Baghdad, Iraq - Relentless sectarian violence is forcing Iraqi families to flee their homes in ever larger numbers, according to figures released Thursday by the Iraqi government.
Sattar Nowruz, a spokesman for the Ministry of Displacement and Migration, said 1,117 families abandoned mixed areas for Shiite or Sunni strongholds in the last week alone, an increase since March that analysts described as a conservative snapshot of internal migration.
In all, he said, nearly 27,000 families, about 162,000 people, had registered for relocation aid since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra on Feb. 22, which set off waves of killings, kidnappings and reprisals.
The migration was “a dangerous sign” of accelerated religious segregation, he said.
In a rare written statement, Iraq’s most prominent Shiite religious authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, said he was heartbroken by the widening divide — the rise of “terror, displacement, killing, kidnapping and everything that words could not explain.”
He called on Iraqis “to exert maximum effort to stop the bloodletting.”
The new migration figures, the most specific to date, come at a time when violence is claiming an average of at least 100 Iraqi lives each day, according to a recent United Nations report.
American military figures released Thursday showed that the number of daily attacks recorded by the police and allied forces in Baghdad jumped to an average of 34 this month from 24 in June.
Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki unveiled an enhanced security plan for the capital last month, emphasizing that as Baghdad went, so would go Iraq. But on Thursday, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, a military spokesman, acknowledged that 50,000 Iraqi forces and 7,200 American troops were struggling to protect Baghdad.
“We have not witnessed the reduction in violence one would have hoped for in a perfect world,” General Caldwell said. He predicted that it would take “months not weeks” to make Baghdad safe.
The White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said Thursday that when Mr. Maliki met with President Bush at the White House next week, Baghdad would be among the first issues discussed. Most Iraqis fleeing dangerous areas have been members of the minority sect in their neighborhoods, Mr. Nowruz said. In some cases, killings or death threats pushed them out.
Khalid Abdul Wahid al-Janabi said he was one of the few Sunnis living in his Baghdad neighborhood when he was recently kidnapped and tortured by a Shiite militia. “I was dumped with 13 dead bodies,” he said. “I have no enemies but during the last few months Mahdi Army militias started to assassinate so many people.”
He then moved to Falluja, a heavily Sunni area where he said he had crammed into a house with relatives. He said his old neighborhood — once 15 percent to 20 percent Sunni — was now almost exclusively Shiite. “Most of the families that used to live in my neighborhood moved to the west of Baghdad and some of them moved to provinces like Diyala, Salahuddin and Anbar,” he said.
Conversely, Shiite families have moved from Sunni neighborhoods of Baghdad and Anbar Province, the site of intense fighting between American forces and Sunni insurgents, government figures show.
For Sunnis, Falluja has become a preferred safe haven. Officials there describe the majority Sunni city as a swelling metropolis, with hundreds if not thousands of families moving in every week, crowding homes and seeking identification cards with Falluja addresses to ensure that they are not mistaken for Shiites.
Some of Falluja’s new arrivals said they were confounded and disturbed by their need to move. Abdul Razzaq Hussein, a former Iraqi Army officer, said he used to live in the mixed area of New Baghdad with his Shiite wife. He said he came to Falluja alone after the Samarra bombing because he feared Shiite death squads. “Sometimes when we woke up in the morning, we used to find threats,” he said.
Anthony H. Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the Iraqi migration was probably more widespread than the government statistics suggested. He described the exodus as both a sign of fear and a potential contributor to sectarian volatility.
“When you add this to violence and economic problems, it puts the country closer to civil conflict,” he said by telephone. “They are relocating not to another province — what you’re seeing are lines being drawn in the middle of cities and people still have to survive. You get enclaves and fortresses where people become violent to the people outside.”
Concentration in a given neighborhood could lead to being made targets by another sect, he added. “You have cumulative process of polarization. It all interacts.”
To protect displaced families, Mr. Nowruz said the government was moving to build four new camps in Baghdad, Mosul, Dhi Qar and Kut.
But the additional space may bring little comfort to the fearful. In one of the older camps near the Baghdad airport last week, Shihab Ahmed Hammoudi huddled inside one of roughly 50 tents with his wife and two young children. He said he left his home and his job as a tea seller in the Jihad neighborhood of Baghdad after Shiite militiamen executed as many as 50 people on July 9, pulling them out of their homes and cars, then shooting many in the head.
Even at the camp, he said it was hard to feel safe. Last Thursday, he said men dressed as Iraqi police officers visited the camp to ask for names of refugees, causing many to fear that the officers were members of a Shiite militia. When families resisted, there was a brief standoff.
“They were pretending to help us, but when they saw how many guards there were protecting the camp, they left,” Mr. Hammoudi said.