Baghdad Revisited

A fortnight before Christmas, I was asked to visit Baghdad by  an American  TV channel which was running short of regular staff during the  holiday  season. The need for more correspondents in   Baghdad  arose from the fact that American troops were  finally going to pull out and the channel wanted me to cover the event.  My family  was  unhappy,  despite my assurances that I would  be back in time for Christmas.  Within three days I was  on my way to  Amman  in Jordan from where I would make the daunting 950 km road journey to Baghdad.

Luckily, I was travelling in an American 8-cylinder  monster SUV called  the GMC Chevrolet, which has tyres the size of a house. The  driver simply flicked the auto-pilot switch, fixed the speed at 190 miles per hour and then sat back. I was returning to the city after seven years since I had been there to cover the Iraq War for Doordarshan.   

With nothing but sand dunes on either side, the  journey was  made less tedious by  my  garrulous  Palestinian  taxi driver, Hammad, who  filled me in on what had been happening . Crime was  rampant, owing to  the  absence of an effective police force and army. The Americans had  replaced the old  police and  army  with new forces but they were too small and poorly trained to be effective.

Hammad  had  barely finished  telling  me  about  the  lawlessness and bombings that were a daily feature  when a  group of  young people  in a car overtook us and forced Hammad to stop.  Brandishing guns, they got out and demanded my wallet. They emptied it, threw it back inside the car and  drove off.  I tried  telling  them in my broken  Arabic that I was  a  friendly   Indian but one of them, who spoke some English, told me to buzz off.

Soon after arriving in Baghdad,  I saw a  taxi  driver, on the main road, being  pushed out of his taxi by an assailant who drove off with the car. The driver broke down, telling anyone who would listen that he was  the only  breadwinner  in a  family of  five. How would he feed them  without his taxi?

By night fall, the streets were deserted and silent, except for the barking of dogs and gunfire. In the mornings, hundreds of  people , looking for work  gathered   outside the  Green  Zone,  a  sprawling  4-square mile heavily barricaded  area  in the  centre of Bagdad,  from where  the Americans controlled  Iraq.

On my  first  trip  to Baghdad, before the war,  the atmosphere was so relaxed that petrol stations were left unmanned and anyone who wished to, could fill the tank after dropping a dollar’s worth of local currency and  drive away.  Now the situation was different. The refineries had closed down and petrol  was being brought in from Kuwait. The petrol that had once been almost as freely available as water was now rationed to 25 litres per person. 

The smart residential areas of Al Mansour, Arasat and Jadariye, where the Iraqi elite lived in huge bungalows, had lost their sheen. Some homes had been taken over by people from  Sadr City or Al Thawra, low cost housing colonies built by Saddam to rehabilitate hundreds of homeless Shia families who had lost  their homes in the uprising against Saddam following the attack against Kuwait. Following the over throw of Saddam, these slum dwellers had taken to crime.   
Before the invasion, Baghdad was like any other modern city – prosperous, highly developed with beautiful architecture, bustling markets and a lively social and cultural life. In the Arasat shopping area, the shops were full of expensive clothes and packed with families dining in open air restaurants.

In the middle class residential area near  Hotel Palestine where I stayed just before the war, local residents used to sit outside their  homes, smoking their nargilas (hookahs) and  sipping kahwa – black spiced Turkish coffee. They used to greet outsiders with an easy  bonhomie and invitations to join them. There was an innocence about them – they had no idea of the horror to come. The invasion began at dawn on March 18, 2003 and lasted  for about three weeks when American Marines entered Baghdad on the afternoon of  April 9. The day after Saddam’s statue in Freedom Square was pulled down, I toured the city with other correspondents. Baghdad had been turned into rubble.

Eight years later, on December 15, 2011,   at a special ceremony at Baghdad Airport to mark the withdrawal of American troops, US  Defence Secretary Leon Panetta spoke of having achieved ‘ultimate success’ and how the soldiers could leave with their heads held high “secure in knowing that your sacrifice has helped the Iraqi people begin a new chapter in history, free from tyranny and full of hope for prosperity and peace.” Later, while travelling through the Middle East, speaking of the human cost of the war, Mr Panetta said, “I think the price has been worth it.”

The human price for the Americans has been around 4,486 mainly young Americans. For the Iraqis, using the most conservative count, the deaths of babies, grandmothers, and young men total more than 106,000. By some accounts, the figure runs into hundreds of thousands. No one is entirely sure.

Panetta talked of how the Americans were leaving Iraq a more secure place, but is it so? Bashaar Al Seraj, a shopkeeper in Al Khadamiye, told me: “The Americans didn’t come to Iraq just to take Saddam down and leave. They are here for their interests and they will never leave totally because of the oil. And there is chaos in our lives.”

There is also tremendous fear about the future. Christian restaurant owner Selvana  Mati looked crestfallen when I asked him what he expected to happen in Iraq now that the Americans were going. He said all Iraqi Christians would now have to leave Iraq. As a minority, none of them could feel secure because of all the sectarian attacks that had been taking place, including bloody attacks on Shias. “There are going to be even more ethnic killings because there are religious extremists everywhere who have moved into the vacuum,” he told me.

Reports are already appearing of Christians and other minorities being persecuted in the ‘Arab Spring’ countries. Analysts say that Iraq is descending into a sectarian inferno, aided by an American built but largely Shiite military. I was shocked to find that Iraq’s oil revenues are roughly the same as they were during Saddam’s time. Bombings are an almost daily occurrence (on some days, hundreds die). Electricity is available in Baghdad for only a few hours a day. Deadly suicide bombings demonstrate the sad fact that groups affiliated to al Qaida – which were nonexistent here before 2003 – have made the city and the country their base.

The troops may have gone but the CIA is expected  to maintain a large  clandestine presence in Iraq.  It will  rely  on a  combination of spies and Special  Operation  Forces to   protect American interests. The  American Embassy in Baghdad is the 10th largest in the world and about 16,000 Americans work in Iraq, many of them in the oil industry. The Iraqi government is spending billions of dollars buying American arms and equipment – Abrams tanks and F16 Fighting Falcons – to upgrade its army and navy, to the delight of American companies.

One of the main anxieties of the US is the close cooperation and relationship between Shiite Iran and Syria, where the ruling elite belongs to the Shia Alawaite minority.  In fact, one local journalist in  Baghdad said that he had prophesied, long before the West and the rebels had overthrown Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, that  “it is going  to be  Syria next”.

The Americans are gunning for the Assad regime to diminish Iran’s influence in the region. Apart from Teheran’s links with Syria, it enjoys influence in Iraq where 65 per cent of the people are Shias. In the areas of Afghanistan that border Iran, people speak Farsi.

While the Americans  were in Iraq, they used sophisticated technology to monitor the long border between Iraq and Syria. Now, with less effective policing,  supplies of  various kinds will  flow unchecked  across it.

If Assad manages to hold on to power, then  Iran will continue to exert its influence over an unbroken swathe from the Afghan border  in the east to the Mediterranean in the west.  This is precisely what Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel fear and this is why they have joined America in trying to topple Assad.

As the sectarian killings in Baghad continue, the Iraqis can only be ‘amused’ by American conservatives claiming that Iraq was responsible for the Arab Spring. The neo-cons say that the freedom George Bush so kindly bestowed on Iraqis had a ‘domino effect’ with other Arabs thinking “Well, if the Iraqis can have elections, why can’t we?”

All I can say is that what I saw and heard in Baghdad bears little relation to the rewriting of history that’s happening in Washington and, no doubt, European capitals.