Ruth
The Living Force
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/21/world/middleeast/21bakers.html?hp&ex=1153540800&en=1c032675f2ee63bd&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Sects' Strife Takes a Toll on Baghdad's Daily Bread
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By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: July 21, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The front line in this city's sectarian war runs through Edrice al-Aaraji's old backyard. He is a Shiite and a baker. So are his two brothers.
For the past year, Sunni Arab militants have swept through their old neighborhood, a heavily Sunni district in northwest Baghdad that borders a Shiite area, forcing Shiites out of their homes and shutting their shops by killing customers and workers inside. One after another, bakeries, whose workers are overwhelmingly poor and Shiite like Mr. Aaraji, began to close.
Now, out of 11 bakeries in the area, northern Ghazaliya, just one, the Sunni-owned Al Obeidi on Center Street, remains open. The neighborhood, like a mouth with missing teeth, is almost entirely without the simplest of Iraqi needs, freshly baked bread.
"To shut down a well-known bakery in a neighborhood, that means you paralyze life there," Mr. Aaraji said, sitting in a bakery in a Shiite neighborhood where he now works and usually sleeps.
As the most basic of local institutions, Baghdad's bakeries are an everyday measure of just how far the sectarian war here has spread.
A year ago, when some of the first bakers were killed, Iraqis in the capital dismissed the deaths as a bizarre aberration. Civil war is not possible here, they said. Sunnis and Shiites have intermarried for generations, they said, and Iraqis will not fight Iraqis on the basis of sect.
For months Iraqis held on to the belief that sectarian attacks were carried out by outsiders, but the bombing of a Shiite shrine in February, after which Shiite militias went on a rampage, dragging Sunnis out of mosques and homes and killing them, shattered that. The unrelenting violence has hardened Iraqis against one another, and people talk in resigned tones about civil war.
Militants on both sides have moved block by block through Baghdad's neighborhoods, threatening, kidnapping and killing. To protect themselves, Shiite bakers have taken posters of their saints off their walls. Those who supply the Iraqi Army, which is predominantly Shiite, have arranged safer sales through middlemen.
Entire neighborhoods are split. In Saidiya, a mixed neighborhood in southern Baghdad where Sunni militants have seized territory recently, so many bakeries closed that residents had to go outside the neighborhood to buy bread. In Adhamiya, Baghdad's oldest Sunni area, Shiite bakers pretend to be Sunnis to survive.
Mr. Aaraji, 23, who smokes a lot and moves nervously even when sitting down, lived on one of the most violent fault lines, the one that divides heavily Sunni Arab Ghazaliya and the almost exclusively Shiite Shuala neighborhood. Until recently his was one of five Shiite families left living on Exchange Street, which forms the border.
In early July, Sunni gunmen finished the job. They walked into Al Karar, one of the few remaining bakeries, shot one man dead and wounded two others. The other bakeries in the area immediately closed, including the one where one of Mr. Aaraji's brothers worked.
A few days later, men drove up to the Shiite houses on Exchange Street and told the families to get out. "They came publicly, during the day," Mr. Aaraji said. "We had to leave by noon."
Mr. Aaraji quickly gathered his belongings and took them to a house on the Shiite side of the divide that belonged to Sunni Arab friends, who had themselves fled for fear of persecution by Shiites. "Ghazaliya is now divided between Sunni families and Shiite families," he said.
Sunni workers, far fewer in number than Shiites, are not immune from attack. One morning in late June, in a bakery in a heavily Shiite district, men with guns in plain clothes blindfolded and handcuffed 10 workers and marched them into four cars, according to the Iraqi authorities and the cousin of one of the workers who was taken.
The workers, Sunni and Shiite, were asked questions in an ordinary house about where they were from, the names of their city council members and the imams of their mosques. Several hours later, all but two - Sunni Arabs from the same tribe - were released.
The two men, brothers in their early 20's, were friends with their Shiite colleagues for years. They all lived together in the mixed neighborhood of Hurriya. The Shiites pulled every string they could to free them, calling powerful political parties and police and army contacts.
A week later, the men's bodies were found. They were killed, shot in the head, according to an autopsy, on the same day that a bomb killed 62 people in Sadr City, a Shiite stronghold. Some Shiite workers attended the funeral.
The man who provided the account said his cousin, one of the abductees, still weeps when their names come up. He, like many interviewed, spoke anonymously for fear of reprisals.
The widespread sectarian killings have gone virtually unchecked by authorities of any kind, American or Iraqi. That is one of the bitterest disappointments of the war for Iraqis, rivaled only by the letdown felt when the military did not stop mobs of looters in April 2003, when Saddam Hussein's government was overthrown. Recently Iraqis have begun to say that an American withdrawal, which they previously feared would result in a bloodbath, might not make any difference.
"Their main task, their whole reason for being here, is to prevent exactly this, but they do nothing," said an Iraqi mother who lives near Sadr City and strongly supported the Americans as recently as last year. "They just let it go, my God, so easily."
The captors of the 10 kidnapped bakers passed easily through an Iraqi Army checkpoint, telling the soldiers that they were Interior Ministry intelligence officers, according to the cousin. Last year, Mr. Aaraji said, militants blocked a minivan of schoolgirls in his neighborhood, shooting the driver and one student dead, while an American convoy moved on a main road nearby.
American visits "are like show business," he said. "When they come, they try to protect themselves, not us."
Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the American military in Iraq, said in an e-mail message: "U.S. forces respond when and where they're needed in order to stop violence," often, he added, in "chance encounters on the streets and in the neighborhoods during patrols."
Workers are washed up like refugees into bakeries in safer areas. Mr. Aaraji found work in Kadhimiya, a heavily Shiite district. In Karada, another Shiite area, Sajid Aziz, a bakery manager, said Shiite workers from Saidiya came to him for work recently, after two co-workers were murdered in a shop there. In Kadhimiya, a worker said that his cousins in Adhamiya had pretended to be Sunnis for months but were recently discovered. Now they are looking for work in a Shiite district.
The details differ by neighborhood. In Saidiya, militants allowed bakeries to reopen under Sunni ownership, residents said. In the more war-torn areas, like Ghazaliya and Dawra, they often seemed to close completely. Daily life here revolves around bakeries, and a closed shop gives an eerie feeling to a neighborhood.
Iraqis living in the most devastated areas - Amiriya in the west and Dawra in the south - commonly say the killing has reached such a pitch that the purpose is not just to clear the area of a certain sect, but to clear it of people altogether. The lack of fresh bread and, in some cases, most shopping, lends some credence to their theory.
Mr. Aziz said he had felt Sunni prejudice first hand, and his experience is a small example of how neighborhoods, and ultimately nations, begin to break down into civil war. A Sunni sheik once told Mr. Aziz that he should take down the posters of Shiite saints tacked to the shop's walls. Mr. Aziz refused, but politely. He wanted to keep good relations with the family.
Last year the sheik fled with several of his sons, while the women in the family stayed behind. Mr. Aziz helped them carry groceries and fuel canisters. In June the sheik was killed. Mr. Aziz paid his respects at the funeral.
Several days later a group of young men went to the bakery shouting that killings like the sheik's made Sunnis kill in retaliation. Mr. Aziz watched from the shop and stood his ground. Eventually they went away.
"They tried to provoke us," he said. "They have the hatred inside them. I don't blame them. I blame the one who put it there."
Karada is still largely safe. But in Ghazaliya, killing has become so routine that it barely registers surprise. The local Sunnis who began to guard streets this year to stop Shiite government forces from entering seem to disappear when Sunni militias want to enter, Mr. Aaraji said.
This summer, Mr. Aaraji's cousin, a tire repairman, was shot dead by Sunni militants. They entered the shop where he was working and asked to look at his identification card, Mr. Aaraji said. His name, Ali, was Shiite.
"Kitlo," Mr. Aaraji said, meaning "they killed him."
"It has become normal," he said, bowing his head slightly and dragging on his cigarette.
He took the recent shooting death of a Shiite friend in stride, because the man had refused to change the ring on his cellphone, a short musical quip insulting Wahhabis, hard-line Sunni Arabs. "We knew it would provoke them," he said. "We told him to change it.
"They put four bullets in his head."
In the quiet of Karada, Mr. Aziz sat on a battered desk in his shop and offered some hope. Since January, Shiite militiamen, followers of a radical cleric, stopped by three times asking about the slain Sunni sheik's family. Each time, Mr. Aziz, who is 31, angrily refused to give them up.
"If anyone touches them, they touch us," he said in a soft voice.
Such individual acts of responsibility might stop a nation from descending into war. But as the violence grinds on, fewer, it seems, are in the mood to risk them.
