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| Suad al-Safar (l.), and her daughter say they are renting their home, but could not say where the landlord is residing. Anna Badkhen |
U.S. Army to Baghdadis: Do you really live here?
As Iraqis return to Baghdad neighborhoods once racked by sectarian violence, the US military wants to ensure that squatters aren't laying claim to their houses.
from the May 13, 2008 edition
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Betson strolls down Saidiyah's bustling commercial streets, striking up conversations with shop owners. He stops at storefronts riddled with bullets, shakes hands, accepts small gifts of bottled soda, inquires about the success of their businesses, and chats about life in the neighborhood.
When Betson comes across a real estate agency, he stops in his tracks. "Do you have official permission from the government to sell real estate?" he demands of the owner, a burly middle-aged man in a long gray dishdasha shirt. The man says he does.
"Do you have the deed on your shop?" Betson asks.
"My brother has the deed," the man replies.
Betson asks to see the man's brother, who said he kept the deed at home.
Betson thinks this is suspicious.
"Keep your deed here," he instructs the man. "So that next time when I come here, I can see the deed."
"Realty business in itself is a touchy subject," Betson explains later, at the company's base in Saidiyah. "Is it real realty, or are they trying to sell homes that are..." he trails off, shaking the palm of his hand back and forth in a gesture symbolizing uncertainty.
On the southern edge of Saidiyah, Iraqi and American troops knock politely on doors and wait for owners to let them in.
"We're done breaking stuff," explains Harmon, who often ordered his platoon to force their way into houses and rummage through wardrobes and closets when the company first arrived here and was looking for militants.
Now, the Iraqi forces quietly walk through homes, asking the residents if they have any weapons. With US soldiers listening closely, their Iraqi translator, who asks to be called by his nickname, Johnnie, to protect his identity, asks residents if they were legitimately occupying the homes.
Brothers Ahmed and Husam Shwel clearly do. They have a corner lot with a gate that Husam was giving a new coat of paint. They returned from self-imposed exile to a different part of Baghdad last month, know their neighbors by name, and have keys to three houses on their street, trusted to them by neighbors.
But it is less clear in the case of a man who identifies himself as Abu Samir, a retired soldier who says he bought his house a week ago. He says he had fled his home in the Baghdad neighborhood of Rahmaniyah after men in black ski masks threatened his family and ordered them to leave and now occupies a palatial two-story villa.
A block away, unemployed engineer Omar al-Aimi says, over the shrieks of his crying children, that he is renting his house for $80 a month from a man who lives in Tikrit.
Mr. Aimi's wife huddles with the children in the darkened living room, explaining that they were afraid of men with guns.
"We may never know if they are legal," Harmon says.
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