BAGHDAD, Feb 22 (IPS) - The death toll is high, according to the website
icasualties.org, which provides reliable numbers of Iraqi civilian and
security deaths.
In January this year 485 civilians were killed,
according to the website. It says the number is based on news reports,
and that "actual totals for Iraqi deaths are higher than the numbers
recorded on this site."
The average month in 2005, before the
"surge" was launched, saw 568 civilian deaths. In January 2006, the
month before the "surge" began, 590 civilians died.
Many of the killings have taken place in the most well guarded areas of Baghdad. And they have continued this month.
"Two
car bombs exploded in Jadriya, killing so many people, the day the
American Secretary of Defence (Robert Gates) was visiting Baghdad last
week," a captain from the Karrada district police in Baghdad, speaking
on condition of anonymity, told IPS.
"Another car bomb killed
eight people and injured 20 Thursday (last week) in the Muraidy market
of Sadr City, east of Baghdad, although the Mehdi army (the militia of
Muqtada al-Sadr) provides strict protection to the city," the officer
said. "There is no security in this country any more."
Unidentified
bodies of Iraqis killed by militias continue to appear in Baghdad and
other Iraqi cities. The Iraqi government has issued instructions to all
security and health offices not to give out the body count to the
media. Dozens of bodies are found every day across Baghdad, residents
say. Morgue officials confirm this.
"We are not authorised to
issue any numbers, but I can tell you that we are still receiving human
bodies every day; the men have no identity on them," a doctor at the
Baghdad morgue told IPS. "The bodies that have signs of torture are the
Sunnis killed by Shia militias; those with a bullet in the head are
usually policemen, translators or contractors who worked for the
Americans."
The "surge" of 30,000 additional troops came to
Iraq, mostly Baghdad, in February of last year. The total current
number of U.S. troops in Iraq is approximately 157,000. They were sent
to end violence, and with a declared aim of helping political
reconciliation.
But where peace of sorts has descended in
Baghdad, Iraq's capital city of six million (in a population of 25
million), it comes from a partitioning of people along sectarian lines.
The Iraqi Red Crescent reports that one in four residents has been
driven out of their homes by death squads, or by the "surge".
According
to an Iraqi Red Crescent report titled 'The Internally Displaced People
in Iraq' released Jan. 27, 1,364,978 residents of Baghdad have been
displaced.
The Environment News Service reported Jan. 7 that
"many of the capital's once mixed areas have become either purely Sunni
or Shia after militias forced families out for belonging to the other
religious branch of Islam."
Some of the eerie calm in areas of
Baghdad comes because togetherness has ended. Sunnis and Shias who
lived together for generations are now partitioned. This is not the
peace many Iraqis were looking for, surge or no surge.
On Jan.
8, UNHCR spokesperson Ron Redmond announced that there were at least
2.2 million Iraqis internally displaced within the country, and that at
least another two million had fled the country altogether. This, no
doubt, would make many areas quieter.
The U.S. military has
erected three to four metre high concrete walls around several
neighbourhoods, forcing residents to choose either Sunni or Shia areas
in which to live. Such separation has brought large-scale displacement,
and protests.
Sunni Muslims seem to have the worst of it. Many Iraqis are outraged by the number of Sunni detainees the "surge" has taken.
Residents
of Amiriya district of western Baghdad demonstrated Feb. 11 against
mistreatment by U.S. and Iraqi forces involved in the "surge". The
"surge" aims to eradicate al-Qaeda from Iraq, but this has meant that
most military operations have been carried out in Sunni areas like
Amiriya.
"We are here to protest against the unfair arrests and
raids conducted against the innocent people of Amiriya," Salih
al-Mutlag, chief of the Arab Dialogue Council in the Iraqi government
told IPS at the demonstration. "This has gone too far under the flag of
fighting terror."
Al-Mutlag said they were also demonstrating
against arrests in the western parts of Baghdad, despite an apparently
peaceful situation there as a result of residents' cooperation with
Iraqi army units. Large numbers of residents came out in the Dora
region of southwest Baghdad to protest against the U.S. military for
arresting 18 people, including an 80-year-old man.
"We are the
ones who improved the situation in western parts of Baghdad without any
interference from the Americans and their puppet Iraqi government,"
former Iraqi Army Major Abu Wussam told IPS in Amiriya. "We negotiated
with our brothers in the Iraqi national resistance who agreed to
conduct their activities in a different way from the traditional way
they used to work.
"It seems Americans did not like it, and so they are punishing us for it, instead of releasing our detainees as they promised."
Some
of the apparent peace on the street is a consequence of rising
detentions. In November last year Karl Matley, head of the Iraqi branch
of the International Committee of the Red Cross, declared that more
than 60,000 prisoners and detainees are held in prisons and other
detention centres. A large number of these were taken during the
"surge".
By August 2007, half a year into the "surge", the
number of detainees held by the U.S.-led military forces in Iraq had
swelled by 50 percent, with the inmate population growing to 24,500,
from 16,000 in February, according to U.S. military officers in Iraq.
The officers reported that nearly 85 percent of the detainees in custody were Sunni Arabs.
Given
that the majority of the detained are Sunnis, the "surge", rather than
bridging political differences and aiding reconciliation between Sunni
and Shia groups, appears to have had the opposite effect.
And yet, there could be more dangerous reasons to doubt such success of the "surge" that is claimed.
Among
the recent arrests in Baghdad, the U.S. military counted six members of
the Sahwa (Awakening) forces. This is a force of resistance fighters
now ostensibly working with the U.S. military. The U.S. pays each
member 300 dollars monthly. More than 80 percent of about 70,000 Sahwa
members are Sunni.
The arrest of some Sahwa members is
indication of U.S. military doubts about the loyalties of some of these
Sahwa fighters. Shia political parties and militias already accuse them
of being resistance fighters in disguise. Many believe that large
numbers of Sahwa forces are resistance fighters simply riding the
"surge".
"How come Sunni parts of Baghdad became so quiet all of
a sudden," says Jawad Salman, a former resident of Amiriya who fled his
house in 2006 after Iraqi resistance members accused him of being a
government spy. "It is a game well played by terrorists to divert the
fight against Shia groups. I lived there and I know that all residents
fully support what the U.S. calls the terrorists."
The Sahwa
strategy has brought down the number of U.S. casualties – for now. But
the U.S. strategy seems to have done less for Iraq than for its own
forces.
Ali al-Fadhily,
our correspondent in Baghdad, works in close collaboration with Dahr
Jamail, our U.S.-based specialist writer on Iraq who has reported
extensively from Iraq and the Middle East.
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