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US military's classification of Baghdad's ethno-sectarian divide
Baghdad is like a jungle, the grey-bearded Shia militia leader said. “It is a savage place where the wild animals fight for their piece of territory. Each animal wants to take more land than the other.”
Abu Bakr takes his job as a commander in al-Mahdi Army extremely seriously. In Sadr City, he organises fighters at checkpoints to defend the Shia enclave from Sunni extremists in neighbouring districts.
His foot soldiers, followers of the Shia cleric Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr, are vigilant in protecting their territory. “The Takfiris [Sunni extremists] want to use Sunni areas as a base to attack the Shia and all of Iraq. They want to make Iraq a country for al-Qaeda,” Abu Bakr cautioned.
Across the Tigris, in western Baghdad, Abu Obeida, an al-Qaeda member, sits in his house in the Sunni district of Amariya. The 33-year-old has the air of one under siege. He talks about preparing to confront al-Mahdi Army and rails against them for murdering innocent civilians. He makes no mention of the car bomb attacks that his group has carried out against the Shia over the past three years.
“What we are trying to do right now is to prevent the expansion of these militias, so we are keeping our forces on the outskirts of our neighbourhoods to prevent them from invading,” Abu Obeida said. “Most important right now is for our groups not to lose our areas.”
More and more, Baghdad is splintering into Shia and Sunni enclaves that are increasingly no-go areas for anyone from outside. The trend is fuelled by the ugliest sectarianism. It also reflects a crude power grab, with both sides egged on by political parties aiming to maximise their clout in the Iraqi Government by dominating as much of the capital as possible. The result is that since February, when Sunnis bombed the golden-domed mosque in Samarra, a Shia shrine, 146,322 individuals have been displaced in Baghdad, according to the International Organisation for Migration.
The pattern is so pronounced that the US military has drawn up a new map of Baghdad to reflect its ethno-sectarian fault lines. Published here for the first time, it lists the mixed neighbourhoods considered to be most explosive. Four of the five are on the western bank of the Tigris, called Karkh, where mixed neighbourhoods are still prevalent. Predominently Shia Kadhamiya and the largely Sunni areas of Qadisiya, Amariya and Ghazaliya have become the deadliest battlegrounds, according to US forces.
The violent struggle for neighbourhoods goes well beyond a fight among outlaws. Armed groups belonging to the parliament’s two main Sunni and Shia political blocs fuel much of the violence, according to senior Iraqi officials. “There is a very clear connection between some of the displacements caused by armed groups in some neighbourhoods in and around Baghdad and the political parties that are in the Council of Representatives,” Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi National Security Adviser, told The Times.
Mr al-Rubaie refused to name the culprits. Officials have blamed the Islamic Party, the biggest Sunni political party in the country, and the Mahdi militia belonging to Hojatoleslam al-Sadr, whose movement has 32 parliament seats, the largest number in the ruling Shia coalition.
“The religious and political leaders don’t seem to have the will to stop it. The Islamic Party is involved. AlMahdi Army does it. These people are fighting each other,” Mahmoud Osman, a Kurd Parliament member, said.
A Shia government official said that the Islamic Party and the Muslim Scholars Association (MSA), the largest grouping of Sunni mosques in the country, had been working in tandem with the insurgent group the 1920 Revolution Brigade to force the Shia out of western Baghdad.
A US military officer acknowledged that the fight for political power was one of the main factors causing Sunni and Shia families to be evicted from their homes. “Control equals money and power. The more districts your ethnic group controls the more potential influence you will have in the Council of Representatives and the Government of Iraq through legal and non-legal means,” he said. He confirmed that al-Mahdi Army and the 1920 Revolution Brigade were main players in the campaign to cleanse neighbourhoods.
The growing number of danger zones has turned their metropolis into a place of dysfunction for ordinary Baghdadis. University students do not dare go to the Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiya to pick up their academic transcripts from the Higher Education Ministry’s registrar office; doctors stay away from Baghdad’s largest hospital, Medical City, afraid of armed groups. Many government ministers no longer head to their offices outside the green zone.
On Palestine Street, one of the main boulevards leading into Sadr City, al-Mahdi Army fighters set up fake checkpoints. Sunnis claim that the militants kidnap young Sunni men and kill them in the name of protecting their community, but for the innocent it is another front line to dodge.
The Sunni-Shia violence has become so bad that Major-General William Caldwell said that the US military had established ethno-sectarian fault lines throughout the city. “We monitor them very closely, with the Government of Iraq security forces, because those are very mixed neighbourhoods.”
In the past two weeks, fighting in western Baghdad between al-Mahdi Army and Sunni groups has caused Shia families to be evicted from Ghazaliya and al-Adal; Sunni families have been forced out of Jihad, Huriya and al-Ammal. On Baghdad’s eastern bank, called Rusafa, the mainly Sunni bloc of Adhamiya and its satellite neighbourhood al-Fadl are locked in a mortal battle with Sadr City and its surrounding Shia districts.
In a report released in October, the Brookings Institution, the Washington-based think-tank, named the same political groups as being suspected of fuelling the sectarian cleansing campaign in Iraq. It also mentioned another important Shia partner in the government, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
“The violence is neither spontaneous nor popular. Displaced people view the most extreme religious fronts – the office of Moqtada al-Sadr and SCIRI on the Shia side and the MSA and the Islamic Party on the Sunni side — as the main drivers of sectarian displacement,” the October report said. “The displacements clearly help further the political agenda of these extremist groups.”
For now, the capital’s battleground remains western Baghdad, where the Sunnis have their biggest footprint. “Our main task now is not to lose this part of the city,” Abu Obeida said.
In turn, some Shia are afraid that the Sunnis are trying to hold Kadhamiya hostage — in the way that Adhamiya is surrounded by the Shia in eastern Baghdad.
Lameeya Muhammad, 36, moved to the western Baghdad neighbourhood of Huriya two months ago, after her husband and two children were evicted from the nearby Sunni enclave of al-Adal. Last week, when long-haired Sunni gunmen made a raid into Huriya, men including Lameeya’s husband picked up their guns and traded fire from rooftops. The shoot-out was the final straw for six Sunni families still living on their street. They fled after the battle. “I’m sure they realised that al-Mahdi Army would come and take revenge,” Mrs Muhammad said.
Her husband, who refused to give his name, was depressed by what had happened. “We have no problems with our neighbours at all,” he said. “It’s all about these parties and political groups who are fighting each other through locals. You watch them at the parliament and you see how they are fighting each other in the sessions, so you understand how they are fighting each other out in the streets but we are the victims.”
City of the displaced
6.7m : the population of Baghdad
146,322: Baghdad residents displaced since February
38,766: displaced persons living in Baghdad (as of December 11)
85 per cent of displaced living in Baghdad come from within the city
72 per cent of displaced living in Baghdad are Shia
27 per cent of displaced living in Baghdad are Sunni
17 per cent of displaced living in Baghdad are Yazidi
Source: International Organisation for Migration
The Times is the only British paper to maintain a full-time Baghdad bureau
