Return to Baghdad

This summer​ , on a visit home, I went to hear the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra at the National Theatre, in the Karradah district of Baghdad. The theatre has a roof shaped like a Bedouin tent and four Islamic arches adorning its façade. Inside, the ceiling is decorated with cascading wooden planks, designed to evoke the trunks of Iraqi palm trees – now a rare and exotic sight. The theatre still attracts a cosmopolitan, elegantly dressed audience, but to go there is to be reminded of a city, and a way of life, that hardly exist, except in memory. I was frisked by a soldier at the entrance; women had their bags checked at a small booth for privacy. In November 2008, an Oldsmobile blew up outside the theatre, killing five people. Iraq is at ‘peace’ again, but wartime habits persist.

By the eighth century, Baghdad was the capital of a sprawling empire, a centre of science and learning, and peerless in architectural splendour. ‘By God, I am passing through a city, and no city more secure or with greater ease of life than it has ever been constructed in East or West,’ the caliph Harun al-Rashid said of Baghdad. That ‘ease of life’ would soon, and repeatedly, be erased by famine and plague, the flooding of the Tigris, the city’s sacking by the Mongols after their overthrow of the Abbasid dynasty and the turbulent centuries of Ottoman rule that followed. Like other members of my generation, I grew up in the shadow of a more recent calamity, the American-led war to remove Saddam Hussein, which opened up the country to both regional terrorism and the global market economy.

The enduring impact of war, poverty and neoliberal transformation are visible everywhere. Late Ottoman areas of tightly packed buildings and cul-de-sacs are in disrepair, while the city has been flooded by bright symbols of Western consumer culture: burger joints, beauty clinics and shopping malls. Security units wearing camouflage patrol in armoured Humvees after a series of assaults by militiamen earlier this year on American-style food chains and businesses that allegedly supported Israel’s war on Gaza. Outside the Palestine and Ishtar Hotels, built during the Saddam-era construction boom and managed by Méridien and Sheraton until the Gulf War, security men scan the passers-by, but tend to leave alone the Shia militiamen who, since 2003, have carried out murders and abductions with impunity.

In the smarter parts of Baghdad, the restaurants are packed, and a rash of neon signs gives the impression of economic recovery. But a growing number of young people are desperate to leave Iraq. In the oil-rich south of the country, activists have found themselves being dragged by police along the asphalt for protesting about unemployment. In the Kurdish north, journalists have faced a violent crackdown, and Erdoğan’s Turkish government continues to hunt down Kurdistan Workers’ Party fighters in Iraqi territory. Both Washington (targeting Iran-backed militias) and Tehran (targeting groups connected to the domestic opposition) have conducted airstrikes in the country; in February a US drone hit a busy shopping street in east Baghdad in order to take out a senior member of Kataib Hizbullah. Iraq’s supposed stability is little more than a ruse to court foreign investment.

Outsiders tend to focus on the sectarian nature of Iraq’s politics, but the most serious divide in Baghdad today is class. While the nouveaux riches ride in G-Class Mercedes, the have-nots make do in tuk-tuks: more than a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Driving from my western suburb to the city centre, I passed an emaciated little girl sitting in the shade of an abandoned concrete watchtower, selling bottles of water. The concrete barrier of a nearby checkpoint was painted with a sign proclaiming ‘seven thousand years of Mesopotamian history’.

On the eastern bank of the Tigris is the modernist ziggurat of the Babylon Hotel, designed by the Slovenian architect Edvard Ravnikar in the early 1970s and intended to be used for the 1982 summit of the Non-Aligned Movement. Since Iran and Iraq, both NAM members, were at the time engaged in a devastating war that would last until 1988, the summit was moved to New Delhi. The Babylon attracts Westerners, Chinese and diaspora Iraqis from the Gulf. Further down Abu Nawas Street is Zaha Hadid’s still unfinished Central Bank, a phallic monument to Iraq’s neoliberal renaissance commissioned in 2010. What was advertised as a sign of progress reminds most Baghdadis of our backward banking system, and of a building boom that was driven by laundered funds.

The 14th of July Bridge, a casualty of indiscriminate American bombing during the 1991 Gulf War which has since been rebuilt, is my exit point from the Green Zone: a ten-square-kilometre area only partially accessible to civilian traffic. This is where the parliament building and the US embassy sit in seclusion. In an attempt to project a sense of normality and to reduce Baghdad’s notorious traffic jams, the state allows commuters to pass near the seat of power. But the gulf between state and citizenry is hardly repaired by this transient proximity. If your car dies on its wide avenues, security personnel hover around until the vehicle is towed away. Those visiting the fortified US embassy are frisked outside the zone’s perimeter by private security guards before buses shuttle them in. Employees making the morning commute to agencies inside must show a permit at a checkpoint before they are allowed in.

The Green Zone is also home to monumental works of public art currently inaccessible to locals: the flying shield of the Monument to the Unknown Soldier, completed in 1982; and the Victory Arch, completed in 1989 to celebrate the ‘triumph’ over Iran – a gargantuan replica of Saddam’s fists, in which he holds crossed swords that rise to an apex of forty metres above the entrance to Festivities Square. Omnipresent on billboards – a reminder of the ghosts haunting Iraqis – are the faces of Qasem Soleimani, the former commander of Iran’s Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who led the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), which fought in Syria as well as Iraq. Both were killed in a US drone strike in 2020.

Tehran’s influence isn’t confined to commemorative billboards: Mohammed al-Sudani’s government, backed by the Co-ordination Framework, is deeply penetrated by Iran. The CF is an alliance of factions led by veteran Shia politicians and loathed even by the young Iraqi Shia they claim to represent. The country’s ethnosectarian power-sharing system, engineered by Washington (the prime minister is required to be Shia, the president Kurdish and the speaker of parliament Sunni), has consolidated clientelism and exclusivist politics, overpowering any attempt by independent forces to change the system from within. Leading politicians of all denominations, keen to protect their business interests, form a resilient ruling class that crushed the October Uprising of 2019. The uprising was precipitated by deteriorating living conditions and failing public services, and called for the downfall of this entire class.

The governing coalition has also prevailed over Muqtada al-Sadr, the populist cleric whose followers have been accused of corruption and human rights violations. Although they outperformed rival Shia parties in the 2021 elections, which were held in response to the uprising, by the summer of 2022 the Sadrists had still failed to form a ruling majority in parliament. Seeing his Iran-backed rivals united against his declared attempt to reform the corrupt system, al-Sadr told his party to withdraw from political activity in protest. This led his followers to storm the Green Zone in the summer of 2022, engaging in deadly clashes with other armed factions. Yet despite their righteous denunciations of the establishment, the Sadrists have often been part of it, presiding over ministries and occupying senior positions in the bureaucracy. As they eye a political comeback, Baghdad remains relatively quiet – but nobody thinks that this will last for long.

Israel’s destruction of Gaza is also chipping away at the façade. ‘Death to America. Death to Israel. Let the Jews be damned,’ banners in Baghdad read. The suffering of Palestinians reminds many Iraqis of their suffering under American occupation two decades ago. But the situation in Gaza has increasingly been exploited by Shia leaders for their own political purposes. In October last year al-Sadr led thousands of his supporters in a demonstration in the heart of Baghdad, all of them dressed in white shrouds to signify their readiness to die as martyrs. As with the attacks carried out by Iraqi militias against US forces, this spectacle was enthusiastically received by the Arab diaspora. It is not lost on locals that, for the Sadrists, these acts are as much as anything about laying a claim to be the region’s foremost defenders of Palestine. This showmanship elides the sorry history of Palestinian experience in Iraq. As Human Rights Watch and others documented at length during the early years of occupation and sectarian struggle, Palestinian refugees were regularly attacked by Shia militias, who accused them of receiving favourable treatment from Saddam’s regime. It’s true, of course, that Iraqis know how alone Palestinians must feel today: they, too, were abandoned in their most desperate years. But long before Iraq turned against its Palestinians it did much the same to its Jews, one of the country’s oldest communities.

For more than two millennia Iraq had a thriving Jewish community, whose leading figures commanded respect from the sultans and pashas in Constantinople and Ottoman Baghdad. Sheikh Sassoon ben Saleh Sassoon was appointed chief treasurer by the Ottomans in 1781. Ezikiel Gabbay, a Baghdadi banker, was chief treasurer and adviser to Sultan Mahmud II in the early 19th century. Until the creation of the state of Israel, most of Iraq’s 135,000 Jews expressed little or no interest in Zionism – much less in leaving their homes for an ethnically exclusive state based on Jewish identity. During the 1948 uprising of Al-Wathba, or the Leap, against the government’s signing of the Portsmouth Treaty, which effectively made Iraq a British protectorate, Baghdad’s Jews marched with their Muslim and Christian neighbours. The uprising overthrew the prime minister, Salih Jabr, and forced the crown prince, Abd al-Ilah, to disavow the treaty in public. The crackdown was deadly. Jewish-owned cinemas closed their doors, liquor stores stopped serving, and, as Orit Bashkin wrote in a 2016 essay, even ‘the lights in al-Rashid Street, Baghdad’s main thoroughfare, were turned off for seven nights as a gesture of grief and bereavement.’

In Three Worlds: Memoirs of An Arab Jew, the Iraqi-Jewish historian Avi Shlaim remembers the Baghdad of his childhood as ‘a multi-ethnic metropolitan city, home to different minorities, littered with mosques, churches and synagogues’.* ‘We had friendly relations with our Muslim and Christian neighbours,’ he writes, ‘unencumbered by religious differences.’ Shlaim’s family lived in an old quarter near Tahrir Square, the site of the Freedom Monument, a series of fourteen bronze reliefs mounted on a travertine-clad ‘banner’, designed by Jawad Saleem and completed in 1961. Read from right to left like a line of Arabic poetry, the images narrate the story of the 1958 revolution that overthrew the pro-British monarchy. It was in Tahrir Square in 2019 that thousands of Iraqis called for a free Iraq and were greeted by bullets and skull-piercing smoke grenades.

On an afternoon in June, a convoy of jubilant members of the Popular Mobilisation Forces cruised past Tahrir, triumphant music blaring, waving their guns in the air in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Shia organisation. The PMF was set up in 2014 after Islamic State militants overran swathes of Iraqi territory, a lethal state failure for which thousands of displaced Iraqis continue to pay a heavy price. Women clad in black abayas, ferried in on buses from all around Baghdad, sat in their seats and clapped. I thought about how things had changed since Shlaim’s childhood. ‘Most of the houses in Bataween [south of the square] were private villas surrounded by gardens and orchards,’ Shlaim writes. As I walked the backstreets of this once affluent area, with its residents of all denominations, I saw a dead homeless man lying in the shade of a makeshift tent as policemen swarmed around his body.

Sha’ul Hakham Sasson used to live not far away. He was the son of Sasson Khdouri, a former chief rabbi of Baghdad. Until his death in 1971, Khdouri tried to shield his dying community from the reverberations of the conflict in Palestine. Unwilling to abandon his ageing father, Sha’ul stayed with him in their ancestral home long after most of the country’s Jews had gone – they fled in 1951, in an exodus sparked by the anger of their Arab neighbours over the loss of Palestine and the clandestine activities of the Zionist underground.

Shortly after the Baathist coup of 1968, Sha’ul was arrested and taken to the Qasr al-Nihaya, an internment facility in western Baghdad known as the Palace of the End, where he was tortured and nearly died. In his memoir, In the Hell of Saddam Hussein: 365 Days in the Palace of the End, published in Arabic in 1999, Sha’ul evokes the shrinking world of those who remained in Iraq under the suspicious eye of the state. ‘I couldn’t take it anymore,’ he writes, ‘and started to fling my body against the door, knowing I would be punished for it. But I wanted to put an end to it, even if they executed me.’ Sha’ul was eventually released, and the palace was shut down after a failed coup by Nadhim Gzar, head of the General Security directorate, in 1973. But one by one Baghdad’s remaining Jews uprooted themselves. Among them was the poet Mir Basri, who, after Khdouri’s death, had assumed the role of community leader. He moved first to Amsterdam and then the UK, where he wrote a poem asking to be reunited in the afterlife with his homeland, ‘in the shadow of palm dates/where dreams of youth will overflow the eyelids’. He died in 2006, condemned, like so many Iraqis, to spend much of his life in exile.

I went to a screening of short films organised by the French and German consulates and held at the Abbasid palace. It has a marvellous arched gate facing the Tigris, leading to vaulted muqarnas corridors which open onto a courtyard with a fountain in the centre. Security men hovered on the rooftop. The German ambassador, Christiane Hohmann, talked vaguely about ‘hope’. The first film was Mohammed al-Ghadhban’s Earth Is Weeping, Its Water are Tears (2022), a clichéd expression of Iraqi trauma, aimed, it seemed, at Europeans. The camera follows the protagonist’s face as he roams through the ruins. Many of the Iraqis in the audience left before the fifteen-minute film was over. They are well versed in pain projected on the screen, and they have had enough of it.