Word: adhamiya
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That means that for girls like Safah, there are few havens left in Baghdad. In 2003, after Safah's father died, her grandmother took her to House of Children No. 2 orphanage in Adhamiya without the knowledge of most of her family. At the orphanage, she was befriended by an affable nurse who spent hours chatting up Safah, a fresh-faced girl whose fingers are still pudgy with baby fat. The nurse's modest hijab framed a sweet face that made Safah feel that the nurse was a good, spiritual woman, one she could trust. The nurse convinced Safah that...
...tragedy had more to do with inadequate policing and haphazard crowd control than with sectarian animosities. If anything, many Shi'ites said, the Sunnis behaved honorably, both before and after the tragedy. After all, over a million Shi'ite pilgrims had passed unmolested through the Sunni stronghold of Adhamiya on their way to the bridge. And when disaster struck, its residents rushed to the rescue. Many jumped into the Tigris River to pull out pilgrims who had leaped (or fallen) off the bridge; others took injured and exhausted pilgrims into their homes, providing food and shelter until emergency crews arrived...
...succor was as surprising as it was welcome. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Adhamiya has turned into a safe haven for Sunni insurgents, earning the nickname "Baghdad's Fallujah." There's little love lost between Adhamiya and Sadr City, the giant Shi'ite slum whose residents made up the majority of the victims. At Adhamiya's ancient Abu Hanifa mosque, close to the Bridge of Imams, sermons routinely laud the jihadis who have been killing Shi'ite civilians and curse the Shi'ite-dominated government. Yet on Wednesday, the yellow-brick mosque became a makeshift triage station for emergency...
...Alas, the cessation of sectarian hostilities was too good to last. A day after the tragedy, a brief gun battle broke out between Iraqi security forces on the bridge and some Sunni insurgents in Adhamiya. And al-Qaeda's Iraqi offshoot, led by Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, claimed credit for an earlier rocket attack on Kadhimiya, the Shi'ite district on the other side of the bridge. Drive-by shootings at Sunni mosques in southern Iraq last Friday suggested scapegoating by some Shi'ites. And calls for a peace march after the joint prayers in Baghdad proved futile: not enough...
...Sadr and his two million followers in Sadr City. The A.M.S.'s al-Qubaisi says his group is already working with al-Sadr to persuade Shi'ites to vote against the constitution. The relationships forged during last week's tragedy and the goodwill generated by the Sunnis of Adhamiya could yet yield a political payoff...