On the line were Taha and Khudair, his former neighbors and best friends. They are Sunnis. He is a Shiite. They hadn’t spoken since June 2007. But on this September morning, they urged him to return to his house in eastern Baghdad’s Amil neighborhood, Kurmash recalled. He is 44, a seller of socks in one of the capital’s biggest markets.

“It is safe now,” Taha’s voice crackled over the receiver. Kurmash fell silent.

He had met Khudair in 1980. They attended the same high school, the same air force college. They fought in the Persian Gulf War. In 1998, Kurmash built a house next to Khudair’s family in a mostly Sunni section of Amil. Their families often shared meals. Kurmash soon grew to know Khudair’s brother Taha.

“We were very close,” Kurmash said.

After the February 2006 bombing of a Shiite shrine in the ancient city of Samarra, sectarian strife raged across Baghdad. But, somehow, it hardly touched Kurmash’s life or his relationship with the Sunnis in his neighborhood.

Until April 2007.

On one block, Sunni insurgents kidnapped a Shiite man. After the $50,000 ransom was paid, the kidnappers killed the man and told his family to fetch his body from the morgue, Kurmash recalled. On another block, a grocer was killed.

Then, one day, Taha told Kurmash matter-of-factly, “We want to make this neighborhood only for Sunnis.” Kurmash felt uncomfortable but immune because of his close ties to the brothers.

But when a bomb exploded in front of another neighbor’s house, he realized that he could easily become a target. “I felt I had to leave,” Kurmash said.

The night before his escape, a Sunni neighbor demanded that Kurmash give him the keys to his house — or else it would be bombed.