For ordinary Iraqis who live in Baghdad, from what I can glean, life seems pretty dark these days.
“The killing, you can’t imagine the killing,” said Yusra Abdul Aziz, 47, a teacher, whose block, in Adhamiya, organized its watch group in March, after four neighbors were shot dead over several days. “Without any reason. Cars come and shoot us. We run to the hospital and get our wounded. We live in a nightmare, actually.”
On her block, seven men, Sunnis and Shiites, stand on rooftops and street corners from midnight to 6 a.m., stopping suspicious cars. Palm tree trunks and pieces of trash are used to block roads. Still, she is so afraid of nighttime raids by both the special police and marauding criminals dressed like police officers that she sleeps in her clothes.
In the United States, most of us take for granted that help in times of crisis is only a phone call away. The vast majority of us sleep soundly at night, unafraid that strange men will arrive in the wee hours with a crash, breaking down our doors and hauling off a father or brother who will later have to be claimed from the town morgue. Most of us trust our local police force.
In Baghdad, such is not the case. I ask those Iraqis I work with, doubting the news reports. They all say the same thing. It’s pretty chaotic out there on the other side of the concrete walls that shelter those of us in the Green Zone. I have a hard time finding optimistic Iraqis. Some think that government will always be corrupt here. Many think that war is always going to haunt them. One man I spoke too says that he was six years old when Iraq went to war with Iran and that he has not seen anything but war since. He cannot picture an Iraq at peace.
He would like to leave Iraq, but he cannot. It is almost impossible for an Iraqi to get a travel visa, he tells me. “Iraqis and dogs. No one wants us,” the man complains. In Islamic nations, dogs are considered unclean, dirty animals.
Who can blame this man and his fellow Iraqis? Day in and day out, they are forced to live with horrific acts of violence. They may be relatively safe inside the walls of the Green Zone, but as soon as they leave to go home, their lives become cheap. If they are discovered working with the coalition, they may be tortured and killed. Most of them go directly home and stay there until it is time to work again. They cannot lead normal social lives. The electricity is not reliable, the water is not reliable and their neighborhoods may flare with violence at any time.
The challenges for the government that is forming are great. They must quell sectarian violence. They must provide reliable basic services such as electricity and water. They have to manage Iraq’s vast oil fields in such a way that average Iraqis see some benefit. They have four years to convince Iraqis that an elected government can work better than what they had before under Saddam. It’s going to be a tough road.
I hope that one day, my Iraqi co-worker no longer feels that the world sees thinks of him as a dog. I hope that he will be able to visit the United States or Europe and see that there are places where people walk around free of the mental scar tissue most of Baghdad’s denizens have been suffering. The new government needs to purge itself of corruption, especially in the Interior Ministry. It needs to disband the militias and ensure that common citizens are being provided with real security by troops who have been trained to see through the blinding veil of sectarianism that seems to have wrapped itself around Baghdad.
Most importantly, it needs to convince normal Iraqis who just want to live free from fear and violence Iraqis that it is working for them and has their best interests at heart. Lots of work is being done behind the scenes to build a government that represents all Iraq. That new government needs to demonstrate that it is serious about security, and it needs to do so as quickly as possible.
During this time of transition, it is critical that the United States stand firm and stay the course.