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Iraqis Surging: Sunni and Shia on Patrol
This is what you call reconciliation:
A surge of their own: Iraqis take back the streets
Attacks plummet as Shias join Sunnis in neighbourhood patrols to tackle militants and reunite communities
Michael Howard in Baghdad
Thursday December 20, 2007Under the embers of the wintry evening sun the Tigris river, usually as brown as old boots, had turned almost blood red. Its waters were calm but its oily sheen was disturbed by the oars of a rower as he sculled his way through the city’s fractured heart.
Alone and apparently indifferent to the threat of a sniper’s bullet, Muhammad Rafiq eased up on his stroke rate and tacked over to the shore. He hauled his craft up the bank to a mosque - the temporary headquarters for his rowing club since US soldiers had commandeered its real boathouse in 2003. Inside the courtyard, his forehead beaded with sweat, Muhammad laid a few old blankets over his upturned boat and padlocked the oars to a railing.“My friends said I was mad when I started rowing,” said the 22-year-old former science student. “They said I would be sharing the river with dead bodies and that people would shoot at me. But it keeps me fit and it keeps me focused for my night work.” As dusk fell, he checked the contents of his kit bag, slung it over his shoulder and jumped into a waiting taxi.
Fifteen minutes later, he had made it through checkpoints and concrete blast barriers en route to his home in al-Amil district of west Baghdad. At a makeshift barricade close to the street where he was born he greeted the sentries as friends. Then he unzipped his kit bag and pulled out a Kalashnikov. And for the next six uneventful hours he stood guard with his peers behind the straggles of barbed wire.
“I help to keep the peace so that I can row in peace, and that is my passion,” said Muhammad, who asked that neither his real name nor that of his rowing club be used. “Now when I go out on the river, you can hear the birds and the hum of the generators. When I began it was only gunfire and bombs.”
Muhammad is one of the thousands of young Baghdadi men to have joined neighbourhood security groups, which have mushroomed over the last year and are a crucial factor in the dramatic decline in civilian deaths. US soldiers call them “concerned local citizens”; Iraqis just call them sahwa (awakening) after the so-called Anbar awakening in western Iraq, which has seen Sunni tribal sheikhs take on foreign-led Islamists.
There are now an estimated 72,000 members in some 300 groups set up in 12 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, and the numbers are growing. They are funded, but supposedly not armed, by the US military. “It is Iraq’s own surge,” said a western diplomat, “and it is certainly making a difference.”
Major General Joseph Fil, the outgoing US commander for Baghdad, said this week that the number of attacks in the capital had fallen almost 80% since November 2006, while murders in Baghdad province were down by 90% over the same time period, and vehicle-borne bombs had declined by 70%.
The city’s neighbourhood security groups vary greatly in form, content and function. But they all appear to have sprung from a shared desire to rise above the sectarian tensions tearing apart large areas of their city.
Though life in Baghdad is still far from normal, and the security situation still perilous, the capital’s remarkably resilient population has begun to believe that the momentum for peace may be sustainable if it is left up to ordinary citizens. “They are filling a void left by Iraq’s feuding and self-serving political elite, most of whom are hunkered down and out of touch in the Green Zone,” said the western diplomat.