A private security guard passes by a painted blast wall Friday in Baghdad. Some artists who had been painting the walls are protesting suggestions to depict sectarian scenes by refusing to continue painting the walls.

Baghdad ? It’s art ornamenting life: murals of soothing landscapes and historical heroes covering the blast walls that are now as much a part of Baghdad’s cityscape as date palms and desert dust.

The idea took off last year when Iraqi aid groups sought to provide work for young artists – and offer a bit of hope and a splash of color to a city whose signature hue is oatmeal brown.

But fully rising above Iraq’s sectarian suspicions has proved a challenge.

Many members in the founding group of artists are putting down their brushes to protest requests from neighborhood councils to depict politically charged sectarian themes such as Sunni shrines in Sunni districts or Shiite saints in Shiite areas.

“We’d rather refuse the work than do that,” said Ali Saleem Badran, one of the original crew of muralists in the Jamaat al-Jidaar, or the Wall Group. “That is not what this work is supposed to say.”

But that is what Baghdad has become: a quilt of Sunni and Shiite enclaves after years of sectarian killings and threats. While some displaced families are crossing the lines and returning to their old neighborhoods as violence ebbs, the capital may never fully regain its place as a true mixing ground for Iraq’s religious and ethnic groups.

The mural project began in early 2007 when Iraqi civic groups approached aspiring and student artists, including Badran who was then in his last year of art school.

Hundreds of concrete slabs – each about 12-by-6-feet and designed to shield against car bombs and other threats – were gradually turned into an open air art gallery meant to boost spirits and kindle optimism.

It’s a bit like the Baghdad version of other acts of art in the face of adversity, such as the New Deal-funded murals during the Depression or the messages and figures on the western face of the Berlin Wall.

But rumbles started a few months ago, Badran said, when the program was transferred from loose government oversight to neighborhood councils that began suggesting sectarian images.

Many of the original artists have refused to take part. Local dabblers have often taken up the slack with less refined – but still potent – references to either Sunni or Shiite roots.

“They want to take an idea that was supposed to unite the city and express the things that divide us,” said Badran, now a professor at the Fine Arts College in northern Baghdad.

City officials have tried to clamp down on overt sectarian symbols, but watching over the miles of blast walls borders on impossible. The best they can do is appeal for reconciliation.