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In Balad, Age-Old Ties Were 'Destroyed in a Second'
Over the weekend, workers at a hospital morgue in Tikrit unloaded bodies of people killed over the four days of sectarian violence in and around Balad.
(By Bassim Daham -- Associated Press)
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Balad's Shiites had been living alongside Sunnis for hundreds of years, Ali said, staring bleakly at the road outside. He had a Sunni son-in-law and Sunni friends, he said. It took the American occupation, he said, to change all that.
"What do you want to know?" Ali demanded bitterly. "How we reached this level? How we started to kill people according to their identity? How this sectarian strife was brought to us?"
The Shiite militiamen from Baghdad remained in Balad at week's end but had melded into newly formed armed bands called civilian defense groups. Shiite militiamen manned the first checkpoint into the city, off the highway. They blocked all people with outside accents.
Real police officers sat meekly in their vehicles down the road closer to Balad, ceding control of the road to the militias.
Three miles outside the city, at the intersection of the highway and the turnoff into Balad, Sunni men had poured in from Samarra, Tikrit and other Sunni communities to the north and south. Scores loitered at a gritty strip of shops, shuttered since the crisis began, staking out the turnoff. Scores more pretended to line up in their vehicles at a gas station that on closer inspection proved to be long closed.
Balad was only starting to pay for the rampage, the Sunni insurgents said. "We kill the guys who go into Balad," an older insurgent said. "And we kill the guys who come out of Balad."
In the midst of it all, the slightly built Shiite man tried to change his flat tire. Seven female relatives in black robes, cradling babies or gripping children by the hand, gathered anxiously around him as he struggled. Strangers in cars slowed each time they passed the family's car, craning their necks to stare.
Exasperated, the Shiite man clutched a crowbar and began to pace. He damned all sides in the conflict, and all of their fighters.
"I am a Shiite, but I condemn what the Shiites did," he said, snorting his refusal later when asked to give his name. "It's the government who's behind the sectarian feelings. Doing that, they are creating the sectarian killing."
Special correspondent Muhanned Saif Aldin in Balad and special correspondent Salih Dehema in Baghdad and outside Balad contributed to this report.
