Iraqis already believe they're in a civil war

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The top U.S. military commander for the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid, told Congress on Thursday that the violence in Baghdad "is probably as bad as I have ever seen it," and went on to say that the country could be headed toward civil war.

Nearly all of the dozen Iraqis who work for McClatchy Newspapers' Baghdad bureau -- evenly split between Shiite and Sunni Muslims -- reached that conclusion long ago.

Their observations have trickled out day by day in the scores of conversations colleagues have with one another about their lives and difficulties.

Their experiences of the last month reveal a capital city that's disintegrating into chaos.

Neighborhoods are falling to insurgents or militias in days; the airport and roads leading from the capital are filled with people who've squirreled away months of salary to taste peace for a few weeks in neighboring countries; a criminal element apparently has decided that the government can't control it, leaving it to do whatever it likes on the streets.

Iraq saw a steady increase in violence after the Feb. 22 bombing of the revered Shiite Askariya shrine in the mostly Sunni city of Samarra. But what the staff talks about now isn't a slow evolution but a sudden change that took place in less than a month. U.S. forces now are entering the capital in an effort to turn Baghdad around so that Iraqis like those on our staff will considering returning to their homes, but no one here thinks they'll succeed.

I first began to realize what was happening when I received an unexpected e-mail from one of my usually mild-mannered Iraqi colleagues: "I want to have a fellowship or scholarship (to Canada) and get out of here," she wrote. "It is the only way I can leave here with my kids." It arrived July 7. At the time, I was away on a three-week break, my longest time away from Iraq since last September.

This colleague is a secular Shiite in her mid-30s whose coy smile often draws information from reluctant sources. She works as hard as she can every day, in part so she can get home to her kids on time. She didn't explain the sudden urge to return to academia, but I didn't have to wait long to find out the reason.

Two days later, another Iraqi staffer wrote. His mostly Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad, al Jihad, had been attacked. Residents there said that gunmen, some of them wearing Iraqi police uniforms, had brazenly attacked their streets. As residents fled, police at makeshift checkpoints asked them for their identification. Those thought to be Sunni, based on their names, were executed in front of their families. In all, more than 50 people were killed, some of them children.

It was wanton violence, even by Iraqi standards.

The women in the staffer's family fled that day. He stayed one more day, then left after a car bomb shattered the windows of his lifelong family home. The family hurriedly moved into a relative's house.

They sleep on the floor now, but their 10-month-old hasn't adjusted to her new environment yet. She can't fall asleep on the floor, and often stays awake until 1 a.m., the staffer complains. I can see it in his sagging eyes every morning.

He doesn't know what happened to his neighbors. The neighborhood is empty now.

"This is the first time this many Sunnis were killed this way," he wrote to me later that day. "I don't know if civil war is starting from al Jihad" or not.

Iraqis had witnessed the ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods before: Nearby Amariyah and Dora were branded no-go zones months ago.

Both those communities were taken over almost methodically. First, threatening notes, often with single bullets in the envelopes, appeared on doorsteps. Then the hairdressers were told to close their businesses because their work was un-Islamic. Perhaps a barber would be assassinated because someone mistook his chatty conversations with customers for spying. Slowly, the neighborhood changed as residents moved out and businesses shut down.

Al Jihad was on that track. But in one day, unpredictably, the neighborhood fell. And it was undeniable that sectarianism had forced people out.

From Washington, where I was visiting my family, I called to check in. Another staffer, a Sunni father of two young children who's never left Iraq in his life, told me that he was sending his wife and children to Syria. Just to give them a break from the violence, he explained.

The flights out of the country were booked for a month, incredible since at $400 a seat, flying costs too much for most Iraqis. Just two months earlier, one could book a flight two days ahead. But now many families wanted to get out of Iraq, at least during their children's summer vacation from school. The staffer's family would leave by road.

He asked whether he could stay in our offices in a Baghdad hotel while they were gone, saying he feared what would happen if Shiite militiamen or American forces found a single man alone at home. "Maybe they will kill me," he said.