U.S. Military Officials Say Encouraging Resettlement Is Perilous, Citing Ongoing Sectarian Violence
By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 8, 2007
BAGHDAD -- Every few days, an Iraqi army officer with a thick mustache and a black beret goes on television to deliver a battery of statistics intended to demonstrate the government's progress in bringing security to the country.
In addition to the numbers of insurgents killed and captured, bombs discovered and defused, Brig. Qasim al-Mousawi gives a running tally of Iraqis, once driven from their houses by sectarian violence, who have decided to return home. The Iraqi government has made resettlement a central objective of its three-week-old Baghdad security plan and says more than 1,000 families have returned to their homes so far.
But ground-level American and Iraqi officials charged with implementing the policy warn that encouraging resettlement is perilous at a time when bombings regularly rock the capital and sectarian violence remains a grave threat in most neighborhoods. Many Baghdad residents who fled, fearing for their lives, say they have no intention of returning home soon. And despite the government's assertions that families are streaming back to neighborhoods in and around Baghdad such as Medaen, Shaab and Abu Ghraib, there is no evidence of any widespread resettlement in the capital.
"Until now, not a single person has come here saying they wanted to return home," said Tofan Abdul Wahab, the manager of an eastern Baghdad branch office of the Ministry of Displacement and Migration, the agency tasked with coordinating services for displaced families. "As an official, I cannot encourage people to return unless there is some security."
In the courtyard outside his office, dozens of people crowded in front of six broken windows, handing clerks documents to prove they had fled their homes and needed assistance. A former resident of Medaen, Ali Hussein Saeed, 47, held a worn letter he received on Feb. 2, 2006, three weeks before the country's sectarian war exploded with the destruction of a Shiite shrine in Samarra.
"We have come to learn that you are supporting the Mahdi Army, who are killing Sunni people," the letter began. It ended: "All the Shia in Medaen are going to be killed."
Twelve days before the letter arrived, Saeed's 18-year-old son, Akheel, had been shot and killed on his way to the market. Saeed, who is unemployed, along with his wife and four other sons, fled without their furniture to the Shiite slum of Sadr City, where they live together in one small room.
To encourage people such as Saeed to return home, the government is offering payments of nearly $200 to help with moving expenses, and officials say that figure may rise to $750 per family, a significant sum for many impoverished Baghdad residents.
"If they gave me millions, I would not go back," Saeed said. "How could I go back? The whole area is insurgency. Even if you do return to your house, will the government be able to stay there 24 hours a day to protect you?"
Iraqi politicians appear to agree that the Balkanization of Baghdad into Sunni and Shiite enclaves guarded by citizen-gunmen must be reversed and that people should eventually return to their homes. But some insist that process should not be rushed.
"A lot of officials are trying to push it forward, to move people back, because if they did, then it would be seen as accomplishing a big part of the national reconciliation," said another Iraqi official at the Ministry of Displacement and Migration. "But I think it's a very dangerous, reckless step."
"Due to their actions, people are getting killed," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl, a U.S. military battalion commander in charge of a 20-square-mile swath of western Baghdad, told his command staff recently that they should not encourage Iraqis to return home. "We're not going to get into the repopulation. That is a political problem," Kuehl said. "When people call, what we need to tell them is it is not safe to resettle. That is my line right now. It is not safe."
Kuehl's sector includes the heavily Sunni neighborhoods of Amiriyah, Khadra and Adil, and he estimates that the violence between encroaching Shiite militias and the Sunni insurgents has driven out roughly 50,000 people from the area. American soldiers worry that resettling Shiites on a large scale could be seen as militia encroachment that could spark further violence.
Lt. Gen. Abboud Gambar, commander of the new security plan, on Feb. 18 ordered all Iraqis squatting in others' homes to leave or be treated as terrorists. Iraqi officials have not made clear how they intend to evict squatters or protect residents moving back. After Gambar's initial 15-day deadline expired, the Iraqi cabinet on March 1 extended it an additional two weeks.
U.S. officers said they refuse to expel squatters at such an early stage in the security plan.
In Adil, which has become a fault line between the Shiites in Hurriyah to the north and the Sunnis in Khadra and Amiriyah to the south, someone last week burned down the home of a Shiite family trying to move back, Kuehl said.
"Sunni and Shia have been fighting there ever since we've been there. I do not think we've set the conditions that allow for resettlement, that's my concern," he said. "There's more thought that's got to go into this before we start a massive resettlement."
In the past year, insurgents and militiamen have worked to homogenize neighborhoods that were once religiously mixed by systematically threatening or killing members of the minority sect. The United Nations estimates that violence has driven 470,000 people from their homes in the past year.
The Iraqi government strategy appears to rely on the influx of thousands of new Iraqi and U.S. troops into Baghdad to provide enough security so that resettlement does not result in more sectarian killing. Just days into the security plan, some officials already were asserting that fighting had ebbed, despite a series of mass-casualty bombings.
"The changes that we are seeing, people feel satisfaction, they feel relaxed," said Fadhil Shuweili, a national security adviser to the government. "People are going back to open their shops, the universities are starting to do their activities, and we can see the children are very happy."
For Hussein Alwan Radi, 20 days of living with his in-laws was sufficient incentive to risk moving home. A month ago, the 36-year-old Health Ministry employee fled the Ghazaliyah neighborhood of western Baghdad because of the seemingly unending rattle of gunfire around his house. Since he's been back, he's noticed some improvement: "I've been here for 10 days and I'm thanking God I haven't seen any gunmen. Before we used to see them moving from alley to alley. It seems very quiet now," he said. "The only problem now is we still don't have electricity."
But conversations with other Iraqis indicate that Radi's experience is the exception.
Last July, Amar Yaseer, 22, fled his four-bedroom home in the heavily Shiite Shula neighborhood of Baghdad when his family noticed that Sunnis who attended their mosque kept getting killed. He found a job as a security guard at a boys' high school west of Baghdad. He and his parents sleep in a small room at the school.
Yaseer's mother periodically ventures back to Baghdad to pick up the family's food ration and asks their former neighbors about the situation in Shula. Once they told her that someone had broken into their abandoned house and stolen some furniture. Another time she learned that a new family had temporarily moved in. The basic message, Yaseer said, has not changed.
"Our neighbors are telling us there are still some strangers in the neighborhood, there are still some people who may do us harm," he said. "I want to come back, but I'm afraid it's a trap."
Special correspondents Naseer Mehdawi and Salih Dehema contributed to this report.
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