Analysis: Neighborhood by neighborhood, Baghdad descends into civil war

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Sectarian violence has turned Baghdad into a deadly jigsaw puzzle of contested neighborhoods where armed bands of Shiite and Sunni Muslims battle daily for control in fighting that is far more similar to an organized military campaign than is generally acknowledged.

For the most part, the Tigris River is still the shimmering blue line that divides Baghdad's predominantly Sunni west, the Karkh, from the majority Shiite east, the Risafa. But over the past several months, Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, often backed by government security forces, has pushed into the western side of the capital and is driving Sunnis from their homes in the east.

Sunni forces - neighborhood youths, former Baath Party members, Islamist extremists - are conducting their own purges to expand their grip on the west and defend their brethren across the river.

Residents trapped in the capital's most fiercely contested districts braced Sunday for a new wave of bloodshed when a 24-hour curfew ends Monday. Reached by telephone, they all offered the same grim assessment: civil war has begun.

That assessment seemed bolstered by a three-pronged assault by the Mahdi Army late Sunday into the Jihad neighborhood, a western Baghdad district once the domain of athletes, diplomats and other middle-class Iraqis of both sects who relied on their lower-income neighbors, mostly Shiites, for vital supplies such as cooking gas and heating fuel.

Sunnis and Shiites traded gunfire from behind sandbags piled in front of mosques and from rooftop posts until U.S. troops entered the fray and tamped down the violence.

Fighting also has been fierce in the Hurriyah district, a one-time mixed district where the Mahdi Army's efforts at complete segregation have been stopped only by the stubbornness of some families who'd rather face death than abandon their homes.

"I was born in this house. My father built this house," said Salah Ahmed, 34, one of the few remaining Sunnis in the area. "If we have to die here in this house, we will. But we will never leave it." For months, the sects have traded kidnappings, gunfire and intimidation on families to flee. Last Thursday, a series of car bombings in the vast Shiite district of Sadr City killed some 200 people and injured at least that many more.

An old Iraqi love song celebrates a woman's eyes as so beautiful that "you won't find the likes of them in Karkh or Risafa." These days, both sides of the river are battlefields for sectarian supremacy.

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