By Sabrina Tavernise
The New York Times, 18 February 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 17 — Not long after the Americans occupied Iraq, strange things began happening in the family of Fatin Abdel Sattar, a Sunni Arab.
Her teenage son stopped giving his Sunni name in Shiite areas. Her sister's marriage fell apart as her Shiite husband turned his anger over old wounds on his Sunni spouse.
"We're concluding that it's better not to marry those from another sect," Ms. Abdel Sattar said, "to avoid problems in the future, to try to make our children's lives a little easier."
Of all of the changes that have swept Iraqi society since the American invasion almost three years ago, one of the quieter ones, yet also one of the most profound, has been the increased identification with one's own sect. In the poisonous new mix of violence, sectarian politics and lawlessness, families are turning inward to protect themselves.
"Since the state was dismantled in Iraq, institutions have disappeared and people have withdrawn into their clans and tribes," Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister, said in a recent interview.
The trend badly damaged the fortunes of Mr. Allawi's bloc of secular parties in the December elections for Parliament, as the vast majority of Iraq's 11.9 million voters cast ballots along sectarian and ethnic lines.
As a result, tribal ties now bind more firmly. Social life has withdrawn from clubs to homes. Mixed marriages are more carefully considered. "For a parent, the first question now is going to be: Sunni or Shiite?" said Shatha al-Quraishi, an Iraqi lawyer who specializes in family law. "People are starting to talk about it. I can feel it. I can touch that something has changed."
At the same time, pent-up feelings that for years were kept hidden under Saddam Hussein's government are now bursting into full view, in some cases dividing families. Shiite husbands jailed under Mr. Hussein turn their anger on their Sunni wives. Children come home asking if they are Sunni or Shiite.
Sectarian tensions in private lives are far from universal: Iraqis of different sects have mixed for decades and still do. But anecdotal evidence provided in interviews with lawyers, court clerks and social workers suggests that fault lines that have always existed are now becoming more distinct.
An analysis provided by one family court in central Baghdad showed that mixed marriages were rare to begin with, making up 3 to 5 percent of all unions in late 2002. But by late 2005 they had virtually stopped: the court did not record any in December, and last month registered only 2 out of 742 marriages.
"For the coming 10 years you can record the biggest changes in the Iraqi community," said Ansam Abayachi, a social researcher who works with Iraqi women and families. "The Sunnis will be on one side, the Shia on the other, and there is no mixed family."
The changes have their roots in the recent upheaval in the order of Iraqi society. Shiites, long oppressed, swept national elections in January 2005 and are now in power for the first time since the formation of the state in the 1920's. Sunni Arabs, once the rulers, deeply resent that loss.
Feelings have been further inflamed by the systematic killings of Shiites by suicide bombers and assassinations of Sunni Arabs by Shiites, some of them tied to the Shiiteled government. The violence has driven many families to seek safety by migrating to areas where their religious group predominates, reinforcing the sectarian tide.
For hard-line Sunnis, Shiite power is a bitter pill. A recent conversation in a Baghdad gas station line illustrates the attitude.
"Those Shiites were servants," one man told another, watching angrily as a third maneuvered in front, according to Ilham al-Jazaari, who was waiting nearby and overheard the exchange. "They wiped our shoes. Now they are going in front of us."
There are the extreme cases. Reports have surfaced of hard-line tribes, particularly in the heavily Sunni areas of central and western Iraq, refusing to allow tribal members to marry Shiites. One mixed couple even had a series of threatening telephone calls demanding that they divorce or be killed.
But most cases are subtler. Maisoon Muhammad, a counselor at the Center for Psychological Health in Iraq, said one of her patients, a Sunni woman, recently received a marriage proposal from a Shiite. One of the woman's aunts urged her to accept, but another forbade the union, saying she would refuse to greet a man she knew to be Shiite.
"We used to dismiss such stances," Ms. Abayachi said. "They were old-fashioned. They were not civilized. They were just holding to a tradition that was meaningless."
But attitudes are changing. Ms. Quraishi said a Shiite friend's family had recently rejected her fiancé, a Sunni. "Before we would have said, 'Why?' " she said. "But now we accept these things."
The changes wrought by the invasion have helped to harden attitudes. Anmar Abed Khalaf, 24, a Shiite university student, was rejected several times by his girlfriend's Sunni father because of his sect.
The man would perhaps not have taken such a hard line — he himself is married to a Shiite — if he had not been fired from his job of many years as a post office manager because of his membership in Mr. Hussein's Baath Party. American soldiers arrested a relative, prompting further anger against the new order.
Mr. Abed Khalaf said he felt more resignation than anger over the rejection. "I do not blame her father or her mother," said Mr. Abed Khalaf, who lives in Dora, a violent mixed neighborhood in southern Baghdad that has been tormented by sectarian assassinations for more than a year. "It is because of the situation."
It was Sunni bitterness that eroded the marriage of Khaloud Muhammad, 25, a Shiite whose father-in-law was from the Douri tribe of hard-line Sunni Arabs.
"I wasn't the one he wanted for his son," said Ms. Muhammad, who was waiting with her mother to file divorce papers in a family court in central Baghdad last month. "He threw words at me: 'I don't like Shia. We are unlucky that our son married you.' "
While some Iraqis pulled back, others became more self-assured in their own ethnic identities, no longer feeling the need to apologize for their Shiite last names, for example. Shortly after the American invasion, one of Ms. Abdel Sattar's brothers-in-law began expressing his identity as a Shiite.
He joined a political party and struck up a friendship with another Shiite in-law. He had been imprisoned under Mr. Hussein for belonging to a political party, and he now began speaking about the scars on his face after living for years with his wife without mentioning them.
But his newfound identity soured his marriage. When Sunni insurgents rebelled in Falluja in 2004, he began saying "you Sunnis" when referring to his Sunni Arab family. Disagreements would erupt in front of the television at night over everything from promotions for the military to news about insurgent attacks. Still angry about the past, he began to blame all Sunnis, including his wife, for his suffering.
"It was like an eruption of a volcano, hidden inside for all those years," Ms. Abdel Sattar said. "Those who were oppressed before, they have a weakness inside themselves. They live with this history. They can't get rid of this feeling."
Ms. Abayachi, the social researcher, said she hoped that the violence could also unite Iraqis. At a conference for victims of violence, at which about 40 Iraqis of different sects spoke of injuries received before and after the invasion, she had a glimpse of that.
"I noticed that when all of those people released their suffering there was a little bit of cooperation," she said. "They were coming together with the common points."
Mr. Abed Khalaf, the student, says he finds fewer and fewer of those connections. Shiites are also becoming too sectarian, he said. New groups of guards with strong Shiite Islamist leanings now patrol his university campus. Last year they asked to see his identification when he was sitting with his girlfriend — an effort, he said, to humiliate him.
"It is their time," he said, walking to the parking lot of the university. "I don't know when it will be mine."
Sahar Nageeb and Mona Mahmoud contributed reporting for this article.
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Citation: Sabrina Tavernise. "Iraq Power Shift Widens a Gulf Between Sects," The New York Times, 18 February 2006.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/18/international/middleeast/18sectarian.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1140238800&en=7feebb6066fcecfa&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin
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