A terrified city: My first trip to Baghdad

I was at Erbil airport waiting to board an Iraqi Airways plane to Baghdad for the first time in my life when I remembered that it was exactly a year ago today I had proudly voted for an independent Kurdistan.

 

The young men of the cabin crew had beards and the women wore hijab.

 

At takeoff I looked out the window and saw towering buildings, construction projects, life in Erbil.

 

Knowing that in less than an hour I would be landing in a city whose leaders took Kirkuk away from us last year gave me goose bumps. Yet I was still eager to see the city we have been stuck with for over a century.

 

I flew over vast empty lands that contained many mass graves of innocent civilians killed and buried in the 1980s merely for being Kurds. The decree to kill and bury these people was hatched in the city I was heading to, Baghdad.

 

In the past fifteen years Baghdad has been witnessing, almost daily, scenes of bleeding children, bereaved women, and decapitated men and massive explosions rocking the city. I was caught up in these thoughts when our plane started descending towards the runway. From the air you admire Baghdad’s design. Its houses all covered in dust like an abandoned ancient city.

 

My destination was the Green Zone in central Baghdad which is home to the US embassy and Iraq’s parliament, presidency, government and high-level officials. The warm welcome the protocol team afforded us at the airport made up for my feeling towards the Iraqi capital on the plane. A big vehicle was waiting for us outside. I couldn’t find ant seatbelts and at that moment one of my friends said, “Welcome to Baghdad!”

It takes 15 minutes to get to the Green Zone from the airport and the road goes through two neighborhoods–one Sunni and one Shiite. Tall concrete walls separate the Sunni neighborhood from the airport.

“In 2007 we landed at the airport, but couldn’t reach the Green Zone because of snipers in the Sunni neighborhoods, so we slept at the airport,” a Kurdish official recalled. That fear has largely gone these days. You could see Shiite flags on the other side of the wall. Posters of Imam Hussein adorned cars, police headquarters and other government institutions.

A decade and a half of violence and turmoil has taught drivers in this city to be vigilant, look out for trouble on the road and get their passengers to their destination safe and sound and on time. My first impressions showed me a Baghdad very different from what I had in mind. I didn’t see much of the destruction and ruin displayed on TV. But still a city with many dangers.

 

At the first checkpoint in the Green Zone a sign on a dusty building read: The Headquarters of the Command of Federal Police. I never expected the federal police to be based in such a rundown place.

 

One day, the taxis taking people from the hotel to the Green Zone and the parliament building sped off so quickly that they left us behind. Once they found out the Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers guarding the premises sent us two of their own vehicles to escort us.

 

They received us warmly at the gates, but there was nothing special about the parliament building. It did not evoke any emotions. It looked to me like any other government building. One thing that put a smile on my face was the Kurdish scripture alongside Arabic on the official signs.

 

In the media office of the parliament I struck up a conversation with someone in Arabic. “Is it okay if the Kurds don’t know Arabic?” I asked. “No, they need to speak it and should learn it,” came the reply.

“Why don’t you learn Kurdish?” I quipped. “According to the constitution, both languages are official. You are working in the federal parliament and should know both languages.”

 

He insisted that Kurds had to learn Arabic but Arabs didn’t have to know Kurdish.

 

It later turned out that he was a Kurd from a famous tribe in the Garmiyan region. He was associated with a Kurdish party and had just been elected MP.

 

“My parents live in Sulaimani,” he carried on. “Of my family members I’m the only one who doesn’t speak Kurdish.”

 

Later that day we went to the prime minister’s guesthouse for some interviews. The room given to me and my colleague Hiwa Jamal overlooked a garden and as I opened the window I saw the field where Saddam Hussein used to oversee military parades and firing his famous rifle.

 

The sound of thousands of soldiers and armor parading on the asphalt in my imagination was drowned by a sad eulogy coming from the minaret of a Shiite Husseiniyah mosque on the occasion of Muharram. It made for a nostalgic moment and when I lived in the Iranian Kurdish city of Naghada where I would hear the same eulogies as a kid. The difference was that Shiites ruled Naghada in name and practice whereas in Baghdad the Americans were in charge on paper but Shiites in reality.

 

Entering and leaving the Green Zone needs meticulous coordination and permits. One evening my colleagues and I left the zone, but we agreed to return early in order to be let back in. Our driver was a Shiite from Basra who was now the bodyguard of Kurdistani MP from an Islamic party. He worked as a taxi driver when off duty.

 

“How did a Sunni Muslim trust you?” I asked jokingly.

 

“He always tells me that we Shiites have caused them so much trouble,” he responded in good humor.

 

There weren’t many traffic lights or regulations in Baghdad. A police or military truck stood on almost every corner, but they only looked on as drivers took the law into their own hands.

 

Late at night and during a stroll we came across a park. Date palms were decorated with white light bulbs and they danced in the night breeze. There was also a playground in the middle of the park. But no one was there. The place was eerie. The driver said those places had been built during the rule of Saddam Hussein. The the big shops and a mall were more recent.

 

One big mall has become a landmark in al-Mansour. Another was under construction. Banners of Muharram and other religious events covered the streets. Among the pedestrians were veiled and unveiled women. It’s said that the people of Baghdad spend half of their income at home and the other half on the night out. I witnessed this in Baghdad.

 

A giant billboard by the Iraqi Airways encouraged people to travel to “Our beloved north”. Much to the Kurds’ dismay Iraq has been using “the north” to refer to Kurdistan as far back we can remember.

 

Baghdad was not the city I had been told by our elders nor did it resemble the city shown in the media.

 

For instance, Abu Nawas was as beautiful as ever. It stretched alongside the Tigris River. The street is said to be empty only during the month of Muharram when the police chase alcohol sellers on the street. There were dozens of beautiful restaurants on the banks of the river. The names of many restaurants on Abu Nawas and other parts of the Iraqi capital were in Kurdish.

When we reached the Jadrriyah neighborhood our driver pointed out. “This is your area protected by the Peshmerga,” referring to the guards of the Iraqi president.

“The al-Salam Palace is over there where Mam Jalal works,” he added. I chuckled at his apparent mistake, but when we reached the roundabout we saw a giant picture of Talabani hanging on the gates of the Palace. The square itself is not officially known as Mam Jalal Square, but rather as the Amar al-Hakim Square.

 

A few years back I translated a Dutch novel into Kurdish titled The Terrified City, The novel is about the life of a family in Baghdad who flee to Kurdistan. The story was so frightening that made me, the translator, fear of the city from afar. But a trip to Baghdad dispelled it all.

 

Back in Erbil one day I was in Bakhtiari shopping when I heard two young people talk about the murder of Iraq’s fashion model and social media star Tara Fares.

 

“Baghdad is very unsafe,” I overheard one of them say. “This lady shouldn’t have returned there.”

 

That little conversation was a reminder of how any news out of Baghdad scares us and how it has been the case since we were attached to Iraq against our will.