Perspective: Too late to secure Baghdad's mix

BAGHDAD — Mohammed Rubaie, 28, is the sort of person President Bush's new Baghdad security plan was designed to protect. But for him and his neighbors and many like them across this city, the plan comes months too late.

One of the chief rationales for sending five additional U.S. brigades to Baghdad is to secure the city's mixed neighborhoods, U.S. military planners say. If residents feel they are safe in their homes, they will no longer turn to sectarian militias to protect them, the strategists argue.

But many of the districts that U.S. planners might have wanted to protect already have been taken over by sectarian gunmen and their allies. Formerly mixed areas, including Rubaie's Hurriya neighborhood, have been transformed by fear and violence. Standing in their place are militantly sectarian communities, their borders hardened by concrete barriers and vigilante-run checkpoints.

Hurriya, where Rubaie was born and grew up, was one of those mixed neighborhoods — a place in Baghdad's northwestern corner where Sunni Arabs and Shiite Muslims lived in relative peace.

But this fall, the militias saw to it that Hurriya would no longer be mixed. One harrowing October night, "there were two gunmen dressed in black, with the police backing them up. They were saying, 'Sunnis, you should leave now. It's the last warning to you all. We're going to burn your houses one by one,' " Rubaie said.

"When our neighbor's house was burned, I felt it was time for us to leave," he added.

Read the rest at the LA Times