Analysis: Shattered Iraq limps into 2007

BAGHDAD -- Iraq will limp into 2007 a shattered nation after a year that saw a bloody insurgency become a brutal sectarian war that threatens to rip the country into shreds.

Amid the daily bombings, kidnappings, and late-night murders that increasingly define life in Iraq, one single incident this year set the tone for the country's dramatic disintegration.

"Iraq's deadliest terrorist attack killed no one," wrote Peter Galbraith in the first line of his recent book The End of Iraq, referring to the February 22 bombing of a golden-domed Shiite shrine in Samarra.

The destruction of the revered shrine by Sunni insurgents lit the fuse of Iraq's sectarian powder keg, and many are now saying that it was the opening shot in a civil war.

Sectarian killings had taken place before Samarra, however.

Since Saddam Hussein's fall in March 2003, Shiite gunmen have hunted down former members of his Baath party, and Sunni extremists led by Al Qaeda's Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi had called for the killing of Shiites.

But after Samarra, black-clad Shiite militiamen poured into the streets and started hunting down Sunni civilians.

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