A Flight Back to Baghdad
By DANIEL PEPPER/BAGHDAD Thu Jan 10, 8:30 AM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/aflightbacktobaghdad;_ylt=ArR_8U2cqddwIsM5YKLbAr1vaA8F<snip>
Today Baghdad looks as you imagine it: a war zone direct from central casting. The detritus of car bombs and truck bombs, suicide bombers and firefights would be ample documentation of urban decimation if it only were safe for photographers to walk around and work on the streets. It is not.
Thick, 15-foot high blast walls are everywhere. Some form extended contiguous barriers, like paranoid rat mazes of concrete-and-sky tunnels. Some connect to nothingness, sitting at odd angles, left littering the highways, neighborhood streets and alleyways, forgotten pieces of drab, tan cityscape. Except for the helicopters thumping just above the low skyline, views in Baghdad are therefore always partly obscured.
Violence may be down 60%, but that only brings the city back to 2006 levels. Life in Baghdad in January 2008 is still a far cry from normalcy. Those of us who were here in 2003 and 2004 remember the backed-up traffic and streets wheezing with raw, unencumbered capitalism, let loose after decades of state-controlled socialism. Back then we ate lunch at hole-in-the chicken shacks. Today, those places literally are holes in the walls.
Buildings that were once thriving now look decrepit and dilapidated. An Internet café is now an empty shell of a concrete structure. Some restaurants have been hit four or five times in car bomb attacks. Wires and cables are strewn like drunken, haphazard spider webs from building to building and street to street. I saw the hotel room I lived in for six weeks in 2004. Not because the desk manager let me in - the place is now shuttered and boarded up - but because the windows are blown out. Banks, mosques, and hospitals, in addition to whole neighborhoods and private houses, are barricaded.
In 2004, journalists still had parties and friends would pass out in the bushes and lived to tell of it. I enjoyed taking taxis at night. Today taking a public taxi during the day as a western journalist is tantamount to a death wish. Back then there was an overabundance of satellite dishes - these big metal pans - for sale at nearly every shop. Today commerce has slowed to a crawl. The traffic now is a bit more orderly, but the number of horse-drawn carts has increased. Fancy cars are all but absent. And everyone is on edge - get too close and you might be a victim of the car bomb in front of you. And 2.2 million Iraqi civilians have fled their homes and are living as refugees, one of the largest mass migrations in recent human history. Now the city is more Somalia than Sacramento.
:(
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