In the struggle for Iraq, tug of war over one Baghdad neighborhood
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"They started killing Shiites, just one every couple of days, in November 2004,'' says Harith, who remembers his first neighbor killed was Umm Saad. The 70-year-old widow ran the small grocery that he and his classmates used to crowd into after school when they were kids.
"Then this year it expanded. You'd see bodies on the streets all the time. A policeman was left dead in his car on my street for 24 hours, until I went to the National Guard and told them to collect the body."
"I now see that, little by little, Amariyah was falling under takfiri control,'' he says, using the popular pejorative term for Sunnis who share Al Qaeda's vision of an intolerant and violent Islam.
In late April, the neighbors to the right of his home, also Shiites, made the mistake of bringing a moving truck when they decided to abandon the neighborhood, and were gunned down before they reached the highway.
In early May, his neighbor in a small house to the left - a divorced mother of two and a Sunni who worked as a maid, was gunned down. "She had been warned to stop working." Harith and his family fled soon after - leaving all their possessions behind.
Colonel Burleson says he thinks the wave of violence in the area is past its crest. In the past month, he says his men and a battalion from the Iraqi Army's 6th Division have killed six insurgents and arrested at least 12 fighters.
"Last fall, if we got in my truck and rolled down there, I guarantee you we'd be in contact,'' he says. "Last week, the Iraqi Army was out picking up trash in the area until midnight to develop goodwill."
One break in early May came when a group of men in a van opened fire on a joint US-Iraqi patrol. They fled to a nearby mosque. After surrounding the area and arranging for a local sheikh to watch the proceedings - "his presence helps to control rumor and innuendo," says Burleson - the soldiers moved in and arrested five insurgents in the mosque.
They also found what Burleson describes as a "weapons garden": Mortars, sniper rifles, and even laser-guided bombs designed to be dropped from airplanes, all concealed in shallow holes in the ground.
Lt. Mohammed, a young Iraqi officer managing the checkpoint to Amariyah who asked that his last name not be used, agrees with Burleson's assessment of recent improvements, but frets that it will be easy for insurgents to move back in.
"We've shut off most of the branch streets and are funneling the traffic through our checkpoints, so we've got a lot more control,'' he says, saying his unit has only found seven bodies in the past 10 days - compared to an average of three to four bodies a day in April.
"But if we don't maintain this type of control, what happens then? What I'd like to see us do is station about 10 soldiers in each of the mosques - that's where the criminals usually base themselves," he says.
Former residents say they might move back - when the killings stop completely.
"Shiites used to make up 25 percent of the neighborhood - I doubt there's more than a handful left,'' says Harith. "When the Americans first came to Iraq, I thought we'd be kings. We hated Saddam and now I'm nostalgic for those days. It makes me sick."
