Sectarian Strife in Iraq Imperils Entire Region, Analysts Warn

Since the war began, 1.6 million Iraqis have sought refuge in neighboring countries; at least 231,530 people have been displaced inside Iraq since February, when Shiite-Sunni violence exploded with the bombing of a Shiite shrine in the northern city of Samarra, according to figures from the United Nations and the U.N.-affiliated International Organization for Migration.

There used to be a time when Sunnis and Shiites "were living like family. We were married to each other, we all had Sunni friends, we all had Shiite friends. It was all like a balloon that exploded," a gaunt, weeping Sunni woman said in her bare apartment.

Until this year, the 41-year-old widow and former teacher -- who would identify herself only as Um Mohammed, fearing retaliation -- lived in Husseiniyah, a Shiite district of Baghdad. But after Shiite militias forced all the Sunnis out, she fled to a too-costly, too-small place in the overwhelmingly Sunni neighborhood of Sadiyah, on the western side of the Tigris River.

The Mahdi Army and the Badr Organization, two militias loyal to the Shiite religious parties now governing Iraq, had taken over her old neighborhood by this spring, she said. Mahdi Army officials commandeered the two rental homes she relied on to support herself and her children. They forced the Sunni tenants out and installed Shiite families, who paid her rent through the Mahdi Army office, at a greatly reduced price set by the militia, the widow said.

Letters placed at the doors of Sunni families -- sometimes with bloody bullets tucked inside the envelopes -- warned Sunnis to leave. Shiite boys as young as 10 took to wearing the black clothes of the militias, and they promised her 10-year-old son, Ahmed, they would burn him alive in his house at night as he slept.

Um Mohammed reluctantly took her only other child still at home, a 15-year-old daughter, out of school and married her off to an older man in Sadiyah in a bid to provide her protection among fellow Sunnis. When Um Mohammed received a third letter threatening death, she and Ahmed finally moved to Sadiyah. Longtime Shiite neighbors sadly watched her leave but were too afraid of the militias to help her move, she said.

"I want to return to my home. But we are safer here," she said.

Across the Tigris River from Um Mohammed, another widow, Zayneb Khatan, a Shiite, sat in her equally plain new home. After gunmen shot and killed her husband in front of their home in the Sunni neighborhood of Cairo as he went to buy bread, Khatan fled with her 2-year-old daughter and the clothes on their backs.

"Some Sunnis are good," she said as she sat on a secondhand divan. "But I cannot say I will ever live among them again."