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  Baghdad Barriers: Building Walls to Stop the Religious War

Baghdad Barriers Building Walls to Stop the Religious War

By Georg Mascolo and Bernhard Zand

Part 2: 'You Break it, You Pay for It'

None of these efforts is likely to succeed as long as there is no palpable reduction in the violence in Baghdad. And that, says Petraeus, remains the responsibility of the United States. Petraeus agrees with former Secretary of State Colin Powell's assessment of the US role in Iraq. Powell used to call it the "Pottery Barn rule" of personal obligation: "You break it, you own it." The US military's latest approach in Baghdad is to erect high walls and rely on high-tech and colorful plastic stickers.

When an old woman died last week in Amiriya, a Baghdad neighborhood, her son Abu Ahmed loaded the body onto his pickup truck to bring it to the Karch cemetery, far out of the city and past Abu Ghraib. The city cemeteries for Sunnis filled up long ago and are no longer accepting bodies. As Abu Ahmed was about to make his way out to the cemetery, he experienced the latest changes in Amiriya firsthand.

Stickers and walls

An American soldier told him that the neighborhood would only have one entrance and one exit in the future, both guarded. If he planned to return to Amiriya after the funeral, the soldier told Abu Ahmed, his vehicle would be searched now and an orange sticker would be placed on his windshield. This would identify him as a resident of Amiriya. Residents from the neighboring Chudra neighborhood would receive a white sticker and those from Ghazaliya a yellow one. Any car can travel along the thoroughfares traveling to other parts of the city, but the appropriate vehicle sticker is required to enter certain neighborhoods.

The three western Baghdad neighborhoods are among the city's most dangerous. Originally mixed, they are now populated almost exclusively by Sunnis and infiltrated by al-Qaida fighters. The philosophy behind building walls in Baghdad is to protect the population and starve out the terrorists. Procedures vary from one neighborhood to the next. At the Ghazaliya checkpoints, where two Germans were kidnapped in February, residents' fingerprints are taken and biometric iris scans performed. In the future, only those residents the GIs can identify using portable mini-computers will be allowed to pass through the checkpoints.

'Bremer walls'

In other places, such as Adhamiya, an area surrounded by Shiite neighborhoods, entire sections of the city are cordoned off for miles with tall "Bremer walls," named after Paul Bremer, the former US civilian administrator, who laid the groundwork for Baghdad as a concrete city four years ago with the construction of the "Green Zone." With US forces planning to build at least 10 of these "oases of security," the demand for the concrete barriers, each weighing more than six tons, is so great that the concrete is sometimes not even dry yet by the time the army's Pioneer units install them.

A fierce debate has erupted over the construction of the wall around Adhamiya. The project had been coordinated with the government, and Iraqi officials had traveled to Belfast last year to familiarize themselves with the principle of "guarded settlements." But as soon as criticism of the walls erupted in Baghdad, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki decided to cancel the joint US-Iraqi project and ordered a halt to construction. Walls are still built in some neighborhoods, but not in others.

Cautiously and in great secrecy, officials in Washington are now considering initial exit scenarios. In fact, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has even admitted that the Pentagon has already considered withdrawal options. "Our commitment to Iraq is long-term," Gates said. "It is not a commitment to have our young men and women patrolling Iraq's streets open-endedly."

At this point, no one knows exactly how to go about bringing home the US's 160,000 soldiers and their millions of tons of heavy equipment. The White House, fearing leaks, has put the brakes on planners. The president wants to avoid, at all costs, making the impression that he is finally giving up Iraq for lost.