The city of Baghdad emits many noises which, while they have become famialiar to my ears, are still alien and sometimes unwelcoming.
Smalls arm fire can be heard multiple times daily. I now know when the cracking noises are warning shots, when they are gun battles and when they are coming from one of the many practice ranges within earshot. Warning shots are by far the most prevalent type of gunfire with practice ranges coming in second and gun battles a very distant third.
Then there are the explosions. We hear multiple booms most days. These are much tougher to distingiush by type. Mortars falling, in my limited experience, usually fall in pairs of two. They explode rapidly, within a few seconds of each other. IEDs and VBIEDs are often spaced further apart, and depending how far away they are, can be accompanied by a concussive shock wave. Mortars have a shock wave too, but I’ve only felt a strong shock wave once, on Christmas Day, when two mortars fell very close to where I was standing. The sound of a boom in Baghdad is sobering because it reminds me of the human cost of the metamorphosis that is taking place here. People are extinguished in the booms. Murdered unnecessarily.
Baghdad is a city of more than 7 million souls. The spiritual leaders here minister to their flocks through loudspeakers. This is perhaps the most surreal of the noise extravaganzas I have experienced since my arrival. The day most Americans worship is Sunday. Muslims worship on Friday. Every Friday, the air is filled with a cacophony of preaching. Imams here disseminate their homilies to the faithful via loudspeakers which blare across the city, each one apparently attempting to drown out the others.
Imagine if you would every pastor in your town mounting a 500 watt loudspeaker on his church steeple and loudly singing his sermon on Sunday morning. Now imagine that there are dozens of churches within earshot of your house. If you lived in Baghdad, your reality would be punctuated with these sermons whether you wanted them or not. I am sure many of the sermons are exhortations to live moral lives, follow the teaching of the Koran and to do good things, but to me it sounds like a competition to win the most followers.
I have experienced one noise here that soothes me. In one of Saddam’s former palaces where I live is a cage full of songbirds I can only assume were also here under the tyrant’s rule. They sing sweetly, unaware or uncaring of the daily struggle that exists all around them. They live in their own reality bubble – a pocket of joy, and their songs are good to listen too. It is said that ignorance is bliss, and sometimes I wish I had been born a songbird.