The building of a five-km-long wall surrounding a Sunni neighborhood in northern Baghdad apparently continued despite the opposition of local residents and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.
 
Qasim Att, spokesman of an ongoing security crackdown in the capital, said that the defense ministry had a "firm opinion" about the plan of building the wall, aiming at enclosing Baghdad's northern district of Adhamiyah, where tit-for-tat sectarian violence is threatening to spiral out of control.

Atta's remarks came after al-Maliki openly called on Sunday for the halt of the separation wall, saying he opposed it, pushing the security forces to mull over alternatives.

"The order of the prime minister is implemented accurately and we have found alternatives for the walls," Atta said, insisting that all kinds of barriers are movable and temporary, which means it could be barbed wires, dirt walls or even trenches.

On April 10, US soldiers began building a concrete wall surrounding the Adhamiyah district. When the wall is finished, Adhamiyah will be completely gated, and traffic control points manned by Iraqi soldiers will provide the only means to enter it.

However, the plan has incurred strong criticism from Iraqi politicians and local residents.

The Iraqi Islamic Party, a major Sunni political organization, condemned the plan.

Politicians loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose militia is accused of getting involved in attacks on Sunni civilians, also denounced the plan.

Talal al-Samarrie, 50, a government employee, complained that daily killings and deteriorated services make living in the neighborhood almost impossible and the solution should be political one.

"If they really want to stop all this daily killing and chaos, the road is clear, it is a political compromise among all those wrestling factions," Samarraie said.

"The government is not serious with national reconciliation and I know the Americans try to practice pressures on those factions to bring them to the table," he concluded.

Muhammad al-Wardi, a Shiite resident in Kadhimiyah neighborhood, rejected the construction of the walls, accusing the media of ignoring the demonstrations in Shiite district about the Adhamiyah wall.

"We reject surrounding our brothers the Iraqis in Adhamiyah and I blame you why not saying anything about our demonstrations in Kadhmiyah and Sadr City neighborhood," Wardi said.

Although the Americans and the Iraqi government insisted that the walls are temporary, residents of Adhamiyah think that temporary walls have a way of becoming permanent, just like the Israeli barriers in the West Bank.

"It would be just like the Israeli segregation walls in the West Bank, justified as a security measure but actually they represent a permanent seizure of territory," Maha Abdullah, 45, a female teacher from the Sunni Adhamiyah district said.

Furthermore, Sunnis in Baghdad mistrust the men who would hold the entrances to their neighborhoods as they keep accusing the Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces of running death squads that killed thousands of Sunni civilians.

In the west Baghdad neighborhood of Ghazaliya, a series of smaller concrete barriers was supposed to separate Shiite militiamen in the north from Sunni insurgents in the south. But the access points were manned by members of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces.

"They (checkpoints guards) allowed militiamen to pass through (the checkpoints) to attack Sunnis, and then flee north again," Ahmad Usama, 35, a Ghazaliyah resident said.

"Even when the US troops are sometimes surrounding our neighborhood looking for insurgents, mortar rounds cross above them to hit houses, so what the use of such walls," he said.

"Checkpoints and walls were mostly useful as a way to slow the attacks of Sunni gunmen and guarantee Shiite militiamen a safe exit," he added.

(Xinhua News Agency April 28, 2007)