Foreign Arabs anger Iraqis

AP/Washington Post:

The wealthy Arab man, sporting a foreign accent, has just given an Iraqi teenager some cash and a bomb when police burst in and arrest him. "You come here from abroad and want to make this young man kill his Iraqi brothers?" an officer asks.

The television ad, widely aired across Iraq in recent weeks and meant to encourage Iraqis to report suspicious behavior to police, is a startling example of a new strain of anger and discrimination against foreign Arabs in this Arab-majority country.

Suspicion toward foreign Arabs stems, in part, from the fact that the Sunni-led insurgency has included many foreign fighters, most of them Arabs, who are blamed for deadly attacks that have claimed thousands of Iraqi lives.

Foreign Arabs who live in Iraq often try to hide their identities by faking an Iraqi accent or staying silent. Iraqis are usually suspicious when they hear a person speaking Arabic with a non-Iraqi accent.

An Associated Press reporter riding a public bus last month heard one of the passengers telling the driver in conversational Egyptian Arabic to drop him at a stop. After the man, carrying a bag, left the bus, Iraqis began arguing with the driver about why he had let the man on. Several passengers searched the seat where the man had been sitting to make sure he had not left a bomb.

The suspicions have shown up in official pronouncements from the Arab Shiite Muslim-led government of Iraq, too.

After a suicide truck bomb killed more than 132 people and wounded hundreds in a Baghdad market a few weeks ago, the head of the Shiite-controlled Interior Ministry's explosives department, Maj. Gen. Jihad al-Jabiri, told state-run Iraqi television: "I call on the government to deport (foreign) Arabs immediately."

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This is more dramatic evidence of how al Qaeda has lost the hearts and mind battle in Iraq. The group has certainly given Iraqis plenty of reason to be suspicious of foreign Arabs. It also appears that the ad has hit a nerve with the public.