Sectarian Conflict Is No.1 Threat in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq July 19, 2006 — -- Sectarianism is slowly but inexorably taking over every aspect of life in Baghdad.

A Sunni man, who lives in northern Baghdad but didn't want to be named for fear of being targeted, says that for the last two nights, masked gunmen have moved through his mixed neighborhood just after curfew, with the police doing nothing to stop them.

He and his neighbors presume they are Shiite and fear they will begin targeting Sunnis under the cover of darkness.

He bears no resentment to his Shiite neighbors, but is now thinking of moving to a safer, all-Sunni neighborhood -- or leaving the country.

It is at this level, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, that the sectarian poison is taking effect.

Sectarian conflict -- not the insurgency -- is the No. 1 threat in Iraq, said U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, in his recent address to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Kamel al-Maliki agrees. He has made stopping "sectarian cleansing" in Baghdad his highest priority.

Most Iraqis on the streets of Baghdad agree. The insurgency is nasty, killing Iraqis and American and other foreign troops. Sectarianism, however, threatens to rip the entire country apart.

The intensified sectarian conflict now contributes to a death toll of about 100 civilians a day, according to the latest figures from the United Nations.

Those figures date back to the bombing of the Shiite mosque in Samarra in February, which outraged the Shiite community and left hundreds dead -- mostly Sunnis -- in bloody reprisals.

Since then, the pattern has been repeated -- a Shiite shrine or marketplace is bombed, Shiite militiamen respond with shooting sprees in Sunni districts, and slowly the formerly integrated neighborhoods of Baghdad are cleansed into all-Sunni or all-Shiite districts.

Both sides share the blame.

The Sunni insurgents are egged on by extremist imams who want to provoke civil conflict to deny Shiites control over Iraq.

The Shiite militias are backed by fanatical leaders like cleric Muqtada al Sadr, who does not hesitate to target Sunni groups in retaliation.

The question: how to break this vicious circle.