Partition
Fears Begin To Rise
By Ali al-Fadhily
16 July, 2007
Inter Press Service
BAGHDAD, Jul 16 (IPS)
- Many Iraqis are now beginning to see the rising sectarian
violence as part of a larger plan to partition the country.
"Americans want to alter
the shape of our cities, dividing Iraqis into ethnic and sectarian groups
living separately from each other," Khali Sadiq, a researcher in
statistics at Baghdad University told IPS.
"They are not doing
this directly, but they have obviously given room to militias and Iraqi
forces to do the job," he said. "We are more than halfway
towards a sectarian Iraq."
A recent report has raised
further suspicions that there is a U.S.-backed plan to partition the
capital city, and possibly the country along sectarian and ethnic lines.
According to the Initial
Benchmark Assessment Report issued by the White House Jul. 12, "the
government of Iraq has made satisfactory progress towards enacting and
implementing legislation on procedures to form semi-autonomous regions."
The report also states that
the U.S.-backed Iraqi government formulates "target lists"
of Sunni Arabs. These lists are compiled by the Office of the Commander-in-Chief,
which reports directly to U.S.-backed Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The report says fabricated
charges are brught to purge Sunnis from the Iraqi security forces.
Samara city, 100 km north
of Baghdad, seems to be one of the current targets of this demographic
change. The bombing of the shrine of al-Askari in February 2006 ignited
a sectarian wave of violence that swept Iraq. Shia clerics in Baghdad
and other Iraqi provinces who are supportive of the occupation began
to speak of a need to change the city from predominantly Sunni to predominantly
Shia.
Shula and Hurriya in western
Baghdad, and most areas on the eastern bank of Tigris River are now
purely Shia after years of killings by death squads. It has been known
for over a year now that Shia death squads have been operating out of
the U.S.-backed Ministry of Interior, often in the guise of the Facilities
Protection Service (FPS).
The FPS was created under
extraordinary circumstances. The U.S. occupation authorities and the
Iraqi leaders working with them set up several new army and police forces
under the supervision of the Multi National Forces (MNF). It was decided
that each ministry could establish its own protection force away from
the control of the ministries of interior and defence.
The FPS was established Apr.
10, 2003, the day after the fall of Baghdad, under Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) order 27.
This document states: "The
FPS may also consist of employees of private security firms who are
engaged to perform services for the ministries or governorates through
contracts, provided such private security firms and employees are licensed
and authorised by the Ministry of Interior."
Global Security.Org, a U.S.-based
security research group, says: "The Facilities Protection Service
works for all ministries and governmental agencies, but its standards
are set and enforced by the Ministry of the Interior. It can also be
privately hired. The FPS is tasked with the fixed site protection of
ministerial, governmental, or private buildings, facilities and personnel."
But evidence has emerged
that this and other police forces have been taken over by Shia militia.
Capt. Alexander Shaw, head
of the police transition team of the 372nd Military Police Battalion,
a Washington-based unit charged with overseeing training of all Iraqi
police in western Baghdad, has said: "To be perfectly honest, I'm
not sure we're ever going to have police here that are free of the militia
influence."
Shaw said about 70 percent
of the Iraqi police force had been infiltrated, and that police officers
are too afraid to patrol many areas of the capital.
Many Iraqis today believe
this is part of an intentional plan to divide Iraq along sectarian lines.
"They (death squads)
evicted many of our good Sunni neighbours and killed many others,"
Abu Riyad of the predominantly Shia Shula area told IPS. "We protected
them for a while, but then we could not face the militias with all the
support they had from the Iraqi government and the Americans. It is
a terrible shame that we have to live with, but what can we do?"
On the other hand, many Sunni
Iraqis seemed unwilling to evict their Shia countrymen -- for a while.
But people in one mixed area of Baghdad described strange developments.
"It is true that our
neighbours did not evict us, but then the Americans swept the area and
local fighters had to disappear from the streets," Hussein Allawi,
a Shia who lived in a predominantly Sunni neighbourhood told IPS. "A
group of masked strangers then entered the town right under American
soldiers' eyes. Only then did we realise that we must leave, and that
our good neighbours could not help us any more."
Many such stories are told
around Baghdad.
"We had to leave our
house in Isskan in the western part of Baghdad," Dr. Fadhil Mahmood,
a Sunni, told IPS. "A Shia friend of mine telephoned me to leave
the house instantly because he heard some people were heading there
to kill me and evict my family."
Mahmood said that his neighbours
later told him that death squads arrived half an hour after he left
his home.
(Ali, our correspondent in
Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr Jamail, our U.S.-based
specialist writer on Iraq who travels extensively in the region)
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