Sunni Baghdad Becomes Land of Silent Ruins
ALISSA J. RUBIN
BAGHDAD, March 25 — The cityscape of Iraq’s capital tells a stark story of the toll the past four years have taken on Iraq’s once powerful Sunni Arabs.
Theirs is a world of ruined buildings, damaged mosques, streets pitted by mortar shells, uncollected trash and so little electricity that many people have abandoned using refrigerators altogether.
The contrast with Shiite neighborhoods is sharp. Markets there are in full swing, community projects are under way, and while electricity is scarce throughout the city, there is less trouble finding fuel for generators in those areas. When the government cannot provide services, civilian arms of the Shiite militias step in to try to fill the gap.
But in Adhamiya, a community with a Sunni majority, any semblance of normal life vanished more than a year ago. Its only hospital, Al Numan, is so short of basic items like gauze and cotton pads that when mortar attacks hit the community last fall, the doctors broadcast appeals for supplies over local mosque loudspeakers.
Here, as in so much of Baghdad, the sectarian divide makes itself felt in its own deadly and destructive ways. Far more than in Shiite areas, sectarian hatred has shredded whatever remained of community life and created a cycle of violence that pits Sunni against Sunni as well as Sunni against Shiite.
Anyone who works with the government, whether Shiite or Sunni, is an enemy in the eyes of the Sunni insurgents, who carry out attack after attack against people they view as collaborators. While that chiefly makes targets of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Army and the police, the militants also kill fellow Sunnis from government ministries who come to repair water and electrical lines in Sunni neighborhoods.
One result of such attacks is that government workers of either sect refuse to deliver services to most Sunni areas. For ordinary Sunnis, all this deepens the sense of political impotence and estrangement. American military leaders and Western diplomats are unsure about whether the cycle can be stopped.
“The Sunnis outside the political process say, ‘What’s the point of coming in when those involved in the government can do nothing for their own community?’ ” said a Western diplomat who is not authorized to speak publicly.
Militant religious groups, known as takfiris, “have taken these Sunni neighborhoods as bases, which made these areas of military operation,” which stops the delivery of services, said Nasir al-Ani, a Sunni member of Parliament who works on a committee trying to win popular acceptance of the Baghdad security plan. “Now the ministries are trying to make services available, but the security situation prevents it. Part of the aim of the takfiris is to keep people disliking the government.”
It adds up to a bleak prognosis for Sunnis in Baghdad. Until the violence is under control, there is unlikely to be any progress. But it is hard to persuade Sunnis to take a stand against the violence when they seem to receive so little in return.
“We want to highlight that when the government is denying services to Sunnis, they are pushing them toward the Sunni extremists who attack the Shiite-dominated security forces,” said Maj. Guy Parmeter, an operations officer for the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry, which operates in the Sunni areas on the west side of Baghdad. “And when that happens, it makes it harder to deliver services to those areas.”
Government leaders admit that there has been outright obstruction on the part of some Shiite ministries. Ali al-Dabbagh, the government’s spokesman, said that the Health Ministry, dominated by Shiites loyal to the militant cleric Moktada al-Sadr, has failed to deliver needed services to Sunni areas, which had thrived under Saddam Hussein.
“This is part of the lack of efficiency in the ministry which didn’t improve this year,” Mr. Dabbagh said. He added, however, that he did not see any remedy in the near term.
But officials also emphasize that many of the skilled Sunnis who used to keep the ministries going have fled, so the ministries are not delivering services to anyone. Again, security has to come first, they said.
Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite whose most recent role is to lead the committee working to win popular acceptance of the security plan, said he saw four problems particularly plaguing Sunni areas: food distribution, electricity, fuel and health services.
Mr. Chalabi says he may have found a solution for the first by assuring that food agents, especially in Sunni areas, have an Iraqi Army escort to the food warehouses. The other problems are deeper, and solutions will take far longer to find, he said.
Since there has been no census taken in years, it is difficult to say the relative proportion of Shiites and Sunnis in Baghdad. Rough estimates suggest that Sunnis now make up no more than 40 percent of Baghdad’s population and possibly much less.
Day-to-day life for most Sunnis has become a nightmare of frustration, punctuated by terror that they will be caught in the cross-fire. Sunni Baghdad is now made up of block after block of shuttered storefronts, broken glass and piles of rubble. By midafternoon in those neighborhoods, hardly a person is on the street. Many residents will not leave their neighborhoods to go to jobs or see a doctor for fear they will be kidnapped at a checkpoint.
Baghdad’s Sunni areas, mostly on the west side, were once roughly 70 percent Sunni and 30 percent Shiite, but those ratios have become more lopsided as Shiites have fled. Each neighborhood has its own sad tale.
In Amiriya, one of the western neighborhoods that was taken over early on by hard-line Sunni insurgents, the Americans and the militants have fought a running battle for more than three years. More recently Shiite militiamen joined the fray, kidnapping and killing those they believed were collaborating with the insurgents.
Now they have fled and been replaced by cells of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, who threaten Sunnis who refuse to cooperate with them. They take over houses that families have fled and use them as bases to attack Iraqi Army and police checkpoints in the neighborhood.
Small wonder that streets are empty, shops are shuttered and neighbors view every foray for life’s essentials as a dangerous journey.
For Um Hint, who did not give her full name for fear of retaliation, the past four years have been a downhill slide. She learned to recognize the different insurgents by what they wear. “The ones we see now are different from the ones before because those wore masks,” she said. “The merchants no longer sell their goods from their stores. We must go to their houses when we want something like shampoo or clothes. Anyone trying to open his shop, the insurgents will threaten him. Sometimes they leave a note, but sometimes they put a bomb in front of the shop.”
The hazards on the streets have forced women to take over many of the activities often taken care of by men: food shopping, making inquiries at government agencies and taking household belongings for repairs. The militants “only kill men,” said Ms. Hint, 40. “So we go out alone.”
In Mansour, an odd silence pervades even before the shadows begin to lengthen. Along the once busy 14th of Ramadan Street, most shops are closed, and almost every side street is blocked off by coils of barbed wire and concrete blocks.
Residents describe an infrastructure so completely broken that they barely limp from one day to the next.
“I simply want to say that there are no services now,” said Abu Ali, 52, an engineer who works for a local cellphone company. “I get electricity for only two hours a day.”
He added: “The phones have been dead for two months; the sewers are bad; I have a broken water pipe in front of my house that has been flooding the street for nearly eight weeks. The garbage truck stopped coming two months ago.”
Even well into 2004, Mansour was one of the most luxurious shopping areas of Baghdad, the home of embassies and government officials. People lucky enough to live there could not imagine moving. Now, the Shiite areas they once scorned evoke envy because Shiite militias provide security and services.
“There are neighborhoods where people are receiving their food basket in full quantities and on time,” Mr. Ali said. “The reason is that those areas are pure Shiite — they are controlled by Mahdi Army,” he said, referring to the militia that claims loyalty to Mr. Sadr. “There you have someone to complain to, even if it’s not the government.”
In Adhamiya, the most heavily Sunni majority neighborhood on the east bank of the Tigris, there has also been a succession of armed groups. Most recently, gangs of young men prowled the neighborhood and attacked anyone trying to help local residents. The head of the district council was gunned down 10 days ago; three months earlier his predecessor was killed the same way.
The council had been a beacon for beleaguered Adhamiya residents, its offices busy from early morning. But its members are under attack, and it is unclear how long they will be willing to continue to take the risks that come with helping their neighbors.
Haji Daoud, 46, a council member and engineer with a degree in psychology, is the man with many of the answers for those who come. He has a caseload of about 2,500 families. For the poorest, he has tried to organize shares in small generators so that they at least have enough electricity to turn on lights at night. No one has enough to run a refrigerator.
Mostly, people want jobs. Shaima, a 22-year-old divorced mother, asked Mr. Daoud if he could find her a job as a cleaner. Mr. Daoud shook his head. “There are no shops open here to clean,” he said.
Across from her sits Ahmed Ali, a grizzled 72-year old carpenter who came for help getting his food ration basket. Mr. Ali closed his carpentry shop because there was no electricity. Known throughout Adhamiya for his craftsmanship, he was famous for making an Arab version of the lute for local musicians.
His eldest son was killed a year ago. When he collected the body at the morgue, he found that holes had been drilled through his son’s joints, a form of torture that is a mark of Shiite militias. Last summer, his younger son was kidnapped near the neighborhood.
He leaned forward slightly on his cane and looked hard at Mr. Daoud as he tried to explain the depth of his losses: the carpentry shop, his food rations, his family. “I made lutes and sometimes I played, but my fingers are numb now,” he said. “I cannot play. I want only to find my kidnapped son.”
25 March 2007
AP Article: Attacks against U.S.-led security crackdown in Iraq kill 47
By Kim Gamel
ASSOCIATED PRESS
BAGHDAD – A suicide bomber driving a truck with explosives hidden under bricks destroyed a police station Saturday in Baghdad – the largest in a series of insurgent strikes against the American-led security crackdown. At least 47 people died in the attacks, including 20 at the police station.
The bomber bypassed tight security to get within 25 yards of the station by blending in with other trucks coming and going as part of a construction project, detonating his explosives after reaching the main gate. Police said half of those killed were policemen and several were inmates at the jail; 28 people were wounded.
“We did not suspect the suicide truck, and he easily reached the main gate where he detonated his truck. Suddenly there was a big explosion and part of the building collapsed,” said police Cpl. Hussam Ali, who saw the blast from a nearby guard post. “We were very cautious, but this time we were taken by surprise. The insurgents are inventing new methods to hurt us.”
The thunderous explosion caused part of the two-story station to collapse and sent a plume of black smoke drifting across the Baghdad skyline.
U.S. and Iraqi forces set up checkpoints at the scene and helped carry the wounded to hospitals, while military helicopters rumbled overhead.
In all, at least 74 people were killed or found dead in Iraq on Saturday, making it the seventh deadliest day since U.S. and Iraqi forces launched the security operation on Feb. 14, according to an Associated Press tally. That included at least 25 bullet-riddled bodies – 11 found in Baghdad, six pulled from the Tigris River south of the capital and eight in the Anbar city of Fallujah.
The U.S. military also announced the deaths of two more U.S. soldiers on Friday – one killed by a roadside bomb while on a foot patrol south of Baghdad and another who died in fighting in the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Anbar province.
Northwest of the capital, a man wearing an explosives belt blew himself up outside a pastry shop in a central market area in Tal Afar, killing at least 10 people and wounding three, just over a year after President Bush declared that city was an example of progress made in bringing security to Iraq.
A man driving an explosives-laden truck carrying boxes of new shoes also blew himself up near a Shiite mosque in Haswa, 30 miles south of Baghdad, killing at least 11 people and wounding 45, police said.
Two suicide car bombers also struck a police station in Qaim, near the Syrian border and about 200 miles west of Baghdad. At least six people – five policemen and a woman – were killed and 19 wounded in that attack.
The Voices of Iraq news agency said there were three suicide car bombers that hit three police stations in the Qaim area, killing at least 20 and wounding 30. The agency said security forces were looking for a fourth car load with explosives and thought to be in the city. The report could not be independently verified.
The bombings were not as numerous and the casualties not as high as the death tolls that were often in the dozens before the U.S. and Iraqi governments sent thousands more troops to the Baghdad area to try to stop a surge of retaliatory attacks between Sunnis and Shiites.
But they came on the heels of a suicide bombing that wounded Iraq's highest-ranking Sunni politician and killed nine other people and a rocket strike that landed near a news conference being held by the U.N. secretary-general in Baghdad, signaling that the Sunni insurgents who usually stage such attacks are picking their targets carefully and finding new ways to overcome security measures.
On March 14, U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William C. Caldwell urged patience and cautioned that “high-profile” car bombings, which rose to a high of 77 in February, could “start the whole cycle of violence again.”
Since the operation began on Feb. 14, the number of execution-style killings in the capital has declined – a development officials say is due to an agreement keeping Shiite militias off the street.
U.S. and Iraqi forces, meanwhile, persisted with their neighborhood-to-neighborhood sweep of the capital, stepping up patrols in the Shiite commercial district of Karradah and shelling two mostly Sunni rural districts near the Dora neighborhood – the scene of several bombardments in recent weeks.
In the Amariyah district in west Baghdad, the military said U.S. soldiers were fired on from the minaret of the al-Qubaisi mosque. The statement said the unit fired back with automatic weapons and two TOW (wire-guided, high explosive) missiles. It did not say whether there were casualties.
“Soldiers immediately cordoned the mosque grounds and called for assistance from the Iraqi security forces. ... (Iraqi security forces) in conjunction with coalition forces searched the mosque and found four AK-47s and seven magazines of ammunition,” the military said.
The suicide bomber targeting the police station in central Dora detonated his explosives after being stopped by a long barricade guarded by policemen and surrounded by concrete blast walls, Ali said.
“I was standing near my shop when I heard a big explosion,” said 42-year-old Salah Abdul-Wahid, who owns a nearby hardware store. “We rushed to the building to see scattered debris everywhere, fallen blast barriers and bodies and wounded people being taken from the building.”
The 10:45 a.m. explosion occurred nearly three hours after two mortar shells landed on a Shiite enclave elsewhere in Dora, killing three people, police said.
Gunmen also ambushed an Iraqi army checkpoint in Baghdad's western Sunni neighborhood of Jami'a, killing a soldier, police said, adding that a militant also was killed in subsequent clashes.
Salam al-Zubaie, one of two deputies to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, meanwhile was moved out of the intensive care unit Saturday morning and was in good condition, Sunni lawmaker Dhafer al-Ani said, adding that the Sunni had received visitors at the U.S.-run hospital in the heavily guarded Green Zone.
The Islamic State in Iraq, an umbrella group that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq, claimed responsibility for Friday's bombing against al-Zubaie at a small mosque attached to the politician's home.
Al-Zubaie is among a long list of politicians – Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds – who have been targeted by militants seeking to undermine a succession of U.S.-backed governments in Iraq. Close relatives of government officials have also been victims of assassinations, abductions and roadside bombs.
The same group claimed on Saturday that it was behind the attack on a Baghdad compound during the news conference two days ago by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Ban was unharmed in the attack.
Meanwhile, the Iranian ambassador visited Iraqi President Jalal Talabani at his home in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah. Talabani spokesman Kamran Qaradaghi said Iranian envoy Hassan Kazemi Qomi paid the “courtesy call” on Friday to convey his government's good wishes for the president's recovery and return to Iraq after 17 days of treatment in a Jordanian hospital for exhaustion and dehydration.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
BAGHDAD – A suicide bomber driving a truck with explosives hidden under bricks destroyed a police station Saturday in Baghdad – the largest in a series of insurgent strikes against the American-led security crackdown. At least 47 people died in the attacks, including 20 at the police station.
The bomber bypassed tight security to get within 25 yards of the station by blending in with other trucks coming and going as part of a construction project, detonating his explosives after reaching the main gate. Police said half of those killed were policemen and several were inmates at the jail; 28 people were wounded.
“We did not suspect the suicide truck, and he easily reached the main gate where he detonated his truck. Suddenly there was a big explosion and part of the building collapsed,” said police Cpl. Hussam Ali, who saw the blast from a nearby guard post. “We were very cautious, but this time we were taken by surprise. The insurgents are inventing new methods to hurt us.”
The thunderous explosion caused part of the two-story station to collapse and sent a plume of black smoke drifting across the Baghdad skyline.
U.S. and Iraqi forces set up checkpoints at the scene and helped carry the wounded to hospitals, while military helicopters rumbled overhead.
In all, at least 74 people were killed or found dead in Iraq on Saturday, making it the seventh deadliest day since U.S. and Iraqi forces launched the security operation on Feb. 14, according to an Associated Press tally. That included at least 25 bullet-riddled bodies – 11 found in Baghdad, six pulled from the Tigris River south of the capital and eight in the Anbar city of Fallujah.
The U.S. military also announced the deaths of two more U.S. soldiers on Friday – one killed by a roadside bomb while on a foot patrol south of Baghdad and another who died in fighting in the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Anbar province.
Northwest of the capital, a man wearing an explosives belt blew himself up outside a pastry shop in a central market area in Tal Afar, killing at least 10 people and wounding three, just over a year after President Bush declared that city was an example of progress made in bringing security to Iraq.
A man driving an explosives-laden truck carrying boxes of new shoes also blew himself up near a Shiite mosque in Haswa, 30 miles south of Baghdad, killing at least 11 people and wounding 45, police said.
Two suicide car bombers also struck a police station in Qaim, near the Syrian border and about 200 miles west of Baghdad. At least six people – five policemen and a woman – were killed and 19 wounded in that attack.
The Voices of Iraq news agency said there were three suicide car bombers that hit three police stations in the Qaim area, killing at least 20 and wounding 30. The agency said security forces were looking for a fourth car load with explosives and thought to be in the city. The report could not be independently verified.
The bombings were not as numerous and the casualties not as high as the death tolls that were often in the dozens before the U.S. and Iraqi governments sent thousands more troops to the Baghdad area to try to stop a surge of retaliatory attacks between Sunnis and Shiites.
But they came on the heels of a suicide bombing that wounded Iraq's highest-ranking Sunni politician and killed nine other people and a rocket strike that landed near a news conference being held by the U.N. secretary-general in Baghdad, signaling that the Sunni insurgents who usually stage such attacks are picking their targets carefully and finding new ways to overcome security measures.
On March 14, U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William C. Caldwell urged patience and cautioned that “high-profile” car bombings, which rose to a high of 77 in February, could “start the whole cycle of violence again.”
Since the operation began on Feb. 14, the number of execution-style killings in the capital has declined – a development officials say is due to an agreement keeping Shiite militias off the street.
U.S. and Iraqi forces, meanwhile, persisted with their neighborhood-to-neighborhood sweep of the capital, stepping up patrols in the Shiite commercial district of Karradah and shelling two mostly Sunni rural districts near the Dora neighborhood – the scene of several bombardments in recent weeks.
In the Amariyah district in west Baghdad, the military said U.S. soldiers were fired on from the minaret of the al-Qubaisi mosque. The statement said the unit fired back with automatic weapons and two TOW (wire-guided, high explosive) missiles. It did not say whether there were casualties.
“Soldiers immediately cordoned the mosque grounds and called for assistance from the Iraqi security forces. ... (Iraqi security forces) in conjunction with coalition forces searched the mosque and found four AK-47s and seven magazines of ammunition,” the military said.
The suicide bomber targeting the police station in central Dora detonated his explosives after being stopped by a long barricade guarded by policemen and surrounded by concrete blast walls, Ali said.
“I was standing near my shop when I heard a big explosion,” said 42-year-old Salah Abdul-Wahid, who owns a nearby hardware store. “We rushed to the building to see scattered debris everywhere, fallen blast barriers and bodies and wounded people being taken from the building.”
The 10:45 a.m. explosion occurred nearly three hours after two mortar shells landed on a Shiite enclave elsewhere in Dora, killing three people, police said.
Gunmen also ambushed an Iraqi army checkpoint in Baghdad's western Sunni neighborhood of Jami'a, killing a soldier, police said, adding that a militant also was killed in subsequent clashes.
Salam al-Zubaie, one of two deputies to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, meanwhile was moved out of the intensive care unit Saturday morning and was in good condition, Sunni lawmaker Dhafer al-Ani said, adding that the Sunni had received visitors at the U.S.-run hospital in the heavily guarded Green Zone.
The Islamic State in Iraq, an umbrella group that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq, claimed responsibility for Friday's bombing against al-Zubaie at a small mosque attached to the politician's home.
Al-Zubaie is among a long list of politicians – Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds – who have been targeted by militants seeking to undermine a succession of U.S.-backed governments in Iraq. Close relatives of government officials have also been victims of assassinations, abductions and roadside bombs.
The same group claimed on Saturday that it was behind the attack on a Baghdad compound during the news conference two days ago by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Ban was unharmed in the attack.
Meanwhile, the Iranian ambassador visited Iraqi President Jalal Talabani at his home in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah. Talabani spokesman Kamran Qaradaghi said Iranian envoy Hassan Kazemi Qomi paid the “courtesy call” on Friday to convey his government's good wishes for the president's recovery and return to Iraq after 17 days of treatment in a Jordanian hospital for exhaustion and dehydration.
23 March 2007
US Army fires smoke bomb on our house
We condemn the US Army's firing a smoke bomb at our house on Tue. 20 Mar. 2007 around 10 pm.
This act caused many small fires and smoke around the house, with the bomb falling only a yard away from a gas cylinder and a kerosene container, but without causing significant damage.
The bomb contained pink small tablets which caused the fires, and their flames increased whenever water was used in an attempt to distinguish them.
The firing source seemed to be from an Apache helicopter, and came as part of the latest military actions in the area.
Similar bombs fell on nearby houses, with at least one causing significant damages inside one of the houses.
20 March 2007
NYTimes.com Article: For Many Iraqis, Hunt for Missing Is Never-Ending
By DAMIEN CAVE
BAGHDAD, March 18 — He comes to her in dreams, dressed in the blue police uniform he wore the day he disappeared.
“I’m alive,” he tells Intisar Rashid, his wife and the mother of their five children. “I’m alive.”
And so she restlessly keeps searching. Ever since the Thursday two months ago when her husband failed to come home, Ms. Rashid has tried to find the man she loves.
In the Green Zone last week, where she waited to scour a database of Iraqis detained by American troops, she said she had already visited the Baghdad morgue a dozen times, every hospital in the city and a handful of Iraqi government ministries.
“I feel like I’m going to collapse,” she said, carrying her husband’s police identification card in one hand and a crumpled tissue in the other. “It’s taken over my days, my nights.”
The past year of dizzying violence here has produced thousands of Iraqis like Ms. Rashid — sad-eyed seekers caught in an endless loop of inquiry and disappointment. Burdened by grief without end or answers, they face a set of horrors as varied and fractured as Iraq itself.
Has my son or husband or father been killed by a death squad, his body hidden? Or has he been arrested? Is he in a legitimate prison with his name unregistered, or trapped in a secret basement jail with masked torturers?
Most importantly: How can he be found?
Under Saddam Hussein, the disappeared were not discussed. Asking for information about people believed to be detained or killed by the regime only brought more danger to the family. But since the war, and particularly following the sharp rise in sectarian fighting over the past year, searching has become an obsession.
Nearly 3,000 Iraqis visited the American-run National Iraqi Assistance Center in the Green Zone last month to look for missing relatives, roughly triple the monthly traffic of last spring, and an increase of 50 percent since December, according to military figures.
Capt. Lance Carr, the director of the center, which also manages programs for medical aid, employment and other issues, said the swell in inquiries about missing men tracks with a rise in detentions under the new Baghdad security plan. Iraqis said that despite the legacy of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, their best-case scenario was still American detention because at least then their loved ones were registered and had a chance to be released if innocent.
But American-run prisons hold only a small portion of Iraq’s detainees. Because many victims of the violence here are never identified, and because the Iraqi detention system remains corrupt, sectarian and opaque, according to Iraqi and American officials, most Iraqis never find who they are looking for.
“There are so many different sides that are fighting now, without names or uniforms,” said Muhammad Haideri, a Shiite cleric and chairman of the human rights committee in the Iraqi Parliament. “There’s terrorism; there are kidnappings, armed militias and gangs. On top of that, when a bomb explodes, people end up deformed, and they are considered missing, too.”
Mr. Haideri said his committee had pressed the Ministries of Interior and Defense to compile lists of prisoners and improve how detainees were treated, but that progress has been slow. He said that both the army and the police had been infiltrated by sectarian gangs and that individual units and commanding officers feared giving people open access to detainee information because it would cut off a source of bribes and the security forces could be accused of torture, especially by Sunni Arabs.
“It does not serve the Interior Ministry, the Ministry of Defense or the prime minister to publish numbers or names, because it will stir up more anger,” Mr. Haideri said. “Even if the Shiites are innocent, it will be chaos.”
The political calculation has only made life harder for those in search of the missing. On a recent day at the National Iraqi Assistance Center, known as NIAC (and pronounced “nye-ack”), 190 people streamed in; 110 of them had come to search for missing relatives.
One door away from the main media office of the United States military in Iraq — the source of upbeat news releases with headlines like “Iraqis leading the way to their future” — the rotating crowd of Iraqis sat quietly, glum, eyes looking toward the floor as if they had not laughed or smiled in months. Most were women, dressed in black and carrying folders with pictures of the missing, their identification cards, and handwritten notes with the worn corners and creases that come from repeated use.
The stories Iraqis told in interviews over several days sounded like different verses of the same dirge.
Anwar Mialla’s brother, a Sunni farm worker near from Falluja, disappeared June 24 during his hourlong commute to work. Neither he nor his car were found.
Hisin Najim, a Shiite, said her husband and 15-year-old son disappeared Aug. 1 near Taji, a Sunni area north of Baghdad, where they had taken a job moving furniture with their pickup truck.
Jemila Jassam’s son Falah, a Sunni Arab, left a friend’s house in the Sunni Baghdad neighborhood of Amiriya on Jan. 8 to get gas. He never returned.
Kadem Mnahi Badr, 61, a Shiite laborer from Sadr City, said his son 21-year-old son Talib disappeared Sept. 9 while driving a taxi. “His car was never found, there was no phone call, no trace at all,” he said.
For many of the Iraqis at NIAC, the lack of information seemed to hurt as much as the loss itself. They provided the basic facts of their stories in monotones, but describe their quests with raised voices and tear-filled eyes.
Ms. Rashid, 45, said she began her search the day after her husband failed to come home. He had called from his cellphone the night before from a checkpoint to say that he was running late at work in Baghdad and was taking a minibus to their home in Mahmudiya, a town 20 miles south of the capital. She kept calling him, but his phone had been turned off, and when he did not arrive, she feared the worst.
“I didn’t sleep at all,” she said.
The next morning, she called her husband’s commanders, who said they knew nothing about it. She drove to Baghdad. At checkpoints along the way, she asked if there had been any car accidents or bombings that might have cost him his life.
At the morgue later that day, and for the next nine days in a row, she said she looked through dozens of ghastly images of the dead — people with their heads cut off, their chests drilled, their faces peeled. Her mustached husband of 19 years, Ali Mahmoud al-Ajelee, the loving father who always kissed his youngest daughter before leaving for work, was not among them.
Hospitals were next. Then the Ministry of the Interior; the Ministry of Defense; the Ministry of Human Rights.
She said she also visited two American military bases in Mahmudiya, and at one point, walked the route from her home to Baghdad, asking everyone she met if they had seen her husband on the day he disappeared.
“I’ve spent two months like this,” she said. “Still, I find nothing.”
It was her second time at NIAC, and she waited patiently while others stepped into the white trailer with the wooden sign that said “detainee section.” A child in a wheelchair looking for medical assistance sat nearby.
Captain Carr, 44, a Navy reservist who works as a risk management consultant in Washougal, Wash., moved through the group softly, like a doctor near sleeping patients.
Though he has grown so dedicated to the center that he is trying to extend his tour past April, he said that most Iraqis who visit leave disappointed.
“For 75 or 80 percent, we can’t give them any news,” he said. “It’s tough. We still get requests for things that happened last April.”
In some cases, mistakes add to the pain. Mr. Badr, the laborer from Sadr City, said he was told a few months ago that his son Talib was in Camp Bucca, an American detention center in southern Iraq. He and his wife drove there a few days later, anxious yet relieved. They would finally get to see their son.
But when they arrived, they discovered there had been a mistake. They young man who greeted them had the same name and date of birth, but it was not their Talib.
“When his mother saw it was not her son, she fainted,” Mr. Badr said.
He said he was just as heartsick. He ran up to the young man and shook him.
“I kept asking that boy — even though I knew it was not my son — I kept asking him his name,” he said. “I had some feeling, some hope that maybe his face had changed while he was imprisoned. I just couldn’t believe it.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Badr was back to continue his search. He said his wife had fallen ill after the visit to Camp Bucca. “She hasn’t left her bed,” he said.The Iraqi workers in the detainee section trailer, one of several that make up NIAC, said that seeing so much hopelessness sometimes made them cry. An employee with a business degree, who called himself Abu Jassim, said he was particularly galled by the stories that involved lawyers and informants who charged families for false information.
It had become a common problem, he said. And in fact, several of the Iraqis who entered the trailer each day said they had paid someone for information.At one point, a woman wearing a blue scarf appeared with a registration number that she said she received from a lawyer. She had paid him 200,000 Iraqi dinar, about $137, for help, and she entered the trailer smiling, confident that things would be different for her. She said she could not wait to visit her husband.
She gave Abu Jassim his name (Wafah Altifat), his year of birth (1974), the date he disappeared (April 25, 2006) and the registration number.
Abu Jassim typed the information into his computer. He looked her in the eye. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The number has another name attached to it, with a different date of birth and a different date of arrest. Your lawyer is a liar.”
The woman burst into tears.
“They told me that a detainee who was released saw him,” she said. She dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “They told me he was there.”
Mr. Jassim said the database took time to update. Maybe it was just a misspelling and he really was with the Americans: “If you want to come here every 10 days,” he said, “we don’t mind.”
After she left, Mr. Jassim said that they did not have the heart to tell people that it was rare for a name to appear in the database more than a few weeks after the person was supposedly arrested.
Even those who knew better seemed to have a hard time giving up.
Ms. Rashid received the same message from a NIAC employee who goes only by the name Google. He told her that her husband could not be found in the system. He said that the database was updated every week or so if she wanted to come back.
“Do you think three months could pass and he wouldn’t be in the database?” she asked him.
He did not respond.
“I’ve heard of cases where someone was arrested in Mahmudiya and they didn’t show up in the database for seven months,” Ms. Rashid said, leaning forward, composed, the tissue in her hand. “Could that be what happened?”
Another pause, no answer.
“But it has happened right? It has happened.”
The employee mixed a shrug with a nod. Ms. Rashid stood up. She said she would return before the end of the month.
An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.
BAGHDAD, March 18 — He comes to her in dreams, dressed in the blue police uniform he wore the day he disappeared.
“I’m alive,” he tells Intisar Rashid, his wife and the mother of their five children. “I’m alive.”
And so she restlessly keeps searching. Ever since the Thursday two months ago when her husband failed to come home, Ms. Rashid has tried to find the man she loves.
In the Green Zone last week, where she waited to scour a database of Iraqis detained by American troops, she said she had already visited the Baghdad morgue a dozen times, every hospital in the city and a handful of Iraqi government ministries.
“I feel like I’m going to collapse,” she said, carrying her husband’s police identification card in one hand and a crumpled tissue in the other. “It’s taken over my days, my nights.”
The past year of dizzying violence here has produced thousands of Iraqis like Ms. Rashid — sad-eyed seekers caught in an endless loop of inquiry and disappointment. Burdened by grief without end or answers, they face a set of horrors as varied and fractured as Iraq itself.
Has my son or husband or father been killed by a death squad, his body hidden? Or has he been arrested? Is he in a legitimate prison with his name unregistered, or trapped in a secret basement jail with masked torturers?
Most importantly: How can he be found?
Under Saddam Hussein, the disappeared were not discussed. Asking for information about people believed to be detained or killed by the regime only brought more danger to the family. But since the war, and particularly following the sharp rise in sectarian fighting over the past year, searching has become an obsession.
Nearly 3,000 Iraqis visited the American-run National Iraqi Assistance Center in the Green Zone last month to look for missing relatives, roughly triple the monthly traffic of last spring, and an increase of 50 percent since December, according to military figures.
Capt. Lance Carr, the director of the center, which also manages programs for medical aid, employment and other issues, said the swell in inquiries about missing men tracks with a rise in detentions under the new Baghdad security plan. Iraqis said that despite the legacy of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, their best-case scenario was still American detention because at least then their loved ones were registered and had a chance to be released if innocent.
But American-run prisons hold only a small portion of Iraq’s detainees. Because many victims of the violence here are never identified, and because the Iraqi detention system remains corrupt, sectarian and opaque, according to Iraqi and American officials, most Iraqis never find who they are looking for.
“There are so many different sides that are fighting now, without names or uniforms,” said Muhammad Haideri, a Shiite cleric and chairman of the human rights committee in the Iraqi Parliament. “There’s terrorism; there are kidnappings, armed militias and gangs. On top of that, when a bomb explodes, people end up deformed, and they are considered missing, too.”
Mr. Haideri said his committee had pressed the Ministries of Interior and Defense to compile lists of prisoners and improve how detainees were treated, but that progress has been slow. He said that both the army and the police had been infiltrated by sectarian gangs and that individual units and commanding officers feared giving people open access to detainee information because it would cut off a source of bribes and the security forces could be accused of torture, especially by Sunni Arabs.
“It does not serve the Interior Ministry, the Ministry of Defense or the prime minister to publish numbers or names, because it will stir up more anger,” Mr. Haideri said. “Even if the Shiites are innocent, it will be chaos.”
The political calculation has only made life harder for those in search of the missing. On a recent day at the National Iraqi Assistance Center, known as NIAC (and pronounced “nye-ack”), 190 people streamed in; 110 of them had come to search for missing relatives.
One door away from the main media office of the United States military in Iraq — the source of upbeat news releases with headlines like “Iraqis leading the way to their future” — the rotating crowd of Iraqis sat quietly, glum, eyes looking toward the floor as if they had not laughed or smiled in months. Most were women, dressed in black and carrying folders with pictures of the missing, their identification cards, and handwritten notes with the worn corners and creases that come from repeated use.
The stories Iraqis told in interviews over several days sounded like different verses of the same dirge.
Anwar Mialla’s brother, a Sunni farm worker near from Falluja, disappeared June 24 during his hourlong commute to work. Neither he nor his car were found.
Hisin Najim, a Shiite, said her husband and 15-year-old son disappeared Aug. 1 near Taji, a Sunni area north of Baghdad, where they had taken a job moving furniture with their pickup truck.
Jemila Jassam’s son Falah, a Sunni Arab, left a friend’s house in the Sunni Baghdad neighborhood of Amiriya on Jan. 8 to get gas. He never returned.
Kadem Mnahi Badr, 61, a Shiite laborer from Sadr City, said his son 21-year-old son Talib disappeared Sept. 9 while driving a taxi. “His car was never found, there was no phone call, no trace at all,” he said.
For many of the Iraqis at NIAC, the lack of information seemed to hurt as much as the loss itself. They provided the basic facts of their stories in monotones, but describe their quests with raised voices and tear-filled eyes.
Ms. Rashid, 45, said she began her search the day after her husband failed to come home. He had called from his cellphone the night before from a checkpoint to say that he was running late at work in Baghdad and was taking a minibus to their home in Mahmudiya, a town 20 miles south of the capital. She kept calling him, but his phone had been turned off, and when he did not arrive, she feared the worst.
“I didn’t sleep at all,” she said.
The next morning, she called her husband’s commanders, who said they knew nothing about it. She drove to Baghdad. At checkpoints along the way, she asked if there had been any car accidents or bombings that might have cost him his life.
At the morgue later that day, and for the next nine days in a row, she said she looked through dozens of ghastly images of the dead — people with their heads cut off, their chests drilled, their faces peeled. Her mustached husband of 19 years, Ali Mahmoud al-Ajelee, the loving father who always kissed his youngest daughter before leaving for work, was not among them.
Hospitals were next. Then the Ministry of the Interior; the Ministry of Defense; the Ministry of Human Rights.
She said she also visited two American military bases in Mahmudiya, and at one point, walked the route from her home to Baghdad, asking everyone she met if they had seen her husband on the day he disappeared.
“I’ve spent two months like this,” she said. “Still, I find nothing.”
It was her second time at NIAC, and she waited patiently while others stepped into the white trailer with the wooden sign that said “detainee section.” A child in a wheelchair looking for medical assistance sat nearby.
Captain Carr, 44, a Navy reservist who works as a risk management consultant in Washougal, Wash., moved through the group softly, like a doctor near sleeping patients.
Though he has grown so dedicated to the center that he is trying to extend his tour past April, he said that most Iraqis who visit leave disappointed.
“For 75 or 80 percent, we can’t give them any news,” he said. “It’s tough. We still get requests for things that happened last April.”
In some cases, mistakes add to the pain. Mr. Badr, the laborer from Sadr City, said he was told a few months ago that his son Talib was in Camp Bucca, an American detention center in southern Iraq. He and his wife drove there a few days later, anxious yet relieved. They would finally get to see their son.
But when they arrived, they discovered there had been a mistake. They young man who greeted them had the same name and date of birth, but it was not their Talib.
“When his mother saw it was not her son, she fainted,” Mr. Badr said.
He said he was just as heartsick. He ran up to the young man and shook him.
“I kept asking that boy — even though I knew it was not my son — I kept asking him his name,” he said. “I had some feeling, some hope that maybe his face had changed while he was imprisoned. I just couldn’t believe it.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Badr was back to continue his search. He said his wife had fallen ill after the visit to Camp Bucca. “She hasn’t left her bed,” he said.The Iraqi workers in the detainee section trailer, one of several that make up NIAC, said that seeing so much hopelessness sometimes made them cry. An employee with a business degree, who called himself Abu Jassim, said he was particularly galled by the stories that involved lawyers and informants who charged families for false information.
It had become a common problem, he said. And in fact, several of the Iraqis who entered the trailer each day said they had paid someone for information.At one point, a woman wearing a blue scarf appeared with a registration number that she said she received from a lawyer. She had paid him 200,000 Iraqi dinar, about $137, for help, and she entered the trailer smiling, confident that things would be different for her. She said she could not wait to visit her husband.
She gave Abu Jassim his name (Wafah Altifat), his year of birth (1974), the date he disappeared (April 25, 2006) and the registration number.
Abu Jassim typed the information into his computer. He looked her in the eye. “I’m sorry,” he said. “The number has another name attached to it, with a different date of birth and a different date of arrest. Your lawyer is a liar.”
The woman burst into tears.
“They told me that a detainee who was released saw him,” she said. She dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “They told me he was there.”
Mr. Jassim said the database took time to update. Maybe it was just a misspelling and he really was with the Americans: “If you want to come here every 10 days,” he said, “we don’t mind.”
After she left, Mr. Jassim said that they did not have the heart to tell people that it was rare for a name to appear in the database more than a few weeks after the person was supposedly arrested.
Even those who knew better seemed to have a hard time giving up.
Ms. Rashid received the same message from a NIAC employee who goes only by the name Google. He told her that her husband could not be found in the system. He said that the database was updated every week or so if she wanted to come back.
“Do you think three months could pass and he wouldn’t be in the database?” she asked him.
He did not respond.
“I’ve heard of cases where someone was arrested in Mahmudiya and they didn’t show up in the database for seven months,” Ms. Rashid said, leaning forward, composed, the tissue in her hand. “Could that be what happened?”
Another pause, no answer.
“But it has happened right? It has happened.”
The employee mixed a shrug with a nod. Ms. Rashid stood up. She said she would return before the end of the month.
An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting.
18 March 2007
Scotsman.com Article: Then and now: how sectarian terror has torn Baghdad apart
Then and now: how sectarian terror has torn Baghdad apart
DAMIEN CAVE IN BAGHDAD
AFTER centuries of vibrant interaction, of marrying, sharing and selling across sects and classes, Baghdad has become a capital of corrosive, violent borderlines. Streets never crossed. Conversations never broached. Doors never entered.
Sunnis and Shi'ites in many professions now interact almost exclusively with colleagues of the same sect. Sunnis say they are afraid to visit hospitals because Shi'ites loyal to the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr run the Health Ministry, while Shi'ite labourers who used to climb into pickup trucks for work across the Tigris River in Sunni western Baghdad now take jobs only near home.
The goal of a new Baghdad security plan is to fix all of this - to fashion a peace that stitches the city's divided neighbourhoods back together.
But even in the few neighbourhoods that are improving or are relatively calm, borders loom everywhere. Streets once crossed without a thought are now bullet-riddled and abandoned danger zones, the front lines of a block-by-block war among Shi'ite militias, Sunni insurgents, competing criminal gangs and Iraqi and American troops.
Some coalition soldiers who have been in both Bosnia and Iraq say Baghdad is increasingly looking like Sarajevo in the 1990s, latticed with boundaries that are never openly indicated but are passed on in fearful whispers among neighbours who have suffered horrific losses.
The boundaries mark histories of brutal violence. And for Iraqis, they underscore a vital question: can scarred neighbourhoods ever heal?
FADHIL/SADRIYA
East Baghdad
Sybaa Street used to be wall-to-wall people: pavements were crammed with shoppers, and roads were snarled with cars as horns honked. In the heart of Central Baghdad, Sybaa was known as the road to get from the car repairers on one side of the city's market district to the hardware stores on the other.
Back then - as recently as two years ago, residents said - no one seemed to care that it was the border between the mostly Sunni neighbourhood of Fadhil and the largely Shi'ite areas of Sadriya and Sheik Omar.
But after six months of fighting between Sunnis and Shi'ites, Sybaa Street is now deserted. Recently, the only sign of life was a lone mechanic working inside a dark garage. Bullets from earlier battles punctured nearly every building.
Um Shaima, 48, a garrulous Sunni widow who used to sell yoghurt in the Sadriya market, lives just north of Sybaa Street in Fadhil. She said she used to visit the shops there to buy clothes. Her cousin Samir worked for years on the Sadriya side of Sybaa Street as a mechanic without any trouble.
Then a few months ago, Shaima said, he received a threat. "They told him, 'You are a Sunni, and all Sunnis are infidels and their women are prostitutes, so stop coming to Sadriya or you will be killed'," she said.
"He didn't listen," she added.
The next day, he was kidnapped. Witnesses said Shi'ite militants yanked him off his motorcycle and threw him in the boot of a car.
"They called his wife at 9am the next day," Shaima said, "telling her that they will kill all the Sunnis, and your husband is dead."
A Shi'ite nephew of Samir's later recovered his mutilated body from a rubbish pile.
Shaima said her two sons now carried guns at night to protect her and her neighbours.
On the other side of the border, in Sadriya, lies a mirror image of anger and fear. The response is similar, too: young men with guns who view themselves as protectors, who justify violence as the reasonable response to violence.
Nazar Sharif Abd Hussein, 35, a carpenter and a self-described militant with the Mahdi Army militia, said he did not hate all Sunnis; one of his sisters who lives outside of Baghdad just married one.
Hussein hardly looks fierce, at 5'7" inches tall, wearing jeans and a grey sweater, with a short beard and sunken dark eyes. But he says he could be vicious when called upon because Sunni gangsters and insurgents in Fadhil had shown no respect for life.
Last May, he said, his 17-year-old best friend, Salar, was shot dead while they both guarded an area near the edge of Fadhil. He said Salar was wearing a flak jacket but a stream of .50-calibre bullets perforated his side and ripped through his chest.
SAYDIA/DORA
South-west Baghdad
Baghdad's relentless violence has also created another divide: the line between the known and the stranger.
As the unfamiliar has become the dangerous, Iraqis have developed elaborate disguises to help them pass as members of the other sect: adopting identification cards with false family names or developing elaborate fictional histories.
Even then, being a member of the same sect or a relative is no guarantee of safety in a city where Shi'ites have killed Shi'ites and Sunnis have killed Sunnis out of frightened uncertainty about who to trust.
Ali Abu Zainab, 50, a mechanic and a journalist, said the border between his neighbourhood of Saydia and Dora had left him and his three young daughters isolated, cut off from his extended family. Both neighbourhoods have historically been populated by a mixture of Sunnis, Shi'ites and Christians. But because Dora has been a battleground for various militant groups for at least a year, he said, crossing over is impossible.
The Hilla highway, a wide road heading south that separates the two areas, and the Dora highway into the neighbourhood of the same name - have become battle zones. A relative who was forced to drive down the Dora highway three months ago because of a surprise checkpoint saw bodies littering the streets.
In the autumn, he said, he missed a cousin's wedding at his aunt's house in Dora. After another cousin was killed by Shi'ite militants, Zainab was unable to attend the funeral.
Now, he shops near his home. When he leaves, he exits from the opposite side of the neighbourhood. Still, the border's dangers seep in. Because Saydia has remained less violent than Dora, security is not as tight. Fighters pushed out of Dora consider Saydia a good place to hide because they can blend in.
KADHIMIYA/HURIYA/SHUALA
North-west Baghdad
Some Iraqis draw the border at their own doorsteps.
Saadi Khazaal Jawad, 60, a Shi'ite former government worker and restaurateur, said his neighbourhood was so dangerous that he had become a virtual recluse. He lives in Chikuk, a mixed area squeezed among the Sunni neighbourhood of Huriya, Shi'ite Kadhimiya and Shuala.
As Shi'ites from the north and east have begun expanding their turf into Chikuk, Sunnis from Huriya have been fighting back, making every corner here a potential danger zone.
Jawad has a car he almost never drives. He has two daughters and four sons he tries to keep home. He has forbidden his 16-year-old daughter to go to school. Jawad keeps pigeons in cages on his roof. They come from places he used to visit on holiday, like Mosul and Basra. "I spend about two or three hours here," he said as he fed the birds. "I forget everything when I'm here. And besides, I can't go anywhere. It's dangerous."
Experts predict future for country in turmoil
Adnan Al-Dulaimi - Key figure in Iraqi Accordance Front, the main Sunni political bloc in parliament
"The hope for reform is small because violence is escalating. One of the most important solutions is to create a real balance in government institutions, especially in the defence and interior ministries, and to work on dissolving [Shi'ite] militias. If the government can manage this, Iraq's problems would be solved. If the current security plan succeeds, Iraq will move in the right direction. If it fails, Iraq is doomed to even worse."
Ayad Jamal-Eddine - Secular Shi'ite cleric and legislator
"Not all scenarios are bad. We are living in a Saddam-free era and that is in itself a good thing. The amount of freedom available is huge and that has turned this era into chaos. We are witnessing a new Iraq that is under construction. There is no doubt the country is on the edge of civil war."
Joost Hiltermann - Iraq expert, International Crisis Group
"The most likely scenario is a failed state, with a moderately stable Kurdish region for some time and chaos in the rest of Iraq, where various parties, groups and criminal gangs will battle each other over turf, power and resources. This could play itself out in two ways: one, the civil wars raging throughout Arab Iraq will be contained through US redeployment to the borders and a US effort to set up a regional security framework that will help neighbouring states from falling to the urge to intervene; and two, the civil wars will spill over into neighbouring states, and the misfortunes of some groups will prompt intervention by their patrons, thus triggering a regional war between principal players such as Iran and Saudi Arabia."
Bing West - Correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, former US marine and former Assistant Secretary of Defence under Ronald Reagan
"In Baghdad, there's a good chance [new US commander] General [David] Petraeus will quell the ethnic cleansing, while the murderous bombings of the Sunni extremists continue. In Anbar, the tribes will join the Marines in fighting the al-Qaeda extremists. In 2008, substantial withdrawal of US troops. In 2009, regardless of who is the new president, a US advisory corps continues, together with a force, to strike al-Qaeda.
"Lacking a sanctuary, the insurgents will be ground down. The US press no longer puts Iraq on the front page, and it churns on relatively unnoticed, like Afghanistan. There will be no easy or quick exit."
Charles Tripp - Author of books on Iraq, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
"My prediction for Iraq would be a larger version of the Kurdistan region: ie powerful figures paying lip service to representational life, but running fairly effective and ruthless intelligence, security and patronage systems within their own recognised spheres of influence, having reached - through terrible bloodshed - an agreed division of the spoils. This seems to be what's going on at the moment."
DAMIEN CAVE IN BAGHDAD
AFTER centuries of vibrant interaction, of marrying, sharing and selling across sects and classes, Baghdad has become a capital of corrosive, violent borderlines. Streets never crossed. Conversations never broached. Doors never entered.
Sunnis and Shi'ites in many professions now interact almost exclusively with colleagues of the same sect. Sunnis say they are afraid to visit hospitals because Shi'ites loyal to the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr run the Health Ministry, while Shi'ite labourers who used to climb into pickup trucks for work across the Tigris River in Sunni western Baghdad now take jobs only near home.
The goal of a new Baghdad security plan is to fix all of this - to fashion a peace that stitches the city's divided neighbourhoods back together.
But even in the few neighbourhoods that are improving or are relatively calm, borders loom everywhere. Streets once crossed without a thought are now bullet-riddled and abandoned danger zones, the front lines of a block-by-block war among Shi'ite militias, Sunni insurgents, competing criminal gangs and Iraqi and American troops.
Some coalition soldiers who have been in both Bosnia and Iraq say Baghdad is increasingly looking like Sarajevo in the 1990s, latticed with boundaries that are never openly indicated but are passed on in fearful whispers among neighbours who have suffered horrific losses.
The boundaries mark histories of brutal violence. And for Iraqis, they underscore a vital question: can scarred neighbourhoods ever heal?
FADHIL/SADRIYA
East Baghdad
Sybaa Street used to be wall-to-wall people: pavements were crammed with shoppers, and roads were snarled with cars as horns honked. In the heart of Central Baghdad, Sybaa was known as the road to get from the car repairers on one side of the city's market district to the hardware stores on the other.
Back then - as recently as two years ago, residents said - no one seemed to care that it was the border between the mostly Sunni neighbourhood of Fadhil and the largely Shi'ite areas of Sadriya and Sheik Omar.
But after six months of fighting between Sunnis and Shi'ites, Sybaa Street is now deserted. Recently, the only sign of life was a lone mechanic working inside a dark garage. Bullets from earlier battles punctured nearly every building.
Um Shaima, 48, a garrulous Sunni widow who used to sell yoghurt in the Sadriya market, lives just north of Sybaa Street in Fadhil. She said she used to visit the shops there to buy clothes. Her cousin Samir worked for years on the Sadriya side of Sybaa Street as a mechanic without any trouble.
Then a few months ago, Shaima said, he received a threat. "They told him, 'You are a Sunni, and all Sunnis are infidels and their women are prostitutes, so stop coming to Sadriya or you will be killed'," she said.
"He didn't listen," she added.
The next day, he was kidnapped. Witnesses said Shi'ite militants yanked him off his motorcycle and threw him in the boot of a car.
"They called his wife at 9am the next day," Shaima said, "telling her that they will kill all the Sunnis, and your husband is dead."
A Shi'ite nephew of Samir's later recovered his mutilated body from a rubbish pile.
Shaima said her two sons now carried guns at night to protect her and her neighbours.
On the other side of the border, in Sadriya, lies a mirror image of anger and fear. The response is similar, too: young men with guns who view themselves as protectors, who justify violence as the reasonable response to violence.
Nazar Sharif Abd Hussein, 35, a carpenter and a self-described militant with the Mahdi Army militia, said he did not hate all Sunnis; one of his sisters who lives outside of Baghdad just married one.
Hussein hardly looks fierce, at 5'7" inches tall, wearing jeans and a grey sweater, with a short beard and sunken dark eyes. But he says he could be vicious when called upon because Sunni gangsters and insurgents in Fadhil had shown no respect for life.
Last May, he said, his 17-year-old best friend, Salar, was shot dead while they both guarded an area near the edge of Fadhil. He said Salar was wearing a flak jacket but a stream of .50-calibre bullets perforated his side and ripped through his chest.
SAYDIA/DORA
South-west Baghdad
Baghdad's relentless violence has also created another divide: the line between the known and the stranger.
As the unfamiliar has become the dangerous, Iraqis have developed elaborate disguises to help them pass as members of the other sect: adopting identification cards with false family names or developing elaborate fictional histories.
Even then, being a member of the same sect or a relative is no guarantee of safety in a city where Shi'ites have killed Shi'ites and Sunnis have killed Sunnis out of frightened uncertainty about who to trust.
Ali Abu Zainab, 50, a mechanic and a journalist, said the border between his neighbourhood of Saydia and Dora had left him and his three young daughters isolated, cut off from his extended family. Both neighbourhoods have historically been populated by a mixture of Sunnis, Shi'ites and Christians. But because Dora has been a battleground for various militant groups for at least a year, he said, crossing over is impossible.
The Hilla highway, a wide road heading south that separates the two areas, and the Dora highway into the neighbourhood of the same name - have become battle zones. A relative who was forced to drive down the Dora highway three months ago because of a surprise checkpoint saw bodies littering the streets.
In the autumn, he said, he missed a cousin's wedding at his aunt's house in Dora. After another cousin was killed by Shi'ite militants, Zainab was unable to attend the funeral.
Now, he shops near his home. When he leaves, he exits from the opposite side of the neighbourhood. Still, the border's dangers seep in. Because Saydia has remained less violent than Dora, security is not as tight. Fighters pushed out of Dora consider Saydia a good place to hide because they can blend in.
KADHIMIYA/HURIYA/SHUALA
North-west Baghdad
Some Iraqis draw the border at their own doorsteps.
Saadi Khazaal Jawad, 60, a Shi'ite former government worker and restaurateur, said his neighbourhood was so dangerous that he had become a virtual recluse. He lives in Chikuk, a mixed area squeezed among the Sunni neighbourhood of Huriya, Shi'ite Kadhimiya and Shuala.
As Shi'ites from the north and east have begun expanding their turf into Chikuk, Sunnis from Huriya have been fighting back, making every corner here a potential danger zone.
Jawad has a car he almost never drives. He has two daughters and four sons he tries to keep home. He has forbidden his 16-year-old daughter to go to school. Jawad keeps pigeons in cages on his roof. They come from places he used to visit on holiday, like Mosul and Basra. "I spend about two or three hours here," he said as he fed the birds. "I forget everything when I'm here. And besides, I can't go anywhere. It's dangerous."
Experts predict future for country in turmoil
Adnan Al-Dulaimi - Key figure in Iraqi Accordance Front, the main Sunni political bloc in parliament
"The hope for reform is small because violence is escalating. One of the most important solutions is to create a real balance in government institutions, especially in the defence and interior ministries, and to work on dissolving [Shi'ite] militias. If the government can manage this, Iraq's problems would be solved. If the current security plan succeeds, Iraq will move in the right direction. If it fails, Iraq is doomed to even worse."
Ayad Jamal-Eddine - Secular Shi'ite cleric and legislator
"Not all scenarios are bad. We are living in a Saddam-free era and that is in itself a good thing. The amount of freedom available is huge and that has turned this era into chaos. We are witnessing a new Iraq that is under construction. There is no doubt the country is on the edge of civil war."
Joost Hiltermann - Iraq expert, International Crisis Group
"The most likely scenario is a failed state, with a moderately stable Kurdish region for some time and chaos in the rest of Iraq, where various parties, groups and criminal gangs will battle each other over turf, power and resources. This could play itself out in two ways: one, the civil wars raging throughout Arab Iraq will be contained through US redeployment to the borders and a US effort to set up a regional security framework that will help neighbouring states from falling to the urge to intervene; and two, the civil wars will spill over into neighbouring states, and the misfortunes of some groups will prompt intervention by their patrons, thus triggering a regional war between principal players such as Iran and Saudi Arabia."
Bing West - Correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, former US marine and former Assistant Secretary of Defence under Ronald Reagan
"In Baghdad, there's a good chance [new US commander] General [David] Petraeus will quell the ethnic cleansing, while the murderous bombings of the Sunni extremists continue. In Anbar, the tribes will join the Marines in fighting the al-Qaeda extremists. In 2008, substantial withdrawal of US troops. In 2009, regardless of who is the new president, a US advisory corps continues, together with a force, to strike al-Qaeda.
"Lacking a sanctuary, the insurgents will be ground down. The US press no longer puts Iraq on the front page, and it churns on relatively unnoticed, like Afghanistan. There will be no easy or quick exit."
Charles Tripp - Author of books on Iraq, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
"My prediction for Iraq would be a larger version of the Kurdistan region: ie powerful figures paying lip service to representational life, but running fairly effective and ruthless intelligence, security and patronage systems within their own recognised spheres of influence, having reached - through terrible bloodshed - an agreed division of the spoils. This seems to be what's going on at the moment."
13 March 2007
BBC News Article: Iraqi PM visits insurgency hotbed
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has made an unannounced visit to Ramadi, a stronghold of the Sunni insurgency.
It is the first visit as prime minister by Mr Maliki, a Shia Muslim, to Iraq's western, mostly-Sunni Anbar province, and is being seen as highly symbolic.
He met Ramadi's provincial governor, as well as local tribal leaders and US and Iraqi military commanders.
Mr Maliki has said he wants to promote reconciliation between the minority Sunni community and the Shia community.
"I love this province and I'm proud that it's part of Iraq," he said after meeting Anbar governor Maamoun Sami Rashid al-Alwani.
"I haven't been to Ramadi since 1976," he told reporters.
Mr Maliki said he and Mr al-Alwani had promised to work together to combat the insurgency.
The two met in a Saddam-era palace inside a US and Iraqi army base.
Ramadi has seen much heavy fighting between insurgents and US and Iraqi security forces.
It is the capital of Anbar province, a large area stretching from west of Baghdad to Iraq's borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Last September, tribal chiefs from the so-called Sunni Triangle met in Ramadi and agreed to join forces to fight al-Qaeda. But the agreement has not stopped attacks on civilians and security forces in the area.
Mr Maliki's visit comes as thousands of additional US and Iraqi troops conduct a security sweep through Baghdad trying to quell insurgent and militia violence.
President Jalal Talabani is to return to Iraq on Wednesday from Amman, Jordan, where he has been recovering from exhaustion after being rushed to hospital for tests on 25 February.
Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/6444859.stm
It is the first visit as prime minister by Mr Maliki, a Shia Muslim, to Iraq's western, mostly-Sunni Anbar province, and is being seen as highly symbolic.
He met Ramadi's provincial governor, as well as local tribal leaders and US and Iraqi military commanders.
Mr Maliki has said he wants to promote reconciliation between the minority Sunni community and the Shia community.
"I love this province and I'm proud that it's part of Iraq," he said after meeting Anbar governor Maamoun Sami Rashid al-Alwani.
"I haven't been to Ramadi since 1976," he told reporters.
Mr Maliki said he and Mr al-Alwani had promised to work together to combat the insurgency.
The two met in a Saddam-era palace inside a US and Iraqi army base.
Ramadi has seen much heavy fighting between insurgents and US and Iraqi security forces.
It is the capital of Anbar province, a large area stretching from west of Baghdad to Iraq's borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Last September, tribal chiefs from the so-called Sunni Triangle met in Ramadi and agreed to join forces to fight al-Qaeda. But the agreement has not stopped attacks on civilians and security forces in the area.
Mr Maliki's visit comes as thousands of additional US and Iraqi troops conduct a security sweep through Baghdad trying to quell insurgent and militia violence.
President Jalal Talabani is to return to Iraq on Wednesday from Amman, Jordan, where he has been recovering from exhaustion after being rushed to hospital for tests on 25 February.
Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/6444859.stm
The Oxford Dictionary's Latest Definitions
The Oxford Dictionary's latest definition of the following words:
Atom Bomb : An invention to end all inventions.
Boss : Someone who is early when you are late and late when you are early.
Cigarette : A pinch of tobacco rolled in paper with fire at one end and a fool on the other.
Classic : A book which people praise, but do not read.
Committee : Individuals who can do nothing individually and sit to decide that nothing can be done together.
Compromise : The art of dividing a cake in such a way that everybody believes he got the biggest piece.
Conference Room : A place where everybody talks, nobody listens and everybody disagrees later on.
Criminal : A guy no different from the rest....except that he got caught.
Dictionary : A place where success comes before work.
Diplomat: A person who tells you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.
Doctor : A person who kills your ills by pills, and kills you with his bills.
Etc . : A sign to make others believe that you know more than you actually do.
Experience : The name men give to their mistakes.
Father : A banker provided by nature.
Lecture : An art of transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the students without passing through the minds of either.
Miser : A person who lives poor so that he can die rich.
Office : A place where you can relax after your strenuous home life.
Opportunist : A person who starts taking bath if he accidentally falls into a river.
Optimist : A person who while falling from Eiffel tower says in midway "See I am not injured yet."
Philosopher : A fool who torments himself during life, to be spoken of when dead.
Politician : One who shakes your hand before elections and your confidence after.
Smile : A curve that can set a lot of things straight.
Tears : The hydraulic force by which masculine will-power is defeated by feminine water power.
Yawn : The only time some married men ever get to open their mouth.
Atom Bomb : An invention to end all inventions.
Boss : Someone who is early when you are late and late when you are early.
Cigarette : A pinch of tobacco rolled in paper with fire at one end and a fool on the other.
Classic : A book which people praise, but do not read.
Committee : Individuals who can do nothing individually and sit to decide that nothing can be done together.
Compromise : The art of dividing a cake in such a way that everybody believes he got the biggest piece.
Conference Room : A place where everybody talks, nobody listens and everybody disagrees later on.
Criminal : A guy no different from the rest....except that he got caught.
Dictionary : A place where success comes before work.
Diplomat: A person who tells you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.
Doctor : A person who kills your ills by pills, and kills you with his bills.
Etc . : A sign to make others believe that you know more than you actually do.
Experience : The name men give to their mistakes.
Father : A banker provided by nature.
Lecture : An art of transferring information from the notes of the lecturer to the notes of the students without passing through the minds of either.
Miser : A person who lives poor so that he can die rich.
Office : A place where you can relax after your strenuous home life.
Opportunist : A person who starts taking bath if he accidentally falls into a river.
Optimist : A person who while falling from Eiffel tower says in midway "See I am not injured yet."
Philosopher : A fool who torments himself during life, to be spoken of when dead.
Politician : One who shakes your hand before elections and your confidence after.
Smile : A curve that can set a lot of things straight.
Tears : The hydraulic force by which masculine will-power is defeated by feminine water power.
Yawn : The only time some married men ever get to open their mouth.
08 March 2007
AFP Article: Iraq's northeastern border an open door for smugglers
by Thibauld Malterre
Thu Mar 8
A truck loaded with crates of fruit shuddered over the muddy stream marking the northeastern limit of Iraq and halted while customs agents gave it a cursory once over.
Despite being the front line in Iraq's battle against weapons smugglers and a potentially dangerous geopolitical flashpoint, there was little sign of tight security at the lonely Bashmakh guard post on the Iran-Iraq frontier.
The White House has accused Iranian agents of smuggling weapons and cash to Iraq's warring factions, including a deadly armour-piercing bomb that has been blamed for the deaths of 170 American soldiers.
But at Bashmakh, there is little to stop smugglers from getting through.
"We need huge improvements here. You can't secure Baghdad if you don't secure the borders," said Command Sergeant Major Bobby Moore, the chief non-commissioned officer in the US military training mission in Iraq.
Although high in the wooded and snow-capped mountains of Kurdistan, an autonomous region where Baghdad's writ runs weak, Bashmakh border crossing is only 300 kilometres (180 miles) from the killing fields around the capital.
Some 180 vehicles per day cross the border here, transporting fruit and vegetables and building materials. The simple frontier post has no modern scanning equipment nor even sniffer dogs, any many loads go uninspected.
"It needs a lot of work: There is no serious paperwork and inspection, and not enough manpower," said Andy Nevarez, a US border patrol agent who left Texas and New Mexico to help Iraq secure its own frontiers.
"We are not here to implement US structures, but to see what works best for them," he said, as a cavalcade of trucks rolled back over the border after being loaded from Iranian vehicles on the eastern bank of the stream.
"The standards are not at the level we want to see. In 2004 and 2005, the borders were neglected," admitted Major General Mohsen al-Kabi of the Iraqi interior ministry's border force.
"We don't have enough scanners for vehicle searching, and we don't have enough people who can use and repair them. Border, passport and customs are working on their own, there should be a director, a single authority."
Iraq's porous borders and unhelpful neighbours have allowed armed factions to reinforce their arsenals of looted arms with a modern terrorist's tools -- including roadside bombs and anti-aircraft missiles.
Senior officials have been complicit in much of the trade, US officers allege, with Iranian agents and shopping lists for Iranian weapons found in raids on the homes of top Shiite politicians in Baghdad.
Iran in turn has accused Iraq and the United States of allowing Pejak, a leftist Kurdish guerrilla movement at war with the Tehran government, to operate with impunity from bases in these northeastern mountains.
US officials have recently focused on the threat posed by the "explosively formed penetrator" -- a roadside booby-trap that Shiite militias use to cut through American armoured vehicles and slaughter trapped GIs.
Iraq's Shiite leaders, however, seek good relations with Iran and they are more concerned by Sunni insurgents coming from Iraq's western neighbour, and by the tactics they use to cause mass civilian casualties.
"The threat is coming from Syria. Up until now, nobody has come from Iran with a suicide vest. A lot came from Syria," General Mohsen said.
For the Americans, however, if few weapons have been found coming in from Iran, it's because the Iraqis weren't looking hard enough. Now, they are seeking to increase the border force's training and capabilities.
"If trucks are not being checked, you are not gonna find anything," said Brigadier General Dana Pittard, commander of the Iraq Assistance Group, which oversees the training of Iraqi security forces.
Pittard's simple inspection visit was enough to unleash Tehran's anger and underline the tension gripping even this remote corner of Iraq.
Iran sent a message to the Kurdish authorities in Sulaimaniyah to denounce what it billed as "the threatening presence of an American delegation".
The regional rivalries that bedevil this part of the Middle East have also undermined the border control mission.
Although both Kurdish and Iraqi flags fly over the border post, the agents are recruited locally from tribes with clans on both sides of the frontier.
"It is an issue, how people are recruited," said Pittard, noting the threat of complicity between smugglers and officials at what he termed the the "point of entry" (POE).
"Personnel manning the POE are locally recruited. There is obviously a danger in that. The ideal would be to mix up Sunni, Shia and Kurds on each border, but we don't want to change their culture," he said.
If weapons are coming across, not many have been stopped.
"They've only seized a small number of pistols coming from Iran," said Colonel Thomas Johnson.
Thu Mar 8
A truck loaded with crates of fruit shuddered over the muddy stream marking the northeastern limit of Iraq and halted while customs agents gave it a cursory once over.
Despite being the front line in Iraq's battle against weapons smugglers and a potentially dangerous geopolitical flashpoint, there was little sign of tight security at the lonely Bashmakh guard post on the Iran-Iraq frontier.
The White House has accused Iranian agents of smuggling weapons and cash to Iraq's warring factions, including a deadly armour-piercing bomb that has been blamed for the deaths of 170 American soldiers.
But at Bashmakh, there is little to stop smugglers from getting through.
"We need huge improvements here. You can't secure Baghdad if you don't secure the borders," said Command Sergeant Major Bobby Moore, the chief non-commissioned officer in the US military training mission in Iraq.
Although high in the wooded and snow-capped mountains of Kurdistan, an autonomous region where Baghdad's writ runs weak, Bashmakh border crossing is only 300 kilometres (180 miles) from the killing fields around the capital.
Some 180 vehicles per day cross the border here, transporting fruit and vegetables and building materials. The simple frontier post has no modern scanning equipment nor even sniffer dogs, any many loads go uninspected.
"It needs a lot of work: There is no serious paperwork and inspection, and not enough manpower," said Andy Nevarez, a US border patrol agent who left Texas and New Mexico to help Iraq secure its own frontiers.
"We are not here to implement US structures, but to see what works best for them," he said, as a cavalcade of trucks rolled back over the border after being loaded from Iranian vehicles on the eastern bank of the stream.
"The standards are not at the level we want to see. In 2004 and 2005, the borders were neglected," admitted Major General Mohsen al-Kabi of the Iraqi interior ministry's border force.
"We don't have enough scanners for vehicle searching, and we don't have enough people who can use and repair them. Border, passport and customs are working on their own, there should be a director, a single authority."
Iraq's porous borders and unhelpful neighbours have allowed armed factions to reinforce their arsenals of looted arms with a modern terrorist's tools -- including roadside bombs and anti-aircraft missiles.
Senior officials have been complicit in much of the trade, US officers allege, with Iranian agents and shopping lists for Iranian weapons found in raids on the homes of top Shiite politicians in Baghdad.
Iran in turn has accused Iraq and the United States of allowing Pejak, a leftist Kurdish guerrilla movement at war with the Tehran government, to operate with impunity from bases in these northeastern mountains.
US officials have recently focused on the threat posed by the "explosively formed penetrator" -- a roadside booby-trap that Shiite militias use to cut through American armoured vehicles and slaughter trapped GIs.
Iraq's Shiite leaders, however, seek good relations with Iran and they are more concerned by Sunni insurgents coming from Iraq's western neighbour, and by the tactics they use to cause mass civilian casualties.
"The threat is coming from Syria. Up until now, nobody has come from Iran with a suicide vest. A lot came from Syria," General Mohsen said.
For the Americans, however, if few weapons have been found coming in from Iran, it's because the Iraqis weren't looking hard enough. Now, they are seeking to increase the border force's training and capabilities.
"If trucks are not being checked, you are not gonna find anything," said Brigadier General Dana Pittard, commander of the Iraq Assistance Group, which oversees the training of Iraqi security forces.
Pittard's simple inspection visit was enough to unleash Tehran's anger and underline the tension gripping even this remote corner of Iraq.
Iran sent a message to the Kurdish authorities in Sulaimaniyah to denounce what it billed as "the threatening presence of an American delegation".
The regional rivalries that bedevil this part of the Middle East have also undermined the border control mission.
Although both Kurdish and Iraqi flags fly over the border post, the agents are recruited locally from tribes with clans on both sides of the frontier.
"It is an issue, how people are recruited," said Pittard, noting the threat of complicity between smugglers and officials at what he termed the the "point of entry" (POE).
"Personnel manning the POE are locally recruited. There is obviously a danger in that. The ideal would be to mix up Sunni, Shia and Kurds on each border, but we don't want to change their culture," he said.
If weapons are coming across, not many have been stopped.
"They've only seized a small number of pistols coming from Iran," said Colonel Thomas Johnson.
07 March 2007
Baghdad... Baghdad...
Days pass, and here I am, sitting alone, under the light of my laptop screen, when there is no electricity, as I hear nostalgic songs about Baghdad.
I have to admit that, being away from home on and off for the past couple of years, and for longer periods recently, is a factor in this nostalgia; and perhaps getting to know more Baghdadis residing in Sulaimaniya is the main reason for this. Every time we meet, we speak about Baghdad, and how we used to spend the evenings here and there, and how we used to walk around, looking at shops, eating sandwiches or ice-cream; back when there was a night life in the greatest city in Iraq.
Baghdad is now divided within us. There is a little Baghdad in each of us. Baghdad, to whom I’d love to refer as “she” instead of "it", is verily like a beautiful woman, that is so dear to every one who really knows her; but now, she is suffering from an illness which has a rare cure; a cure that is difficult to get.
This is how we Baghdadis feel. We cannot do anything but pray for the safety of our loved ones who are still there, and pray for Baghdad’s well-being. And here we are; crying, smoking, or both, whenever that bitter-sweet memories of Baghdad are recalled.
The worst, heart-mangling feeling in the world is when you see someone you really love, fading away before your eyes, and you can do nothing to save them, but pray.
It is like an 18th Century love story, where one cannot see his beloved, except when she goes out in the morning to bring water from the spring or river; and when she doesn’t come on time, he worries and worries, until he is told later that she is gravely ill.
Many of us, exiled or self-exiled Baghdadis, are unfortunately unable to visit Baghdad the beloved, for one reason or the other; but our spirits fly there, with every dove as the day breaks, kissing every palm tree, eating pastry and cream for breakfast at street corners, and embracing the sweetness of cardamom flavored hot tea cups.
“
Our city is beautiful,
Her name is Baghdad
She is a bride sent from Heaven to Earth,
I haven’t seen anyone as beautiful as her
Tigris passes by her, throwing flowers in her way,
And kissing her eyes with its waves
She is a lady of Science, Culture & Poetry,
“She is the beautiful and glorious,” said the Arabs, ”and an ever-welcoming hostess,”
Was there ever anyone she deprived?
Or was there a hungry she didn’t feed?
Words that her sons speak,
Are like music to my ears
She is proud, and will never be servile,
No matter how many scoundrels try.
O, city of Peace,
O, you paradise,
O, you with the most beautiful eyes,
Our city is beautiful,
Her name is Baghdad,
She is a bride sent from Heaven to Earth,
“
Baghdad, I will love you forever.
A Week in Brief
This has been a busy week, or maybe two weeks. I have lost counting! I remember that we were in late February, then quickly came March, and the total Lunar Eclipse on 3 March, which was cool. What surprised me was that a mainly religious Shiite TV channel, Al-Forat, was carrying the eclipse live from Baghdad, with a “suitable” religious soundtrack running with the eclipse!
I will try posting the eclipse photos i got, soon on my Picasa album.
The other thing that gave me the giggles this week was something I read in a Kurdish newspaper here. It was an article about Britney Spears, and how she recently shaved her head. The funniest thing was a typo by that newspaper which made the singer’s name as “Brainy Spears”!!! When I read that I was like: “But dude! This girl isn’t brainy! She didn’t do anything brainy that I could recall recently!!”
04 March 2007
AP Article: Total lunar eclipse wows stargazers
By RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press Writer
The moon darkened, reddened, and turned shades of gray and orange Saturday night during the first total lunar eclipse in nearly three years, thrilling stargazers and astronomers around the world.
The Earth's shadow took over six hours to crawl across the moon's surface, eating it into a crescent shape before engulfing it completely in a spectacle at least partly visible on every continent.
About a dozen amateur astronomers braved the cold and mud outside the Croydon Observatory in southeast London to watch the start of the eclipse.
"It's starting to go!" said Alex Gikas, 8, a Cub Scout who was studying for his astronomy badge. "I've never seen anything like it before. I'm really excited."
By the time greatest eclipse, shortly after 5:44 p.m. EST, the light of the full moon was replaced by near-total obscurity.
"It was really very dark," said Paul Harper, Chairman of the Croydon Astronomical Society, who estimated that moon had lost over four-fifths of its luminosity. "It was quite a nice one."
Lunar eclipses occur when Earth passes between the sun and the moon, an uncommon event because the moon spends most of its time either above or below the plane of Earth's orbit.
Sunlight still reaches the moon during total eclipses, but it is refracted through Earth's atmosphere, bathing the moon in an eerie crimson light.
Mike Ealay, a 60-year-old architect who wandered over to the observatory to watch the eclipse, said the red color of the moon made it look like a close-up version of Mars.
"I think it's quite exciting. It's like having the red planet on your doorstep," he said.
Despite cloudy conditions over much of Europe, a variety of Webcasts carried the event live, and astronomers urged the public not to miss out on the spectacle.
"It's not an event that has any scientific value, but it's something everybody can enjoy," said Robert Massey, of Britain's Royal Astronomical Society.
The moon's red blush faded as it began moving out of Earth's shadow just after 8 p.m. EST. The eclipse ended a little more than hour later.
Residents of east Asia saw the eclipse cut short by moonset, while those in the eastern parts of North and South America had the moon already partially or totally eclipsed by the time it rose over the horizon in the evening.
While eastern Australia, Alaska and New Zealand missed Saturday's show, they will have front row seats to the next total lunar eclipse, on Aug. 28.
___
The moon darkened, reddened, and turned shades of gray and orange Saturday night during the first total lunar eclipse in nearly three years, thrilling stargazers and astronomers around the world.
The Earth's shadow took over six hours to crawl across the moon's surface, eating it into a crescent shape before engulfing it completely in a spectacle at least partly visible on every continent.
About a dozen amateur astronomers braved the cold and mud outside the Croydon Observatory in southeast London to watch the start of the eclipse.
"It's starting to go!" said Alex Gikas, 8, a Cub Scout who was studying for his astronomy badge. "I've never seen anything like it before. I'm really excited."
By the time greatest eclipse, shortly after 5:44 p.m. EST, the light of the full moon was replaced by near-total obscurity.
"It was really very dark," said Paul Harper, Chairman of the Croydon Astronomical Society, who estimated that moon had lost over four-fifths of its luminosity. "It was quite a nice one."
Lunar eclipses occur when Earth passes between the sun and the moon, an uncommon event because the moon spends most of its time either above or below the plane of Earth's orbit.
Sunlight still reaches the moon during total eclipses, but it is refracted through Earth's atmosphere, bathing the moon in an eerie crimson light.
Mike Ealay, a 60-year-old architect who wandered over to the observatory to watch the eclipse, said the red color of the moon made it look like a close-up version of Mars.
"I think it's quite exciting. It's like having the red planet on your doorstep," he said.
Despite cloudy conditions over much of Europe, a variety of Webcasts carried the event live, and astronomers urged the public not to miss out on the spectacle.
"It's not an event that has any scientific value, but it's something everybody can enjoy," said Robert Massey, of Britain's Royal Astronomical Society.
The moon's red blush faded as it began moving out of Earth's shadow just after 8 p.m. EST. The eclipse ended a little more than hour later.
Residents of east Asia saw the eclipse cut short by moonset, while those in the eastern parts of North and South America had the moon already partially or totally eclipsed by the time it rose over the horizon in the evening.
While eastern Australia, Alaska and New Zealand missed Saturday's show, they will have front row seats to the next total lunar eclipse, on Aug. 28.
___
02 March 2007
AP Article: Total eclipse of the moon comes Saturday
LONDON - The moon will turn shades of amber and crimson Saturday night as it passes behind the Earth's shadow — the first total lunar eclipse in three years.
The eclipse will be at least partly visible from Asia to the Americas, although residents of Europe, Africa and the Middle East will have the best view.
Lunar eclipses occur when Earth passes between the sun and the moon, blocking the sun's light. The event is rare because the moon spends most of its time either above or below the plane of Earth's orbit.
Although it will pass completely under Earth's shadow, light from the sun will still reach the moon after being refracted through Earth's atmosphere, giving the moon an eerie dark reddish tinge.
"It's not an event that has any scientific value, but it's something everybody can enjoy," said Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Earth's shadow will begin moving across the Moon at 2018GMT Saturday, with the total eclipse occurring at 2244GMT and lasting over an hour.
Residents of east Asia will see the eclipse cut short by moonset, while those in the eastern parts of North and South America will find the moon already partially or totally eclipsed by the time it rises over the horizon Saturday evening.
Eastern Australia, Alaska and New Zealand will miss the show altogether.
The next total eclipse of the moon will occur on Aug. 28.
___
The eclipse will be at least partly visible from Asia to the Americas, although residents of Europe, Africa and the Middle East will have the best view.
Lunar eclipses occur when Earth passes between the sun and the moon, blocking the sun's light. The event is rare because the moon spends most of its time either above or below the plane of Earth's orbit.
Although it will pass completely under Earth's shadow, light from the sun will still reach the moon after being refracted through Earth's atmosphere, giving the moon an eerie dark reddish tinge.
"It's not an event that has any scientific value, but it's something everybody can enjoy," said Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Earth's shadow will begin moving across the Moon at 2018GMT Saturday, with the total eclipse occurring at 2244GMT and lasting over an hour.
Residents of east Asia will see the eclipse cut short by moonset, while those in the eastern parts of North and South America will find the moon already partially or totally eclipsed by the time it rises over the horizon Saturday evening.
Eastern Australia, Alaska and New Zealand will miss the show altogether.
The next total eclipse of the moon will occur on Aug. 28.
___
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