Baghdad Comes Alive

"Everything in Iraq is shades of gray," says Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the Third Infantry Division. Sunni groups like FAR include "a lot of guys that may have been involved with the insurgency yesterday and may become involved tomorrow. But we have reconciled with enemies before. Right now they're part of the solution, not the problem."

The question is how healthy or sustainable that solution is. Abu Abed's relations with the Iraqi Army are noticeably cooler than with the Americans, and he worries about what will happen when they leave. "If the U.S. Army doesn't stay with us, we can't do anything," he says. The success in Ameriyah owes something to the fact that it's almost entirely Sunni now. Most Shiite neighborhoods, on the other hand, are still controlled by groups like the Mahdi Army, whose ceasefire has contributed greatly to the drop in attacks on U.S. troops but who are still feared by Baghdad's Sunnis.

The plan is not to create warlords in hundreds of little fiefdoms, but to gradually enlist the volunteers in Iraqi police and Army units, to be stationed at first in their own areas. U.S. commanders complain, though, that the Iraqi government has been deliberately dragging its feet on processing the volunteers. Sunni neighborhoods like Ameriyah have also been last in line to get municipal services—a few hours of electricity a day, and trash pickups so infrequent the place looks more like a slum than the bullet-riddled upper-middle-class area it actually is. When the locals were in open rebellion, that neglect may have been understandable. Now it's not, says Humadi, a senior adviser to Shiite vice president Adel Abdul Mahdi: "The Americans have done their part. But the Iraqis have not." (Last week the Iraqi government announced a new $900 million capital budget for Baghdad, double this year's.)

The most important repairs—to Baghdad's psyche—may be out of anyone's control. "The greatest obstacle [to reconciliation] is what the social fabric was subjected to," Tareq al-Hashemi, the Sunni vice president, said last week. For the first time in years, Baghdad's citizens now feel reasonably safe in their own neighborhoods. But they remain fearful of moving between them, across the capital's myriad sectarian borders, some invisible, others marked by high concrete. There continues to be a handful of sectarian killings daily in the city, most attributed to rogue Shiite militias ignoring the ceasefire, but each one leaving a family with a potential vendetta. Patching up Baghdad's social fabric may prove a lot harder than defeating Al Qaeda. And, yes, it could still get worse again. A pessimist is also an optimist who has too often been proved wrong.

With Salih Mehdi and Hussam Ali in BaghdadWith and in Baghdad

© 2007