Even Dating Is Perilous In Polarized Baghdad

"If a Shiite gets married to a Sunni guy, how will her mother be able to go and visit her?" Hussein asked. "And when the country is divided into Sunni and Shiite areas, there will be a difficult question: Will the women choose to go with their husbands or stay with their families? And the kids? Who is going to take care of them?"

She paused. "It will be a great tragedy," she said.

Hussein's parents forbid her to see the Sunni man, but she continues to trade covert I-love-you's with him on the phone. She will not break a tradition that requires parental approval for marriage, but she hopes their families might one day change. "We will leave it up to God," she said. "Maybe He will plant love between our families and show them the right way."

Many couples -- particularly well-educated, secular city-dwellers -- continue to intermarry. But even when the lovers and their parents consent to the marriage, mixed relationships are often fraught with danger.

Qais Jassim, 26, a Shiite from the Adhamiyah section of Baghdad, spent his wedding night petrified that his Sunni wife's relatives would abduct and behead him. After three months of one-on-one meetings with the woman's father, Jassim had finally persuaded her parents to support their marriage. But her cousins disagreed.

"Leave her alone or we'll kill you," the cousins screamed at him, Jassim recalled.

Such disputes, however, arise only after lonely Iraqi souls manage to find a potential mate, an increasingly daunting proposition in a country with curfews, limited mobility and the constant threat of death squads. Some teenage boys have taken to dialing random numbers in hopes that a girl will answer. Other young Iraqis have tried to connect via ubiquitous Internet chat rooms.

In cyberspace, like almost everywhere in Iraq these days, one of the first questions is often: Are you Sunni or Shiite? Give the wrong answer, and the conversation is over. Manal Hussein, a 34-year-old biology student at Baghdad University, recalled someone in a chat room inquiring about her sect.

"When I told him I was Sunni, he said, 'Okay, bye-bye,' " she recalled.

Each thwarted Sunni-Shiite relationship etches the gulf between the two groups a little deeper and foils another opportunity to produce the next generation of children with mixed backgrounds -- those living testaments to the not-so-distant peace between the sects.

Ayad, the 24-year-old Sunni who said he would never marry a Shiite, fears that Iraq has already begun a free fall into carnage.

He shook his head and pointed at a dirty white ashtray filled with five crumbled cigarette butts. "The future of Iraq will be like this," he said.

Special correspondents Salih Dehema, Waleed K. Asmaeel and other Washington Post staff contributed to this report.