McClatchy Washington Bureau

last updated: September 07, 2007 07:06:06 PM

BAGHDAD - When President Bush announced in January what the White
House called a "New Way Forward" in Iraq, he said that Iraqi and
American troops would improve security while the Iraqi government
improved services. Responsibility for security in most of Iraq would
be turned over to Iraqi security forces by November.

With better security would come the breathing room needed for
political reconciliation, Bush said.

With less than a week to go before the White House delivers a
congressionally mandated report on that plan, none of this has
happened.

Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, are scheduled to appear on
Monday before two House of Representatives committees to discuss
security and politics in Iraq. The White House assessment, which must
be delivered by Sept. 15, is expected to hail security gains and hold
out hope for improvement - if U.S. troops are given more time.

But interviews with Iraqis, statistics on violence gathered
independently by McClatchy Newspapers and a review of developments in
the country since the U.S. began increasing troop strength here last
February provide little reason for optimism.

Baghdad has become more segregated. Sunni Muslims in the capital now
live in ghettos encircled by concrete blast walls to stop militia
attacks and car bombs. Shiite militias continue to push to control the
city's last mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods in the southwest, by
murdering and intimidating Sunni residents and, sometimes, their
Shiite neighbors. Services haven't improved across most of the capital
- the international aid group Oxfam reported in July that only 30
percent of Iraqis have access to clean water, compared with 50 percent
in 2003 - and tens of thousands of Iraqis are fleeing their homes each
month in search of safety.

Iraqi security forces remain heavily infiltrated by militias, and
political leaders continue to intervene in their activities.

Civilian deaths haven't decreased in any significant way across the
country, according to statistics from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, and
numbers gathered by McClatchy Newspapers show no consistent downward
trend even in Baghdad, despite military assertions to the contrary.
The military has provided no hard numbers to back the claim.

The only sign of progress is in the homogenous Sunni Arab province of
Anbar, where tribes have turned on al Qaida in Iraq and established
relative security in a once violent area. But that success has little
to do with the 4,000 U.S. troops who were sent to Anbar as part of the
surge of 30,000 additional troops to Iraq. Instead, it began more than
four months earlier, with the formation last September of the Anbar
Salvation Council to fight the escalating terror of Sunni extremists.
Officials agree that the anti-Islamist coalition in Anbar has yet to
ally itself with the Shiite-led government in Baghdad, and a recent
National Intelligence Estimate warned that it might even threaten it.

Elsewhere in Iraq, violence continues to flourish. In the north since
the surge began, suspected Sunni extremists have carried out some of
the deadliest terror attacks of the war, killing hundreds in car and
truck bombings.

In the southern city of Basra, death tolls have increased as rival
Shiite militias square off for control.

American politicians have focused on the Iraqi government's inability
to meet a series of benchmarks designed to mark steps toward
reconciliation. A Government Accountability Office report last week
said that the Iraqi government has failed to meet 11 of the 18
benchmarks and had partially met only four others.

A preliminary White House report in July gave better marks but still
pronounced little hope that compromise was near on key issues such as
the division of oil revenues, the role in government of former members
of Saddam Hussein's Baath party and the setting of a schedule for
provincial elections. The National Intelligence Estimate by the
country's 16 intelligence agencies concurred last month.

Bush administration officials are expected to praise recent agreements
by some Iraqi leaders and Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to work
toward compromise. But Maliki's cabinet still has nearly as many
vacancies as it has sitting ministers, and no major legislation
governing Iraq's major issues, including a militia disarmament
program, has made it to the floor of the Iraqi parliament.

Last week, the parliament, back from its summer vacation, barely had a
quorum in its first meetings.

BAGHDAD

Taking control of Iraq's capital city was at the center of Bush's
surge strategy in January. At least half the U.S. troop surge is
taking place here and surrounding suburbs, where the U.S. focused on
establishing so-called joint security outposts in Iraqi neighborhoods
to be closer to areas where sectarian violence was claiming dozens of
lives each day.

The military threw up concrete walls across the capital to foil car
bombs and stop Shiite militia members or Sunni insurgents from
entering targeted neighborhoods. One military official said U.S.
troops were erecting walls as "fast as they could build them." Most
"hardened" neighborhoods, encircled with towering gray walls and with
single entrances and exits, are Sunni enclaves, military officials
said.

The result is a city now sharply divided into sectarian boroughs where
the battle lines have only hardened. Some Baghdad residents say they
feel somewhat safer in their neighborhoods, but they fear traveling
anywhere else in the capital.

Falah Amin, 52, a Sunni from Adhamiyah, called her neighborhood in
northeast Baghdad a prison. Adhamiyah was among the first
neighborhoods to be walled off by the U.S. military to protect it from
Sunni car bombs and Shiite militias.

"We've been separated from the rest of our city as if we have the
plague," Amin said.

The neighborhood, Amin said, is virtually empty. Those left don't have
the money or connections to leave, she said.

"Is this to keep us safe or to keep all those outside the wall from
seeing what is taking place inside the walled area?" she asked.

Amin expects the worst if U.S. troops pull out and leave Adhamiyah to
the Iraqi security forces and a government she doesn't trust.

"First, they will empty Baghdad of the Sunnis, then they will think
about security, real security, not now."

Even Shiite residents are concerned. "If the U.S. troops leave, (the
Shiite militias) will be free and we will have a Shiite Taliban," said
Mohammed al Kabi, 39, a Shiite and once hard-line follower of Shiite
cleric Muqtada al Sadr. "I don't believe that the Iraqi government can
control the security situation because some of the high-ranking
officials cooperate with the militias."

Outside the walled-in neighborhoods, the push to drive Sunnis from
Shiite neighborhoods continues in a city that U.S. military officers
say has gone from being 65 percent Sunni to being 75 percent Shiite.

Late last year, Sadr's Mahdi Army militia had moved from Baghdad's
mostly Shiite eastern half across the Tigris River to the Sunni-
dominated western half, pushing Sunnis out of the city's northwest.
That campaign has continued during the surge, with the Mahdi Army
fighting to control the Jihad, Bayaa, Amil and Saidiyah neighborhoods
in the city's southwest.

The push is particularly evident in Saidiyah, where Sunnis and Shiites
are displaced daily. Military experts say that if the Shiite militias
take control of the area, the Shiites will have limited Sunnis in the
capital to just a few enclaves.

Unidentified bodies continue to show up daily in Baghdad, though the
pace is lower than it was last December, when 1,030 bodies were found,
according to statistics compiled by McClatchy Newspapers. The biggest
drop came between December and January, before the U.S. began adding
troops and after Sadr told his troops to lie low. Since February, when
the first additional troops arrived, the trend has been inconsistent -
dropping to 596 in February, rising in May to 736, and then dropping
again to 428 in August.

Some military officials and many residents attribute the generally
lower numbers not to the U.S. security plan, but to the purges in
mixed neighborhoods that have left militants with fewer people to
kill.

There's little evidence that Baghdad residents are feeling safer and
returning to homes they'd fled, said Dana Graber Ladek of the
International Organization for Migration, which tracks refugee
movements. Of an estimated 1 million Iraqis who've fled their homes
since February 2006, 83 percent are from Baghdad, the IOM says.

"There have been very few returns," Ladek said. Those that have come
back have done so only briefly to gather belongings. "They are waiting
for long-term stability."

ANBAR

No one disputes that Anbar province, once the heart of the Sunni
insurgency, is far more secure now than it was this time last year.
But what credit American troops can claim for that and how likely it
is to remain that way are hotly debated.

The tribal rebellion against al Qaida in Iraq began in September 2006,
well before the surge was even contemplated. That's when tribal
leaders, fed up with al Qaida in Iraq's attacks on moderate Sunnis and
its efforts to impose strict Islamic fundamentalism, formed the Anbar
Salvation Council to battle the group.

Tribal sheik Fassal Gaoud, a former Anbar governor, told McClatchy
Newspapers in June that the tribes previously had asked for U.S. help
in attacking the group, but had been rebuffed. By the time U.S. troops
began working with the tribes, the battle against al Qaida was well
under way. Gaoud, however, was killed in a bombing at the Mansour
Melia hotel in central Baghdad in July in the midst of the U.S. surge.

"We did in three months what they couldn't do in four years," Ali
Hatam Ali al Suleiman, another tribal leader, told McClatchy in June.

Still, Anbar is the scene of extraordinary security measures.

Ramadi, the province's capital, has been subdivided by towering
concrete walls that divide neighborhoods from one another and stop
trucks and cars from traveling in most of the capital.

In Fallujah, Anbar's largest city, only cargo trucks were allowed to
drive through the city for three months. Now police are allowing only
200 civilian vehicles, primarily taxis, to circulate in the city.
Fallujah's 350,000 residents must all carry special government-issued
identification cards.

Residents complain that the city has become a police state and that
police frequently torture and kill residents with any suspected ties
to al Qaida in Iraq. Residents who complain about the police also are
abused, they say.

Violent deaths, however, have dropped, from 36 in January, one month
before the surge, to 11 in August. About 63 people were killed in June
during a bloody fight to control the city, according to local
hospitals.

There are few indications that the campaign against al Qaida has
brought the Sunni tribes closer to the Shiite-led Maliki government.
Last month, Maliki told McClatchy Newspapers that he won't work with
certain Sunni groups that the Americans are working with, and other
Shiite politicians have worried that the tribes will oppose the
government, a concern echoed by last month's National Intelligence
Estimate.

ELSEWHERE IN IRAQ

In other areas in Iraq, violence has increased and conditions are
deteriorating - Oxfam estimates that 28 percent of Iraqi children are
malnourished, compared with 19 percent before the U.S. invasion. No
Iraqi McClatchy spoke to in preparation for this article said he or
she had confidence in the government.

Sunni militants remain openly active in the north. Three weeks ago,
fighters for the Islamic State of Iraq, an al Qaida in Iraq front
organization, paraded through the streets of Mosul, the capital of
Nineveh province, said tribal sheik Fawaz Mohammed al Jarba.

"It's very bad," Jarba said. "There are so many attacks that never
make it in the media."

In August, the largest attack in the history of the Iraq war killed at
least 322 people in two impoverished villages in Nineveh province, one
of a series of deadly bombings, each of which briefly held the title
as the deadliest so far of the year.

A blast in March killed 152 people in Nineveh's Tal Afar, and 150
people were killed in an explosion in Amerli in Salah ad Din province
in July. A double suicide bombing in July left at least 85 people dead
in the northern city of Kirkuk.

In the Shiite-dominated south, violence is rising as Shiite militias
vie with one another for control.

At least 52 people were killed this month when fighting broke out
between the Mahdi Army and the rival Badr Organization during a
religious festival in Karbala.

In Basra, the strategic port city on the Persian Gulf, those militias
and one from the Fadhila party have fought pitched battles for
control, with the death toll rising throughout the year, from 59 in
January to 134 in May. In August, 90 people died there.

Overall, civilian casualties in Iraq appear to have remained steady
throughout the siege, though numbers are difficult to come by.

According to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, 984 people were killed
across Iraq in February, and 1,011 died in violence in August. No July
numbers were released because the ministry said the numbers weren't
clear.

But an official in the ministry who spoke anonymously because he
wasn't authorized to release numbers said those numbers were heavily
manipulated.

The official said 1,980 Iraqis had been killed in July and that
violent deaths soared in August, to 2,890.

(Special correspondents Laith Hammoudi, Mohammed al Dulaimy and Sahar
Issa contributed from Baghdad. Jamal Naji contributed from Fallujah
and Ali Omar al Basri contributed from Basra.)

2007 McClatchy Newspapers