sadr city wall

forces now patrol the neighborhood, its mosques and its markets. His book, Baghdad Bulletin (Michigan, 2005), is an account of the first year of the occupation and the English-language magazine he co-founded in Baghdad. will show you video and photographs from some of the most important sites in Sadr City and interview the soldiers, officials and civilians that will play a role determining which direction it moves in next. The class arguments and anticolonial sentiments initially advanced by many of the followers of Sadr, the Sadrieen, were acceptable, even supportable. We will all live in peace Now they do, and they do not want the local councils dominated by certain political parties,” al-Obaidi said, referring to SIIC. People who professed not to care about sectarian identity found themselves forced to choose sides. Within a year, the palace complex—what would later become the Green Zone—went from a compound guarded by a handful of soldiers who had sandbagged small machine-gun emplacements to miles of walls and wire, choking traffic, causing confusion and increasingly making areas “no-go” for the average Iraqi. Many of the group’s officials were moving undercover now. “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation building.”, George W. Bush, presidential candidate Oct. 11, 2000. “Just being outside your truck in that area is never a great thing.”. Just read the following article titled "US Begins Erecting Wall in Sadr City".. here's the link: Protected content "Trying to stem the infiltration of militia fighters, American forces have begun to build a massive concrete wall that will partition Sadr City, the densely populated Shiite neighborhood in the Iraqi capital." Some militia leaders and political figures were exempted from arrest, and time was given for militia leaders to flee and for weapons to be hidden before the Iraqi army entered Sadr City. “We are the underclass here in the east. The neighborhood is also one of the most important places to visit for people seeking to understand the mood of Shiite Muslims, long oppressed but the majority in Iraq. The platoon leader, through his translator, badgered residents about the whereabouts of their sons and took pictures of faces to be uploaded to biometric databases. Just like the infamous Berlin Wall before it, the Sadr City Wall is used to "protect" the troops, it serves as a "checkpoint" and it slows the flow of people in and out of the area. Within those Ghaith, I discovered, had taken over a mosque less than a block from the apartment he had rented on Palestine Street. America should spend their efforts “They are afraid that during the coming elections, they will not have the same results as in the last elections. After the fight over the building of the wall, which turned most of the buildings on both sides of the corridor to rubble, the Iraqi government and the Sadrieen negotiated a settlement whereby only Iraqi soldiers could patrol north of the wall. They said, ‘We are your friends, and we do not want anything to happen to you.’ He asked why, and they just said, ‘We don’t want anything bad to happen to you.’ He left. There is a vastly improved civil situation in Iraq with 15 of the 18 benchmarks having been fullfilled. There was fresh resentment over the establishment of a small firebase constructed in the neighborhood, across the street from the Tayyera Sadrieen headquarters. Without oil revenue, the Middle East is a political and cultural The gunners on top of the Humvees trained their weapons on the crowd. He promised it would be like 1920—and, in many ways, he was right. They banned the presence of al-Sharqiya, a Baghdad-based satellite station deemed sympathetic to Saddam’s government and hostile to the current administration, and discouraged other journalists from attending. The US response to the uprisings in the western part of the country was to wall off neighborhoods in various cities, most notably Falluja. Download Images of Sadr city - Free for commercial use, no attribution required. “Their capabilities are severely, severely degraded,” Captain Andrew Slack of the First Armored Division told me. If an insurgent is thought to be in a house, air crews who might not arrive until many hours later when conditions are completely different, in the middle of the night in fact, are called in to kill the entire family We saw a couple When I asked if all this was really attributable to the containment wall, one of my friends chimed in, smiling now too, “It is like zoo.”. And this a fact because you posted it on the internet, which is of course free of small thinking and bias? They won’t care what the outcome of this war is as long A few minutes later, al-Obaidi called and gave us directions for an alternate location. I was reminded of an interview I had conducted with Hezbollah fighters in South Lebanon in 2006. Those who were aware of my presence, the presence of a foreigner, did not look happy. During this time I was able to piece together the story of his rise within the Sadrieen. SIIC has been successful, however, in legitimizing its militia’s presence by “integrating” it into the Iraqi military, special police forces, and death squad units, all with the training and backing of the US. Ghaith couldn’t keep from crowing about the work he and his men were doing for the neighborhood. Shiite mosque in IraQ — that Shiite sectarian retaliation commenced by Sadrists and other Shiite militia groups. “Do you see any dead Iranians here?” the man asked rhetorically. These were the poorest of the poor, reviled by most Iraqis as uneducated, as rabble; I could understand how the rhetoric of being God’s chosen ones would appeal to them. Hmmm. JAM, as the US military would acronymize them. And while the Askariya bombing was provocation, plans for many of the attacks against the mosques had been made far in advance. Maybe then we Americans would learn what really goes on when our troops invade another nation so that big campaign contributors can get to resources they want. “We’re civilians now.”. “They said, ‘Hey, we don’t want any problems. Let Iraq burn. By 2008, that dynamic had changed, and as I walked around their sector, it occurred to me that some of Slack’s men hadn’t been old enough to drive when US tanks first entered Sadr City. He handed the IDs back along with my camera without a word. Some of them came to him and asked him to leave. “Things like that are all over the city,” Slack said. The poor are still very poor—and even worse than before—but now they are below the poverty line.”. After a deal was brokered, the militia melted away in Najaf but remained in control of Sadr City. I followed the troops out into the streets as they searched houses, detaining a dozen men and collecting nearly fifty light weapons, mostly AK-47s and a handful of World War II vintage automatic rifles. At War is a reported blog from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other conflicts in the post-9/11 era. Of course, their goal is to curb our freedom, to control our movement. Iraqi Army troops were positioned at major intersections and public buildings. on the faultlines, and civilians caught in the middle. not be sitting here in the comfort of my desk in an airconditioned room while another American right now is making that same call thousands of miles away from his family while you critizise how he performs his They directed the Iraqi government to do this—to hurt Sadr City and especially the Sadr movement. To diminish our humanity in the neighborhood and instill fear in us again. Eight months later, the Jeish al-Mehdi engaged US troops in Baghdad and Najaf, bloody battles that cost the US few troops but proved that the Mehdi were far more interested in fighting than in strategy. This is no longer a civil war. 100 meters there was 11 total I.E.D.s. Leaving Baghdad: What Should the Americans Do? “The US sent more troops to Iraq,” he said. How did you become so educated on the subject Bill? With a raised fist, he promised bloodshed. As the crowd of chanting men grew around us, my translator gave me a sidelong glance. What I didn’t understand then was how quickly the logic of violence makes everything impure. “It might have taken weeks to get it fixed. Two days later the mosque was shot up.”. Representatives from the Sadr office had to link arms to hold back young men at prayers from confronting the army. It’s not like when we were clearing these main routes. Naziha al-Dulaimiwas instrumental in turning the vast slums of eastern Baghdad into a massive public works and housing project that came to be known as Revolution … The American presence, per se, was not a problem for most people—but American attempts to extend power and to control ground were. Williams said. Normally I complained when a translator told me it was time to go, but I felt the urgency too. “From the beginning when the city was founded, it was called Revolution City. “People know that it’s not tolerated by coalition forces or the Iraqi Army to display propaganda that shows guys with weapons … You still will see propaganda like what you see on the wall right there,” he said. Much of the earlier fighting had centred around a massive concrete wall that the US military has been building to cut off at least a third of Sadr City, in an attempt to prevent the flow of weapons to the rest of Baghdad. The Israeli military had begun bulldozing houses as it moved northward through the village. Read more…, Hundreds of letters from an Army private named Harold Grove Moss, whose tour of duty spanned Pearl Harbor to the surrender of Japan, have been transcribed and posted online by his daughter. As the guerilla war against the US and its allies became more violent, Sunni rebels attempted to create a ring of territory around Baghdad from which to operate, driving out Shiites and claiming they were collaborators with the US military. Sadr City to focus on the later years of strife and violence in Sadr City. I was happy to do what I could, especially for bored troops pulling a cordon, reduced to smiling weakly at the Iraqis passing by or communicating in single words (“Stop,” “Yes,” “No”). In some streets, the walls have been painted over with murals; in others they are covered with advertisements. I Mehdi Army fighters repeatedly attacked those constructing the wall under US protection. Well, you knew it was coming, and it sure didn’t take long. They insist that they have only been serving in a particular area a short amount of time and cannot comment on the conduct of the previous unit. Give me a break! For all the intrigue, all the cloak-and-dagger, al-Obaidi was surprisingly frank in describing the continued necessity of the Sadr movement. Muqtada al-Sadr (Arabic: مقتدى الصدر ‎, romanized: Muqtadā ṣ-Ṣadr; born 4 August 1974) is an Iraqi Shia cleric, politician and militia leader. The battalion would slowly clear a portion of the road of I.E.D.s then return the next day to find that insurgents had added new explosives to the same location. “We have the right to cooperate with anyone who can help us here and there, including the Iranians. Then they began to appear in other parts of Baghdad, blocking roads and choking a city already beset by traffic problems. grenade, common in Iraq, powerful and deadly. Hahaha, all these pro-insurgent people make me laugh. Berliners took down their wall in 1989, and then, the USA BUILDS walls in their frontier with México (separating developed from undeveloped, richs and poors); and now in Irak, separating “terrorist” Read more…, A Vietnam-era veteran says presidential candidates should not be judged harshly just because they did not serve during that war. They were becoming better organized—and larger. Read more…, A former Marine Corps officer argues that good leadership makes all the difference in smoothing the integration of women into combat units. The constant attacks from side streets made the job of looking for I.E.D.s even more difficult. Baghdad fighting focuses on Sadr City Wall. They aim to keep us haunted with fear—to dominate us and force us into submission. Estimates indicate it will take two weeks to complete this segment. I looked around at the crowd, continuing to swell. Such gatherings had been banned by Saddam Hussein for exactly that reason. “We had eight detonated and we found three. A tacit, unironic endorsement of the larger strategy: segregation for peace. But the trend of taking down walls was soon reversed. They were easy targets, but undaunted. Baghdadis have a love-hate relationship with the neighborhood, but the fact is that the majority of people in Iraq’s capital live in areas like Sadr City; more than four million are crowded into impoverished slums. Soldier of 1-6 battalion, 2nd brigade, 1st Army Division, patrols near the wall in the Shiite enclave of Sadr city, Baghdad, Iraq, on Monday, June 9, 2008. from “free people? Supporters of Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, denounced the wall as a nefarious effort to divide the city. This was the era the US had promised to end when they overthrew Saddam. Moqtada al-Sadr preached a boycott of the government appointed by the Americans, and the prayers often took on the air of a political demonstration. As the civil war intensified and people were being displaced by the thousands, the Mehdi began carrying out their own retaliatory attacks and cleansing. After the February 2006 bombing of the revered Askariya Shrine in Samarra, a Shiite pilgrimage site in a restive city with a majority Sunni population an hour north of Baghdad, the Mehdi Army and other Shiite militias attacked more than a hundred Sunni mosques in Baghdad, killing hundreds and beginning a process that drove thousands from their homes. The apartment was on Palestine Street, a major thoroughfare bordered by nice, planned neighborhoods south of Sadr City. On the outside wall of the base, someone had plastered a poster of Sadr. Col. Hort said "the building of the [so-called] T-wall became a magnet for every bad guy in Sadr City." 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