Sects’ Strife Takes a Toll on Baghdad’s Daily Bread

[Rose Siding]

snip>
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.
...
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.
...
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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/21/world/middleeast/21bakers.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5094&en=1c032675f2ee63bd&hp&ex=1153540800&partner=homepage

[Rose Siding]

1. This is akin to the assaults against the US supply lines-

ALEXANDRIA, VA. – American forces in Iraq are in danger of having their line of supply cut by guerrillas. Napoleon once said that "an army travels on its stomach." By that he meant that the problem of keeping an army supplied is the prerequisite for the very existence of the force.

A 21st-century military force "burns up" a tremendous volume of expendable supplies and continuously needs repairs to equipment as well as medical treatment. Without a plentiful and dependable source of fuel, food, and ammunition, a military force falters. First it stops moving, then it begins to starve, and eventually it becomes unable to resist the enemy.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2403393