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By Rod Nordland newsweek.com Baghdad, March 24, 2007. The Baghdad Security Plan is going so well that Iraqis displaced by sectarian violence are flocking back to their homes in Baghdad, so a number of officials are telling us. The only problem with that: it's probably not true. General David Petraeus, in an interview with the BBC on March 18, said hundreds and even up to a thousand Iraqis had already returned, although he warned the plan is still in its early stages--a hopeful sign. On March 20, a Pentagon official, Major General Michael Barbero, gave a briefing in Washington during which that statistic morphed into hundreds of Iraqi families, which at a conservative multiplier of six to a family, bumps that number well above a thousand people. Meanwhile, Brig. General Qassim Atta al-Moussawi, the Iraqi spokesman for the Baghdad Security Plan, confidently asserted that 2,000 families had returned.
Good luck finding them all. Tufan Abdu-Wahab, head of the Baghdad section in the Ministry of Migration and Displaced People, said in an interview that only a handful of Iraqi families had returned, and most of those were Shias returning to Shia districts, rather than to formerly mixed communities. -snip- Abdu-Wahab says that only about 1 percent have come back--which would be 350 families in the first month of the security plan--but many of those have only returned to check on their belongings and leave again. Meanwhile, families continue to flee at the rate of 25 a day, according to the ministry's registration statistics, easily outstripping any returns.more... http://checkpointbaghdad.talk.newsweek.com/default.asp?item=539953 |
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