Baghdad Under Surge

The Shia are in a better position to set up checkpoints than the Sunni because they effectively control the police commandos and many of the units of the Baghdad police. An official police checkpoint may simply be a death squad in uniform.

It is extraordinary that three-and-a-half years after the US captured Baghdad it still controls so little of the city. At the end of January, US and Iraqi army soldiers were trying to fight their way into Haifa Street, a district with a population of 170,000 people that has long been a bastion of Sunni insurgents, though it is less than a mile from the Green Zone.

Patrick Cockburn reports from Baghdad.

Baghdad has broken up into a dozen different cities at war with each other. Walls are covered with slogans in black paint saying “Death to Spies”. Any Shia caught in a Sunni district will be killed as a spy or because of his religion and vice versa. Each side has its checkpoints where armed men in civilian clothes casually ask drivers for their identity cards. They wave to one side those they suspect of being of the opposite religion who are then interrogated, tortured and killed. The checkpoints are difficult to avoid because they suddenly spring up without any advance warning. Some 30 to 50 bodies, often mutilated, are picked by the police every day.

The methods used by Sunni and Shia in these tit-for-tat killings are different. The Sunni are behind the car bombings and suicide bombers of Shia areas, targeting markets and religious processions to cause maximum casualties. On 3 February a man drove a truck into the vegetable market in the Shia district of Sadriya telling local militiamen that he was delivering cooking oil, cans of food and sacks of flour. Once in the market he detonated a ton of explosives hidden under these goods, killing 135 people.

Posted by Szamko
Just tries to tell the truth.