This sectarian resentment was woven into the country’s fabric, a legacy of massacres and pogroms that dated back to Islam’s founding generation. And yet, particularly in the later decades of the twentieth century, Iraqis had come to share a common national identity and a uniquely Iraqi sense of patriotism, one that had been made stronger by an eight-year war against Iran’s Shiite-led theocracy. Before Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, Sunnis and Shiites mingled easily in Iraqi schools and universities and often lived side by side in mixed neighborhoods. Now, thanks in large measure to Zarqawi, the
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