One Utah

I used to wonder how the Great Wall of China was supposed to work. Fixed fortifications are generally a bad idea, and it would be really difficult to maintain enough troops to defend all 4,000 miles. But the Great Wall was intended as a horse barrier as much as a conventional fortification, since Mongol raiders would not be able to get in and out of China very quickly on foot or by stopping to breach the wall to get their cavalry through.

The US Army is now trying a variation of this tactic in Baghdad, with what our guys of course dubbed the Great Wall of Adhamiyah. Armed insurgents can’t get very far by walking, and car bombs don’t get anywhere without a vehicle. So the 82nd Airborne Division’s 407th Brigade Support Battalion is building a wall around the Sunni enclave of Adhamiya, 12 feet tall and three miles long. People entering the neighborhood will be required to park their cars outside Adhamiya, walk through a narrow passage in the wall and take taxis on the other side.

OK, but what about hearts and minds? Residents and local council leaders in Adhamiya have described the project as “collective punishment.” The L.A. Times reports that both Shiite and Sunni Arabs living in the shadow of the barrier were united in their contempt. Several residents interviewed pointed out the obvious parallel to the Israeli wall of separation that cuts off the West Bank. There is the Green Zone of course, and earthern berms have been tried in Samarra, Tal Afar and Fallujah –but this is the first purely sectarian barrier to be built in Iraq. According to IraqSlogger, residents fear the wall would isolate their neighborhood even further from the rest of the capital and would create a fortress for extremist Sunni groups that are wreaking havoc. The area suffers from frequent rocket and mortar attacks, which the wall will do nothing to stop.

IraqSlogger, quoting the newspaper al Hayat, says similar walls will be built around the neighborhoods of ‘Amiriya, Khadhra’ and Rasheed (all Sunni-majority neighborhoods in western and central Baghdad).

Work on the Adhamiyah wall began April 10, but in a Cairo press conference twelve days later Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said that he had “protested” the building of the barrier and that its construction will stop soon.

UPDATE: CNN’s Arwa Damon reported that someone is tearing down sections of the wall at night, and large numbers of residents have staged a public protest against the wall. An article on CNN’s website indicates that construction of the wall has now been halted, presumably on orders from the Iraqi government. IraqSlogger has pictures of the protest.

UPDATE: The wall-building policy is enmeshed in contradictory statements coming from Iraqi government officials, the US ambassador to Iraq, and the US military command, says IraqSlogger. Construction of the Adhamiya wall reportedly continues.

UPDATE: The US military and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Malki have “conflicting views” on the construction of a wall surrounding the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiyah, Admiral William J. Fallon told reporters at a press conference in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), adding that the Adamiyah “barrier” is being constructed to protect its residents.

This entry was posted Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Disaster, Iraq, This Blog, War. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.