The US military is erecting tall concrete walls to protect five Baghdad neighborhoods in a new strategy that some residents said would isolate them from other communities and sharpen sectarian tensions.

The US military said the intention was to protect the residential areas from gunmen as part of a security crackdown, seen as a final attempt to halt all-out civil war between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs.

"We are not sealing off neighborhoods, we are controlling access to them. It's a tactic, it's not a change in strategy to divide Baghdad along sectarian lines," military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Scott Bleichwehl said Sunday.

The announcement that more "gated communities" are being built in the Iraqi capital came after the US military said last week it was putting a 5-km cement wall around a Sunni enclave in the city.

Concrete barriers up to 3.5 meters tall are being built around Adhamiya, a mainly Sunni Arab area that is surrounded on three sides by Shi'ite communities. Traffic control points manned by Iraqi soldiers would be the only way in and out of Adhamiya once the wall was finished.

"The intent is not to divide the city along sectarian lines," Brigadier General John Campbell, deputy commanding general for American forces in Baghdad, said in a statement.

"The intent is to provide a more secured neighborhood for people who live in selected neighborhoods. Some of the people who I've talked to have had favorable comments about it, and they want us to build some of them faster."

Um Othman, 45, a teacher, said residents in Adhamiya regarded the concrete barriers as an "isolating wall".

"It will be like Palestine. The people of Adhamiya and neighboring districts have mutual historical relations, like religious festivals and marriage," she said.

Ziad Tariq, 38, a coach at an athletic club in Adhamiya, said walling off the area would deepen sectarian divisions.

"It will affect national reconciliation," he said.

Baghdad is already largely divided along sectarian lines after the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 sparked a wave of violence that reshaped the city's fabric.

(China Daily via agencies April 23, 2007)