World In Brief (11/28/06)

Neighborhood by neighborhood, Baghdad descends into civil war

Hannah Allam and… Neighborhood by neighborhood, Baghdad descends into civil war

Hannah Allam and Mohammed al Dulaimy, McClatchy Newspapers

Residents trapped in Baghdad’s most fiercely contested districts braced for a new wave of bloodshed when a 24-hour curfew ended on Monday. Reached by telephone, they all offered the same grim assessment: civil war has begun.

That assessment seemed bolstered by a three-pronged assault by the Mahdi Army late Sunday into the Jihad neighborhood, a western Baghdad district once the domain of athletes, diplomats and other middle-class Iraqis of both sects who relied on their lower-income neighbors, mostly Shiites, for vital supplies such as cooking gas and heating fuel.

Sunnis and Shiites traded gunfire from behind sandbags piled in front of mosques and from rooftop posts until U.S. troops entered the fray and tamped down the violence.

Fighting also has been fierce in the Hurriyah district, a one-time mixed district where the Mahdi Army’s efforts at complete segregation have been stopped only by the stubbornness of some families who would rather face death than abandon their homes.

“I was born in this house. My father built this house,” said Salah Ahmed, 34, one of the few remaining Sunnis in the area. “If we have to die here in this house, we will. But we will never leave it.”

For months, the sects have traded kidnappings, gunfire and intimidation on families to flee. Last Thursday, a series of car bombings in the vast Shiite district of Sadr City killed some 200 people and injured at least that many more.

The most violent reprisal attacks for the Sadr City blasts came in Hurriyah, the blue-collar neighborhood where Saddam Hussein’s bureaucrats stored tea and other government rations in large warehouses. Until recently, Hurriyah remained a mixed-sect neighborhood, celebrated by Iraqis as the home district of the country’s best-loved singer, Kadhim al-Saher, who is said to have a parent from each sect.

For the first two years after the U.S. invasion, Hurriyah was known as a hotbed for the Sunni insurgency. In 2006, however, Mahdi Army militiamen began inching into the area from Shiite districts to the northeast and northwest.

Local Sunnis, along with extremist groups, are fighting back to prevent the militia’s capture of Hurriyah. Losing it would mean near-total Shiite control of the northwest side of the Tigris. So far, at least three of about a dozen Sunni mosques have been taken over by the Mahdi Army and converted into Shiite places of worship. Two others were flattened in bombings and burnings, including one in the past week.

Residents estimate that two-thirds of Hurriyah is now under Mahdi Army control, with just one large Sunni holdout that’s protected by the Batta tribe, known as fierce warriors with roots in the western Anbar province.

With the Shiite shrine on the Sunni side, and the Sunni shrine on the Shiite side, fighting became so fierce that the bridge linking the neighborhoods was sealed. Now, each side pelts the other with mortars and small arms fire, and there are fears the violence could return soon to hand-to-hand combat.

Mild hurricane season coming to an end

Martin Merzer, McClatchy Newspapers

Congratulations. The hurricane season, a surprisingly gentle one, is effectively over. Now, experts say, use the breather wisely and don’t take too much for granted.

After two brutal seasons, the law of averages kicked in this year and the gods of wind and rain treated us kindly, but scientists say the long-term outlook remains stormy.

We still are locked in a decades-long period of heightened activity, they say, and should not be misled by the relatively benign 2006 hurricane season, which officially ends Thursday.

“I am so thankful that someone decided to give us a break,” said Stanley Goldenberg, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Research Division on Virginia Key.

“But people need to realize that we are still in the active era. Within a year or two, we can expect things to bounce back up.”

“The break”: We had a slightly below average season, thanks to some unanticipated shifts in global weather patterns. Nine named storms formed this year, five of them grew into hurricanes and no hurricanes struck the United States.

The potential “bounce back”: A return to the above-average activity we experienced in 2004 when 15 named storms developed into nine hurricanes, four of which slammed Florida.

Or, even worse, a repeat of the hyperactivity of the record-smashing 2005 season, when 27 named storms became 15 hurricanes, four of them also hitting Florida.

“People should use this break to examine their preparedness and harden their defenses,” Goldenberg said. “They should not be thinking, ‘Oh good, we’re done with this.'”