On June 13, explosions destroyed the two 100-year-old minarets of the highly revered Shiite Askariya mosque in the largely Sunni inhabited city of Samarra, 100 kilometres north of Baghdad. “The Askariya shrine means a lot to us, the people of Samarra”, Abu Abdullah, a Sunni who lives next to the shrine, told the June 13 Washington Post, adding: “To lose the shrine hurt us a lot, and made us afraid about what will happen next. Someone wants to create sectarian strife by doing this act.”