It was their last stand. Kamal and a handful of his neighbors were hunkered down on the roof of a dun-colored house in southwest Baghdad two weeks ago as bullets zinged overhead. In the streets below, fighters from Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army fanned out and blasted away with AK-47s and PKC heavy machine guns. Kamal is a chubby 44-year-old with two young sons, and he and his friends, all Sunnis, had been fighting similar battles against Shiite militiamen in the Amel neighborhood for months. They jumped awkwardly from rooftop to rooftop, returning fire. Within minutes, however, dozens of uniformed Iraqi policemen poured into the street to support the militiamen. Kamal ditched his AK on a rooftop and snuck away through nearby alleys. He left Amel the next day. "I lost my house, my documents and my future," says Kamal, whose name and that of other Iraqis in this story have been changed for their safety. "I’m never going back."
Thousands of other Sunnis like Kamal have been cleared out of the western half of Baghdad, which they once dominated, in recent months. The surge of U.S. troops – meant in part to halt the sectarian cleansing of the Iraqi capital – has hardly stemmed the problem. The number of Iraqi civilians killed in July was slightly higher than in February, when the surge began. According to the Iraqi Red Crescent, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) has more than doubled to 1.1 million since the beginning of the year, nearly 200,000 of those in Baghdad governorate alone. Rafiq Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the International Organization for Migration, says that the fighting that accompanied the influx of U.S. troops actually "has increased the IDPs to some extent."
When Gen. David Petraeus goes before Congress next week to report on the progress of the surge, he may cite a decline in insurgent attacks in Baghdad as one marker of success. In fact, part of the reason behind the decline is how far the Shiite militias’ cleansing of Baghdad has progressed: they’ve essentially won. "If you look at pre-February 2006, there were only a couple of areas in the city that were unambiguously Shia," says a U.S. official in Baghdad who is familiar with the issue but is not authorized to speak on the record. "That’s definitely not the case anymore." The official says that "the majority, more than half" of Baghdad’s neighborhoods are now Shiite-dominated, a judgment echoed in the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq: "And very few are mixed." In places like Amel, pockets of Sunnis live in fear, surrounded by a sea of Shiites. In most of the remaining Sunni neighborhoods, residents are trapped behind great concrete barricades for their own protection.
Amel’s transformation is one of the most dramatic in the city. Under Saddam Hussein the area was a bedroom community for regime apparatchiks – generals and officers like Kamal, who worked for one of Saddam’s secret services. Spacious houses were arranged in grids around schools and recreation centers, fronted by palm trees and wide sidewalks. Saddam trusted the community: houses nestle up against the strategic highway that leads to the airport, and are only a short distance away from the Republican Palace complex that dominates the Green Zone. Now Amel’s Sunnis are crowded into a strip that’s less than a quarter-mile square, surrounded on all sides by concertina wire and scrap-metal barricades. City power cables have been cut, and the streets are strewn with trash and broken glass. There is only one access road not under Shiite control, leading to the airport highway. The enclave houses perhaps 5,000 Sunnis; nearly all the rest of Amel’s estimated 100,000 population is now Shiite. With the agreement of locals, U.S. troops plan to replace the Sunnis’ makeshift roadblocks with concrete barriers.
From our point of view, there are two Islams in Iraq involved in a continual struggle that long antedated our arrival. I think Bush and Cheney wanted a "good" Sunni government, to keep the Iraqi Shia from allying with Shiite Iran. I expect that the Sunni Saudi’s wanted a "good" Sunni also. I’m not sure of how it all works, but I think the Sunni dream is of returning to a unified Caliphate for the entire Muslim world. The Shiites have other ideas. Whatever the case, the Islamic sects are realigning under our noses. The "Civil War" is actually proceeding, even as we occupy the country. So Bush sits around talking about us fighting Terrorism in Iraq, and the Iraqis are fighting for either control of the country, or its segregation along sectarian lines. al Qaeda in Iraq is just one of the groups in the fray. In either case, the goal is Theocracy. Even with Hussein, it was a Theocratic government, or at least a sectarian government.
What’s our goal? According to this article, whatever all of this is about, we don’t have a place in this scenario anymore. Theocracies are, almost by by definition, not exactly democratic. So, when Petraeus report his statistics, what he says is likely to have meanings that have little to do with the Surge, or the Bush Doctrine, or anything else that we hear talked about. Our fight was with al Qaeda, and it was because they blew up our buildings and killed a lot of Americans. We are so far off the mark right now, it’s hard to even imagine how we got here.
When I was in the Air Force, I was stationed in England. Literally, the day I arrived, the British announced "internment," a policy of locking up I.R.A. fighters in Ireland. I had no earthly idea what that was about. For the three years I lived there, the papers were full of little else [well maybe a bit about Watergate]. There were bombings all the time. We got evacuated from a movie theater in Dublin because of a bomb threat [a Steve McQueen flick]. I never got what the whole business was about – something to do with King James sending Protestants to Ulster 200 years ago. I gather it’s finally sort of settled down, though I never "got it" – whatever all of that was about. Now we’re in the middle of a similar thing in the Middle East. Whatever "it" is, the outcome doesn’t have anything to do with us, or our Iraq invasion misadventure, or our Surge. We had an enemy to fight. And we still have the same enemy as when we started – that guy that blew up our buildings and killed a lot of Americans…
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