For most of the first four years after the United States and its allies invaded, Suad Sattar was able to hide in her home from the nightmare that Iraq has become.
While violence raged all around her in Baghdad's once-affluent Dora neighbourhood — a mixed Sunni-Shia area in Saddam Hussein's time — the 44-year-old widow and her six children went outside their white villa only when they had no other choice.
But last month the war came through her front door, in the form of a letter.
"In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful," it began. "You have seven days to leave or you and your sons will be killed." For emphasis, a bullet was enclosed.
Ms. Sattar had known in her heart that this day would eventually come. One of her neighbours, a Sunni Muslim like her, had been dragged from his home several days earlier by masked men she believes were linked to the Mahdi Army of radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Two days later, her friend's corpse was found in a pile of garbage.
Ms. Sattar and her children fled first to another neighbourhood of Baghdad, where she received another warning from the Shia death squads who are working to cleanse the city of Sunnis. Then she hired a car for the perilous 330-kilometre drive north to Sulaymaniyah and the relative safety of Iraq's Kurdish autonomous area.
Her former neighbours tell her that her home in Dora was set ablaze by militants the day after she left. The neighbourhood, which links Baghdad with the Shia-dominated south of the country, is now bitterly contested turf. Sunnis live in fear of the Shia death squads, while Shiites are regularly targeted by car bombs attributed to al-Qaeda and other Sunni groups.
“There are no Sunnis left in Dora now. If there are any Sunnis still there, they'll soon be rounded up and killed,” Ms. Sattar says bitterly of an area that once had a Sunni majority, and where Mr. Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, once owned property. She believes that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite and a political ally of Mr. al-Sadr, supports the militias with government forces.
When the U.S. Army invaded Iraq in March, 2003, Ms. Sattar hated the foreign soldiers for destroying the life she used to have. But four years later, after the announcement that Britain is going to start withdrawing its troops, she's terrified that the Americans will soon leave too.
“All this happens while the Americans are monitoring the Iraqi army. Imagine what will happen if they leave,” Ms. Sattar said. “In the beginning, I was so mad at America, but now I don't want them to leave Iraq. They came and destroyed everything. Now, they have to rebuild it before they go.”
Ms. Sattar and her family are now denizens of a dingy tent camp that is sinking into the late-winter mud that surrounds Sulaymaniyah. There are 54 families here, packed into 16 tents that have no facilities other than kerosene heaters and stoves. Water is fetched by children, and carried to the tents on donkeys.
Many of the internal refugees are former members of Baghdad's well-to-do class, and though none admit it, some probably had connections to the Baath party that ruled Iraq for so long. They seem shocked to find themselves sleeping with only a few itchy rugs between their heads and the wet ground.
“I was a rich man in Baghdad — my house was worth 80 million dinars. Now, I live in a tent,” said Walid Chiad, a proud Sunni Muslim with a straight back and full black beard. “I have no idea how this happened to Iraq.”
Like Ms. Sattar, he was furious when the American army came to Iraq and toppled a regime that, for all its abundant flaws — including the violent repression of the country's Shia and Kurdish populations — provided security and stability, especially to Mr. Hussein's fellow Sunnis. But now? “If the Americans leave, it will get worse,” Mr. Chiad predicted. “Brothers will kill brothers in the street.”
