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Destruction, death and fear on Iraq streets

Baghdad was never a beautiful city. A sprawling sea of low rise, dusty concrete cubes with few green spaces, it is a typical Middle Eastern architectural disaster, expanding without any real urban planning from the 1950s. But if you knew the city you could find your corners: a narrow, zigzagging alleyway, an Ottoman courtyard, the shade of a lemon tree in spring.

One of my favourites was the Mutanabi book market. The cafes and teahouses lining the old street had become a hangout for journalists, poets and artists, and with them had come the book market. It was here that I used to buy my illegal photocopies of Marx’s Communist Manifesto — in Arabic — and Orwell’s 1984.

Last week, I went back to Mutanabi. To reach it I travelled through bullet-pocked Bab al-Mu’adham, past countless checkpoints: Shia police commandos, some carrying newly U.S.-supplied M-16 guns, hunkering behind sandbags, Sunni militiamen in khaki trousers, T-shirts and trainers.

Mutanabi street itself looks like a scene from a second world war movie, a couple of gutted buildings, heaps of garbage in the muddy road. Before the war, booksellers spilled into the road and you had to push and shove to walk down the street; now there were only half-a-dozen of them.

The street was targeted by a car bomb, killing dozens, a few months ago. A week later the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, vowed that he would rebuild the street. When I went there, a lone small concrete mixer had been left in the middle of the road as if to indicate that his Excellency’s words were taken seriously.

I asked one of my old friends there for a book on a 1960s poet. “Nothing on poetry,” he said. “I have lots of books on religion these days. They come from Saudi and Iran, big leather-bound books for only 1,000 dinars (about 80 US cents). Religion sells good.”

The Shahbander, one of the city’s oldest cafes, where intellectuals once whispered the names of banned novelists and chewed over Sartre, was destroyed by a car bomb. The owner, Haji Muhammad, sits outside, reading amid piles of rubbish. His five sons died in the bombing, he tells me.

On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the war, I had returned to the city where I was born and lived for 30 years to find out what five years of occupation and civil war had left of the Baghdad I knew.

In the days leading up to the start of the war on March 20 2003, I spent my time cycling through the city with a couple of borrowed cameras, trying to document what was going on. Then I would sit under the big eucalyptus tree outside my favourite cafe, the Side Street Chai-Khaneh, and scribble in a cheap notebook.

March 13 2003:

I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but people around me are freaking out and running away. Yesterday for the first time I was afraid ... it’s going to be lonely here.

March 16:

We evacuated the office today ... I am running like mad to finish stockpiling for the war.

March 20:

5.30 a.m. It came — several explosions. Not as I imagined. Not shocked nor awed. I can see from my window a police car racing through the street.

March 22:

The whole city has changed, military vehicles and pick-up trucks, groups of gunmen, even the traffic police are wearing helmets.

A few days later I was arrested in the street by one of Saddam’s Special Security police who was convinced he’d caught a spy when he found my cameras and short wave radio (my lifeline to the outside world). But travelling through the city then was much easier than now.

Few Baghdadis would try it these days. Most now live in walled, effectively ethnically cleansed, communities. Travelling across the city means hopping from one frontline to another and negotiating countless militia-controlled fiefdoms.

To do it I must make elaborate preparations. First, two separate ID cards, one with a Sunni name, another Shia. Then the rings: Shia militiamen favour two big ones. As we approach Shia checkpoints I stick my hand out of the window wearing them, wave Salam, and am almost always waved through.

I grew up in Karrada, a mixed neighbourhood, but I went to school in Adhamiya, a strongly Sunni area where the insurgency started. Soon after the war Adhamiya was taken over by Al-Qaeda but today it is controlled by an anti Al-Qaeda Sunni militia. The main threat comes from across the highway: the Shia area of Qahira. The highway between the two areas resembles a scene from the West Bank: two high concrete walls separating the two sides of the road. The militiamen say they feel safe inside Adhamiya, but a few yards outside the neighbourhood it is very different. “Our limit is the checkpoint at Antar square,” their commander says. “After that the Mahdi army of Qahira will kidnap us.”

In the market the vegetable sellers say that each time they bring in food supplies, they must bribe the Iraqi army soldiers manning checkpoints. “We are worse than Gaza because if they don’t let me through I have to drive all around the area and 99 per cent I will be dead.”

Not far from the checkpoint and behind the famous Abu Hanifa mosque was a small park. Because so many have been killed in the area, and because people can’t move outside it, it has been converted into a cemetery.

Three thousand graves have been dug in two years, according to the man who supervises it. An old man sprinkling rosewater on his son’s grave told me: “He was killed by the Shia Mahdi because his name was Omar” — a common Sunni name.

Many here have been killed by the Mahdi army but others were killed by car bombs laid by the Sunnis themselves against Americans or Shia army units. Some were victims of battles between Sunni factions. I drove to the place I once used to sit with friends after school. It is right on the edge of the wall: there are no ordinary people here now, just pockmarked buildings, and a few young militiamen toting guns. Another day, I changed my ID card and car and visited the other side of the wall. It is a poor area, controlled by a Shia militia, some of whose members are affiliated to the Mahdi army.

There were two funeral tents that day, one for Hussein, a young boy whose brother says he was killed mistakenly by the Americans the night before, the other for Jassim, a pick-up driver whose father and cousins say he was killed by the people of Adhamiya.

There is no such thing as a Baghdadi any more.

(Ghaith Abdul-Ahad has been shortlisted for foreign correspondent of the year in the British Press Awards.)

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