Dorm gunfights, kidnappings and death threats over grades make fear No. 1 distraction
By JOSHUA PARTLOW
Washington Post
BAGHDAD, IRAQ - The letter was slipped under the dean's office door, in an envelope slightly bulging from the AK-47 bullet tucked inside.
"You have to understand our circumstances. We cannot perform well on the exam because of the problems in Baghdad. And you have to help," the letter began, said its recipient, A.M. Taleb, dean of the College of Sciences at Baghdad University. "If you do not, you and your family will be killed."
It's finals time in Iraq. Black-clad gunmen have stormed a dormitory to snatch students from their rooms. Professors fear angering their pupils for giving them failing grades. Administrators curtailed graduation ceremonies to avoid convening large groups of people into an obvious bombing target. Perhaps nowhere else does the prospect of two months' summer vacation — for those who can afford it, a chance to flee the country — bring such unbridled relief.
"Every 30 minutes our families call us to make sure we're all right," said Istabraq Muhammed, 21, an architecture student in her third year at the university. "They are very worried about us."
The morning before Thaer Abdul Naba took his last exam in accounting for oil engineers, a gunfight erupted outside his off-campus dorm in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Bab al-Muadham. For much of the day, he huddled with a group of students in a commons room, away from the windows and the unknown assailants. Unable to study until late at night, he said, he was too tired to concentrate when it was time for the test.
"One of the students was wounded as he was hit with a bullet in his leg. If you go inside the dorm now, you'll find bullet holes and broken windows," said Abdul Naba, 26, a junior. "They even shot the laundry that was hanging outside."
Relatively calm
On the tree-shaded, stone-slab courtyard of Iraq's most prestigious university, with 70,000 undergraduates and 10,000 graduate students, students still stroll to class and chat idly with friends. They sit at an outdoor cafe, relaxing after their exams and exchanging goodbyes. Within the concrete blast walls and barbed-wire barriers, the campus exists in relative calm compared with overtly violent areas of Baghdad.
Under former President Saddam Hussein, university officials required that students study the political ideology and martial history of the ruling Baath Party. After the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, those classes disappeared, replaced with courses about democracy and human rights.
"From the point of view of exchanging or expressing opinions, there is no comparison. Back then, there was no possibility to express your views in any way," said the school's president, Mosa al-Mosawe. "But in terms of security, during the Baath regime it was much better."
Mosawe spoke Thursday, the day Baghdad University's chief of security was assassinated by gunmen outside his home. About 50 university staff members have been killed since the invasion, more than half of roughly 90 university employees killed across Iraq, Mosawe said. Other calculations of slain professors are even higher: An antiwar organization called the Brussels Tribunal lists 250 names.
Some professors say the killings are motivated by the same sectarian rivalries between Shiite and Sunni Muslims that take Iraqi lives every day and are intertwined with the country's political struggles. Regardless of the reason, the killings are inspiring an exodus of professors from the university system.
At Baghdad University, 300 staff members have requested one-year leaves of absence to flee the violence, and about half of all professors will spend the summer out of the country or in Iraq's more peaceful north, Mosawe said.
"The religious people are taking over the universities, and all the secular people are being driven out," said Mustafa al-Hiti, former dean of the university's College of Pharmacy and now a parliament member.
In Baghdad last week, gunmen wearing black raided a dormitory of the University of Technology, beat 10 students and kidnapped them. The students were said to be Sunnis from such insurgent strongholds as Ramadi in western Iraq.
"We are suffering from this dangerous situation: the kidnappings, the gangs that are moving around freely," architecture student Tamara Muhanned, 21, said as she sat on a bench along the courtyard of Baghdad University.
When she entered the university three years ago, it was more common to take field trips to study ancient sites, such as Babylon, in person. Now those trips happen rarely, if ever, she said. After finishing her final exam, she was eager to turn in her textbooks a day early, so her family could prepare to leave the country for the summer.
When asked how she felt about the school year ending, she didn't hesitate.
"Alhamdulillah," she said — thank God.
21 July 2006
NYT Article: Sects’ Strife Takes a Toll on Baghdad’s Daily Bread
Shiites and Sunnis
Sects’ Strife Takes a Toll on Baghdad’s Daily Bread
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
BAGHDAD, Iraq — The front line in this city’s sectarian war runs through Edrice al-Aaraji’s old backyard. He is a Shiite and a baker. So are his two brothers.
For the past year, Sunni Arab militants have swept through their old neighborhood, a heavily Sunni district in northwest Baghdad that borders a Shiite area, forcing Shiites out of their homes and shutting their shops by killing customers and workers inside. One after another, bakeries, whose workers are overwhelmingly poor and Shiite like Mr. Aaraji, began to close.
Now, out of 11 bakeries in the area, northern Ghazaliya, just one, the Sunni-owned Al Obeidi on Center Street, remains open. The neighborhood, like a mouth with missing teeth, is almost entirely without the simplest of Iraqi needs, freshly baked bread.
“To shut down a well-known bakery in a neighborhood, that means you paralyze life there,” Mr. Aaraji said, sitting in a bakery in a Shiite neighborhood where he now works and usually sleeps.
As the most basic of local institutions, Baghdad’s bakeries are an everyday measure of just how far the sectarian war here has spread.
A year ago, when some of the first bakers were killed, Iraqis in the capital dismissed the deaths as a bizarre aberration. Civil war is not possible here, they said. Sunnis and Shiites have intermarried for generations, they said, and Iraqis will not fight Iraqis on the basis of sect.
For months Iraqis held on to the belief that sectarian attacks were carried out by outsiders, but the bombing of a Shiite shrine in February, after which Shiite militias went on a rampage, dragging Sunnis out of mosques and homes and killing them, shattered that. The unrelenting violence has hardened Iraqis against one another, and people talk in resigned tones about civil war.
Militants on both sides have moved block by block through Baghdad’s neighborhoods, threatening, kidnapping and killing. To protect themselves, Shiite bakers have taken posters of their saints off their walls. Those who supply the Iraqi Army, which is predominantly Shiite, have arranged safer sales through middlemen.
Entire neighborhoods are split. In Saidiya, a mixed neighborhood in southern Baghdad where Sunni militants have seized territory recently, so many bakeries closed that residents had to go outside the neighborhood to buy bread. In Adhamiya, Baghdad’s oldest Sunni area, Shiite bakers pretend to be Sunnis to survive.
Mr. Aaraji, 23, who smokes a lot and moves nervously even when sitting down, lived on one of the most violent fault lines, the one that divides heavily Sunni Arab Ghazaliya and the almost exclusively Shiite Shuala neighborhood. Until recently his was one of five Shiite families left living on Exchange Street, which forms the border.
In early July, Sunni gunmen finished the job. They walked into Al Karar, one of the few remaining bakeries, shot one man dead and wounded two others. The other bakeries in the area immediately closed, including the one where one of Mr. Aaraji’s brothers worked.
A few days later, men drove up to the Shiite houses on Exchange Street and told the families to get out. “They came publicly, during the day,” Mr. Aaraji said. “We had to leave by noon.”
Mr. Aaraji quickly gathered his belongings and took them to a house on the Shiite side of the divide that belonged to Sunni Arab friends, who had themselves fled for fear of persecution by Shiites. “Ghazaliya is now divided between Sunni families and Shiite families,” he said.
Sunni workers, far fewer in number than Shiites, are not immune from attack. One morning in late June, in a bakery in a heavily Shiite district, men with guns in plain clothes blindfolded and handcuffed 10 workers and marched them into four cars, according to the Iraqi authorities and the cousin of one of the workers who was taken.
The workers, Sunni and Shiite, were asked questions in an ordinary house about where they were from, the names of their city council members and the imams of their mosques. Several hours later, all but two — Sunni Arabs from the same tribe — were released.
The two men, brothers in their early 20’s, were friends with their Shiite colleagues for years. They all lived together in the mixed neighborhood of Hurriya. The Shiites pulled every string they could to free them, calling powerful political parties and police and army contacts.
A week later, the men’s bodies were found. They were killed, shot in the head, according to an autopsy, on the same day that a bomb killed 62 people in Sadr City, a Shiite stronghold. Some Shiite workers attended the funeral.
The man who provided the account said his cousin, one of the abductees, still weeps when their names come up. He, like many interviewed, spoke anonymously for fear of reprisals.
The widespread sectarian killings have gone virtually unchecked by authorities of any kind, American or Iraqi. That is one of the bitterest disappointments of the war for Iraqis, rivaled only by the letdown felt when the military did not stop mobs of looters in April 2003, when Saddam Hussein’s government was overthrown. Recently Iraqis have begun to say that an American withdrawal, which they previously feared would result in a bloodbath, might not make any difference.
“Their main task, their whole reason for being here, is to prevent exactly this, but they do nothing,” said an Iraqi mother who lives near Sadr City and strongly supported the Americans as recently as last year. “They just let it go, my God, so easily.”
The captors of the 10 kidnapped bakers passed easily through an Iraqi Army checkpoint, telling the soldiers that they were Interior Ministry intelligence officers, according to the cousin. Last year, Mr. Aaraji said, militants blocked a minivan of schoolgirls in his neighborhood, shooting the driver and one student dead, while an American convoy moved on a main road nearby.
American visits “are like show business,” he said. “When they come, they try to protect themselves, not us.”
Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the American military in Iraq, said in an e-mail message: “U.S. forces respond when and where they’re needed in order to stop violence,” often, he added, in “chance encounters on the streets and in the neighborhoods during patrols.”
Workers are washed up like refugees into bakeries in safer areas. Mr. Aaraji found work in Kadhimiya, a heavily Shiite district. In Karada, another Shiite area, Sajid Aziz, a bakery manager, said Shiite workers from Saidiya came to him for work recently, after two co-workers were murdered in a shop there. In Kadhimiya, a worker said that his cousins in Adhamiya had pretended to be Sunnis for months but were recently discovered. Now they are looking for work in a Shiite district.
The details differ by neighborhood. In Saidiya, militants allowed bakeries to reopen under Sunni ownership, residents said. In the more war-torn areas, like Ghazaliya and Dawra, they often seemed to close completely. Daily life here revolves around bakeries, and a closed shop gives an eerie feeling to a neighborhood.
Iraqis living in the most devastated areas — Amiriya in the west and Dawra in the south — commonly say the killing has reached such a pitch that the purpose is not just to clear the area of a certain sect, but to clear it of people altogether. The lack of fresh bread and, in some cases, most shopping, lends some credence to their theory.
Mr. Aziz said he had felt Sunni prejudice first hand, and his experience is a small example of how neighborhoods, and ultimately nations, begin to break down into civil war. A Sunni sheik once told Mr. Aziz that he should take down the posters of Shiite saints tacked to the shop’s walls. Mr. Aziz refused, but politely. He wanted to keep good relations with the family.
Last year the sheik fled with several of his sons, while the women in the family stayed behind. Mr. Aziz helped them carry groceries and fuel canisters. In June the sheik was killed. Mr. Aziz paid his respects at the funeral.
Several days later a group of young men went to the bakery shouting that killings like the sheik’s made Sunnis kill in retaliation. Mr. Aziz watched from the shop and stood his ground. Eventually they went away.
“They tried to provoke us,” he said. “They have the hatred inside them. I don’t blame them. I blame the one who put it there.”
Karada is still largely safe. But in Ghazaliya, killing has become so routine that it barely registers surprise. The local Sunnis who began to guard streets this year to stop Shiite government forces from entering seem to disappear when Sunni militias want to enter, Mr. Aaraji said.
This summer, Mr. Aaraji’s cousin, a tire repairman, was shot dead by Sunni militants. They entered the shop where he was working and asked to look at his identification card, Mr. Aaraji said. His name, Ali, was Shiite.
“Kitlo,” Mr. Aaraji said, meaning “they killed him.”
“It has become normal,” he said, bowing his head slightly and dragging on his cigarette.
He took the recent shooting death of a Shiite friend in stride, because the man had refused to change the ring on his cellphone, a short musical quip insulting Wahhabis, hard-line Sunni Arabs. “We knew it would provoke them,” he said. “We told him to change it.
“They put four bullets in his head.”
In the quiet of Karada, Mr. Aziz sat on a battered desk in his shop and offered some hope. Since January, Shiite militiamen, followers of a radical cleric, stopped by three times asking about the slain Sunni sheik’s family. Each time, Mr. Aziz, who is 31, angrily refused to give them up.
“If anyone touches them, they touch us,” he said in a soft voice.
Such individual acts of responsibility might stop a nation from descending into war. But as the violence grinds on, fewer, it seems, are in the mood to risk them.
Hosham Hussein contributed reporting for this article.
Sects’ Strife Takes a Toll on Baghdad’s Daily Bread
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
BAGHDAD, Iraq — The front line in this city’s sectarian war runs through Edrice al-Aaraji’s old backyard. He is a Shiite and a baker. So are his two brothers.
For the past year, Sunni Arab militants have swept through their old neighborhood, a heavily Sunni district in northwest Baghdad that borders a Shiite area, forcing Shiites out of their homes and shutting their shops by killing customers and workers inside. One after another, bakeries, whose workers are overwhelmingly poor and Shiite like Mr. Aaraji, began to close.
Now, out of 11 bakeries in the area, northern Ghazaliya, just one, the Sunni-owned Al Obeidi on Center Street, remains open. The neighborhood, like a mouth with missing teeth, is almost entirely without the simplest of Iraqi needs, freshly baked bread.
“To shut down a well-known bakery in a neighborhood, that means you paralyze life there,” Mr. Aaraji said, sitting in a bakery in a Shiite neighborhood where he now works and usually sleeps.
As the most basic of local institutions, Baghdad’s bakeries are an everyday measure of just how far the sectarian war here has spread.
A year ago, when some of the first bakers were killed, Iraqis in the capital dismissed the deaths as a bizarre aberration. Civil war is not possible here, they said. Sunnis and Shiites have intermarried for generations, they said, and Iraqis will not fight Iraqis on the basis of sect.
For months Iraqis held on to the belief that sectarian attacks were carried out by outsiders, but the bombing of a Shiite shrine in February, after which Shiite militias went on a rampage, dragging Sunnis out of mosques and homes and killing them, shattered that. The unrelenting violence has hardened Iraqis against one another, and people talk in resigned tones about civil war.
Militants on both sides have moved block by block through Baghdad’s neighborhoods, threatening, kidnapping and killing. To protect themselves, Shiite bakers have taken posters of their saints off their walls. Those who supply the Iraqi Army, which is predominantly Shiite, have arranged safer sales through middlemen.
Entire neighborhoods are split. In Saidiya, a mixed neighborhood in southern Baghdad where Sunni militants have seized territory recently, so many bakeries closed that residents had to go outside the neighborhood to buy bread. In Adhamiya, Baghdad’s oldest Sunni area, Shiite bakers pretend to be Sunnis to survive.
Mr. Aaraji, 23, who smokes a lot and moves nervously even when sitting down, lived on one of the most violent fault lines, the one that divides heavily Sunni Arab Ghazaliya and the almost exclusively Shiite Shuala neighborhood. Until recently his was one of five Shiite families left living on Exchange Street, which forms the border.
In early July, Sunni gunmen finished the job. They walked into Al Karar, one of the few remaining bakeries, shot one man dead and wounded two others. The other bakeries in the area immediately closed, including the one where one of Mr. Aaraji’s brothers worked.
A few days later, men drove up to the Shiite houses on Exchange Street and told the families to get out. “They came publicly, during the day,” Mr. Aaraji said. “We had to leave by noon.”
Mr. Aaraji quickly gathered his belongings and took them to a house on the Shiite side of the divide that belonged to Sunni Arab friends, who had themselves fled for fear of persecution by Shiites. “Ghazaliya is now divided between Sunni families and Shiite families,” he said.
Sunni workers, far fewer in number than Shiites, are not immune from attack. One morning in late June, in a bakery in a heavily Shiite district, men with guns in plain clothes blindfolded and handcuffed 10 workers and marched them into four cars, according to the Iraqi authorities and the cousin of one of the workers who was taken.
The workers, Sunni and Shiite, were asked questions in an ordinary house about where they were from, the names of their city council members and the imams of their mosques. Several hours later, all but two — Sunni Arabs from the same tribe — were released.
The two men, brothers in their early 20’s, were friends with their Shiite colleagues for years. They all lived together in the mixed neighborhood of Hurriya. The Shiites pulled every string they could to free them, calling powerful political parties and police and army contacts.
A week later, the men’s bodies were found. They were killed, shot in the head, according to an autopsy, on the same day that a bomb killed 62 people in Sadr City, a Shiite stronghold. Some Shiite workers attended the funeral.
The man who provided the account said his cousin, one of the abductees, still weeps when their names come up. He, like many interviewed, spoke anonymously for fear of reprisals.
The widespread sectarian killings have gone virtually unchecked by authorities of any kind, American or Iraqi. That is one of the bitterest disappointments of the war for Iraqis, rivaled only by the letdown felt when the military did not stop mobs of looters in April 2003, when Saddam Hussein’s government was overthrown. Recently Iraqis have begun to say that an American withdrawal, which they previously feared would result in a bloodbath, might not make any difference.
“Their main task, their whole reason for being here, is to prevent exactly this, but they do nothing,” said an Iraqi mother who lives near Sadr City and strongly supported the Americans as recently as last year. “They just let it go, my God, so easily.”
The captors of the 10 kidnapped bakers passed easily through an Iraqi Army checkpoint, telling the soldiers that they were Interior Ministry intelligence officers, according to the cousin. Last year, Mr. Aaraji said, militants blocked a minivan of schoolgirls in his neighborhood, shooting the driver and one student dead, while an American convoy moved on a main road nearby.
American visits “are like show business,” he said. “When they come, they try to protect themselves, not us.”
Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the American military in Iraq, said in an e-mail message: “U.S. forces respond when and where they’re needed in order to stop violence,” often, he added, in “chance encounters on the streets and in the neighborhoods during patrols.”
Workers are washed up like refugees into bakeries in safer areas. Mr. Aaraji found work in Kadhimiya, a heavily Shiite district. In Karada, another Shiite area, Sajid Aziz, a bakery manager, said Shiite workers from Saidiya came to him for work recently, after two co-workers were murdered in a shop there. In Kadhimiya, a worker said that his cousins in Adhamiya had pretended to be Sunnis for months but were recently discovered. Now they are looking for work in a Shiite district.
The details differ by neighborhood. In Saidiya, militants allowed bakeries to reopen under Sunni ownership, residents said. In the more war-torn areas, like Ghazaliya and Dawra, they often seemed to close completely. Daily life here revolves around bakeries, and a closed shop gives an eerie feeling to a neighborhood.
Iraqis living in the most devastated areas — Amiriya in the west and Dawra in the south — commonly say the killing has reached such a pitch that the purpose is not just to clear the area of a certain sect, but to clear it of people altogether. The lack of fresh bread and, in some cases, most shopping, lends some credence to their theory.
Mr. Aziz said he had felt Sunni prejudice first hand, and his experience is a small example of how neighborhoods, and ultimately nations, begin to break down into civil war. A Sunni sheik once told Mr. Aziz that he should take down the posters of Shiite saints tacked to the shop’s walls. Mr. Aziz refused, but politely. He wanted to keep good relations with the family.
Last year the sheik fled with several of his sons, while the women in the family stayed behind. Mr. Aziz helped them carry groceries and fuel canisters. In June the sheik was killed. Mr. Aziz paid his respects at the funeral.
Several days later a group of young men went to the bakery shouting that killings like the sheik’s made Sunnis kill in retaliation. Mr. Aziz watched from the shop and stood his ground. Eventually they went away.
“They tried to provoke us,” he said. “They have the hatred inside them. I don’t blame them. I blame the one who put it there.”
Karada is still largely safe. But in Ghazaliya, killing has become so routine that it barely registers surprise. The local Sunnis who began to guard streets this year to stop Shiite government forces from entering seem to disappear when Sunni militias want to enter, Mr. Aaraji said.
This summer, Mr. Aaraji’s cousin, a tire repairman, was shot dead by Sunni militants. They entered the shop where he was working and asked to look at his identification card, Mr. Aaraji said. His name, Ali, was Shiite.
“Kitlo,” Mr. Aaraji said, meaning “they killed him.”
“It has become normal,” he said, bowing his head slightly and dragging on his cigarette.
He took the recent shooting death of a Shiite friend in stride, because the man had refused to change the ring on his cellphone, a short musical quip insulting Wahhabis, hard-line Sunni Arabs. “We knew it would provoke them,” he said. “We told him to change it.
“They put four bullets in his head.”
In the quiet of Karada, Mr. Aziz sat on a battered desk in his shop and offered some hope. Since January, Shiite militiamen, followers of a radical cleric, stopped by three times asking about the slain Sunni sheik’s family. Each time, Mr. Aziz, who is 31, angrily refused to give them up.
“If anyone touches them, they touch us,” he said in a soft voice.
Such individual acts of responsibility might stop a nation from descending into war. But as the violence grinds on, fewer, it seems, are in the mood to risk them.
Hosham Hussein contributed reporting for this article.
19 July 2006
Christian Science Monitor Story (The Mother of All Reports)
This is "The Mother of All Reports", if you will, regarding the situation in Amariyah.
Headline: In the struggle for Iraq, tug of war over one Baghdad neighborhood
By: Dan Murphy and Awadh al-Taee
(BAGHDAD)
Harith says the insurgents began arriving in Amariyah after the deadly US assault on Fallujah in April 2004. The first jihadis sought haven with relatives, many of them former senior officers in Saddam Hussein's Army.
The new neighbors roamed the streets at night with rifles and heavy machine guns, planting bombs targeting US patrols. "We'd peer through the blinds and watch them firing mortars at the Americans from my street,'' recalls Harith, a Shiite Arab from Amariyah who asked that his full name not be used. "We decided it was safest to ignore them. They were leaving us alone."
But that didn't last. Not content with having found a haven, the militants set about transforming the demographics and social mores of the area.
"At first it was just the outsiders, but some of the young men - surrounded by these people telling stories about what the Americans did in Fallujah and these preachers telling them it was their duty to fight - joined up,'' says Aqeel, a former resident of Amariyah who fled in February.
Soon, graffiti praising Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and promising death to traitors proliferated; new prayer leaders took over mosques, issuing strident demands for jihad over their loudspeakers every Friday; leaflets were distributed warning women not to work and to cover their hair, men not to trim their beards or wear shorts; then bodies started to appear on street corners.
Amariyah, a wealthy Baghdad district that butts up against the US military's sprawling Camp Victory, which includes the Baghdad airport, is a testament to the ease with which Sunni Arab extremists can take over an established neighborhood and use it as a base of operations.
And over the past six months, the Baghdad neighborhood of shaded gardens and hulking villas once popular with Mr. Hussein's entourage has become synonymous with gruesome, anonymous death, as have other Sunni neighborhoods like Dora and Adhamiya. They are all examples of the ongoing battle occurring throughout Iraq to loosen the grip of the insurgency - and the tough fight facing the Iraqi Army and US forces to dislodge them.
The Americans return
The situation in Amariyah had grown so bad that in March, the US Army's 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, N.Y., retook partial responsibility for a neighborhood that had been handed to the Iraqi military in late 2005.
Since then, the Iraqi military has set up fixed checkpoints at the two main entrances to this isolated neighborhood, and occupied abandoned villas while combined US and Iraqi forces have made dozens of arrests.
Residents say hundreds have been killed here this year by Sunni extremists aligned with Al Qaeda. Shiites mostly, but Sunni shopkeepers, bus drivers, and former Baathists, too. For a while, bound and mutilated corpses were dumped frequently outside the popular Honey Sweets Shop on once-bustling Public Works Street. Most of the shops there are now closed.
Amariyah's pain demonstrates the evolution of Iraq's war, from one in which faceless Sunni Arab insurgents targeted mostly US and Iraqi forces with roadside bombs and suicide attacks to one in which killing squads - both Shiite and Sunni - are focused on unarmed fellow citizens. And they are seeking to transform neighborhoods into enclaves of fear. Baghdad's civilian death toll in the past three months is roughly 3,000, more than the US loses during three years of war.
The district, home to the secular administrators of Hussein's Iraq, also rests within the country's maze of fault lines. It rests between Sunni insurgents who have moved in from strongholds to the west and Shiite militias who venture out of Baghdad's eastern suburbs.
Shiite families who fled Amariyah, which they say had been taken over by supporters of Mr. Zarqawi, say they have no intention of returning any time soon. Violence in Baghdad more generally has continued unabated.
Wednesday, Reuters reported that at least 100 people, mostly in Baghdad, were killed over the past week. It reported that, "Police said they had found 42 bodies over the last 24 hours in different parts of the capital - bound, tortured and shot."
Sunni Arabs still living in Amariyah say they fear reprisals - both from jihadis and also from Shiite police forces if US troops pull out. It's as much a measure as anything of the way the conflict here has shifted.
Two years ago, many Sunnis saw the US as their principle enemy. Now, with a police force packed with Shiite militiamen who have dispatched assassination squads against Sunnis, US forces are often seen as protectors.
And while the neighborhood - with limited ways in and out and just three miles from the more than 5,000 US soldiers at Camp Victory - may well become manageable again, the insurgents remain strong in nearby Dora and in the warrenlike allies of Adhamiya in central Baghdad. In Saydiyah, national tennis team coach Hussein Rashid was murdered Saturday along with two of his players. Local residents believe the men were murdered because one of them was wearing shorts, something deemed un-Islamic by Sunni militants.
'They started killing Shiites'
Former resident Aqeel says once the insurgents moved in, his neighbors began joining their ranks.
One Sunni Arab neighbor had joined the insurgents, and explained their choices of targets, he says. "This guy told me that 'if we focus on the Americans they grind us into dust,' " says Aqeel. "So they prefer to hit the Iraqi police, Shiites, translators, people they think are too secular. That's easy for them."
Aqeel decided to move his family to a Shiite district after going to buy groceries on Public Works Street one afternoon in early February. While there, a white Opel with four gunmen screamed to a halt at that corner, pulled a bound man from the trunk, shot him twice in the head and sped off.
And, more often than not, Shiites were the ones targeted.
"They started killing Shiites, just one every couple of days, in November 2004,'' says Harith, who remembers his first neighbor killed was Umm Saad. The 70-year-old widow ran the small grocery that he and his classmates used to crowd into after school when they were kids.
"Then this year it expanded. You'd see bodies on the streets all the time. A policeman was left dead in his car on my street for 24 hours, until I went to the National Guard and told them to collect the body."
"I now see that, little by little, Amariyah was falling under takfiri control,'' he says, using the popular pejorative term for Sunnis who share Al Qaeda's vision of an intolerant and violent Islam.
In late April, the neighbors to the right of his home, also Shiites, made the mistake of bringing a moving truck when they decided to abandon the neighborhood, and were gunned down before they reached the highway.
In early May, his neighbor in a small house to the left - a divorced mother of two and a Sunni who worked as a maid, was gunned down. "She had been warned to stop working." Harith and his family fled soon after- leaving all their possessions behind.
Former residents say they might move back - when the killings stop completely.
"Shiites used to make up 25 percent of the neighborhood - I doubt there's more than a handful left,'' says Harith. "When the Americans first came to Iraq, I thought we'd be kings. We hated Saddam and now I'm nostalgic for those days. It makes me sick."
Headline: In the struggle for Iraq, tug of war over one Baghdad neighborhood
By: Dan Murphy and Awadh al-Taee
(BAGHDAD)
Harith says the insurgents began arriving in Amariyah after the deadly US assault on Fallujah in April 2004. The first jihadis sought haven with relatives, many of them former senior officers in Saddam Hussein's Army.
The new neighbors roamed the streets at night with rifles and heavy machine guns, planting bombs targeting US patrols. "We'd peer through the blinds and watch them firing mortars at the Americans from my street,'' recalls Harith, a Shiite Arab from Amariyah who asked that his full name not be used. "We decided it was safest to ignore them. They were leaving us alone."
But that didn't last. Not content with having found a haven, the militants set about transforming the demographics and social mores of the area.
"At first it was just the outsiders, but some of the young men - surrounded by these people telling stories about what the Americans did in Fallujah and these preachers telling them it was their duty to fight - joined up,'' says Aqeel, a former resident of Amariyah who fled in February.
Soon, graffiti praising Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and promising death to traitors proliferated; new prayer leaders took over mosques, issuing strident demands for jihad over their loudspeakers every Friday; leaflets were distributed warning women not to work and to cover their hair, men not to trim their beards or wear shorts; then bodies started to appear on street corners.
Amariyah, a wealthy Baghdad district that butts up against the US military's sprawling Camp Victory, which includes the Baghdad airport, is a testament to the ease with which Sunni Arab extremists can take over an established neighborhood and use it as a base of operations.
And over the past six months, the Baghdad neighborhood of shaded gardens and hulking villas once popular with Mr. Hussein's entourage has become synonymous with gruesome, anonymous death, as have other Sunni neighborhoods like Dora and Adhamiya. They are all examples of the ongoing battle occurring throughout Iraq to loosen the grip of the insurgency - and the tough fight facing the Iraqi Army and US forces to dislodge them.
The Americans return
The situation in Amariyah had grown so bad that in March, the US Army's 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, N.Y., retook partial responsibility for a neighborhood that had been handed to the Iraqi military in late 2005.
Since then, the Iraqi military has set up fixed checkpoints at the two main entrances to this isolated neighborhood, and occupied abandoned villas while combined US and Iraqi forces have made dozens of arrests.
Residents say hundreds have been killed here this year by Sunni extremists aligned with Al Qaeda. Shiites mostly, but Sunni shopkeepers, bus drivers, and former Baathists, too. For a while, bound and mutilated corpses were dumped frequently outside the popular Honey Sweets Shop on once-bustling Public Works Street. Most of the shops there are now closed.
Amariyah's pain demonstrates the evolution of Iraq's war, from one in which faceless Sunni Arab insurgents targeted mostly US and Iraqi forces with roadside bombs and suicide attacks to one in which killing squads - both Shiite and Sunni - are focused on unarmed fellow citizens. And they are seeking to transform neighborhoods into enclaves of fear. Baghdad's civilian death toll in the past three months is roughly 3,000, more than the US loses during three years of war.
The district, home to the secular administrators of Hussein's Iraq, also rests within the country's maze of fault lines. It rests between Sunni insurgents who have moved in from strongholds to the west and Shiite militias who venture out of Baghdad's eastern suburbs.
Shiite families who fled Amariyah, which they say had been taken over by supporters of Mr. Zarqawi, say they have no intention of returning any time soon. Violence in Baghdad more generally has continued unabated.
Wednesday, Reuters reported that at least 100 people, mostly in Baghdad, were killed over the past week. It reported that, "Police said they had found 42 bodies over the last 24 hours in different parts of the capital - bound, tortured and shot."
Sunni Arabs still living in Amariyah say they fear reprisals - both from jihadis and also from Shiite police forces if US troops pull out. It's as much a measure as anything of the way the conflict here has shifted.
Two years ago, many Sunnis saw the US as their principle enemy. Now, with a police force packed with Shiite militiamen who have dispatched assassination squads against Sunnis, US forces are often seen as protectors.
And while the neighborhood - with limited ways in and out and just three miles from the more than 5,000 US soldiers at Camp Victory - may well become manageable again, the insurgents remain strong in nearby Dora and in the warrenlike allies of Adhamiya in central Baghdad. In Saydiyah, national tennis team coach Hussein Rashid was murdered Saturday along with two of his players. Local residents believe the men were murdered because one of them was wearing shorts, something deemed un-Islamic by Sunni militants.
'They started killing Shiites'
Former resident Aqeel says once the insurgents moved in, his neighbors began joining their ranks.
One Sunni Arab neighbor had joined the insurgents, and explained their choices of targets, he says. "This guy told me that 'if we focus on the Americans they grind us into dust,' " says Aqeel. "So they prefer to hit the Iraqi police, Shiites, translators, people they think are too secular. That's easy for them."
Aqeel decided to move his family to a Shiite district after going to buy groceries on Public Works Street one afternoon in early February. While there, a white Opel with four gunmen screamed to a halt at that corner, pulled a bound man from the trunk, shot him twice in the head and sped off.
And, more often than not, Shiites were the ones targeted.
"They started killing Shiites, just one every couple of days, in November 2004,'' says Harith, who remembers his first neighbor killed was Umm Saad. The 70-year-old widow ran the small grocery that he and his classmates used to crowd into after school when they were kids.
"Then this year it expanded. You'd see bodies on the streets all the time. A policeman was left dead in his car on my street for 24 hours, until I went to the National Guard and told them to collect the body."
"I now see that, little by little, Amariyah was falling under takfiri control,'' he says, using the popular pejorative term for Sunnis who share Al Qaeda's vision of an intolerant and violent Islam.
In late April, the neighbors to the right of his home, also Shiites, made the mistake of bringing a moving truck when they decided to abandon the neighborhood, and were gunned down before they reached the highway.
In early May, his neighbor in a small house to the left - a divorced mother of two and a Sunni who worked as a maid, was gunned down. "She had been warned to stop working." Harith and his family fled soon after- leaving all their possessions behind.
Former residents say they might move back - when the killings stop completely.
"Shiites used to make up 25 percent of the neighborhood - I doubt there's more than a handful left,'' says Harith. "When the Americans first came to Iraq, I thought we'd be kings. We hated Saddam and now I'm nostalgic for those days. It makes me sick."
18 July 2006
The Shootout
I went out this late afternoon to search for an internet provider in our area. It was one of the very few times that i drove alone because it wasn't that far trip, just about 2 miles both ways. I went to an acquaintance's house who supposedly knew a provider.
I took him and drove to the tip of our area, a zone with many dead end streets. We went to a "provider" who thought that i was a real computer newbie, because he wanted me to bring my computer to him in order to install "a program that would connect me to his network"... Hmmm, i asked him if i could download and/or install this thing myself, he said no and insisted on it, so i said to him: "I'll get back to you soon" and off we went.
Imagine me, allowing him, to install a spyware program into my computer, ha ha ha!
The acquaintance i had with me was rather an imbecile to be honest. He should have known the nature of the area's closed streets, and that the best way to go out is the same way you came on. This dude insisted that i take the last street, the western-most in the area, which is a wall away from an American base, which i was 80% sure it was closed.
I was also a bit stupid to be courteous in such a matter that is fully of the driver's authority.
The moment i took the turn under his insistance, and drove to what turned to be a dead end, bullets errupted towards the base, from the base, coming from behind us, and buzzing high over our heads. There was no other place to go because the other end was blocked with concrete. The guy didn't seem to care at all, while i was trying in vain to find even a tree that would hide us and the car.
As the bullets calmed down i turned the car around, and drove carefully to spots where people were standing, and step by step, i dropped this dude who still wasn't even caring that his "shortcut" advice could have probably shortcutted our lives!
There was another distant shootout as i drove back home, but it wasn't so close as the one before.
Oh man, a mile could be much longer than you think!
I took him and drove to the tip of our area, a zone with many dead end streets. We went to a "provider" who thought that i was a real computer newbie, because he wanted me to bring my computer to him in order to install "a program that would connect me to his network"... Hmmm, i asked him if i could download and/or install this thing myself, he said no and insisted on it, so i said to him: "I'll get back to you soon" and off we went.
Imagine me, allowing him, to install a spyware program into my computer, ha ha ha!
The acquaintance i had with me was rather an imbecile to be honest. He should have known the nature of the area's closed streets, and that the best way to go out is the same way you came on. This dude insisted that i take the last street, the western-most in the area, which is a wall away from an American base, which i was 80% sure it was closed.
I was also a bit stupid to be courteous in such a matter that is fully of the driver's authority.
The moment i took the turn under his insistance, and drove to what turned to be a dead end, bullets errupted towards the base, from the base, coming from behind us, and buzzing high over our heads. There was no other place to go because the other end was blocked with concrete. The guy didn't seem to care at all, while i was trying in vain to find even a tree that would hide us and the car.
As the bullets calmed down i turned the car around, and drove carefully to spots where people were standing, and step by step, i dropped this dude who still wasn't even caring that his "shortcut" advice could have probably shortcutted our lives!
There was another distant shootout as i drove back home, but it wasn't so close as the one before.
Oh man, a mile could be much longer than you think!
Bank Robbery
News off the wires have just mentioned that the state-run Rafidain Bank branch in our area, which is about 2 kms (1.5 miles) away, have been robbed by 2-pickup trucks and 1 BMW load of men who were wearing Iraqi Army uniforms!
They "hands-up"ped the bank security guys and took 1.25 billion IQD (around 845000 $), as easy as taking sweets from a baby!
Welcome to the Wild Wild West!
They "hands-up"ped the bank security guys and took 1.25 billion IQD (around 845000 $), as easy as taking sweets from a baby!
Welcome to the Wild Wild West!
17 July 2006
Escalation
Yesterday and today, many mortar shells were fired from our area, and some shells fell on our area, with one around 500 meters (yds) from us. There were also many explosions, 3 of which turned out to be 3 car bombs that hit the same Iraqi Army check point 3 times in one day. The Army dismantled the check point, and deployed snipers above the surrounding buildings, and the exit to and from the Airport Highway towards Jihad Quarter is closed.
The worst of all is the new "trend" of killing the families that flee the sectarian violence in case they take their belongings with them. A family that brought a truck to take their belongings away as they fled was killed on the street, without even sparing a young girl, then the truck was burned.
So, there are mortars falling at random, being fired at random, people killed, threatened to leave, and being killed as they leave.
O, Iraqis! Jungle animals have hearts more than you!
The worst of all is the new "trend" of killing the families that flee the sectarian violence in case they take their belongings with them. A family that brought a truck to take their belongings away as they fled was killed on the street, without even sparing a young girl, then the truck was burned.
So, there are mortars falling at random, being fired at random, people killed, threatened to leave, and being killed as they leave.
O, Iraqis! Jungle animals have hearts more than you!
12 July 2006
Update on the Mosque Assault
I went this morning to look at the mosque street. There were traces of a burnt car, and i couldn't get closer to the mosque to see whether if it was directly affected by yesterday's assault.
I spoke to the shopkeeper i was worried about yesterday, he was fine, but he was clearly shaken and shocked from yesterday's terrible events. He said that there were no casualties from the region except 2 wounded, one was hit by the attackers, and the other shot himself in the foot!
We got phone calls from some friends and relatives asking about us, and how are we doing.
The story made it to int'l newspapers. Google'ing our region's name, i got this article as a result:
http://www.registerguard.com/news/2006/07/12/a2.int.iraq.0712.p1.php?section=nation_world
Iraqi politicians say it's now a civil war
By Joshua Partlow
and Bassam Sebti
Published: Wednesday, July 12, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq -
The words they have come to fear thundered out from the mosque loudspeakers as the sun sank over Baghdad: ``God is great! God is great! God is great!''
Just one day before, Sunni Arab sheiks in Amariyah, one of Baghdad's most embattled neighborhoods, had gone door to door recruiting volunteers willing to fight against Shiite militias. The mosque's signal Tuesday night meant the time to fight was now.
According to witnesses and a Washington Post special correspondent, carloads of men in track suits, suspected by residents to be members of the powerful Shiite militia known as the Mahdi Army, pulled up outside the Malouki Mosque and fired rocket-propelled grenades at the house of worship. During the firefight, a bullet pierced the shoulder of a mosque guard, while cars were gutted and burned. Residents said they didn't know how many people died.
Gunfire clattered through the hot evening air; children bawled at the sound. In one home, a wife locked the front door and pleaded with her husband not to leave the house. A former army officer barked orders to neighbors who assembled to mount a defense: You go up to the rooftops. You guard the street corners.
Saleh Muhammed, an Amariyah resident, told a Post special correspondent that he dialed 130 into his cell phone, Baghdad's emergency number. "The Mahdi Army has attacked Amariyah," he told the Interior Ministry dispatcher.
"The Mahdi Army are not terrorists like you," said the dispatcher at the ministry, which is controlled by a Shiite party and operates closely with militias. "They are people doing their duty. And how could you know that they are the Mahdi Army? Is it written on their foreheads?" He hung up the phone.
11 July 2006
The Mosque Assault
After the attacks on different mosques in Hayy Al-Jihad area, our area became the next to witness such things.
It was exactly 7:35 pm, about half an hour before sunset when it erupted. There were two big explosions, apparently caused by RPGs (Rocket Propelled Grenades) and heavy Kalashnikov shooting was heard from the area next to the closest mosque to us (which is about 350 meters (yards) away).
From a window upstairs I saw many young men come out of their homes with Kalashnikovs in hand running towards the mosque. Later they spread all over the area so that the attackers do not seek refuge in the neighborhood alleys or even jump to the nearby homes' gardens and fight from there. Some men even parked their cars in the middle of the alleys in order to block access.
The mosque started calling: "Allahu Akbar" (= God is Great) which could be a sign of battle, and then the man holding the microphone at the mosque tried to recite some verses that condemn people who destroy the mosques of God, but the situation there was very intense and emotional so he couldn't pull himself together to do that.
Shooting continued, some shots near, some shots far, but the main battle was on the main street where the mosque is. After some 30-40 minutes, the shots started going farther away, and by the prayer time, the mosque gave instructions that everybody should pray at home, and that everyone should hold their fire (because American and Iraqi troops are supposed to deploy in the area after these incidents).
By that time, looking from a narrow window upstairs, I saw what seems to be a burning car's smoke rising about 400 meters (yards) away from where I am, and about 150 meters (yards) away from the mosque.
At around 8:30 pm, we started hearing the sounds of tanks on the main street where the mosque is. And that was also confirmed by what the neighborhood men were saying.
At 9 pm, Baghdad TV, owned by the (Sunni) Iraqi Islamic Party mentioned the attack, "done by terrorist militias", and that the neighborhood residents called on the Government to take its responsibilities, and secure the area. The same channel, however, wrote in its news ticker that the Interior Ministry's commandos also took part in this attack; but that is a bit weak, because the area under discussion is outside the Interior Ministry's operations field, and it falls under the responsibility of the US & Iraqi Army.
Baghdad TV pointed out an interesting fact, however, which is that since the beginning of the terrible events in Jihad District, no American or Iraqi army patrols were seen in our area, thus creating a security gap which probably led to today's assault.
Baghdad TV also said that many people were wounded in the area. I fear for the shopkeepers at the shop that I always shop from which is about 100 meters (yards) away from the mosque. They are very good and nice people, and I pray sincerely that neither them, nor anybody else (except the aggressors) was hurt.
Gunshots were still heard but definitely not as much, even two hours after the whole thing started, but in other farther areas of the district.
I got a phone call from a friend at the farthest side of our district, some 3 kms (2 miles) away, and he said that everybody in their area is on the alert too, and that their mosque said that there may be some events taking place tonight, probably after the attack on our mosque.
How low will the gunmen go? From bombing mosques, to bombing shops, to fake check points… and it keeps going lower and lower by the day.
While the "religious" authorities on both sides are so silent, and sometimes even villain as the Hooded Claw in Penelope Pitstop Cartoons, if you ever saw them! This blames that, and that blames this, as if they were children, and nobody talks to one another, and they just blab over satellite channels and websites… Grow up!
Wake up and stop this mess, your holy dude'ness, whoever you may be, or you would wake up one day and find no one to holify you anymore! We'll all be darn dead, you ~@#$%^&*s !
A Neighborhood Hymn
____________________
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thru the night that our MOSQUE was still there.
To chuckle in difficult times is a Heaven-sent blessing!
It was exactly 7:35 pm, about half an hour before sunset when it erupted. There were two big explosions, apparently caused by RPGs (Rocket Propelled Grenades) and heavy Kalashnikov shooting was heard from the area next to the closest mosque to us (which is about 350 meters (yards) away).
From a window upstairs I saw many young men come out of their homes with Kalashnikovs in hand running towards the mosque. Later they spread all over the area so that the attackers do not seek refuge in the neighborhood alleys or even jump to the nearby homes' gardens and fight from there. Some men even parked their cars in the middle of the alleys in order to block access.
The mosque started calling: "Allahu Akbar" (= God is Great) which could be a sign of battle, and then the man holding the microphone at the mosque tried to recite some verses that condemn people who destroy the mosques of God, but the situation there was very intense and emotional so he couldn't pull himself together to do that.
Shooting continued, some shots near, some shots far, but the main battle was on the main street where the mosque is. After some 30-40 minutes, the shots started going farther away, and by the prayer time, the mosque gave instructions that everybody should pray at home, and that everyone should hold their fire (because American and Iraqi troops are supposed to deploy in the area after these incidents).
By that time, looking from a narrow window upstairs, I saw what seems to be a burning car's smoke rising about 400 meters (yards) away from where I am, and about 150 meters (yards) away from the mosque.
At around 8:30 pm, we started hearing the sounds of tanks on the main street where the mosque is. And that was also confirmed by what the neighborhood men were saying.
At 9 pm, Baghdad TV, owned by the (Sunni) Iraqi Islamic Party mentioned the attack, "done by terrorist militias", and that the neighborhood residents called on the Government to take its responsibilities, and secure the area. The same channel, however, wrote in its news ticker that the Interior Ministry's commandos also took part in this attack; but that is a bit weak, because the area under discussion is outside the Interior Ministry's operations field, and it falls under the responsibility of the US & Iraqi Army.
Baghdad TV pointed out an interesting fact, however, which is that since the beginning of the terrible events in Jihad District, no American or Iraqi army patrols were seen in our area, thus creating a security gap which probably led to today's assault.
Baghdad TV also said that many people were wounded in the area. I fear for the shopkeepers at the shop that I always shop from which is about 100 meters (yards) away from the mosque. They are very good and nice people, and I pray sincerely that neither them, nor anybody else (except the aggressors) was hurt.
Gunshots were still heard but definitely not as much, even two hours after the whole thing started, but in other farther areas of the district.
I got a phone call from a friend at the farthest side of our district, some 3 kms (2 miles) away, and he said that everybody in their area is on the alert too, and that their mosque said that there may be some events taking place tonight, probably after the attack on our mosque.
How low will the gunmen go? From bombing mosques, to bombing shops, to fake check points… and it keeps going lower and lower by the day.
While the "religious" authorities on both sides are so silent, and sometimes even villain as the Hooded Claw in Penelope Pitstop Cartoons, if you ever saw them! This blames that, and that blames this, as if they were children, and nobody talks to one another, and they just blab over satellite channels and websites… Grow up!
Wake up and stop this mess, your holy dude'ness, whoever you may be, or you would wake up one day and find no one to holify you anymore! We'll all be darn dead, you ~@#$%^&*s !
A Neighborhood Hymn
____________________
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thru the night that our MOSQUE was still there.
To chuckle in difficult times is a Heaven-sent blessing!
09 July 2006
Sad Day
I'm sorry, i wanted to write about the terrible events that took place today in Jihad Quarter, but i am too sad to write.
All i can say is that he whoever kills an Iraqi does not deserve to be an Iraqi.
God, your mercy is all that is left for us.
All i can say is that he whoever kills an Iraqi does not deserve to be an Iraqi.
God, your mercy is all that is left for us.
07 July 2006
AP Article: Sectarian TV Main Source of News in Iraq
This is something i pointed out in one of my postings after the Samarra bombing, now reported by AP.
Sectarian TV Main Source of News in Iraq
By BASSEM MROUE
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A television station flashes a headline announcing that "terrorist militias" stormed into a Sunni family home in Basra, killing a husband in front of his wife and children.
Turn the channel and another station is reporting that Shiites in a Baghdad suburb are being brutally attacked by Sunni extremists and implores security forces to rescue them.
Such is Iraq's flourishing broadcast media, where stations owned by political parties - Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish and Turkomen - dish out news with a decidedly sectarian slant. Some analysts fear the stations are deepening the sectarian divide at a time when the country instead needs to unite to curb Shiite-Sunni violence.
"I don't think it's especially helpful to have stations that need to draw distinctions between Iraqis," said Jon B. Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who studies Arab media.
Iraq's freewheeling TV stations are a far cry from the decades of Saddam Hussein's rule, when most Iraqis could watch only two stations - one run by the regime and the other owned by his son, Odai. Back then, a satellite channel broadcast propaganda to the Arab world. Only trusted regime supporters or rich Iraqis were allowed to own satellite dishes and have access to news from the outside world.
Since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, however, more than two dozen Iraqi stations have competed for viewers. They include stations aimed at Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, Kurds, Turkomen, along with one owned by the government.
Many Iraqis with satellite dishes can also watch the big pan-Arab television stations such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. Alhurra, the station funded by the U.S. State Department, has a special local channel for Iraq that offers wide coverages of the country.
The most popular stations include state-run Iraqiya and Sharqiya, owned by Saad al-Bazzaz, a one-time chief of Saddam's radio and television. Al-Bazzaz fled Iraq years before Saddam's fall and returned after the regime collapsed.
Sharqiya's programming is filled with Iraqi soap operas, some newer shows and others in black and white dating back to the 1960s. The station also airs music - and like Iraqiya, its news reports are relatively neutral.
But that's not the case with many stations. The two most pointed examples are Al-Forat, owned by the biggest Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq; and Baghdad Television, operated by the main Sunni Arab party.
Both unabashedly present news aimed at promoting the interests of their own religious communities.
Women announcers on both stations adhere to Islam's strict dress code, with only their hands and faces showing. Each station highlights the suffering of its own religious community at the hands of the other.
Other stations include Al-Masar, run by the Shiite Dawa Iraq Organization; Ashour, a Christian broadcaster; Biladi of the Islamic Dawa Party; Al-Hurriya, run by President Jalal Talabani's Kurdish faction; Turkmaniya of ethnic Turkomen; and Nahrain, owned by billionaire Egyptian businessman Naguib Sawiris.
Stations linked to Iraq's religiously and ethnically based parties offer no apologies for their points of view.
"The Shiites have been persecuted for 1,400 years and kept from power by force and oppression, even though they are a majority," said Mohsen al-Hakim, head of public relations at Al-Forat. "Today, we are not asking for more than our rights. We are calling for our rights through democratic principle."
He insisted the station is not hostile to Sunnis, adding "there is no place for any fanatic at Al-Forat."
Baghdad Television's deputy director, Thaer Ahmed, said his station "represents the point of view of Iraqis in general, and we report the suffering of Iraqis, whoever they are."
Al-Forat's 300 employees are all Shiite except for one Sunni Kurd, al-Hakim said. Ahmed boasts that his station's 90 staffers include few Shiites without giving a number or saying what they do.
Still, the two stations are closely identified with their sectarian communities. Al-Forat's offices are located in Karradah, a mixed Shiite Christian neighborhood on the east side of the Tigris river. Baghdad Television broadcasts from predominantly Sunni west Baghdad.
Neither station can send journalists to report on events in the other sect's areas because of fear of attacks. Each depends on news agencies for such reports.
Baghdad Television's biggest scoop was the release last March of American journalist Jill Carroll, held by Sunni extremists for 82 days. The former hostage appeared on the station wearing a Muslim head scarf shortly after she was freed.
In news reports, the stations use code words for militants from the rival sect. Baghdad Television speaks of "terrorist militias," a term favored by Sunnis to describe armed Shiite groups such as the Mahdi Army and the Badr Organization.
Al-Forat refers to "takfiris," meaning Sunni extremists who attack Shiite civilians. As Baghdad Television recently aired reports of attacks against Sunnis in the mostly Shiite city of Basra, the screen flashed the words: "People of Basra, be patient."
Al-Forat often airs a flim clip showing bodies lying in the street after an explosion. Words begin flashing on the screen: "They target innocent people. They target holy places. No to terrorism. They are ignorant. They are Saddamists. This is terrorism, not resistance."
Al-Hakim boasts that Al-Forat was the only station allowed to film the country's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, in his house in Najaf during an emergency meeting following the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra last February.
"We are the stations of the grand ayatollahs," he said.
As the new government seeks to ease sectarian tensions, some officials have pondered how to regulate stations that encourage sectarian divisions - without resorting to heavy-handed state control in the style of Saddam.
Shiite cleric Kahled al-Attiyah, deputy parliament speaker, said the media should not be controlled by the state as it was under Saddam but there should be some regulations.
"The situation today is in a way chaotic," al-Attiyah said. "What we need today is to work on a media law."
05 July 2006
NYT Article: A Baghdad Commander, Armed With Pink Tulle
Courtsey: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/world/middleeast/04planner.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
BAGHDAD, July 3 — Question: How do you get 15 layers of wedding cake with butter cream frosting through eight checkpoints and 45 minutes of snarled Baghdad traffic in 110 degree heat?
Answer: Hire Nadia Habib, wedding planner extraordinaire.
Ms. Habib, a 53-year-old Iraqi Christian with a strong sense of humor and a passion for weddings and cakes that can intimidate even her own clients, has worked through two wars — the current one is her third — and a decade of devastating economic sanctions.
Despite Iraq's current suffering, daily life, however strange and stunted, still moves in many of its familiar rhythms. Couples meet. They fall in love. They plan weddings.
"I tell you frankly, nothing has changed," Ms. Habib said, sitting in a large banquet hall in the Alwiya social club and thumbing through wedding albums with examples of elaborate cakes from past years. "When we get married, we still want everything to be perfect."
Nothing has changed, but everything is different. Since the American invasion three years ago, Baghdad, home to a quarter of the country's population, has descended into a state of low-grade civil war. Populations are shifting as sectarian violence changes the face of once mixed neighborhoods. Body counts in the Baghdad morgue this spring have been the highest since the invasion.
The city is now divided. Western neighborhoods have fallen to Sunni Arab insurgents. Parties are no longer possible there. In eastern neighborhoods, dominated by Shiite Islamists, singing and dancing are forbidden, so traditional wedding singers no longer take part in ceremonies.
Weddings, difficult enough in times of peace, have emerged as little battles of their own.
As the violence has increased, Iraqis have retreated inside their homes, and fewer couples are choosing to hold wedding parties in public places. Ms. Habib now sets up between two or three weddings a week, compared with five or six before the invasion. Garden settings are out, for fear of mortars and bombs. Guests are far fewer. In the past, guests often numbered 500. Now they are rarely more than 300. Weddings are now held during the day, so guests can return home in the safety of daylight, before curfew begins.
Ms. Habib, flanked by her husband, Hekmet Ayub, a smiling 61-year-old who resembles a beardless Santa Claus, forges ahead fearlessly. Like an expert hockey goalie neatly deflecting or catching every puck, she skillfully accommodates, or adjusts, every one of her customers' desires.
Flowers? Take fake. Real ones, all imported, are no longer affordable since the road from Jordan became dangerous. Gold ribbon? Beige is better, easier to buy in markets that are safe. Hand-designed invitations? Printers are scarce. Better to use a computer.
"When they want something strange and complicated, they come to me," she said, in her melodic, accented, English. "I have done many strange things," she said, laughing.
Strange began in the 1990's, after Iraq's war against Kuwait, when Iraqis, Christian and Muslim, began holding weddings in social clubs instead of their homes, to avoid the cost of putting on a huge spread. Weddings got showier, too. Ms. Habib once hid the bride and groom behind a curtain on a stage instead of marching them down the aisle. Wedding cake constructions had secret chambers that hid caged doves. Flaming swords became fashionable.
Ms. Habib ticked off her baking triumphs: A tall cake made to look like a pile of presents. A church-and-village cake. A 10-foot tower of cake layers, each on pedestals, completely encircled by balloons that floated up when a string was snipped, revealing the cake inside. A rotating cake that stopped when the bride cut into it.
But in the past three years, as bombs have smashed families, and secret killings, often sectarian, have changed entire neighborhoods, couples have developed a taste for short, simple celebrations. "They want classic style," she said, as Mr. Ayub and their helpers blew up gold balloons behind her. "They want to finish as soon as possible, to complete the party successfully."
Anything can happen. In June, a bomb in the southeast neighborhood of New Baghdad killed an aunt of a groom, and the family had to call off the celebration. In February, after the bombing of a Shiite shrine that set off a spasm of sectarian killings and then a curfew, several weddings were canceled. One couple married early in the morning and left for Jordan without a party. In each case, Ms. Habib was left with cakes she could not sell. An average set of cakes costs about $140.
"Now, when I make the cake, I am afraid," she said. "I don't know if they'll take it or not."
Baking has its own frustrations. Baghdad has only an hour of power every four hours, and most households have two other sources: the neighborhood generator, operated by a much despised 'generator man' and a small, home generator. The official price of gasoline, needed for generators, is 10 times what it was a year ago. The voltage from the generators is different from that in the city's lines, forcing families to buy appliances in pairs.
Ms. Habib works in a small addition to her house. It has seven freezers and three refrigerators, and baking supplies of all types. Flowers fill one refrigerator. Her garden, she said, is crowded with fuel containers and two large generators.
"I canceled the garden," she said.
The violence on city streets has been a serious problem for planning. Invitations used to be hand printed on Mutanabi Street, a bookseller area in central Baghdad, but few people are working anymore and the area is too dangerous anyway, Ms. Habib said. Late last month, Mr. Ayub wanted to go to Bab al-Sharji, a local market area where everything from fake police uniforms to fake flowers (his intended purchase) is for sale. Ms. Habib told him not to go. That afternoon, a large bomb killed several people there.
"Always we are worried, even when we are laughing," she said, her fingers fluttering on her chest. "I am nervous until I put the cake down and finish the party."
One of the biggest problems is simply moving around the city. Once, on her way to get the cake, a long convoy of American Humvees blocked the road for so long that she did not make it back in time for the wedding. The bride made frantic telephone calls, but Ms. Habib was helpless.
On Monday, she drove from her neighborhood in northeast Baghdad to the Hindiya Club in Karrada. It is a 20-minute drive without traffic, but since the new government imposed the latest security plan, in which Iraqi troops operate hundreds of new checkpoints around the city, it now takes almost an hour. By the time she had reached the club, the cakes, stacked three layers high in the trunk of a Mercedes sedan, had begun to look oily.
"My butter cream is strong," she said confidently. "It doesn't easily go down."
As often happens, the club refused to turn on the air-conditioning before the ceremony. That money-saving habit seemed an insurmountable obstacle in one particularly hot wedding hall. Ms. Habib resourcefully placed the cakes on the seats of her car, and left it running with the air-conditioning turned on, until shortly before the couple arrived.
"You see how we work?" she said, wiping sweat from her face with one hand and digging angrily in her purse for a small fan, and offering a second one to a reporter.
Nearby, Ms. Habib's daughter was ironing a white linen tablecloth with a fan blowing directly on her face. Three assistants, all neighbors, including a well-known soccer coach, bustled around the hall, ribbons and pins between their teeth, and wads of pink tulle under their arms. A small boy wandered among the balloons, popping them. The adults winced at the sound.
Couples keep coming. In the Alwiya club last week, Rim, 25, a dental technician, and Amar, 29, a computer programmer, were beaming as they sat with Mr. Ayub, looking over seating arrangements drawn out on a piece of paper. Relatives introduced them a few months ago in Rim's house. Amar could not stop looking at her.
"I felt my heart beating," he said, with an embarrassed smile.
The sense of danger intensifies people's feelings for one another.
"We feel that we could die at any moment," he said.
Ms. Habib chimed in.
"It's very good of us that we are living here without law," she said. "Really, it's admirable."
Sahar Nageeb contributed reporting for this article
Fuel Crisis 2
Here's an update for the fuel crisis:
My father went out today, at 6:30 am, about half an hour after sunrise, bound to the fuel station to fill the car. He found the 4 kms line already there! It turns out that people are spending the night waiting in the line!
The line advanced slowly, because there were still so many cars coming from the exit into the station after paying a 10,000 IDs bribe to the door guards.
The price of 20 litres has become 38000-40000 IDs, that is if you could find any.
He waited in the line until it was 6 pm, that is almost 12 hours, without getting any fuel because the station closed at 6 pm!
The only thing he got was a bad sunburn, or tan as you may call it.
I decided to open expences for fuel no matter how high its price may reach, because we live on this small generator of ours, and services like bakers have become so far since the closer ones closed due to terrorist threats.
Last time i mentioned electricity improvment. I am so sorry for bringing that up. It was a short lived 2-nights improvment, and then it's back to "normal", and normal means 1.5 hours yes, 4.5 hours no... And the "no" time is increasable of course.
The security situation has become a rotten tomato joke... A lady who's a member of parliament was kidnapped, followed by a deputy minister one day later, who was a bit more lucky because he was released at the same day.
So, to wrap it up on fuel... No fuel to run the generator, no fuel to drive around and necessary stuff, and no electricity from the "national" source.
Good Grief!
My father went out today, at 6:30 am, about half an hour after sunrise, bound to the fuel station to fill the car. He found the 4 kms line already there! It turns out that people are spending the night waiting in the line!
The line advanced slowly, because there were still so many cars coming from the exit into the station after paying a 10,000 IDs bribe to the door guards.
The price of 20 litres has become 38000-40000 IDs, that is if you could find any.
He waited in the line until it was 6 pm, that is almost 12 hours, without getting any fuel because the station closed at 6 pm!
The only thing he got was a bad sunburn, or tan as you may call it.
I decided to open expences for fuel no matter how high its price may reach, because we live on this small generator of ours, and services like bakers have become so far since the closer ones closed due to terrorist threats.
Last time i mentioned electricity improvment. I am so sorry for bringing that up. It was a short lived 2-nights improvment, and then it's back to "normal", and normal means 1.5 hours yes, 4.5 hours no... And the "no" time is increasable of course.
The security situation has become a rotten tomato joke... A lady who's a member of parliament was kidnapped, followed by a deputy minister one day later, who was a bit more lucky because he was released at the same day.
So, to wrap it up on fuel... No fuel to run the generator, no fuel to drive around and necessary stuff, and no electricity from the "national" source.
Good Grief!
03 July 2006
Fuel Crisis
Well, it's that time of the week when the "reservoir" car that we have runs out of fuel, because we use its fuel to feed the small generator that we have.
My father went out early, around 7:30 am to fill the reservoir car with fuel. The line before you enter the station could be 3-4 Kms long, but it usually moves well enough, so you could end up standing there for 3-4 hours.
I called him for the 1st time around 10 am, and he said that they hadn't moved much since 7:30 am. I called him again around noon, and there wasn't much change in the situation either.
He returned around 1:30 pm, without getting any fuel. The problem is that there are so many cars/drivers that come in the middle of the line and squeeze themselves into the line, so you see that there are cars entering the station alright, but the end of the line is moving much slower.
While he was there, shooting errupted between some gunmen and the Iraqi Army, but luckily enough, he wasn't close to the fighting.
He tried getting the fuel from the black market. He saw someone who wanted 20 litres for 40000 IDs. The official price is 5000-7000 IDs.
It was until the afternoon, when we got fuel for the generator, with the price of 20000 IDs for 20 litres. And we considered ourselves so lucky!
Isn't it damn sarcastic that Iraq holds the World's second petroleum reserve?!
Down with the state-run stations, and long live the sailors! (= the Iraqi slang expression for those who sell fuel in the black market).
One positive point worth mentioning though, on another scale. Electricity is given for us for more hours.
Let's pray and hope this one good thing continues and increases.
But what would one positive island do, in a stormy sea of negatives?
Maybe the sailors would have the answer!
My father went out early, around 7:30 am to fill the reservoir car with fuel. The line before you enter the station could be 3-4 Kms long, but it usually moves well enough, so you could end up standing there for 3-4 hours.
I called him for the 1st time around 10 am, and he said that they hadn't moved much since 7:30 am. I called him again around noon, and there wasn't much change in the situation either.
He returned around 1:30 pm, without getting any fuel. The problem is that there are so many cars/drivers that come in the middle of the line and squeeze themselves into the line, so you see that there are cars entering the station alright, but the end of the line is moving much slower.
While he was there, shooting errupted between some gunmen and the Iraqi Army, but luckily enough, he wasn't close to the fighting.
He tried getting the fuel from the black market. He saw someone who wanted 20 litres for 40000 IDs. The official price is 5000-7000 IDs.
It was until the afternoon, when we got fuel for the generator, with the price of 20000 IDs for 20 litres. And we considered ourselves so lucky!
Isn't it damn sarcastic that Iraq holds the World's second petroleum reserve?!
Down with the state-run stations, and long live the sailors! (= the Iraqi slang expression for those who sell fuel in the black market).
One positive point worth mentioning though, on another scale. Electricity is given for us for more hours.
Let's pray and hope this one good thing continues and increases.
But what would one positive island do, in a stormy sea of negatives?
Maybe the sailors would have the answer!
01 July 2006
AP Article: Sectarian Divides Change Baghdad's Image
AP Article: Sectarian Divides Change Baghdad's Image
By Sameer N. Yacoub BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Imad Talib lived in a Shiite-dominated district for many years until threats by Shiite militiamen forced the Sunni Arab to move across town. Ahmed Khazim left a mostly Sunni suburb for Sadr City, where his Shiite sect forms the majority.
Religiously mixed neighborhoods of this sprawling city are gradually disappearing as sectarian tensions are prompting Shiites and Sunnis to move to areas where they are predominant.
The trend is raising concerns that Baghdad is slowly being transformed into a divided city - with a Shiite-dominated east and mostly Sunni west, separated by the Tigris River that flows through the heart of the capital.
The independent newspaper Al-Mashriq cited the trend, warning in a recent editorial against the "sick dreams of sick people" to redraw the map of Baghdad "into two sectarian parts."
"Those acts (of violence) have convinced us that we are no longer welcome. We prefer to lose our houses than to lose our families," said Khazim, who left the heavily Sunni Abu Ghraib suburb and moved his 12-member family into a rented apartment in Shiite-dominated Sadr City.
Talib, the Sunni, said he decided to move to a largely Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad after a Sunni neighbor was killed. The neighbor had ignored warnings by the Mahdi army, the Shiite militia led by the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
All that seems ominously like the days of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war, when Christians held sway in the east of Beirut and Muslims dominated the west. Roadblocks, high sand barriers and armed men kept the two religious communities apart.
The situation in Baghdad, a religiously and ethnically mixed city of about 6 million people, is far from wartime Beirut. Nevertheless, many Iraqis fear a divided future if sectarian violence cannot be contained.
Moves toward sectarian division began soon after the 2003 collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. The trend accelerated after the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra. The bombing triggered reprisal attacks against Sunnis in Baghdad, Basra and other religiously mixed areas.
Since the Samarra bombing, Interior Ministry official Satar Nawrouz estimates that nearly 4,000 families - or about 23,670 people - have been forced to relocate to other neighborhoods in the Baghdad area due to sectarian tensions.
In an effort to curb the sectarian flight, police Col. Ali Rashid said authorities are adding checkpoints and patrols in the areas where armed groups are threatening people in hopes of reassuring minorities they will be safe. He said armed extremists from the rival camps want to establish "practically separate neighborhoods on Sunni and Shiite basis" and establish "a clear front-line between the two parts of Baghdad."
But many Sunnis complain that the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry is at the heart of the problem, alleging that it has been infiltrated by the militias.
The new government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has promised to crack down on the militias. But the prime minister's promise has done little so far to reassure ordinary Iraqis.
Instead, signs of a widening gap between Sunnis and Shiites are becoming clearer.
Sunni taxi drivers who shuttled between Jordan and Syria are now telling passengers living in Shiite neighborhoods that they will pick them up only in Sunni areas. The route to Jordan and Syria goes through Anbar province, a stronghold of Sunni insurgents.
Shiite taxi driver Jamal Nassir remembers roaming over all of Baghdad just a few months ago in search of fares. Now he refuses to take passengers through Sunni neighborhoods, fearing for his life.
No neighborhood in Baghdad is entirely safe, as the 66 deaths in a car bomb Saturday in Sadr City attest. But many Iraqis find the prospect of death and injury in random bombings less frightening than being hunted down and slain by militiamen from a rival sect.
Many Iraqis who feel safe in their neighborhoods have begun to steer clear of parts of the capital where they are in the minority.
Two months ago, Hakim al-Kinani, a Shiite, and three cousins were heading home when their car was stopped at what they thought was a police checkpoint in Azamiyah, a Sunni part of the capital.
As he approached the checkpoint, al-Kinani called his family on his cell phone to say he would be delayed because of security checks. But he and his cousins never showed up. The checkpoint was actually manned by gunmen in police uniforms, their relatives said.
Their bodies were discovered the next day in the Baghdad morgue. Hakim's brother, Jassim, said the family now avoids any route that takes them through Azamiyah.
By Sameer N. Yacoub BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Imad Talib lived in a Shiite-dominated district for many years until threats by Shiite militiamen forced the Sunni Arab to move across town. Ahmed Khazim left a mostly Sunni suburb for Sadr City, where his Shiite sect forms the majority.
Religiously mixed neighborhoods of this sprawling city are gradually disappearing as sectarian tensions are prompting Shiites and Sunnis to move to areas where they are predominant.
The trend is raising concerns that Baghdad is slowly being transformed into a divided city - with a Shiite-dominated east and mostly Sunni west, separated by the Tigris River that flows through the heart of the capital.
The independent newspaper Al-Mashriq cited the trend, warning in a recent editorial against the "sick dreams of sick people" to redraw the map of Baghdad "into two sectarian parts."
"Those acts (of violence) have convinced us that we are no longer welcome. We prefer to lose our houses than to lose our families," said Khazim, who left the heavily Sunni Abu Ghraib suburb and moved his 12-member family into a rented apartment in Shiite-dominated Sadr City.
Talib, the Sunni, said he decided to move to a largely Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad after a Sunni neighbor was killed. The neighbor had ignored warnings by the Mahdi army, the Shiite militia led by the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
All that seems ominously like the days of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war, when Christians held sway in the east of Beirut and Muslims dominated the west. Roadblocks, high sand barriers and armed men kept the two religious communities apart.
The situation in Baghdad, a religiously and ethnically mixed city of about 6 million people, is far from wartime Beirut. Nevertheless, many Iraqis fear a divided future if sectarian violence cannot be contained.
Moves toward sectarian division began soon after the 2003 collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime. The trend accelerated after the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra. The bombing triggered reprisal attacks against Sunnis in Baghdad, Basra and other religiously mixed areas.
Since the Samarra bombing, Interior Ministry official Satar Nawrouz estimates that nearly 4,000 families - or about 23,670 people - have been forced to relocate to other neighborhoods in the Baghdad area due to sectarian tensions.
In an effort to curb the sectarian flight, police Col. Ali Rashid said authorities are adding checkpoints and patrols in the areas where armed groups are threatening people in hopes of reassuring minorities they will be safe. He said armed extremists from the rival camps want to establish "practically separate neighborhoods on Sunni and Shiite basis" and establish "a clear front-line between the two parts of Baghdad."
But many Sunnis complain that the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry is at the heart of the problem, alleging that it has been infiltrated by the militias.
The new government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has promised to crack down on the militias. But the prime minister's promise has done little so far to reassure ordinary Iraqis.
Instead, signs of a widening gap between Sunnis and Shiites are becoming clearer.
Sunni taxi drivers who shuttled between Jordan and Syria are now telling passengers living in Shiite neighborhoods that they will pick them up only in Sunni areas. The route to Jordan and Syria goes through Anbar province, a stronghold of Sunni insurgents.
Shiite taxi driver Jamal Nassir remembers roaming over all of Baghdad just a few months ago in search of fares. Now he refuses to take passengers through Sunni neighborhoods, fearing for his life.
No neighborhood in Baghdad is entirely safe, as the 66 deaths in a car bomb Saturday in Sadr City attest. But many Iraqis find the prospect of death and injury in random bombings less frightening than being hunted down and slain by militiamen from a rival sect.
Many Iraqis who feel safe in their neighborhoods have begun to steer clear of parts of the capital where they are in the minority.
Two months ago, Hakim al-Kinani, a Shiite, and three cousins were heading home when their car was stopped at what they thought was a police checkpoint in Azamiyah, a Sunni part of the capital.
As he approached the checkpoint, al-Kinani called his family on his cell phone to say he would be delayed because of security checks. But he and his cousins never showed up. The checkpoint was actually manned by gunmen in police uniforms, their relatives said.
Their bodies were discovered the next day in the Baghdad morgue. Hakim's brother, Jassim, said the family now avoids any route that takes them through Azamiyah.
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