Inside Baghdad: last battle of a stricken city

[leftchick]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1874375,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12

For two weeks Peter Beaumont, Foreign Affairs Editor, has travelled across Baghdad with the US military. In this remarkable dispatch he describes a desperate struggle to stop a brutal sectarian conflict from ripping the city apart

Sunday September 17, 2006
The Observer


Karima Mohammed's men were taken on 5 September. Her husband Saleh Ahmed Mahmoud, 50, and 17-year-old son, Ghazan Saleh Ahmed, were seized by men wearing the uniform of the Iraqi police near the filling station in Zafaraniya in southern Baghdad. The day after they disappeared, her husband's brother received a threatening phone call. He would not tell Karima what the caller said, only that it was 'sectarian' in nature. Since then she has heard nothing. Karima now fears the worst. It would be hard not to - between Wednesday and Friday more than 130 bodies were found, dumped on the dusty streets, the fetid rubbish tips, and floating in the sewers and rivers of the capital. Yesterday morning there were a further 47 corpses. Those killed by sectarian violence now far outnumber Iraqis being killed by suicide car bombs and insurgent attacks - more than 50 have died that way in the city in the past 72 hours.

Karima is a Sunni and her misfortune is to live in a largely Shia area - a stronghold of the Jaish al-Mahdi, the militia of the firebrand preacher Moqtada al-Sadr, a group implicated in the campaign of attacks against Sunni families across Baghdad. In Zafaraniya, bombs have been thrown at Sunni houses. A Sunni mosque has come under attack. People, like Karima's husband and son, have simply disappeared.

Surrounded by her remaining children in the courtyard of her modest home, Karima bursts into tears. 'I am so scared. We don't have any news of them. We can't sleep at night we are so terrified. We are so poor. My family relies on my husband and my son for their wages to live on.' The soldiers of Bravo Battery of the 4-320th Artillery of the US 101st Airborne Division, who came to Zafaraniya on Friday to follow up abduction cases involving Sunnis in the area, are shocked by Karima's plight. They empty their Humvees of anything they can find to help her and her children.

What is happening in Zafaraniya is not unique in the capital. Sunni families in largely Shia neighbourhoods, and Shia families in majority Sunni areas, are being driven out of their homes in the rapidly worsening campaign of sectarian violence and intimidation.

... is it civil war yet?

[Palladin]

1. Nice job PNAC.

Thanks a lot, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, "Scooter" Libby, Elliot Abrams, Michael Ledeen, Abram Shulsky, Ken Mehlman, John Podhoretz, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter. What a wonderful service you have done the world. :sarcasm:
What goes around, comes around....

[msongs]

2. war yes, but it's not very...civil nt

[Bucky]

3. Well, there is one up side to all this.

They are at least better off without Saddam.

[calimary]

4. Damn, took the words straight out of my mouth!

But don't you think they're better off without Saddam???

I read something describing some Baghdad residents speaking wistfully about the ice cream parlors they enjoyed visiting in the city - that were always open until THREE IN THE MORNING. Now, they're seldom open in the evenings at all. And this is "improvement"???