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.
Rubaie's family joined a widening flood of Baghdad residents who have abandoned their home districts as the violence between Shiite militiamen and Sunni insurgents has reshaped Baghdad's neighborhoods. In many cases, U.S. officials say, violent sectarian "cleansing" has been abetted by elements of the Iraqi security forces.
The violence has tilted the demographics of some neighborhoods from one sect to the other. In other neighborhoods, it has consolidated sectarian populations and hardened religious boundaries.
Lines are shifting
The United Nations estimates that at least 300,000 Baghdad residents have fled the country since 2003, when the capital's population was approximately 6 million people.
In the last 11 months, since the February bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra triggered Iraq's plunge into civil war, about 60,000 Baghdad residents have left their homes for other neighborhoods within the city, according to the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement.
