Neighborhood Sectarian Displacement and the Battle for Baghdad: Unanticipated and Anticipated Consequences of Crimes Against Humanity in Iraq

Abstract

We use two unique Iraq datasets to show how fear and uncertainty served to prefigure and motivate the self-fulfilling, neighborhood-specific forces that followed the US led invasion of Iraq. Sectarian criminal violence by armed Shia and Sunni organizations created a situation of ethnic/religious cleansing that reconfigured much of Baghdad. The paper focuses on the case of how one particularly violent group, the Mahdi Army, mobilized through the coercive entrepreneurship of Muqtada al-Sadr, used organized crime tactics of killing, torture, rape, kidnapping, harassment, threats, and forced displacement in a widespread and systematic attack against civilians that forced Sunni residents from their Baghdad neighborhoods. Ordinary Iraqis were victims of an amplified “self-fulfilling prophecy of fear” that created the momentum for massive sectarian displacement in the battle for Baghdad. We demonstrate that there is a neighborhood specific effect of early post-invasion neighborhood fear net of intervening violence on displacement three years later, following the Al Qaeda Samara Shrine attack, confirming an effect of a self-fulfilling prophecy of fear in the neighborhoods of Baghdad that compounded in a self-reinforcing way. The neighborhood measurement of this effect of fear in a dataset separate from the neighborhood measurement of displacement three years later is a demanding test of the self-fulfilling effect of neighborhood specific sectarian fear in Baghdad. The Mahdi Army changed the neighborhood demography of Baghdad and helped leverage al-Sadr and his movement into Iraq politics and governance, serving to extend a particular vision of Shia influence in the remaking of the Iraq state. The changed demography of Baghdad was effectively consolidated by the later Surge of U.S. forces that left in place the territorial gains made by the Shia led Mahdi Army at the expense of former Sunni residents. We conclude that this continues to matter because the resulting grievances have contributed to renewed violence and a resurgent Sunni insurgency in Iraq.