As Baghdad's Sadr City thrives, Sunni areas die

[bigtree]

Friday, February 9, 2007

By Damien Cave
The New York Times

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Just past the main checkpoint into Sadr City, children kick soccer balls at goals with new green nets, on fields where mounds of trash covered the ground last summer. A few blocks away, city workers plant palm trees by the road, while men gather at a cafe nearby to chatter and laugh.

Sadr City, once infamous as a fetid slum and symbol of Shiite subjugation, is recovering, with the help of $41 million in reconstruction funds from the Shiite-led government, all of it spent since May, according to Iraqi officials, and millions more in U.S. assistance.

But as Shiite areas such as Sadr City begin to thrive as self-enclosed fiefs, middle-class Sunni enclaves are withering into abandoned ghettos, starved of government services.

Many residents credit a Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, and its powerful political leader, the renegade cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, for keeping the area safe enough to allow rebuilding. Yet the Mahdi Army also has killed U.S. soldiers and has been linked to death squads preying on Sunnis, making the district a target as U.S. troops pour into Baghdad to enforce the new security plan.

http://www.registerguard.com/news/2007/02/09/a2.int.sadrcity.0209.p1.php?section=nation_world

[sinkingfeeling]

1. God Bless George Bush for establishing an Iraqi theocracy!