BAGHDAD - Sundus abdul-Fatah says she is still unsure whether she was right to leave her home in Baquba, where she and her late husband raised seven children.

A resident of the Yarmouk neighbourhood in the Sunni majority town 65 kilometers northeast of Baghdad, 30-year-old Abdul-Fatah fled with her family to the capital after Sunni insurgents killed her husband and threatened her children unless they all left.

She only had time to take a few valuables, moving to her sister’s until she could find somewhere to live - a problem facing many Iraqis displaced by the escalating sectarian conflict.

“It’s hard to leave a house you built and spent your life in, with all your best memories. But death is dreadful,” she said through tears. “The image of my husband getting killed in front of the house pushed me to flee with my children, because I feared they will face the same fate. I had to leave everything behind.”

Thousands of families have now been displaced by both Sunni and Shia insurgents. Abdul-Khaliq Zangane, a parliamentary deputy and member of the parliamentary committee on displaced and migrants, says that through November 2006, around 100,000 families had been forced from their homes.
House swaps are going well. So far, we have housed more than a hundred families in Baghdad and the suburbs without any problem, and both sides are satisfied.

As a result, a new phenomenon has emerged: Sunni and Shia families swapping houses. Real estate agents provide lists of available property, facilitating swap arrangements.

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