# Baghdad heading backward: Hopes for Iraq’s future growing dimmer by the day
BAGHDAD, Iraq — The first time I arrived in Baghdad was April 2003, a month after the American invasion of Iraq. As a Kurd from Halabja, I was something of a novelty in a city filled with Sunni and Shiite Arabs.
Because I had worked as a reporter in my hometown and could speak and write in English, I had come to my country’s capital hoping to get a job with the U.S. military, a foreign company or an international news agency.
In fact, at that time, it seemed that everyone in Baghdad had the same idea. American dollars were pouring into the city and it seemed everyone was enrolling in English-language courses.
Many of us dreamed that democracy had finally come to Iraq. “Iraq is becoming the 51st American state,’’ many of us thought.
After getting a job as a “fixer’’ for an international company, I had a chance to travel to Hilla province, where I saw the mass graves where many of Saddam Hussein’s victims were buried. While it made me sad to see such a sight, it reinforced my hope that the American invasion meant that Iraq would never again be the scene of such horrors. I thought everyone would now live in peace.
It turned out I was wrong.
My attitude toward the American invasion and my country’s future soon began to change. As I traveled around the country, I saw American soldiers fire on unarmed civilians. I watched the insurgency and sectarian violence replace Saddam’s brutality.
After my Baghdad apartment had been broken into several times, I began to fear that I, too, would become a victim of the growing violence. I decided to go back home to the relative peace of Kurdistan.
Since settling in Sulaimaniyah, I have visited Baghdad only occasionally.
But after the attack on a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February and the sudden surge in sectarian violence, I decided to return and assess the state of the capital for myself.
What I found was a virtual ghost town, where residents are afraid to leave their homes after dark and heavily armed militias roam the streets.
Arriving back in Baghdad, I checked into the Palestine Hotel, which had once served as the headquarters for many Western news organizations. To get into the building, I had to maneuver around concrete barriers, barbed-wire fences and pass through two checkpoints. Outside the hotel, I noticed shattered glass and broken windows, left over from a recent car bombing.
This was not the Palestine Hotel I had visited in 2003. Back then, there wasn’t a room to be had and the parking lot was filled. The lobby used to be packed with journalists from around the world, along with U.S. businessmen and military officials.
Now I was the hotel’s only guest. When I tried to pay the $2 fee for Internet service, the clerk behind the front desk didn’t have enough cash to give me change from a $5 bill.
I went back to my old neighborhood, Karada — a predominantly Christian area where Shiites and Sunnis also lived in peace — late one afternoon to see how things had changed over the last three years.
Although shops in the area once stayed open until midnight, many were already preparing to close. Storeowners told me they were closing early in order to get home safely before the 8 p.m. curfew went into affect.
A car bombing, apparently aimed at a Shiite mosque across the street, had heavily damaged the neighborhood stores where I used to buy fruit and vegetables.
The streets I remember as being filled with children and families doing their late-night shopping were now empty, dark and sad.
http://wvgazette.com/section/Perspective/200604225