BAGHDAD — For nearly a decade, Abu Omar has been fleeing Iraq’s many conflicts, but they always seem to catch up to him.
In his Sunni family’s ancestral home in Fallujah, it was the heavy shelling — by the Americans first in 2004 and then again this past January, when the walls shook and the roof caved in over their heads
In the Baghdad neighborhood where they have twice sought refuge, it is the persistent fear of a late-night knock on the door by shadowy sectarian militias.
Abu Omar’s grim odyssey is shared by countless members of Iraq’s once-dominant Sunni minority, who feel maligned by the Shiite-led government in Baghdad, hounded by its security forces and increasingly threatened by the militias.
Their grievances have metastasized since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003 and handed power to the long-oppressed Shiite majority. Their anger fueled the rampage of Sunni militants across northern and western Iraq this summer, and the militant onslaught has aggravated sectarian tensions elsewhere.
The patriarch of a 13-member family said he is afraid to let his sons leave Azamiyah because their names give them away as Sunni.
“They hear Omar and Othman and right away think they are with Daesh,” he said, using the Arabic descriptor for the Islamic State group. “The (Shiite) militias want to make trouble for anyone who is Sunni.”
Human Rights Watch said last month that government-backed militias have been kidnapping and killing Sunni civilians in Baghdad and surrounding provinces for the past five months.
In the southern Shiite-majority city of Basrah, nearly two dozen Sunnis reportedly have been killed and many more wounded in targeted killings and abductions since June, the U.N. said. “In each incident, the local community has expressed the view that the victims were targeted for no other reason than their faith,” said Francesco Motta, chief of the human rights section of the U.N. mission in Iraq.
