Sunni, Shiite factions carve up Baghdad

updated 5:38 p.m. ET Sept. 1, 2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Four years ago this was a city where people mixed freely — where, in most parts of town, no one cared if a neighborhood was majority Sunni or Shiite. Loyalty to Saddam Hussein was more important than religious identity.

But now a battle for Baghdad is well under way between the two major Muslim sects. Death squads are slaughtering people daily, and an estimated 160,000 Iraqis have fled their homes — mostly here in the capital.

Out of that violence, a new but not better city is emerging. Many Iraqis fear that the result will be a Sunni west and a Shiite east, with the broad Tigris River snaking through the middle as the sectarian boundary.

The process ultimately could leave a legacy of bitterness and poison Iraqi society for generations. Each sect has legitimate claims to territory on both sides of the river that they won’t emotionally abandon. And no national Iraqi government can truly function if sectarian “no go” zones are scattered all over the capital.

Baghdad, Iraq’s largest city with a population of more than 6 million, is still a long way from that stark sectarian divide. There are many religiously mixed neighborhoods, and Shiite and Sunni enclaves remain on both sides of the river.

The mixed character of some neighborhoods, such as Jihad and Amariyah, is partly due to Saddam Hussein’s policy of rewarding government officials and Baath Party figures.

Spacious villas or plots of land in newly developed neighborhoods went to Iraqis based not on religion but on loyalty to the regime. Rich Shiite businessmen were as welcome as anyone, even in neighborhoods populated by officers from Saddam’s Sunni-dominated military.

But that peaceful coexistence began to change after the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 that toppled Saddam.

Sunnis, suddenly powerless, saw the Shiite politicians and clerics who cooperated with the Americans as their enemy and legitimate targets in the sectarian struggle.

February turning point
The rifts widened dramatically this year. After a Feb. 22 blast destroyed an important Shiite shrine in Samarra, Shiite hard-liners stopped listening to their clerics’ appeals for restraint.

Although reliable census data is unavailable, the city has developed historically with Sunnis in greater numbers west of the Tigris and Shiites, Kurds and Christians more numerous in the east. That general pattern has been sharpened and made more stark as tensions have risen and people have fled to neighborhoods where others of their “kind” live.

As the city reshapes itself, flashpoints are emerging. The core fight today is a struggle for control of the corridors into the city from the north and south.

In the north, Shiites control an arc of neighborhoods — Sadr City, Kazimiyah and Shula. In the south, Sunni militants are trying to consolidate power in another arc, comprised of Sadiyah and Dora.

The anchor of Shiite power is Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad. It’s an almost exclusively Shiite community of 2.5 million people that is the stronghold of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, head of an important militia called the Mahdi army.

For the time being, Sadr City is a Shiite militia safe haven. Al-Sadr is a key supporter of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and the prime minister angrily criticized the Americans for using excessive force in a joint U.S.-Iraqi raid on Sadr City in early August.

From Sadr City, Mahdi militiamen fan out across eastern Baghdad and use major traffic arteries such as Palestine Street to reach religiously mixed areas to the south and east. That gives them a degree of control along the eastern and northern routes into the city — and they’re trying to strengthen that control.

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