When Hate Lives Next Door

Sahar Ashour Nema has been visited twice by Iraq's sectarian demons. Two years ago, her husband, a Shi'ite laborer, was murdered by Sunni militants, who decapitated him, then hacked his body to pieces and set ablaze his small mobile home in western Baghdad. Before taking her children with her to live in her father's home in nearby al-Haswa, Nema returned one last time to their old neighborhood--just long enough to collect her husband's charred body parts in a plastic bag so he could have a decent burial. Her Sunni neighbors were impassive. "Nobody offered to help me in any way," she says, her face hardening at the memory.

But that departure was almost amiable compared with the one Nema had to make from al-Haswa last week. For months, Nema says, the mixed neighborhood's young Shi'ite men had been disappearing, their bodies turning up days later. Gradually, Shi'ites and Sunnis had stopped talking to each other. After the bombing of Samarra's al-Askari shrine two weeks ago and the wave of Shi'ite reprisals that followed, the atmosphere in al-Haswa turned toxic. The killings accelerated, and pamphlets began appearing in the street denouncing Shi'ites as "spies and betrayers" and demanding that they leave--or else. By the time Nema and her family fled, roads in and out of the neighborhood were manned by armed Sunnis who were roughing up and robbing the departing Shi'ites. The family abandoned most of its belongings and finally made it to a cousin's house in the Shi'ite neighborhood of al-Shulla. "We were lucky to find an unguarded exit," she says, her breath still catching with fear as she narrates their escape.

Most Iraqis cling to hope that the country won't descend into all-out civil war. But the sectarian violence that has racked the country over the past two weeks has upended the lives of thousands of families like Nema's, forcing them to leave their homes and changing the complexion of cities like Baghdad, perhaps forever. Across the capital, mixed neighborhoods have undergone the equivalent of wholesale religious cleansing, as Sunnis and Shi'ites have sought safety in their sectarian communities. In areas where Shi'ites and Sunnis once lived in tolerance, even harmony, the two sides are drawing sectarian lines to separate themselves from each other--even as Iraqi politicians and U.S. diplomats express hope that the risk of an imminent outbreak of communal conflict is receding. "If you are a minority in a neighborhood, you have to get out," says Adil Faaq Mohammed, a Sunni security guard at the Iraqi Health Ministry. "If you stay, your own neighbors will turn against you."