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Baghdad Neighborhood's Hopes Dimmed by the Trials of War
Iraqis gathered at the scene of a car bomb explosion earlier this month in Baghdad's Karrada neighborhood. The attack, which injured five Iraqis and a foreigner, targeted a convoy of SUVs.
(By Wathiq Khuzaie -- Getty Images)
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"He started crying," Mohammed said of the Iraqi driver, humiliated in front of the neighborhood.
Mohammed, who said he had been one of the happiest people in Karrada to see the Americans when they came in April 2003, retrieved the bottle and handed it to the weeping man.
"I said, 'Give this to the Iraqi government,' " Mohammed said. " 'Tell them this is the sovereignty the Americans have brought us.' "
Breakdown in Order
Many in Baghdad were sure that the mightiest army in the world had a plan for what would follow the invasion. Hiding in their homes, they waited to be told what it was.
A month after the Americans arrived, Kareema, a 42-year-old engineering student, wondered when they would reschedule oral defenses for master's theses.
Kareema was sheltered in her dark home with her four sisters and sisters-in-law -- all doctors or engineers who had devoted their lives to learning and their careers and waited only to resume them. Outside, looters had stripped classrooms of desks and blackboards, burned university buildings and ransacked a museum holding artifacts charting 5,000 years of civilization in Iraq.
The breakdown in order and the dismissal of Iraq's security forces unleashed a crime wave that still lingers. Daylight kidnappings and robberies are common. Parents hire armed guards for their children's school buses. Boys and girls in middle-class neighborhoods routinely fight off strangers who attempt to shove them into the trunks or back seats of cars and take them away for ransom.
And three summers into the U.S. occupation, Kareema and her sisters and sisters-in-law cloak themselves in black and wear black gloves when they go out, a neighbor who knows them said. But these days, the neighbor said, the sisters seldom go out.
A Web of Problems
When the Americans came, they protected only a few public buildings from looters, said Nagham Emad, 23, a university student lingering in a Karrada ice cream shop, spooning up her frozen sundae slowly to put off the return to a dark, hot home.
One of the buildings was the Oil Ministry, Emad said. The others were Saddam Hussein's marble-and-gilt palaces, which the Americans took over for their offices. Now, when power outages darken the rest of Baghdad, she said, massive generators make the barricaded, highly guarded palaces of the Americans glow.
The lack of electricity, like the lack of security, remains one of the two biggest complaints among Baghdad's 6 million people.
The Americans had underestimated the problems with Iraq's infrastructure, a U.S. official in Baghdad said on condition of anonymity. A U.S. military spokesman, Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, said a large part of Baghdad's electricity problem is that even as supply increases, it is being inexorably outstripped by demand.
