DAMASCUS - Celebrations on the streets; young people dancing and taking pictures of each other with mobile phones. Many unveiled women promenading on the arms of their male friends. Fireworks in the air with the voice of Kazem al-Saher (a crooner from Iraq famous throughout the Arab world) coming out of parked car radios. Richer young people wining and dining at the Sheraton or the Palestine Hotel. All of these festivities over New Year in Baghdad were topped with a complete electricity blackout that left the city in darkness - and which made the fireworks all the more beautiful.
But on January 1, reality struck. The fun was over. A suicide bomber walked into the condolence service for Lieutenant Nabil Hussein Jasim, a retired officer who was killed in a terrorist attack on December 28. That attack, which took place in a crowded market in Tayaren Square, left 14 people dead. While people were mourning their deceased officer, the suicide bomber denoted his explosives, killing another 36 Iraqis.
This bloody welcome of 2008 reminded Iraqis that they shouldn't get their hopes up too high. On Christmas day, another suicide bomber had killed 10 people at a funeral in Baquba, south of Baghdad. While all of this was happening, a massive clampdown took place in al-Dour, another Iraqi city, where hundreds of young people were arrested on suspicion of hiding Saddam Hussein's former henchman, Ibrahim Izzat al-Douri, the current secretary general of the disbanded Iraqi Ba'ath Party.
Emotions in the Sunni community of Iraq had already been sour, commemorating the first anniversary of the death of their former president in December 2006. The clampdown in al-Dour only made things worse for Sunnis.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JA04Ak04.html