one step forward, two steps back, down ina babylon

• Soldiers stopping cars hand out leaflets warning drivers to check their vehicles before they set off, because of bombs which can be easily and quickly attached with magnets.
• Concrete anti-blast walls still surround almost every significant building here, and stretch along streets where there are markets bringing relative safety, but turning the pavements - where the vendors' stalls are - into narrow, claustrophobic canyons.
• There are numerous sandbagged machine-gun posts. There is even one looking out from the walls of the ministry of agriculture compound.
• Residential districts are protected with chicanes of concrete bollards, coils of rusting razor-wire, oil drums filled with concrete, sawn-down trunks of date palm trees and more check-points, protected with sandbags.
• One day, our anonymous BBC car is waved on by two policemen, but then everybody is doing urgent U-turns and heading back the way they came.
• The street is cordoned off - there has been a roadside bomb. Two people are dead and two cars are wrecked - their bonnets thrown up and twisted, tyres blown out, dents in their doors from the impact of the explosion.
• Shopkeepers are sweeping up glass from their front windows. One man - still in shock - rails against the American occupation. "Is this the freedom they brought us?" he asks. And he curses the bombers: "How can people call themselves Muslims and do this?"
• The next day, two bombs - one in a car in a car-park, the other by the roadside - kill 16 people. They were out shopping and at least 50 more were injured, but it barely makes the news. Baghdad is getting better now, is it not?
• It is getting better, but this could simply be the eye of the storm, like the calm circle in the middle of those dramatic satellite photographs of hurricanes.
• The second stage of this hurricane could be revenge. Thousands of people have been threatened, burned, bombed and shot from their homes.("Painfully slow progress in Iraq," BBC, 11 Oct. 2008)
  

the label is balkanization

• WASHINGTON - Satellite images taken at night show heavily Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Baghdad began emptying before a U.S. troop surge in 2007, graphic evidence of ethnic cleansing that preceded a drop in violence, according to a report published on Friday.
• The images support the view of international refugee organizations and Iraq experts that a major population shift was a key factor in the decline in sectarian violence, particularly in the Iraqi capital, the epicenter of the bloodletting in which hundreds of thousands were killed.("Satellite images show ethnic cleanout in Iraq," By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor, Reuters, Fri Sep 19, 2008)
  

assassination attempts continue "routinely"

• BAGHDAD -- A suicide bomber tried to assassinate politician Ahmad Chalabi on Friday night, killing six of his guards when he rammed his car into the Shiite Muslim politician's speeding convoy, Chalabi's spokesman said.
• Chalabi, who has survived at least three previous attempts on his life, was returning to his home in the west Baghdad district of Mansour when the bomber in a sport utility vehicle struck, spokesman Iyad Kadhim Sabti said. At least 17 people were wounded, including nine of Chalabi's guards, police said. Chalabi was unharmed....
• Despite a drop in violence in the last year, assassination attempts targeting civil servants and prominent individuals continue to occur routinely in Baghdad. Earlier Friday, gunmen with silencers killed a civilian advisor to the Defense Ministry, Abdul Amir Hassan Abbas, as he drove through east Baghdad, police said.("Iraq politician Ahmad Chalabi survives assassination attempt," By Ned Parker and Saif Hameed, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers, September 6, 2008)
  

Balkanization in Iraq hits refugees

	Photo 1 of 4
A Palestinian girl pushes a baby in a stroller through the Palestinian housing complex comprising of 16 apartment blocks, lined by two streets of shops, most of them closed, in the Baladiyat district of Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, Aug. 24, 2008. In recent months sectarian violence has dropped sharply across Iraq, however Iraq's Palestinians, who number about 11,000 and have come under attack by Shiite gunmen in the past, remain one of the most vulnerable groups, a U.N. official says. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

good view of post-surge Baghdad, from March 2008

Baghdad, 5 years on (part 1 of 3): City of walls

Baghdad, 5 years on (part 2 of 3): killing fields


Baghdad 5 years on (part 3 of 3): Iraq's lost generation

since we have recently had a dispute over chronology of the surge....

...I thought this might be a relevant post

• In a presentation yesterday at the American Enterprise Institute, escalation architect Frederick Kagan repeated his claim that sectarian cleansing has not affected the drop in violence in Iraq. Kagan called it a “myth”:

The bad news from this perspective is that the sectarian areas of Iraq is still mixed. The good news is that the sectarian areas of Iraq are still mixed. And there is a myth out there that the violence has fallen because all of the cleansing is done. That is absolutely not the case.

• Watch it:

• Kagan makes the same claim in his new report, “Iraq: The Way Ahead“:

One of the persistent myths about the reasons for the success of coalition efforts in 2007 is that the killing stopped because the sectarian cleansing was completed. This myth is absolutely false. Baghdad remains a mixed city. The traditionally Sunni neighborhoods of Adhamiya, Mansour, and Rashid remain predominantly Sunni, and Shiite enclaves in East Rashid remain Shiite. Shia have moved into some parts of the Sunni neighborhoods, and many sub-districts within neighborhoods that had been mixed are now much more homogeneous. But the key components of a mixed Baghdad remain.

• Kagan’s claim is contested by major news organizations and the U.S. military’s own data. In December 2007, the Washington Post published the maps below, comparing the sectarian make-up of Baghdad’s neighborhoods in April 2006 and November 2007, and revealing the transformation of the city resulting from sectarian cleansing:

• The Post’s distribution of sectarian enclaves corresponds closely with these graphs, provided by Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), that chart sectarian violence in Baghdad between July 2006 and July 2007, which is the period in which the U.S. military escalation, also known as the Baghdad Security Plan, took place.
• The August 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq also rebuts Kagan’s mythmaking. One of the NIE’s judgements was that where some “conflict levels have diminished,” it was due to sectarian “separation.” (Think Progress, Wonk Room, "Escalation Architect Fred Kagan Doubles Down On His Claim That Sectarian Cleansing In Baghdad Is A ‘Myth,'" By M. Duss on Mar 25th, 2008 at 5:47 pm)