Baghdad's Residents Fear Renewed Civil War
With the Sunnis in Anbar and Mosul demonstrating against what they call the Iraqi government’s sectarianism, Baghdad residents fear that their mixed city may once again become the main arena for civil war, writes Mushreq Abbas.
“When a civil war erupts in Iraq, its main theater is Baghdad.” Baghdad residents know that fact. Their city has about 7 million people and was the scene of fighting between various militias in the civil war that lasted from 2006–2008.
The numbers show that the fighting and sectarian displacement during that war transformed Baghdad’s demography. For the first time, Baghdad acquired pure Shiite and Sunni neighborhoods.
There is no accurate census on how many Sunnis and Shiites live in Baghdad, nor can we rely on the 2009 local election results, in which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State and Law Coalition won 35 of the 57 city council seats. In those elections, Baghdad was a single district and the ballots were not segregated on a sectarian basis.
Despite that, the city council is 70% Shiite. The demographic distribution of the city’s residents indicates that the Sunnis are concentrated in the western part of Baghdad (al-Karkh) and the Shiites in the eastern part (al-Rusafa), with the Tigris River separating the two sides.
