Wall built to separate warring sects

Baghdad: US troops are building a wall around a Sunni enclave in Baghdad, part of a strategy to "break the cycle of sectarian violence" in the Iraqi capital.

Work began on April 10 on the 5km cement wall at Al Adhamiya, a mainly Sunni Arab area surrounded on three sides by Shiite communities.

"The wall is one of the centrepieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence," Sergeant Mike Pryor, a public affairs officer, wrote in an article released by the US military.

Senior US military officials in Baghdad said the wall was not intended to divide the capital into separate communities as part of a two-month-old security crackdown.

US and Iraqi forces have poured thousands of extra troops into the capital to enforce a plan seen as a final attempt to bring Iraq back from the brink of all-out sectarian civil war.

But senior military officials said the crackdown would not include dividing the capital into Sunni Arab and Shiite areas. "It is not the stated goal of the Baghdad security plan to divide everything up into these ... small gated communities," military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Garver said.

Retaliations

He said this was not "completely incongruous" with the wall at Al Adhamiya.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that a similar project had started around Doura, another Sunni area in southern Baghdad.

The article said Al Adhamiya had been trapped in "a spiral of sectarian violence and retaliation" and work would continue on the wall, with barriers up to 3.5-metres tall.

"Shiites are coming in and hitting Sunnis, and Sunnis are retaliating across the street," Captain Scott McLearn of the US 407th Brigade Support Battalion was quoted as saying.