Word: adhamiya
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Farooq al-Obeidi sensed his killers were near. "We have been penetrated by al-Qaeda," said al-Obeidi, a top commander of the Sunni Awakening group in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of Adhamiya...
...condemned the plan Sunday. Anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is heavily implicated in attacks on Sunni civilians, denounced the idea too. Iraq's Shi'ite Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, followed suit Sunday and called for a halt to the construction of the barrier in the Adhamiya district, one of the last remaining Sunni enclaves in Shi'ite east Baghdad...
...Sunnis have the more obvious cause for alarm. The Sunni residents of Adhamiya are already prisoners in their own neighborhood. Leaving the neighborhood necessitates traveling through Shi'ite territory, so few take the risk. Meanwhile access to basic goods and services is slowly being choked off as the area comes under frequent mortar attack. With this ancient Sunni community slowly being strangled to death, its residents were unlikely to rejoice at the prospect of being surrounded, "for their protection," by a 15-foot-high barrier of gray concrete slabs...
Ubaid lives with three brothers and their families. In November, they all moved to Adhamiya from Shulla, a mostly Shi'ite neighborhood where she was born. "I knew every brick of every house on my street," she says. "When we left, some of our neighbors cried and promised they would protect our house with their lives. But the next day, a Shi'ite family took the place, and nobody stopped them." Ubaid says she had considered raising Mohammed as a Shi'ite, out of respect for her husband. But now, she says, "that would be inviting disaster." Still, Ubaid says...
...came to that, no bridge, no crossing, would convince the residents of Adhamiya and Khadamiya that they had dreams in common. Just as Muslawi and Hussein look back at the stampede over the bridge in 2005 and see different pasts, so Iraq's Sunnis and Shi'ites may now be contemplating a future that they cannot share. There could be no more bitter legacy of the Bush Administration's fateful decision to go to war in Iraq...