The Iraqi grew accustomed to seeing at least one dead body in the street every
morning when he left his Baghdad flat for work.
His neighbourhood, known as Saddam District before the invasion and,
ironically, Peace District afterwards, had become the site of gunfights,
kidnappings and public executions as an avalanche of sectarian violence hit
the city.
“There was heavy gunfire at night. The shops were shut. Rubbish and sewage was
everywhere. The compound was a war zone,” said Omer Nouri, a Sunni Arab who
fled to northern Iraq in February last year with his wife and two-year-old
son.
He returned nine months later after hearing that the killing had subsided,
only to find that the new security came at a price. His neighbourhood, like
many others in Baghdad, was no longer a mix of Sunni and Shia families
living side by side. An ugly wall divided the two sects and Iraqi soldiers
kept the peace.
Mr Nouri’s experience offers a snapshot of what has happened to the capital
since American tanks rumbled up the highway five years ago and the giant
statue of Saddam Hussein in al-Fardous Square was brought crashing down.
Once one of the most modern and cultured cities in the Middle East, Baghdad
has been left with many of its landmark buildings destroyed and roads broken
in the invasion — the obvious cost of war. A more fundamental change has
also taken place.
The sectarian bloodshed that erupted has transformed the ethnic map of this
previously diverse city of Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds, Christians,
Turkmen and, for a while, even Jews.
Much of Baghdad is now divided along sectarian lines defined by a patchwork of
concrete walls, barbed wire and checkpoints. Indiscriminate killings,
targeted murders and forced displacement have also left families emotionally
scarred.
Mueen Hamed al-Kadhimi, chairman of the Baghdad Provincial Council, believes
that it will take a long time to fix the physical and psychological damage.
“Many displaced people who have suffered will not want to return to their
neighbourhoods,” he said. “We now have the phenomenon of Shia Arabs selling
their house to Sunni Arabs and vice versa in different districts . . . It
will be very, very difficult to return the Baghdad map to how it used to be.”
The bombing of a revered Shia shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, in February
2006 inflamed the sectarian killings, with the Sunni extremists of al-Qaeda
clearing neighbourhoods of Shia Arabs, Christians and anyone else who
opposed them, while Shia death squads hunted down Sunni Arab families in
majority Shia areas. Almost 92,000 families were forced to leave their homes
and move either to another part of the city, elsewhere in the country or
abroad. Thousands more people were killed, many of them tortured, their
bodies strung from lampposts.
Mina al-Ta’e, whose father was executed by Saddam, rejoiced when the regime
fell. “I couldn’t believe that we were finally able to have a satellite
television and a mobile phone,” the 26-year-old bank employee said. “I was
dreaming of a life full of freedom, joy, entertainment and prosperity.”
Barely two years later her hopes were in shatters. Ms Ta’e and her mother fled
their home of almost 20 years in Amariyah, a notorious al-Qaeda-run enclave
in west Baghdad, after a Shia neighbour was beheaded in front of his parents
in June 2005.
Renting their house to a displaced Sunni family that was escaping to Ameriya
from a Shia district, they found cramped accommodation in nearby Mansour,
which was relatively safe for both sects. Within months that also changed.
“Assassinations started in Mansour targeting government officials,” Ms Ta’e
said about the once-smart district that contained Saddam’s favourite
restaurant, which was bombed by the US military, missing the President by
minutes. “Many shopkeepers were killed and there were repeated car bombs as
al-Qaeda and other Sunni groups sought control, but Shia militias from the
adjacent Shia neighbourhoods fought back.”
About six months ago the Iraqi Army moved in, erecting checkpoints and closing
roads. As a result, shops started to reopen but the main street is still
largely deserted. Last week five US soldiers were killed in a suicide
bombing outside one of the stores, underscoring the fragility of the
security gains.
Ms Ta’e said that it remained too dangerous for her as a Shia Arab to return
to Ameriya, even though the neighbourhood is similarly encircled by blast
walls and patrolled by a form of civilian security guard made up of local
men, including Sunni Arab fighters who say that they have turned against
al-Qaeda. Stuck in Mansour, she said: “There are moments when I wish the
Saddam days would return. This makes me very disheartened because I never
imagined I would miss the reign of the man who robbed me of my father when I
was five.”
A surge of 30,000 US troops into Baghdad and the surrounding belts, a
ceasefire by the powerful Shia al-Mahdi Army and the rejection of al-Qaeda
by Sunni Arab fighters are credited with a sharp drop in violence since last
summer. As a result, a sense of normal life is emerging in certain quarters
of the capital, particularly on the eastern side of the Tigris river.
Shopkeepers in districts such as Karada are enjoying a healthy trade, coffee
shops stay open late and families venture out once again to local parks.
Signs of reconstruction, previously hampered by the fear of attack, are
starting to show, with pavements being resurfaced, bridges repainted, sewage
pipes fixed, schools reopened and rubbish collected.
Blast walls that line shopping streets, after repeated car bomb attacks, are
decorated with signs advertising products in the stores they protect. The
barriers around neighbourhoods are on occasion decorated with bright
pictures. Tellingly, many of the paint jobs are green — a shade favoured by
Shia Arabs. Where portraits of Saddam once hung there are pictures of Shia
religious leaders, and Shia flags flutter from numerous houses, a sign of
the emerging power in the new Iraq.
The hardcore Shia slum of Sadr City is benefiting from investment after
decades of neglect under Saddam, while in neighbouring Shaab most Sunni
families have been forced out by the al-Mahdi Army, creating yet another
Shia enclave, again surrounded by barriers.
Uncertainty remains over what will happen when the blast walls that cut
Baghdad are taken away and US forces pull out, with residents convinced that
their newly restored peace is wholly conditional. A person would still be
killed for straying into the wrong neighbourhood, they say.
Such concerns prompt Mr Nouri to use a fake identity card still because he
does not want people to know that he is Sunni when passing through
checkpoints in the Peace District, which was built by the former regime for
government employees. Before the war this residential compound of 2,000
apartments in west Baghdad had an integrated mixture of middle-class Sunni
and Shia families. Now the sects are split.
“Shia families don’t come into our half and we don’t go into theirs,” Mr Nouri
said sadly. He hates the concrete partitions, but added: “For the moment,
living in a prison is better than being killed.”
Where are they now?
Rageh Omaar
A few weeks into the Iraq war and Britain was worried. Troops in Basra were
out on street patrols, there was looting in Baghdad and – troublingly –
there was an absence from the nightly news. Where, people asked in e-mails
to the BBC, was Rageh Omaar? Was he in danger? Had something terrible
happened to the man who Viz magazine described as “Britain’s
best-loved bullet-dodging dreamboat”? In fact, the BBC’s man in Baghdad had
simply taken a short break from reporting. But one thing seemed certain: the
“Scud Stud” was now one of the organisation’s prize assets. Then he spurned
it all. Having described the BBC as a white man’s club, and later claiming
that his Iraq reporting covered “almost nothing about Iraqi people”, he
moved in 2006 to al-Jazeera – a news organisation controversially banned
from Iraq at one point after it was accused of supporting the insurgency. He
now presents Witness, a daily documentary on the channel that
showcases independent film-makers. (Tom Whipple)
Larry Lindsey
In 2002, few Bush Administration officials were willing to comment publicly on
the potential costs of war to the United States. When Larry Lindsey,
economic adviser to President Bush, suggested an “upper bound” estimate of
$200 billion in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the White
House dismissed the figure as far too high. Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy
Defence Secretary, even said that Iraq could finance its own reconstruction.
Mr Lindsey was dismissed later that year and, in January 2003, Donald
Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, said that the budget office had come up
with “a number that’s something under $50 billion”. Congress now estimates
that, by the end of this year, the war will have cost ten times that – more
than double Mr Lindsey’s original, derided, estimate. Mr Lindsey went on to
found the Lindsey Group, an economic advisory firm based in Washington. His
most recent book, published in January, is What a President Should Know .
. . but Most Learn too Late. (Hattie Garlick)
Saddam Hussein taught evolution to women. What the west decried as atrocities were incisive actions against the constant shadow of terrorism - not just the youths with explosives strapped to them, but also the finger-wagging cowards who foster such nihilism. The death count before and after Saddam's regime confirm his fundamental decency. Ask the Iraqi picking up his children's limbs if we values his vote.
Let us honestly proclaim Saddam as what he was: a secular hero, a bringer of peace. Thank you Saddam; at least you tried.
stephen, london,