Iraqi men look at a bullet-riddled wall following an alleged raid by US forces into Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City.
BAGHDAD—When he's not working alongside his father in the nearby soot-spewing power plant, Abdullah Hassan sells soda and fruit of dubious freshness from a small stand in front of his house in the Dora neighborhood of the Iraqi capital. It's not much, and Hassan, 18, says he's miserably bored. "Idle hands," says his father Zayed, drawing slowly on a cigarette and leaving the proverb unfinished. So he found his son a shift at the power station.
Abdullah says he'd rather be in school, but when the family was pushed at gunpoint out of its old Shiite-dominated neighborhood, the headmaster of his former school refused to transfer his records to a school in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood. Zayad, a Sunni, recalls the headmaster saying, "We're not going to help terrorists," and threatening him if he complained. Without the records, Abdullah can't attend school. "Shiites are swine," Abdullah mutters in Arabic, though it's unclear if he's talking about his former principal or the thousands of pilgrims marching nearby.
Suffering has washed like the muddy Tigris through the capital for the past five years. Yet as the violence has ebbed during the past six months, a fragile truce has emerged in some formerly chaotic areas. The additional American troops, as Army commanders here are quick to note, are not the primary element behind what has been a reduction in killings. A cease-fire by the country's largest Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, and a new understanding between Sunnis and U.S. forces are chiefly responsible for plummeting numbers of roadside bombs and sectarian killings. The new troops, though, have helped stabilize some neighborhoods, particularly in Baghdad.
Reconciliation among Baghdad residents has not come from the central government, which is seen as weak and largely unrepresentative of Sunnis who boycotted the national elections. Instead, reconciliation, such as it is, has come primarily through local affairs arranged within neighborhoods and coordinated by American forces among tribal, religious, military, and family groups. This has occurred in the formerly mixed neighborhoods of Ghazaliyah, Dora, and Aamel, with prompting by American officers. "It is time to move on from the troubles of the past, yet the hardest work for you is still ahead," Lt. Col. James Crider of the 1-4 Cavalry, told a gathering of neighborhood leaders in Dora. "As peace returns, you'll see fewer American soldiers living among you."
A peace-through-stalemate has materialized with both Sunnis and Shiites well armed and confined by an endless line of concrete blast walls that ring their neighborhoods. Many areas have been "cleansed" of the minority sect, and some estimate that the city—once 40 percent Sunni—is now perhaps 20 percent Sunni. Last year, an estimated 800,000 Baghdadis were displaced, and they have been slow to return. The Iraqi government, meanwhile, has been silent on the issue of returning displaced families to their former homes, unless the homes are vacant. And the U.S. military does not involve itself in housing disputes at all. The only organized repatriation comes at the behest of local reconciliation committees, returning residents to unoccupied homes. But the process can often make things worse—Shiite families returning to their homes in Dora have found soda bottles filled with homemade explosives and ball bearings placed on their front gates by their Sunni neighbors.
Over the past few years, the Shiite Mahdi Army in Aamel systematically drove out Sunni residents until only a small cluster of about 30 Sunni households remained. Shiites also fled the chaos. But early last month , several dozen Shiite and Sunni families began to move back into their abandoned homes in Aamel. As a lineman atop a ladder worked to connect houses back to the power grid—though there's still less than three hours of city power per day—the returning families greeted their old neighbors. "Mercifully, no one has stolen or broken into my house in six months," says one Shiite woman with two young children, whose husband was killed by a suicide bomber at a market last year.
While the soldiers can escort families back to their old houses, they can't always keep them safe afterward. "Reconciliation is like pouring concrete," says Capt. Sean Lyons, a company commander in the 1-28 Infantry, which oversaw some of the repatriation of Shiite and Sunni families in Aamel. "The U.S. Army can hold the forms up for a while, but we can't make it dry any faster."
On the border between the Shiite and Sunni sections of Ghazaliyah, two guards, Abdul Kareem and Hussein Ahmed, stand—or, rather, slouch—outside their Sunni mosque. The facade is pockmarked with bullet holes. Shiite homes now surround the holy site. The two men gripe to a group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division on a foot patrol. "The new people here still spit at my face when they walk by, but they've stopped shooting at us," says Kareem with a smile, gesturing to bullet holes near the gate.
As they are talking, a local Shiite man approaches the patrol with his 8-year-old young daughter. Her back and right arm are horribly scarred and blistered after she dropped a pan of boiling cooking water on herself the day before. "We don't go to the clinic," says the father, gesturing up the road to where the neighborhood becomes Sunni, "because we will not get care." The two guards are stonily silent as the Army medic tells the father to go to the nearby combat outpost for emergency treatment.
Sunnis often complain that the central government favors Shiite neighborhoods, providing more services there. While that might be true in some cases, no one has been spared the ill effects of the war. The city's shattered infrastructure and essential services have themselves become instruments of sectarian conflict. In Aamel, Shiites blame Sunni insurgents for targeting power lines that feed the city. In Dora, the streets are still so dangerous that the Red Crescent has no presence, and the government doesn't fund local Sunni clinics. In Ghazaliyah, the enclave of Sunnis complains that the Shiites in other parts of town have turned up the pressure of the water system, destroying the underground pipes and flooding potable water into the lakes of raw sewage that dot both sections of the neighborhood.
For American soldiers tasked with policing the fragile cease-fire, a decline in violence is both a blessing and a bore. Attention to discipline, as any officer knows, always increases as the fighting declines, which means soldiers—some on their third or fourth tours—are pestered about small imperfections in their uniforms or proper handling of their weapons.
But sometimes the endless hours of uneventful patrolling can lead to mischief. Driving slowly for hours on end through the newly reopened and crowded Dora market, American soldiers rig the windshield washer on their armored humvee as a water gun to spray pedestrians. The young soldiers—despite knowing how a small incident can turn ugly fast—find it funny to spray unsuspecting Iraqis. Young boys seem to get the joke and smile. But when the soldiers spray a series of veiled women, old men, and chickpea vendors, the joke gets old fast. "We should stop—it looks like the masses are starting to get angry," says the humvee driver, glancing around and moving his hand off the plunger button on the dashboard.
Not far from the market, Abdullah Hassan and his father sit in their house talking about the past few years. They can now walk to work at the power plant, but the family still gets only an hour of power per day for their efforts. Abdullah watches Arabic music videos whenever there's enough juice to run the television. A year ago, their yard and the fruit and soda stand sat in the crossfire between a Sunni sniper's nest and an Iraqi Army checkpoint. The family didn't use the front door for more than a year. The sniper is still around but lying low and getting paid $350 per month to stand guard at a checkpoint as a member of a local "Awakening" movement militia. "We are all living between the terrorists," says Abdul Kareem, a former Iraqi Army officer who now works on a neighborhood reconciliation committee. "We can't just walk by, pretend they don't exist, and not say hello."
And outside his command center in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Pat Frank, commander of the 1-28, posted a hand-lettered motivational sign: "When historians write about American actions in Iraq," it reads, "they will focus on the 2003 invasion and the surge—you are part of history—your victory will be recorded." That might be so, but when Iraqi historians write about the past five years, they will doubtlessly focus on the full five years that have plunged their country so far into the abyss.
