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Baghdad: a view from the streets

By Borzou Daragahi
Newhouse News Service

KARIM KADIM / AP A security guard inspects the car of the deputy governor of Baghdad province, Hatim Kamil, who was killed by gunmen who opened fire on his car in Baghdad on Monday.

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A simple trip to the supermarket turns disastrous when a gunfight erupts. A well-to-do doctor drives a beat-up jalopy while keeping his two Mercedes on cinder blocks, fearful he'll be carjacked. Rockets tear into hotels in the heart of the city's most secure areas.

And the car bombs, which happen daily now, are so common that some people don't even halt sentences for the explosions, much as a New Yorker might ignore a car alarm.

This is the emerging picture of life on the streets in Baghdad, where citizens and foreigners alike live with constant fear, and new questions about the country's future abound.

"I would prefer that the new leader will be Saddam Hussein because I would rather vote for Saddam Hussein than anyone else," said Wafa Hamid, a 41-year-old engineer at the Ministry of Trade and a mother of two. "He was one of the most hated people in the history of Iraq. And I was against him more than anyone else. But if he runs for election, I'm going to vote for him."

This is my eighth trip to Iraq in two years. Born in Iran, I spent almost my entire life in New York and Chicago. The events of Sept. 11 drew me to the Middle East and Iraq.

I have seen many intense, seemingly contradictory images here — from freshly printed newspapers heralding the beginning of a free press, to bodies decapitated by car bombs expressing the rage of those opposed to the U.S.-led occupation.

The "thieves market"

Still, the fear and trauma Iraqis live with surprised me during a hasty visit earlier this month to the Bab al Sharji "thieves market," a sprawling bazaar in the old section of town. The market is not far from the statue of Saddam that U.S. Marines toppled on April 9, 2003, marking the symbolic end of his reign.

I found myself among pickpockets, car thieves and prostitutes as I gravitated to a 13-year-old named Allawi Ali Haydar.

Allawi, wearing a gray sports jersey, was selling videos of local guerrillas fighting U.S. and Iraqi National Guard forces. A screen mounted in his booth titillated shoppers with bloody images and clips of Mahdi Army militiamen opening fire from alleyways.

The videos, which cost less than a dollar, were selling briskly.

"I don't feel good when I see them," said the boy, something like sadness flickering in his brown eyes, "because I live in Sadr City, and most of the events shown are in Sadr City, and I don't want such things to happen in my part of town."

The market is part of a busy commercial district.

Tribal men in flowing dishdashas examine stereos. Baghdad sophisticates in suits walk toward government offices. Professional women eye clothing shops. Lithe, dark-skinned Iraqis from the south sell fruit while traditional women wrapped in all-covering black abayas beg for money.

Haves and have-nots

The shops and stalls are filled with consumer goods denied citizens under Saddam: shoes from Turkey, digital cameras from Japan, air-conditioning units from Iran, shampoos from Syria.

Salaries of government employees have multiplied dramatically, and a new class of citizens is financially better off.

Still, up to 60 percent of Iraqis are officially unemployed, arguably one of the reconstruction effort's most striking failures. All around the bazaar are young, restless, unemployed men and teenagers, milling about, hunting for work as porters or cleaners.

There is a protocol to everything journalists, contractors and other Westerners do here.

We wear local clothes, like drab plaid button-down shirts, and drive in low-key vehicles, such as second-hand Korean-made Daewoo sedans. If you're male, you grow facial hair. If you're female, you wear a headscarf over every strand of hair on your head.

Trips outside the capital on Iraq's treacherous highways require careful planning. For most of us, paranoia is a constant companion.

It is still hard not to think of Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, the French reporters kidnapped in mid-August on the road to Najaf. I last saw Chesnot in Paris. He was pondering coming back to Iraq. Malbrunot was at my wedding in July and he had been talking about settling down back home with his new girlfriend.

They are among the growing number of foreigners and Iraqis kidnapped for ransom or political goals. Most of those kidnapping victims actually are Iraqis, snatched for ransom by criminal gangs.

A harrowing account

Mayada Farho was one of the lucky abductees to escape with her life.

Farho was recently seized from the sidewalk in front of her home by gun-toting men. In a desperate quest, her uncle Behnam, a 44-year-old goldsmith, went on a weeklong odyssey into Baghdad's new criminal underworld.

At one point, he sat in an outdoor teahouse in Sadr City and had a chat with a whiskey-guzzling kingpin who he hoped held a clue to Mayada's fate.

Behnam Farho paused and asked the man if it was safe to be seen with him — "What if the police come now?" he asked.

The mobster laughed. "Before the police even left the station," he said, "I would get a call on my cellphone."

A few weeks later, the Farhos paid the kidnappers a $10,000 ransom, all Behnam and family members from as far away as Chicago could cobble together.

Mayada, 23, eventually was sent home in a taxi, and Behnam started selling his family's property.

He was headed to Syria.

"There's no place for us in Iraq," Behnam Farho said during an interview in his niece's modest Baghdad home."Even if I wound up in a poor country in Africa, I'd be happy, as long as I could sleep at night without fear."

Hanna Abdul Hakim, a high-school teacher, walked hand in hand with her two children, 6 and 8 years old, down a city street, less than a week after a string of bombs killed at least 35 children in the western part of the city.

She explained how one of the bombs exploded on the highway a few hundred yards from her house, and the children have been terrified since, refusing to stay in the house unless she is with them.

So Hakim's employer allows her to leave work every day at noon, pick up her kids from grammar school and bring them to work while she teaches afternoon classes.

"We're scared for our kids mostly," she said. "But we cannot keep our children locked up. They have so much energy. We can no longer take them to the park or public places, because of the explosions. They're afraid of the explosions."

School started in early October, a few weeks later than usual because of security concerns. Many parents, Hakim said, have considered pulling their children out of school altogether until there is some level of normalcy.

Several Baghdad schools are much better equipped than they were under Saddam, and several were renovated and refurbished by the Americans.

Officials at the new education ministry are working hard to revamp the curriculum and purge it of pro-Saddam rhetoric and slogans. Salaries for teachers have been bolstered, from a few dollars a month to as much as $150.

But challenges remain.

Most of Iraq gets no more than 12 hours a day of electricity, so the fans and air conditioners in schools, which were donated by coalition forces, can be useless at times.

And posters of fundamentalist religious leaders, including Muqtada al-Sadr, adorn the walls of many schools, placed there by bands of religious enforcers. A wall near one school is covered with graffiti that says: "Long live the resistance. Long live the holy warriors. The occupier will leave, by God. Traitors and spies, beware."

Mutual uneasiness

The first time I visited Iraq, it was in the country's Kurdish north, which actively supported the coming war. The Kurds' view of the war as a liberation of Iraq was infectious, and when the northern front fell, I followed Kurdish militiamen into cities where locals embraced them with flowers, hugs and sweets.

That was before the prisoner-abuse scandals, beheadings, kidnappings, car bombings and airstrikes of the past year. That was also before more than 1,000 U.S. troops died here.

Today, American soldiers have a difficult time understanding the complexities confronting them.

"I like the Iraqi people," Pfc. Isaac Staley, 30, of Springfield, Ore., said as he worked a joint U.S. Army-Iraqi police checkpoint. "But there's so much separating them from us, from our Western civilization, that it's hard to get past. There's prejudice ... prejudice on our side, and there's prejudice on their side."

It isn't hard to find U.S. soldiers in Baghdad who are stunned by what they consider the ignorance, ingratitude and hostility of Iraqis.

In moments of candor, beyond the watch of their commanders, many question their mission. They are under frequent fire. They have seriously curtailed patrols and rarely venture off their base in unarmored vehicles. They suspect the same people who smile at them during the day are the ones firing rocket-propelled grenades at them by night.

"It's more of an insurgency than a war," said U.S. Army Capt. Jeff Mersiowsky, of Tucson, Ariz. "Don't trust anyone, not even the 10-year-old kid on the street. You're not nervous when you're out there on the street. You're nervous when you're at the base thinking about being out there."

In reality, U.S. troops are confronting a fraction of Iraqis who are fighting the Americans. A larger group of Iraqis is actively trying to find a way out of the country, while the majority of the citizens remain mired in postwar Iraqi life.

Sabotage's toll

People struggle to find gasoline because pipelines and other facilities have been sabotaged.

They hunt for cooking gas along roads that are choked by monstrous traffic congestion, frequent roadblocks and checkpoints. They tangle with the country's re-emerging bureaucracy, which despite much of the bad news in Iraq, has slowly begun to assert itself. People are paying taxes, civil-service employees are working again, the country's hospitals and schools are up and running, and the water and sanitation levels are up to prewar levels.

Most important, the bureaucracy also is rebuilding Iraq's army and civil security forces. With the help of the United States, it is training thousands of new police officers and soldiers.

Normalcy, stress the new Iraq's few boosters, is just around the corner.

"We believe this is natural, a result of the collapse of the regime," said Hamid al-Bayati, the deputy foreign minister. "This has happened everywhere: the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Iranian Revolution. When a dictatorial regime with 13 security organizations, with a huge army of a half-million or more, collapses, and the arms go into the hands of gangs, criminals and thieves, this is the obvious result."

Looking to get out

Iraq's passport offices are among the most popular places. It is here you will find young and talented Iraqis making arrangements to leave the country.

Ahmad Ibrahim, 21, worked as a translator for the U.S. Army, one of the most dangerous occupations in all of Iraq. He has lost three of his fellow translators, all good friends. People on the street tell him he is a traitor who deserves to be killed for working with Americans.

But it took a particularly gruesome day with his unit patrolling Sadr City to finally drive him to the passport office. Ibrahim remembered the intense gunfire of Sadr City and the battalion commander handing him a pistol with three words of wisdom: "Watch your back."

"I didn't sign up for this," Ibrahim said away from prying eyes and ears during a recent interview in my hotel room. "I just wanted to be an interpreter. I've been just like an American soldier. I've been jumping over fences, doing hard raids. I've been taking fire on patrol."

The $800 a month can mask his mental anguish and cover the movements in his double life for only so many months.

"I want to leave, but it's still my country," he said. "I feel so bad about it. Everything is starting to get worse and worse."

Flickers of light

Still, amid the darkness and confusion, there are flickers of hope.

Once isolated from its neighbors, Iraq is now integrated with the contemporary world, and subject to its troubles, joys and dilemmas. Iraqis can speak their minds, and many of them recognize this as a hard-won freedom.

According to a September survey by the Baghdad-based Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, 67 percent of Iraqis intend to vote in January elections — down from 88 percent in June, but still a sizable majority.

Reconstruction continues. Iraqi Airways, badly damaged during the war, has resumed flights, albeit with a single airplane.

"Things will be better, but we need time," said Moayed Qassem al Badrani, a 26-year-old grocery store clerk and high-school graduate. "The government is doing what it can, but terrorism is slowing down everything."

Despite budget cuts, certain government operations already are functioning as well or better than before the war. At one point the Ministry of Water Resources employed 150,000 Iraqis to dredge the country's vital irrigation-canal system, which had been neglected under Saddam. Its headquarters in Baghdad is a gleaming glass-and-steel testament to the employees' dedication.

Sadr City

Across Baghdad, a giant poster of junior cleric Sadr hovers above the bright smiles of two laughing young women shining out from their black abayas.

Sadr City is best known as the vast slum of 2.5 million Iraqi Shiites who suffered immensely under Saddam. I have always thought of it as the pulsating, high-energy domain of young Iraqis.

Today, the kids still dominate the sewage-infested streets. They still scrawl graffiti on its walls. Only now, with feckless disregard for their own lives, some pick up rocket-propelled grenades and engage in running battles with American soldiers and the Iraqi National Guard.

"Iraq is for sale," says one piece of graffiti. "Please see Iyad Allawi."

Hamid Feras, a 30-year-old civil-service worker, offers a speck of hope and moderation among the opinions of the younger rebels.

"In my opinion," Feras said, "now is not the time for resistance. Up to this point, we should be grateful to the Americans because they got rid of a nightmare we'd never thought we'd get rid of. We should give them two, three, four years to rebuild the country."

His voice was drowned out by a passing convoy of U.S. tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles. A pair of Kiowa helicopters flew overhead. Dusk was bleeding into dark, and gunfire erupted in the distance.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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