Amir Taheri:
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And, yet, on Wednesday, the Serene Imam, the Tamer of Anger, was unable to save his people from the worst. Before the sun had set, at least 1,000 people — mostly women and children — were dead, trampled under foot in a stampede or drowned in the Tigris River into which they had jumped from a bridge jam packed with pilgrims.
Then something unexpected happened: Sunnis watching from the neighboring Azamiyah district of Baghdad jumped into the river to save the screaming Shiites from drowning.
"Our Sunni neighbors saved hundreds of lives," Muhammad Jawad, a teacher in Sadr City (the Shiite slum on the river's eastbank), who was present on the scene, told Arab TV channels. "Many Sunni brothers also drove their cars to the river to take the wounded to hospital."
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"Far from pushing Iraq towards civil war, as some in the West suggest, this tragedy could bring Shiites and Sunnis closer together," says Ghazi al-Yawar, Iraq's vice president and leader of the nation's largest Sunni Arab tribe. "The Shiites saw how many Sunnis risked their own lives by jumping into the river to save theirs. They saw Iraqis coming to help other Iraqis."
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