Soldier and social scientist Adam L. Silverman attempts to redress the perception that sectarian violence in Iraq is fueled by doctrinal irreconcilables rather than pragmatic geopolitical aspirations:
Virtually all the individuals we interviewed, whether sheikhs, internally displaced Iraqis, or average Iraqis, told us that tribes tended to be mixed religiously. Even if a tribe in Mada’in where we were conducting interviews was completely Sunni, it typically had a branch elsewhere in Iraq that was Shiite. Likewise, the Shiite tribes had Sunni branches. Moreover, all the sheikhs indicated that their tribe’s people intermarry with members of other local tribes regardless of sectarian orientation. When asked, about 2/3rds of tribal leaders insisted that “sectarian” conflict was really about resources. The remainder asserted that outside religious extremist influences (whether deriving from the Wahhabi form of Islam or from hard line Shiism) are to blame and that often that influence is used to manipulate Iraqis in order to usurp their resources. We are confident in our finding that the inter-communal disputes are resource-driven, not the result of religion. Theology and dogma are used as a cover for negative actions taken.
[…]A great example of how this resource war, disguised as sectarian conflict, operates is the dispute over the Salman al Farsi Mosque. This mosque named for a Persian companion of the Prophet Muhammed, located in Salman Pak—the Markaz Mada’in—has historically been a Sunni mosque. […] The Salman al Farsi Mosque, or rather its waqf (endowment) is one of the largest landowners in the area—both inside and outside the city. As a result many of the residents are actually renting their homes, shops, and farms from the mosque. Whoever controls the mosque controls its endowment and whoever controls the endowment controls a lot of money and power. While the mosque has traditionally been under Sunni control, and we were told that a string of historical documents proves this assertion, under the new Iraqi government it was somehow moved from the Sunni Mosque Ministry into the Shia Mosque Ministry.
Read the entire piece here.