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azinorum -> RE: THE LATEST CRACKDOWN AGAINST THE MILITIAS! (4/20/2007 9:35:51 AM)
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Some people have just forgotten they a police force and army. Too sad.
On patrol with a Baghdad vigilante
By Mike Wooldridge
For several hours each night Abu Abdullah patrols his street in a mainly Sunni northern district of Baghdad - Kalashnikov rifle at the ready - to protect his home and those of his neighbours.
These days, many people in this violent capital do the same thing. Abu Abdullah - not his real name because he prefers anonymity in the growing climate of mistrust - is a 33-year-old Sunni. He got married in 2003, the year of the US-led invasion, and he and his wife have a two-and-a-half-year-old child and another of six months.
'No choice'
His family, like many others in Baghdad, crosses the Muslim sectarian divide. One of his parents is Sunni and the other Shia.
"A few months ago I never thought I would be involved in this," Abu Abdullah says of the neighbourhood guard operation. "We do this to protect our homes from the militias and the illegal forces."
For him it comes on top of a nine-hour day job.
"It makes me tired. But I have no choice to save my family and my children," he says.
Abu Abdullah has a brother who is 10 years older. In the dark humour of so many places and societies where conflict seems relentless, his brother points to Abu Abdullah's hair - already greying.
"Many people," says the brother, "think he is older than me."
Shia militia threat
I went to Abu Abdullah's district last August when US and Iraqi forces were engaged in their latest plan to restore security to Baghdad: Operation Together Forward. It was the first day of cordoning and searching the area. The remains of a car bomb were in the middle of a street as we entered but a local US commander said the house-to-house search was proceeding satisfactorily. The aim was to rid the most volatile areas of the capital of the perpetrators of violence of all kinds so that people like Abu Abdullah and his family would have a better chance of being able to live something approaching a normal life.
In various parts of the city people said the violence did dip. But the effect did not last. So now Abu Abdullah and his family, and six million other people across Baghdad, are waiting to see the impact of Operation Together Forward's successor - the new Baghdad security plan announced by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Maliki last month and made the cornerstone of US President Bush's new Iraq strategy.
Does Abu Abdullah believe it will make a difference? "I don't think so," he told me. He identifies the main threat in his district as Shia militias. He talks of an attack in which seven people were killed and he says the area is prone to mortar fire from the militias. But he says they are not the only problem.
His neighbourhood regards the police and army as being in collusion with the militias. "We don't have any trust in them," Abu Abdullah says. And so in his view the fatal flaw in the much-heralded Baghdad security plan is that these same Iraqi security forces will be in the lead. The only forces he and his community recognise as "real", he says, are the Americans.
So, once again it seems, the challenge for the US is to build the public's confidence in the Iraqi forces that Washington is relying on to assume increasing responsibility for security in the battered and bloodied capital.
But Abu Abdullah has a message for the Americans and their allies, too. If the Baghdad security plan did not work, I asked him, how did he believe the capital and the country might be pacified?
He said Iraq had to become "free from occupation" and have a "real government of all Iraqis". It is one man's view - the view of a man who describes Baghdad as "my home and my city". But he adds: "In this situation I don't like to stay. It is like hell."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6333725.stm
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