Omar seethed in silent fury as he gave soda and cellphone scratch cards to his father’s killers
September 17, 2007 4:04 pm IraqSectarian Toll Includes Scars to Iraq Psyche - New York Times, September 17, 2007
On a recent Tuesday, a thin parade of tired-looking couples trudged through the office of a family court judge in Sharchiya, a mostly Shiite neighborhood in central Baghdad. Only about 5 percent of the marriage contracts he registers are for mixed-sect couples, down from about 50 percent before the war, the judge said…. The court is one of the city’s few family courts, but as a testament to how separated the neighborhoods are now, just one in 10 couples he marries is Sunni.
Omar’s father was shot dead by six men from the neighborhood in May. Omar can name every one of them. Now they visit his grocery shop and take sodas without paying. They were poor before the war. Now they drive Land Cruisers taken from their victims.
They drive through the neighborhood, windows down, blasting songs about the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr and sometimes honking the horn….
Omar seethed in silent fury as he gave soda and cellphone scratch cards to his father’s killers.