Rivers of Babylon

Iraqis are indignant about the wall being built around Baghdad's Adhamiya area, site of the Sunni insurgency. But the US is right to proceed; it will save Sunni and Shia lives
June 29, 2007
A wall grows in Baghdad

The demonstration by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr against the "Adhamiya wall"—the security cordon being built around a Sunni neighbourhood of Baghdad—was not as odd as it looked. Those killing the Sunnis of Adhamiya are almost certainly Sadrist death squads; no wonder they don't like the wall.

The idea of building a concrete barrier to rein in Sunni terrorists and to keep out Shia death squads was, well, my own. I first suggested it on my blog Talisman Gate last December, when the Iraq Study Group was considering a new strategy for securing Baghdad. The inspiration came from the Israeli "fence"—tragic and effective in equal measure—that encloses Arab pockets in the West Bank.

Indignation was quick in Baghdad among both Shias and Sunnis, who still hold on to the fantasy that there is no need for sectarian barriers and who blame their constant killing of each other on the Americans. The uproar was fanned by Arab satellite channels, which spun the wall as an anti-Sunni measure. Iraq's Shia prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was eventually compelled to demand the cessation of building—an order ignored by the American and Iraqi generals who oversee construction.

Lost in the hullabaloo is the fact that the wall will save Sunni lives as well as Shia. As well as helping to contain by far the most vicious exporters of Sunni violence in Baghdad, the wall creates a safe haven for a defeated minority whose insurrection, having peaked at least six months ago, is now beginning to blow up, often literally, in its face.

Adhamiya is as Sunni a place as you can find. It was initially a settlement around the shrine of a much-revered 8th-century Sunni jurist, Abu Hanifa, whose rite is followed by the vast majority of Baghdad's Sunnis, as well as by the Ottoman sultans in their day. The settlement began to the north of old Baghdad, and was soon joined across the Tigris river by another shrine town, the Shia enclave of Kadhimiya.

Adhamiya is where Saddam Hussein last dared appear in public, just as US forces were entering Baghdad in April 2003. It was in Adhamiya that the Sunni insurgency first stirred in the capital, five months after the war. When the Sunnis started focusing most of their efforts on trying to provoke civil war with the Shias, hoping they could use the ensuing chaos and America's notoriously short attention span to re-establish the status they enjoyed under Saddam, Adhamiya became the launching point for the most vicious attacks in the capital.

Adhamiya is now reaping the whirlwind, bearing the brunt of the sectarian reprisals—led by al-Sadr's Mahdi army—that its insurgents were trying to provoke. Death squads from Sadr City started taking young men off the streets of Adhamiya in broad daylight, and mortar shells started raining in from the neighbouring Shia district. Many families fled the neighbourhood.

Admittedly, bringing walls to Baghdad represents a regression to an earlier era. In 1869, a reforming Ottoman governor of the province of Baghdad, Midhat Pasha, took the enlightened step of levelling the centuries-old burnt brick walls that encircled the city. He did so to signal that the lawlessness of the lands around the ancient city had been checked, and that there was no longer a need for insularity.

Two and a half centuries earlier, an Ottoman sultan, Murad IV, used these same walls to send another message. He ordered the Talisman Gate, Baghdad's most easterly approach, to be bricked up so that it might never again admit the Safavid Persians, his empire's Shia rivals to the east. The gate survived Midhat Pasha's later "reforms," only to be blown up as the Ottomans retreated in 1917 before the British advance. The city's Turkish defenders did not want the ammunition stored in the gate to fall into British hands.

The wall around Adhamiya is now well over half complete, with construction proceeding apace according to eye-witnesses. So far my recommendations for pairing technology with concrete—and establishing cameras, motion sensors and neighbourhood-specific ID cards—have been received less enthusiastically.

A mysterious would-be Caliph

Who is Abu Omar al-Baghdadi? For eight months, the question has perplexed US and Iraqi forces, who have declared the alleged leader of the al Qaeda-dominated Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) killed once and arrested twice since March. The last time they thought they had him, the Iraqi government displayed a corpse on national television. The ISI denied it was al-Baghdadi's.

Unravelling al-Baghdadi's identity is especially important, as he seems to be al Qaeda in Mesopotamia's candidate for the role of temporal leader of an Islamic caliphate: his descent from the tribe of Quraysh, a prerequisite for a would-be caliph, has been trumpeted by al Qaeda from the time al-Baghdadi was declared head of the ISI in October 2006.

Sources who hob-nob among Sunni insurgents tell me that "al-Baghdadi" is actually Khalid Khalil Ibrahim al-Mashhadani, a Sunni fundamentalist in his early forties, briefly imprisoned under Saddam for his radicalism.