When Hate Lives Next Door

By Bobby Ghosh/ Baghdad

Sahar Ashour Nema has been visited twice by Iraq's sectarian demons. Two years ago, her husband, a Shi'ite laborer, was murdered by Sunni militants, who decapitated him, then hacked his body to pieces and set ablaze his small mobile home in western Baghdad. Before taking her children with her to live in her father's home in nearby al-Haswa, Nema returned one last time to their old neighborhood--just long enough to collect her husband's charred body parts in a plastic bag so he could have a decent burial. Her Sunni neighbors were impassive. "Nobody offered to help me in any way," she says, her face hardening at the memory.

But that departure was almost amiable compared with the one Nema had to make from al-Haswa last week. For months, Nema says, the mixed neighborhood's young Shi'ite men had been disappearing, their bodies turning up days later. Gradually, Shi'ites and Sunnis had stopped talking to each other. After the bombing of Samarra's al-Askari shrine two weeks ago and the wave of Shi'ite reprisals that followed, the atmosphere in al-Haswa turned toxic. The killings accelerated, and pamphlets began appearing in the street denouncing Shi'ites as "spies and betrayers" and demanding that they leave--or else. By the time Nema and her family fled, roads in and out of the neighborhood were manned by armed Sunnis who were roughing up and robbing the departing Shi'ites. The family abandoned most of its belongings and finally made it to a cousin's house in the Shi'ite neighborhood of al-Shulla. "We were lucky to find an unguarded exit," she says, her breath still catching with fear as she narrates their escape.

Most Iraqis cling to hope that the country won't descend into all-out civil war. But the sectarian violence that has racked the country over the past two weeks has upended the lives of thousands of families like Nema's, forcing them to leave their homes and changing the complexion of cities like Baghdad, perhaps forever. Across the capital, mixed neighborhoods have undergone the equivalent of wholesale religious cleansing, as Sunnis and Shi'ites have sought safety in their sectarian communities. In areas where Shi'ites and Sunnis once lived in tolerance, even harmony, the two sides are drawing sectarian lines to separate themselves from each other--even as Iraqi politicians and U.S. diplomats express hope that the risk of an imminent outbreak of communal conflict is receding. "If you are a minority in a neighborhood, you have to get out," says Adil Faaq Mohammed, a Sunni security guard at the Iraqi Health Ministry. "If you stay, your own neighbors will turn against you."

He speaks from experience. Mohammed's family fled its home in Baladiat, in northeastern Baghdad, in the aftermath of the Samarra blast. Once a mainly Sunni enclave adjoining the Shi'ite district of Sadr City, Baladiat gradually turned into a mixed neighborhood after the fall of Saddam Hussein. "We made lots of friends among the Shi'ites," Mohammed says. "On their festivals, we would invite them to feasts at our home." The day after the shrine bombing, he was at work when his uncle called. "He said, 'Come home at once.' He sounded frightened." But Mohammed was on duty and could not return until the following morning. It was too late. The previous afternoon, Shi'ite militias had stormed the home and taken away his uncle's three eldest sons. "Somebody had told them ours was a Sunni home, with adult men," says Mohammed. "We were betrayed."

In Iraq today, when your relatives disappear, you head first not to the police but to the hospitals and morgues. After a day's searching, Mohammed found the bodies of his cousins in the city's main morgue. "They had been brutally tortured, cut and burned," he says. "Even their genitals had been mangled." The bodies were buried the next day in the family hometown of Fallujah. Despite a daytime curfew, Mohammed says, many neighboring Shi'ites attended the funeral. "Some of them were very helpful. They helped us make all the arrangements," he says, his voice breaking. Even so, the family decided not to return to Baladiat. "The only Sunni families left there are those who have many sons and many weapons," Mohammed says. "And even they know the time will come when they have to leave."

Victims of the sectarian violence have little faith that the country's politicians will find a way to stop the killings--and hold no hope of getting justice from a largely corrupt and inept police force that many Sunnis believe has been infiltrated by Shi'ite militias and death squads. "Those who killed my cousins will be punished," says Mohammed, "but not by the police or the government. They will answer to God." Many others are pinning their hopes for revenge on armed vigilantes or sectarian militias like the Mahdi Army and Sunni insurgent groups. Although politicians and religious leaders have called on the militias to end the violence, reports from across the country indicate that many fighters are ignoring those appeals and instead responding to the growing resentments in the street.

Fear of the militias is palpable, even in neighborhoods where there have been heartening signs of Sunni-Shi'ite comity. In Shi'ite-majority al-Shulla, militias damaged the tiny al-Haq Sunni mosque with rocket-propelled grenades. Afterward, members of the local unit of the Shi'ite Mahdi Army surrounded the mosque, guarding it from further attack. "That afternoon and night the Shi'ites prayed in my mosque," says the grateful local imam, Jawhar Omar al-Zibari. "They told me they would die before allowing another attack." But the imam's Sunni flock is streaming out of the area. A year ago, at least 50 people went into the mosque for the five-times-a-day prayers; now it's a good day when 10 people show up. "Fear has taken over our lives," says al-Zibari. "People tell me they are leaving for the sake of their children, their lives, and in the hope of getting a night's sleep without fear."

Not far from al-Zibari's mosque, Sahar Nema says that while she and her family are not exactly comfortable in their cramped sleeping arrangements, they are spared the sectarian nightmares that haunted them in their previous home. In the days ahead, the family will have to confront difficult choices--where to look for jobs, where to send the kids to school, what to do about the home they abandoned. They may ultimately try to swap homes with one of the Sunni families being forced out of al-Shulla by the influx of Shi'ites. "I don't care if the house we get here is smaller than the one we left," Nema says. The only certainty: she will never return to her old home. To be twice a victim of Iraq's sectarian hatreds is quite enough.

With reporting by Assad Azzawi/ Baghdad