Sunni, Shiite factions carve up Baghdad

Leon Franca Aziz, 61, a Christian, used to live in one of those mixed eastern neighborhoods until he found a warning spray-painted on the wall around his house: “Crusaders must leave or their heads will be our sons’ soccer balls.” He packed up and moved to Syria last April.

Sparsely populated areas just outside Sadr City also are good locations for firing mortars and rockets at the U.S.-controlled Green Zone, to the southwest along the west bank of the Tigris.

To the west of Sadr City lies a second major Shiite stronghold — Kazimiyah — a neighborhood that grew up around the shrine of an 8th century Shiite saint. Next over to the west lies Shula, a haven for Shiites driven from their homes elsewhere.

But wedged between Sadr City and Kazimiyah is a cluster of Sunni districts, chief among them Azamiyah, where Saddam hid when Baghdad fell to U.S. forces in April 2003. Azamiyah thus prevents Shiite extremists from moving freely between Sadr City and the two other Shiite strongholds to the west.

That makes Azamiyah a target for Shiite militiamen. Mindful of that, Sunnis in Azamiyah have formed armed neighborhood militias to guard against outsiders — even those who in theory are there to protect them.

When Iraqi government police entered the area last April to set up checkpoints, many Azamiyah residents were convinced that Shiite death squads would not be far behind. The Sunni groups battled government forces for two days.

Meanwhile, across the city on Baghdad’s southern rim, lies another key flashpoint — where Sunnis are pressing to consolidate power over the mixed, but mostly Sunni, neighborhoods of Dora and Sadiyah.

The arc they form along a bend in the Tigris River is another key point of control. It’s a route that Shiite pilgrims travel between Baghdad and a religious shrine to the south. But it also connects Baghdad to a belt of Sunni villages where al-Qaida and other Sunni religious extremists operate — an area known as the “Triangle of Death” for its frequent attacks.

Dora's decline
In this area, Dora is the prize. A once-fashionable neighborhood of spacious villas and leafy streets, it was home, before Saddam’s fall, to Sunnis, Shiites and Christians who lived together peacefully. Now, Sunni extremists have been violently pressuring Shiites and Christians to leave.

Shiite physician Ahmed Mulktar, his wife and their four children left their two-story house in Dora in July for a cramped apartment in eastern Baghdad after he was kidnapped and told there was “no room for Shiites” in Dora.

“I didn’t have any other choice but to leave my house and move to another, safer area,” Mulktar said.

Sunni control of Dora also threatens Karradah, a mostly Shiite district across the Tigris that is controlled by the country’s biggest Shiite party. In late July, about 30 people were killed in Karradah in a coordinated attack of car bombs and a rocket barrage fired across the river from Dora.

Since then, U.S. officials have claimed some success in reducing the city’s sectarian violence with a major influx of troops. But restoring public confidence will take much longer, and in the meantime the city continues to segregate along religious lines.

Abu Saleh, a retired Agriculture Ministry official, moved from Shula, in the Shiite area, to Sadiyah in July after he and his wife were verbally harassed as “defiled Sunnis.”

“Moving to another place was a must,” he said. “But it was hard to leave everything behind.”

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