LA Times reporter Patrick McDonnell covered Baghdad from 2003 to 2005. Then he was away for a year. This month, he went back and filed this horrifying piece on what life there is like now. You should read it.
A city in which it was long taboo to ask, "Are you Sunni or Shiite?" has abruptly become defined by these very characteristics. Once-harmonious neighborhoods with mixed populations have become communal killing grounds....
Even gathering the bodies of loved ones is an exercise fraught with hazards. A Shiite Muslim religious party controls the main morgue near downtown; its militiamen guard the entrance, keen to snatch kin of the dead, many of them Sunni Muslim Arabs. Unclaimed Sunni corpses pile up.
