The Great Wall of Baghdad may be going up, but there's still carnage on the streets

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Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad

The first thing Said, a small contractor, did on visiting a military prison in west Baghdad was to pay a $2,000 bribe. The money went to an officer in return for a promise not to torture Said's brother and business partner, Ali. The main payment comes later. For Ali's release, Said will pay a further $100,000.

The brothers are Sunni, and the police commandos who arrested Ali are Shia. What happened to him explains why the US military "surge", the dispatch of 20,000 extra troops to Iraq announced by President Bush in January, is failing to end the Sunni-Shia sectarian civil war in the capital.

The US and the Iraqi government are having some success in cultivating divisions between the fanatical partisans of al-Qa'ida in Iraq and the rest of the Sunni community. But overall, the five million Sunni community supports armed resistance to both the US and the Shia-Kurdish government.

Ali, a 40-year-old with three children, was a successful businessman before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. A member of the al-Hamdani tribe, he lived in the predominantly Sunni middle-class neighbourhood of al-Khudat in west Baghdad. After the invasion, he worked as a driver for a Western company for two years, but a bomb blast destroyed his car and seriously injured him. In 2005, one of his sons was kidnapped, and he had to pay $20,000 to get him back.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2516744.ece