BAGHDAD — In an omi­nous sign rem­i­nis­cent of the atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted in the Balkan Wars, the funeral of “Atwar Bah­jat, an al-Arabiya jour­nal­ist killed Wednesday”:http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1655859, is under attack right now in a west­ern sub­urb of Bagh­dad.
As I watched the cov­er­age this morn­ing, a cor­re­spon­dent trav­el­ing with the funeral party called into al-Arabiya, say­ing the funeral pro­ces­sion was under attack by gun­men in the neigh­bor­hood of al-Haswah, a Sunni area. The sound of gun­shots could clearly be heard around the cor­re­spon­dent and there was a note of panic in his voice. Four peo­ple have been injured and one killed, so far.
The funeral pro­ces­sion was a mixed Sunni and Shi’a affair, because Bahiat, a styl­ish 26-year-old female cor­re­spon­dent for al-Arabiya who was killed Wednes­day in Samarra as she was cov­er­ing the bomb­ing there, came from a mixed fam­ily. The funeral pro­ces­sion had police cars on either end of it, and this may have caused the inhab­i­tants of al-Haswah to believe the pro­ces­sion was led by Shi’as com­ing to attack them with gov­ern­ment sup­port.
Ten­sions here are so high that any no one should think of mov­ing between neigh­bor­hoods, or within a mixed neigh­bor­hood. The Amer­i­cans have been almost invis­i­ble, except for an air pres­ence. Apaches and Black­hawks buzz the city, snarling by over­head as their pilots watch the city’s mil­i­tants entrench them­selves for a bat­tle that, from the ground, seems inevitable.