NY Times Ignores U.S. Affect on Sunni Neighborhood

To read about the troubled Baghdad neighborhood of Al-Adhamiya, just about everyone is a cause of the predominantly Sunni area's current heartache. Everyone, that is, except the US military, which is barely mentioned in the 1,800-word piece. Not a single reference to the US and Iraqi troop presence there, or the when Shia militias come calling. Not one mention of the numerous raids on houses and mosques there. Not one mention of the bombings during the 2003 invasion.

Here's a gem from the Times article:

Far more than in Shiite [sic] areas, sectarian hatred has shredded whatever remained of community life and created a cycle of violence that pits Sunni against Sunni as well as Sunni against Shiite.

"Whatever remained"? I won't give writer Alissa J. Rubin, who I suspect has never been to Adhamiya without a heavily armed escort (if even then), the credit of suspecting she was so much as alluding to the US ravaging of Adhamiya. What could have harmed Sunni community life? Perhaps raid after brutal raid on the Abu Hanifa mosque, one of Iraqi Sunnis' most-revered sites?

Of Amiriyah, another mostly Sunni neighborhood, there is one brief mention of US forces' presence:

In Amiriya [sic], one of the western neighborhoods that was taken over early on by hard-line Sunni insurgents, the Americans and the militants have fought a running battle for more than three years.

But that's all we hear -- nothing about the affect of that running battle on civilians.

And we wonder why so many Americans think Iraqis are their own worst enemy. Maybe those same Americans read enlightened papers such as the Times.

For some of the best on former TNS correspondent Dahr Jamail's . Some of those pieces may have a definite pro-Sunni bias, but at least they expose there’s more to the story than the Times would have us know, as the US impact on Adhamiya is undeniable.