesterday's disaster in Baghdad, in which up to 1,000 Shia pilgrims were crushed or drowned when they panicked on a bridge over the river Tigris, cannot but add to communal and sectarian tensions there at a time when Iraq is perilously near to civil war over its political future.
All the more will this be so if suspicions are confirmed that the panic was provoked by earlier mortar attacks on the huge crowd and by agents provocateurs in it who spread rumours about a suicide bomber. The transitional government's inability to provide elementary security and public order in the capital has once more been vividly demonstrated, even if inter-communal tension is not immediately to blame.
As in other deeply divided societies such religious pilgrimages express current hostilities and resentments. This annual event commemorates the martyrdom of Moussa al-Kadhim by the Sunni Caliphate at the end of the eighth century. He is revered by Shia Muslims ever since but despised by ultra-orthodox Sunnis. Such commemorations reproduce and reinforce existing tensions between the two communities. They have been immensely exacerbated by the US-led invasion and occupation of the country and the resulting reconfiguration of its power structures. As a result the previously dominant Sunnis have lost out and foresee a bleak future as a rejected elite group.
Iraqis are to vote in six weeks on a new constitution. Although the document is approved by the majority of the country's Kurdish and Shia populations, the 20 per cent Sunni minority rejects it. But so do the majority of Shias in the Baghdad region. They too would lose out if a loose federation allowing for substantial Kurdish and southern Shia autonomy, including control over the country's crucial oil resources, is approved. Acting together, Sunni and Shia voters in Baghdad and the central region of Iraq could overturn the draft constitution on October 15th. This would lead to a renegotiation of the document, potentially in less fevered conditions and with less pressure from the United States for a politically favourable outcome which would allow some of its troops to be withdrawn next year.
Yesterday's disaster feeds into this highly charged and uncertain political situation. There is no let-up in the lethal resistance movement against foreign troops and the transitional government, which has its main base in Sunni areas and is supported by foreign Islamist fighters. The prospect of losing power to opposing socio-religious blocs in a loose federation can only stoke up this movement by making a civil war for survival more realistic not to mention the potential breakup of such a dysfunctional state, which would have huge consequences for its neighbours and for regional stability.
The horrifying deaths of 1,000 people, and the way in which ordinary Sunni Iraqis came to the aid of survivors yesterday, could help to head off such a bleak scenario. Iraqis now need all the human solidarity they can muster.