The War & The View From Mohammed's Alley

Mohammed's neighborhood in Baghdad, which is a Sunni enclave, is abroil with rumors. A Shiite shopkeeper was assassinated and leaflets are being distributed threatening residents lives if they don't leave.

He writes at Iraq the Model:

Do I and my family have to leave our home now? Impossible!

That was the first thing I thought of . . . No, I'm not running away, I'm not leaving the home I was raised in and I'm not abandoning my country . . . What do these people want from us?!

I sat for a while trying to recover from the shock and put my thoughts in order then I turned to the neighbor who brought the news "but wait a minute, aren't Sunni a majority in this area? It doesn't make any sense to receive such a threat. . . there must be something wrong"

I asked if he actually saw one of those leaflets and he said no, and I asked others who were talking about the threat but again no one had actually received a leaflet or read one with his own eyes.

However the hysteria mounted in the neighborhood and especially in the "central command" which is the mosque and its regulars who take care of organizing the watch teams and plan where road blocks are constructed.

With the assassination of the shopkeeper (who was by the way a Shia) the hysteria reached higher levels. I can't tell whether the assassination was a quick reaction to the threat or an implementation of the threat that hit the wrong target, I don't know but the two incidents seem somehow connected.

But what I really need to find out is whether that threat was for real and whether it's part of the wicked plan to partition Baghdad into a Shia east and Sunni west . . . I''m not sure but I do smell the escalation coming from local religious entities and I mean the mosque and the Husseiniya.

Regardless of that, ordinary people will panic and will find no choice but to listen to what the voices from the dark ages say because these are the only voices that possess some form of organization and because the police and army would rarely intervene in problems is a small neighborhood leaving the helpless citizen to feel that he's got nobody but his sect to give him the sense that he's not alone in the face of this threat.