Bobby Ghosh in Time Magazine:
It has come to this: the hatred between Iraq’s warring sects is now so toxic, it contaminates even the memory of a shining moment of goodwill. On Aug. 31, 2005, a stampede among Shi’ite pilgrims on a bridge over the Tigris River in Baghdad led to hundreds jumping into the water in panic. Several young men in Adhamiya, the Sunni neighborhood on the eastern bank, dived in to help. One of them, Othman al-Obeidi, 25, rescued six people before his limbs gave out from exhaustion and he himself drowned. Nearly 1,000 pilgrims died that afternoon, but community leaders in the Shi’ite district of Khadamiya, on the western bank, lauded the “martyrdom” of al-Obeidi and the bravery of his friends. Adhamiya residents, for their part, held up al-Obeidi’s sacrifice as proof that Sunnis bore no ill will toward their Shi’ite neighbors across the river.
Eighteen months on, one of the men who jumped into the river to help the Shi’ites says al-Obeidi “wasted his life for those animals.” Hamza Muslawi refuses to talk about how many he himself saved, saying it fills him with shame. “If I see a Shi’ite child about to drown in the Tigris now,” says the carpenter, “I will not reach my hand out to save him.”
More here.