Baghdad was never a beautiful city. A sprawling sea of low rise, dusty concrete cubes with few green spaces, it is a typical West Asian 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.
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. Religion sells good.”
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. 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.
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 is no such thing as a Baghdadi any more. Everyone now is identified with a particular walled neighbourhood, guarded by one of a dozen or so militias.
Compared to much of Baghdad, my beloved Side Street Cafe has changed relatively little. It’s nothing more than a metal table with a gas burner, a few huge copper kettles, and a couple of metal tables on the pavement. Before the war it was run by two chubby brothers, Hayder and Ali — Ali always smiling, Hayder always grumpy. Immediately after the war the compulsory Saddam portrait was replaced by an assortment of bearded clerics. Then they, too, were replaced by a single, fleshy, bearded face — Moqtada al-Sadr.
Now Moqtada has given way to posters of Hakim, the new cleric on the block. It is his militia that dominates this neighbourhood, Karrada.
Though the area has had its share of car bombs, it remained relatively immune from sectarian killings. Karrada seemed a rare oasis of safety. Its relative calm made it a favourite backdrop for TV journalists voicing pieces to camera about how things were getting better in the Iraqi capital.
A few days ago, I was heading back to Karrada. Suddenly I heard the thump of an explosion, the traffic stopped, cars reversed and started driving on the wrong side of the road, bullets were fired and ambulance cars raced in and out of the area. Smoke began to rise from two explosions that had killed 68 people and injured 120. Karrada’s tranquillity had been shattered.
The next day the stores were empty and there were no shoppers on the street.
The Guardian
