Ethnic Cleansing in Iraq

It's going on all the time, but rarely in broad daylight.

Bands of armed Shiite militiamen stormed through a neighborhood in north-central Baghdad on Saturday, driving hundreds of Sunni Arabs from their homes in what a Sunni colonel in the Iraqi Army described as one of the most flagrant episodes of sectarian warfare yet unleashed in the capital..

This particular event was about 100 families, 500-600 people, but I think the specific geography of some of these actions is not being talked about enough.

Sayed Muhammad (a Sunni cleric) described the aim of the Shiite attacks on Saturday as creating a Sunni-free corridor across northern Baghdad that would run from the Shula district on the city’s northwestern edge to Kadhimiya, a Shiite stronghold on the west bank of the Tigris river.....

“It’s part of a much wider plan,” the cleric said. “What we’re experiencing here is the Shiite groundwork for a civil war.”

Ethnic cleansing represents only the first phase of the civil war.