“Al Qaeda in Iraq will be recruiting them,” he said.

Wariness as Walls Fall

Each slab is the shape of a tombstone and the height of a double-decker bus. Assembled on the streets of Baghdad, the walls stretched for miles and redefined the city’s look and feel. As they are removed, the bullet-pocked slabs are stacked in large storage zones waiting to be used elsewhere or moved to a central depot.

The walls are not coming down in all, or even most, Baghdad districts. They still surround the Green Zone, the once notorious airport highway, government buildings, checkpoints and entire neighborhoods like the Sunni enclave of Adhamiya.

But they have already been dismantled in some parts of the city. At a recent ceremony during the closing days of Ramadan, Sunnis from the Fadhil District, east of the Tigris River, joined with Shiites from adjoining Abu Saifeen to celebrate the removal of sections of a 15-month-old American-built wall that had divided their neighborhoods.

A checkpoint operated by Awakening groups from both neighborhoods now stands in the gap.

Col. Craig Collier, commander of the Third Squadron, 89th Cavalry Regiment, Fourth Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, said that in the past year, relations between Awakening groups in the two areas had “gradually gotten better and better, until now, you’re at the point where they’ve taken the wall down and the two sides get together a lot.”

He added, “They’ve been playing soccer.”

A nearby square on Kifah Street was the scene of a huge car bomb that killed 140 people in April 2007. It serves as a bus terminal, where buses are still barricaded behind blast walls. A billboard depicts a collage of photos of drivers killed in the bombing. “If you see my photo, say a prayer for me,” reads the caption.

Here, opinion about the walls was divided. Haider Falah, an Awakening guard, shrugged off past clashes between those in Abu Saifeen and Fadhil.

“We are all Iraqis,” he said.

But Alaa Hadi, 28, a watermelon seller, lost his brother in an earlier bombing that killed 137 people and destroyed much of the market. Fearing outsiders, he is against any walls coming down.