Along bloody fault lines of Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq — In quiet moments, especially once the sunlight has begun to fade, a passerby can almost imagine the former glory of Karadat Mariam, once Baghdad's most upscale neighborhood. Palm trees shade broad avenues. Hedge groves shield stately villas. Young men and women in gym shorts jog along sidewalks.

But such moments pass quickly. A low-flying Black Hawk helicopter roars overhead or a convoy of Humvees pushes through the 15-foot blast walls and tangles of barbed wire that surround you here in the Green Zone, the country's fortress-like administrative center.

Within this surreal landscape, in mansions once occupied by former President Saddam Hussein and his deputies, U.S. officials and Iraqi politicians desperately try to build a new Iraq, making heartfelt speeches and discussing law and governance as if this were a coherent country.

But step outside, across the 14th of July Bridge, through Baghdad's neighborhoods to the outskirts and beyond, through provincial farmlands and out to Iraq's borders of mountain and desert, and another universe opens.

Cold War-like checkpoints and concrete barriers, bursts of machine-gun fire and close encounters with bands of armed men punctuate the lives of millions of ordinary Iraqis. House by house, neighborhood by neighborhood, province by province — a tour of the streets and roads of Iraq is lined with guideposts pointing to the country's potential disintegration.

Although Iraq has seen a flowering of long-suppressed Shiite faith, a surge in religious hatred has sharpened the rift between the two main Muslim sects in key cities and rural enclaves. Iraqis are now more free to speak their minds and organize politically, but ethnic rivalries among Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens in the north fester, even as the war between U.S.-led forces and Sunni-dominated guerrillas in the west continues.

Three years after the U.S. military invasion to oust Saddam, the country's fault lines are visible in the landscape, like land heaved up by shifting tectonic plates.

The streets and sidewalks directly outside the Green Zone are magnets for car bombs and roadside explosives targeting the authorities who venture out. Despite Baghdad's dangers, it's safer to melt into the disorder of the densely packed neighborhoods of the city.

The smells of burning kebabs and raw sewage engulf the air of the Karada district as you head north from the city center. Grizzled middle-age merchants emerge from shops, working prayer beads and greeting one another. Women in head scarves, daughters in hand, browse clothing shops. Karada is among the city's safest districts, the domain of moderate middle-class Shiite Muslims who are the great winners of the invasion three years ago.

Yet even here, perils persist. Shrapnel from car bombs scars mosques and office buildings. Shopkeepers place roadblocks in front of their stores to prevent customers from parking there, lest a vehicle explode. The roads are dominated by vehicle convoys of armed men. Some of the men wear makeshift camouflage uniforms and drive vehicles with official-looking insignias.

Others wielding guns and wearing ski masks drive around without any indication of whether they represent the forces of law and order, the private militia of a political or religious leader, or some more sinister group. They drive pickups with mounted machine guns. They spray gunfire over vehicles to clear traffic. They wheel the nozzles of their AK-47s toward anyone who gets too close.

Beyond the relatively safe middle-class central neighborhoods, violent divisions are tearing the country apart. Neighborhoods such as Dora, Sadiya and Ghazaliya, once quiet districts of single-family homes on the city's western and southern peripheries where children could play ball in the streets and walk to and from school without fear, have become battlegrounds between Shiites and Sunnis.

Even inside Iraq's spotless new schoolhouses, the freshly painted and refurbished pride of U.S. reconstruction efforts, Shiite children have begun to sit on one side of the class, Sunni children on the other.

"My daughter came home and asked me, 'Daddy, what sect do we belong to?' " said Shafiq Mahdi Jabouri, a Baghdad educator who belongs to a tribe with both Shiite and Sunni branches. "I was shocked. Sect used to be a joke in Iraq. Now it's a dividing line."

Shiite families living in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods have been threatened. Chilling graffiti is scrawled on houses. Families hurriedly sell their homes at bargain prices and move elsewhere.

Sunnis living in Shiite neighborhoods have "disappeared" — abducted from their homes by uniformed men purporting to belong to the security forces. Their bullet-ridden bodies turn up several days later, discovered by schoolchildren playing near railroad tracks or empty lots, or never at all.

Militias and neighborhood-watch groups are armed with the AK-47s that seem as common in Iraqi households as ashtrays. Mosque preachers call neighbors to arms with frantic cries of "God is great!"

The detritus of three years of war appear on the city's outskirts. Burnt husks of trucks and remains of car bombs litter the road. Buildings are pockmarked with gunfire. Electrical towers felled by saboteurs lie on the farmland.

Sunni-led insurgents have turned all critical highways leading out of and into the capital into kill zones, in effect cutting off the central government's ability to apply its authority on the provinces.

Travelers almost always encounter some roadside horror: Emergency workers load police officers bloodied in a bomb attack. A blown-up oil pipeline spouts fire hundreds of feet into the sky. Masked gunmen stage impromptu checkpoints demanding identification cards, pulling out those from the wrong tribe or named after a Shiite imam and shooting them.

To the west along the highways to Syria and Jordan, the insurgency in Al Anbar province continues to rage, a conflict between Sunni Arab fighters and Americans that has turned once-lively riverside cities into battle-scarred ghost towns. Sparsely populated Al Anbar has claimed more than a third of the 2,300 U.S. military personnel who have died in Iraq.

But Iraq's next front may be unfolding elsewhere, away from the gaze of authorities, just beyond Baghdad's outskirts, in tiny hamlets crisscrossed by collapsing, disease-infested agricultural canals and dirt roads.

Here, in a large crescent of farmland north, east and south of the capital, insurgent violence aimed at security forces and Americans has melded with tensions between Shiite and Sunni.

Saddam and previous Sunni rulers back to the Ottoman era encouraged Sunni tribesmen loyal to the central government to settle among Shiites, forming a protective barrier against potential invaders from Shiite-dominated Iran. As a result, sets of Sunni households lie next to sets of Shiite households. These mixed areas, where sectarian tensions are overlain with layers of tribal codes and rivalries, have slowly become a powder keg.

"We are even afraid of each other," said Samir Abdel Qadir, a 37-year-old Sunni merchant from Baqouba.

Caches of bodies turn up. Bombs detonate aside makeshift mosques and markets in dirt-poor villages. This year, in one particularly gruesome attack, a suicide bomber targeted a funeral near Baqouba, killing as many as 36 people. In tiny country hamlets along dirt roads, houses have emptied, and occasionally caravans of Shiite families can be seen heading away out of fear for their lives.

"There was never any division between Sunnis or Shiites," said Kamil Naji, a 42-year-old from Taji. "Now, it's becoming a way of life."

Los Angeles Times staff writers Louise Roug, Raheem Salman and Asmaa Waguih and special correspondents in Baqouba, Basra, Kirkuk, Najaf and Taji contributed to this report.