[NYTr] Sectarian Toll Includes Scars to Iraq Psyche

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The New York Times - Sep 17, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/world/middleeast/17baghdad.html


Sectarian Toll Includes Scars to Iraq Psyche

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

BAGHDAD, Sept. 16 — Violence swept over the Muhammad family in
December, taking the father, the family’s house and all of its
belongings in one chilly morning. But after the Muhammads fled, it
subsided and life re-emerged — ordinary and quiet — in its wake.

Now they no longer have to hide their Shiite last name. The eldest
daughter does not have to put on an Islamic head scarf. Grocery
shopping is not a death-defying act.

Although the painful act of leaving is behind them, their minds keep
returning to the past, trying to process a violation that was as brutal
as it was personal: young men from the neighborhood shot the children’s
father as they watched. Later, the men took the house.

“I lost everything in one moment,” said Rossel, the eldest daughter. “I
don’t know who I am now. I’m somebody different.”

They are educated people, and they say they do not want revenge. But
typical of those who are left from Iraq’s reasonable middle, the
Muhammads have been hardened toward others by violence, and they have
been forced to feel their sectarian identity, a mental closing that
allows war made by militants to spread.

“In the past the country lived all together, but now, no,” Rossel said.
“I don’t trust anyone.”

Iraqis have continued to flee their homes throughout the American troop
increase, which began early this year, and despite assurances that it
is becoming safe to return, uncrossable lines have been left in Iraqi
minds and neighborhoods. Schools, hospitals and municipal buildings are
quickly losing their diversity, and even moderate Iraqis like the
Muhammads say they cannot imagine ever going back.

In northeastern Baghdad, Hashem, a polite 14-year-old from a different
Shiite family, has an acute sense of sect. (For his safety, his last
name is not being used.) The players in his soccer club are Shiite. His
school is three-quarters Shiite. His five or six close friends are all
Shiites. He refrains from telling a joke he likes about a Sunni
politician because it might hurt the feelings of the Sunni boys.

Though the alignment is religious, in practice it is more like being on
the same sports team: Hashem, like his father, is not at all devout.

“In the beginning it was a shame to say Sunni or Shiite,” he said,
sitting on a couch in a guest room in a heavily Shiite neighborhood in
northern Baghdad, “but we know.”

His school has adjusted to new sectarian imperatives; the punishment
for arguing about religion is a three-day suspension. So when he fought
with a Sunni boy who was making chauvinistic remarks about Shiites, the
two walked away without telling the adults what the fight was about.

Part of the sensitivity comes from trauma inflicted by Saddam Hussein’s
government: years ago, Hashem’s grandparents were forced out of their
homes by local Baathists and died in the desert.

The segregation is reshaping the structure of families. On a recent
Tuesday, a thin parade of tired-looking couples trudged through the
office of a family court judge in Sharchiya, a mostly Shiite
neighborhood in central Baghdad. Only about 5 percent of the marriage
contracts he registers are for mixed-sect couples, down from about 50
percent before the war, the judge said.

“It used to be more festive,” he said, after a mother in a black
Islamic robe limply threw a handful of candies in his direction. The
court is one of the city’s few family courts, but as a testament to how
separated the neighborhoods are now, just one in 10 couples he marries
is Sunni.

The patterns started to form in 2005, when militants began pushing
Iraqis out of their houses, a deeply personal violation that often
leaves families jobless and impoverished.

In a survey of 200 displaced Shiite families living in Karbala, a
southern city, researchers from Al Amal, an organization that assists
the displaced, found that 60 percent were unable to take their
furniture or belongings when they fled.

Rossel’s father, a suit importer, was killed while packing the family’s
belongings into cars to move out of Dora, an area in southern Baghdad
controlled by Sunni Islamists. The Muhammads were never able to return,
though a kindly neighbor drove their car to them in their new, mostly
Shiite, neighborhood in Baghdad. They lost their past — photograph
albums, diaries and heirlooms.

Not everyone in the family wanted to know what happened to the house,
but Rossel was told that a Sunni family she did not know had moved in.

“I try to imagine my room and what they do in it,” she said, her voice
intense.

Rasheed Hameed, a Sunni Kurd, was forced out of his house this summer
in Baya, another southern neighborhood, and moved his family to safety
in Syria. Back in Baghdad, he saved some of his furniture with the help
of neighbors who have militia connections. His dresser, kitchen chest
and bed frame stood awkwardly in a courtyard at his new house on
Friday. Inside, several large printing machines sat like giant unwanted
guests, the property of a previous owner.

“They destroyed all my life,” Mr. Hameed said, gesturing at the
furniture. “For what? We don’t know. What is our crime?”

Early in the war, it was extremely rare that an Iraqi would know his or
her attacker, but as time went on the violence moved closer to home. In
the Karbala study, 47 percent of families said that their neighbors
were directly or indirectly responsible for their flight. The men who
tipped off the killer of Rossel’s father lived in the neighborhood and
were working as movers for the family on the day he was shot.

Omar, an 18-year-old Sunni who withheld his family name for his safety,
said that as Shiites took over his neighborhood in western Baghdad,
childhoods spent together seemed never to have existed. Now he and his
cousins change the subject when old Shiite friends walk past his stoop.
Safe topics: electricity, girls and soccer.

“It’s true we used to play with them,” he said, “but we couldn’t read
what was inside their hearts.”

Omar’s father was shot dead by six men from the neighborhood in May.
Omar can name every one of them. Now they visit his grocery shop and
take sodas without paying. They were poor before the war. Now they
drive Land Cruisers taken from their victims.

They drive through the neighborhood, windows down, blasting songs about
the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and sometimes honking the horn.

“As if they are telling us, ‘We killed him, and now we’re driving his
car,’ ” Omar said.

Meanness crept in, as privileged Sunnis lost status, Shiites became the
targets of attacks and the cycle of revenge began.

Shaima Ali Hussein, a Shiite student from a Sunni-dominated city north
of Baghdad, said male medical students she had known for years refused
to sit next to her during an exam, and an anatomy professor forced her
to examine a cadaver without gloves, behavior strictly forbidden for
Shiites, she said.

“Even the patients didn’t want to be touched by us,” she said.

She tried to accept some of their views, “in order to open a window in
their minds, but they closed it and threw away the key,” she said.

Her family fled to Baghdad late last year, around the time her
brother’s college friend, a Shiite outspoken about his identity, was
beheaded.

“I don’t trust these people,” Ms. Hussein said, sitting in a sunny
front room of their new house in Karada, a largely Shiite neighborhood.
“Their minds are closed. I’m so tired. I want to isolate them. But
instead, they have isolated me.”

Ms. Hussein distrusts new American efforts to work with Sunni tribes,
fearing that will backfire by arming a force that will turn on Shiites.

Despite widespread displacement, large parts of the city are still
mixed, and society has not broken down completely. Acts of kindness are
everywhere. In Ur, a Shiite neighborhood, a family broke a human-size
hole into a wall that separated its house from Sunni neighbors so that
the Sunni family could flee through it and pose as Shiites if militia
members arrived.

Many Iraqis take pride in having friends and neighbors of the opposite
sect. Ms. Hussein’s father showed a poem he had received by text
message from a Sunni friend. Rossel’s father had two close Sunni
friends, also importers, though the men now live in Dubai. Rossel’s
brother Zain, 19, volunteers for Al Amal, the religiously diverse
community group that helps the displaced.

In many ways the war, at least in the capital, has moved past sect and
ideology, deep into the realm of the criminal. Gangs mouth sectarian
slogans but kill for property and power. In Omar’s neighborhood, Shiite
militias are killing their own: they have slain 16 Shiites in the past
two months, including four women and a 9-year-old girl.

The deeper the war penetrates, the more people in the middle are forced
to take a side. Zain was never interested in his Shiite identity, but
after his father’s killing, he contacted Shiite leaders in his new
neighborhood. He would be naïve to ignore it, he said. He said he
remembered when Sunni militants in his old neighborhood stopped hiding
their identities.

“My Sunni friends said, ‘Join with us or get out.’ ”

Sunnis who move to quiet Shiite areas, like the Sunni couple who moved
next door to Hashem’s family this year, hide basic details of their
lives out of fear of being noticed. Joining new neighborhoods is
difficult, particularly for someone from the opposite sect, as trust
between Iraqis is broken.

Sunnis in western Baghdad, Hashem’s mother said, “deserve what they
get,” because they allowed militants to mingle among them.

Omar seethed in silent fury as he gave soda and cellphone scratch cards
to his father’s killers. Then they asked for something far more
serious: that he watch and report movements of American troops from the
door of his father’s store. He had no choice but to agree. Moving the
family would make it poor, and take the children out of school.

“When I see them I want to jump on them, beat them, torture them, kill
them,” he said, biting his bottom lip. “But I can’t. I’m alone. I’m
Sunni in a Shiite area.”

Hosham Hussein and Qais Mizher contributed reporting.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times