Almotamar.net Google News - American forces, struggling to improve security in Baghdad, are turning to an approach with a 4,500-year history in the region: They are building a three-mile wall around the heavily Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya.
A news release said the project, which soldiers jokingly called “the Great Wall of Adhamiya,” was “one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence.”
By limiting entry points to the neighborhood, and then setting up checkpoints at those points, the plan is to let “residents and people with legitimate business in, while keeping death squads and militia groups out.”
Wednesday’s wave of bombings in Baghdad missed Adhamiya, which is at the top of the map. (Photo: The New York Times)
In the district, “any semblance of normal life vanished more than a year ago,” The Times’s Alissa Rubin wrote on April 26. The local council’s leader was killed ten days before that, and his predecessor was killed three months earlier.
The idea of wall-building is a “popular one among some ground troops now manning small combat outposts within city neighborhoods,” according to Stars and Stripes, an independent newspaper published for the American military, reported.
Israel has been building a much longer security fence between Israeli and Palestinian territories to decrease terrorist attacks. In 2002, a Slate article argued against the idea for several reasons: Fences leak, they obstruct trade, and they encourage unilateralism, rather than cooperation.
After the news release went out, Gen. William B. Caldwell IV stressed that the wall is an exceptional case and not a “centerpiece” of the strategy to secure Baghdad. “We have no intent to build gated communities,” he said. “Our goal is to unify Baghdad, not subdivide it.”