family lived in it and paid a nominal rent. In Amriya one of her sons and a nephew had been killed by Al Qaeda. “Things can’t go back to how they were before,” her son said about Iraq. “There was blood, vengeance.” They heard a Sunni from the Mashhadani tribe was killed after he tried to return to Hurriya. “Every Sunni who returns to a Shiite area and gets killed,” her son said, “they say he was a terrorist or Baathist.” I asked if the relations between Sunnis and Shiites could ever go back to the way they were. “Impossible,” they all said. “Every displaced person says it’s impossible,” Um Omar said with disapproval. “I don’t think it’s impossible.”
After listening to thousands of traumatized Iraqis, I had become inured to the stories of heartbreak that I had heard. But when Um Omar took me to Amriya’s squatter settlement, on a sandy lot on the outskirts of the neighborhood, it was as if I was twenty-five years old again and taking my first footsteps in Iraq.
Behind the squatter settlement, a large wall divided Amriya from an American military base. Guard posts with tinted windows and rotating sensors towered above the shacks. Most of the squatter families here were from Amil, and as we explored the settlement Um Omar was visibly uncomfortable and warned me not to speak English. She worried about Al Qaeda supporters among the displaced who came in, she said, and tricked poor people who wanted to be mujahideen. Sixty-eight families lived in makeshift shacks, and in one of them I found a middle-aged woman sitting alone in a cold room, bare except for a mattress Um Omar had provided. She had rented a home with her daughters in the Amil district. “When the Sunni and Shiite started,” she said, Shiite militiamen told her to leave or they would take her daughters. She started crying as she told me this, and I was suddenly reminded of my mother, whom she resembled, and I got tearful. As I left, I tried to fix the corrugated iron shield that was protecting her hovel from the cold, howling wind, but the wind kept knocking it down.
“THE SITUATION CANNOT go back to how it was,” said Captain Salim, the Iraqi army intelligence officer I had known in Washash. “We have a strong government; you can use the law.” I had joined him and his Sunni lieutenant for lunch at their base in Baghdad—a Saddam-era palace in Adhamiya. Both men insisted that the era of sectarian division within the armed forces and the police was over. “The army was not built on a sectarian basis,” the captain said. “It was built by the Americans to serve Iraqis, and it was strong in the fight against Al Qaeda and against the Mahdi Army.”
The Mahdi Army was finished now, Salim continued, though it was still killing Iraqi army officers in a campaign of targeted assassinations; more than five officers who had taken part in the operation to crush the Mahdi Army in Sadr City had been killed in Baghdad in the past two months. In the past, they said, armed groups could easily attack police and army checkpoints; they had the firepower and the quiet support of the civilian population. “Before people would say that they didn’t see anything after an attack,” the Sunni lieutenant said. “Now they call us before anything happens.” Anonymous tips, he added, were leading to numerous arrests. “We can’t work without the people’s help, and the calls help a lot.”
Salim told me that he had detained “bad” Awakening leaders and that he was waiting until after the elections to arrest even more, in order to avoid any destabilizing effects. His main challenge was obtaining arrest warrants. “The judge asks for more evidence,” he said. “The prisons are full of innocent people, so they want more evidence. They don’t want random arrests like in the past.” Though Salim had once feared his police counterparts for their associations with Shiite militias, now, he said, the police were good, and Iraqi Security Forces were continuing to arrest Mahdi Army men.
Neither man thought it possible that the civil war could resume. “The people understand now,” Salim said. “Before Shiites loved the Mahdi Army, but the Mahdi Army worked for its own interests, for the interests of Iran. The Sunnis supported Al Qaeda because they didn’t trust the government, but then the Awakenings were established.” In the army, they said, most officers supported Maliki or the secular former Baathist Ayad Allawi—and Salim said he worried only about the Shiite Alliance leader, former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whom many blamed for the intensification of the civil war that occurred under his watch. “Only he can bring sectarianism back,” Salim said.
Salim was confident the Americans would not leave Iraq because of their conflict with Iran and because of their continued support and training of the Iraqi army. Although the Americans had saved the Iraqi Security Forces from humiliation during the battles with Shiite militias in 2008, “Now we have engineers, intelligence, armor, 120- millimeter mortars, helicopters, good logistics,” he boasted.
I asked if the army was stronger now than it was before the overthrow of Saddam. As a fighting force it was, he said, “but before, when you fought, you had trust that the government had your back. Now, you don’t know. If Sadrists win the elections, they will find a way to fire us. The army has no relation with the government. We weren’t Saddam’s army either.”
Ironically, for all Salim’s talk about the improving security situation and the strength of the state, like many of his colleagues, he had moved his family to Suleimaniya, a Kurdish city in the north, for safekeeping. The Iraqi Security Forces were more confident and less sectarian, it seemed, but still vulnerable. Having their wives up north also freed the men to attend parties with liquor and prostitutes, called
After lunch Salim invited me to join him for shooting practice—which I did. He also invited me to join him and other officers for a
In Diyala, a majority-Sunni province northeast of Baghdad, I met with Dhari Muhamad Abed, head of the government’s Returnee Assistance Center. “Now sectarianism is completely over,” he said. “Security is good.” Indeed, as we drove through villages in Diyala where numerous atrocities had taken place, we found that Iraqi police and soldiers were pervasive, as was the case almost everywhere I traveled in Iraq, no matter how rural or remote. The security forces were no longer hiding their identities to avoid being killed by Al Qaeda, and they were no longer acting as death squads, though arbitrary detention of suspects remains the norm. Human rights abuses persist in Iraq, but they can no longer be described as sectarian; the state has achieved security in part by returning to its authoritarian roots.
More than thirty-seven thousand families had been displaced in Diyala—about 25 percent of the province’s total population—and eighty-five villages were destroyed during the civil war. Only one-third of the refugees have returned. With the end of the civil war and the establishment of a security infrastructure, the refugee crisis remains Iraq’s most serious issue. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are homeless and landless, squatting on government property. A senior United Nations official put the figure at half a million, calling it “an acute humanitarian crisis.”
In Baquba, the provincial capital, seven hundred Sunni families are squatting at Saad camp, on the grounds of an army base on the outskirts of the city. They were driven from their homes shortly after the American invasion in 2003 by Kurdish militias eager to seize territory in the chaos that followed the fall of Saddam.
I asked one man if he would like to return to his home. “Who will protect us if we go back?” he asked. The police regularly raided their camp, arresting men and telling the people they would have to leave. “Where will we go?” one old man asked me.
Similar scenes can be found across the country. In the Abu Dshir district of Baghdad, an immense and sprawling squatter camp houses thousands of Shiites who fled rural areas around the capital; they live in tents and makeshift shelters built from scrap metal and mud. The enormous Sadrein camp, in Baghdad’s Sadr City, contains more than 1,500 families, who live on a rubbish dump with the choking stench of sewage clotting the air. Most of the men I met were unemployed. Children played in mountains of rubbish. Like most poor Iraqis, the squatters depended on the state rations, known as the Public Distribution System, for survival. “If they decide to remove the squatters, there will be an uprising and chaos,” said the leader of one compound in Hurriya where hundreds of families were living. “No one can remove the squatters,” Captain Salim told me. “We have to solve the problem first, give them land. The government only builds housing for its workers, not the poor citizens.”
SUNNIS LARGELY did not take part in the January 2005 parliamentary elections. They voted in the October 2005 constitutional referendum but resoundingly opposed the majority’s support for the Constitution. The December 2005 parliamentary elections enshrined the new sectarian order and empowered a Shiite-dominated government, leading to the civil war.
But the January 2009 provincial election results showed that Iraqis were tiring of the overtly sectarian
