Of course the flip side of this coin is that, just as Bush-Wingo Americans would be (_are_) more than happy to witness the slow-burn genocide ("ethnic cleansing") of Sunnis from Baghdad, so in the future they wouldn't mind "ethnically cleansing" Shiites from the land of great oil fields, either. THAT would be quite a trick of course (neutron bombs anyone?), a "trick" that the US effectively accomplished politically if not physically by supporting the Saddam Hussein regime.
Don't forget: as recently as _1991_ the Bush (Sr.)/Rumsfeld/Cheney administration (both Rumsfeld and Cheney were Secretaries of War under Bush1) ALLOWED SADDAM TO CRUSH the Shiite/Kurd rebellion, without the US lifting a finger, much less preventing Saddam's military from using helicopter gunships to attack the rebels.
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Shiites Remake Baghdad in Their Image
By Sabrina Tavernise
December 23, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/world/middleeast/23shiites.html
BAGHDAD, Dec. 22 — As the United States debates what to do in Iraq, this country’s Shiite majority has been moving toward its own solution: making the capital its own.
Large portions of Baghdad have become Shiite in recent months, as militias press their fight against Sunni militants deeper into the heart of the capital, displacing thousands of Sunni residents. At least 10 neighborhoods that a year ago were mixed Sunni and Shiite are now almost entirely Shiite, according to residents, American and Iraqi military commanders and local officials.
For the first years of the war, Sunni militants were dominant, forcing Shiites out of neighborhoods and systematically killing bakers, barbers and trash collectors, who were often Shiites. But starting in February, after the bombing of a shrine in the city of Samarra, Shiite militias began to strike back, pushing west from their strongholds and redrawing the sectarian map of the capital, home to a quarter of Iraq’s population.
The Shiite-dominated government publicly condemns violence against Sunnis and says it is trying to stop the militias that carry it out. But the attacks have continued unabated, and Sunnis have grown suspicious.
Plans for a new bridge that would bypass a violent Sunni area in the east, and a proposal for land handouts in towns around Baghdad that would bring Shiites into what are now Sunni strongholds underscored these concerns.
Sunni political control in Baghdad is all but nonexistent: Of the 51 members of the Baghdad Provincial Council, which runs the city’s services, just one is Sunni.
In many ways, the changes are a natural development. Shiites, a majority of Iraq’s population, were locked out of the ruling elite under Saddam Hussein and now have power that matches their numbers.
The danger, voiced by Sunni Arabs, is that an emboldened militant fringe will conduct broader killings without being stopped by the government, or, some fear, with its help. That could, in turn, draw Sunni countries into the fight and lead to a protracted regional war, precisely the outcome that Americans most fear.
“They say they’re against this, but on the ground they do nothing,” said Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the speaker of Parliament, a Sunni. He moved his family to the better-protected Green Zone in October.
The debate reaches to the heart of the American enterprise here. While President Bush is considering more troops, some in the Shiite-dominated government say the Americans should stay out of the sectarian fight in Baghdad and let the battle run its course. Getting involved would simply prolong the fight, they say.
At an army base in northern Baghdad, an Iraqi general moved his hand across a map of the capital. The city is dividing fast, he said, writing, “Sunni” and “Shiite” in graceful Arabic script across each neighborhood.
“Now we face a new style of splitting the neighborhoods,” said the general, a Shiite. “The politicians are doing this.”
Neighborhoods in the east — most vulnerable to Shiite militias from Sadr City, the largest eastern district and one of its poorest — have lost much of their minority Sunni populations since February. Even the solidly middle-class neighborhoods of Zayuna and Ghadier, very mixed as little as six months ago, are starting to lose Sunnis.
In Baladiyad, a once-mixed area of eastern Baghdad, workers smoothed mortar onto brick. A Shiite mosque was taking shape.
On the same block, a half-finished Sunni mosque stood deserted, its facade hung with peeling posters of last year’s leaders. Less than a mile away, another mosque has never been used.
“They can’t come here now,” a Shiite worker said. “They are Sunni.”
Further south, in the neighborhood of Naariya, a Shiite refugee family sat in a darkened living room in a house they recently occupied.
The house belonged to a Sunni family, but they had fled after a spate of killings, and the local office of Moktada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric, had arranged for Shiites to move in.
The new family’s scant belongings hung on the wall: a portrait of the father, now dead, and a broken revolver. Somebody else’s clock chimed. Mattresses and couches of the previous owners packed the room.
“They told us it’s safe here, it’s a Shiite neighborhood,” said Mustafa, one of the sons. “The Mahdi Army is protecting the area,” he said, referring to Mr. Sadr’s militia. Family members declined to give their name for safety reasons.
The family has no sympathy for the Sunnis. They fled Baquba, a relentlessly violent town north of Baghdad, after Sunni militants killed their father, a man in his 70’s; kidnapped a brother; and shot another brother dead.
Around 400 Shiite families have fled from Baquba to Naariya and a nearby neighborhood, Baghdad Jedidah, over the past few months, said Mustafa, citing local officials in Mr. Sadr’s office.
“We are a ship that sank under the ocean,” said his mother, Aziza, 46.
Besides, Mustafa said, Shiite militias pursue only Sunnis with suspicious affiliations. The Sunni militias, on the other hand, “are killing anyone who is Shiite,” Aziza said. (A relative in a separate conversation said one of Aziza’s sons had killed more than 10 Sunnis since coming to Baghdad this fall. The family denied any involvement in militias.)
Aziza added, “My husband was an ordinary man.”
But a divided Iraq can destroy ordinary people.
A Sunni man named Bassim, his Shiite wife and their three small children said Shiite militiamen forced them to leave their home in Huriya, west of the Tigris, one chilly afternoon this month. Bassim left two jobs as a butcher and a hospital cleaner because they were in very Shiite neighborhoods.
“My husband is a Sunni, but he has nothing to do with insurgents,” said his wife, Zahra Kareem Alwan, holding her sobbing daughter on her hip in a school in Adel, a Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad where families took temporary refuge. Boxes of water were stacked in a corner.
Last week, the family was moved to an empty house farther west. They did not know the owner.
Shiite leaders argue that the Iraqi Army would not allow massacres. They say Americans will be embedded with units as a safety check.
In Huriya, it was an Iraqi Army unit that helped Ms. Alwan and other families into trucks and brought them to Adel. An American colonel advising the Iraqi Army unit that controls the area said that Shiites occupied the houses within 48 hours. Americans counted about 180 families who had fled. The Iraqi general said it was 50.
Shiite political leaders were skeptical.
“These are lies,” said Hadi al-Amiri, head of the security committee in Parliament and of the Badr Organization, the armed wing of one of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite parties.
“It’s merely propaganda to create fears among Arabs,” he added, a reference to Sunni Arab countries.
The main problem, Mr. Amiri said, was Sunni insurgents and their suicide bombs.
“They want to go back to the old equation, when they were the officers and the Shia were just soldiers and slaves,” Mr. Amiri said, with an intensity that spoke of deep scars inflicted by the past government, referring to the loyalists to Saddam Hussein. “This will never happen again. They should believe in the new equation.”
Using the unlikely analogy of Mr. Hussein draining the marshes in southern Iraq to destroy the marsh Arabs, Mr. Amiri talked about ways that Baghdad could be encircled to choke off the supply lines of Sunni militants, for instance, by fortifying a network of rivers, a dam, and several highways.
“He divided it, drained the water, and within two to three years it was a desert,” he said. “I believe Baghdad will be like this.”
Militias are already doing their part to defend Shiites. In a Shiite mosque in northern Baghdad, refugees from the embattled northern village of Sabaa al-Bour, many of them women in black abayas, gathered in October asking for food and shelter.
Killings of Shiites in the town had enraged leaders in Baghdad. But weeks had dragged on, and one morning in October, a volunteer walked through the refugees telling them to go back home.
The Mahdi Army was there now, she said. The town was now safe for Shiites.
Shiites are also making inroads on local and federal levels. Baghdad’s municipal government is taking bids for designs of a bridge that would connect Greyat with Kadhimiya, two major Shiite areas in northern Baghdad on opposite sides of the Tigris River. Adhamiya, a Sunni area where the bridge is now and where it has been closed, would be bypassed altogether.
“The former regime refused to make the connection because it would strengthen the Shia,” said Naem al-Kaabi, a deputy mayor of Baghdad.
In another plan that appears intended to repopulate heavily Sunni-controlled areas with Shiites, the Ministry of Public Works has proposed giving land to victims of violence inflicted by Mr. Hussein and by insurgents since 2003. The plots would be in six towns outside Baghdad — Abu Ghraib, Taji, Salman Pak, Husseiniya, Mahmudiya and Latifiya, according to a local official familiar with the plan.
Sunni militants now control the towns and have conducted brutal campaigns to eliminate Shiites. Mr. Hussein gave favors to Sunni tribes there to protect against Shiites from the south. Few Sunnis claim compensation as victims of violence, since the application requires visits to police stations and hospitals, places no longer safe for Sunnis.
It was not clear how soon the plan would be carried out. A previous proposal, made by the Iraqi cabinet last year, would give some land in heavily Sunni west Baghdad to about 3,000 families, but names are still being registered.
In another indication of the current mood, a popular cellphone ring in eastern Baghdad, now largely Shiite, is a tune with the words: “If you can’t beat me, don’t fight me.”
The Sunni houses in Naariya did not empty easily. A college student with a Sunni name said he hid in his house, as Shiite militiamen went into homes on his block in late September and marched people away. A few days later, his uncle, a 35-year-old refrigerator repairman, was taken. The body was found in Ur, a Shiite stronghold in north Baghdad.
But unlike a bomb blast, where everybody remembers how someone died, the Sunnis’ losses seems to melt away. The Mahdi Army-controlled police station had no record of them.
Terrified, the men of the family scattered, settling on couches and in a garage of friends and family.
The student, Omar, is keeping a diary.
“One day I’ll be a teacher,” he said. “I should teach children what we passed through.”
Qais Mizher and Hosham Hussein contributed reporting.
Saturday, December 23, 2006
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