A boy inspects the site of a car bomb attack in the town of Muqdadiya, 80 km northeast of Baghdad.
BAGHDAD: A spike in violence is spilling over to Iraq’s struggling economy, with an increasingly murky future making customers reluctant to spend and the re-emergence of sectarian threats forcing costly changes to the way business is done.
The wave of violence is the deadliest since Iraq teetered on the edge of civil war half a decade ago. The bloodshed is linked to rising sectarian divisions between Iraq’s Sunni and Shia and friction between the Arabs and Kurds, dampening hopes for a return to normalcy nearly two years after US forces withdrew from the country.
Just this week, 14 Shia truck drivers and crew were killed with bullets to the head at a fake checkpoint set up by militants along a highway in a northern Sunni area.
Some Shia neighbourhoods in Baghdad, meanwhile, are again becoming off-limits to Sunnis, particularly after word began spreading that Shia militiamen were setting up fake checkpoints of their own. While the Interior Ministry has denied the claims, the threats remind Iraqis of the dark days of 2006 and 2007 when retaliatory killings between the sects were a daily routine. Insurgent attacks since April have killed more than 3,000 people, including more than 500 since the start of July.
So truck drivers have found ways to avoid the violence.
Two safe zones were set up west of Baghdad in the towns of Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, where Sunni drivers can hand goods over to Shia counterparts safely. Another unloading area is located in the Iraqi capital’s western Sunni-dominated Ghazaliyah neighbourhood.
“Some Sunni drivers are willing to take the risk and enter Baghdad for the money, but I’m not,” said Manaa, a 33-year-old father of four who uses the handover spots. He used to earn about $1,200 to $1,300 for each shipment from Jordan to Baghdad, but says his income has now dropped by some 80 percent because he doesn’t unload in Baghdad.
Violence surged after an April crackdown by security forces on a Sunni protest camp in the northern town of Hawija that killed 44 civilians and a member of the security forces, according to United Nations estimates.
The unrest risks eating into much-needed economic growth, which the World Bank had been predicting would reach 9 percent this year.
Sunni merchant Ekram Khairi has not travelled to Baghdad from his northern city of Mosul since the Hawija attacks, although the Iraqi capital has for years been his only destination for buying plastic products at wholesale markets for resale back home. He also quit coming to the capital in 2006, when sectarian bloodshed was at its peak, but began returning in 2008 as security started to improve.
Baghdad-based merchants say business hasn’t been this bad in years. They say the country’s economy, which started to improve in recent years on the back of an oil boom, is starting to feel stagnant because of the unrest. AP
