Districts walled off in Baghdad

BAGHDAD – A U.S. military brigade is constructing a three-mile-long concrete wall to cut off one of the capital’s most restive Sunni Arab districts from the Shiite Muslim neighborhoods that surround it, raising concern about the further Balkanization of Iraq’s most populous and violent city.

U.S. commanders in northern Baghdad say the 12-foot-high barrier will make it more difficult for suicide bombers, death squads and militia fighters from sectarian factions to attack one another and slip back to their home turf. Construction began last week and is expected to be completed by the end of the month.

Although Baghdad is replete with blast walls, checkpoints and other temporary barriers, including a massive wall around the Green Zone, the wall being constructed in Adhamiya would be the first to essentially divide a neighborhood by sect.

A largely Sunni district, Adhamiya is one of Baghdad’s flashpoints, avoided by not only Shiites, but Sunni outsiders. The area is almost completely surrounded by Shiite-dominated districts.

The ambitious project is a sign of how far the U.S. military will go to end the nonstop bloodshed in Iraq. But U.S. officials said the barrier is not a central tactic of the ongoing U.S.-Iraqi security crackdown announced Feb. 13.

“We defer to commanders on the ground, but dividing up the entire city with barriers is not part of the plan,” U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Garver said Thursday.

News of the barrier construction was first reported Thursday by the newspaper Stars and Stripes.

Sunnis and Shiites living in the shadow of the barrier are united in their contempt for the imposing new structure.

“Are they trying to divide us into different sectarian cantons?” said a Sunni drugstore owner in Adhamiya, who identified himself as Abu Ahmed, 44. “This will deepen the sectarian strife and only serve to abort efforts aimed at reconciliation.”

Some of Ahmed’s customers come from Shiite or mixed neighborhoods that are now cut off by large barriers along a main highway. Customers and others seeking to cross into the Sunni district must park their cars outside Adhamiya, walk through a narrow pedestrian passage in the walls and catch taxis on the other side.

Several residents interviewed likened the project to the massive barriers built around some Palestinians zones in Israel.

“Are we in the West Bank?” asked Abu Qusay, 48, a pharmacist who said that access to his favorite kebab restaurant in Adhamiya has been cut off.

Residents complained that Baghdad has already been dissected by hundreds of barriers that cause daily traffic snarls.

Some predicted the new wall would become a target of militants on both sides. Last week, construction crews came under small-arms fire, military officials said.

“I feel this is the beginning of a pattern of what the whole of Iraq is going to look like, divided by sectarian and racial criteria,” said Abu Marwan, 50, a Shiite pharmacist.

Marwan lives on a predominantly Shiite side of the wall, but works in the Sunni district.

Najim Sadoon, 51, worried he will lose customers at his housewares store. “This closure of the street will have severe economic hardships,” he said. “Transportation fees will increase. Customers who used to come here in their cars will now prefer to go other places.”

Majid Fadhil, 43, a Shiite police commissioner in a neighborhood north of the wall, said flatly, “This fence is not going to work.”

Pentagon officials first broached the idea of creating “gated communities” earlier this year.

But more recently, military officials have emphasized political negotiation as well as heightened troop presence as a way to stem sectarian conflict.

On a tour of the Middle East this week, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates repeatedly struck chords of unity and reconciliation. He is expected to meet with sectarian leaders and government officials in Baghdad today.

The construction in Adhamiya is not the first time U.S. military planners have attempted to isolate hostile regions. In 2005, U.S. troops tried to surround the Sunni-dominated city of Samarra with earthen berms to prevent insurgents from entering and leaving the city. A similar strategy was deployed to contain Tall Afar. Experiments with less extensive walls and trenches have also been attempted in Baghdad and Kirkuk.

The latest project is the work of the 407th Brigade Support Battalion, part of the 82nd Airborne Division, based in northern Baghdad’s Camp Taji. Since April 10, soldiers have ventured out almost nightly after curfew, overseeing installation of the 14,000-pound wall segments, using giant construction cranes and employing Iraqi crews, said Army Sgt. Michael Pryor, a public affairs specialist for the unit.

Soldiers have dubbed the project the “The Great Wall of Adhamiya.” Commanders in the 82nd Airborne could not be reached for comment Thursday.

In a news release earlier this week, military officials said the project was intended to protect citizens on both sides.

“(The wall) is on a fault line of Sunni and Shia, and the idea is to curb some of the self-sustaining violence by controlling who has access to the neighborhoods,” Army Capt. Marc Sanborn, brigade engineer for the project, said in the release.