By SABRINA TAVERNISE
New York Times
4 July 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 30 - The night before he was shot to death outside a mosque last month, Qasim Azawi talked with his wife about leaving the neighborhood. Two fellow Sunni worshipers had been killed in previous weeks, and he was afraid.
Less than 10 hours later, he was dead, the ninth Sunni to be killed since March in Ur, a neighborhood in northeast Baghdad.
In the shifting landscape of the new Iraq, Ur, with a population more than 80 percent Shiite, is a troubling example of how lethal the sectarian divide can become. Since late March, at least 12 religious Sunnis, most of them worshipers at Ur mosques, have been killed, according to relatives of the dead and to Sheik Ahmed al-Ani, an imam from Ur who is tracking the deaths. Tallied together with an adjoining neighborhood -- Shaab -- the death toll is 26.
It is a quiet kind of killing, beneath the radar of car bombs and other headline-grabbing violence. But block by block, battle lines are being drawn, with religious Sunnis and Shiites lining up on opposite sides.
In the past, Ur, made up of tidy, treeless blocks, was, like most other Baghdad neighborhoods, the domain of Sunnis. Shiites endured decades of repression and killing under Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Arab, and were treated as second-class citizens. Now, with an Iraqi insurgency driven mostly by the fringes of the Sunni Arab community, Shiites bear the brunt of the attacks. Insurgents have driven car bombs into Shiite mosques and restaurants.
But attacks are carried out quietly against Sunnis as well, particularly in mixed neighborhoods, like Ur. Since March, some 56 families, according to Sheik Ani's count, have moved from Ur to areas where Sunnis predominate.
''There is a lot of fear,'' said Muhammad Azawi, 20, Mr. Azawi's son, who has moved out of Ur with his family. ''Sunni families are leaving. It's not safe.''
The Firdos mosque, where Mr. Azawi was killed, is open to the street in the back. It has been repeatedly strafed from passing cars.
''They want to frighten people,'' said Hassan Falah Hassan, the mosque's 57-year-old caretaker, who showed reporters the bullet holes.
A short distance from Al Firdos, where Mr. Azawi was killed, is a former Baath Party headquarters building. After the ouster of Mr. Hussein, it was taken over by a Shiite mosque, Al Shohada. It is a meeting place for followers of the radical Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr and his militia, the Mahdi Army.
Two people who live next to the Shohada mosque said attendance had risen in recent months. They reported seeing men, often armed, enter the building in the early evening and leave before evening prayers. Inside is a court, where defendants are judged according to Islamic law. Cars without license plates are frequently parked in the lot outside.
The mosque has claimed more space in the neighborhood, blocking off the roads immediately around it with barbed wire and blast walls, said one resident whose house is within the blocked area. Men from the mosque enforce Baghdad's 11 p.m. curfew in the area.
''Shiites now have everything, like the sun has the day,'' said a Shiite man who lives inside the roadblocks near the mosque and who agreed to speak on the condition that his name not be printed, because he is afraid of repercussions from the mosque. ''The government now is Shiite. If I want a job somewhere, I'm Shiite. I'm No.1. It's easy.''
Not so for the neighborhood's Sunnis. A Sunni Arab in Ur, who agreed to speak only if he was referred to by his nickname, Abu Diyar, said he moved out of Ur in early June, after his nephew was killed. Men dressed like soldiers took the young man, he said; the body was found in a dump.
More than two dozen bodies have surfaced in the same area, near a Shiite slum, during the past two months. In May, a bulldozer unexpectedly unearthed 14 bodies. Sheik Ani said the victims, who were blindfolded and had their hands tied behind their backs, were those of farmers from a town south of Baghdad who had come to Baghdad to sell vegetables.
Now living in a majority Sunni neighborhood, Abu Diyar said he kept a close-cut beard to try to look more Shiite. He contends that Shiites are doing the killing. ''The Shiites feel that for 35 years, they were victims,'' he said. ''Saddam put them down. Now they have power and they are taking revenge. They think the solution is to kill Sunnis.''
In contrast to the Shohada mosque, the Sunni mosque, Al Firdos, has seen attendance drop to almost nothing. Mr. Azawi told his wife in early April that there were only eight men at prayers. Gone are classes for children. The door to the women's section is ajar, the inside dusty.
It is not entirely new that Sunnis are being killed in Ur. Three brothers were shot to death outside Al Khulafa mosque in December 2003. But the violence intensified in March, when, as Sunni residents were quick to point out, religious Shiites took control of the government.
On the morning of May 19, Qasim Azawi's wife cooked him fried cheese and helped him choose a tie. He left for work and as he walked past the Firdos mosque, he was shot to death by gunmen in a white Daewoo sedan. The police, mostly Shiites, were slow to follow the car. They never made an arrest.
Suspicions focused on the Mahdi Army. Residents, Shiite and Sunni, circulate accounts that bolster the case against the group.
One Shiite man who said he witnessed the killing said he recognized two attackers as Mahdi members. In another clue, a man believed to be a Baathist was killed, and the getaway car eluded the police by maneuvering through checkpoints around the Shohada mosque, a route that only those familiar with the mosque could know.
A spokesman for Mr. Sadr, Abdel Hadi al-Daraji, denied that the Mahdi Army had been involved. He said in an interview, ''Even if we arrest criminals or terrorists, we always turn them over to the Iraqi police.''
Shiites in majority Sunni neighborhoods face similar problems, sometimes because they are assumed to be hostile.
Fatma Rakabi, 34, moved her Shiite family from a heavily Sunni area in Dora last year, after neighbors warned them that they had been marked as members of an informal Shiite militia, the Badr organization. Many Sunnis see it as a symbol of Iranian influence and of their own fall in status.
Ms. Rakabi said they had to hide their religion. On a trip to the hairdresser just before national elections in January, she was drawn into conversation with other women who were praising the insurgents, and hid her intention to vote.
She ultimately registered in another neighborhood, out of sight of Sunni neighbors. Ms. Rakabi said she winced when the women referred to insurgents as holy warriors. ''To me,'' she said, ''they were terrorists.''
Maryam Mohamed al-Obeidi, a religion teacher who moved out of Ur two months ago, now gives lessons in a mosque in Monsour.
''So many assassinations,'' she said, with several young girls kneeling in a reading group beside her. ''Why are they making problems for us under the cover of religion?''
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Citation: Sabrina Tavernise, "Quiet Killings Split Neighborhood Where Sunnis and Shiites Once Lived Side by Side," New York Times, 4 July 2005
Original URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/04/international/middleeast/04migration.html?ei=5070&en=9cce48ac1c3e442b&ex=1121140800&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print
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