Removal of roadblocks boosts traffic and trade in Baghdad
baghdad — Suha Abdelhamid’s life has dramatically improved over the past two months — thanks to the removal of fortified roadblocks that had made her daily commute in Iraq’s capital a misery.
Like people across Baghdad, the young dentist finds a certain joy in rediscovering streets that were previously behind a tortuously slow slalom of concrete barriers and checkpoints.
“Before, I never thought of passing through here” said Abdelhamid, as she shopped in a small supermarket in her wealthy home district of Al Bounouk.
The removal of barriers and roadblocks is a work in progress.
“More than 1,000 streets and alleyways have been reopened in Baghdad since last year”, said General
Saad Maan, spokesman for the city’s security forces high command. The first concrete walls in the old city sprang up in 2007, as violence intensified.
In the decade since then, more than eight million citizens and nearly two million vehicles have had to endure daily jams in the capital, caused by the walls, other barriers and security
checks. But thanks to key routes and feeder roads being reopened, traffic circulation is now improving in some districts.
For 27-year-old civil servant Ahmed Abdelrahman, bringing his arthritic mother to a doctor in Al Harthiya district was once a nightmare. The jams between security checks used to make the journey a feat of endurance for her.
But “everything has changed since they shut the checkpoints and reopened certain streets”, said Abdelrahman, helping his mother out of the car and into the street.
The dismantling of the barriers has also seen trade flow more freely. “We could not bring trucks in and customers had to walk a long way to access the shops”, said trader Rami Dhia in Al Bounouk’s main commercial street.
Business “activity has soared by four times” since the cement barriers were removed, Dhia added.
But Abdallah Ali, who sells children’s clothes, will never forget the many years “when we spent several days in a row selling nothing”. “Many shops closed” because of the roadblocks, he lamented. —