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Across central Iraq,
there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives
as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them
down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as
ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale.
The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height
of the fighting in the 1990s when each community
fled to places where its members were a majority and
were able to defend themselves. "Be gone by evening
prayers or we will kill you," warned one of four men
who called at the house of Leila Mohammed, a
pregnant mother of three children in the city of
Baquba, in Diyala province north-east of Baghdad. He
offered chocolate to one of her children to try to
find out the names of the men in the family.
Mrs Mohammed is a Kurd and a Shia in Baquba, which
has a majority of Sunni Arabs. Her husband, Ahmed,
who traded fruit in the local market, said: "They
threatened the Kurds and the Shia and told them to
get out. Later I went back to try to get our
furniture but there was too much shooting and I was
trapped in our house. I came away with nothing." He
and his wife now live with nine other relatives in a
three-room hovel in Khanaqin.
The same pattern of intimidation, flight and death
is being repeated in mixed provinces all over Iraq.
By now Iraqis do not have to be reminded of the
consequences of ignoring threats.
In Baquba, with a population of 350,000, gunmen last
week ordered people off a bus, separated the men
from the women and shot dead 11 of them. Not far
away police found the mutilated body of a kidnapped
six-year-old boy for whom a ransom had already been
paid.
The sectarian warfare in Baghdad is sparsely
reported but the provinces around the capital are
now so dangerous for reporters that they seldom, if
ever, go there, except as embeds with US troops. Two
months ago in Mosul, I met an Iraqi army captain
from Diyala who said Sunni and Shia were
slaughtering each other in his home province.
"Whoever is in a minority runs," he said. "If forces
are more equal they fight it out."
It was impossible to travel to Baquba, the capital
of Diyala, from Baghdad without extreme danger of
being killed on the road. But I thought that if I
took the road from Kurdistan leading south, kept
close to the Iranian border and stayed in
Kurdish-controlled territory I could reach Khanaqin,
a town of 75,000 people in eastern Diyala. If what
the army captain said about the killings and mass
flight was true then there were bound to be refugees
who had reached there.
I thought it was too dangerous to go beyond the town
into the Arab part of Diyala province, once famous
for its fruit, since it is largely under insurgent
control. But, as I had hoped, it was possible to
talk to Kurds who had sought refuge in Khanaqin over
the past month.
Salam Hussein Rostam, a police lieutenant in charge
of registering and investigating people arriving in
terror from all over Iraq, gestured to an enormous
file of paper beside him. "I've received 200
families recently, most of them in the last week,"
he said.
This means that about one thousand people have
sought refuge in one small town. Lt Rostam said that
the refugees were coming from all over Iraq. In some
cases they had left not because they were threatened
with death but because they were fired from their
jobs for belonging to the wrong community. "I know
of two health workers from Baghdad who were sacked
simply because they were Kurds and not Shia," he
said.
This was probably because the Health Ministry in
Baghdad is controlled by the party of Muqtada al-Sadr,
the Shia cleric.
The flight of the middle class started about six
months after the invasion in 2003 as it became clear
Iraq was becoming more, not less, violent. They
moved to Jordan, Syria and Egypt. The suicide
bombing campaign was largely directed against Shias
who only began to retaliate after they had taken
over the government in May last year. Interior
Ministry forces arrested, tortured and killed
Sunnis.
But a decisive step towards sectarian civil war took
place when the Shia Al-Askari shrine in Samarra was
blown up on 22 February this year. Some 1,300 Sunni
were killed in retaliation.
Kadm Darwish Ali, a policeman from Baquba and now
also a refugee, said: "Everything got worse after
Samarra. I had been threatened with death before but
now I felt every time I appeared in the street I was
likely to die."
Every community has its atrocity stories. The cousin
of a friend was a Sunni Arab who worked in the
wholly Shia district of Qadamiyah in west Baghdad.
One day last month he disappeared.
Three days later his body was discovered on a
rubbish dump in another Shia district. "His face was
so badly mutilated," said my friend, that "we only
knew it was him from a wart on his arm."
Since the destruction of the mosque in Samarra
sectarian warfare has broken out in every Iraqi city
where there is a mixed population. In many cases the
minority is too small to stand and fight. Sunnis
have been fleeing Basra after a series of killings.
Christians are being eliminated in Mosul in the
north. Shias are being killed or driven out of
cities and towns north of Baghdad such as Baquba or
Samarra itself.
Dujail, 40 miles north of Baghdad, is the Shia
village where Saddam Hussein carrying out a judicial
massacre, killing 148 people after an attempt to
assassinate him in 1982. He is on trial for the
killings. The villagers are now paying a terrible
price for giving evidence at his trial.
In the past few months Sunni insurgents have been
stopping them at an improvised checkpoint on the
road to Baghdad. Masked gunmen glance at their
identity cards and if under place of birth is
written "Dujail" they kill them. So far 20 villagers
have been murdered and 20 have disappeared.
independent co.uk
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