BAGHDAD, Iraq – Following the July 24 suicide attack in the Shiite area of Kadhimiya in Baghdad, member of parliament (MP) Awatef Naameh, a Shiite herself, asked why Kadhimiya had been targeted and not the neighboring majority Sunni suburb of Adhamiya as well. Naameh called the attack, which killed 21 and wounded 36, a “genocide targeting Iraq’s Shiites.” Her statement raised the ire of Sunni MP Liqaa Wardi, who deemed it “sectarian incitement.” The Islamic State (IS) ultimately claimed responsibility.

The statements by the two MPs reflect the sectarian conflict that has simmered and sometimes flared in Iraq, at one point erupting in civil war, between 2006 and 2008, with Kadhimiya and Adhamiya serving as two opposing battlefields. These neighboring areas — which face each other on opposite banks of the Tigris River — date back to Baghdad's early days, some 1,000 years ago, and share a history of coexistence disturbed by bursts of violent conflict.

Kadhimiya is home to the shrine of Imam al-Kadhim, one of the Shiite's twelve imams, who was, according to Shiites, poisoned in prison in 173 A.H. (A.D. 790) at the order of the Sunni Caliph Harun al-Rashid. (Sunnis believe Kadhim died of natural causes.) The Baghdad suburb is also home to the shrine of Mohammed al-Jawad, Kadhim's grandson and the ninth Shiite imam.

Adhamiya, on the other hand, is home to the mosque of Abu Hanifa al-Numan​, an eighth-century Sunni imam and founder of one of the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence, the royal cemetery (also Baghdad's main Sunni cemetery), and the Great Imam University College, a training school for Sunni imams, as well as the offices of the Sunni Waqf (endowment).