In a fresh clash with his American allies, the Prime Minister of Iraq ordered the US military to halt the construction of concrete walls being built around some of the most violent neighbourhoods in Baghdad.

Nouri al-Maliki, the Shia leader, stepped in as Sunni communities complained that their neighbourhoods were being turned into ghettoes that could choke off life in their areas. “I oppose the building of the wall, and its construction will stop,” he said during a visit to Egypt yesterday. “There are other methods to protect neighbourhoods.”

The US military had started to build concrete walls around five Baghdad neighbourhoods, most of them Sunni, in an attempt to stop car bombers leaving them and death squads infiltrating them.

Mr al-Maliki, who has often been at odds with his US backers over security policy in the capital, said that “this wall reminds us of other walls”, in an apparent reference to the Israeli wall running through the Palestinian West Bank.

Sunnis living in the newly sealed-off enclaves had complained that the walls would cause severe traffic congestion and entrench the sectarian rift already dividing many Sunni from Shia areas.

“This will make our life hell,” Ahmed Ghafur, 35, a mosque guard, said. “We will spend half the day leaving and the other half coming back in. They will put us in a big prison and the militias will get information on our movements from their informers at the checkpoints. This will allow them to choose who to assassinate.”

However, the US miltary insisted that the walls had been started after consultation with local councils. Lieutenant-Colonel Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman, said: “It makes it harder to bring in weapons and car bombs.”

Abu Moamer, a Sunni professor of international relations, said that the wall plan “reflects the failure of the American and Iraqi Government and its inability to restore lost security and to establish the rule of law on the streets. Instead of one mixed Iraqi society, it will be two societies, Shia and Sunni.”

However, the effective civil war that already exists between the two communities was underscored yet again yesterday when two suicide car bombers killed another 17 people in an attack on a west Baghdad police station. In Mosul, in the north, gunmen stopped a minibus full of textile workers and shot dead 23 passengers.

Work had already started in many places, with heavily armed security forces protecting labourers as they erected endless six-tonne slabs of concrete, already a familiar sight in Baghdad where they entomb all government buildings, hotels and checkpoints.

Sunni residents of Ghazaliya, one of the most violent areas of western Baghdad, said that the Iraqi Army had also announced the construction of another dividing wall between their mainly Sunni district and Shuala, to the north, a predominantly Shia area where the Mahdi Army militia is strong.

They complained that the wall, running along a de facto green line between a Mahdi Army zone and a Sunni guerrilla-held area, enclosed a part of Ghazaliya that had been purged of Sunnis by the Shia militia, so reinforcing the ethnic cleansing.

Mr al-Maliki did not say what alternative method he was considering to replace the “gated community” scheme.

Walls have already been built around the Sunni town of Fallujah, with residents having to submit to fingerprint and retina scans before being given badges to return home. The Sunni towns of Rutba and Hit have also been fenced off by the US military.

The wall-building has confirmed fears among Iraqis that their country is being carved up along sectarian lines. Ali Naim, an Adhamiya engineer, said: “The Government had a hand in the sectarian conflict from the start. I used to think the US was stupid, but now I see that it was a plan to divide first Baghdad, then Iraq.”

Dividing lines

—Israel began constructing the West Bank barrier in 2005. It has three gates, which are opened for 20 minutes each day

—More than 20 walls, built in Belfast from the 1970s to divide the Catholic and Protestant communities, became renowned for their sectarian murals

—Almost half a million people were isolated in the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw when it was walled in by the Nazis in November 1940

—The Berlin Wall, begun in 1961, separated the East and West of the city for 28 years

—Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, is bisected by walls marking the Green Line drawn up at the 1974 truce

Source: Oxfam; geographyinaction.co.uk; University of San Francisco; die-berliner-mauer.de

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