Iraqis plan to build trenches around Baghdad

Iraqi soldiers patrolled Baghdad Friday during a driving ban. The Iraqi government is planning to increase security in and around Baghdad by circling the city with trenches and setting up more checkpoints. Hadi Mizban/Associated Press

I found this story off Americablog, so I thought I'd go to the New York Times to read about it. It is just incredible. This is from The New York Times:

BAGHDAD, Sept. 15 — The Iraqi government plans to seal off Baghdad within weeks by ringing it with a series of trenches and setting up dozens of traffic checkpoints to control movement in and out of the violent city of seven million people, an Interior Ministry spokesman said Friday.

The effort is one of the most ambitious security projects this year, with cars expected to be funneled through 28 checkpoints along the main arteries snaking out from the capital. Smaller roads would be closed. The trenches would run across farmland or other open areas to prevent cars from evading checkpoints, said the ministry spokesman, Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf.

“We’re going to build a trench around Baghdad so we can control the exits and entrances so people will be searched properly,” he said in a telephone interview. “The idea is to get the cars to go through the 28 checkpoints that we set up.”

There has been a surge in the number of Iraqis killed execution-style in the last few days, with scores of bodies found across the city despite an aggressive security plan begun last month. The Baghdad morgue has reported that at least 1,535 Iraqi civilians died violently in the capital in August, a 17 percent drop from July but still much higher than virtually all other months.

Are we going back to the 10th century here? Trenches being built around Baghdad to keep the supposed bad guys out, and the rest of the population in? What's next--burning oil and putrid water to fill these trenches?

In one sense, this story tells me that the government of Iraq no longer has control of either the country, or its population. This is a siege mentality here. The government cannot trust its own citizens. So now this same government is building fortifications--trenches--to protect itself from its own citizens.

This war is lost.