Sects slice up Iraq as US troops 'surge' misfires

[babylonsister]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2026079,00.html

Sects slice up Iraq as US troops 'surge' misfires


Peter Beaumont in Baghdad
Sunday March 4, 2007
The Observer

Ahmad Hamad al-Tammimi used to live in the village of Quba. Before Iraq descended into sectarian war it was home to around 700 families. The vast majority were Sunnis. Tammimi, spiritual head of Diyala province's Shias and a follower of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most important religious leader, was the imam at the local mosque. He farmed groves of date palms and oranges close to the Diyala river. That was then. He has not seen his house, his farm or old mosque for close to two years.

'I get my information from a moderate Sunni family that lives in Quba,' he said. 'There is another family in my house. A Sunni family. Other people have taken over my groves. People from outside the village. Now I hear they have allowed my plants to dry up and wither.'

The Shias have left Quba, pushed out of their homes over two years of gradual, deadly ethnic cleansing that is now almost complete. Sectarian deaths are decreasing because there are few people left available to kill.

Both communities have retrenched in areas where they feel they are safe and which they can defend, sometimes with barricades and armed men. It is a process repeated across Iraq in an endless cycle of displacement that the new efforts to end sectarian violence in Baghdad seem to have done little to diminish.

Yesterday at Youssifiya, 12 miles south of the capital, six Sunni men who had received death threats for mixing with local Shias were killed in execution-style slayings. On Friday at least 14 members of the Shia-led security forces were abducted and believed killed.

The Iraqi government wants tens of thousands of families to return as part of the Baghdad Security Plan, but only a few hundred have done so, many of them to hide behind locked doors. So the cycle continues. Displaced Sunnis push out Shias, who in turn push out the Sunnis in the areas they relocate to. While more than a million have left Iraq, three million have been internally displaced. The displacement has been conducted with ruthless efficiency. A mosque will be attacked, a grenade thrown at a house, men kidnapped and killed, a few houses burnt - delivering the message to get out.

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[Monkeyman]

1. Lets be honest did anyone here think the so-called surge would work

[ixion]

2. anyone who was intellectually honest did not...

I would hope.