THE POINT WAS TO LIBERATE THE SHI'ITES:

All light in the night for Shi'ites (AP, December 15, 2007)

STRINGS of light bulbs festooning the Imam Kazim shrine's four majestic minarets light up the sky over Baghdad's Shia Kazimiyah neighbourhood, attracting thousands of night-time worshippers.

Coffee houses and restaurants are packed with customers along nearby streets, where turbaned clerics, chador-clad women and families buy furniture, toys and clothes in teeming shops. The district's gold market, the largest in the city, does brisk business until well after dusk.

But a drive from Kazimiyah over an unlit Tigris River bridge into Azamiyah, a Sunni stronghold, reveals only darkness and no signs of life along the main road. What night-life does exist stays strictly within a walled area of about 5sqkm, heavily patrolled by Americans. One glaring exception: Kasrah, a Shia enclave, with its lively outdoor market and coffee houses. Night is the time when the Shia dominance of the capital becomes most apparent following the sectarian "battle of Baghdad" that displaced tens of thousands of Sunnis and reshaped a city where the two sects had lived in relative peace.

As violence has eased over the past month or so, some neighbourhoods, mostly Shia, have regained much of their old confidence. Residents shop and eat out until as late as 9pm, more than four hours after sunset. Shia neighbourhoods enjoy the protection of Shia militiamen as well as the Shia-dominated Iraqi security forces.

Karradah, a Shia area in central Baghdad, has come closer to normalcy than any other Baghdad neighbourhood. Thousands have been crowding its commercial heart after dark, shopping for the coming Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha in its colourfully lit boutiques, dining on freshly cooked kebabs and falafel or buying fruit and vegetables from street stands.

The Sunni need merely submit to majority rule.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 14, 2007 5:57 PM