Balkanized Homecoming

Iraqis carry their luggage through Baghdad after returning from Syria this month. Many refugees come back to find their houses occupied or ransacked, and their neighborhoods transformed into sectarian strongholds. (By Wathiq Khuzaie -- Getty Images)

U.S. military commanders and diplomats here acknowledge that the recent decline in violence is the result, in part, of the city's segregation. There are now far fewer mixed neighborhoods where religious militias can target members of the other sect.

"There is an element of the violence being down because segregation has already happened," said Col. William E. Rapp, a senior aide to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. "The violence is still at the fault lines, and we're sitting on those fault lines."

Rapp said Iraqis have to ask themselves: "Do you even want to come back? Because that neighborhood is no longer Sunni, it's now Shia. Or it's no longer Shia, it's now Sunni."

In most of Baghdad, the population shift has been at the expense of Sunnis, many of whose former neighborhoods are newly populated by poorer Shiite migrants under militia protection and, often, control. Groups such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia "are no longer just thugs who are carrying guns around on the street," the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity about the issue. "They've kind of supplanted local government, with streams of revenue -- rent from housing they've taken over, protection money from businesses," and control of fuel and electricity supplies.

Omar Qasim, 36, left Baghdad's Sidiya district with his wife and two sons for Damascus last December, after Shiite militias began moving into the neighborhood and fellow Sunnis began getting killed. Now, he said in a telephone interview from Syria, his car and furniture are gone and his house is occupied by a militia commander. "I wish to go back right now to my country," he said, "but the current calm in Baghdad is the calm before the storm."

The U.S. military command estimates that there are 350,000 displaced persons in Baghdad, 80 percent of them original residents of the capital who fled their neighborhoods primarily because of sectarian violence. The figure does not include those who have not come to official attention by registering a new address for monthly food rations.

"This is a major issue that's probably going to be resolved by new housing construction as opposed to wholesale evictions and resettlements," Rapp said. "But we have been asking, pleading with the government of Iraq to come up with a policy so that it's not put upon our battalion commanders and the [Iraqi] battalion commanders to figure it out on the ground."

After frantic foreign intervention, the Iraqi government agreed this month to temporarily suspend the offer of a bus trip from Syria.

Seeing the problem as one of new housing construction is an indication of the lowered expectations that have come to characterize many aspects of the current U.S. push for political reconciliation in Iraq. But U.N. and other aid officials argue that the status quo is unacceptable.

"People have papers. There should be a law. Houses cannot just be taken like that; people will not accept it," Siri said.

The number of Iraqis returning under their own steam is still a relative trickle. The Iraqi Red Crescent estimates that 25,000 have come back from Syria since September, while the Iraqi government puts the combined total in recent months at 60,000 from Syria and Jordan, where the Iraqi refugee population totals about 700,000.

Recent surveys conducted by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees paint an increasingly dire picture of refugee life. In Syria, a third of Iraqi refugees said their resources will last for less than three more months. With new Syrian visa requirements and restrictions on services, nearly half said their children have dropped out of school.