10 May 2006Sabrina Tavernise
It was almost 3 a.m. in Zubaida Square in central Baghdad last week when headlights signaled one flash, then two, then one again.
From the darkness, someone signaled back. The watchers were there.
As evidence mounts that Shiite police commandos are carrying out secret killings, Sunni Arab neighborhoods across Baghdad have begun forming citizen groups to keep the paramilitary forces out of their areas entirely. In large swaths of western Baghdad, and in at least six majority Sunni areas in its center, young men take turns standing in streets after the 11 p.m. curfew, to send out signals by flashlights and cellphones if strangers approach.
In some cases, the Sunnis have set up barricades and have taken up arms against Shiite-led commando raids into their neighborhoods. In other cases, residents have tipped off Sunni insurgents. Watch groups have been assembled in other mixed areas, including Baquba to the north and Mahmudiya to the south, residents and officials said.
Three years after the American invasion, the war has settled here, in the quiet of neighborhoods, streets and Iraqis' backyards. Dozens of bodies surface daily. People are taken from their homes and executed. Assassinations are routine. But instead of looking to the government for protection, ordinary Sunni Arabs are taking up arms against it, perhaps the most vivid illustration of the depth of Sunni mistrust of the American backed, Shiite-led security forces. "There is no bridge of confidence between the government and the Iraqi people," said Tarik al-Hashimy, a vice president of Iraq who is a Sunni Arab.
The groups, informal networks of neighbors, are not tracked by the authorities, and so are difficult to count. The Iraqi Army's battalions responsible for the northern and central portions of eastern Baghdad touched base with groups in Fadhel, Qaera, Waziriya and Adhamiya last Monday night. Many more neighborhoods, including Khudra, Jihad and Ghazaliya, in heavily Sunni western Baghdad, report similar organization. The residents emerge after dark, and are encountered by Iraqi Army night patrols who check in on them.
The groups — with intricate webs of cellphones, mosque loudspeakers, flashlight codes and handheld radios — mushroomed after the February bombing of a sacred Shiite shrine in Samarra that sparked several days of killing of Sunnis by Shiite militias.
"Samarra is the turning point in the security file," Mr. Hashimy said.
In March, the Baghdad morgue received 1,294 bodies, more than double the 596 received in March 2005. In April, the figure was up by 88 percent from the previous April. Nearly 90 percent died violently, most by gunfire, according to the morgue.
"The killing, you can't imagine the killing," said Yusra Abdul Aziz, 47, a teacher, whose block, in Adhamiya, organized its watch group in March, after four neighbors were shot dead over several days. "Without any reason. Cars come and shoot us. We run to the hospital and get our wounded. We live in a nightmare, actually."
On her block, seven men, Sunnis and Shiites, stand on rooftops and street corners from midnight to 6 a.m., stopping suspicious cars. Palm tree trunks and pieces of trash are used to block roads. Still, she is so afraid of nighttime raids by both the special police and marauding criminals dressed like police officers that she sleeps in her clothes.
As a counterweight to sectarian extremism, neighborhood watch groups often cross sectarian lines, with Sunni and Shiite neighbors standing guard together. Sunnis have even helped to protect Shiite neighbors from Sunni militias.
Many Sunnis say that despite their terror of the Iraqi special police, they tolerate the Iraqi Army, which they consider more professional and less partisan. They say soldiers sometimes turn a blind eye to their weapons, which are illegal outside the house. Some neighborhood watchers interviewed said they had cellphone numbers of army commanders in their speed-dial lists.
"Sometimes they talk to us," said a neighborhood guard. "They say, 'Don't let us see your weapons.' "
The army has even protected Sunni residents from the Shiite police. Col. Ghassan Ali Thamir of the Third Battalion said he stopped several Ministry of the Interior sport utility vehicles from entering Adhamiya last year, infuriating the ministry, which sent a memo demanding an explanation.
"The MOI says Colonel Ghassan cooperates with the terrorists," he said, sitting in his office in a former palace of Saddam Hussein in Adhamiya. "I don't want anyone taking anyone without a list. If they come for one, O.K., take one. But not more."
Sunnis also say they feel safer if Americans accompany Iraqis. "The Americans will not let the Iraqi forces kill us," one Ghazaliya resident put it bluntly.
American commanders say that the watch groups are benign, and that the Iraqi Army does not permit them to patrol with weapons.
"You will see them — a guy standing on the street corner," said Lt. Col. Paul Finken, of the 506th Regimental Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division, whose area of control includes Adhamiya. "They are there, and it's no issue for U.S. Army forces."
Still, to some Iraqi soldiers, the neighborhood patrols seem indistinguishable, in the end, from the Iraqi insurgency. A soldier who patrols in Adhamiya lifted up his sleeve to show scars from a hand grenade that had been thrown at him in the area.
"They show themselves as liking the army, but it's not true," said Second Lt. Ali Khadham of the Iraqi Army's Second Battalion, which patrols Adhamiya. "There's a very big hate inside them for government forces."
Sunnis say they have organized purely out of self-protection, to defend their turf in a city where more and more areas have become no-go zones. In the darkness of Zubaida Square, a guard, Adel Kareem, 38, said he has given up work as a taxi driver because leaving his neighborhood with his Sunni ID meant risking arrest and execution, a fear echoed in many other Sunni areas.
"I can't go to Kadhimiya, Shuala, Sadr City, Shaab," he said, ticking off the city's Shiite neighborhoods. "I would disappear."
Sunni neighborhoods are just as dangerous for Shiites, in part because of neighborhood watch patrols.
Shiites have also organized neighborhood patrols, but their trust in the police is high, and guards are few. Lieutenant Khadham said that in his majority Shiite neighborhood, Ur, about 15 neighbors guard an area of about 400 houses, far less than in Adhamiya, where dozens of guards keep watch on each block.
Shiite areas breathe more easily at night. In Greyat, a riverside Shiite enclave just north of Adhamiya, families with children were out walking at midnight recently. Tea shops overflowed with guests, bakeries exuded inviting smells and men sat talking in outdoor restaurants. In contrast, just several blocks away in the largely Sunni Arab neighborhood of Slekh, lights were out and blocks appeared vacant.
In the darkness of a quiet block in the largely Sunni district of Waziriya in central Baghdad on Monday night, Ali Salah Mahdi, a gangly, 21-year-old Sunni Arab, said his group had heard through its network that extremists intended to attack a neighbor who was working as a translator for American troops. They warned the man, who quickly fled with his family. Shortly after, Mr. Mahdi said, attackers strafed the man's house.
Paramilitary raids in the city appear to have eased in recent months, and Sunni residents attribute the drop to neighborhood patrols obstructing them. The evidence, they say, is that killers are now striking targets at their workplaces, in the hospitals and while they commute.
A recent example is the killing of 14 young men from Slekh last month. The men, who commuted together in a minivan from their shops in Sinek, another area, were returning home on April 15 when their vehicle was stopped and they were led away. Their bodies, some with drill holes, surfaced in the morgue several days later. Residents blame the Interior Ministry, though with no survivors from the van, no witnesses remain.
The incident only hardened residents' resolve for self-defense.
"I am dizzy from going to funerals," said a guard at the Najib mosque, where neighbors came to mourn the men two weeks ago.
And in a more violent, and perhaps more telling, episode, on the night of April 17, uncontrolled gun battles raged in Adhamiya for more than seven hours. Four men, who identified themselves as local guards, said in interviews that shooting broke out after dozens of Interior Ministry cars drove into Adhamiya, though no one acknowledged actually seeing such a car.
Colonel Thamir said Sunni insurgents started rumors that the police had come to arrest people, setting off the battle. Five people were killed and many more were wounded.
Similar battles were reported in Khudra and in Shuhada in western Baghdad, during the days of sectarian rioting in February.
Insurgents started the fight, said Second Lt. Ahmed Majeed of the Iraqi Army's First Battalion Delta Force.
"The civilians started to shoot," he said, looking frustrated. "What should we do?"
The problem, he said, is ultimately one of trust.
"Everyone has a gun," he said. "When I say, 'I'm here to protect you,' they say, 'I'm not sure.' "
Qais Mizher, Omar al-Neami and Sahar Nageeb contributed reporting for this article.
