Opinion (Patrick Cockburn): The year of gold and blood

The golden dome of the al-Askari shrine before and after bombing.

The history of Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein has been full of fake turning-points - the capture of Saddam in 2003, the supposed handover of sovereignty to Iraqis in 2004, the parliamentary elections and referendum in 2005. All these events were greeted by the White House and Downing Street at the time as important and encouraging signs of progress, justifying the invasion of 2003. But with every year the war has become more intense. Iraqis are now dying at the rate of about 1,000 a week, according to the UN. Civil war is raging in central Iraq. The war against the US soldiers has also escalated, though American casualties are far lower. The country is awash with blood.

There were two real turning-points of very different kinds in Iraq in 2006: the blowing up of the Shia al-Askari shrine in Samarra on 22 February; and the Republican defeat in the US mid-term elections, in which Iraq was the main issue, on 7 November. The first was the starting gun for the present sectarian bloodbath. The second also had a vast effect within Iraq as the US began to contemplate failure.

In Samarra, nobody was killed by the explosion itself, though it wrecked the great golden dome of the shrine. But the attack led to a Shia onslaught on Sunni Arabs. Shia restraint, already close to breaking point, finally gave way after more than two years of bombs aimed at army and police recruits, who were mostly Shia, as well as at purely civilian targets. Within days, 1,300 people, mostly Sunni, were dead. People caught in the wrong areas at the wrong time were dragged from their cars and slaughtered.

Amid this bloodbath, it is difficult to pick out long-term trends. However, several were clearly visible in 2006:

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