In land of fear, hope takes root

First of two parts

BAGHDAD -- In the two fitful years since American troops rolled across the border bearing the promise of liberation, Iraq has lurched from a grim police state to wide-open anarchy to its present condition: a daily hell that somehow still bristles with hope.

From north to south, Iraqis have been forced to accept suicide bombings as commonplace.

The wealthiest power centers, such as Baghdad and Mosul, have lost the perks of privilege granted by Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Like their neighbors in the Sunni Triangle, the residents of central Iraq live in a country that has been almost continuously at war since March 2003.

The indexes of life for the one-third of the population that lives in the Mesopotamian heartland are dreary, measured in the thousands of Iraqis killed in bombings, kidnapped by brigands, or caught in crossfire in the ongoing violence. Daily life means interminable gas lines, a shrinking power supply, and understaffed, overtaxed hospitals. In terms of reversal of fortune, Baghdad, the country's most ethnically mixed city and traditionally its intellectual capital as well as the seat of power, has arguably paid the highest price for the liberation from Hussein.

But even here, some of those who have suffered the most have surprisingly found cause for optimism amid their misfortune.

''Even though there is pain and the sacrifice is complicated, we are gaining against the criminals," says Adnan Nusaif Jasim al-Saidi, 49. Less than a month after casting the first free vote of his life, for fellow Shi'ites, Saidi tasted the worst of what the new Iraq offers: Two of his brothers and a nephew, on their way to bury an aunt in a cemetery south of Baghdad, were murdered by sectarian killers who then called from the dead men's cellphones, taunting them for being ''Shi'ite pigs and infidels."

He displays almost preternatural positive energy in the face of such loss, but his story tells only part of what has happened to Iraq in the past two years.

Shi'ites in southern Iraq are living in boom times, their lives relatively secure, their political prospects riding high. Shi'ites account for two-thirds of the country's population, and about half of them live in the long-ignored and destitute south.

They have seen health clinics sprout in Najaf and Nasiriyah and port facilities reopen in Umm Qasr, bringing thousands of jobs.

More importantly, these Shi'ites still rejoice at a new era free from the Ba'athist intelligence service that pursued them with particular vengeance, methodically torturing or executing draft dodgers and suspected rebels.

If the occasional suicide bombings puncture their calm, many of them say it's a bearable if tragic toll to pay for an end to the state-sponsored bloodbath they endured for more than 20 years.

Similarly, Kurds in their semi-autonomous enclave in the north have only seen their influence and prosperity grow; they had already flourished under the protection of the American no-fly zone, which had kept the Ba'athists in Baghdad at bay since 1991. Over the past two years they have exerted unprecedented influence over Iraq's central government, while their region has prospered as the safest base for business in Iraq.

In Baghdad, a few blocks from Saidi's home, a Sunni businessman unwittingly echoes his Shi'ite neighbor's enthusiasm for the future, even as he watches his fortune wither away with the protections of the Ba'ath regime gone.

''For the first time I am using my mind," said Mohammed Faleh al-Dulaimi, 35, an entrepreneur who raked in cash under the old regime through Ba'athist connections and strategic bribes. Two of his four businesses have failed, and until recently Faleh saw guerrillas fighting US troops as the standard-bearers of Iraqi pride.

But in the last month, as insurgent violence leached into his neighborhood and his wife gave birth to another son, Faleh has found a sense of hope and expectation, despite his continuing rage against US authorities and the mostly Shi'ite Iraqi interim government.

The personal stories of the two men illustrate better than any statistics the changes wrought on Iraqis' daily lives by a turbulent two years that began with the Ba'athists' last stand and bumped through an invasion, a year of formal American occupation, a growing wave of sectarian killings that have targeted Shi'ites and Kurds, and finally, a national election unlike any in Iraq's modern history.

Success and sorrowSaidi's life has followed the upward arc of the Shi'ite majority. Before the American invasion, he drove a bus and shared the profits with his brothers, who ran a smoked fish shop on the Tigris River.

Life has only gotten better since he and his neighbors in Baghdad's Karada section cheered the arrival of US tanks in 2003. Suddenly, he and his brothers could apply for government jobs. One brother, Sa'ad, left the fish shop for a lucrative position transporting thousands of workers to a refinery south of Baghdad.

Money poured in as never before, evidenced in the Persian carpets at his home and the new air cooler bolted to the window.

But tragedy reshaped Saidi's life in the last week of February when his brothers, Sa'ad and Saleh, and his nephew, Wisam, were tortured and killed, their mutilated bodies found near a bridge.

Most of those killed in Iraq today are Shi'ites -- civilians, police officers, military recruits, people driving the treacherous gantlet that is the road to Najaf. Saidi is not alone in seeing the killings as a deliberate effort to provoke the Shi'ites into sectarian warfare -- a refrain used by Shi'ite politicians to mobilize turnout in the Jan. 30 elections.

In minute detail, Saidi recounts the torture his relatives endured for five hours, according to the coroner's estimate, describing the broken bones, collapsed faces and bullets through the heads of his kinsmen.

Saidi has taken over his brother Sa'ad's job transporting workers; he must support Sa'ad's three wives and nine surviving children.

Two years ago, Shi'ites in the same neighborhood for the first time publicly recounted nearly identical stories about relatives tortured and killed by Hussein's regime. Saidi said the bodies of three cousins killed in prison in 1985 bore torture scars nearly identical to those of his brothers and nephew.

Now, he prefers to focus on future opportunity: Shi'ites will hold the plurality of power in the new government. And in his daily life, Saidi can move freely, without fear of the Ba'ath Party.

The good life lostQuality of life is what Faleh, the Sunni businessman, most likes to talk about. Strutting in a dark gray suit and a pressed yellow shirt with an ostentatious butterfly collar, Faleh projects the entitlement of the lordly governing class that reaped most of the benefits of the Ba'athist crony system.

Faleh built on his upper-class family's wealth by importing tariff-free appliances and medical supplies from Syria into a marketplace rigidly regulated to keep competition at bay.

Before the Americans came, he was living in the top slice of Iraqi society.

Evenings found him and his young wife at riverfront cafes, where they smoked water pipes stuffed with sweet tobacco. They went for picnics on weekends at the park on Baghdad Island, or in the date-palm farms in the countryside around the capital.

Those riverfront cafes have closed now. Baghdad Island is a US military base. His family farm in the military town of Salman Pak is now an insurgent battleground.

For the first year after the invasion, Faleh watched his businesses erode under the onslaught of the free market. Entrepreneurs with more capital and more savvy brought in better appliances from Asia.

He closed his date farm. Two months ago, he shuttered his appliance store. Now only the medical supply business and a small sideline in printing limp on, but they hardly make money.

Faleh's daily life revolves around the inconveniences of free Iraq.

Because of the high rate of attacks, car bombs, and firefights, he and his family retreat behind locked doors by nightfall.

On his way to work each day, he confronts traffic jams that can make what used to be a 20-minute commute a two- or three-hour ordeal. Prosperity has increased the number of cars on the road by a million, and between the US military and the Iraqi police, numerous major thoroughfares are closed for security alerts every day.

Once every week or two, Faleh spends the whole day in a gas line to fill his car; recurring fuel shortages mean a normal wait is 12 hours. Despite Iraq's prodigious oil reserves -- the world's second largest -- crumbling infrastructure and insurgent attacks mean that not enough oil is refined to meet the country's needs.

The erratic electricity supply is the other constraint shaping his life. Nationwide power output is about 80 percent of the prewar level, averaging eight hours of electricity a day (the figure for Baghdad was 9.3 hours of electricity per day at the start of March).

The insurgency, too, has starkly intruded into Faleh's life.

Less than six months ago, Faleh glibly talked of the ''honorable resistance" that attacked American forces. A month ago, a suicide car bomber targeted a passing American convoy outside his house, throwing the hood of the car into his front yard. His terrified wife, nine months pregnant at the time, refuses to return home with their newborn son, preferring to stay at her mother's.

If he leaves his house empty for more than two days, he said, thieves will ransack it.

''I don't feel safe anywhere," he said, ticking off the main threats he and his friends fear: kidnapping, robbery, arrest, being killed by loose-cannon Iraqi security forces, and the twin risks of driving on the roads with US convoys -- getting shot by insurgents aiming for Americans or getting shot by Americans who take them for insurgents.

In spite of it all, Faleh predicted that his intelligence would ultimately make him rich again. He fantasizes about doing marketing for the Baghdad Stock Exchange.

''If we measure it by money, I'm poorer," he said. ''But in terms of the information gained by dealing with people in the market for two years now, we are richer."

That tension between increased danger and increased opportunity is reflected across Iraq.

Money flows inThe US Agency for International Development has spent nearly $5 billion over the past year (about 10 percent of that on unexpected security costs), and its projects currently employ 78,000 people.

Unemployment hovers at about 30 percent, but Spike Stephenson, the USAID mission director, said reconstruction projects helped to calm areas such as Sadr City and Najaf after fierce fighting last summer.

''Fly across this city, you'll see a satellite dish on top of every house," he said of Baghdad. He also pointed to 20,000 new business registrations in the last year.

Even more money is pumping into the economy from civil servant salaries that have increased about tenfold, with teachers and low-level engineers who once earned the equivalent of less than $20 a month now bringing home more than $200. The result: a busy marketplace flooded with goods once unaffordable because of the protectionist tariffs that sheltered businesses such as Faleh's, with its crusty Syrian wares.

Supermarkets burst with crates of Western soft drinks, Iranian nuts, and Saudi Arabian juices. Internet cafes, mobile phone stores, and appliance shops dot even the poorest quarters. Mobile phone advertisements have replaced once ubiquitous images of Hussein.

But security fears temper the economic good tidings, and the new Iraq still feels like an impromptu fortification, with a maze of concrete blast walls and razor wire around every public building as well as the homes of the wealthy.

Iraqis have exchanged the travel restrictions of the rigid Ba'athist system, that tracked where you lived and moved, for another set of limitations imposed by ever-flaring violence.

As Iraq enters the second year and inaugurates the third government since the invasion, the past few weeks have brought reminders that many of the things people expected to improve the fastest -- like the infrastructure -- have grown worse. Earlier this month, three days of rain flooded Baghdad, which has virtually no drainage system. A week after the rainfall, 2 feet of water and raw sewage kept cars out of Sadr City, a poor section of the capital that is home to 2 million Shi'ites.

Most Iraqis' long-term view holds that the future is tenuous, even if there is cause for optimism. Three decades of internal crackdowns, external war, and the economic embargo of the 1990s have conditioned them to treat good fortune with suspicion -- it never has seemed to last before.

Saidi, reflecting on the murders of his family members, blames old Ba'athists who cannot bear to surrender power, even now that majority-Shi'ite rule feels inevitable.

''The regime loyalists were killing Iraqis for 35 years. This hatred continues," he said.

Hussein's bequest, he said, is a nation poised to grow anew with the dictator's shadow removed.

But, he added, sectarian rage lurks at every delicately navigated political crossroads, and Iraqis cannot forget their dead or their killers.

''My brother left me a heavy burden, as heavy as the burden left by Saddam," Saidi said. For the first time in several hours, his voice rises in anger. ''May God take revenge on Saddam who has left us with all this chaos. He is responsible for all of it."

Next: Village life untouched by regime change

Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.