The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the US started increasing its troops since February this year. According to the reports from two humanitarian organizations this is ultimately resulting in the partition of Iraq in sectarian enclaves.
Despite US claims that the troop buildup has improved security in certain areas, sectarian violence is growing. Operations by US forces have resulted into new fighting and driving fearful Iraqis from their homes at much higher rates than before the tens of thousands of additional troops arrived, the studies show.
Sunni and Shia enclaves:
Report speakes of Internally displaced Iraqis: These are the people who have been driven from their neighborhoods and seek refuge elsewhere in the country rather than fleeing across the border. The effect of this vast migration is to drain religiously mixed areas in the center of Iraq, sending Shiite refugees toward the overwhelmingly Shiite areas to the south and Sunnis toward majority Sunni regions to the west and north.
Agony of the displaced:
Most displaced Iraqis say they would like to return, but everybody know its not possible now. One Sunni Arab who had been driven out of the Baghdad neighborhood of southern Dora by Shiite snipers said she doubted that her family would ever return.
‘There is no way we would go back,’ said the woman, 26, who gave her name only as Aswaidi. ‘It is a city of ghosts. The only people left there are terrorists.’
What the statistics say:
Statistics collected by one of the two humanitarian groups, the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, indicate that the total number of internally displaced Iraqis has more than doubled, to 1.1 million from 499,000, since the buildup started in February.
These figures are consistent with data compiled independently by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) an agency affiliated to the United Nations. IOM specializes in tracking wide-scale dislocations. It found that in recent months the rate of displacements in Baghdad, where the buildup is focused, had increased by as much as a factor of 20, although part of that rise could have stemmed from improved monitoring of displaced Iraqis by the government in Baghdad, the capital.
The new findings:
The new findings suggest that while sectarian attacks have declined in some neighborhoods, the renewed intense fighting brought on by the influx of troops have brought is also responsible. According to the IMO this is the worst human displacement in Iraq’s modern history.
The failure of troops:
The troops were meant to defuse the sectarian tension. But the present situation is opposite. Fighting is still intense in many places in Iraq. Sixty-three percent of the Iraqis surveyed by the United Nations said they had fled their neighborhoods because of direct threats to their lives, and more than 25 percent because they had been forcibly removed from their homes.
Conspiracy of Iraq’s partition:
The are lobbies in and outside Iraq who would be delighted to see Iraq into three pieces. Iraqis themselves and even US not excluded. Such shifts of population could favor those who would like to see Iraq partitioned into three semi-autonomous regions: a Shiite south and a Kurdish north sandwiching a Sunni territory.
Maze of the crisis:
Over all, the scale of this migration has overburdened the Iraqi administration and the relief agencies. Some provinces have refused to even register any more displaced people, or will accept only those whose families are originally from the area. But Rafiq Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the migration office, said that in many cases, the ability of extended families to absorb displaced relatives was also stretched to the breaking point.
The squatters, enchroacher and the puppet helpless Iraqi Government:
According to him the reports of people going back to their homes were exaggerated. As the buildup began, the Iraqi government said that it would take measures to evict squatters from houses that were not theirs and make special efforts to bring the rightful owners back.
