http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/26/AR2006052601578.html
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Iraq Is the Republic of Fear
By Nir Rosen
Sunday, May 28, 2006; B01
Every morning the streets of Baghdad are littered with dozens of
bodies, bruised, torn, mutilated, executed only because they are Sunni
or because they are Shiite. Power drills are an especially popular
torture device.
I have spent nearly two of the three years since Baghdad fell in Iraq.
On my last trip, a few weeks back, I flew out of the city overcome
with fatalism. Over the course of six weeks, I worked with three
different drivers; at various times each had to take a day off because
a neighbor or relative had been killed. One morning 14 bodies were
found, all with ID cards in their front pockets, all called Omar. Omar
is a Sunni name. In Baghdad these days, nobody is more insecure than
men called Omar. On another day a group of bodies was found with hands
folded on their abdomens, right hand over left, the way Sunnis pray.
It was a message. These days many Sunnis are obtaining false papers
with neutral names. Sunni militias are retaliating, stopping buses and
demanding the jinsiya , or ID cards, of all passengers. Individuals
belonging to Shiite tribes are executed.
Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, dissidents called Iraq "the
republic of fear" and hoped it would end when Hussein was toppled. But
the war, it turns out, has spread the fear democratically. Now the
terror is not merely from the regime, or from U.S. troops, but from
everybody, everywhere.
At first, the dominant presence of the U.S. military -- with its
towering vehicles rumbling through Baghdad's streets and its soldiers
like giants with their vests and helmets and weapons -- seemed
overwhelming. The Occupation could be felt at all times. Now in
Baghdad, you can go days without seeing American soldiers. Instead, it
feels as if Iraqis are occupying Iraq, their masked militiamen
blasting through traffic in anonymous security vehicles, shooting into
the air, angrily shouting orders on loudspeakers, pointing their
Kalashnikovs at passersby.
Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy.
They, too, are killing Iraqis.
Last fall I visited the home of a Sunni man called Sabah in the
western Baghdad suburb of Radwaniya, where the Sunni resistance had
long had a presence, and where a U.S. soldier had recently been
killed. On Friday night a few days before I came, his family told me,
American soldiers surrounded the home where Sabah lived with his
brothers, Walid and Hussein, and their families and broke down the
door. The women and children were herded outside, walking past Sabah,
whose nose was broken, and Walid, who had the barrel of a soldier's
machine gun in his mouth. The soldiers beat the men with rifle butts,
while the Shiite Iraqi translator accompanying the troops exhorted the
Americans to execute the Sunnis.
As the terrified family waited outside, they heard three shots from
inside. It then sounded to them as though there was a scuffle inside,
with the soldiers shouting at each other. Thirty minutes later the
translator emerged with a picture of Sabah. "Who is Sabah's wife?" he
asked. "Your husband was killed by the Americans, and he deserved to
die," he told her. At that he tore the picture before her face.
Walid was then taken away, and inside the house the family found Sabah
dead. His bloody shirt showed three bullet holes that went through his
chest; two of the bullets had come out of his back and lodged in the
wall behind him. Three U.S.-made bullet casings were on the floor.
Sofas and beds had been overturned and torn apart; tables, closets,
vases of plastic flowers, all were broken and tossed around. Even the
cars had been destroyed. Photographs of Sabah had been torn up and his
ID card confiscated. One photograph remained on his wife's bureau:
Sabah standing proudly in front of his Mercedes.
I later asked Hussein if they wanted revenge. "We are Muslim, praise
God," he said, "and we do not want revenge. He was innocent and he was
killed, so he is a martyr."
Across town, U.S. troops had also raided the Mustapha Huseiniya, a
Shiite place of worship in the Ur neighborhood. The Huseiniya, similar
to a mosque, belonged to the nationalistic and anti-occupation Moqtada
al-Sadr movement, and in front of its short tower were immense signs
with images of the movement's important clerics. The Sadr militia,
known as the Army of the Mahdi, had been using the Huseiniya as a base
for counterinsurgency operations. Mahdi militiamen kidnapped Sunnis
suspected of supporting the insurgency, tortured them until they
confessed on video, and then executed them.
When the Americans raided the Huseiniya, they brought Iraqi troops
with them. They killed not only Mahdi fighters but also innocent
Shiite bystanders, including a young journalist I knew named Kamal
Anbar, in what witnesses described to me as summary executions.
Although neighbors blamed the U.S. troops, Iraqi troops were so laden
with gear, flak jackets and helmets provided by the Americans, they
were often indistinguishable.
When I visited the next morning, the Huseiniya's floors, walls and
ceilings were stained with blood; pieces of brain lay in caked red
puddles. Just as Shiites cheered when the Americans hit Sunni targets,
Sunni supporters of the insurgency greeted news of the U.S. raid with
satisfaction.
The Mahdi militiamen were already back in force that morning, blocking
off the roads and searching all who approached, wielding Iraqi
police-issue Glock pistols and carrying Iraqi police-issue handcuffs.
In Baghdad and most of Iraq, the police are the Mahdi Army and the
Mahdi Army is the police. The same holds for the actual Iraqi army,
posted throughout the country.
The sectarian tensions have overtaken far more than Iraq's security
forces and its streets. Militias now routinely enter hospitals to hunt
down or arrest those who have survived their raids. And many Iraqi
government ministries are now filled with the banners and slogans of
Shiite religious groups, which now exert total control over these key
agencies. If you are not with them, you are gone.
For instance, in the negotiations between parties after the January
2005 elections, Sadr loyalists gained control over the ministries of
health and transportation and immediately began cleansing them of
Sunnis and Shiites not aligned with Sadr. The process was officially
known by the Sadrists as "cleansing the ministry of Saddamists."
Indeed, some government offices now do not accept Sunnis as employees
at all.
Based on my visits to the ministries, it is clear that an apartheid
process began after the Shiites' electoral success. In the Ministry of
Health, you see pictures of Moqtada al-Sadr and his father everywhere.
Traditional Shiite music reverberates throughout the hallways. Doctors
and ministry staffers refer to the minister of health as imami, or "my
imam," as though he were a cleric. I also saw walls adorned with
Shiite posters -- including ones touting Sadr -- in the Ministry of
Transportation. Sunni staffers have been pushed out of both
ministries, while the Ministry of Interior is under the control of
another Shiite movement, the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq (its name alone a sufficient statement of its
intentions).
Shiites with no apparent qualifications have filled the ranks. In one
case in the transportation ministry, a Sunni chief engineer was fired
and replaced with an unqualified Shiite who wore a cleric's turban to
work. In all cases, this has led to a stark drop in efficiency, with
the health and transportation ministries barely functioning, and the
interior ministry operating much like an anti-Sunni death squad, with
secret prisons uncovered last November, and people disappearing after
raids by shadowy government security units operating at night.
Even shared opposition to the Occupation couldn't unite Iraq's Sunnis
and Shiites, and perhaps that was inevitable given their bitter
history of mutual hostility. Instead, as the fighting against the
Americans intensified, tensions between Sunni and Shiite began to
grow, eventually setting off the vicious sectarian cleansing that is
Iraq today.
During the first battle of Fallujah, in the spring of 2004, Sunni
insurgents fought alongside some Shiite forces against the Americans;
by that fall, the Sunnis waged their resistance alone in Fallujah, and
they resented the Shiites' indifference.
But by that time, Shiite frustration with Sunnis for harboring Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, the bloodthirsty head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, led some
to feel that the Fallujans were getting what they deserved. The cycle
of violence escalated from there. When Sunni refugees from Fallujah
settled in west Baghdad's Sunni strongholds such as Ghazaliya,
al-Amriya and Khadhra, the first Shiiite families began to get threats
to leave. In Amriya, Shiites who ignored the threats had their homes
attacked or their men murdered by Sunni militias.
This is when sectarian cleansing truly began. Sunni refugees in Amriya
seized homes vacated by Shiites. These operations were conducted by
insurgents as well as relatives of the refugees. Soon such cleansing
had become widespread and commonplace, both out of vengeance and out
of its own cruel logic; both sides took part. There was no space left
in Iraq for nonsectarian voices. Sunnis and Shiites alike were pushed
into the arms of their respective militias, often joining out of
self-defense. Shiites obtained lists of the Baath party cadres that
were the foundation of Hussein's regime and began systematically
assassinating Sunnis who had belonged. Sunni militias that had fought
the American occupier became Sunni militias protecting Sunni territory
from Shiite incursions and retaliating in Shiite areas. The insurgency
became secondary as resistance moved to self-defense. In the
Shiite-dominated south, meanwhile, Shiite militias battled each other
and the British forces.
In November I asked a close Shiite friend if -- considering all this
violence, crime and radicalism in Iraq -- life had not been better
under Hussein.
"No," he said definitively. "They could level all of Baghdad and it
would still be better than Saddam. At least we have hope."
A few weeks later, though, he e-mailed me in despair: "A civil war
will happen I'm sure of it . . . you can't be comfortable talking with
a man until you know if he was Shia or Sunni, . . . Politicians don't
trust each other, People don't trust each other. [There is] seeking
revenge, weak government, separate regions for the opponents . . . We
have a civil war here; it is only a matter of time, and some peppers
to provoke it."
The time came on Feb. 22, when the Golden Mosque of the Shiites in
Samarra was blown up. More than 1,000 Sunnis were killed in
retribution, and then the Shiite-controlled interior ministry
prevented an accurate body count from being released. Attacks on
mosques, mostly Sunni ones, increased. Officially, Moqtada al-Sadr
opposed attacks on Sunnis, but he unleashed his fighters on them after
the bombing.
Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed
neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found
on the main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People
are afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the
police, for fear that they, too, will be found dead the following day.
In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighborhoods,
Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are
being targeted.
The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis
fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would
portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long
before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in
Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and
Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.
Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New America Foundation and author of "In
the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq" (Free
Press).
© 2006 The Washington Post Company