BAGHDAD: Beyond the City of Ghosts (Madinat Ashbah)

Sheri Laizer | Exclusive to iKurd.net

Amongst the reeds that edge the Dijlah river1 the water fowl are mating noisily. In the leafy, east Baghdad suburb of Karada, school children are wandering to school in boisterous groups, passing giant billboards of Hadi al-Ameri, stony-faced as the strongman of the Badr Shi’a militia. Those passing it no longer even notice.

A wedding party sets off in a convoy of shining Japanese Four-wheel drives. The bride can be glimpsed, her face unveiled, brightly painted, smiling – a love match, then, if she is lucky…

The city’s traffic is moving steadily, heading Downtown, skirting the blocked-off 14 July Bridge that links the east Bank of the Tigris to the Green Zone, with the 14 Ramadan Bridge open and busy, offering a broad perspective up and down the river.

The sky is clear, the day cool – Anzu, the Sumerian lion-headed force of the storm has flown north to the land of the Carduchi.2 In his place, a pair of American Apache helicopters lift off overhead, setting out on patrol above the Green Zone as they do each morning, circling above Sijood Palace, the former residence of Saddam Hussein, its peacock fantail gardens still intact, and over al-Salam (Peace Palace) and the Republican Palace that were less fortunate. Given the extremity of Shock and Awe, Baghdadis consider it miraculous that the Americans did not obliterate all their city’s most historic spaces…3

The helicopters buss steadily on overhead, climbing above Abu Nuwas street that flanks the curves of the river, on past the Palestine Hotel where the foreign media captured the atrocities of the bombing campaign, around the circle of Firdos Square where once lush gardens shaded the 14 Ramadan mosque and on April 9, 2003, Saddam’s towering bronze statue was felled before the world’s eyes. Nothing now replaces it but dust and debris. The gardens and fountains also are no more…4

The Apaches continue their daily patrol, hovering above the bottleneck on Rashid street, quickly on past the equestrian statue of King Faisal I on Haifa Street, where the traffic surges to cross al-Ahrar bridge and only the poor go on foot.5

Completing a circuit around the former President’s walled palaces for good measure, the helicopters linger over Zawra Park – its Ferris wheel casting reflections across the tide – buzzing steadily on their way above the lost walls of Caliph, Abu Ja’afar al-Mansur, whose design for the city recast the zodiac in ambitious earthly symmetry…

Al-Shaheed monument Baghdad, Iraq — Al-Shaheed monument, Baghdad, Iraq. Photo: Sheri Laizer 2019/Ekurd.net

For the moment, all is peaceful, or seems so from above as the sun shines down on the turquoise-tiled split dome of the al-Shaheed monument, cast in tribute to the martyrs of the Iraq-Iran war –and since –6 its womb open to the grandiose new Oil Ministry that recalls more than anything else George Orwell’s vision of doom, 1984, guarded by black-clad thugs who pursue too readily anyone that lingers to stare through its parted gates…

Like dragonflies, the Apaches hover above the Iraqi Museum – returned to life after the plunder from the invasion; on past the 1961 Freedom Monument (Nasb Hurriya) in Tahrir Square that its creator, Jawad Salim, never lived to see completed. And thus onwards, over Mansour district, above the grey spectre of the Sunni al-Rahman mosque intended to be the greatest of the city, its completion stalled by war and regime change; on over the Hunting Club once frequented by Saddam’s vicious sons; over the Mansour Mall and busy shopping thoroughfares below, simple shoe-shine stands trading haphazardly on the sidewalk in contrast to the lavish sequined wedding gowns displayed in the shop windows.

A quick turn back across the river, glancing down to the Dora oil refinery and power station, lit up at night like a Disney castle; carrying on over the golden domes of the Kadhimiya shrine,7 and the American military base at Taji…. And then completing a circuit back over the Expressway, crossing Karada, and dropping down into the Green Zone near the giant Swords of Qādisīyah, grasped in replicas of Saddam Hussein’s hands near the new American Embassy.

For those going on foot below, the scent of orange blossom signals the approach to dwindling orchards and palm groves.

Once, there were many green spaces across Baghdad, date palms and citrus trees shading elegant Ottoman and British colonial houses – one of them a modest dwelling of Gertrude Bell, Iraq’s ‘progenitor’ – a woman in a man’s world, who rose above most of them, and whose remains lie all but forgotten in the crumbling Anglican cemetery behind the Armenian Orthodox Church of St Gregory.

Tomb Miss Bell Baghdad, Iraq — Tomb of ‘Miss Bell’, Baghdad, Iraq. Photo: Sheri Laizer @2019/Ekurd.net ⁸

Baghdad brims as usual with life and with death – false friends or true foes, tyrants and terrorists, militia men and murderers coming in and out of mind – a city capable of beneficence, still hoping for balance: a city like others where couples fall in love and gaze into the future, the ghosts of the past whispering hope to the broken-hearted…

1 Arabic and Kurdish ‘Dijlah’, the Tigris in English, means ‘palm trees.’
2 The Carduchi are considered by many scholars to be the ancestors of the Kurds. See for example, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1478-1913.1926.tb00614.x
3 With a little vision, the monuments may yet become public spaces but Iranian designs on Iraq do not include aesthetics.
4 A short-lived monument to the Iraqi family was erected thereafter. The statue was taken down for some odd reason perhaps owing to Islamic edicts against figurative imagery in art commensurate with the imposition of Sharia law and increased fundamentalism in the post-Saddam government of Iraq.
5 No threat to Ba’athist Iraq, Saddam had replaced the original of the statue that had been felled during the Arab revolt against the colonialist British puppet monarchy on July 14 1958.
6 Designed by Iraqi architect, Saman Kamal, and Iraqi sculptor-artist, Ismail Fattah al-Turk, the monument opened in 1983. http://architectuul.com/architecture/al-shaheed-monument
7 A prime target of Al Qaeda in 2005 targeting the Shi’a community. See, for example, a day of carnage at https://www.independent.ie/world-news/baghdad-the-bloodiest-day-25966265.html
8 The centenary of Iraq has produced new works on Iraq’s founders, among them, Queen of the Desert: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell a biography by Janet Wallach, and a new film, Letters from Baghdad (2016).

Sheri Laizer, a Middle East and North African expert specialist and well known commentator on the Kurdish issue. She is a senior contributing writer for iKurd.net. More about Sheri Laizer see below.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.