Sabrina Tavernise (Extracted from "Sectarian hatred pulls apart Iraq's mixed towns", New York Times, 20 November 2005)

"Abu Noor's town had become so hostile to Shiites that his wife had not left the house in a month, his family could no longer go to the medical clinic and mortar shells had been lobbed at the houses of two of his religious leaders.

'I couldn't open the door and stand in my yard,' he said.

So when Abu Noor, a Shiite from Tarmiya, a heavily Sunni Arab town north of here, ran into an old friend, a Sunni who faced his own problems in a Shiite district in Baghdad, the two decided to switch houses. They even shared a moving van."

[Ed Iraq is now entering the same impasse as Northern Ireland where steel walls thread along streets in Belfast, dividing Protestant and Catholics working- and unemployed-class areas. In both countries, politicians think they can resolve crises by means of clever Constitutional formulae. Iraqis are now re-inventing the shared removal van of Northern Ireland. In Baghdad most of the working- and unemployed-class Kurds have long since left for their new homeland. The proportion of the Shias and Sunnis who are working-class or unemployed in Iraq is much higher than in Northern Ireland so it is the whole country, not just parts of its major city, that is dividing. It confirms what the anthropologists say -- if only politicians would listen -- that when tribes can't trade together then they become . . . well . . . more tribalistic than they were before.]