BAGHDAD (AP) – The street market bustles in the early mornings and late afternoons as shoppers come out to buy fruit, bread, clothes and toys. Late into the hot summer nights, whole families gather to eat grilled kebabs at tiny stalls, their small children shrieking as they play tag.

The Hurriyah neighborhood of northwest Baghdad, gripped by a spasm of deadly ethnic violence a year ago, has grown markedly calmer over the past eight months. It is now the kind of area that both U.S. and Iraqi officials point to when they cite progress at stabilizing Baghdad.

But only Shiites are welcome – or safe – in Hurriyah these days. And neither Iraq’s government nor U.S. or Iraqi security forces are truly in control.

Instead, the Mahdi Army militia runs this area as it does others across Baghdad – manning checkpoints, collecting rental fees for apartments, licensing bus drivers, mediating family fights and even handing out gas for cooking.

OK, so the surge is working because the Sunnis aren’t allowed into the area?? Is that it?? Well, here’s how you get Iraq to settle into a quite and peaceful neighborhood, let the Shiites run their neighborhoods, let the Sunnis run theirs and the Kurds can just have northern Iraq and it’s what it should have been all along, 3 separate and sovereign nations, independent of each other, self governing and on their own, and if they go to war with each other after that, let ‘em fight, winner take all…

“They control people’s lives,” said one resident of Hurriyah, a Shiite government employee who would give his name only as Abu Mahdi, 36, because he feared Mahdi militia reprisals. Scornfully calling them uneducated, bullying teenagers, he said: “They are worse than the Baathists” – the party that held total authority under the rule of Saddam Hussein.

Others are more supportive of the militia.

“Our area is safe because of the presence of the Mahdi Army,” said Abu Hussein, a 50-year-old taxi driver, who also refused to give his full name. “Most people feel that way. Very few are anti-Mahdi Army.”

Well, as the old saying goes, you can’t please everyone…

This isn’t our fight now, Iraq has had their elections and they have seated an ineffectual government, and now they are morphing back into sectarian divisions that if kept apart may not kill each other, at least until the next Saddam emerges and takes control of the whole thing, and mark my words, there will be another Iraqi strongman come out of this, it is an inevitability in my opinion, and once he does he will seek to reconquer ALL of Iraq and become the President or King or Grand Poo-bah or whatever and he’ll run the thing with an iron fist, killing any that stand against him, THAT is Iraq, that WAS Iraq before we went in and deposed Saddam and it’s what Iraq will be in a very short time if we ever leave…

Why put off the inevitable?? Read the full story, it’s very interesting…

Full Story Here:
Shiite Militia Expands Grip in Baghdad

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