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By Yara Bayoumy and Dean Yates

BAGHDAD, April 22 (Reuters) - The U.S. military is erecting tall concrete walls to protect five Baghdad neighbourhoods in a new strategy that some residents said on Sunday would isolate them from other communities and sharpen sectarian tensions.

The U.S. military said the intention was to protect the residential areas from gunmen as part of a security crackdown, seen as a final attempt to halt all-out civil war between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunni Arabs.

"We are not sealing off neighbourhoods, we are controlling access to them. It's a tactic, it's not a change in strategy to divide Baghdad along sectarian lines," military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Scott Bleichwehl said on Sunday.

The announcement that more "gated communities" are being built in the Iraqi capital came after the U.S. military said last week it was putting a 5-km (3-mile) cement wall around a Sunni enclave in the city.

Concrete barriers up to 12 feet (3.5 metres) tall are being built around Adhamiya, a mainly Sunni Arab area that is surrounded on three sides by Shi'ite communities. Traffic control points manned by Iraqi soldiers would be the only way in and out of Adhamiya once the wall was finished.

"The intent is not to divide the city along sectarian lines," Brigadier-General John Campbell, deputy commanding general for American forces in Baghdad, said in a statement.

"The intent is to provide a more secured neighbourhood for people who live in selected neighbourhoods. Some of the people who I've talked to have had favourable comments about it, and they want us to build some of them faster."

Um Othman, 45, a teacher, said residents in Adhamiya regarded the concrete barriers as an "isolating wall".

"It will be like Palestine. The people of Adhamiya and neighbouring districts have mutual historical relations, like religious festivals and marriage," she said.

WALLED CITY

Ziad Tariq, 38, a coach at an athletic club in Adhamiya, said walling off the area would deepen sectarian divisions.

"It will affect national reconciliation," he said.

Baghdad is already largely divided along sectarian lines after the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 sparked a wave of violence that reshaped the city's fabric.

Sunnis now mainly live on the west side of the Tigris River and Shi'ites on the east, although there are still some mixed areas. Baghdad was founded as a walled city in the 8th century to protect it from foreign invaders.

The military statement said the "temporary concrete barrier walls will outline selected neighbourhoods around Baghdad in an attempt to help protect the Iraqi population from terrorists".

Campbell said the decision to erect barriers was a "cooperative" one with residents. The districts being targeted are the Sunni insurgent strongholds of Adhamiya, Amiriya and Khadra and the mixed neighbourhoods of east and west Rashid.

"We've selected communities that have seen an increase in violence, a heightened violence, and we're protecting some of those communities with walls," Campbell said.

"We'll take feedback from the local communities. If we find that they're not doing what they're intended to do, we'll certainly move them. We'll add where we have to."

U.S. and Iraqi forces have poured thousands of extra troops into Baghdad, increasing patrols and also establishing dozens of joint security stations where combined forces live together.

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