109 HRES 984 IH: Expressing the sense of the House of U.S. House of Representatives 2006-09-06 text/xml EN Pursuant to Title 17 Section 105 of the United States Code, this file is not subject to copyright protection and is in the public domain.

IV 109th CONGRESS 2d Session H. RES. 984 IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES September 6, 2006 Ms. Waters submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on International Relations RESOLUTION Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war since the February 22, 2006, bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, Iraq, one of the holiest places for Shiite Muslims.

Whereas the United States went to war with Iraq on March 19, 2003; Whereas the government of Saddam Hussein fell in April 2003 as a result of the military action taken by the United States; Whereas since the fall of the Hussein government there has been a struggle to gain political power by numerous Iraqi political and religious factions; Whereas a majority of political scientists define a civil war as a war between different sections or parties of the same country or nation in which casualties are in excess of 1,000; Whereas the death toll in Iraq has far exceeded this level, with a conservative estimate of 30,000 and may be in excess of 100,000 Iraqis killed since the war began on March 19, 2003; Whereas violence in Iraq has claimed the lives of approximately 100 Iraqis each day in May and June of 2006; Whereas Baghdad’s central morgue reported that it received the bodies of 1,855 people in July of 2006, an average of nearly 60 a day, representing a 16 percent increase compared to June and a 71 percent increase compared to January; Whereas the United Nations estimates that more than 14,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq in the first half of 2006; Whereas on February 22, 2006, Sunni Muslims bombed and partially destroyed the Golden Mosque in Samarra, one of Shiite Muslims holiest sites, unleashing a nationwide wave of sectarian violence between Iraq’s Shiite and Sunni Muslims which has yet to subside; Whereas Iraq’s former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a Shiite, declared in March 2006 that Iraq was in a civil war; Whereas Adnan Dulaimi, a Sunni Arab leader, said of the violence in Iraq, It’s bloodshed and killing of the innocents, killing the elderly and women and children. It’s mass killings. It’s nothing less than an undeclared civil war; Whereas Ayad Samaraie, a leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said of the violence in Iraq, It is actually a civil war; Whereas Fadhil Sharih, a leader of the Sadr movement, said of the violence in Iraq, It seems clear that it’s been moving toward the direction of civil war; and Whereas a senior Iraqi government official was quoted by Reuters on July 23, 2006, saying of the violence in Iraq, If this is not civil war … then I don’t know what is: Now, therefore, be it

That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that Iraq has been in the midst of a civil war since the February 22, 2006, bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, Iraq, one of the holiest places for Shiite Muslims.