Text 755, 217 rader
Skriven 2006-05-29 14:42:52 av Alan Hess
Ärende: religious strife in Iraq?
=================================
If this is accurate (especially if it isn't just happening in Baghdad), this
does not bode well toward developing a unified country in Iraq.  When people
fear their neighbors solely due to their respective ethnicities, that's a
serious problem.  Perhaps a three atate solution (either three totally
independent states, or three stats under a federal government) really is the
only answer?
********

washingtonpost.com

Iraq Is the Republic of Fear

By Nir Rosen
Sunday, May 28, 2006; B01

Every morning the streets of Baghdad are littered with dozens of bodies,
bruised, torn, mutilated, executed only because they are Sunni or because they
are Shiite. Power drills are an especially popular torture device.

I have spent nearly two of the three years since Baghdad fell in Iraq. On my
last trip, a few weeks back, I flew out of the city overcome with fatalism.
Over the course of six weeks, I worked with three different drivers; at various
times each had to take a day off because a neighbor or relative had been
killed. One morning 14 bodies were found, all with ID cards in their front
pockets, all called Omar. Omar is a Sunni name. In Baghdad these days, nobody
is more insecure than men called Omar. On another day a group of bodies was
found with hands folded on their abdomens, right hand over left, the way Sunnis
pray. It was a message. These days many Sunnis are obtaining false papers with
neutral names. Sunni militias are retaliating, stopping buses and demanding the
jinsiya , or ID cards, of all passengers. Individuals belonging to Shiite
tribes are executed.

Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, dissidents called Iraq "the republic of
fear" and hoped it would end when Hussein was toppled. But the war, it turns
out, has spread the fear democratically. Now the terror is not merely from the
regime, or from U.S. troops, but from everybody, everywhere.

At first, the dominant presence of the U.S. military -- with its towering
vehicles rumbling through Baghdad's streets and its soldiers like giants with
their vests and helmets and weapons -- seemed overwhelming. The Occupation
could be felt at all times. Now in Baghdad, you can go days without seeing
American soldiers. Instead, it feels as if Iraqis are occupying Iraq, their
masked militiamen blasting through traffic in anonymous security vehicles,
shooting into the air, angrily shouting orders on loudspeakers, pointing their
Kalashnikovs at passersby.

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too,
are killing Iraqis.

Last fall I visited the home of a Sunni man called Sabah in the western Baghdad
suburb of Radwaniya, where the Sunni resistance had long had a presence, and
where a U.S. soldier had recently been killed. On Friday night a few days
before I came, his family told me, American soldiers surrounded the home where
Sabah lived with his brothers, Walid and Hussein, and their families and broke
down the door. The women and children were herded outside, walking past Sabah,
whose nose was broken, and Walid, who had the barrel of a soldier's machine gun
in his mouth. The soldiers beat the men with rifle butts, while the Shiite
Iraqi translator accompanying the troops exhorted the Americans to execute the
Sunnis.

As the terrified family waited outside, they heard three shots from inside. It
then sounded to them as though there was a scuffle inside, with the soldiers
shouting at each other. Thirty minutes later the translator emerged with a
picture of Sabah. "Who is Sabah's wife?" he asked. "Your husband was killed by
the Americans, and he deserved to die," he told her. At that he tore the
picture before her face.

Walid was then taken away, and inside the house the family found Sabah dead.
His bloody shirt showed three bullet holes that went through his chest; two of
the bullets had come out of his back and lodged in the wall behind him. Three
U.S.-made bullet casings were on the floor. Sofas and beds had been overturned
and torn apart; tables, closets, vases of plastic flowers, all were broken and
tossed around. Even the cars had been destroyed. Photographs of Sabah had been
torn up and his ID card confiscated. One photograph remained on his wife's
bureau: Sabah standing proudly in front of his Mercedes.

I later asked Hussein if they wanted revenge. "We are Muslim, praise God," he
said, "and we do not want revenge. He was innocent and he was killed, so he is
a martyr."

Across town, U.S. troops had also raided the Mustapha Huseiniya, a Shiite place
of worship in the Ur neighborhood. The Huseiniya, similar to a mosque, belonged
to the nationalistic and anti-occupation Moqtada al-Sadr movement, and in front
of its short tower were immense signs with images of the movement's important
clerics. The Sadr militia, known as the Army of the Mahdi, had been using the
Huseiniya as a base for counterinsurgency operations. Mahdi militiamen
kidnapped Sunnis suspected of supporting the insurgency, tortured them until
they confessed on video, and then executed them.

When the Americans raided the Huseiniya, they brought Iraqi troops with them.
They killed not only Mahdi fighters but also innocent Shiite bystanders,
including a young journalist I knew named Kamal Anbar, in what witnesses
described to me as summary executions. Although neighbors blamed the U.S.
troops, Iraqi troops were so laden with gear, flak jackets and helmets provided
by the Americans, they were often indistinguishable.

When I visited the next morning, the Huseiniya's floors, walls and ceilings
were stained with blood; pieces of brain lay in caked red puddles. Just as
Shiites cheered when the Americans hit Sunni targets, Sunni supporters of the
insurgency greeted news of the U.S. raid with satisfaction.

The Mahdi militiamen were already back in force that morning, blocking off the
roads and searching all who approached, wielding Iraqi police-issue Glock
pistols and carrying Iraqi police-issue handcuffs. In Baghdad and most of Iraq,
the police are the Mahdi Army and the Mahdi Army is the police. The same holds
for the actual Iraqi army, posted throughout the country.

The sectarian tensions have overtaken far more than Iraq's security forces and
its streets. Militias now routinely enter hospitals to hunt down or arrest
those who have survived their raids. And many Iraqi government ministries are
now filled with the banners and slogans of Shiite religious groups, which now
exert total control over these key agencies. If you are not with them, you are
gone.

For instance, in the negotiations between parties after the January 2005
elections, Sadr loyalists gained control over the ministries of health and
transportation and immediately began cleansing them of Sunnis and Shiites not
aligned with Sadr. The process was officially known by the Sadrists as
"cleansing the ministry of Saddamists." Indeed, some government offices now do
not accept Sunnis as employees at all.

Based on my visits to the ministries, it is clear that an apartheid process
began after the Shiites' electoral success. In the Ministry of Health, you see
pictures of Moqtada al-Sadr and his father everywhere. Traditional Shiite music
reverberates throughout the hallways. Doctors and ministry staffers refer to
the minister of health as imami, or "my imam," as though he were a cleric. I
also saw walls adorned with Shiite posters -- including ones touting Sadr -- in
the Ministry of Transportation. Sunni staffers have been pushed out of both
ministries, while the Ministry of Interior is under the control of another
Shiite movement, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (its
name alone a sufficient statement of its intentions).

Shiites with no apparent qualifications have filled the ranks. In one case in
the transportation ministry, a Sunni chief engineer was fired and replaced with
an unqualified Shiite who wore a cleric's turban to work. In all cases, this
has led to a stark drop in efficiency, with the health and transportation
ministries barely functioning, and the interior ministry operating much like an
anti-Sunni death squad, with secret prisons uncovered last November, and people
disappearing after raids by shadowy government security units operating at
night.

Even shared opposition to the Occupation couldn't unite Iraq's Sunnis and
Shiites, and perhaps that was inevitable given their bitter history of mutual
hostility. Instead, as the fighting against the Americans intensified, tensions
between Sunni and Shiite began to grow, eventually setting off the vicious
sectarian cleansing that is Iraq today.

During the first battle of Fallujah, in the spring of 2004, Sunni insurgents
fought alongside some Shiite forces against the Americans; by that fall, the
Sunnis waged their resistance alone in Fallujah, and they resented the Shiites'
indifference.

But by that time, Shiite frustration with Sunnis for harboring Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, the bloodthirsty head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, led some to feel that
the Fallujans were getting what they deserved. The cycle of violence escalated
from there. When Sunni refugees from Fallujah settled in west Baghdad's Sunni
strongholds such as Ghazaliya, al-Amriya and Khadhra, the first Shiiite
families began to get threats to leave. In Amriya, Shiites who ignored the
threats had their homes attacked or their men murdered by Sunni militias.

This is when sectarian cleansing truly began. Sunni refugees in Amriya seized
homes vacated by Shiites. These operations were conducted by insurgents as well
as relatives of the refugees. Soon such cleansing had become widespread and
commonplace, both out of vengeance and out of its own cruel logic; both sides
took part. There was no space left in Iraq for nonsectarian voices. Sunnis and
Shiites alike were pushed into the arms of their respective militias, often
joining out of self-defense. Shiites obtained lists of the Baath party cadres
that were the foundation of Hussein's regime and began systematically
assassinating Sunnis who had belonged. Sunni militias that had fought the
American occupier became Sunni militias protecting Sunni territory from Shiite
incursions and retaliating in Shiite areas. The insurgency became secondary as
resistance moved to self-defense. In the Shiite-dominated south, meanwhile,
Shiite militias battled each other and the British forces.

In November I asked a close Shiite friend if -- considering all this violence,
crime and radicalism in Iraq -- life had not been better under Hussein.

"No," he said definitively. "They could level all of Baghdad and it would still
be better than Saddam. At least we have hope."

A few weeks later, though, he e-mailed me in despair: "A civil war will happen
I'm sure of it . . . you can't be comfortable talking with a man until you know
if he was Shia or Sunni, . . . Politicians don't trust each other, People don't
trust each other. [There is] seeking revenge, weak government, separate regions
for the opponents . . . We have a civil war here; it is only a matter of time,
and some peppers to provoke it."

The time came on Feb. 22, when the Golden Mosque of the Shiites in Samarra was
blown up. More than 1,000 Sunnis were killed in retribution, and then the
Shiite-controlled interior ministry prevented an accurate body count from being
released. Attacks on mosques, mostly Sunni ones, increased. Officially, Moqtada
al-Sadr opposed attacks on Sunnis, but he unleashed his fighters on them after
the bombing.

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed
neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found on the
main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People are afraid to
approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, for fear that
they, too, will be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya
and other once-diverse neighborhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In
Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear
calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth,
the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings.
It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered
what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is
yet to come.

nirrosen@yahoo.com

Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New America Foundation and author of "In the Belly
of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq" (Free Press).
+ 2006 The Washington Post Company

--- Msged/2 6.0.1
 * Origin: tncbbs.no-ip.com - Try the CROSSFIRE echo - all welcome (1:261/1000)