[NYTr] IRAQ: A Tale of One City, Now Two

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

IPS - Nov 12, 2007
http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=40018

IRAQ: A Tale of One City, Now Two

by Ali al-Fadhily

BAGHDAD, Nov 12 (IPS) - The separation of religious groups in the face
of sectarian violence has brought some semblance of relative calm to
Baghdad. But many Iraqis see this as the uncertain consequence of a
divide and rule policy. Claims are going the rounds that sectarian
violence in Iraq has fallen, and that the U.S. military "surge" has
succeeded in reducing attacks against civilians. Baghdad residents
speak of the other side of the coin – that they live now in a largely
divided city that has brought this uneasy calm.

"I would like to agree with the idea that violence in Iraq has
decreased and that everything is fine," retired general Waleed
al-Ubaidy told IPS in Baghdad. "But the truth is far more bitter. All
that has happened is a dramatic change in the demographic map of Iraq."

And as with Baquba and other violence-hit areas of Iraq, he says a part
of the story in Baghdad is that there is nobody left to tell it. "Most
of the honest journalists have left."

"Baghdad has been torn into two cities and many towns and
neighbourhoods," Ahmad Ali, chief engineer from one of Baghdad's
municipalities told IPS. "There is now the Shia Baghdad and the Sunni
Baghdad to start with. Then, each is divided into little town-like
pieces of the hundreds of thousands who had to leave their homes."

Many Baghdad residents say that the claims of reduced violence can be
tested only when refugees go back home.

Many areas of Baghdad that were previously mixed are now totally Shia
or totally Sunni. This follows the sectarian cleansing in mixed
neighbourhoods by militias and death squads.

On the Russafa side of Tigris River, al-Adhamiya is now fully Sunni;
the other areas are all Shia. The al-Karkh side of the river is purely
Sunni except for Shula, Hurriya and small strips of Aamil which are
dominated by Shia militias.

"If the situation is good, why are five million Iraqis living in
exile," says 55- year-old Abu Mohammad who was evicted from Shula in
West Baghdad to become a refugee in Amiriya, a few miles from his lost
home.

"Americans and Iranians have succeeded in realising their old dream of
dividing the Iraqi people into sects. That is the only success they can
talk about."

Violence is no more hitting the headlines, but it clearly continues.
Bodies of Iraqis killed after being tortured are still found in garbage
dumps, although fewer than a few months ago.

"Iraqi and American officials should be ashamed of talking of
'unidentified bodies'," Haja Fadhila from the Ghazaliya area of western
Baghdad told IPS. "These are the bodies of Iraqis who had families to
support, and names to be proud of. But nobody talks about them, there
is no media. It is as if it is all taking place on Mars."

The Iraqi ministries for health and interior have said that they are
finding on average five to ten "unidentified bodies" on the streets of
Baghdad every day.

"Those Americans and their Iraqi collaborators in the Green Zone talk
of five or ten bodies being found everyday as if they were talking of
insects," Thamir Aziz, a teacher in Adhamiya told IPS. "We know they
are lying about the real number of martyrs, but even if it's true, is
it not a disaster that so many innocent Iraqis are found dead every
day?"

Most people blame the Iraqi police for the sectarian assassinations,
and the U.S. military for doing little to stop them.

"The Americans ask (Prime Minister Nouri al) Maliki to stop the
sectarian assassinations when they know very well that his ministers
are ordering the sectarian cleansing," Mahmood Farhan from the Muslim
Scholars Association, a leading Sunni group, told IPS.

A UN report released September 2005 held interior ministry forces
responsible for an organised campaign of detentions, torture and
killings. It said special police commando units accused of carrying out
the killings were recruited from the Shia Badr and Mehdi militias.

Retired Col. James Steele, who served as advisor to Iraqi security
forces under former U.S. ambassador John Negroponte, supervised the
training of these forces.

Steele had been commander of the U.S. military advisors group in El
Salvador in 1984-86; Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to neighbouring
Honduras 1981-85. Negroponte was accused of widespread human rights
violations by the Honduras Commission on Human Rights in 1994. The
Commission reported the torture and disappearance of at least 184
political workers.

The violations Negroponte oversaw in Honduras were carried out by
operatives trained by the CIA, according to a CIA working group set up
in 1996 to look into the U.S. role in Honduras.

The CIA records document that "special intelligence units", better
known as "death squads", comprised CIA-trained Honduran armed units
which kidnapped, tortured and killed thousands of people suspected of
supporting leftist guerrillas.

Negroponte was ambassador to Iraq for close to a year from June 2004.

[Ali, our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with
Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who travels
extensively in the region.]

(END/2007)