Senior US diplomat on Mahdi Army: “They’ve kind of supplanted local government, with streams of revenue — rent from housing they’ve taken over, protection money from businesses,” and control of fuel and electricity supplies.
December 16, 2007 9:08 am Mahdi Army, Iraq
Iraqis carry their luggage through Baghdad after returning from Syria this month. Many refugees come back to find their houses occupied or ransacked, and their neighborhoods transformed into sectarian strongholds. (By Wathiq Khuzaie — Getty Images)
Karen DeYoung, Balkanized Homecoming - washingtonpost.com, December 16, 2007
When the Iraqi government last month invited home the 1.4 million refugees who had fled this war-ravaged country for Syria — and said it would send buses to pick them up — the United Nations and the U.S. military reacted with horror.
Iraqis carry their luggage through Baghdad after returning from Syria this month. Many refugees come back to find their houses occupied or ransacked, and their neighborhoods transformed into sectarian strongholds.
U.N. refugee officials immediately advised against the move, saying any new arrivals risked homelessness, unemployment and deprivation in a place still struggling to take care of the people already here. For the military, the prospect of refugees returning to reclaim houses long since occupied by others, particularly in Baghdad, threatened to destroy fragile security improvements.
“It’s a problem that everybody can grasp,” said a senior U.S. diplomat here. “You move back to the house that you left and find that somebody else has moved into the house, maybe because they’ve been displaced from someplace else. And it’s even more difficult than that, because in many cases the local militias . . . have seized control and threw out anybody in that neighborhood they didn’t like.”…
In most of Baghdad, the population shift has been at the expense of Sunnis, many of whose former neighborhoods are newly populated by poorer Shiite migrants under militia protection and, often, control. Groups such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia “are no longer just thugs who are carrying guns around on the street,” the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity about the issue. “They’ve kind of supplanted local government, with streams of revenue — rent from housing they’ve taken over, protection money from businesses,” and control of fuel and electricity supplies.