A
Tale Of One City, Now Two
By Ali al-Fadhily
13 November, 2007
Inter Press Service
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.
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