December 1, 2007
Saudi Rape Case Spurs Calls for Reform

By RASHEED ABOU-ALSAMH
JIDDA, Saudi Arabia, Nov. 30 — The case of a 20-year-old woman who was sentenced to be lashed after pressing charges against seven men who raped her and a male companion has provoked a rare and angry public debate in Saudi Arabia, leading to renewed calls for reform of the Saudi judicial system.

The woman, known here only as “the Qatif girl, ” was initially subjected to 90 lashes for being alone with a man to whom she was not married.

Her outspoken human rights lawyer appealed the sentence and brought down the wrath of the court, which doubled the woman’s sentence and stripped her lawyer of his license to practice.

The case is now being appealed to the Kingdom’s highest court. Human rights activists and legal observers said the treatment of the woman from Qatif, the man who was raped with her, and her lawyer, call into question the consistency of Saudi justice and make a mockery of the court system’s commitment to openness and fairness.

The Saudi system still operates without a codified legal system and uses a strict Wahabi interpretation of Islamic law, or Shariah, to hand down verdicts. Like all institutions in Saudi Arabia, the court system is subject to the absolute authority of the monarchy.

“The system has to be transformed from top to bottom,” said Ali Alyami, the executive director of the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia. “Judges in Saudi Arabia have no more power than the princes want them to have.”

Saudi officials have faced a firestorm of embarrassing international publicity. American presidential candidates decried the sentence on the campaign trail. During the Annapolis summit meeting, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, faced a barrage of questions about the kingdom’s handling of the case. “What is outraging about this case is that it is being used against the Saudi government and people,” he told reporters.

But the prince also said the judiciary would review the case.

The rape took place a year and a half ago in the town of Qatif, a small Shi’ite waterfront town in the Eastern Province, center of the Saudi Arabia’s oil industry. Judges in Qatif provoked outrage in many quarters in the Kingdom — and vociferous criticism from the United States — when they increased the sentence against the rape victim on appeal in mid-November.

In the weeks since the new sentence was announced, government authorities have ordered the rape victim’s lawyer, a well-known human rights activist named Abdulrahman Al-Lahem, to stop talking to the news media, and have also put gag orders on the victim and her husband.

The Saudi Ministry of Justice and two prominent Saudi judges have lashed out against the victim, suggesting that she was engaged in immoral behavior at the time of the assault.

The Justice Ministry published two statements on its Web site on Nov. 20 and 24, 2007, alleging that the rape victim had confessed to engaging in illicit acts and was undressed in a car prior to the rape.

Mr. Lahem, the woman’s lawyer, denied these accusations and said that neither she or her male friend had ever confessed to any such acts. The lawyer is now suing the Saudi Ministry of Information and Culture for having distributed the Justice Ministry’s statements to the news media through the state-run Saudi Press Agency.

“The Saudi Ministry of Justice should immediately stop publishing statements aimed at damaging the reputation of a young Saudi rape victim who spoke out publicly about her ordeal and her efforts to find justice,” New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement on Nov. 29.

The ministry released its statements after the doubling of the rape victim’s punishment by a Qatif court on Nov. 14 for having been illegally alone with an unrelated male just before the rape happened, from 90 lashes to 200 lashes and six months in jail.

But the ministry stopped short of accusing the rape victim of adultery, or “zina” in Arabic, which could carry the death penalty, with the man that she met in his car on the night of the rape in 2006. Mr. Al-Lahem has complained that the judges in the case appear to base their conclusions about the events on the night of the rape on testimony of the seven rapists, who have been sentenced to five to seven years in jail.

Under Islamic law, two people can be accused of adultery only if they are caught in the actual act of penetration by four male witnesses of good character.

“The Ministry of Justice’s response to criticism of its unjust verdict has been appalling,” said Farida Deif, a researcher in the women’s rights division of Human Rights Watch. “First, they attempted to silence this young woman, and now they’re trying to demonize her in the eyes of the Saudi public.”

A Saudi judge, Ibrahim bin Salih Al-Khudairi of the Riyadh Appeals Court, said in an interview published in Okaz newspaper on Nov. 27 that if he were a judge in the Qatif court that he would have sentenced her, her male companion and the seven rapists to death and that they should be lucky that they did not get the death penalty.

The woman from Qatif met with an Associated Press reporter in November, before the court ordered her and her lawyer to stop talking to reporters. She has trouble sleeping, her hands tremble, and she described the sentence against her as a “big shock,” The Associated Press reported.

The Human Rights Watch researcher, Ms. Deif interviewed the woman from Qatif in December 2006. The testimony she gathered directly contradicts the narrative of events being put forward by Saudi justice officials.

In her testimony to the human rights group, the woman said she had given a photo of herself to a high school classmate. Years later, when she was 19 and engaged to another man, she asked for the photo back. She agreed to meet him in his car in downtown Qatif. Another car blocked their path when they were 15 minutes from her house, she said.

“Two people got out of their car and stood on either side of our car. The man on my side had a knife,” she said. “I screamed.”

She and her companion were taken to an isolated building in the working-class Awwamiyah neighborhood of Al-Qatif where they were both raped repeatedly by seven men over several hours.

The Qatif girl said that she was photographed during the rape by one of the men using his cell phone camera. The photos were later entered as evidence in the trial, but the judges refused to consider them.

The husband of Qatif girl, who also refuses to be identified publicly, found out about his wife’s rape only four months after it happened when the rapists were bragging about it in Qatif. He has not divorced her, which he could under Saudi law, instead choosing to help her fight her case in Saudi courts.

But he, too, has found the Saudi legal system reluctant to help a woman that it considers to be responsible for her own fate because of what it views as her fatal flaw of having gone out alone with an unrelated male.

Although she and her husband are technically married under Islamic law, they are still not living together because they have not had their wedding party yet.

A high school student when the rape occurred, Qatif girl has now stopped her studies. Qatif is a small town, and the identities of the rape victims are known locally.

Mr. Lahem has had trouble handling the Qatif girl’s case from the beginning. He got into several arguments with the three judges who originally handled the trial, and has since had his license suspended for “disrespecting” the court after he supposedly raised his voice in court. He faces a disciplinary hearing before a committee of the Ministry of Justice in Riyadh on Dec. 5.

Neither he nor the husband of the victim have been given a copy of the verdict despite repeated requests for it, which has delayed the filing of the appeal.

Yet a copy of it was apparently leaked to a conservative Saudi Web site called Alsaha (www.alsaha.com), according to Human Rights Watch.

Several Saudi human rights groups said that they were looking into various aspects of the case, but most are too afraid to get involved while the case is still in the courts.

Mr. Lahem said that he initially did not want to make waves about the Qatif girl’s case but that the doubling of her punishment in November forced him to go public. He said that he had hoped to keep things quiet and then apply for a royal pardon from King Abdullah, who has pardoned jailed convicted human rights activists in the past.

Mr. Alyami believes that this will still happen in the case of the Qatif girl.

“The international condemnation of this arbitrary and barbaric decision will force the king to pardon the woman or drastically reduce her prison sentence,” he said. “There will be no flogging.”

But Bander Alnogaithan, a Saudi who finished Harvard Law School, and lives in Boston, said he was sure her increased punishment would be overturned by a higher court because of a series of errors committed by the lower courts.

Judges violated a basic tenet of Islamic law which prevents harming anyone who files an appeal, an error that Mr. Alnogaithan said reflected the poor quality of the religious judges.

“We can’t blame the judges for not knowing the law, as they are picked from Shariah colleges where they mainly focus on general Islamic legal thought and history and don’t study ‘manmade’ laws,” he said.

November 7, 2007
Turkish-Bred Prosperity Makes War Less Likely in Iraqi Kurdistan

By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
DOHUK, Iraq, Nov. 6 — Viewed from the outside, Iraqi Kurdistan looks close to war. Tens of thousands of Turkish troops are amassed on the border. And thousands of Iraqi Kurdish pesh merga fighters have taken up positions in the Mateen Mountains, ready for a counterattack, their local commanders say, should any Turkish operation hit civilians.

But wander the markets and byways here and a different reality comes into view, helping to explain why, despite bellicose Turkish threats, an all-out armed conflict may be less likely than is widely understood: the growing prosperity of this region is largely Turkish in origin.

In other words, while Turkey has been traditionally wary of the Kurds of Iraq, it is heavily invested here, an offshoot of its own rising wealth. Iraqi Kurdistan is also a robust export market for Turkish farmers and factory owners, who would suffer if that trade were curtailed.

Moreover, the Kurds’ longstanding fear of dominance by other powers now seems to be colliding with modest yet growing material comfort for some urban Kurds that was unthinkable not long ago, and has come on the back of Turkish investment, consumer goods and engineering expertise.

About 80 percent of foreign investment in Kurdistan now comes from Turkey. In Dohuk, the largest city in northwestern Kurdistan, the seven largest infrastructure and investment projects are being built by Turkish construction companies, said Naji Saeed, a Kurdish government engineer who is overseeing one project, a 187-room luxury hotel with a $25 million price.

Some of the projects, including overpasses, a museum and the hotel, are financed or owned by the Kurdistan Regional Government, Mr. Saeed said, underscoring the direct financial partnership. Turkish investors are also building three large housing projects, including a $400 million venture that will feature 1,800 apartments as well as a health clinic, school, gas station and shopping center.

At the construction site for a 15-story office building in central Dohuk, all of the engineers and managers are Turkish, as are dozens of laborers. “There are not any Kurdish engineers for a big project like this,” Ahmed Shahin, the Turkish engineering manager, said.

Since the American invasion four years ago, Dohuk has had a burst of consumerism, also thanks largely to Turkey. At the upscale Mazi Supermarket, rows and rows of Turkish-made glassware, shoes, cleaning supplies, beauty products and frozen chickens are for sale. Sixty percent of Mazi’s products are from Turkey, Sherwan Jamil, a store manager, said. Many other products are imported through the Turkish border crossing at Zakho.

“Turkish things are the best, better than Syria and Iran,” said Shamiran Eshkery, 34, as she shopped for shoes. “We don’t have any problem with Turkish food and clothing, but we are upset because we don’t want to fight.”

Indications are growing that Turkish officials do not want a large battle, either. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggested in Washington this week that military operations in Iraq would be narrowly concentrated on guerrillas from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., who use the jagged mountain border frontier as a haven after attacks in Turkey.

“We have taken the decision to pursue an operation,” Mr. Erdogan said Monday through an interpreter at the National Press Club. “We are not seeking war,” he added, but offered no specifics or timing.

His battle is largely one of perception, trying to convince the Turkish public that he is acting against the Kurdish guerrillas and that he has United States support to do so. But most analysts in Turkey expect any attack to be limited. Whatever the case, Mr. Erdogan’s visit seemed to satisfy the Turkish public. Daily newspapers on Tuesday shouted headlines like, “Green Light to the Operation.” Hard-line nationalists expressed disappointment, but on talk shows, most seemed to welcome the result.

“People are probably giving the government the benefit of the doubt at the moment,” said Ilter Turan, a political science professor at Istanbul Bilgi University. “Most are relieved that no major operation will start on Iraq.”

But if a large attack were to occur, Turkish soldiers would encounter thousands of Kurdish pesh merga fighters who have formed a loose sort of Maginot defensive line that parallels the Turkish border along the ridges of the Mateen Mountains. Kurdish leaders speak only generally about repelling an invasion, but political and military commanders here have specific instructions: Attacks on civilian villages will draw a fierce counterattack.

“If the civilians face any problems, that is our 100 percent red line,” Muhammad Muhsen, a regional leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party office in Amedi, said in a recent interview, before Kurdish authorities prohibited local commanders from discussing the conflict with Turkey. Amedi anchors a large border region where fighters are camped on south-facing slopes as trucks bring pesh merga and weapons up curvy roads.

Mr. Muhsen expressed a common fear among Kurdish commanders, that the Turkish military wants to use recent guerrilla attacks as an excuse to damage the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq. “Turkey doesn’t even want to say the name Kurdistan,” he said. “How would it ever accept Kurdistan as an independent nation?”

Yet years of fighting the P.K.K., have made for strange bedfellows, especially in Bamarni, a village north of Dohuk. In the mid-1990s the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the dominant power in western Kurdistan, allowed the Turkish military to occupy several bases on the Iraqi side of the border, when both were fighting the P.K.K. The Turks now have about 1,500 soldiers at these bases, said a senior American military official in Baghdad who was not authorized to speak for the record.

In Bamarni, Kurdish pesh merga fighters are now stationed at a camp beside a Turkish air base that is home to dozens of tanks and armored vehicles. Turkish soldiers routinely dash out in gun trucks to deliver food to soldiers operating tanks that oversee the air base. They also buy supplies at local shops, said Ahmed Saeed, a local political official at a Kurdish outpost nearby.

“They have no obstacles to going to the market,” said Mr. Saeed, who estimated that as many as 400 Turkish soldiers and 50 tanks were at the base. The pesh merga never have problems with the soldiers, he said. But if heavy fighting breaks out he is not sure what to expect. “If they surrender themselves to us, then we will not kill them, because we are peaceful,” he said.

Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting from Istanbul, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Iraqi Kurdistan.

Murtha finds military progress in trip to Iraq
Warns that Iraqis must do more for their own security
Thursday, November 29, 2007
By Jerome L. Sherman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
WASHINGTON - U.S. Rep. John Murtha today said he saw signs of military progress during a brief trip to Iraq last week, but he warned that Iraqis need to play a larger role in providing their own security and the Bush administration still must develop an exit strategy.

"I think the 'surge' is working," the Democrat said in a videoconference from his Johnstown office, describing the president's decision to commit more than 20,000 additional combat troops this year. But the Iraqis "have got to take care of themselves."

Violence has dropped significantly in recent months, but Mr. Murtha said he was most encouraged by changes in the once-volatile Anbar province, where locals have started working closely with U.S. forces to isolate insurgents linked to Al Qaeda.

He said Iraqis need to duplicate that success at the national level, but the central government in Baghdad is "dysfunctional."

Mr. Murtha's four day-trip took him to a Thanksgiving dinner with troops in Kuwait last Thursday, and he then made stops in Iraq, Turkey and Belgium.

November 30, 2007
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Wounds of the Revolution

By DAVID BROOKS
BEIJING

During the 20th century, hell descended on many nations, and each one seems to recover in its own way. This is the story of one man’s recovery, and a glimpse into the rise of modern China:

Edward Tian was 3 years old when Mao Tse-tung launched the Cultural Revolution. His parents, ecologists who had been educated in the Soviet Union, were deported to rural backwaters. A mob invaded his home and burned his family’s books. He was separated from his sister and was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in the industrial city of Shenyang.

His grandmother was a terrifying yet fiercely devoted woman, whose child-rearing philosophy was summed up by her motto: “Do not smile until the children are in bed.”

Tian remembers being furious with his parents during their 11 years of separation: “I was very angry. Why didn’t they take care of me? I didn’t have a good relationship with my parents again until my own children were born.” Meanwhile, he was studying Marxism at school and dreaming of becoming a soldier for the revolution.

His grandmother persuaded him not to go into the military, but to continue his studies. In 1981, he enrolled in Liaoning University, and after graduation he sent out letters to American universities in hopes of getting a scholarship somewhere.

Texas Tech offered him one, and Tian, under the impression that Lubbock, Tex., was near New York, accepted. “The first plane ride of my life was the flight from Beijing to San Francisco, then I flew to Dallas where the airport was huge. I was so scared.”

He felt obliged to continue in his parents’ footsteps and study ecology, so the boy from Shenyang ended up getting a Ph.D. in Texas ranch management. He spent five years driving around local ranches. His dissertation was a statistical model of the spread of bromegrass weeds, which was read, after years of work, by 10 people.

But at Texas Tech he did have access to a Macintosh computer. “During breaks I had no family and no friends around, so I’d play with it. It planted a seed in my heart.”

By the early 1990s, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms were beginning to transform China, the Internet was beginning to transform the world and Tian seized the historical moment. He and a Chinese friend from Dallas founded AsiaInfo Holdings to bring Internet technology back home. Within three years, he had 320 employees and revenues of $45 million a year.

In 1999, the Chinese government created a new company, China Netcom Group, to compete with China Telecom in bringing broadband to China. Tian was asked to become chief executive, and he accepted. The ranch researcher from Lubbock ended up with 230,000 people working for him.

But the Cultural Revolution still lurks in the mental shadows. “Insecurity is a very important thought in my head,” he says. He now works with business luminaries like Henry Kravis, and observes: “Henry Kravis doesn’t need to prove himself. Because I’m Chinese, I need to prove I can do that. I can travel faster and learn more.”

Recently, he was the keynote speaker at a conference in Malaysia and arrived late and hungry to a buffet dinner. He went to the buffet table, piled his plate with rice and began furiously shoveling it into his mouth. A friend said he was embarrassing his fellow Chinese by behaving like a peasant. “I had to think about why I was behaving like that.”

Meanwhile, the prodding from home continues. On a trip to Japan, he called his grandmother, who is now 92, and told her that despite what she had suffered during the Japanese occupation, he was now standing in a beautiful Japanese park. She responded: “Why are you sightseeing? You should be hard at work.”

Tired of the bureaucracy, Tian resigned from Netcom and has founded China Broadband Capital. It funds firms that are using cellphones as the next information technology platform, and it owns part of MySpace China. He sits alone in a beautiful office in the middle of the park where the Qing Dynasty emperors came to worship the sun. His office was the emperor’s dressing room.

With his lingering insecurity, with his fierce determination to prove and reprove himself, he is in some ways typical of the Cultural Revolution generation elite. But he is also a cultured man, and in that he is atypical. The Cultural Revolution swept away much of the old Chinese culture. It was followed by the wave of commercialism and materialism. Dignity is now defined by money and French and Italian luxury goods.

The spiritual vacuum left by the Cultural Revolution has yet to be filled. Some set of values — good or bad — will eventually fill it, and at that point, the final aftershock of the hell will be finally felt.

November 30, 2007
Iraq Lacks Plan on the Return of Refugees, Military Says

By MICHAEL R. GORDON and STEPHEN FARRELL
BAGHDAD, Nov. 29 — As Iraqi refugees begin to stream back to Baghdad, American military officials say the Iraqi government has yet to develop a plan to absorb the influx and prevent it from setting off a new round of sectarian violence.

The Iraqi government lacks a mechanism to settle property disputes if former residents return to Baghdad only to find that their homes are occupied, the officials said. Nor is it clear whether Iraqi authorities will be able to provide aid, shelter and other essential services to the thousands of Iraqis who might return. American commanders caution that if the return is not carefully managed, there is a risk of undermining the recent security gains.

“All these guys coming back are probably going to find somebody else living in their house,” said Col. William Rapp, a senior aide to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, speaking at a two-day military briefing on measuring military trends for a small group of American reporters in Baghdad.

“We have been asking, pleading with the government of Iraq to come up with a policy so it is not put upon our battalion commanders and the I.S.F. battalion commanders to figure it out on the ground,” he added, referring to the American and Iraqi security force commanders.

When sectarian violence soared in 2006, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fled to Syria and Jordan, or moved to safer areas in Iraq. But now that the American troop reinforcement plan and a new counterinsurgency strategy have helped reverse a rising tide of car bombings and sectarian killings, there are signs that Iraqis are starting to return.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has hailed the development as an indication that security is beginning to improve. As if to underscore Mr. Maliki’s point, 375 Iraqi refugees arrived Thursday in a convoy of buses from Damascus, Syria, escorted by heavily armed policemen. After the lengthy journey, the tired Iraqis were ushered into the white marble affluence of the Mansour Melia Hotel in Baghdad to receive a promised government payout to people returning to the capital.

Many neighborhoods in Baghdad have become largely Shiite or Sunni, as one group drove the other out in calculated sectarian cleansing. Sunnis have moved into Shiite homes, and Shiites into Sunni ones. This segregation has contributed to the decline in violence. But what would happen if the original residents insisted on moving back into their homes?

Ahmad Chalabi, a Shiite politician and former Iraqi exile who made common cause with the Americans against Saddam Hussein, has been charged with developing a plan to provide services.

American officers discussed estimates of the displaced Iraqis at a seminar here on the military’s system for measuring trends in Iraq held at Camp Victory.

Recent American military data indicates that for the fourth week in a row, the nationwide number weekly number of attacks is at its lowest level since January 2006. The number of civilians killed, as measured by the American and Iraqi governments, continued to decline in November. The number of weekly casualties, wounded as well as killed, suffered by Iraqi civilians, Iraqi forces and American forces, increased last week by 56 percent but was still below the level for most of 2006 and 2007.

The military also lowered its tally of how many Iraqis have joined local neighborhood watch groups. . The new figure for “Concerned Local Citizens,” as the military calls the volunteers, is 60,321. The previous estimate of 77,000 erroneously combined the number of volunteers who are currently serving with those who expressed a willingness to join.

Military officials said that they were seeking to make greater use of some Iraqi government data to provide a more comprehensive portrayal of the situation in Iraq. Though there are concerns about the reliability of some Iraqi reports, American military data generally understates Iraqi civilian deaths, since American units only report what they observe, officials said. At General Petraeus’s recommendation, the Pentagon is expected for the first time to include the Iraqi government data on civilian deaths in its report next month on security trends in Iraq.

While there is no question that large numbers of Iraqis have left their homes, American officials said they could not give an exact number. The International Organization for Migration has reported that the number of internally “displaced” Iraqis — those who have fled their homes but still live in Iraq — has grown to more than one million since the February 2006 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra. Among those displaced Iraqis, more than 350,000 live in Baghdad Province, according to estimates by humanitarian organizations.

Estimates by the Iraqi Red Crescent of the number of displaced Iraqis run much higher, but are marred by the double and triple counting of Iraqis who move from one area to another, American officials say. One difficulty in fixing an accurate count is that many displaced Iraqis do not register their migrant status with Iraqi authorities, American officials said.

In addition, more than two million Iraqis are also estimated to have left Iraq altogether for neighboring counties like Syria and Jordan and other nations.

Col. Cheryl L. Smart, who tracks the data on displaced Iraqis for General Petraeus’s command, said that the American military had been “very vocal” with the Iraqi government about the need to establish a system to adjudicate claims about property rights and to avoid using Iraqi troops to carry out “forced evictions.”

Colonel Rapp voiced the hope that confrontations might be avoided by building new homes for returning Iraqis instead of forcing all of the squatters to leave. “It is probably going to be resolved with new housing construction as opposed to wholesale evictions and resettlements,” he said.

“Whether they will remix is probably a multiyear, decade kind of issue,” he added, referring to the possibility of sectarian reintegration.

“The immediate return of I.D.P.’s will create tensions in that system, and we are concerned about it,” he said, referring to the internally displaced people in Iraq.

A senior Sunni official said that the government was not doing nearly enough. “There are many missing links,” said Iraq’s vice president, Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni. “We don’t have a comprehensive plan. We have a ministry of migration, but the problem is the bureaucracy.”

Speaking at his home in the Huriya neighborhood in northwest Baghdad, Mr. Chalabi said he was aware of the issue of returnees’ lingering fears. “I don’t think that people who have committed crimes or transgressions against their fellows in those areas would come back,” Mr. Chalabi said. “But the fear of, for example, the Sunnis here, is that the people who did the transgressions on the other side continue to be here and that they may threaten them.”

He said that he had put forward proposals for large-scale new housing developments, but that they should not be on a sectarian basis. “Baghdad is an integrated city and we should try to get it back to an integrated city,” he said.

Col. J. B. Burton, commander of the Second Brigade Combat Team of the First Infantry Division, which controlled northwest Baghdad until this month, said that some neighborhood leaders had made efforts to allow displaced Iraqis to return to their residences, but that their programs were hampered by the lack of a national plan.

“Displacement is a national issue,” Colonel Burton said Thursday in an e-mail exchange. “The government has got to establish policies which are not focused on sects.”

Most of the Iraqis who returned to the Mansour Melia Hotel on Thursday said they were returning voluntarily after hearing reports that the security situation had improved, but some said they had been forced to return because they had no jobs or money in Syria.

Some said their houses were long ago destroyed by Shiite militias or Sunni insurgents, or still occupied by people on the other side of the sectarian divide. Others said that it was still too unsafe to go back to areas like Dora, Jihad and Mansour, and that they would have to stay with relatives.

Abdul Kadim Mohammed, 58, a Shiite from Abu Ghraib, said he would be staying with relatives for now. “I feel more comfortable in Baghdad but still can’t go to Abu Ghraib which is not completely good,” he said. “The next step that the government needs to work on is how to get back to our homes.”

Reporting was contributed by Alissa J. Rubin, Damian Cave, Mudhafer al-Hussaini and Ahmad Fadam.