U.S. walls off Baghdad neighborhood

[Lone_Star_Dem]

By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer 23 minutes ago

BAGHDAD - U.S. soldiers are building a three-mile wall to protect a Sunni Arab enclave surrounded by Shiite neighborhoods in a Baghdad area "trapped in a spiral of sectarian violence and retaliation," the military said.

When the wall is finished, the minority Sunni community of Azamiyah, on the eastern side of the Tigris River, will be gated, and traffic control points manned by Iraqi soldiers will be the only entries, the military said.

"Shiites are coming in and hitting Sunnis, and Sunnis are retaliating across the street," said Capt. Scott McLearn, of the U.S. 407th Brigade Support Battalion, which began the project April 10 and is working "almost nightly until the wall is complete," the statement said.

It said the concrete wall, including barriers as tall as 12 feet, "is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence" in Baghdad.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070420/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_neighborhood_barrier

[thecrow]

1. Ah, reconstruction.... at last!

wheeeeeee

[KamaAina]

2. Why don't they just build a wall across the whole damned city?

I mean, we saw how well that worked in Berlin... :sarcasm:

[CottonBear]

3. Well, you know that's worked so well in other parts of the world.

:sarcasm:

God god, the war is lost and has been lost for a long time. :(

[Lone_Star_Dem]

9. I agree with what this person said further down in the article

"I don't think this wall will solve the city's serious security problems," said Ahmed Abdul-Sattar, 35, a government worker. "It will only increase the separation between our people, which has been made so much worse by the war."

This will only exasperate the the core problems.

[CottonBear]

14. The US just created a Sunni ghetto. :( n/t

[Lone_Star_Dem]

15. Exactly

And they called it progress.

[porphyrian]

4. Ooo, that'll work.

No one can get past a wall.
:eyes:

[bdamomma]

8. just like the Green Zone huh?

yea, that wall didn't stop them.

[Atman]

5. How much will Cheney-burton get to build the wall?

Just curious.

.

[gordianot]

6. George Bush tear down that wall!

It could happen.

[shain from kane]

7. In the Ghetto. End the Ghetto.

[endarkenment]

10. Next: ethnic armbands.

We are working on a final solution to the iraqi problem.

[Dr Fate]

11. The good news is, we cant PAINT the wall. We have some left over from all the SCHOOLS we painted.

I guess Haliburton over ordered- good thing.

[paparush]

12. Oh..what's that city in Germany? Oh yeah ... BERLIN!

They had a wall too, for a while.

[frogcycle]

13. "U.S. soldiers are building a three-mile wall to protect a Sunni Arab enclave surrounded by Shiite "

Somebody want to tell me why Sunni Iraqis can't build a damned wall?

We spend tens of thousands training some of our finest young people for THIS?

If that's what our army is for, send them to New Orleans. There are people there surrounded by water. They need a wall to protect them.

BRING THEM HOME!

[shain from kane]

16. It's a Shiite job, but someone has to do it.

Supposedly, there is no civil war. But we are building walls to separate the Shiites from the Sunnis. It will never be a united country. Time to consider partition, so they can patrol their own borders. Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, and anybody else that wants a piece of it.