"We Are Afraid to Return"
Page 2 of 2
|
|
Most of the families in Chikook are from Haswa, a Shiite village located between the town of Abu Ghraib and Baghdad's western— and largely Sunni—neighborhoods. Others in the village have moved to predominantly Shiite cities in southern Iraq, such as Basra, Najaf, and Karbala.
Latif al-Awainy is sitting in a tent in Chikook stuffed with all the belongings his family could bring as they fled Haswa. He says that the town's approximately 10,000 Shiite families are now almost completely gone.
"There are a few that do not have enough money to leave Haswa," he says. "We are afraid to return to get our other things. My cousin went there yesterday and insurgents shot at him."
Al-Awainy's brothers, covered with mortar, take a break from constructing their new house to have some tea in the tent, which families use until their houses are built.
In other areas around Baghdad, Shiite militias—most often Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army—have fought back against Sunni guerillas. But members of the militia complain they are outgunned by insurgents with heavier weapons, and constrained by U.S. troops, who will arrest anyone in fighting in a militia. In some villages, such as Haswa, the militias were too far removed from other Shiite-dominated areas and couldn't defend workers traveling to and from Baghdad against the insurgents.
Shiites who fled the cities of Taji and Tarmiya, north of the capital, accuse the Iraqi army of collaborating outright with insurgents. Others say the Iraqi army and police are simply unwilling or unable to stop the ethnic cleansing.
"The Iraqi National Guard is just there to collect a paycheck," Al-Awainy says.
Umm Thair arrived in Chikook a year ago from Mosul after her husband was assassinated—by insurgents or criminals—for selling cars to the government. Her house in the suburb, larger than most, is currently being used to shelter many other families waiting for their own dwellings to be built.
Thair holds the central government responsible for inaction over the ongoing violence. "The government does nothing! What should I say about the government? This is the democracy. This is the freedom," she says, laughing bitterly. "The freedom is that you must leave your house."
"Families are living in their cars," says Abu Ali, another man from Haswa. "It's like Shiites aren't human beings."
Al-Awainy also blames the US military for operating in the town Abu Ghraib and the surrounding area and stoking Sunni furor while at the same time failing to protect Shiites.
"When the American soldiers came to Zidan [a village near Abu Ghraib], they drove out the terrorists, but then they left, and the terrorists came back," he says. "The American government put us here."
Attacks by Sunni insurgents have provoked a Shiite backlash, but so far the men in Haswa seem to obey orders by Shiite clerics such as Sadr and Ayatollah Al-Sistani, the country's ranking Shiite cleric, to restrain themselves. Some Shiites offer as proof of their obedience the fact that a handful of Sunni families are allowed to live in Chikook unmolested. The families are refugees who fled the fighting in Fallujah a year ago and still have yet to return.
But signs are everywhere that sectarian tensions are getting worse. Back in 2004, in Shaola, a large Shiite slum of approximately one million people next to Chikook, Shiite mosques served as shelters for Sunni families fleeing Fallujah. But that sort of inter-sect unity is hard to find in this area, as fighting increasingly breaks down along sectarian lines.
"[The Sunnis] forgot how we helped them in the past," Al-Awainy says. Shiites are the majority in the country, he points out. The anger clearly burns.
"Any orders [from the Shiite clerics], and we will fight," he says. "If there is no solution, we will change the situation."
David Enders is author of Baghdad Bulletin: Dispatches on the American Occupation.
Photo: David Enders
