©Sebastian Meyer
Baghdad, Kadhamia district
The
man had approached me in the decaying lobby of Baghdad’s Palestine
Hotel 10 years ago, with a little piece of paper in his hand, my name
scribbled in Arabic. His name was Abbas al-Sarray, he was an Iraqi Shia,
sometime driver, sometime construction worker. He had 10 children and
he was looking for a job. A few days earlier, across the street in
Firdos Square, a new Iraq had been born, as the towering statue of
Saddam Hussein, the dictator who had turned the country to ruin during
more than two decades of rule, came tumbling down, with help from
American troops who had marched into the capital.
People
such as Abbas, who came from the long-suppressed Shia majority, were
optimistic, if a little apprehensive, about what lay ahead and how long
the Americans would stay. This was the time when “stuff” was happening,
as Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, had infamously dismissed
the destructive wave of looting that convulsed a capital that was now in
the hands of everyone, and no one. Iraqis, deprived of their freedom by
Saddam and of a livelihood by a decade of the toughest sanctions in
history, were taking every advantage liberation had to offer, good and
bad. The city was there for the taking, with only a few sites, including
the oil ministry, guarded by US forces.
It was also the time when Iraqis were searching for mass graves and
raiding security offices for information about lost relatives; when new
political parties were suddenly surfacing, squatting in old offices of
Saddam’s ruling Ba’ath party across the city, and pavements were
brimming with stalls of looted or smuggled goods. These were the days
when, for the first time, the Shia marched freely on the main roads
leading to their holy sites in Karbala, a human tidal wave determined to
experience a ritual that had been denied to them in the past.
In the most vivid memory I have of those days, I had watched them as I
made my way from Kuwait to Baghdad, through a volatile Basra and the
Shia heartland, past the checkpoints manned by edgy US soldiers (and
their more relaxed British colleagues). I’d heard about how afraid they
had been in the past, as they crawled through fields to the Karbala
shrine to mark the martyrdom of their revered Imam Hussein, the
grandson of the Prophet Mohammed – but also of their hopes now that
Saddam had been removed. It mattered little to the worshippers why or
how the Americans had landed in Iraq – whether under the pretence of
weapons of mass destruction, or through a bombing campaign. The roads to
Karbala were theirs for the first time.
A street scene at Baghdad’s Shorja bird market
©Sebastian Meyer
An Iraqi soldier, Haifa Street, Baghdad
©Sebastian Meyer
Forty-eight-year-old Abbas became the FT’s driver in the years that
followed, and also a friend to correspondents. Now that I was back in
the country 10 years after the US invasion, there he was, looking barely
a day older, his sarcastic humour as piercing as ever. He’d had another
child since then but was no longer in the mood for driving in Baghdad’s
clogged streets. One of his sons now has a government job so he helps
finance the family. Abbas has been taking philosophy courses and is
preparing to run for a seat on the Baghdad provincial council in the
April elections. He is about to start his door-to-door campaigning.
“I’ll still be the same Abbas if I win,” he reassures me. When I ask him
about life in Baghdad, he bursts out laughing. Like most Iraqis I would
meet on this trip, he was disillusioned, at times livid at the
disparity between what Iraq is today and what it could be. “Nothing’s
changed,” he tells me, time and time again. “In fact, it’s all going
backwards. I might as well go into politics since I have nothing else to
do. Even people who have jobs don’t do anything at their work. We
Iraqis just consume now, we don’t actually produce anything.”
Ten years later – and more than a year after Barack Obama pulled out
the last troops – Iraq is indeed sovereign, as the US president
declared. But it is not, as he also said, stable. It has a
government of national unity that
brings together the majority Shia population and the minority Sunni and
Kurds but it is not being governed. Thanks to US spending and training,
it has a collection of military and security agencies with an estimated
1.2 million personnel, for a population of 32 million. The north of the
country is inhabited by the Kurds, who were already semi-autonomous and
have benefited the most, their lands spared much of the sectarian
fighting that blighted the rest of the country and protected by their
own militias. Their economy is also booming, and they are exploiting
their own oil resources.
©Corbis
April 2003: the Iraqi capital, soon after the Americans marched in
Southern
Shia parts of the country too are re-emerging from conflict, and
reconstruction is starting apace around religious shrines in Karbala and
Najaf. However, the centre of the country and the capital Baghdad seems
to belong to a different time. A veneer of modern trappings conceals an
Arab capital stuck in the 1970s rather than the 21st century.
©Getty
December 2011: 'flag casing ceremony' at US Baghdad air base
American
and British officials had calculated that the quest for “normality”
would, in the aftermath of the invasion, push Iraq’s various sects –
including the once dominant Sunni – towards compromise and peaceful
cohabitation. What I found was a society traumatised by decades of war
and sanctions, in the midst of a constant political storm. The new Iraq
has a prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, whose partners in government
denounce him on a fairly regular basis as an aspiring Shia dictator; a
Sunni vice-president who fled the country more than a year ago after
being accused of terrorism; and a long-time central bank governor who
was sacked after being targeted in a corruption investigation. Iraq also
has a finance minister who has just resigned after his bodyguards were
arrested on terrorism charges. (All the officials deny the accusations.)
“A black, black comedy,” is how Sarmad al-Tahai, a columnist for
al-Mada newspaper, describes the state of the country’s politics. A
young colleague from the same media organisation, 24-year-old Hamad
al-Sayyed, is equally disenchanted. “We went from one-party rule to
constant confrontation, to a lack of consensus, to parties which say
they represent God on earth but which corrupt civil life.” An engineer
who can’t find work in his field and is instead employed by al-Mada’s
radio station, he tells me that his dream is to rebuild Iraq but “our
dreams have been postponed.”
. . .
For a superpower that occupied Iraq for eight years, spent $60bn on reconstruction and lost more than 4,400 US lives,
America has left few traces behind,
except perhaps for the GI-style gear and rifles of local soldiers, far
too many of them all over the city. The Baghdad that US forces abandoned
in December 2011 is no longer bloodied by the violent onslaught of the
middle of the last decade, when civil war raged and hundreds were killed
every day. Many people are confident that, however intense the
political battles, there can be no return to full-blown civil war. But
Iraqis still worry about security when moving around the country and the
army is on constant alert.
Baghdad feels besieged by security forces guarding against cars laden
with explosives whose drivers try to make their way into residential
areas and food markets – far less deadly a threat than before but still a
regular occurrence. The city is divided by concrete walls that surround
politicians’ houses and official buildings, sometimes sealing off whole
neighbourhoods. Side streets are blocked and permanent checkpoints
erected all over, sometimes turning a 10-minute drive into an hour of
traffic agony. Yet the bombs, presumed to be the work of a much weakened
but not eradicated al-Qaeda, still sneak in. One day while I was in
town, the roads emptied as news filtered in of at least nine consecutive
explosions, many in poor Shia neighbourhoods.
Iraqis are now used to such incidents. “It’s normal,” quips a soldier
at a checkpoint, as he jokes with Abbas and points to where a truck
exploded the night before. The banality of violence is part of a strange
combination of simultaneous progression and regression. Baghdad’s
potholed streets are crumbling, with only rare signs of new
infrastructure. Residents still receive only a few hours of electricity a
day. Many young people are unemployed, while others take up three jobs
to make ends meet. But the façades of old shops have been covered with
shiny hoardings advertising the glut of consumer goods now available,
from mobile telephones to flatscreen televisions.
Iraq’s factories are still idle but there are several new malls under
construction, as well as fancy car dealerships and private banks. In
parts of the Kerrada shopping district, the streets are lively at night
and the restaurants busy. In this rentier state, the government
accumulates oil revenues (production is back to 1990 levels of three
million barrels per day, and could double by the end of the decade) and
doles part of them out in salaries, with some of it (the Iraqi
perception is most) wasted in inefficiency and corruption. A teacher’s
salary of $1 a month in the last years of Saddam has now risen to $500. A
policeman makes twice as much. In many cases, though, landing a
government job requires political connections and money, as can a
promotion and often the supply of a government service.
©Sebastian Meyer
Central Baghdad, February 2013
At
a dealership for Chinese cars, which are popular with taxi drivers,
Maisam Fawzi, a 26-year-old saleswoman whose made-up face is wrapped by a
colourful headscarf, says she has a civil engineering degree but can’t
find employment in her field. She paid $5,000 to someone close to
someone important in the government to secure a job, but has been
waiting for a year and is now asking for her money back. “That’s how you
get a job, that’s our government,” she told me. “They’re keeping people
busy with cars, electronics and mobiles and they give us no services,
no security or jobs and no housing.” Even so, surely life is better than
under Saddam’s dictatorship, I ask her? She shrugs. “We had one
oppressive regime but now we have 100 political parties that are
oppressive. We can express ourselves but so what? No one is listening.”
Outside Baghdad University, I sit in a minibus and chat with
students. Alia, a 24-year-old studying for a master's degree in biology,
says young people are enjoying access to the internet, to the dozens of
satellite channels that have been set up in Iraq, and adds that,
despite the political struggle between the elite, there is no sense of
division between Sunni and Shia at the university. Yet she too is
dissatisfied, her family always worried about her whereabouts,
particularly when they hear of bomb blasts. “Freedom is important but it
doesn’t give me enough,” she says. “Freedom should be about being able
to do what you want, not just talk.”
Such expressions of disenchantment are part of the Iraqi nature,
Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s gregarious foreign minister, tells me. We are at
his ministry on a main avenue in the city. The building was
reconstructed at record speed after the 2009 bombing when 250kg of
explosives hidden in a truck blew up the original structure, killing 43
people. “I followed this change from the beginning [as foreign minister
since 2003] and my honest feeling is that the change has been worth [it]
for those of us who can compare,” he says. “A few years ago you
wouldn’t be able to talk to me without hearing gunfire outside.” The new
system has brought “unprecedented freedom, media, travel, access to the
internet and satellite, all that was taboo … Iraq was [previously]
isolated, an outlaw state, and this is no longer”. He acknowledges,
however, that the country has failed to make an “overall” change, and
goes on to list the many shortcomings. “The government has not done a
good job on providing services or resetting the bad deeds of the
occupation … or on settling the issue of the disputed territories
[between Arabs and Kurds] or on corruption in the system. It’s the fault
of the politicians.” And then there is the confusion between the
executive and other powers and the judiciary. “Parliament acts like the
government and the executive interferes in the work of the judiciary,
that’s a key problem,” he says.
Unlike many of his colleagues, Zebari works outside what is now
called the international zone but is known in Iraq, and across the
world, as the Green Zone. This swath of Baghdad real estate near the
Tigris river, around Saddam’s old presidential palace, is where the
Americans set up their headquarters when they arrived in the city. It
continues to be the heart of political power, of plotting and intrigue,
and is home to the prime minister’s office and parliament. Still
surrounded by blast walls, but its entry points now controlled by Iraqi
forces, the Green Zone is a world apart from the chaos of the city.
The US embassy, the largest US mission in the world, is here of
course. It is the first time that I have seen the massive new compound,
with its apartment blocks for staff, sports facilities including tennis
and basketball courts, and even a power station. In a fitting image of
the US’s declining influence, though, the 10,000 staff – mostly
contractors – who work here and across the other missions in Iraq – are
being slashed to 5,000-6,000 by the end of this year. The US puts a
brave face on Iraq’s predicament. An embassy official says the country’s
trajectory is “upward” and that there has been dramatic change since
Saddam. “There’s life in Baghdad,” he tells me. “It’s much better than
it was five years ago.”
. . .
Abbas lives in Sadr City, which used to be called Saddam City – an
overpopulated and troublesome Shia district 3km from the centre of
Baghdad, which the late dictator tried to subdue, partly by punishing
its people with neglect. So deep was the poverty, so overflowing the
sewage and garbage, that the city was of particular concern to the
Americans keen to win the approval of the local population. They set up
shop in an old cigarette factory and called it Camp Marlboro. The
locals, though, were not amused. When I visited a hospital there with
Abbas a few weeks after the fall of Saddam, Shia clerics had beat the
Americans to the task and taken charge, delivering supplies and posting
guards at the gate. A stronghold of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr,
the city soon became a battleground as Shia militias joined in the fight
to force the US out of Iraq. The Hospital of Martyr Sadr couldn’t keep
up with the flow of dead and injured.
©Sebastian Meyer
Abbas
al-Sarray, driver: ‘Nothing’s changed. In fact it’s all going
backwards.’ On her return visit, Roula Khalaf was reunited with her
driver from 2003
As Abbas had warned me, the drive to Sadr City takes two and a half
hours, despite the short distance, because every single car is inspected
at the entry checkpoint. Two days earlier three bombs had exploded in
the area, and it is one of the locations in the city which continues to
be regularly targeted. Entering Sadr City, we pass a new amusement park
with a ferris wheel. It is called “Fantasy Land”. The district feels
more crowded than I remember, and not much cleaner. So little space is
left that property prices have skyrocketed. The pavements, meanwhile,
have been taken over by traders.
Salam Khalaf, the spokesman for the Martyr Sadr hospital, moonlights
as a photographer and is also taking evening classes in economics and
management. He says the hospital has been renovated and expanded, with a
new operating theatre and a lab. The militias are no longer on the
streets (the main one in Sadr City, the Mahdi Army, is “dormant”,
according to its supporters, and others are now more active). The
hospital is guarded by 50 policemen and another 30 soldiers: a bomb was
detonated in the car park last year. “There’s relative improvement in
Sadr City – relative,” says Khalaf.
As I wait for him to get permission to speak to me – the ministry of
health told him to proceed but stress the positives – the leg of a desk
in the director’s reception room cracks and two security guards rush to
hold the top together. One turns to me with a chuckle: “Here’s how Iraq
has improved.” The crumbling desk, he says, was damaged when a
disgruntled family of a patient who had died at the hospital stormed the
office determined to punish the doctors. One of the problems for
hospitals – indeed for many other sectors – is the tribes who demand
compensation when accidents befall one of their own.
©Sebastian Meyer
A soldier patrols a Baghdad street. A heavy military presence is visible across the city
The
tribes have always been powerful in Iraq, and were bolstered by Saddam
before the 2003 war. They are now even more influential as police and
security forces, busy chasing car and truck bombers, have little time to
uphold the law. One of the many Iraqis who dream of a modern state and
is outraged by the power of the tribes is Hana Edward, a leading human
rights activist I meet in central Baghdad. A small and fiery woman who
opposed the Saddam regime for 30 years, she now challenges the Maliki
government.
©Sebastian Meyer
Students at Baghdad University. Students are still frustrated by the lack of real freedom
Edward
tells me that despite the phenomenal expansion of security agencies in
Iraq, tribes and militias still get their way if they don’t like a
doctor or a judge or if a teacher fails a student. In fact, members of
tribes donate to the leaders what amounts to an insurance policy so that
they can pay someone off if they get into trouble. It is a system that
is supported, if not promoted, by the police, which, in many reported
cases, suggests that people settle their differences through their
tribes. “There’s no state, no institutions, no system to protect you,”
she says. “Even if someone is sentenced by the courts, the tribes will
interfere and try to find a different solution.” Edward related the
story of an electronics store owner who died when his shop went up in
flames. The shop was then looted by thieves, one of whom suffered an
electric shock and also died. “The family of the dead thief went to the
tribe of the dead owner and asked for compensation. They had to pay,”
she says.
. . .
I am dressed in the black shroud of Umm Haidar, Abbas’s wife, and
sitting with my head down on the back seat of the car. We are driving to
Fallujah, the Sunni town that prides itself as the hub of the
insurgency against the American forces (though in the past it was better
known for its numerous mosques and the quality of its kebabs). In one
of the most bloody and controversial episodes of the US occupation,
Fallujah was devastated by a major American offensive in 2004, after
insurgents killed four American contractors and hanged their mutilated
bodies from a bridge.
To avoid any questioning and delays I’m told by Abbas not to look the
soldiers in the eyes at the highway checkpoints – they rarely if ever
ask for a covered woman’s identity papers. We go past spectacular palm
groves and the notorious Abu Ghraib prison before a Fallujah minaret
appears in the distance. Ali Ghazal Abbas al-Hiali, who heads a
development organisation in the Anbar province, takes me on a tour of
the town.
Though some buildings still bear the scars of fighting, much has also
been rebuilt, including a hospital. In the neighbourhood that saw some
of the worst confrontations with US troops, al-Hiali points to a
destroyed minaret. “It was kept as a memorial of Fallujah’s resistance,”
he says.
Sunni protesters in Fallujah, February 2013
Fallujah
is still in rebellion, but this time peacefully. The main attraction in
town is the protest camp that has been set up on an empty plot at the
entrance, part of a wave of demonstrations in the Sunni region that was
triggered by the December arrest of the Sunni finance minister’s
bodyguards. “The intifada of Fallujah” reads a banner above a stage,
flanked by Iraqi flags from the era of Saddam Hussein, with the three
stars restored. Tribes have set up tents at the camp, with green and
white plastic chairs and reed mats across the floor.
The country’s Sunni population were the big losers in the new Iraq.
The more radical among them joined the ranks of the insurgency. Many
others were alienated by the American decision to dissolve Saddam’s army
and impose a policy of de-Baathification, rooting out members of the
Ba’ath party from the Iraqi bureaucracy. The Americans eventually
realised their appalling mistake and tamed the insurgency by enlisting –
and paying – the tribes who had tired of war, turning them against
al-Qaeda. The Iraqi government, however, did not live up to its promise
to integrate and keep these fighters on the payroll, instead pursuing a
heavy-handed policy that human rights organisations say includes unfair
arrests and detentions without trial.
Roula Khalaf and Sheikh Khaled Hammoud Mahal al-Jumaili in Fallujah
One
of the leaders of the Fallujah protest is Sheikh Khaled Hammoud Mahal
al-Jumaili, a powerful cleric with a bushy white beard. Iraqis in
general and the Sunni in particular have had enough, he says, of both
the government and what he calls the occupation of Iraq by Iran (the
state with the greater influence on the Shia parties). When the protests
started, he tells me, two of their major demands were repeal of
antiterrorism legislation that the Sunni feel targets only them and the
release of prisoners held without charge. But since January 25, when
clashes with the army left several protesters dead, the demands have
hardened. Fallujah wants to get rid of the government and of the
constitution.
When he steps on to the podium to address a crowd, the Sheikh
declares that Fallujah rejects “Bremer’s constitution”, in reference to
Paul Bremer, the former de facto American governor of Iraq and the man
most Iraqis blame for the catastrophic US handling of the Iraq
occupation.
. . .
Back in Baghdad, I hear words of sympathy for the Sunni from both
Shia and Kurdish politicians, perhaps because of the widespread
political disillusionment with Maliki’s rule. “It’s unusual for a person
who heads the government to have all his partners telling him that he
should change his policies – and he thinks they are all wrong and
conspiring against him and against Shia Islam,” says Diaal-Asadi, a
senior official in Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s bloc. “There are
attempts to bring the cult of dictatorship back. But no one is going to
allow it to happen.”
I go to see Hussein Shahrestani, Iraq’s deputy prime minister and the
point man on the Sunni crisis. In an ironic twist of fate, the former
nuclear scientist’s office in the Green Zone is in a sumptuous palace
that once belonged to Izzat al-Douri, Saddam’s ex-vice-president and the
presumed leader of the post-2003 insurgency. He tells me that the
“legitimate” demands of protesters, including releases of prisoners and
pensions and salaries for those deprived of them, are now being met.
“But people demanding the abrogation of the constitution and people
carrying al-Qaeda flags and Saddam’s flags, are not really a problem;
they are part of the old political system and still see Saddam as their
hero. They are a small minority,” he says.
When I suggest that the Sunni problem is a symptom of a larger
political malaise, Shahrestani is dismissive. “People used to sell their
doors and windows to feed their children, now they have mobiles and
cars. We have to take our time practising democracy, improving the
system and the standard of living.”
One evening, I visit an art gallery in one of Baghdad’s upscale
districts, Mansour, expecting to hear of a reinvigorated art scene in
the era of greater freedom. But Mazen Iskandar, the gallery owner, is
grumpy. Many artists have left Iraq and people who appreciate art and
can afford it also fled the violence of the last decade. “In the past
some of the houses in this neighbourhood were like museums but now
they’re empty. Foreign embassies that also bought art are in the Green
Zone, they don’t come here. And people with money now aren’t interested
in buying art.”
©Sebastian Meyer
A poor district of central Baghdad. The capital is decaying, signs of new building are rare
Later on, I hear more hopeful talk over dinner at Reef, a pizza
restaurant that has been popular since the Saddam era. A band is playing
a Shirley Bassey song while a group of professionals explains that
Iraq’s failures today are also opportunities for the future. Suha
Najjar, an old Iraqi friend who lives in London but visits Baghdad
almost every month, is starting an investment fund to buy stocks on the
Iraqi exchange. She says Iraq needs so much reconstruction and
infrastructure that an economic boom is inevitable. Her friend Seif Abu
Altimen, whose family trades wheat and rice, is a rare example of a
young professional who has returned to live in Iraq, taking up a job at a
telecoms company and helping develop the family business. “I thought I
had an edge here,” he says. Although he was injured in an explosion, he
is staying put.
Najjar, my friend, had arranged a meeting for me at a prominent
business organisation run by Ibrahim al-Baghdadi – a rotund man, known
as a savvy and energetic lobbyist for business. Over tea, juice and
multicoloured biscuits, company representatives grab the microphone and
launch into PowerPoints about projects they are working on worth
billions of dollars. There’s a housing project and a cement factory in
Najaf, a sports city in Basra, and malls and hotels in Baghdad.
Beyond business, too, young people are trying to find a purpose in
Iraq. Hamad al-Sayyed, the engineer who works in media, is a co-founder
of “I am Iraqi, I read it”, an association that encourages donations of
books in ballot-like boxes on a Baghdad street and redistributes them
for free, an initiative inspired by similar groups in other Arab states.
“We’ve had so many problems in Iraq that people don’t read, they focus
on basic needs,” says al-Sayyed.
Another group of 30 young volunteers who met on Facebook have
launched a campaign intended to persuade voters to register their
support for a civic state, accumulating votes that can then be
channelled towards nonsectarian candidates. “Society is becoming tribal
and sectarian, and we don’t want this to become enshrined. If we don’t
move now the situation will get worse, there’s no time left,” says Ahmad
Ibrahim, one of the founders of the initiative. “No one is happy with
the situation except the parties which are benefiting.” Religious-based
parties claim they are fighting in the name of religion, he goes on,
“but they’re all fighting for money – Iraq is a treasure”.
People such as Ibrahim are still in a minority, though he is
convinced that the mismanagement of Iraq by the current political class
can only increase the numbers of those who reject sectarian parties.
“Change will come with the new generation,” Hana Edward reassures me.
“That’s what gives me hope.” For the sake of Iraq and the Middle East, I
hope that Edward is right, though I know that political sectarianism is
difficult to dislodge once it is entrenched.
When I leave Baghdad, I say goodbye to Abbas at the hotel. He can’t
drive me all the way to the airport because it’s a restricted area.
Passengers board buses long before the departure lounge, and then submit
to a series of searches in an impressive security operation that is no
doubt a legacy of the American occupation.
What I leave behind are two different Baghdads. The first one belongs
to a people tired of conflict and eager for a normal life that goes
beyond the ability to consume and talk freely: in this Baghdad desperate
people have been forced to turn to party and tribe for guidance. The
second Baghdad hides behind concrete blast walls: it is a city inhabited
by greedy politicians struggling for control of the state. For this
political class, sectarianism and patronage are the only means of
survival.
One former senior official who spoke to me privately described Iraq’s
problem. “No one wants to reform the state,” he said, “and because it
is rich in oil, no one feels the need to reform it.”
Against the hope of its young people stands the formidable reality of Iraq’s poisonous politics.
