Word: baghdad
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...Sunnis in Baghdad, the sight of policemen is cause for concern rather than reassurance. Traffic checkpoints are especially perilous. Recently three TIME staff members--brothers, all Sunni--were detained at a police checkpoint for five hours. They began to worry when a Shi'ite friend who had been riding with them was allowed to leave. When the men showed their media badges, issued by the U.S. military, the cops accused them of being American spies. "We'll send you to the Interior Ministry," a cop said, obviously enjoying their discomfort as he bundled them into the back of a pickup...
Feeling the heat from the militias and security forces, Baghdad's Sunnis know their best hope for protection lies in the Americans, the very occupying forces they have despised for toppling them from power. My meeting with a high-level commander of a Sunni insurgent group takes an unexpected turn when he angrily demands, "Where are the Americans? Why aren't they protecting our people?" For two years, the man has boasted to me about his fighters' operations against U.S. soldiers. Now he wants them as a shield from the marauding militias. It's clear from his indignation that...
...state of denial about the danger of sectarianism. For months, officials and military brass have doggedly maintained that the Shi'ite-on-Sunni sectarian killings were one-offs, unlikely to spread across the community. That posture began to change when Shi'ite mobs went on a murderous spree in Baghdad's Sunni neighborhoods after the Feb. 22 bombing of the Shi'ite shrine in Samarra. By the time U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his latest visit to Baghdad last month, the assessment was more realistic. General George Casey, the U.S. commander in Iraq, told Rumsfeld that Shi'ite death...
...avert a civil war: "If it fails, I don't know what the destiny of Iraq will be." For a second, I thought I recognized the expression on his face. It's the one I had seen on the faces of my fellow passengers on the flight into Baghdad--that mixture of fear and resignation, just before the descent into hell...
...submit questions to Aparisim Ghosh about life in Baghdad, visit time.com