BAGHDAD "Of the 92,000 displaced families in Baghdad, 11,000 have returned to their homes and we hope that this number will increase soon," Major General Qassim Atta told reporters. "Al Qaeda had a plan to divide the capital along sectarian lines, ensuring that each sect is well separated from the other," he added.
A government study in February found that 43 percent of the 212,063 families displaced across the country are from Baghdad.
Tens of thousands of families fled their homes in the city and in other regions after the eruption of sectarian violence following the bombing of a Shiite shrine in the central city of Samarra in February 2006. According to the United Nations the wave of violence ended in the summer of 2007 and a tentative return began in autumn last year, especially in Baghdad.
"There are terrorist groups who do not want families to return, but the government and the army are closely tracking the situation," Atta said.
Last week the son of senior Sunni lawmaker Adnan al-Dulaimi was arrested on allegations that he had placed a bomb in the home of a displaced family in a majority Sunni district of Baghdad.
Corruption plagues democracy
Corruption is a grave and gathering threat to Iraq's fragile democracy and its strides in curtailing bloodshed, a senior US official in Baghdad said. Unchecked, corruption "threatens the stability of the democracy, because people won't support a government that is widely viewed as corrupt through and through," Ambassador Lawrence Benedict, anti-corruption coordinator at the US embassy in Baghdad, said in an interview this week.
"Senior officials in the Iraqi government have characterised corruption as the second insurgency -- that's pretty strong language in a place like this," Benedict said. "Iraqis view it a serious problem, and we certainly share that view."
Widespread graft is drawing scrutiny as Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki's Shia-led government seeks to match success on the battlefield with government reforms and political progress.
After more than five years of war, violence across Iraq has dropped to levels not seen since 2004. But Iraq scored only above Myanmar and Somalia in 2007 in Transparency International's ranking of perceptions about corruption in 180 countries and territories.
Radhi Hamza Al Radhi, former head of Iraq's integrity board, told the US Congress last year the cost of corruption across Iraqi ministries was believed to be at least $18bn.
Iraq, blessed with the world's third largest oil reserves but scarred by years of authoritarian rule, crippling sanctions and war, is a country primed for such pitfalls, Benedict said.