There is another war taking place in Iraq. It's much less noted, but one by one, Sunnis are killing Shiites and Shiites are murdering Sunnis. It's a war of retribution and intimidation. Iraqis fear it more than the insurgency.
"This polarization has to end," says Sunni legislator Adnan Pachachi. "Otherwise it could lead to disaster for the country."
Each day, new funerals are held on both sides — the casualties of a simmering sectarian war inflicted by armed militias and shadowy assassins who don't fit the neat definition of insurgents.
While most Iraqi's don't yet call it civil war, it is, at its worst, a form of ethnic cleansing.
"Real Iraqis don't kill each other," says one man, reflecting the general sentiment on the street.
Adding to the polarization is a quiet migration. The violence is causing Shiites and Sunnis to move, turning once mixed areas into purely Sunni or Shiite enclaves.
Shehad Mohammed, a Sunni, has come to Baghdad's largest mosque looking for help to find a safe Sunni-dominated place to live. He brought pictures of his tortured and murdered brother.
Mustafa Karim, another frightened Sunni, also needs relocation.
"During Saddam's days," he says, "even though there was a lot of injustice, we did not go through such circumstances."
After three of his relatives were killed and his family was threatened with death, Ali Abdullah, a Shiite, also felt compelled to move. The conditions in his new, pure Shiite neighborhood are rough, but at least he feels safer.
"I am hoping that I will return to my place one day," he says, "and hope that everything will be better soon."
But he fiddles with his worry beads more often these days. A nation that has lived through two generations of conflict fears what could be the bloodiest of them all — civil war.
