BAGHDAD — While the Iraqi capital is not under any immediate threat of falling to the militants who have captured a wide swath of the country's north and west, battlefield setbacks and the conflict's growing sectarian slant is turning this city of 7 million into an anxiety-filled place waiting for disaster to happen. Traffic is nowhere near its normal congestion. Many stores are shuttered and those that are open are doing little business in a city where streets empty hours before a 10 p.m. curfew kicks in. Arriving international and domestic flights are half empty, while outgoing flights to the relatively safe Kurdish cities of Irbil and Suleimaniya are booked solid through late July as those who can flee. The number of army and police checkpoints has grown, snarling traffic. Pickup trucks loaded with militiamen roam the city. A climate of war reminiscent of Saddam Hussein's days permeates state-run television broadcasts dominated by nationalist songs, video clips of army and police forces in action and reruns of speeches by Nouri Al-Maliki, the prime minister. Interviews with Iraqis vowing to fight or declaring their readiness to die for Iraq are daily fare, along with footage showing young volunteers at signup centers or in trucks being ferried to army camps. The Iraqi capital has seen little respite from violence for more than three decades, from the ruinous 1980-88 war with Iran, the first Gulf War over Kuwait in 1991, to the 2003 US-led invasion and subsequent years of turmoil that peaked in 2006 and 2007, with bloodletting that left tens of thousands killed and altered the longstanding sectarian balance, turning Baghdad into a predominantly Shiite city. Baghdadis, Sunnis and Shiites alike, are renowned for their resilience, but they fear the threat posed by the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Shiites fear they will be massacred if the militants take the city or even parts of it, while Baghdad's Sunni residents worry the Shiite militiamen, with the full acquiescence of the Shiite-led government, will target them in reprisal attacks if the Islamic State continues its battlefield successes. “They are coming to destroy life and humanity,” Al-Maliki, the worshipper at the Imam Al-Kazim shrine, said of the militants. A government employee who was injured in a 2004 blast blamed on militants in the city of Najaf. Around him in the plaza, families sat in circles as their children energetically ran about as the day's searing heat finally relented. But reminders of the dark days that may be ahead were only a stone's throw away. Across the plaza, a giant screen displayed the text of June 13 edict by Iranian-born Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, Iraq's top Shiite cleric, calling on Iraqis to join the security forces to fight the Islamic State fighters, and reminding them that the insurgents have threatened to march on Shiite shrines in Baghdad, Samarra, Najaf and Karbala. Just outside the mosque gates, Shiite clerics addressed dozens of Shiite militiamen in ski masks and combat fatigues. Though unarmed, their presence near one of Iraq's most revered Shiite shrines added to the sense of impending war — and was a reminder of the quick erosion of government authority following the security forces' humiliating defeat in the north, where Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, fell after troops abandoned their positions and weapons. – AP
