When the current Baghdad security plan was announced in February, there was a fairly widespread sense of hope among Baghdadis that their city might be given a degree of security at last. Nouri al-Maliki's government pledged to park a tank on every street, an Iraqi twist on the British political promise of a constable on every corner.
But almost three months into the "Imposing Law" plan, as it has been dubbed by Iraqi generals, less than 60 per cent of the promised American troops have arrived in Iraq, whereas more than 80 per cent of the promised Iraqi forces have already been deployed. The available forces have been concentrated on the eastern portion of Baghdad or the left bank of the Tigris river, historically called the Resafa. This Shia-dominated area encompasses Sadr City, the bastion of militant Shiism, but also contains Sunni pockets such as Adhamiya.
The Karkh district of Baghdad, on the right bank of the river, becomes more Sunni as one heads west towards a rural belt of predominately Sunni towns, long considered incubators of the insurgency. Most attacks on US forces originate and occur in these Sunni areas, but during the surge they have witnessed only minor US-led forays hunting for arms and militants, followed by the establishment of a few outposts to challenge the insurgents on their own turf. So it seems the first priority of the generals is to halt the activity of Shia death squads before moving on to the Sunni neighbourhoods. Already fewer corpses of young Sunni men are appearing in Baghdad's back alleys.
But that doesn't stop all sides from complaining. One liberal Sunni MP, Mithal al-Alusi, tells me, "The people of Karkh say that they're getting the worst of it while their enemies, the people of Resafa, are left alone. And in Resafa, they say they are being targeted whereas the real offenders, the people of Karkh, are unfettered." But, says al-Alusi, when everyone sees himself as the victim, "it's a good thing—it shows fairness." Another Sunni opposition MP, Dhafir al-Ani, a hardliner, has been telling the western press that the plan "seems to be directed only against those who oppose Iran's hegemony." What he is implying is that the homes of Sunnis such as himself are being raided to placate Maliki's Shia and allegedly Iran-friendly government. Al-Ani ignores the fact that US forces keep finding sniper rifles, insurgent propaganda and mortars when raiding his home and those of his colleagues.
Muqtada al-Sadr's followers are also unhappy about the plan. Many of their leaders have been rounded up, and al-Sadr himself seems to have gone into hiding—some allege in Iran.
The middle class trickles back
Umm Nisreen takes a dangerous commute to work in Baghdad. She must leave a relatively safe neighbourhood near the green zone and travel to Abu Ghraib, on the western outskirts of Baghdad, where the College of Agriculture is located. Umm Nisreen, in her sixties, does not need this headache. She could go back to Amman, in Jordan, where much of Iraq's middle class has moved while waiting out the violence. She was fired from her teaching post in 1963 for being a member of the Communist party, and spent time in prison before ending up in exile during the three-decade rule of the Baathists. But she'll be damned if she'll allow something like the insurgency to get in her way now that Saddam is no longer around, and will make it to her faculty office even though Abu Ghraib is as dangerous as it comes. And she should know something about danger: she was abducted in late 2004 by a gang claiming to be an insurgent group, and heard some of her captors speaking in Syrian accents—probably foreign jihadists.
Umm Nisreen complains if she encounters too few checkpoints on her route—"Where is the security plan?" —and also when there are too many: "They made us wait for hours!" And should her driver, a man she hired as a precaution against more abductions, take a shortcut through Hai al-Jami'a, a neighbourhood Umm Nisreen used to live in when she first moved back to Baghdad, he gets severely berated. "It was 11am and the main street was empty," she said after a recent such excursion. "Not a shop was open, burnt cars everywhere."
As recently as a couple of years ago, that main street, Shari' al-Rabea, was bustling into the late hours. Shopkeepers back then would have cleared the broken glass and other accoutrements of carnage within hours of a bombing. But one bombing too many, as well as roving bands of Sunni insurgents threatening death to anyone who opens their shop, have brought normal and civic life to a halt.
Further east, in the once upscale and mixed Mansour area, the "shops are now closing at 7 or 8pm these days; in the winter they were closing at 5pm" says Nofel, a young businessmen who recently returned to Baghdad from Cairo after his savings ran out. "That's a sign that people are becoming more confident because of the security plan," he adds. "Yes, abductions for ransom are increasing, and that scares the merchants. But at least they're not being kidnapped and killed for sectarian reasons."
