BAGHDAD, Dec. 31 -- It was a year to forget.
Saleem Mata and his wife, Nada Romaya, spent the last hours of 2004 in a two-mile-long line waiting for gasoline because of a fuel shortage. A checkered blanket and a cooler filled with juice and sandwiches rested on the back seat of their car, a taxi that Mata drives every other day. On alternate days, he waits for gas.
"It was the worst year we have ever had," said Romaya, 24. "It was bad for everybody, the Iraqis and the Americans who lost their relatives in the war here."
Iraqi police stop and check cars in Baghdad. Iraqis could not go out and about for late parties because of a curfew prohibiting driving after 11 p.m.
(Wathiq Khuzaie -- Getty Images)
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For many Iraqis, the June 28 handover of political power by the U.S.-led occupation authority was nothing more than a date on the calendar, a moment to mark and then forget, lost in a brutal insurgency that has shown little mercy ever since.
Life became worse for large numbers of Iraqis in 2004. Suicide car bombings, gun battles, kidnappings, beheadings and assassinations killed thousands of people, sometimes more than a hundred on a single day.
"In 2004 we witnessed horrible events," said Ali Hasan Jawad, who sells building materials in Najaf, a holy city about 90 miles south of Baghdad, where hundreds of people were killed and whose center was destroyed in August during a three-week standoff between U.S. forces and fighters loyal to Moqtada Sadr, a rebellious Shiite Muslim cleric.
"Explosions, car bombs, mortars . . . kidnappings, assassinations in 2004, and we don't know what 2005 holds for us," he said. Jawad, his wife and five children had no plans for New Year's Eve.
"How could I celebrate the new year?" he asked. "What do I have to remember if I want to celebrate?"
No one could go out and about for New Year's Eve anyway because of a curfew prohibiting driving after 11 p.m.
In Baqubah, about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, Uday Haider, 27, said his family had no plans for New Year's Eve. "Nothing new will happen," he said. "We will stay at home and watch TV."
Haider blamed the Americans for the violence.
"I hope that by the coming year, the occupiers will leave in order to stop the disasters and the explosions, and that harmony and peace will be in this country," he said.
Ahmed Haidari, 11, who attends school in Baqubah, said he would pray for the fighting to end in the new year.
"We want to continue going to school without any fear because nowadays we feel afraid when we go to school," he said. "We always hear explosions. May God protect Iraq, and I hope peace will be achieved in my country."
Karim Wamidh, 54, an employee at the Ministry of Agriculture in Tikrit, about 90 miles north of Baghdad and the home town of deposed president Saddam Hussein, said he had high hopes for the country when 2004 began.
"We thought with the coming of the new year, we could have a new life, freedom, justice and security," he said. "But what happened during the year was very disappointing. A high level of unemployment, terrorism increased and poverty spread."
Wamidh said he would hope for better days in 2005.
"Maybe the situation will change after we get the elected government," he said, referring to elections scheduled for Jan. 30, "although I don't think anything would change with the existence of occupation in the country."
Isam and Sahar, married science professors who work at a university in Baghdad, used to throw a big party on New Year's Eve for their extended families. But the professors, who declined to give their last names because of the increase in assassinations and kidnappings of university employees, said that this year they would stay at home with their two daughters, Sara, 20, and Raosal, 16.
"I hope that the Iraqi people, and even the people of the other countries, have a good and peaceful life" next year, Sahar said. Her husband said he wished that Iraq's universities would regain their place of prominence in the world.
In the Karrada neighborhood in central Baghdad, Hajirsan Sanno, 51, shopped for presents at a gift shop. He said he would celebrate New Year's Eve at home with his family gathered around him, just as he had last year and the years before.
"The only difference is that before, Saddam was in power, and now he is not," Sanno said. "We are very happy he is gone."
But life is still not easy, Sanno said, particularly at night.
"When it gets dark, it is difficult to move around, and we can say all our life is dark now," he said. "There is no light."
Omar, 32, and Shayma, 28, who live with their two young sons in the Zayouna district in east Baghdad, decided to throw a party in spite of the terrible year that they and their neighbors endured.
Omar, who was a captain in the disbanded Iraqi Republican Guard, has not worked since March 2003, when the U.S.-led war began. Shayma's mother provides for the family.
For New Year's, Omar and Shayma, who also declined to give their last names because of security concerns, invited several neighbors to their large, beautiful four-bedroom house, which has no furniture because they have had to sell off most of it.
The three families attending the party brought their own mattresses and heaters so they would have a place to sleep during the night, and each took a bedroom. Even though the families all live within a few blocks of one another, they did not dare venture home after dark.
When the electricity went off, they lighted candles, and one of the revelers remarked that it was more romantic that way anyway.
As a guitar player hired by the families strummed, everyone danced. Faster, faster, they cried when the old Iraqi songs depressed them.
"The situation is bad, and we are feeling bad," Shayma said. "If New Year's Eve passes without a party, we will feel worse."
At midnight, as celebratory gunfire rang out in the neighborhood, the women and children popped balloons with needles and forks. The men kissed one another on their cheeks, then kissed their wives and children. Abu Ali, one of the guests, gave a toast with a bottle of brandy shaped like a sword.
As they toasted, they wished each other a safe year, something they had never said before.
Special correspondents Hasan Shammari in Baqubah, Salih Saif Al-Din in Tikrit, Saad Sarhan in Najaf and Bassam Sebti, Naseer Nouri and Sahar Nageeb in Baghdad contributed to this report.
