Stories of ethnic cleansing in Iraq persist despite "surge"

[ck4829]

The expressway skirting the Amil neighborhood in Baghdad is only a couple of miles from Mahmoud Mekki's home, but it might as well be a hundred.

To reach it, Mekki must pass checkpoints guarded by Iraqi police commandos who he says are really Shiite Muslim militiamen trying to drive Sunni Muslims out of Amil.

So Mekki, a Sunni, remains holed up in his home, dependent on sympathetic Shiite neighbors to pick up his groceries and run other errands.

"I ask you to help us!" Mekki sobbed on the phone late one hot July night. "I don't want democracy! I just want security."

Iraqi and American military officials say incidents of sectarian "cleansing" in Baghdad have decreased since a U.S. military clampdown began in February, but what is happening in Amil and neighboring Bayaa belies the claim.

Since May, Iraqi police say, more than 160 bodies have been found in Amil and Bayaa -- men without identification, usually shot and bearing signs of torture, hallmarks of sectarian death squads.

On many days, the number of corpses found in the two neighborhoods account for half of those picked up across the capital. Before the war, Amil and Bayaa were middle-class neighborhoods where Sunnis and Shiites lived easily among one another. Now, not only are they mainly Shiite, but they have become prime territory for Shiite militias looking to expand into the surrounding Sunni-dominated areas.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-cleansing12aug12,0,6618301.story?coll=la-home-center