Category | Arts & Living

For some Iraqis returning to their neighborhoods, ‘home means death’

Published on October 21, 2008 by The Sentinel

    Haj Ali’s family had been home for less than a month when a
makeshift bomb blew off part of his garage. The message was clear: Go
back to wherever you came from.

    Two years ago, when Sunni Muslims began killing Shiites in Ali’s west Baghdad neighborhood, he quickly gathered a few belongings and fled. Last month, his family returned home. They didn’t stay long.

    “We thought it was safe,” Ali said. “Now I see that for us, home means death. There are still people who don’t want us there.”
    Only a small fraction of the roughly 5 million Iraqis who have fled their neighborhoods in fear since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion have returned, although returns have picked up since the Iraqi government last month began urging people home.

    In Baghdad, where most of the sectarian cleansing has taken place, about 8 percent of the people who moved within the country have gone back to their neighborhoods, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

    Many Iraqi families have returned to their old homes in peace, but a disturbing trend already is emerging: They’re being targeted and attacked, and in some cases killed, for returning to their homes. Some returnees have been threatened. Others have found explosives tied to their front doors. Some have had their homes blown up.

    The trend, along with an uptick in sectarian and ethnic violence in northern Iraq and growing tensions among rival Shiite factions in the south, is a worrisome development for American political and military leaders who are increasingly eager to declare victory and begin withdrawing more U.S. troops from Iraq in order to send more forces to Afghanistan.

    Sectarian cleansing has helped to reduce the violence in Iraq to a four-year low, but the small number of returnees who’ve been targeted could be a warning that the violence could return, too.

    “There are insurgents still remaining on all sides who don’t want the situation to improve,” said Bassim al-Hassani, a member of the Iraqi parliament’s committee on displacement. “So they are targeting a few to send a message to many.”

    At least a few families coming home to Baghdad and Diyala province have been killed, an Oct. 1 study by the IOM reported. American commanders in several parts of the capital said the homes of some returnees have been targeted with explosives.

    “It’s not happening every day, but it is happening,” said Army Capt. Dave Lombardo from Kennesaw, Ga., the commander of the 4th Infantry Division’s Troop B, 7th Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team out of Fort Hood, Texas, who oversees Baghdad’s Khadraa neighborhood. “It’s usually explosives taped up to people’s front gates. It’s an intimidation tactic.”

    In Ghazaliyah, a west Baghdad neighborhood where about 250 families have come home since Sept. 1, attacks on returnees are carried out or attempted about twice a week, said Lt. Col. John Hermeling, a native of Green Bay, Wis., the commander of the 1st Squadron, 75th Cavalry Regiment from Fort Campbell, Ky.

    In southern Ghazaliyah, an area once dominated by Sunni insurgents and al-Qaida in Iraq, Shiite families have come home to makeshift bombs, military officials said. A few returnees’ houses have been blown up, and at least one returnee has been killed, a Shiite who was gunned down in a drive-by shooting.

    In other neighborhoods, returnees have been kidnapped, said Mazin al-Ajaili, the head of the Baghdad city council’s displacement committee.

    “We are hearing of people coming home and finding letters with a bullet tucked in, or they find messages written on their doors,” Ajaili said. “Sometimes one family member is killed so the rest will leave again.”