The Battle for Baghdad's Future

BAGHDAD, April 8 -- As American tanks rumbled into Baghdad three years ago, Omar al-Damaluji took to the streets of the bomb-battered city with an old Canon camera and a singular mission.

An amateur photographer and civil engineering professor at Baghdad University, Damaluji crisscrossed the capital, ducking into doorways during firefights and snapping 15 rolls of film in two weeks. He knew his beloved Baghdad would never be the same, he recalled, and he wanted to document the transformation.

"This is how it looked. This is how my city looked," he said as he sat before a computer in his well-appointed study one recent afternoon, armed men manning a makeshift checkpoint on the quiet street outside. He clicked through before-and-after photographs of a government ministry, first shown with pristine white walls and a tidy yard, then with smoke billowing from a fractured roof.

"It was never a paradise," Damaluji, now 50, said with a sigh. "But Baghdad has become a wretched place."

Three years after U.S. forces swept Saddam Hussein's government from power, car bombings and political assassination are near-daily occurrences. Neighborhoods, now torn along sectarian lines, are plagued by increasingly violent militias and dysfunctional public services, and occupied by tens of thousands of foreign troops. Some analysts are beginning to compare Baghdad with another Middle Eastern capital that was synonymous with anarchy and bloodshed in the 1970s and '80s.

"In Beirut when the civil war began, you had electricity 24 hours a day and running water all the time, and the air conditioning was working, and so were the elevators," said Francois Heisbourg, a French military analyst. "In the case of Baghdad, it looks like Beirut after 10 years of civil war."

U.S. officials here have predicted that 2006 will mark the battle for Baghdad, and both insurgent attacks and the effort to stop them are increasingly focused on this city of about 7 million people. Until the situation in the capital is normalized, they say, the United States will not be able to argue that it has brought peace and stability to Iraq.

"As Baghdad goes, so goes the rest of the country," said Michael P. Fallon, head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Iraq reconstruction programs. "We are now consciously bumping up our efforts in the Baghdad area."

Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said that "if you think like the enemy," the issues would be: "Where is the center of gravity for the people of Iraq? Where do I focus my effort? Where are my attacks going to have the most significant effects worldwide? So he's focused on Baghdad."

Referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, Lynch said, "We're convinced that Zarqawi now is zooming in on Baghdad." And so is the United States. "There is indeed a focused effort on Baghdad, both for security and improvement of the basic conditions in Baghdad, so that by the end of 2006 you see a markedly different city," Lynch said.

When U.S. troops arrived here on April 9, 2003, they found a giddy and apprehensive capital and a weary populace that appeared willing to give them a chance. U.S. officials predicted that American troops would be welcomed as liberators and that the transfer of authority to new Iraqi leaders would be quick. Instead, a powerful anti-U.S. insurgency took root, led in part by homegrown backers of Hussein and in part by foreign fighters loyal to Zarqawi.

Baghdad has borne the brunt of the bloodshed. According to a January tally by Iraq Body Count, a British antiwar group, more than 20,000 people have been killed in Baghdad since the March 2003 invasion, accounting for almost 60 percent of the group's estimate of civilian deaths throughout Iraq. Roughly a quarter of the 2,350 U.S. military deaths in Iraq have occurred in the capital.