De Facto Partition Takes Hold in Iraq

Iraqi women react at the site of the previous day's attack in downtown Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, Dec. 3, 3006. A triple car bombing struck a food market in a predominantly Shiite area in central Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least 51 people a day after a U.S.-Iraqi raid against Sunni insurgents in a nearby neighborhood. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed) (Khalid Mohammed - AP)

The U.N. says violence now claims up to 100 Iraqi lives daily. A total of 1.6 million people have been displaced inside Iraq and a similar number have fled the country since the U.S.-led invasion. Estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians killed since 2003 range from 50,000 to 600,000.

After talks in Jordan on Thursday, President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said they rejected a partition, a course of action some candidates in last month's U.S. congressional elections floated in their campaigns as one way to stabilize Iraq and allow a drawdown on U.S. troops deployed here to begin.

"The prime minister made clear that splitting his country into parts, as some have suggested, is not what the Iraqi people want, and that any partition of Iraq would only lead to an increase in sectarian violence," Bush said Thursday.

Partitioning Iraq as a solution to its deep predicament has never found much public support in Iraq. It is not expected to be among recommendations made in a U.S. bipartisan commission report on policy options in Iraq, which is due out Wednesday.

But there seems to be very little at the moment that Bush, al-Maliki or the 140,000 American troops and their Iraqi allies can do to stop Iraq's gradual slide into de facto partition, with Iraqis like the Waheed brothers fleeing their neighborhoods and bodies of apparent victims of sectarian death squads turning up by the dozens every day.

As Baghdad's mixed districts slowly disappear, the Tigris River is emerging as an unofficial barrier in the capital, flowing between a mostly Shiite eastern bank and a mainly Sunni western side.

It is not uncommon now for residents, especially men and boys of fighting age, to refuse to take jobs in areas dominated by members of one of the two sects. People who do travel through different areas often carry fake IDs to hide any hint of their sect, which is often reflected in names.

Outside the capital, Shiites and Kurds rarely venture into the Sunni-dominted Anbar province west of the capital, a bastion of Iraq's insurgency. In the volatile and largely Sunni provinces of Salahuddin and Diyala, north and northeast of Baghdad, some areas are deemed too dangerous for members of the other sect to go.

Sunni Arabs stay away from the mainly Shiite south of Iraq, where militias linked to Shiite political parties are active or virtually in control of some areas.

To the north, the 15-year-old autonomous Kurdish region has begun to show signs of independence. Authorities there enforce rigid security regulations for non-Kurdish Iraqi visitors that are more suited for foreigners than citizens of the same country.

These include a security interview on arrival and registering with police when taking up residence or finding employment. Visitors traveling by road are stopped at three checkpoints before entering Kurdistan.

Amr Hamzawi, a Middle East expert at Carnegie Endowments, a Washington think tank, says partitioning could be a solution to Iraq's problems, noting the country was cobbled together from three separate Ottoman provinces barely a century ago.

"If the violence continues at this level, it could take between two and four years for Iraq to break up," he said.

Sheik Ahmed al-Lami, representative of anti-American Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr in a town south of Baghdad, agreed.

"It will happen, without a doubt," he said from Mahmoudiyah, where a Shiite militia loyal to al-Sadr has been battling Sunni militants. "God will not punish us for partitioning Iraq, but will certainly punish us for allowing so many Iraqis to die."