On the run from sectarian violence, their neighbourhoods in flames, many Iraqis say American withdrawal could be the only thing worse than the original invasion. The anti-war mood in the U.S. might spell the end of Iraq as a nation. MARK MacKINNON reports from the ground.

SULAYMANIYAH, IRAQ -- For most of the first four years after the United States and its allies invaded, Suad Sattar was able to hide in her home from the nightmare that Iraq has become. While violence raged all around her in Baghdad's once-affluent Dora neighbourhood — a mixed Sunni-Shia area in Saddam Hussein's time — the 44-year-old widow and her six children went outside their white villa only when they had no other choice. But last month the war came through her front door, in the form of a letter. “In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful,” it began. “You have seven days to leave or you and your sons will be killed.” For emphasis, a bullet was enclosed.
Ms. Sattar had known in her heart that this day would eventually come. One of her neighbours, a Sunni Muslim like her, had been dragged from his home several days earlier by masked men she believes were linked to the Mahdi Army of radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Two days later, her friend's corpse was found in a pile of garbage.

Ms. Sattar and her children fled first to another neighbourhood of Baghdad, where she received another warning from the Shia death squads who are working to cleanse the city of Sunnis. Then she hired a car for the perilous 330-kilometre drive north to Sulaymaniyah and the relative safety of Iraq's Kurdish autonomous area.
Her former neighbours tell her that her home in Dora was set ablaze by militants the day after she left. The neighbourhood, which links Baghdad with the Shia-dominated south of the country, is now bitterly contested turf. Sunnis live in fear of the Shia death squads, while Shiites are regularly targeted by car bombs attributed to al-Qaeda and other Sunni groups.

“There are no Sunnis left in Dora now. If there are any Sunnis still there, they'll soon be rounded up and killed,” Ms. Sattar says bitterly of an area that once had a Sunni majority, and where Mr. Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, once owned property. She believes that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite and a political ally of Mr. al-Sadr, supports the militias with government forces.

When the U.S. Army invaded Iraq in March, 2003, Ms. Sattar hated the foreign soldiers for destroying the life she used to have. But four years later, after the announcement that Britain is going to start withdrawing its troops, she's terrified that the Americans will soon leave too.
“All this happens while the Americans are monitoring the Iraqi army. Imagine what will happen if they leave,” Ms. Sattar said. “In the beginning, I was so mad at America, but now I don't want them to leave Iraq. They came and destroyed everything. Now, they have to rebuild it before they go.”

Ms. Sattar and her family are now denizens of a dingy tent camp that is sinking into the late-winter mud that surrounds Sulaymaniyah. There are 54 families here, packed into 16 tents that have no facilities other than kerosene heaters and stoves. Water is fetched by children, and carried to the tents on donkeys.

Many of the internal refugees are former members of Baghdad's well-to-do class, and though none admit it, some probably had connections to the Baath party that ruled Iraq for so long. They seem shocked to find themselves sleeping with only a few itchy rugs between their heads and the wet ground.

“I was a rich man in Baghdad — my house was worth 80 million dinars. Now, I live in a tent,” said Walid Chiad, a proud Sunni Muslim with a straight back and full black beard. “I have no idea how this happened to Iraq.”

Like Ms. Sattar, he was furious when the American army came to Iraq and toppled a regime that, for all its abundant flaws — including the violent repression of the country's Shia and Kurdish populations — provided security and stability, especially to Mr. Hussein's fellow Sunnis. But now? “If the Americans leave, it will get worse,” Mr. Chiad predicted. “Brothers will kill brothers in the street.”

And while Shia leaders such as Mr. al-Sadr and even Mr. Maliki himself have pushed for the U.S. to set a timetable to leave Iraq, ordinary Shiites are as afraid as their Sunni brethren of what will happen the day after the Americans leave.

“They can't leave now,” said 35-year-old Abbas Kathem, the foreman at a construction site in Sulaymaniyah where 120 Iraqis from all over the country, Sunnis and Shiites alike, work together despite the carnage just a few hours away. The day he was interviewed, 64 civilians were reported killed across Iraq by car bombs, a suicide bomber, a chlorine bomb and death squads.

“You see the situation now,” Mr. Kathem sighs. “It would be much worse if the Americans leave.”

But that's exactly what is now being discussed in the U.S. A recent poll by ABC television and The Washington Post found that for the first time a majority of Americans (53 per cent) want to set a timetable for leaving Iraq, with many favouring a withdrawal within six months or a year. Fifty-six per cent thought it was okay to bring the troops home even if sectarian violence was continuing.

Meanwhile, the Democrats, who now control Congress, last month passed the first anti-war resolution since Sept. 11, 2001 — a non-binding vote against President George W. Bush's decision to send more troops into Iraq. With the 2008 presidential election campaign already under way, it's reasonable to expect candidates to try to capture the public's growing disenchantment with the bloodshed in Baghdad.
It's a difficult question for the anti-war movement — which claims the American presence in Iraq is aggravating the sectarian divide there — to answer: Should the troops be brought home if it means unleashing even more Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence than we've seen to date?

The idea that the situation could somehow get worse is hard to grasp. When Mr. Maliki recently declared that the new security program for Baghdad — including the much-heralded “surge” in American troop levels in the capital — was a success, many Iraqis had their first good laugh in months.

The seeming ridiculousness of the statement was punctuated only hours afterward when a truck bomb exploded outside a mosque in the Sunni town of Habbaniya, killing 56 people. Two days later, Vice-President Adel Abdul-Mahdi, a Shiite, narrowly escaped assassination when a bomb exploded at the Ministry of Public Works shortly after he finished a speech. Six people were killed in the blast. The same day, 16 children and two female spectators on a soccer field were killed by another bomb.

The sorry news is that Mr. Maliki was nonetheless correct, in a strictly statistical sense. The tens of thousands of extra U.S. troops and the additional Iraqi army checkpoints had made a difference, though it was hard to see the island of good news in the river of blood. In the two weeks preceding the security crackdown, an average of 122 Iraqis a day died violent deaths. In the first two weeks of the “surge,” that number fell to 75 a day.

But as the fourth anniversary of the invasion approaches, the overall numbers are grim to contemplate. By the low-end figures from the British group Iraq Body Count, which tallies only those reported by at least two media sources, roughly 60,000 Iraqis have died violently since March 20, 2003. The Iraqi government's estimate is that 100,000 to 150,000 had died as of November, 2006. Meanwhile, an ambitious epidemiological survey by the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that by last summer, 655,000 Iraqis had died “as a consequence of the war.” To argue that a civil war is not in full bloom is to close one's eyes and pretend.

“I had a heart attack because of the security situation. I panicked every time my sons went outside and came home late. I was always hearing explosions and wondering if they had been killed,” said a Shia mother of four who fled Baghdad's violent Sadr City neighbourhood. Though she now lives in the relative safety of Sulaymaniyah, and gets treatment for her anxiety, she asked that her name not be used — one of her sons still lives in the capital.

Experts say the falling number of deaths since the new security program came into effect is a short-term phenomenon, reflecting only a strategic move by Mr. al-Sadr to take his fighters off the streets temporarily to avoid a confrontation with the U.S. Army. Proof of that came last weekend when American soldiers entered the stronghold of Sadr City, but saw no sign of the Mahdi Army that normally completely controls it.

“The Sadrists clearly decided early on that they would not confront the American forces,” said Joost Hiltermann, an Amman-based analyst with the International Crisis Group. He said the Mahdi Army's silence has meant that car bombings by Sunni insurgents have gone unanswered, for now. “They're just lying low. They're coming back as soon as they can. It's just a lull,” Mr. Hiltermann said.

Mr. al-Sadr, who led his forces in two anti-American uprisings in 2004, has already expressed his dissatisfaction with the new security program. “There is no good that comes from a security plan controlled by our enemies, the occupiers,” read a recent statement attributed to the radical cleric.

Fearing that things are about to get worse, families like Ms. Sattar's continue to flee the violence-racked centre. Since 2003, 1.6 million Iraqis have left their homes for safer parts of Iraq, while 1.8 million others have found refuge outside the country's borders, mostly in Syria and Jordan. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says the Iraqi refugee crisis is the worst to hit the Middle East since the 1948 Palestinian flight from what is now Israel.

Since last year's bombing of the Askariya mosque in Samarra, which many identify as the moment civil war began, the exodus has thickened. The UNHCR now estimates that 40,000 to 50,000 families leave their homes every month.

Rebwar Karim is lucky to be alive. A professor of political science at the University of Sulaymaniyah, he narrowly escaped death in December, 2003, when a car bomb destroyed a corner store in Baghdad just minutes after he stopped there to buy cigarettes. He has scars on his back from the shrapnel as reminder of how close he came to joining the tens of thousands of nameless Iraqis who have been killed in the non-stop violence of the past four years.

Despite that close call, he is one of the few remaining optimists about his country's future. A former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-run interim government headed by Paul Bremer after the invasion, he still believes democracy will emerge from the chaos and eventually spread to Iran and other parts of the Middle East.

To Prof. Karim, the violence engulfing Iraq is more complex than a simple settling of centuries-old scores between Sunnis and Shiites. Like the Bush administration, he sees it as a good-versus-evil struggle for the soul of the Middle East, with the U.S. in one corner and the mullahs of Tehran in the other.

“We can't call what's happening a civil war, because in fact it's a war between Iran and Syria and America,” Prof. Karim said. “It's not in Iran's interests to have a powerful state called Iraq, because a powerful Iraq means a weaker Iran. And a weak Iraq means a powerful Iran.”
Those who agree with the proxy-war theory see last month's announcement by Tony Blair — that Britain will begin a phased withdrawal from its bases in Basra and the south of Iraq — as the first sign that the U.S. and its allies don't have the stomach to win.

“They are presenting Basra on a golden dish to Iran,” said Mohammed Penjweni, editor of the Kurdistani Nwe newspaper.
An effectively autonomous “Shia-stan” was already emerging in the south, he said, to match the Kurdish north, which has governed itself separately from Baghdad since 1992. The Sunnis, he predicted, are on their way to inheriting a rump state in the centre with little of Iraq's oil wealth to support it.

But something so drastic as splitting a country in three cannot happen cleanly. To Iran, Turkey and Syria, all of whom share a border with Iraq and have their own restive Kurdish minorities, the idea of an independent Kurdish state in Iraq's north is anathema. The U.S. and its Sunni Arab allies in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf states are no happier about the idea of Iran carving out a domain in the south.

Even if there were regional support for partitioning Iraq, there inevitably would be more bloodletting in mixed Sunni-Shia areas such as Baghdad — not to mention cities such as Kirkuk and Mosul, which have populations of Kurds, Arabs and Turkomen — before borders could be settled on peacefully.

The idea gaining strength in the U.S., that the future of Iraq is now up to the Iraqis, troubles Kurds in particular. They bought into the American promise of a democratic, federal Iraq — one that gave the Kurds wide autonomy — and contributed their peshmerga militia to the fight to oust Mr. Hussein.

They fear that if the Americans leave, the Kurdish quasi-state will be crushed between the civil war in the south and the massing Turkish army. It has threatened to invade Kurdistan in pursuit of rebels from the Kurdish Workers' Party, a Turkish Kurd group that has used Iraqi territory in cross-border raids.

As the drumbeat for a U.S. withdrawal grows, the Kurds are anxiously campaigning for a promise that it will stay in Kurdistan, even if it leaves the rest of Iraq.

Qubad Talabani, the son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and the Kurdistan regional government's representative to Washington, has been loudly asking for a promise that the U.S. troops won't abandon the Kurds and will maintain a permanent base in Northern Iraq. So far the only answer he has received is a resounding silence.

“What we are up against is anarchy plus fanaticism. There is little or no nationalism.”
The words were not intended to describe the situation in Iraq today, but the 1920 revolt against heavy handed British rule in Mesopotamia, an uprising that left more than 10,000 people dead. They were written by Sir Arnold Wilson, the Paul Bremer of his time. Even those who oversaw its birth wondered if Iraq, their creation, could last.

As one of the architects of what is now Iraq (he played a crucial role in drawing its borders and changing the name from Mesopotamia), Sir Arnold knew well the reason for the lack of nationalism, having overseen the moves to glue together the Sunni province of Baghdad, the Shia province of Basra and the Kurdish province of Mosul from the detritus of the Ottoman Empire.
The Shia Arabs outnumbered Sunnis by a three-to-one margin in 1920, and would, in Sir Arnold's opinion, never accept Sunni domination. Yet a Sunni ruler was installed because it was seen as preferable to a Shia-led government, which the British believed could easily devolve into a theocracy. Sir Arnold wrote that the Kurds “will never accept an Arab ruler,” yet Mosul was nonetheless appended to the new entity so that its oil fields would not fall under the control of neighbours like Turkey and French-controlled Syria.

The decisions and quandaries of that era still reverberate today. Eighty-seven years ago, Sir Arnold believed that only direct British rule could hold together the fractious Iraq he had helped to create.

Today, many believe that it is only the presence of the Americans, today's colonialists, that is keeping Iraq from violently splitting apart.
“I'm not optimistic about this country now, in this situation. . . . Iraq consists of so many nations, it's like Switzerland,” said Salar Bassireh, the assistant dean of political science at the University of Sulaymaniyah. But in this Switzerland, he added, there is no history of democracy. The various nations resort to force to resolve their differences.

Like Sir Arnold, Prof. Bassireh said he sees a Shia-dominated Iraq as tending toward theocracy, something neither Sunni Arabs nor Kurds could ever accept. Better, he said, to let Baghdad, Basra and Kurdistan go their own ways.

“The perpetual solution for Iraq is to separate it into three,” he said.

“I, personally, don't believe in the word Iraq,” the young man in the grey jacket told the hushed room. “Not for a minute do I believe that I'm Iraqi. Even if Iraq were suddenly to become a paradise, I would not want to be Iraqi. I want a Kurdish state.”

The student, 26-year-old Ihsan Ali, was one of several dozen young Iraqis taking part in a Norwegian-sponsored workshop on human rights in conflict zones hosted in an otherwise empty cultural centre in the centre of Sulaymaniyah. The discussion, however, rapidly slid away into a discussion of what it meant to be an Iraqi.

Mr. Ali was a fervent nationalist, convinced that Arabs and Kurds could no longer live together.
When he finished speaking, the room resounded with whispers, but no one responded aloud.
It was hard to stand up for Iraq. The power was out in Sulaymaniyah — even here in the relatively stable Kurdish north, the government can provide only two hours of electricity a day. Outside, cars were parked in kilometres-long lineups, waiting for days on end for a tank of gasoline, which somehow remains scarce in the country with the second-largest proven oil reserves on the planet.

That day, 56 civilians would be reported dead across Iraq, including 14 who were killed in a U.S. air strike on the Sunni insurgent hotbed of Ramadi. Dozens of mutilated corpses were found on the streets of Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul and other towns.

Finally, an Arab woman with a small cross around her neck self-consciously raised her hand and tried to answer Mr. Ali's words.
“I believe in Iraq,” she said sheepishly, as though she knew what she was saying sounded ridiculous to the others in the room. “Kurds, Arabs, Iraqis. For me, it's the same,” she continued bravely as Mr. Ali and those sitting near him contemptuously shook their heads.
After the class was finished, Manal, the Christian woman, qualified her optimism. She still lives in Baghdad, but rarely goes outside because of the terrifying violence on the streets.

“We are prisoners in our homes,” the 48-year-old said as she packed her things for the dangerous return journey to the capital. “If you don't have something to do that's urgent, you don't go outside. I don't even go shopping in Baghdad. I'm afraid of the bombings, of the kidnappings.”

Manal, who was too afraid of reprisals to give her last name, said that her Muslim friends recently warned her that even though she's Christian, she should wear a hijab. She said that while the new security program in Baghdad had created more checkpoints for her to pass through, she felt no safer than she did before.
But rather than fleeing the country, as so many Christians already have, Manal said she clings to the ideal of Iraq as it was. She remembers Saddam Hussein's era not only for the secret police, but also as a time when Sunnis and Shiites, Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Kurds peacefully co-existed, at least in her Baghdad neighbourhood.

That time was gone now, because of the Americans and the “many mistakes” they made, she said. But it didn't have to be lost forever. She hoped the sectarian violence was a phase that would eventually pass, and that bloodletting would be followed by reconciliation.
She acknowledged, however, that not too many people think like she does any more.

“I really do still believe in Iraq,” she sighed. “But I'm a minority.”

The Globe and Mail; 10 March 2007