At the nadir of the American occupation, in 2007, Baghdad resembled a medieval city under siege. U.S. soldiers stood guard on every block, part of a force of a hundred and sixty-five thousand throughout the country, along with about thirty thousand contractors and five thousand British soldiers. Entire neighborhoods were sealed off by concrete blast walls, to protect residents from the sectarian killers who roamed the city. Nevertheless, every morning dozens of new corpses appeared in the streets, many of them frozen in their final moments: hands bound, heads bagged, burned with acid, drilled with holes.
Two years after the last American soldiers departed, it’s hard to find any evidence that they were ever there. Blast walls still stand outside office buildings, but only a handful of Americans remain, shuttling around the capital to help Iraqis use U.S. military equipment, and to drill for oil. Iraq has become one of the world’s largest oil producers, but little of the profit reaches ordinary citizens; Baghdad is as drab and trash-strewn as before, its skyline mostly unbroken by new construction. It’s as though the residents were still too exhausted to celebrate the calm that descended in late 2008, not entirely trusting that it would last.
The signature sound of the American war was the blast from a bomb—thousands of them, delivered by car or vest, or buried under the street. The bombs are back, sometimes a half-dozen a day, nearly always deployed by Sunnis to kill Shiites. In January, in a Shiite neighborhood called Kasra, a man parked his sedan in front of a tea shop, turned off the ignition, and walked away. A few moments later, the sedan exploded, obliterating a row of shops and five people unlucky enough to have been close. Twenty-seven others were wounded. One of the dead, a nineteen-year-old taxi-driver named Abdul Karim Latif, was engaged to be married. A few hours later, I watched mourners lift his coffin atop a minibus, draped in a fluorescent-pink bedsheet, to carry it to a cemetery. A group of women wailed. One of the survivors told me, “May God take vengeance on the people who did this.”
The fantastic bloodletting of the civil war, when thousands of Iraqis were dying a month, turned neighborhoods that for centuries had harbored both Sunni and Shiite Muslims into confessionally pure enclaves. Roughly speaking, Sunnis moved to the west of Baghdad and Shiites to the east. These days, whatever security can be found in the city is owed in part to the relentless segregation that took place during the civil war; as Matthew Sherman, a former civilian adviser to the U.S. Army, told me, “There was no one left to kill.” Against the odds, some Baghdad neighborhoods have regained their diversity, passing through an inferno first. In 2006, Adel, a mixed neighborhood in western Baghdad, fell to Sunni insurgents, who murdered dozens of Shiites and forced others from their homes. Today, Adel is mixed again; many of the Shiite families who fled have followed the calm back to their houses. On a recent afternoon, Shiite prayer flags fluttered in the midday breeze.
The resurgence of Iraq’s Shiites is the greatest legacy of the American invasion, which overthrew Sunni rule and replaced it with a government led by Shiites—the first since the eighteenth century. Eight years after Maliki took power, Iraqis are sorting through the consequences. The Green Zone—still known by its English name—has the same otherworldly feel that it did during the American war: a placid, manicured outpost in a jungle of trouble. Now, though, it is essentially a bastion of Shiite power, in a country shot through with angry Sunni citizens.
Two years after the last American soldiers departed, it’s hard to find any evidence that they were ever there. Blast walls still stand outside office buildings, but only a handful of Americans remain, shuttling around the capital to help Iraqis use U.S. military equipment, and to drill for oil. Iraq has become one of the world’s largest oil producers, but little of the profit reaches ordinary citizens; Baghdad is as drab and trash-strewn as before, its skyline mostly unbroken by new construction. It’s as though the residents were still too exhausted to celebrate the calm that descended in late 2008, not entirely trusting that it would last.The signature sound of the American war was the blast from a bomb—thousands of them, delivered by car or vest, or buried under the street. The bombs are back, sometimes a half-dozen a day, nearly always deployed by Sunnis to kill Shiites. In January, in a Shiite neighborhood called Kasra, a man parked his sedan in front of a tea shop, turned off the ignition, and walked away. A few moments later, the sedan exploded, obliterating a row of shops and five people unlucky enough to have been close. Twenty-seven others were wounded. One of the dead, a nineteen-year-old taxi-driver named Abdul Karim Latif, was engaged to be married. A few hours later, I watched mourners lift his coffin atop a minibus, draped in a fluorescent-pink bedsheet, to carry it to a cemetery. A group of women wailed. One of the survivors told me, “May God take vengeance on the people who did this.”
The fantastic bloodletting of the civil war, when thousands of Iraqis were dying a month, turned neighborhoods that for centuries had harbored both Sunni and Shiite Muslims into confessionally pure enclaves. Roughly speaking, Sunnis moved to the west of Baghdad and Shiites to the east. These days, whatever security can be found in the city is owed in part to the relentless segregation that took place during the civil war; as Matthew Sherman, a former civilian adviser to the U.S. Army, told me, “There was no one left to kill.” Against the odds, some Baghdad neighborhoods have regained their diversity, passing through an inferno first. In 2006, Adel, a mixed neighborhood in western Baghdad, fell to Sunni insurgents, who murdered dozens of Shiites and forced others from their homes. Today, Adel is mixed again; many of the Shiite families who fled have followed the calm back to their houses. On a recent afternoon, Shiite prayer flags fluttered in the midday breeze.
The resurgence of Iraq’s Shiites is the greatest legacy of the American invasion, which overthrew Sunni rule and replaced it with a government led by Shiites—the first since the eighteenth century. Eight years after Maliki took power, Iraqis are sorting through the consequences. The Green Zone—still known by its English name—has the same otherworldly feel that it did during the American war: a placid, manicured outpost in a jungle of trouble. Now, though, it is essentially a bastion of Shiite power, in a country shot through with angry Sunni citizens.
by Dexter Filkins, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Moises Saman
