Word: shying
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...speaks from experience. Mohammed's family fled its home in Baladiat, in northeastern Baghdad, in the aftermath of the Samarra blast. Once a mainly Sunni enclave adjoining the Shi'ite district of Sadr City, Baladiat gradually turned into a mixed neighborhood after the fall of Saddam Hussein. "We made lots of friends among the Shi'ites," Mohammed says. "On their festivals, we would invite them to feasts at our home." The day after the shrine bombing, he was at work when his uncle called. "He said, 'Come home at once.' He sounded frightened." But Mohammed was on duty and could...
...found the bodies of his cousins in the city's main morgue. "They had been brutally tortured, cut and burned," he says. "Even their genitals had been mangled." The bodies were buried the next day in the family hometown of Fallujah. Despite a daytime curfew, Mohammed says, many neighboring Shi'ites attended the funeral. "Some of them were very helpful. They helped us make all the arrangements," he says, his voice breaking. Even so, the family decided not to return to Baladiat. "The only Sunni families left there are those who have many sons and many weapons," Mohammed says...
Victims of the sectarian violence have little faith that the country's politicians will find a way to stop the killings--and hold no hope of getting justice from a largely corrupt and inept police force that many Sunnis believe has been infiltrated by Shi'ite militias and death squads. "Those who killed my cousins will be punished," says Mohammed, "but not by the police or the government. They will answer to God." Many others are pinning their hopes for revenge on armed vigilantes or sectarian militias like the Mahdi Army and Sunni insurgent groups. Although politicians and religious leaders...
Fear of the militias is palpable, even in neighborhoods where there have been heartening signs of Sunni-Shi'ite comity. In Shi'ite-majority al-Shulla, militias damaged the tiny al-Haq Sunni mosque with rocket-propelled grenades. Afterward, members of the local unit of the Shi'ite Mahdi Army surrounded the mosque, guarding it from further attack. "That afternoon and night the Shi'ites prayed in my mosque," says the grateful local imam, Jawhar Omar al-Zibari. "They told me they would die before allowing another attack." But the imam's Sunni flock is streaming out of the area...
...will have to confront difficult choices--where to look for jobs, where to send the kids to school, what to do about the home they abandoned. They may ultimately try to swap homes with one of the Sunni families being forced out of al-Shulla by the influx of Shi'ites. "I don't care if the house we get here is smaller than the one we left," Nema says. The only certainty: she will never return to her old home. To be twice a victim of Iraq's sectarian hatreds is quite enough...