Iraq under fire and on the run

Iraq is in flight. Everywhere inside and outside the country, Iraqis who once lived in their own houses cower for safety six or seven to a room in hovels.

Many go after they have been threatened. Often they leave after receiving an envelope with a bullet inside and a scrawled note telling them to get out immediately.

Others flee after a relative has been killed believing they will be next.

Out of a total population of 26m, there are now 1.6 m Iraqis who have fled the country and a further 1.5m people displaced within Iraq according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

In Jordan alone there are 500,000 Iraqi refugees and a further 450,000 in Syria.

In Syria alone they are estimated to be arriving at the rate of 40,000 a month.

It is one of the largest long term population movements in the Middle East since Israel expelled Palestinians in the late 1940s.

Few of the Iraqis taking flight now show any desire to return to their homes.

The numbers compelled to take to the roads have risen dramatically this year with 365,000 new refuges since the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samara in February this year.

Rich and poor are both vulnerable.

"I'll need more than five bodyguards if I am to live in Baghdad," said one political leader who has left Iraq.

"One evening the police came to my antique shop and drove me around Baghdad in their car," said an antique dealer from the formerly well off shopping district of al-Mansur.

"They wanted money or they'd charge me with illegal traffic in antiques. I gave them $5,000 in cash, closed my shop and went with my brother to Jordan the same night. I haven't been back."

One well-established consultant doctor fled after escaping his kidnappers in Baghdad to the Kurdish capital of Arbil where he reopened his surgery.

Bakers are often Shia and have been frequently targeted. Some now make bread with a Kalashnikov machine gun propped against the wall beside them.

Many have left Sunni districts in some of which it became difficult to buy bread.

Former pilots who are Sunni and served in the air force believed they were being singled out by Shia death squads because they might have once bombed Iran and many fled to Jordan.

Jordanian immigration is more welcoming to Sunni than Shia Iraqis. The latter often find it easier to go to Syria. Every day heavily laden buses leave central Baghdad for Damascus.

All sorts of Iraqis are on the run. Sunni are disappearing from Shia districts and vice versa. But the Christian minorities from Karada and Dhoura in Baghdad are also fast disappearing. Most of their churches are closed.

Many leave the country while the better off try to rent expensive houses in Ain Kawa, a Christian neighbourhood in Arbil, the Kurdish capital. Nobody feels safe.

Some 70,000 Kurds have taken flight from the largely Sunni Arab Mosul city.

Among their cruellest persecutors are Arabs, settled in Kurdish areas by Saddam Hussein over the last 30 years, who were in turn expelled by returning Kurds after the US invasion in 2003.

In Basra, the great Shia city of the south, Sunni are getting out after a rash of assassinations.

Baghdad is breaking up into a dozen different cities, each under the control of its own militia. In Shia areas this usually means the Mehdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr.

In Sunni districts it means that the insurgents who are also at war with the Americans, are taking over.

A new sectarian geography is being created in the capital: The Sunni control the south and south west; the Shia the north and east.

There is heavy fighting in mixed districts like Amel and Baya or places where there is still an out-numbered Sunni minority as in Hurriya.

Some neighbouring Sunni and Shia districts now bombard each other with mortars every night.

The worst slaughter -- and consequent flight -- is happening in the towns and villages on the outskirts of Baghdad where Sunni and Shia live side by side.

For instance Shia are fleeing from Mahmoudiyah 20 miles south of Baghdad towards Suwaira and Kut.

The Iraqi army does little to help, and Shia complain that the US is more intent on attacking the Mehdi Army than rescuing Shia villagers.

According to one report from the Mahmoudiyah area: After two days of fighting a platoon of Iraqi soldiers "was despatched from the Sawaira base to break the siege.

They turned up for two hours and evacuated some of the women and children to the safe zone of Sawaira, but had to turn back as they were not fully equipped to handle the situation without [US] air support." The Shia accuse the US gunships of attacking their own defensive lines.

Nineteen people were killed and scores injured in a bombing and mortar assault yesterday in Mahmoudiyah, in attacks blamed by the main Sunni bloc on the Mehdi army.

Shia do have relatively safe areas to flee to (so far as any part of Iraq is safe) in east Baghdad or the Shia south of Iraq.

Almost all the Sunni areas are beset so they may move only a few streets to a house they deem more secure.

Otherwise they must leave the country, as many have, to Jordan or Syria.

Flight often brings a host of difficulties with it. For instance much of the Iraqi population is unemployed and depends on state funded rations bought cheaply from a local grocery shop.

A refugee in Baghdad cannot go to another shop even if he has taken up residence elsewhere, but if he goes to the shop near his old home he risks being murdered.

The lumbering state bureaucracy makes no allowance for this and only shows flexibility on receipt of a bribe.

Sometimes flight is not total. A man may move out of a district but still have his job there which he dare not give up (Iraqi unemployment is 60 per cent).

For instance 10 days ago, 14 Shia labourers from the Shia town of Balad north of Baghdad were found with their throats cut in an orchard in the nearby Sunni town of Dhuluiya where they had been working.

In retaliation the Shia of Balad hunted down some 38 Sunni in their town and killed them.

A single email from a Sunni friend in Baghdad that I received last April is worth quoting in full because its chilling contents explains the mass exchanges of population now going on in Iraq.

It reads in shaky English: "Yesterday the cousin of my step brother (as you know my father married two) killed by Badr [Shia militia] troops after three days of arresting and his body found thrown in the trash of al-Shula district .

He is one of three people who were killed after heavy torture.

They did nothing but they are Sunni people among the huge number of Shia people in the General Factory for Cotton in al-Qhadamiyah district where they worked.

|His family couldn't recognise his face but by the big wart on his left arm."

It is not only sectarian killings that are turning so many Iraqis into refugees.

There is the total breakdown of law and order. Kidnappings are rife. Businessmen may try to win a contract by paying for the assassination of a rival bidder. Sunni militants kill women wearing trousers and men wearing shorts.

Rival Shia militias in southern Iraq fight pitched battles for control of oilfields. American soldiers often shoot at anything that moves.

No wonder so many Iraqis have left their homes or fled their country.

- INDEPENDENT