The US soldiers obligingly stopped periodically during one patrol and
\nallowed me to clamber out and talk to people. What they said
\nsurprised me so much that I later sent some of the Sunnis from the
\noffice to the same neighborhood to check it out.<\/p>\n
These people wanted the Americans around. They trusted the Americans […]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Of course, you really need to see it in context to judge, so the full text is below the fold:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"i-b6fdec97849345e84139e49766cd39ba-sm_jihadstr.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/467\/files\/2012\/04\/i-b6fdec97849345e84139e49766cd39ba-sm_jihadstr.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\nIn the midst of this whole mess, the last place I expected to find
\npeople who liked America was west Baghdad.<\/p>\nWest Baghdad, roughly speaking, is the Sunni part of a very mixed
\ncity, and has the distinction of being the home to a pretty nasty
\ninsurgency for the last few years – you wanna get kidnapped, go to
\nwest Baghdad, where they also shoot men for wearing shorts and women
\nfor not wearing veils.<\/p>\nUS troops turned the place over to the Iraqi army back in December,
\nall part of that process of Bush calls our stepping down as the
\nIraqis step up… Except it all went to hell so badly that in April
\nthe US army had to move back in – I don’t think that was mentioned in
\nthe state of the union address.<\/p>\nNow, the whole capital’s going to hell in a handbasket and the same
\nprocess is being repeated across the city as more US troops are being
\nrushed in. Six weeks into the new prime minister’s security plan,
\nit’s worse than ever here and the Iraqi forces have shown themselves
\nunable to control their own capital.<\/p>\nDoesn’t bode well.<\/p>\n
This time it’s not the insurgents that are messing things up,
\nhowever, it’s the death squads, the militias, the sectarian killings.
\nPeople don’t spend much time targeting the Americans out here any
\nmore, they’re too busy killing each other<\/p>\n.<\/p>\n
Before going on a patrol, the burly sergeant (they’re always burly it
\nseems) was giving the patrol briefing which includes reading down the
\n“sigacts” report. What? Signficant activities. So we stood there in
\n120 degree (45C) weather next to our humvees listening to a list of
\nwho’d been shooting who and where bombs and bodies had been turning
\nup across the west Baghdad area.<\/p>\nOne bit caught my attention. Up in the north, a Sunni and Shiite
\nneighborhood were shooting mortars at each other every night. I later
\nheard this goes on in some southern neighborhoods as well. As someone
\nin the office later pointed out, if two neighborhoods are shelling
\neach other, can’t we call it a civil war?<\/p>\nSo we all piled into the humvees and went on patrol through the
\n“mean” streets of west Baghdad, and the first thing I noticed was
\njust how nice some of these streets were. There were leafy palm trees
\neverywhere, in one area a few people had even trimmed their hedges
\ninto topiary shapes. Brightly colored bougainvilleas spilled down
\ngarden walls into the street.<\/p>\nTrash, however, lay piled uncollected in any vacant lot and every
\nblock had a massive generator, festooned with wires, serving the block.<\/p>\nAt every street corner, people had dragged rocks, bits of concrete
\nbarrier and whole palm trunks to block off their streets. The
\ninhabitants told me it was to protect against nighttime intruders and
\nstop drive by shootings.<\/p>\nThe commercial streets, the public spaces, in these neighborhoods
\nwere shattered. Rows of shops with their metal shutters closed at all
\nhours of the days. There were twisted metal frames that were once
\ncars packed with explosives, and never any people.<\/p>\nIt was like a reversion to medieval Islamic cities were the gates of
\nalleys and quarters would be locked at night, dividing cities up into
\na series of isolated strongholds – much the way Baghdad now seemed to
\nfragmenting.<\/p>\nThe US soldiers obligingly stopped periodically during one patrol and
\nallowed me to clamber out and talk to people. What they said
\nsurprised me so much that I later sent some of the Sunnis from the
\noffice to the same neighborhood to check it out.<\/p>\nThese people wanted the Americans around. They trusted the Americans
\n– at least not to kill them for their id cards, as one guy put it.
\nYou know the situation in Baghdad is bad when the American occupiers
\nare preferred, better yet, considered fair and just.<\/p>\nAnd this is after the allegations marines shooting up civilians in
\nHaditha and a soldier raping a woman and killing her family.<\/p>\nYou knew what happened after you were arrested by an American, when
\nyou were taken away by the police your just weren’t heard from again.<\/p>\nThe focus is no longer the Americans in Baghdad, they have drifted
\noff to the sidelines as the neighborhoods arm themselves for the
\ninternecine battles.[…]<\/p>\nI met this one old Iraqi guy in a particularly nice west Baghdad
\nneighborhood called Jamaa, or university, he talked about how his
\nneighbors are just melting away.<\/p>\n“That guy was a professor, he now lives in Malaysia, I’m not sure
\nwhere that guy moved, and that guy over there lives in Jordan after
\nhe was kidnapped and ransomed,” he said gesturing to the leafy houses
\nacross the street with their unkempt lawns.<\/p>\nEveryone in this neighborhood of professors, doctors and lawyers
\nfears kidnapping. He described how his neighbor was snatched right in
\nthe street by a pair of black BMWs. The ransom was half a million
\ndollars<\/p>\n“I have two doors, one in front, one in back – I always leave the
\nhouse from the back door,” he said, a diminutive little man wearing
\njust an undershirt in the summer heat. He showed me his garden, a
\nmini Versaille of statuary and ornamental benches.<\/p>\nThe neighborhoods got a little shabbier later when I accompanied a
\npatrol farther south into Jihad, where a few weeks earlier Shiite
\nmilitiamen descended on the neighborhood, set up fake checkpoints and
\njust started killing people.<\/p>\nThe Americans didn’t patrol it much before. Now they do. Perhaps it
\nwas my imagination, but there was a lot more smiling and waving at
\nAmericans in this neighborhood than I’d seen in others. Half of Jihad
\nis fairly nice houses inhabited by Sunnis while the other half is
\ntrash filled and crumbling and Shiite.<\/p>\nThe area is patrolled by the federal police, once known as the
\ncommandos, and predominantly Shiite. The litany of events that led up
\nto the massacre is quite depressing.<\/p>\nThe police raided a mosque known to harbor weapons and insurgents. A
\nfew days later a bomb hit a police patrol killing several. A few days
\nlater a bomb went off in front of a Sunni mosque just after prayers,
\nkilling several. The next day a huge car bomb went off in front of a
\nShiite mosque, shattering it and killing 12.<\/p>\nThe next day the militias showed up.<\/p>\n
I saw the shattered remnants of the Shiite mosque, in a poor
\nneighborhood, in a street filled with rubble, with barricades all
\naround to prevent new car bombs.<\/p>\nGraffiti nearby read “the army of the imam is the fork in the eye of
\nterrorism”.<\/p>\nTen minutes drive later we were outside the Sunni mosque that was
\nbombed, where the Shiite militia had set up a check points and
\nstarted killing people in the street. Where the national police who
\nwere supposed protect the mosque had suddenly disappeared. The US
\nsoldiers pointed out to me the large dark patches of dried blood
\nstill on the sidewalk.<\/p>\nIn the backstreets behind the mosque the graffiti said “long live the
\nresistance and death to the Americans and the spies.” But in front of
\nthe mosque on the street with the dark stains, the same graffiti had
\nbeen painted over.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Another email update from Senior Middle East Correspondant Paul Schemm, this time including some stuff that could be read as sort-of positive, if you’re a fan of the American presence in Iraq: The US soldiers obligingly stopped periodically during one patrol and allowed me to clamber out and talk to people. What they said surprised… Continue reading Good News from Baghdad<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}