A ‘Sunni awakening’ – and a recurring nightmare

[ProSense]

September 10, 2007

A ‘Sunni awakening’ – and a recurring nightmare

Our correspondent returns to a Baghdad still riven by division and despair

Martin Fletcher

Every time I return to Baghdad the ugliness hits me – the tattered plastic bags trapped in endless coils of razor wire, the miles of ugly concrete blast barriers, the sandbags, checkpoints, ubiquitous guns. The roads are pitted, the pavements crumbling, the cars ancient. Saddam-era ministries and palaces bombed in 2003 still stand abandoned, gaping holes in their flanks. The showpiece hotels are empty. The fancy shops are shut. Rubbish piles up. Water and electricity grow increasingly scarce. Statues are broken. The traffic lights have not worked in years. Billboards have collapsed.

There is nothing new or colourful in the city, nothing of beauty. There are no cinemas or theatres still open, no fountains, no zoo, no car dealerships, shopping malls or well-kept parks. The background noise is not of music, birdsong or children’s laughter, but of generators, helicopters and bursts of gunfire. Its inhabitants hurry home before dusk. It is a baked, dusty, joyless city from which those who can have fled, a city where the preoccupation of those that remain is survival, a city in a seemingly terminal state of neglect and decay. On the flight from Jordan I sat next to a young Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture employee who was returning from five months training in Australia. He had been tempted to stay, but could not abandon his family. “I come back here to die,” he said.

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The tribal leaders of Anbar province led the way, encouraging thousands of their followers to join the hated Iraqi police and make common cause with the equally reviled US military. Anbar, once the heart of the infamous Sunni Triangle, is now one of the safer provinces in Iraq – so safe that Mr Bush visited it last week. The US military is now trying to replicate the success of Anbar in other Sunni areas by recruiting thousands of Sunni males into groups of “concerned citizens” determined to take back their neighbourhoods.

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This “Sunni awakening” is an astonishing development, but as far as bragging rights go it has its limits. For a start, it began months before the “surge”, though the deployment of an additional 30,000 US troops probably emboldened more ordinary Sunnis to tackle the extremists in their midst.

More importantly, it has done little to remedy Iraq’s most pressing problem – its sectarian civil war. The anti-American insurgency may be finally losing heat, and al-Qaeda may be off-balance, but those Shia-Sunni emnities that al-Qaeda ignited through deliberate slaughters of Shias show no sign of abating.

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THE CHAOS HAWKS....