Patrick Cockburn: Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad? [View All]

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Is the US really bringing stability to Baghdad?
To judge from the talk in Washington, the 'surge' that put 30,000 more US troops on the ground in Iraq has succeeded in bringing stability to a nation still riven by ethnic, religious and tribal conflict. Life, the Pentagon boasts, is returning to normal. But the truth is a very different story.
By Patrick Cockburn
Friday, 15 February 2008

People in Baghdad are not passive victims of violence, but seek desperately to avoid their fate. In April 2004, I was almost killed by Shia militiamen of the Mehdi Army at a checkpoint at Kufa in southern Iraq. They said I was an American spy and were about to execute me and my driver, Bassim Abdul Rahman, when they decided at the last moment to check with their commander. "I believe," Bassim said afterwards, "that if Patrick had an American or an English passport they would have killed us all immediately."

...

"People say things are better than they were," says Zanab Jafar, a well-educated Shia woman living in al-Hamraa, west Baghdad, "but what they mean is that they are better than the bloodbath of 2006. The situation is still terrible."

Baghdad still feels and looks like a city at war. There are checkpoints everywhere. "You seldom see young girls walking in the streets, or in restaurants," adds Zanab Jafar, "because their families are terrified they will be kidnapped, so they send private cars to pick them up directly from school." New shops open, but they are always in the heart of districts controlled by a single community because nobody wants to venture far from their home to shop.

For all the talk of Baghdad being safer, it remains an extraordinarily dangerous place. One Western security company is still asking $3,000 to pick a man up at the airport and drive him six miles to his hotel in central Baghdad. The number of dead bodies being picked up by the police every morning in the capital is down to three or four when once it was 50 or 60.

"People are being killed in the back streets and alleyways but not in the main roads as they were 12 months ago," says one Shia leader with a network of contacts throughout Baghdad. "About twice as many people are being killed as the government admits." This figure is still well below what it was 18 months ago, and is unlikely to return to its previous level as long as al-Qa'ida does not resume its suicide bombing campaign, using trucks loaded with a ton of explosives detonated in the middle of Shia markets or religious processions, killing and wounding hundreds. If the attacks on the two bird markets in Shia areas on 1 February, killing 99 people, are repeated, then Shia death squads will start a fresh cycle of tit-for-tat killings of Sunni.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/is-the-us-really-bringing-stability-to-baghdad-782425.html