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More Iraqis Are Said to Flee
Since Troop Increase
JAMES GLANZ and STEPHEN FARRELL
NY
Times
Friday Aug 24, 2007
The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the
American troop increase began in February, according to data from
two humanitarian groups, accelerating the partition of the country
into sectarian enclaves.
Despite some evidence that the troop buildup has improved security
in certain areas, sectarian violence continues and American-led
operations have brought new fighting, driving fearful Iraqis from
their homes at much higher rates than before the tens of thousands
of additional troops arrived, the studies show.
The data track what are known as internally displaced Iraqis:
those who have been driven from their neighborhoods and seek refuge
elsewhere in the country rather than fleeing across the border.
The effect of this vast migration is to drain religiously mixed
areas in the center of Iraq, sending Shiite refugees toward the
overwhelmingly Shiite areas to the south and Sunnis toward majority
Sunni regions to the west and north.
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Though most displaced Iraqis say they would like to return, there
is little prospect of their doing so. One Sunni Arab who had been
driven out of the Baghdad neighborhood of southern Dora by Shiite
snipers said she doubted that her family would ever return, buildup
or no buildup.
“There is no way we would go back,” said the woman,
26, who gave her name only as Aswaidi. “It is a city of
ghosts. The only people left there are terrorists.”
Statistics collected by one of the two humanitarian groups, the
Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, indicate that the total number
of internally displaced Iraqis has more than doubled, to 1.1 million
from 499,000, since the buildup started in February.
Those figures are broadly consistent with data compiled independently
by an office in the United Nations that specializes in tracking
wide-scale dislocations. That office, the International Organization
for Migration, found that in recent months the rate of displacement
in Baghdad, where the buildup is focused, had increased by as
much as a factor of 20, although part of that rise could have
stemmed from improved monitoring of displaced Iraqis by the government
in Baghdad, the capital.
The new findings suggest that while sectarian attacks have declined
in some neighborhoods, the influx of troops and the intense fighting
they have brought are at least partly responsible for what a report
by the United Nations migration office calls the worst human displacement
in Iraq’s modern history.
The findings also indicate that the sectarian tension the troops
were meant to defuse is still intense in many places in Iraq.
Sixty-three percent of the Iraqis surveyed by the United Nations
said they had fled their neighborhoods because of direct threats
to their lives, and more than 25 percent because they had been
forcibly removed from their homes.
The demographic shifts could favor those who would like to see
Iraq partitioned into three semi-autonomous regions: a Shiite
south and a Kurdish north sandwiching a Sunni territory.
Over all, the scale of this migration has put so much strain
on Iraqi governmental and relief offices that some provinces have
refused to register any more displaced people, or will accept
only those whose families are originally from the area. But Rafiq
Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the migration office,
said that in many cases, the ability of extended families to absorb
displaced relatives was also stretched to the breaking point.
“It’s a bleak picture,” Mr. Tschannen said.
“It is just steadily continuing in a bad direction, from
bad to worse.”
He also cautioned that reports of people going back to their
homes were overstated. As the buildup began, the Iraqi government
said that it would take measures to evict squatters from houses
that were not theirs and make special efforts to bring the rightful
owners back.
“They were reporting that people went back, but they didn’t
report that people left again,” Mr. Tschannen said. He added
that Iraqis “hear things are better, go back to collect
remuneration and pick up an additional suitcase and leave again.
It is not a permanent return in most cases.”
American officials in Baghdad did not respond to a request for
comment, but the national intelligence estimate released Thursday
confirmed that Iraq continues to become more segregated through
internal migration. “Population displacement resulting from
sectarian violence continues,” it found, “imposing
burdens on provincial governments and some neighboring states.”
Dr. Said Hakki, director of the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization,
said that he had been surprised when his figures revealed that
roughly 100,000 people a month were fleeing their homes during
the buildup. Dr. Hakki said that he did not know why the rates
were so high but added that some factors were obvious.
“It’s fear,” he said. “Lack of services.
You see, if you have a security problem, you don’t need
a lot to frighten people.”
It is clear that military operations, both by American troops
and the Iraqi forces working with them as part of the buildup,
have something to do with the rise in displacement, said Dana
Graber Ladek, Iraq displacement specialist for the migration organization’s
Iraq office.
“If a surge means that soldiers are on the streets patrolling
to make sure there is no violence, that is one thing,” Ms.
Ladek said. “If a surge means military operations where
there are attacks and bombings, then obviously that is going to
create displacement.”
But Ms. Ladek added that, in contrast to the first years of the
conflict, when major American offensives were a main cause of
displacement, the primary driving force had changed.
“Sectarian violence is the biggest driving factor —
militias coming into a neighborhood and kicking all the Sunnis
out, or insurgents driving all the Shias away,” Ms. Ladek
said.
Her conclusions mirrored the experiences of Iraqis who had fled
their homes.
Aswaidi and her family were driven out of the Dora section of
Baghdad five months ago when Shiite snipers opened fire on their
Sunni neighborhood from nearby tower blocks, shooting through
their windows “at all hours of day and night.”
Returning covertly to check on the property in mid-August, she
found Sunni insurgents occupying the building and neighboring
homes, walking unchallenged through the deserted streets. Nearby,
she claims, the same insurgents captured one of the Shiite snipers
who drove the residents away, and claimed that he was a 16-year-old
Iranian.
She now fears that her entire neighborhood will be taken over
by Shiite militias like the Mahdi Army, which is loyal to the
radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
“I don’t want them to take my town, but I think they
will,” Aswaidi said. “It will change from Sunni to
Shia. The Americans can’t stop it.”
Shiites face similarly overwhelming odds. In Shualah, on the
northern outskirts of Baghdad, 400 Shiite families now live in
a makeshift refugee camp on wasteland commandeered by Mr. Sadr’s
followers.
In a sprawl of cinder block hovels and tin and bamboo-roofed
shacks, families have stories of being expelled from their homes
by Sunni insurgents.
Ali Edan fled Yusifiya, a Sunni insurgent haven south of Baghdad,
when his uncle was killed. He has no intention of returning, even
though American commanders claim Sunni sheiks there have begun
cooperating with them. “It is still an unsafe area,”
said Mr. Edan.
Both humanitarian groups based their conclusions on information
collected from the displaced Iraqis inside the country. The Red
Crescent counted only displaced Iraqis who receive relief supplies,
and the United Nations relied on data from an Iraqi ministry that
closely tracks Iraqis who leave their homes and register for government
services elsewhere.
Before the troop buildup, by far the most significant event causing
the displacement of Iraqis was the bombing of a revered Shiite
mosque in Samarra in February 2006. The bombing set off a spasm
of sectarian killing, but the rate at which Iraqis left their
homes leveled off toward the end of that year before accelerating
again as the buildup began, the Red Crescent figures show.
The United Nations figures also include a little over a million
people it says were displaced in the decades before the Samarra
bombing, including the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. The Red Crescent
data does not include them.
In Baghdad, the latest migration involves an enormously complex
landscape in which some people flee one district even as others
return to it.
In Ghazaliya, a mixed but Sunni-majority district of north Baghdad,
one 30-year-old Shiite said his family was driven out by Sunni
insurgents a year ago with just two hours notice to leave their
home.
Five months ago, the troop buildup brought American soldiers
and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Army onto his street and his family
returned. But even as it did, Sunni neighbors fled, knowing that
the army had been infiltrated by Shiite militias.
“They are afraid, because the army has good relations with
the Mahdi Army,” said the 30-year-old man, who said he was
too afraid to give his name. “My area used to have a lot
of Sunni. Now most are Shia, because Shias expelled from other
places have moved into the empty Sunni homes.”
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