Article

Journal of Planning History

2020, Vol. 19(1) 52-68
ª 2019 The Author(s)
Urban Unplanning: How Violence, Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Walls, and Segregation Destroyed DOI: 10.1177/1538513219830106
journals.sagepub.com/home/jph
the Urban Fabric of Baghdad
Michael M. R. Izady1

Abstract
Baghdad was formerly a relatively well-planned and thriving city, serving as home to a multitude of
intertwined ethnoreligious groups. As a result of the American-led invasion, and five years of urban
civil war that followed, the city was segregated along ethnic lines. The effects of comprehensive wall
building to segregate the warring urban neighborhood have altered the very fabric of the city and
have undone the earlier rational urban planning. Contemporary Baghdad shares much with cities like
Belfast that have been physically divided due to civil unrest. The author visited Baghdad a number of
times following the 2003 invasion, collecting data personally or through hired informants.

Keywords
Asia, regions, race relations, social issues, segregation, urban design, planning practice, master plans,
neighborhoods, places, postwar planning, planning eras/approaches

Baghdad grew to become one of most populous cities in the world after obtaining the status of a
newly built capital of the Islamic Caliphate in the eighth century. The city benefited from ample and
well-developed water-based transportation (rivers and canals), the proximity to rich farmlands, and
raw material, which facilitated the expansion. A location astride the world’s land commercial artery,
the Silk Road, was a further bonus. The original city was built in AD 762 on the time-honored
Persian “cartwheel” urban design, on the west bank of the Tigris below modern Kadhimain (Kad-
himiyya). Baghdad’s original geometric design is reflected in satellite images of the archeological
remains of Gur/Firuzabad and Darabgird in Iran.1 The round city, however, was quickly over-
whelmed by the influx of people, and the residential areas spilled out toward the riverbanks and
then over it onto the east bank. The city nonetheless maintained its orderly design and straight street
pattern during the Caliphal time. This was not a unique phenomenon, as this orderliness of street
patterns is common among the medieval Islamic cities that have been excavated in modern times,
from Gurgan to Heart, from Samarra to Siraf.

1
New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:
Michael M. R. Izady, New York Institute of Technology, 16 West 61st Street, Suite 811, Manhattan, NY 10023, USA.
Email: mizady@nyit.edu
Izady 53

But even this expansion proved insufficient for the taste of the caliphs. The rapid expansion and
crowdedness of Baghdad prompted a temporary relocation of the capital to Samarra in 836 AD—a
geometrically designed city, built from scratch—approximately one hundred miles to the north,
before returning to Baghdad in two generations’ time in AD 892.
After the fall of the caliphate in 1253, the city began a long decline. By the end of the eighteenth
century, Baghdad had only around 10,000 inhabitants, a plurality, if not a majority of them being
impoverished “Babylonian” Jews.2 Before the takeover of the city by the British in 1917, the last
Ottoman census for Baghdad had counted about 80,000 Jews in the total population of 202,000.
They formed the single largest ethnoreligious group in the city.3 The remainder included the Sunni
and Shia Arabs, the Christians, Kurds, Persians, and others.4 The British administration of the
Mandate of Iraq still registered the Jews of the city to be the single largest ethnoreligious group in
1922.5 They occupied bustling and rather well to do neighborhoods at Hennouni, Shorja, Suq
al-Ghazal, Suq al-Jadid, and the affluent waterfront of the district of Karrada—all in present
downtown Baghdad.
Modern Baghdad began its steady expansion and prosperity with the creation of the contemporary
state of Iraq by the British in 1921. The city has grown now to house about seven million people,
primarily Shia Arabs, but also other ethnic and religious groups to include the Sunni Arabs, Kurds,
Christians of various denominations, Iranians of various ilk, but also many others.
Contemporary metropolitan Baghdad is the result of the merger of four separate towns: Kadhi-
main—a primary Shia shrine town, A’adhamia—a primary Sunni shrine town, Karkh (the medieval
imperial round city, currently serving as the Government’s institutional headquarters), and the
Baghdad proper (present downtown area primarily, on the east bank of the Tigris). Except for
Kadhimain, the other three were primarily Sunni towns. There were periods of time when the Jews
formed the plurality of the inhabitants in Baghdad proper, for instance, from 1750s to 1920s.
Otherwise, Baghdad was known as a Sunni Arab town into the 1960s.
Baghdad has experienced two distinct episodes of ethnic cleansing, although the first episode—
the Jewish expulsion—did not entail a spatial segregation. The first episode began with the Farhoud
(“pogrom”) of 1941 against the large and historic Babylonian Jewish population of the city. The
relocation of a Palestinian religious leader and many influential elite to Baghdad at this time,
coupled with the anti-British sentiments of the Iraqis and the anti-Semitic sentiments of the Pales-
tinian (fanned by the European Nazis’ ideology and actions), added more fuel to the existing flames
of discord. Following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Baghdadi Jews realized that
continuing to live in Iraq was untenable. By 1953, a vast majority of them had emigrated. A total
eviction followed the 1967 Arab–Israeli war. Sunni Arab settlers and businessmen claimed Jewish
homes, business, and city districts.
The cordial relationship between the monarchical Iraq and Iran made a quick roundabout fol-
lowing the violent takeover of the government in Baghdad by successive Sunni Arab military juntas
that culminated in the reign of Saddam Hussein by the onset of the bloody Iraq–Iran war of 1980–
1988. From 1964 to 1980, nearly two million Iraqis of Iranian background were expelled from the
country. In the complete absence of any official data, an educated guess can be made that around a
fifth of these may have been originating from the Baghdad metropolitan area.
Following the Iraqi economic boom fed by the massive influx of petrodollars of the post-1973
Arab oil embargo crisis, the ethnic and class makeup of the city changed once again—and quite
rapidly. This coincided with the period of rule by the Sunni Arab president-for-life, Saddam Hussein
and his Ba’ath political clique. During his dominance of political power in Iraq (1968–2003),
Baghdad expanded exponentially with millions of settlers from the countryside and smaller towns
moving in. They were looking for jobs, better education, and health care but also an opportunity for
upward mobility. Naturally, not many of them succeeded. Among the Shia, the anger over the
54 Journal of Planning History 19(1)

inequitable conditions was directed at the Sunni Arab minority and their privileged status under
Saddam Hussein’s government.
The poor Shia multitude from the south created the sprawling slums of Baghdad in the east (al-
Thawra [“The Revolution”], renamed Saddam City in the 1980s, and then Sadr City after 2003
[named after the Shia revered cleric, Ayatollah Sadr]), southeast (the districts of Za’farania and New
Baghdad/Nisan), as well as many districts to the west and southwest of the city such as Ghartan,
Shu’la, and Ghazzalia. By 2003, Sadr City slums housed about 40 percent of the entire population of
the city, although it covered no more than 15 percent of its urban surface. The population composi-
tion was and remains entirely Shia. The disillusioned Shia settlers in Baghdad, particularly those in
Saddam/Sadr City, proved to be a reliable source of militancy against Saddam’s regime, whose
favors were unmistakably directed toward the fellow Arab Sunnis, thus planting the early seeds of
murderous animosity between the two communities.
Baghdad under Saddam Hussein was largely remade to have wider, straight streets, wide avenues,
and many boulevards, particularly along the Tigris River that cut through the downtown areas where
business was centered. Even Saddam/Sadr City was properly planned with gridiron streets and
municipal piped water and electricity although not always to each housing unit. It was a matter
of prestige for the government, namely, to avoid having one or more shantytowns in the capital city.
Nonetheless, Saddam/Sadr City was certainly (and still largely is) a veritable slum. Meanwhile, the
population of the city boomed as the flood of settlers from the countryside became a deluge.
Population of Baghdad by Years.

1900 0.145 million

1950 0.580 million
1977 3.19 million
1987 3.84 million
1997 5.42 million
2001 4.95 million
2006 6.55 million
2011 7.05 million
2015 7.22 million

Naturally, no walls divided any of the slums from the rest of the prospering city. Economy, not
ethnoreligious identity, was the denominator of where one lived in pre-2006 Baghdad. One could
easily move from one neighborhood to the other as long as he or she could afford the rent or the
purchasing prices. A relevant and crucial point to bear in mind is the persistent belief among the
relatively smallish Sunni Arab minority that in fact they formed the majority of the population, not
just in Baghdad but also in Iraq at large.6 While the first assumption was true into the early 1960s
(excluding the satellite town of Kadhimain), the latter was an empty propaganda promoted vigor-
ously by successive Sunni Arab governments of Iraq since independence in 1921.
This untenable claim of demographic dominance also emanated from multiple sources. The
misrepresentation side, for instance, went on to shuffle, under the same rubric of “Sunni,” the Kurds
(about 21 percent of the country’s total) with the Sunni Arabs (about 19 percent of the total).7 While
this is religiously largely accurate (most Kurds are Sunni Muslims but follow the Shafi’i rite, while
the Arab Sunnis follow Hanafism), ethnically and psychologically it is the farthest thing from the
truth. Since the advent of the state of Iraq where the British set the Sunni Arab minority in charge of
the military and hence the country, Kurds have been at war with that state.8 To shuffle in the Kurds
along with the Sunni Arabs as one group sharing identity or sympathy speaks of purposeful manip-
ulation and propaganda, if not utter ignorance. The Kurds shall sooner side with the Shia (with whom
they share a history of persecution at the hands of the Sunni Arab minority) than with their
Izady 55

oppressors. The Kurds indeed stayed close to the Shia during and after the liberation of Iraq in 2003
to form together a block of about 80 percent of the total population and have kept their peace while
Baghdad was actively getting rid of its Sunni Arab population during and after the civil war to the
present.
The real demographics, moreover, soon came to haunt Iraqi Sunnis, when they realized their
smallness of numbers in the city as well as the country. In reality, the evolving breakdown of ethnic/
group identity of masses in Iraq stood as follow in 2015:
Group Totals for 2015.

Shia Arab 19,705,924

Kurd 6,707,825
Sunni Arab 4,538,818
Turkoman 856,301
Christian 380,075
Others 375,000

As the graphs and charts in Figure 1 clearly present that at no point in the short history of the state
of Iraq have the Sunni Arabs measured over one-fifth of the total population of the country. They did
in fact form a majority in the city of Baghdad for several decades before the mid-1960s,9 but never in
the country as a whole.10
To remedy this unpleasant demographic reality, the Iraqi Sunni elite ushered into their midst
thousands of Sunni Arab fighters and then the bona fide terrorists from 2004 onward. This was
presumably in the hope of restoring the Sunni Arab minority back into power in Iraq.11 This
miscalculation, however, proved to be their downfall. Daily murderous attacks on the Shia civilians
were carried out by individuals: suicide bombers (carried on by the person driving bomb-laden
vehicles into crowds of people and/or placing IEDs—the roadside bombs) killed hundreds of
Baghdad’s residents daily, nearly all of them Shia Arabs or Christians (Figure 2).12
The desire of the Shia youths for revenge and restoration of their “honor” was effectively
hampered by their religious leaders’ strict order of abstention in fear of a civil war. The Sunni
Arabs and their terrorist foreign guests interpreted this as pusillanimity and “spinelessness,” not
forbearance. They genuinely believed that the Shia would soon return to their rightful place of
servitude by the Sunni-inspired sustained attacks on the Shia civilians and the destruction of their
sacred spaces. This proved to be a gross and lethal miscalculation following the events of February
2006 in Samarra.

Advent of Violent Urban Segregation and Ethnic Cleansing

The trigger, although not the cause, for the advent of the civil war that was fought largely in Baghdad
can be traced to a single wanton act of destruction, most likely in the hands of the international
terrorists invited into Iraq by the former military and political Sunni elite. When one of the holiest
shrines in all of the Shia world, the Askaria shrine in the town of Samarra, north of Baghdad, was
bombed on February 22, 2006, a bloody civil war broke out in the country and in Baghdad. Breaking
ranks, many young and vengeful Shias took up arms against civilian and combatant Sunni Arabs
alike, many of whom were still tactlessly and gleefully feting the local and international terrorists
who stayed busy in their daily murderous attacks on the Shia civilians in Baghdad and beyond.
The bombing of the holy Shia shrine in Samarra ended any forbearance on the side of the Shia
youths. Following the call for revenge by the young but prestigious cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia
armed men came out in their tens of thousands under the umbrella name of the “Mahdi Army”
(loosely, the “Army of the Messiah”) to let the Sunni taste their own medicine, by systematically and
56 Journal of Planning History 19(1)

Figure 1. Ethnoreligious composition of Baghdad by year. Percentages on the bottom-right chart, depicting the
actual ethnic breakdown of Iraq, are based on Iraqi government district-level population estimates for 2014. On
the bottom left,” the official figures are adjusted to reflect the massive emigration—largely Sunni Arab—from
the country to the end of 2015. Source: M. Izady, Atlas of the Islamic World and Vicinity (Columbia University,
2006), II.A.21, segments. http://gulf2000.columbia.edu/images/maps/Iraq_Ethnic_Shift_1947-2017_lg.png.

persistently attacking the Sunni civilians, their places of worship, their households, and their busi-
nesses. A bloody civil war had finally broken out. Around a thousand people were killed daily in the
melee during the heydays of the civil war—March to July 2006.13
Increasing number of people in Baghdad reported they had seen ethnic cleansing in their neigh-
borhood or been victims of it (31 percent in Baghdad), and an even larger number had left their
neighborhoods by the end of 2007 to avoid violence and/or persecution. This included 26 percent of
the Sunnis and 35 percent of the Shia, as reflected in Figure 3. In less than one year, the Shia militia
had ethnically cleansed much of the city of Baghdad of its Sunni residents, forcing them into a few
small areas of the city. The cutting off of the Sunni Arab elements from political and economic
power structure in Iraq at large and Baghdad in particular, has led to a lasting sense of discontent
among the now-disinherited Sunni.14 It also engendered a new round of civil war in the country. In
Izady 57

Figure 2. Baghdad’s ethnic neighborhoods in 2003 on the eve of the US-led invasion. Source: Paul Schenmm, “In
Iraq, and Exodus of Christians,” AP, May 14, 2009; Izady, Atlas, II.A.3. http://gulf2000.columbia.edu/images/maps/
Baghdad_Ethnic_2003_lg.jpg.

Figure 3. Ethnic displacement, ABC News/USA Today the BBC/ARD poll.

58 Journal of Planning History 19(1)

2014, the Sunni supplemented their numerical inferiority by inviting in foreign warriors, then the
violent terrorists. The extremist Wahhabi/Salafi ISIS (the so-called, “Islamic State of Iraq and
Syria”, later change to ISIL and finally IS, but known with its Arabic name “Daesh” to the locals)
thus brought in, proved to be a wild ally to the Sunni, as ISIS harmed and murdered anyone who did
not fully accept their extremist Salafi ideology, be they Shia, Sunni, Christian or Yezidi.
By the start of 2007, some Sunni Arab tribal leaders were seeing the handwriting on the wall,
portending of their eclipse, if not demise. To stem that, they realized that a cooperation with the Shia
government in Baghdad and the Coalition/Americans to be the only rational course of action. Thus,
they scrambled for a compromise and rejected the bankrupt policy of intransigence espoused by the
surviving functionaries and propagandists of the old regime. Thus was created among the Sunni
Arabs the sahwa or “awakening” movement, awakening to the bitter fact that with an American
departure and without a power-sharing deal put into writing by them, the new vengeful Shia power in
Baghdad would completely sideline them, if not worse.15 Approximately 85,000 people, most of
them Sunni Arabs, had already been killed in the city during the civil war.16

Walls of Segregation, Walls of Defense

As early as 2005, the Coalition forces were building some blast walls along the main highways and
those more commonly used by their forces in Baghdad. Until 2006 and the advent of the full-fledged
civil war, these walls were simple defensive blast walls, built of three types of concrete blocks to
prevent the ubiquitous “roadside bombs” (IEDs) and the easy ambush of the Coalition convoys and
vehicles by the insurgents. Some Iraqi government officials involved in the process actually believed
that security could be had without constructing walls that would ultimately segregate the city
permanently.17 Their idea was to create more and more checkpoints—stopping the vehicles and
inspecting them and their passengers for instruments of violence. The outcome was more blast walls
with checkpoints! Driving through Baghdad’s well-designed modern freeways became an exercise
in futility as there were few exits/entrances left open, and the checkpoints could take hours to get
through. More and more of the checkpoints kept popping up in the freeways, then highways, and
finally boulevards and primary streets. Modern transportation had ceased its function as traffic was
reduced to a crawl by the end of 2008.
After 2009, many of the checkpoints eventually melted away along with the blast walls,
particularly at the intersections, only to go back up in 2014 with the advent of a new round of
terrorism, suicide bombings, and attacks via bomb-laden vehicles. Officials recognized that dis-
mantling the walls and checkpoints, without resolving the fundamental sectarian divisions,
encouraged terrorism. To facilitate traffic and commerce, officials began building new roads and
expanding others to serve only specific neighborhoods: the city is fundamentally dividing itself
into two, each serving a different ethnoreligious group. As an example, prior to 2003 all traffic to
Kadhimain (in northwest Baghdad) from the Shia-inhabitted northeastern parts of the city, had to
pass through Sunni-dominated A’adhamia and over the only bridge on the Tigris in northern
Baghdad. Not anymore. A new (pontoon) bridge directly connecting Ghrai’at/Krai’at and the Shia
northeast to Kadhimain and the Shia northwest Baghdad completely bypasses A’adhamia (Figure
4).
Predictions that walls would segregate the city neighborhoods from one another, destroy the
organic fabric of the city, and then become permanent subsequently came to pass. By mid-2006, the
blast walls began to be complemented by the neighborhood enclosure walls—walls built to protect
the residents. These were built to wholly or mostly surround a neighborhood in order to protect it
from presumed annihilation in the hands of the local vigilante militias or foreign terrorists. Neigh-
borhoods in many sections of Baghdad, like A’adhamiya, Amiriya, Dawra, Hurriya—to name a
few—were completely blocked off with tall “T blocks” of cement18 (Figure 5).
Izady 59

Figure 4. Baghdad’s ethnoreligious neighborhoods at the end of 2007 and the conclusion of the Iraqi Civil War.
Source: Thomas Ricks, The Economist, October 14, 2009; Izady, Atlas, II.A.7.

While the walls certainly managed to save the residents from many murderous attacks, they could
not provide full security. Mortar shells from surrounding neighborhoods rained in from time to time,
flying over the new enclosing walls. Walled-in Shia neighborhoods like Za’farania (southeast of
Baghdad), Abu Deshir (southwest of the city), Sadr City in the east, and Amel/Amal in the west all
came under intense mortar attacks from the Sunni-dominated neighborhoods of Dawra, Mahdiya,
and Mekanik. This was after the Shia had fled those same Sunnified neighborhoods into the Shia
exclusive ones behind the “protective” walls.
By the start of 2006, many Sunni neighborhoods of the city had in fact proved themselves to be the
refuge for foreign terrorists, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, for instance. The residents of the predomi-
nately Sunni district of Adel/Adl in the affluent western Baghdad, just to the north of the district of
Khadra.

“Claimed that a US military commander threatened to permit [Shia] Mahdi Army militiamen to climb
over the enclosing walls and assault the district if attacks against US troops were not ceased immediately.
They said he told them the Mahdi Army militias are based in the neighboring [Shia] districts of Shu’la
and Hurriya, and that he is prepared to permit them to storm the Adel district and destroy it if IED attacks
against US troops did not cease.”19
60 Journal of Planning History 19(1)

Figure 5. Security walls of Baghdad at their greatest extent, 2008. Source: Mustafa Obaid, Behind the Blast Wall:
Walls of Post-occupational Baghdad (Weimar, Germany: Bauhaus-Universität, 2014); Izady, Atlas, VI.1. http://
gulf2000.columbia.edu/images/maps/Baghdad_Walls_lg.png.

Sunni insurgents from the satellite towns and villages around Baghdad, such as Hor Rijab/Rajab,
Arab Jubour, and Ma’eenat, proved too effective in their attacks. They used their proximity to launch
mortars and rockets on Shia neighborhoods of the city while the international terrorists they were
hosting were sent in supplement those destructive mortar attacks with suicide bombings.20 The
defensive walls proved only partially protective.

Protective Walls as Dividers

Another controversy surrounding neighborhood-enclosing walls was that the definitive bound-
aries they drew were to also inadvertently became the new ethnoreligious boundaries. For
instance, building the protective wall around the district (formerly the town) of A’adha-
miya—home to the most revered Sunni shrine in Baghdad and Iraq—basically enclosed only
about half the area that the local Sunnis considered to be their traditional district of A’adha-
miya. The Sunnis on this basis vehemently opposed the wall, although not having it meant the
likely total destruction of the Sunni population of the district in the hands of the invigorated
Shia militia and vigilantes in summer of 2007. Because the walls as built left out the Sunni
Izady 61

Figure 6. Walls of Belfast or the “Peace Lines” at present. Source: Andrew Griffin, Urbanism of Conflict: Sectarian
Segregation, Belfast (2012). http://c-lab.columbia.edu/0223.html.

neighborhoods of Najib Pasha, Waziriya, and Qahira, the Coalition in effect handed these areas
to the Shia to ethnically cleanse and repopulate with their own people. The building of the new
bridge joining the Ghrai’at to Kadhimain that completely bypassed A’adhamia neighborhood
(vide supra) has now turned the Sunni A’adhamiya into a remote, and effectively isolated,
island in a sea of Shias21 (Figure 4).
In building urban walls, Baghdad has come to look very much like Belfast, Northern Ireland, with
various ethnoreligious neighborhoods hiding behind segregation walls, totally disrupting the city’s
fabric and function as they were planned and/or existed prior to the civil war.22 It should be noted
that the paradigm of Belfast is used here solely as the “known quantity” (well-studied and well-
documented) in order to better understand the processes at work in the “unknown quantity,” namely,
Baghdad.
In Belfast, the segregation walls, some over thirty feet high, were/are officially, and incongru-
ously, known as the “Peace Lines.” At the onset of wall building by the British authorities in Belfast,
there were but a few in numbers and short in their extent. They quickly expanded in length and
numbers to over forty separate barrier walls, stretching over thirteen miles, disrupting the urban
fabric of the old city. All plans and projects to bring them down have failed until the present day23
(Figure 6).
As Andrew Griffin explains,

. . . the 40-odd peace lines, large and small, share one characteristic: once built, they never come down.
The walls are popular with residents, imparting a sense of security. Beginning to dismantle them would
require a leap of faith, and for now those on both sides of the walls want them to stay. “We’re safe now
with this peace line—in fact we’d like to see it higher,” a Catholic housewife living in the shadow of the
wall separating the Shankill from the Catholic Falls told me. “Once they take that wall down I wouldn’t
be here, definitely not.” The same sentiments were voiced by a Protestant housewife who lives in
invisible proximity, literally a stone’s throw away on the other side of the wall: “We feel very much
at ease here, it’s not a bad atmosphere at all, but if that wall came down I’d be away.”24
62 Journal of Planning History 19(1)

Iraqis faced a similar dilemma to the Irish as they confronted the legacy of urban civil war.
Following the temporary conclusion of the Iraqi civil war at the end of 2007, the Shia-
dominated government promised the removal of the walls. In fact, many walls began coming
down prior to the promised year of 2009, but only to go back up when the new wave of
bombing of the government and public buildings started.25 Walls were equated with the Coali-
tion’s presence and the country’s occupation, and therefore, most people initially wanted them
gone.26 The blast walls, however, were easier to pull down than the neighborhood enclosing/
segregating walls:

Brigadier Qassim Mousawi, the spokesperson for the Baghdad security plan says that security forces,
following the orders of the prime minister, have sought alternatives to the proposed barrier, including
installing more checkpoints in the area, stressing that such measures are not meant to be permanent, but
only to protect the lives of residents while security and stability are being imposed. Mousawi said that the
areas that have been surrounded by checkpoints enjoy relative stability and that sectarian killings had
decreased inside them.27

The violence had virtually emptied out parts of the city by the end of the nearly two years
long civil war (starting in early 2006 and ending at the end of 2007).28 This was particularly
true of the mainly Sunni western side of the city west of the Tigris River. By the end of 2009,
the violence and fear had turned parts of Baghdad neighborhoods into virtual ghost towns.
Families that had gone back were sometimes “met with spray-painted threats and other forms of
intimidation, including the now-ubiquitous graffiti: “Will be back right after a break . . . [signed]
the Mahdi Army.””29
Despite the declared policy of returning the ethnically cleansed Baghdadis back to their original
homes and neighborhoods, the new Shia government has done little to achieve this task. In fact, by
providing every incentive, including employment for the fellow Shias immigrants, the city has
witnessed a further and steady rise in its Shia component.30 Many satellite towns to Baghdad,
meanwhile, have been thoroughly Shiatized and renamed after the Shia saints. Jawadain (formerly
Saba’ al-Bor) and Husainia (formerly Rasheedia), both to the north of Baghdad, are just two
examples.
According to the US military estimates, by March of 2009, only about 50,000 displaced fami-
lies—or 16 percent—had returned to their former homes or districts in Baghdad. According to the
Associated Press reporters, most of them were believed to be Sunnis. For example, in the Shiatized
district of Hurriya, only about 650 Sunni families—or 17 percent of those who had fled—have ever
returned. In addition, 350–400 of the displaced families have sold their Hurriya homes, suggesting
they intend to stay away forever. Many more had been abandoned, vandalized, or destroyed by 2008.
In the district of Ameriya/Ameria, for example, only a few hundred of the Shia families that fled
came back. Just a token seventy Shia families have returned to Khadra district.31
The civil war in Baghdad resulted in a solid domination of the city life and politics by the Shia.
The share of the Sunni population in the city may have dropped as low as just 10–15 percent of the
total. This is based on statistics obtained by the Associated Press from the US and Iraqi officials as
well as the AP’s own reporters’ interviews in key Baghdad neighborhoods, which were acknowl-
edged by the US military commanders on the ground at the time.32
This figure is a far cry from the 1940s when Baghdad was basically a Sunni city with relatively
few Shias.33 By 2010, the Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad were cantonized and isolated from one
another. To the east of the Tigris, only the center of the shrine town of A’adhamia remained Sunni,
as also eastern portions of the Rasheed neighborhood. Sunnis that remain are cut off from the
mainstream of urban life.
Izady 63

Figure 7. Western Baghdad, 2017. Source: Thomas Ricks, The Economist, October 14, 2009; Izady, Atlas, II.A.8,
portions of the larger infograph at http://gulf2000.columbia.edu/images/maps/Baghdad_Walls_lg.png.

Conclusion of the Civil War and the Lingering Segregation,

2008 to Present
The trend of a shrinking Sunni Arab share of the city temporarily stopped, and in fact reversed, in
2014 and the onset of the most recent civil war in the country. But this was an illusion caused by the
unfolding refugee crisis from the Sunni countryside fleeing into the city for protection following
ISIS occupation of the huge Anbar province (to the immediate west of Baghdad) and its major city of
Fallujah. A massive exodus of Sunni Arabs of the Euphrates basin into Baghdad followed. Hundreds
of thousands arrived at the western gates of Baghdad at Abu Ghraib district. By late 2015, around
half a million Sunni refugees from nearby towns and cities had come to settle in Baghdad, mostly in
the Sunni neighborhoods in Mansur quarter (the Umm al Qura’ neighborhood in particular) and
Sayyidia and A’alam in the Rasheed quarter, but also re-Sunnifying some of the neighborhoods from
which they had been expelled during the 2006–2007 civil war. Even this influx managed to only
slow down the Shiatization of Baghdad, not reverse it.

Current State of Urban Life and Services in Baghdad

In a short few years time, the large city of Baghdad has in effect become mainly two ethno-cities,
with little and decreasing communications between the two. The old blast walls have returned in
large / after 2014, while the neighborhood walls never went away. Roads and the city bus lines have
been rerouted to service particular ethnic sections of the city. From 2015 onward, the Iraqi
64 Journal of Planning History 19(1)

Figure 8. Belfast’s ethnic neighborhoods in 1992 and the conclusion of the Northern Ireland’s civil war.
Source: www.irelandstory.com. This infograph is in public domain.

government also set out to encircle the entire city by a wall in the hope of preventing terrorists’
infiltration and attacks on the residents.
The communication between its two sections, the Sunni and the Shia, is limited. The Arab Sunni
minority lives in its own exclusive neighborhoods, shops there and receives schooling there. Even at
the prestigious Baghdad University, it takes bravery for a Sunni student to join. The places of
worship—mosques, shrines, lodges—that in the past served as community centers are fully segre-
gated. A Sunni pilgrim, for example, appearing at a Shia shrine (which they frequently did in the pre-
2003 Baghdad) would undoubtedly be taken as a terrorist bomber by the Shia.
Following the civil war, the Sunni population has been pushed into the far western reaches of the
city. Its newly built neighborhoods now stretch as a salient along the main Baghdad-Fallujah high-
way. It now incorporates the former satellite town of Abu Ghraib, which was nearly a dozen miles to
the west of the Baghdad in 2003. There are no Shias in this new urban extension, as it is effectively
segregated from the rest of the city. The Mansour-Abu Ghraib conglomerate has now evolved into a
self-contained “Sunni town” where the normal urban services are progressively independent of the
rest of the city—for example, retail shops, schools, health-care facilities, and public transportation.
Meanwhile, the two isolated Sunni neighborhoods of Dowra/Dora in the south and A’adhamiya in
the east of the city find it progressively more difficult to connect their urban life to that of Mansour-
Abu Ghraib hub where the bulk of the Baghdadi Sunni now live (Figure 7). The capital city authorities
have perceptively improved the urban services in the Shia areas, particularly the huge slums of Sadr
City. New bridges connecting the Shia areas on the east and western banks of the Tigris have
progressively integrated the Shia areas in the city, while purposefully or inadvertently isolating the
Izady 65

Sunni areas further. For all practical purposes, and just as in Belfast, Baghdad has become two cities in
one, and no pragmatic reintegration plans of the two have been on the table so far.34
In this context of urban segregation and division, only the Christians have largely stayed put in
their old neighborhoods that straddle their historic churches. But they too saw expulsions in the
darkest days of the civil war. The Jazira-Athuriyun districts remain only partially Christian, as the
residents fled to the Shia-dominated Karrada neighborhood where they found safety with other
Christians (Figure 8). Christians in Baghdad, however, seem to be going the way of the Jews of
that city, namely, progressively disappearing. More and more of them emigrate from Baghdad and
Iraq to safer Christian lands in the West, chased out by the violence and turmoil that is the city’s
companion since 2003.

The Future Prospects of Reintegration: The Paradigm of Belfast

The chances of Baghdad becoming an ethnically mixed and integrated city are slim. Just as the
segregation walls in Belfast, the so-called Peace Lines, have lingered to the present day, so have the
Baghdad segregation walls. As to reintegration of the residents of Baghdad, Belfast’s fate stands a
gloomy example against any such reintegration. Belfast went through the same process of ethnic
violence and cleansing starting in 1971. In 2017—nearly half a century after the start of the
“Troubles”—Belfast remains a segregated city. Despite a period of relative peace, most areas and
districts of Belfast still reflect the divided nature of Northern Ireland as a whole. The city is still
highly divided along its ethnic lines, especially in the working-class neighborhoods. Flags, graffiti,
and murals invariably mark these zones—Catholic on one side and Protestant on the other. Much of
the public panic in Belfast was the handiwork of relatively few active violent individuals, using
extreme and unusual methods to terrify and scare off the undesirable ethnic group from their homes.
The group known as the “Shankill Butchers” in Belfast did not exceed twenty-five individuals.35 In
2009, 68 percent among the eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old inhabitants of Belfast had never had a
meaningful conversation with anyone from the other community across the “Peace Line” (a brick
and metal fence separating the two communities in the city). In all age groups, six in ten said they
had been victims of verbal or physical abuse since the first cease-fire of 1994, and the same number
believe that community relations had worsened during the same period. “Everyone sees themselves
as a victim in Northern Ireland,” said a random interviewee. “There is a complete denial of the other
side’s victimhood; people cannot see themselves as perpetrators of violence and intimidation, only
as victims of the opposite camps.”36

In the late 1960s, a demographic study of Shankill (99 percent Protestant) and Clonard (98 percent
Catholic) found that residents in these areas lived discretely from their sectarian opposites. Catholics and
Protestants not only lived in different suburbs, they also read different newspapers, frequented different
shops and pubs, played in and supported different sporting teams. It was not only a case of Protestants
purposefully shunning Catholics and vice versa; they simply did not encounter each other in their day-to-
day lives. Each remained at arm’s length, ignorant of the politics, culture and values of the other.37

Like Baghdad, many places of worship in Belfast have changed hands and persuasion since the
start of the civil strife in 1920, all the way to 1994.38 These Protestant and Catholic churches in the
“wrong” neighborhood are telltales of the formerly desegregated city, as is true of the denomina-
tional mosques in Baghdad.
Baghdad and Belfast present an uncanny and depressing spatial resemblance: the minority was
pressed into a wedge-shaped area of refuge on the western side of the city, with walls, barbed wires,
and checkpoints protecting it from the vengeful majority at the time, and some small islands of the
minority remained here and there in the city, walled in from the rest. The organic neighborhood
66 Journal of Planning History 19(1)

interrelationship in both Baghdad and Belfast was disrupted by violence and then divided by walls
and remains so today in Baghdad. City services have realigned themselves to fit this fact on the
ground, in effect creating two cities in one, in fear and disdain of each other, carrying on their urban
lives as if they were in two different countries.

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Surge in Iraq (Musings on Iraq, 2011, August 22).

News Media
James Baker and Lee Hamilton (co-chairmen of the study), The Iraq Study Group Report. http://
media.usip.org/reports/iraq_study_group_report.pdf; Gabriel Gatehouse, “Iraq Says 85,000 Vio-
lently Killed,” BBC report, October 14, 2009; Michael Gordon, “Troop Surge Took Place Amid
Doubt and Debate,” New York Times, August 30, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/
washington/31military.html; Liz Sly, “New Boss Turn the Table on Al Qaeda: Ex-Sunni Insurgents
becomes US Ally,” Chicago Tribune, November 22, 2007.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.
Izady 67

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Notes
1. For Gur/Firuzabad, the Google satellite image at https://www.google.com/maps/place/Firuza
bad,þFarsþProvince,þIran/@28.8594741,52.5470757,14628m/data¼!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x3
fb2a457f8d5a2dd:0xaec5e6d7cc0de319!8m2!3d28.8395155!4d52.5638794 and for Darabgird: https://
www.google.com/maps/place/Darab,þFarsþProvince,þIran/@28.6926876,54.4945044,7326m/
data¼!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x3e54f1dd52d61483:0x8d97744725f6cdb2!8m2!3d28.7559514!4d54.
5546793.
2. Stephen Longrigg and Frank Stoakes, Iraq (London: E. Benn, 1958).
3. Ibid.
4. Nissim Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq (Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1985).
5. Ibid., 211.
6. It has often been noted how many Sunni Arabs have repeatedly accused demographic surveys of Iraq of
under-representing their numbers.” A. Jawad al-Tamimi, Assessing the Surge in Iraq (Middle East Forum,
2011, December 22), p. 4.
7. International Crisis Group, “In Their Own Words: Reading the Iraqi Insurgency,” Middle East Report, no.
50 (2006, February 15): 3–6.
8. Ibrahim al-Marashi, Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis (Monterey, CA,
Naval Postgraduate School publication, September 1, 2002), passim.
9. http://gulf2000.columbia.edu/images/maps/Iraq_Ethnic_Shift_1947-2017_lg.png (accessed 1 January
2019).
10. For 2007, the demographic figures provided by the US Department of State (Diplomacy in Action, Bureau
of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor: Iraq, International Religious Freedom Report, 2007), maintain
the following breakdown for the Iraqi people. “Shi’a Muslims–predominantly Arabs, but also including
Turkmen, Faili Kurds, and other groups–constitute a 60 -65% majority. Sunni Muslims make up 32-37% of
the population, of whom there were 18-20% Sunni Kurds, 12-16% Sunni Arabs, with the Sunni Turkmen
comprising the remaining. The remaining 3% is comprised of Christians Yezidis, Sabean-Mandaeans,
Baha’is, Shabaks, and Kaka’is.
11. K. Katzman, Iraq and Al Qaeda (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, December 7, 2007),
passim; Lionel Beehner, Al Qaeda in Iraq: Resurging or Splintering? (New York City, NY: Council on
Foreign Relations, 2007, July 7), passim.
12. That has been the sorry lot of the Iraqi Christians, not just the ones living in Baghdad. The last
official Iraqi census in 1987 found 1.4 million Christians in the country. Now, according to the 2008
US State Department report on International Religious Freedom, that number has dropped to between
550,000 and 800,000. See, for example, Paul Schenmm, “In Iraq, and Exodus of Christians,” AP, May
14, 2009.
13. Gabriel Gatehouse, “Iraq Says 85,000 Violently Killed,” BBC report, October 14, 2009.
14. Al-Tamimi. “[A]nother reason that must be considered is the sense of disconnect created by 70 years of
minority rule between the Sunni Arabs and the rest of the population." Assessing the Surge in Iraq (Middle
East Forum, 2011, December 22), p. 4.
15. Liz Sly, “New Boss Turn the Table on Al Qaeda: Ex-Sunni Insurgents becomes US Ally,” Chicago
Tribune, November 22, 2007.
16. Gatehouse, “85,000 Violently Killed,” 2009.
68 Journal of Planning History 19(1)

17. Al-Hayat, “Ominously, One Interior Ministry Official Said That Building Separation Barriers Will Not End
the Series of Violent Acts in the Capital. The Money Coming from the Defense Ministry for the Construc-
tion Was Enough to Crate and Equip an Advanced Brigade of Security Forces,” April 3, 2007.
18. Howard LaFranchi, “Iraq’s New Gated Communities: Safer, Mixed, Walled-in,” The Christian Science
Monitor, May 6, 2008; Joseph Giordono and Morin Monte, “Soldiers Building Wall Separating Sunnis,
Shiite: Three Mile Structure in Baghdad Is a Disputed Part of Security Plan,” Stars and Stripes Mideast
edition, April 19, 2007; G Hauer and R. Whitney, eds., Two Scoops of Hooah: The T-Walls of Kuwait and
Iraq (Madison, Connecticut: Operation Music Aid, 2010); Usama Redha, “Iraq: Cement Blast Walls Go Up
in Another Baghdad Neighborhood,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 2009.
19. Mustafa Obaid, Behind the Blast Wall: Walls of Post-occupational Baghdad (Weimar, Germany: Bauhaus-
Universität, 2014).
20. International Medical Corps, Iraqis on the Move: An Assessment (Los Angeles, CA: January 2007), 4-5.
21. Zeyad Kasim, “Mortars Raining on Shi’ite Areas of Baghdad,” Inside Iraq, April 26, 2007.
22. Zeyad Kasim, “Mortars Raining on Shi’ite Areas of Baghdad,” Inside Iraq, April 26, 2007.
23. Andrew Griffin, Urbanism of Conflict: Sectarian Segregation, Belfast (2012). http://c-lab.columbia.edu/
0223.html.
24. David McKitrick, “Divided City—Belfast,” Englischlehrer, May 25, 2011.
25. Rebecca Santana, “As War Ebbs, Baghdad Blast Walls Start Coming Down,” AP, February 23, 2011.
26. Muhanad Mohmmed, “Iraqi Worries Grow as Blast Walls Vanish,” Reuters, August 16, 2009.
27. Agence France Presse, “Trapped between the Wall and the Militant,” April 30, 2007.
28. W. Tavernise, “District by District, Shiites Make Baghdad Their Own,” New York Times, December 23, 2006, 1.
29. The Economist, March 2, 2006.
30. International Medical Corps, Iraqis on the Move, 8–10.
31. US military as quoted by AP, March 24, 2009.
32. Sources reporting on this are manifold, including the US military sources. As a sample, Thomas Ricks, The
Economist, “Eight Question for Thomas Ricks: On Afghanistan, Iraq and the American Military,” October
4, 2009. Many of these base their conclusions on this author’s research and locally obtained figures.
33. Shias predominated only in the holy town of Kadhimain/Kadhimiyya that was still a separate municipality
a few miles northwest of Baghdad of the time.
34. M. Izady, Atlas of the Islamic World and Vicinity (Columbia University, 2006).
35. Martin Dillon. 1989. The Shankill Butchers: The Real Story of Cold-Blooded Mass Murder (New York
City, Routledge, 1989). They were named as such due to the fact that their violent operations centered on
Shankill Road, which in time became the dividing line (and later on, walled along its course) between the
Protestant Shankill district and the Catholic neighborhood of Clonard in Belfast.
36. O. Bowcott and H. McDonald, “Riots engulf Belfast as peace line strains ceasefire to the limit,” The
Guardian, 4 June, 2002.
37. David McKittrick, “Divided City,” Prospect, May 25, 2011, 134.
38. Source:www.irelandstory.com. This infograph is in public domain.

Author Biography
Michael M. R. Izady is an established scholar in the field of ethnic cultures and politics. He has been producing
publications-books, articles, review, infographs, guidebooks for the past 30 years, and served as the editor of
IJKS academic journal. He has been a college professor during that entire time.