Baghdad, 10 years after
In March 2003, a Us-led coalition invaded Iraq. A decade on from the fall of Baghdad, Peter Beaumont returns to find a changed city and speaks to some of the ordinary Iraqis he first met 10 years ago to find how their lives and country have fared in the y
N a pleasant park on the banks of the Tigris, Qaislaz Zubaidi is eating lunch with his family. He asks me to join him and we watch as a pair of scullers from the Iraqi Rowing Union sweep past on the river’s brown current.
Zubaidi, 47, is in real estate and successful, by the look of him. He is a member of the Shia sect; 10 years ago, he was an officer in the defeated army of Saddam Hussein, his city newly under US occupation.
“I didn’t give up until 11 April, two days after the fall of Baghdad, ” he says, smiling.
“There were only four of us left. The radio had gone silent. There was no communication, no one to ask for orders any more. We sat down and decided things had come to a dead end. So we left. I didn’t feel relief or anything; I just felt negligent for abandoning my post. Then I got home to chaos and looting.”
Zubaidi talks without bitterness. He tells me he is happier these days and hated his time in the army.
“Under Saddam, the state intervened in everything. We were ruled with an iron fist. In those days, I couldn’t afford fruit and didn’t have a car. Now everything’s reversed. We have freedom. We can buy what we like.
“But we don’t have stability. The politicians here behave grotesquely. They are climbing on the people’s shoulders to benefit themselves and I blame them too for the sectarian
Iinstability that we have here again. ” We chat a little longer. It is only after leaving Zubaidi and his family that I think about arriving in Baghdad on the day the city fell — April 9 2003. I remember that, although I had seen many US and British soldiers over the days of the invasion, by the time I arrived in the capital Iraqi soldiers such as Zubaidi were gone, their uniforms abandoned in little piles on street corners. In the southern city of Basra, which had fallen a few days earlier, the only Iraqi fighters I came across were the bodies outside the university that locals had covered with carpets.
It has taken me 10 years to ask an Iraqi soldier what defeat felt like.
Back then, reporting for The Observer, travelling independent of the invading US and British forces, I found myself by chance walking into Basra on the day it fell to coalition forces. I followed a British paratroopers column I had run into on the road, waiting to enter the city. Travelling with a few colleagues, we continued when the paratroopers stopped and reached the Shatt al-Arab waterway on the city’s edge.
On the banks we found a parade of eerie figures, statues of soldiers with fingers pointing towards Iran.
A few days later, the evening Baghdad fell, I was on the outskirts of the Iraqi capital driving past burning buildings, US tanks and the scattered bodies of Saddam’s paramilitaries — fedayeen — and civilians. That night was spent in the grounds of the blue-domed mausoleum built by Saddam just a year before to commemorate Michel Aflaq, founding father of the Ba’ath Party. We were invited to stay by occupying troops of the US 3rd Infantry Division after an awkward incident in which they almost killed us.
For four years I kept returning, to cover the first elections and then the first wave of sectarian killings that DAY IN THE LIFE: Clockwise from top left, two policemen guard a central Baghdad apartment block. Since the end of the sectarian war that ran from 2005 to 2008 and pitted Shia against Sunni, some neighbourhoods have been walled in and the streets guarded; a group of fashionable middle-class youngsters in Baghdad s Zawara Park; customers in one of Baghdad s most famous pastry shops; and a child stares out of a car window while his father is stuck in traffic in one of the city s interminable traffic jams made worse by the many police and army checkpoints started in the Baghdad suburbs. In time, sectarian conflict would sweep across Iraq, introducing an era Iraqis call the sectarian war, which pitted the Shia militias that had infiltrated the police against their Sunni rivals. AlQaeda got involved, bombing Shia shrines and pilgrimages, fuel queues and weddings. Over three years, from 2005 to 2008, whole neighbourhoods were “cleansed” and tens of thousands killed.
My last two trips, in 2007, were to report on the US military “surge ” in Baghdad when US President George W Bush increased troop numbers in an effort to stabilise the city. This was the beginning of the end of the worst of the sectarian killings.
I twice found myself in convoys hit by Sunni jihadimilitant bombs. The first time, in the city of Baquba, four Iraqi soldiers were killed. The second, on the way back from the town of Tal Afara, a car bomb detonated in front of the US armoured vehicle I was travelling in. It seemed time to take a break.
The first thing I notice, walking around Baghdad today, is that there are street vendors with their drums of embers preparing and selling masgouf — grilled carp — on almost every pavement. Ten years ago, if you could find it at all, the national dish was only available in the restaurants in Abu Nawas Street, which catered to the old elite. One of the vendors explains that the proliferation of artificial ponds for rearing carp has brought down the price. What was once expensive has become available to all.
Driving around one afternoon, an Iraqi friend points out a poster hanging from a lamppost for the provincial council elections in April. “See that,” he says. “It reads ‘ my province first’. In Arabic, the word for province is muhafatha.” He giggles. “If you remove the alif [the long Arabic “a” after the “h”] it reads ‘ my wallet first’.” A wag, he tells me, has already made this amendment on Facebook.
Later, when I visit human rights activist Hanna Edwar, she will tell me that although Iraq may now have the appearance of democracy — elections and political parties — it lacks the functional realities. It is beset by corruption, nepotism and an often scant regard for the rule of law.
The most visible sign of the corruption afflicting Baghdad is the state of the pavements. On every block you can find a section dug up and waiting to be shoddily relaid by contractors who — so the story goes — bribe local politicians for contracts to renew the streets almost every year, whether it is required or not. Still, the city has improved. The Baghdad I left behind five years ago was a grim place. Even short journeys out of the Hamra hotel, which would be bombed twice and now is almost derelict, were dangerous. I recall one evening sitting there and watching a fireball erupt as a neighbouring hotel was hit. There were random checkpoints and militia in the streets, boys on motorbikes who, if they saw a foreigner, would phone in the tip for money.
These days, Baghdad can be a vibrant place, its parks crowded and its restaurants busy. There are new shopping centres under construction. You see Range Rovers and Lexus sports cars. One day, I saw a cyclist in full Lycra on a Bianchi racer powering through the traffic.
But the sprawling, less wellto-do neighbourhoods, such as Ghazaliya, Dora and Saidiya, still feel angry and tense. The concrete walls and armed checkpoints, put up during the US occupation at the height of the sectarian violence, remain in place. They still function to control the population, limiting access in some neighbourhoods to a few exits that can be easily sealed off.
And although the private security contractors who would fire warning shots to clear the traffic are gone and US soldiers no longer patrol the streets, Humvees and armoured vehicles remain on every corner, repainted and manned by Iraqi soldiers and police. There are still killings related to corruption and politics almost every day — not on the same scale, not civil war any more, but a steady drip-drip.
The same tall concrete blast walls still surround the green zone, the name US officials gave the city centre area with its palaces, government homes and foreign embassies to differentiate it from the dangerous red zone outside. In places the walls have been painted on, but that does not change what they are: fortress walls built to protect the buildings inside from the bombs that still target them from time to time.
I go looking for the people I came across during previous times in Baghdad. And I find no one who has been left unscarred by the last decade. — © The Observer