The Times April 15, 2006
Beaten, burnt and bullied: the families hounded out by religious
vigilantes
From Ali Hamdani in Kut and Nick Meo and Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
ON ANY normal spring weekend the amusement park in al-Kut would be
filled with families barbecuing lamb by the big wheel and playing
football.
But recently the dusty stretch of grass in this overwhelmingly Shia
town south of Baghdad has become a scene of despondency. It is covered
with the makeshift tents of nearly a thousand refugees, driven from
their homes in predominantly Sunni areas of the capital.
The frightened people of Baghdad believe that they are witnessing the
start of the ethnic cleansing of their city, and every day brings
chilling accounts of families being burnt and bullied from their
homes.
The number who have fled for safer parts has more than doubled in the
past fortnight to 65,000, says the Ministry of Displacement and
Migration. “For all Iraq’s past troubles we have never seen sectarian
problems before. We hear 1,000 people a day are being intimidated to
quit their homes,” said Sattar Nawruz, the ministry spokesman.
The International Organisation for Migration believes that the true
figure is even higher, as most refugees are living with friends and
relatives, and the exodus has greatly accelerated since the bombing of
the Golden Mosque in Samarra on February 22 sparked a wave of
sectarian killings.
The Shia families seeking sanctuary in al-Kut’s fairground had to
abandon their homes and possessions after being told that if they
stayed they would be killed.
They slept in mosques until the gunmen tracked them down, and now
their only shelter is some old tents provided by the Red Crescent.
They depend on food handouts from sympathetic townspeople. Clean
drinking water is scarce, and there is little sanitation. Dysentery is
spreading, and soon the temperature will reach 50C (122F). But the
camp is at least safe, whereas bound and mutilated corpses are
discovered in and around Baghdad daily, dumped in sewers and on
rubbish tips.
Encampments of Shia refugees like this have sprung up all over
southern Iraq, while Sunni families have been forced into tented camps
in the infamous Sunni triangle, west of Baghdad. The exodus threatens
to turn a capital where Sunni and Shia once intermarried freely into a
divided city with two communities confronting each other across the
River Tigris.
The tactics used by the religious vigilantes include black crosses
painted on doors — a symbol now known in Baghdad as “the mark of
death”.
Gunmen in luxury saloons throw leaflets from their vehicles
instructing Shia families to leave. Threatening messages are scrawled
on school walls. Militias abduct youngsters off the street and send
them home a couple of hours later with a message for their parents to
clear out or watch their children be executed.
Mahdiyia Muhsin, a mother of eight from the western suburb of Abu
Ghraib, found her name on a death list adorned with Koranic verses,
which Sunni Mujahidin in balaclavas had circulated in her street.
With 31 other Shia families on the list, she began packing when the
gunman returned and dragged her neighbour from his house. They
tortured then shot him as a warning that they should leave
immediately. As they fled, the dead man’s home was set alight.
Close to tears, she said: “In Saddam’s time my husband fled from Kut
when his brother was executed for being in the resistance, so he
escaped to Baghdad. Now he returns to Kut because he is threatened
again. So he left it as a refugee and returned to it as a refugee.”
Siham Saleh, 35, is now living with her husband and six children —
including a four-month-old baby with dysentery — in a small, stifling
tent. They were forced to move after their names were on a list of
“enemies” read out at a Sunni mosque. “What crime have we committed
that makes us live like beggars?” she asks.
As he watched his eight children on a slide, Karim Abid described how
a Sunni classmate of his eldest son came to his door with a notice to
be out within the hour.
They were not even allowed to take his son’s wheelchair, so the Red
Crescent rigged up an improvised contraption using a white plastic
picnic chair and bicycle wheels. When the people of al-Kut heard how
Muhammad, 13, also had to abandon his 60 prized racing pigeons, they
bought him half a dozen new birds.
Watching them pecking in the dirt around his improvised wheelchair,
Muhammad said: “I hope the birds I left managed to escape. It is nice
to have some new birds. I wish I was like them and could fly away.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-2134971,00.html
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Michael Gray.
Founding Member and Doorman,
Earthquack's 666 Club.
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