Who will stop them?

Mahmood Elahi, Iris Street, Ottawa, Canada
While the month-long Shiite Hezbollah and Israel war in Lebanon caused 1000 Lebanese and 100 Israeli deaths, more than 3,000 Shiites were killed by the Sunni extremists in Iraq during the same period. These Sunni extremists have bombed Shiite mosques filled with devotees during Friday prayers. They have attacked schools, hospitals and markets in mostly Shiite areas.

The slaughter of the Shiite majority by the Sunni minority in Iraq had been going on long before the US-led invasion. During Saddam Hussein's Sunni-minority rule, Shiites were systematically brutalised. It may be recalled that when after the First Gulf War in 1991, the Shiite majority rose in revolt against Saddam's brutal rule, his largely Sunni Republican Guards massacred them without mercy. Although the Sunni minority have lost their grip on power after the American invasion of 2003, the Sunni insurgents are systematically killing the Shiites in the name of fighting the coalition forces. For the Sunni extremists, the Shiites are heretics and must be destroyed. The Shiites are now retaliating by killing, albeit in much smaller numbers, Sunnis.

Who will stop the Sunni extremists from butchering their fellow Shiite Muslims in Iraq and Pakistan?