Iraqi and US officials defended their decision to build a three-mile wall around Baghdad's Sunni district of Adhamiyah, even though Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has attacked the project.
The new US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, used his first press conference since arriving in Baghdad last month to insist that the concrete wall was not meant to segregate the city's warring Sunni and Shiite communities.
"I think it's important ... that one not lose sight of the threat that is motivating some of the decisions that have been made," Crocker said, according to AFP. "The intention in Adhamiyah is clearly not to segregate communities nor to engage in a form of political or social engineering," he continued.
"It's to try to identify where the faultlines are, where avenues of attack lie and to set up the barriers literally to prevent those attacks."
The spokesman for the Iraqi forces engaged alongside US troops in enforcing the Baghdad security plan, Brigadier General Qassim Atta, stated that many other districts already had or would have some form of barrier.
Some of these might be walls, but others ditches, sand-bags or fences, he said. "In fact the Adhamiyah security barrier has been exaggerated by the media, and we anticipated there would be some reactions by weak-minded people," he said.
Atta said Iraqi units involved in planning and building walls are under Maliki's command and implied the prime minister had reacted to false reports, saying: "He said he would not accept a 12-metre high security barrier."
Maliki told reporters in Cairo on Sunday that he opposed the wall, saying its "construction is going to stop."
On Monday, hundreds of Sunnis marched through the streets of Adhamiyah, carrying banner reading "No, No to sectarian barrier!" in protest at the wall.
