For Baghdad couples, love often lost amid sectarian struggle

[unhappycamper]

For Baghdad couples, love often lost amid sectarian struggle
Leila Fadel and Sahar Issa
August 22, 2007 3:33 PM
(Sunday 8-26 release)
McClatchy Newspapers


BAGHDAD - Najlaa Abdul Razaq, 32, a Sunni Muslim, remembers the happy mornings when she awoke early to hear her daughters giggling and to make sweet tea and breakfast for her Shiite taxi-driver husband.

Wissam Abdul Kadhim, 31, a Shiite, remembers when she and her Sunni husband could visit her parents without anyone asking what her religious sect was.

All that is gone now.

Najlaa is divorced - her Shiite husband threw her out after his family pressured him to get rid of her.

Wissam wouldn't leave her Sunni husband when the Mahdi Army came and forced his family to leave their Shiite neighborhood. So now she lives in the Sunni enclave of Ameriyah and visits her parents in her old neighborhood only with the care of a spy, with two stops to change cars. Her husband never makes the trip.

Intermarriage between Sunnis and Shiites was once common in Iraq, but no more. Warfare between the country's two major sects has segregated neighborhoods and divided families. Now it's ending marriages and filling with dread the few unions strong enough to survive.

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