For Baghdad couples, love often lost amid sectarian struggle

"Najlaa is divorced — her Shiite husband threw her out after his family pressured him to get rid of her.
Wissam wouldn't leave her Sunni husband when the Mahdi Army came and forced his family to leave their Shiite neighborhood. So now she lives in the Sunni enclave of Ameriyah and visits her parents in her old neighborhood only with the care of a spy, with two stops to change cars. Her husband never makes the trip."
Because of growing disputes and violence between Shiites and Sunnis, men and women in Baghdad are being forced to break apart. A Shiite male will be pressured by his family until finally he is made to divorce his Sunni wife, or vice versa. Perhaps people will come and tell the wife to leave or her family will be slaughtered.
This article follows the stories of two different families. The first involved the wife, Najlaa. Her husband "burst into the house and yelled, "Go! You are divorced. You are my wife no longer," she recalled. His eyes never lifted from the floor." He didn't come back again that night, but later appeared with three other men with him who told her to leave the house. When she prepared to take her children with her, they threatened to kill her family if she didn't leave alone. So she did, and fled to Abu Ghraib, where she found many more like herself; women divorced or widowed by the war. She stayed here for a while, until a messenger with a cell phone approached her. It contained a text message with her husband's apology for his weakness and the idea to flee to Syria. So Najlaa is left waiting for him, hoping he was serious.
Another woman, Wissam, was happily married to her Sunni husband, Ahmed. But there was mounting violence against Sunni in her area until finally his brother was threatened with gunfire, and was told to leave and get out of town. They took that as their cue to leave as well. Ahmed and his father packed up the home and they all moved to Ameriyah, a once-upscale Sunni neighborhood that's now mostly deserted and a flashpoint for violence between al Qaida in Iraq extremists and Sunnis who are fighting them. Wissam no longer leaves the house unless at her husband's side. She doesn't speak, for fear that her accent will give away her Shiite dialect and get her killed. Ahmed says "If worse comes to worse, I will take her to her parents' house and leave the country and then send for her."
This shows the dramatic effects war is having on married couples. Where Shiite and Sunni marriages used to be perfectly normal and acceptable, now families are being forcibly torn apart, or threatened and killed. Often husbands fall to the pressure of their families telling them to split and cast their wives out. I think when people consider effects of war, they think of the people fighting and their families. But people don't really think about others in the area and how they're being affected. I never thought about people being forced to divorce, and here are two personal stories of people being directly affected.

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