Just imagine this happening in your neighborhood.
Gruesome Ethnic Sorting Focuses on Baghdad’s Sunnis
by Elizabeth Sullivan
Dr. Rafal Badri had heard the stories of displacement and murder before: A family member executed at a Baghdad checkpoint because his last name was recognizably Sunni. Friends and relatives forced to move, to flee to Amman or Damascus or to other parts of Baghdad, harried from their longtime homes because of sectarian identities few considered important just a few years ago. Families rent asunder by those same divisions.
But the Cleveland doctor said “the story never hit home as strong with me, as much as it did” three weeks ago, when he learned of the gruesome fate of one of his best friends from childhood, a Sunni man who was abducted from his home with his two eldest sons.
Sabah Abboud al-Naimi was an apolitical military officer from a Sunni tribal family famed for its orange groves north of Baghdad.
But this summer, he and two sons were snatched from their home in a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad. In front of the younger boy, the father and brother were tortured and then murdered.
This was neither random violence nor murder for gain, said Badri, who left Iraq about 25 years ago, when he was 29.
Instead, al-Naimi and his son were executed solely to broadcast a sectarian warning to other Sunnis to vacate their homes in the Shaab neighborhood in northeast Baghdad.
“The son was sent back home with the message that, You people do not belong in this neighborhood, and you are going to serve as the messenger to tell everybody, in advance, that if they don’t leave, they will deserve similar fate.’ ”
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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/16/3871/