Why Baghdad Can Never Truly Be Secure

“The terrorists are certainly hiding in the Sunni areas,” Abbas al-Tamimi, a Shiite Muslim resident in a government housing complex in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, told NIQASH. “But we don’t accuse all of them of helping the terrorists. But we know some of them are.”

“A lot of the time the terrorists come from outside the area,” al-Tamimi continued, “but they find locals who can help them find their way round and that helps them carry out their attacks.”

To try and solve the ongoing security problems in the Baghdad belt, the Iraqi government suggested building a fence around the city’s outskirts which will include a three-meter high concrete blast barrier and a three-meter wide trench.

This isn’t a new idea. A similar plan was mooted by the US military in 2006. But at the time Sunni Muslim politicians objected to the idea because the security fence was ostensibly splitting Iraq’s populations in two – this would exacerbate sectarian tensions, they claimed. The politicians were also concerned about the fact that land that was supposedly in Anbar and Babel provinces would become part of Baghdad without the correct procedures.

There is opposition to this idea from the same quarters, for the same reasons, again this year. They oppose the idea of lifting the concrete walls that separate Sunni Muslim and Shiite Muslim neighbourhoods in Baghdad and simply transporting them – and the idea they stand for - to the outskirts of the city.