How Iraq's war has turned friendship between families into sectarian hatred

[babylonsister]

And * considers this a success...


How Iraq's war has turned friendship between families into sectarian hatred
By Kim Sengupta in Baghdad
Published: 24 September 2007

They are two Iraqi families, one Shia, the other Sunni, who once lived in what were called "mixed" neighbourhoods. Now they are among the 2 million internal refugees in the country, a vast and desperate pool of the dispossessed whose numbers have risen massively along with US troop "surge" operations.

The forced migration, called "a human tragedy unprecedented in the country's history" in the latest Iraqi Red Crescent report, has uprooted communities from homes they have occupied for decades. In Baghdad, the focus of US military action, there are a million displaced people in a population of four million.

Another two million people, according to UN estimates, have fled abroad. Amnesty International, in a report released today, identifies Britain as forcibly returning more Iraqi refugees than any other country in Europe.

But it is the internal diaspora that is causing acute problems in this fractured society, with numbers rising by 71 per cent in just one month, according to the Red Crescent. The Independent has spoken to two families, the al-Rawis and the al-Amirys, who had been forced to flee their homes. In both cases the horrors they endured have turned tolerance and friendship across the religious divide into sectarian anger and hatred.

Um Samir al-Rawi is now living with her two daughters, Saba, 33, and 28-year-old Hiba, in a dark and dingy house in Khadra, a Sunni neighbourhood where they had taken refuge after being driven out of their home in the previously mixed Jihad district. Mrs al-Rawi's husband died in 2004, and their son, Samir, is now in exile in Syria after being hunted by the Mehdi Army Shia militia, which had accused him of being an insurgent.

"I asked Samir to stay at a friend's house in Mansour, he is the only man left in the family and we could not afford to lose him," said Mrs al-Rawi, 69. "It was very fortunate that he left, otherwise he would have been killed. The Mehdi Army were shouting that all Sunnis were terrorists and deserved to die. They killed one of our neighbours, Abu Bakr. They shot him in cold blood in front of his home. He had refused to leave his house. We were also told that he was killed because of his son's name."

more...

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2993310.ece

[JohnyCanuck]

1. Every time I read a story like this....

I think of Shitferbrains going, "Those weapons of mass destruction gotta be somewhere. Nope, no WMD's under here" while the assembled ass-lickers and whore media guffaw at the hilarity of his lame ass "joke."

[Skittles]

2. a disgusting, shameful event

I remember reading about a 16 year-old girl who was very upset by that because her soldier brother had been killed in Iraq - I can't even imagine