A lively Baghdad, back from the dead
By Dexter Filkins Published: September 21, 2008

BAGHDAD: At first, I didn't recognize the place.

On Karada Mariam, a street that runs over the Tigris River toward the Green Zone, the Serwan and the Zamboor, two kebab places blown up by suicide bombers in 2006, were crammed with customers. Farther up the street was Pizza Napoli, the Italian place shut down in 2006; it, too, was open for business. And I'd forgotten altogether about Abu Nashwan's Wine Shop, boarded up when the black-suited militiamen of the Mahdi army had threatened to kill its owners. But there it was, flung open to the world.

Two years ago, when I last stayed in Baghdad, Karada Mariam was like the whole of the city: shuttered, shattered, broken and dead.

Abu Nawas Park - I didn't recognize that, either. By the time I had left the country in August 2006, the three-kilometer, or two-mile, stretch of riverside park was a grim, spooky, deserted place, a symbol for the dying city that Baghdad had become.

These days, the same park is filled with people: families with children, women in jeans, women walking alone. Even the nighttime, when Iraqis used to cower inside their homes, no longer scares them. I can hear their laughter wafting from the park. At sundown the other day, I had to weave my way through perhaps 2,000 people. It was an astonishing, beautiful scene - impossible, incomprehensible, only months ago.

When I left Baghdad two years ago, the nation's social fabric seemed too shredded to ever come together again. The very worst had lost its power to shock. To return now is to be jarred in the oddest way possible: by the normal, by the pleasant, even by hope.

The questions are jarring, too. Is it really different now? Is this something like peace or victory? And, if so, for whom - the Americans or the Iraqis?

There are plenty of reasons why this peace may only amount to a cease-fire, why it's fragile and reversible. The "surge" of American troops is over. The Iraqis are moving to take their country back, yet they wonder what might happen when the Americans' restraining presence is gone. The Awakening, a poetic name for paying former Sunni insurgents not to kill Americans or Iraqis, could fall apart, just as the Shiite Mahdi army could reanimate itself as quickly as it disappeared.

Politics in Iraq remains frozen in sectarian stalemate; the country's leaders cannot even agree to set a date for provincial elections, which might hand power to groups that never had it before. The mountain of oil money, piled ever higher by increased oil prices, may become another reason to spill blood.

But if this is not peace, it is not war, either - at least not the war I knew. When I left Iraq in the summer of 2006, after living three and a half years here following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, I believed that evil had triumphed, and that it would be many years before it might be stopped. Iraq, filled with so many people living so close together, nurturing dark grievances, seemed destined for a ghastly unraveling.

And now, in the late summer of 2008, comes the calm. Violence has dropped by as much as 90 percent. A handful of the five million Iraqis who fled their homes - one-sixth of all Iraqis - are beginning to return. The mornings, once punctuated by the sounds of exploding bombs, are still. Is it possible that the rage, the thirst for revenge, the sectarian furies, have begun to fade? That Iraqis have been exhausted and frightened by what they have seen?

"We are normal people, ordinary people, like people everywhere," Aziz al-Saiedi said to me the other day, as we sat on a park bench in Sadr City, only recently freed from the grip of the Mahdi army. The park was just a small patch of bare ground with a couple of swing sets; it didn't even have a name, yet it was filled to the bursting.

"We want what everyone else wants in this world," he said.

Everything here seems to be standing on its head. Propaganda posters, which used to celebrate the deaths of American soldiers, now call on Iraqis to turn over the triggermen of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the Mahdi army. "THERE IS NOWHERE FOR YOU TO HIDE," a billboard warns in Arabic, displaying a set of peering, knowing eyes. I saw one such poster in Adamiyah, a Sunni neighborhood that two years ago was under the complete control of Al Qaeda. Sunni insurgents - guys who were willing to take on the Qaeda gunmen - are now on the American payroll, keeping the peace at ragtag little checkpoints for $300 a month.
In Sadr City, the small brick building that served as the Mahdi army's headquarters still stands. But not 50 feet away, a freshly built Iraqi Army post towers above it now. Next to the post, perhaps to heighten the insult to the militia, the Iraqi government has begun installing a new sewer network, something this overcrowded ghetto sorely needs. "Wanted" posters adorn the blast walls there, too, imploring the locals to turn in the once-powerful militia leaders.

Inside the Sadr Bureau, as it is called, the ex-militia gunmen speak in chastened tones about moving on, maybe finding other work, maybe even transforming their once ferocious army into a social welfare organization. I didn't see any guns.

"Please don't print my name in your newspaper," one former Mahdi army commander said to me with a sheepish look. "I'm wanted by the government."

As for the Americans, they are still here, of course, but standing ever more in the background. Early this month, I joined a convoy carrying Tariq al-Hashemi, one of Iraq's vice presidents. Hurtling through Baghdad at high speed, we came upon a caravan of American Humvees. I waited for Hashemi and his men to slow down, but the Iraqis - guns bristling, sirens wailing - barreled past. The Americans hurriedly pulled over and made way. Never in three and a half years in Iraq did I see anything like that.

The other day, I rode in a helicopter to Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, the big slice of desert west of Baghdad. Two years ago, 30 marines and soldiers were dying there every month. In 2005, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia declared Anbar the seat of its "caliphate." Since then, violence in Anbar has plummeted. Al Qaeda has been decimated. I was coming in for a ceremony, unimaginable until recently, to mark the handover of responsibility for security to the Iraqi Army and the police.

Standing in the middle of the city center, I found myself disoriented. I had been here before - I was certain - but still I couldn't recognize the place. Two summers ago, when I'd last been in Ramadi, the center of the city lay in ruins. Only one building stood then, the offices of the Anbar provincial government, and the Americans were holding onto it at all cost. For hundreds of meters in every direction, everything was destroyed: streets, buildings, cars, even the rubble had been ground to dust. Insurgents attacked every day.

And then, suddenly, I realized it: I was standing right in front of the government offices. It was sporting a fresh concrete facade, which had been painted off-white with brownish trim. Over the entrance hung a giant official seal of Anbar Province. The road where I stood had been recently paved; it was black and smooth. American marines were walking about, without helmets or flak jackets or even guns.

In the crowd, I saw a face I recognized. It was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser. He is a warm, garrulous man, a neurologist who spent years in London before returning to Iraq. But he is also a Shiite, and a member of Iraq's Shiite-led government, which, in 2005 and 2006, was accused of carrying out widespread atrocities against Iraq's Sunnis.

Anbar Province is almost entirely Sunni.

Rubaie made his way through the crowd, I noticed he was holding hands with another Iraqi man, a traditional Arab gesture of friendship and trust. The man was Brigadier General Murdi Moshhen al-Dulaimi, the Iraqi Army officer taking control of the province - a Sunni. The sun was blinding; Rubaie was wearing sunglasses, but finally he spotted me.

"What on earth are you doing here?" he asked over the crowd.

I might have asked him the same thing.

In Iraq, the calm is very fragile. The arrangements that keep the peace here are, by their nature, extremely tentative. You don't have to be a pessimist to recognize that.

I got a good sense of the fragility the other night in Adamiyah, the big Sunni neighborhood in northern Baghdad. I was standing on Al Camp Street as a wedding procession, made up of perhaps 25 cars, suddenly turned my way.

An Iraqi bride and groom sat in the back seat of the lead sedan, a black Mercedes-Benz, while a mass of revelers danced and tooted their horns. Two years ago, like the scene in Abu Nawas park, such a sight was inconceivable.
Spotting me, an American in ordinary clothes, the wedding train halted. The groom, dressed in a dark suit, climbed out of the Mercedes, leaving his bride, in flowing whites and heavy rouge, inside.

"It's wonderful, wonderful," said the groom, Yassin Razzaq, 25, shaking my hand. And then Razzaq pointed to a group of plainclothes Iraqi gunmen who had gathered at the roadside to watch. "It's all thanks to them."

Razzaq was referring to the members of the local Awakening Council, the name given to the Sunnis, many of them former insurgents, who now keep the peace in Sunni neighborhoods.

"Did you hear that - did you hear what he said?" asked Abu Safa al-Tikriti, a mustachioed former officer in Saddam's army and a member of the tribe that dominates the executed dictator's hometown. "Without us, there would be chaos."

Chaos, indeed. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has expressed an intention to dismantle the Awakening Councils, which employ about 100,000 men, most of them Sunnis.

Maliki doesn't like the idea of paying people who used to be shooting at him. But many American and Iraqi officials worry that firing these men would drive them underground, and back to the gun. Tikriti, the Awakening leader, doesn't make much of a secret of that.

"I've come too far to turn back now," Tikriti said. "It's this or death."

For obvious reasons, almost no one in Baghdad seems willing to predict the future anymore. Ask anyone, and you are likely to get to the all-purpose Arabic expression, "Insha'Allah" - "God willing." Everyone, it seems, is trying to enjoy the calm while it lasts.

But if people here do not want to talk about the future, they still have to plan for it.

Sadiya Salman's four sons and their families, for instance, returned home to Adamiyah recently after two years away. I found them crowded into their small, dimly lit home in Zhrawaya, Adamiyah's only Shiite neighborhood.

Like so many other of Baghdad's mixed neighborhoods, Zhrawaya was the scene of terrifying sectarian violence in 2006 and 2007. As Shiites in predominantly Sunni Adamiyah, the Salman brothers - Wajdi, Luay, Rushdi and Feraz - considered themselves likely targets.

Then came the men in black masks one day, who spray-painted a warning on the wall: "Rafida," Arabic for "rejectionist." It is a derogatory word that some militant Sunnis use for Shiites.

And so the brothers left, taking their wives and children with them, 13 in all. Sadiya Salman, an intense and energetic woman of 68 years, stayed behind with her four daughters; as a female, she thought, she would be safe.

"I never did get a look at them because they always wore masks," Salman, seated on the couch in her home, said of the gunmen who took over Zhrawaya. "But the accents were Iraqi."

Every other Shiite family also fled Zhrawaya, and it is still largely empty. To slow the death squads, the Americans built a cement wall stretching more than three kilometers around the outskirts of her neighborhood. It's 6 meters high, or 20 feet, and painted baby blue. It gives the neighborhood a bleak and claustrophobic feel.

In the two years that her sons were gone, Salman said, she rarely ventured outside. The exception, she said, was when she saw American soldiers.

"Oh, I love them," Salman said, brightening in her darkened house. "I always knew I was safe with them."

With life returning to normal in Adamiyah, the Salman brothers and their families recently returned.

"We are the first Shia to come back," Feraz Salman said. "The rest of the families are still too afraid."

Life is difficult; during the day, the temperature can soar above 49 degrees Celsius (120 Fahrenheit). For most of the day there is no electricity. When the sun goes down, the interior of the Salman house goes dark.

Yet for all the hardship endured by the Salmans, they appear to have lost neither their generosity nor their sense of grace. As I sat in their darkened apartment, Zaineb, one of Sadiya's daughters, served me tea. Her son Luay held a flashlight over my shoulder for well over an hour while I took notes. As I talked and scribbled, another son, Rushdi, stood behind me, waving a fan to keep me cool.

Dexter Filkins, who covered Iraq for The New York Times from 2003 to 2006, is the author of "The Forever War."