Criticism mounted today over a wall US troops are building around a Sunni enclave surrounded by Shiite areas in Baghdad, with residents calling it "collective punishment".
According to the local council leader, the community did not approve the project before construction began.
The US military says the wall is meant to secure the minority Sunni community of Azamiyah, which "has been trapped in a spiral of sectarian violence and retaliation." The area, on the eastern side of the Tigris River, would be completely gated, with entrances and exits manned by Iraqi soldiers.
But some residents were alarmed about the plan, and said they had not been consulted about the barrier being built.
"This will make the whole district a prison. This is collective punishment on the residents of Azamiyah," said Ahmed al-Dulaimi, a 41-year-old engineer. "They are going to punish all of us because of a few terrorists here and there."
"We are in our fourth year of occupation and we are seeing the number of blast walls increasing day after day, suffocating the people more and more," al-Dulaimi said in an interview.
US and Iraqi forces have long erected cement barriers around marketplaces and coalition bases and outposts in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities such as Ramadi in an effort to prevent attacks, including suicide car bombs. But the Azamiyah project appears to be the biggest effort ever to use a lengthy wall in Baghdad to break contact, and violence, between Sunnis and Shiites.
The US strategy for stabilising Iraq now involves persuading Iraqis to live in peace and support their democratically elected government and launching a security plan in the capital that calls for 28,000 additional American troops and thousands of Iraqi soldiers.
Interior Ministry employee Khalid Ibrahim, 45, said the Americans were working hard to divide Baghdad's neighbourhoods - something he said he wasn't sure was a good thing.
"This is good if it is temporary, to help the area with security problems. But if this wall stays for the long term, it will be a catastrophe for the residents and will restrict our movements," he said.
The US military hopes to finish the three-mile long barrier as soon as possible. Community leaders said construction began before they had approved an American proposal for the wall.
Agencies