The curse of Saddam city
As long as the dictator was in power, the Shiites Ghetto in Baghdad was the quarter of the tortured. Now it is the germ cell of a new power. The Mullahs take care of public order and want to expand their rule across the whole town.
By Alexander Smoltczyk
They heard voices from deep underground. The subject are prisoners, since years locked up in the underground cells and now forsaken by their guards. "One hears them call", says somebody, "They are all still there", since the end of the war he's been running from one bombed-out police station of Baghdad to another on the search for his disappeared brother.
And yet another, Mohammed Fuad of the Adnan hospital, swears any oath you ask him, that among the corpses, that they dug up yesterday on the Yafa road there was still somebody living: "He began suddenly, by himself, to move", he says, without any sign of astonishment.
Two weeks after the fall of the Saddam statue the city Baghdad may have calmed down. Garbage trucks are driving, and children sit on the "Abrams" tanks of the winners. But that is on the surface. Beneath, nothing is clear. There's fear. There are voices and reports of deeply hidden bunkers and tunnels, where the Tyrant is lurking, waiting for his hour to come again.
Behind the restaurant Alsaa in the quarter of the rich, Mansur, there's a crater ten, twelve meters deep. A hole filled with bricks, bent carriers, splintered shelves. Here four bunker-breaking US bombs hit on 9 April. Saddams car column was seen in the road briefly before the hit.
People stand around it all day long. It smells of decay, but it's just chickens of the restaurant. Not the dictator. The crater became the place of pilgrimage nevertheless. A corpulent woman wrapped into embroidered cloth came with her small sons and three cousins. When she sees foreigners, she begins to cry: "Saddam will return, believe me, and then he will punish all the traitors!"
Nobody standing around says anything. "He lives in a shelter! He sent a message over Al-Jaseera!", screams the woman, hyperventilating and under tears. He is her loved leader, he named her sons Kussei and Udai called after the sons of Saddam.
"We were lords under Saddam, and we will remain lords." Asna Abess is her name, and one is free to write the following down: "I am ready to kill an American. If it were not for my kids .. Come, Udai ", says the woman and drags the pale, mute boy in shorts away. A child with the name of a killer.
When the Americans entered the city, the fear has not disappeared. Liberation - that was no fun, just destruction and looting. The bombs were precise, the stealing that followed, general. They say, that Kuwaitis penetrated the town and started plundering, as a revenge for the raids, they suffered themselves in 1990; they say, that Americans intentionally provoked it, in order to completely destroy Baghdad. The Baghdadis look for explanations, in order to drown one thing: the disgust over themselves.
Over that part of themselves, that was always excluded and pushed away into the Northeast of the town. Into Saddam city, whence the majority of looters came from, into that corner of Baghdad, where people live, who really have all the reasons for ruthless rage.
The road to Saddam city takes you first past the completely unscathed and well guarded Oil Ministry, then past the completely burned out Ministry of Education, then comes martyr monument, purification plant, industrial fallow, transformer station and then a roundabout, where dirty children for a few dinars wash cars.
End of the fifties the Iraqi autocrat Abd Al-Karim Kassim distributed the land to the poor, which had come up from the Shiite south and wilted away in their metal-sheet huts. Each family got 200 square meters and constructions loans: the area was called "city of the revolution". Today the people curse Abd al-Karim Kassim for building their city.
Later Saddam Hussein visited the stinking quarter in the northeast of the town and promised everything would get better from then on. He needed the hopeless from the "city of the revolution" to send them back down to the south, this time to the battlegrounds of the Iran war. Saddam ordered to do canalization and to asphalt the roads. The people were jubilant and baptized their city into "Saddam city". Perhaps in hope that they will not be forgotten. Perhaps it was different: Nobody in the Arab world is surprised, if the strong devours the weak. And there is no asylum and no escape from what has once been written down.
Now, after the war, Saddam city is the only part of Baghdad, where the portraits of Saddam have been erased and painted over without a trace. "welcome in Sadr city!" stands on the walls at the entrance. "Do not accept stolen money!" And next to it the portrait of an old man with a white beard and glasses: Mohammed Sadik al-Sadr, leader of the Shiites, venerable scholar and loved father of the believing. Murdered in February 1999.
Whether "city of the revolution", "Saddam city" or "Sadr city" - it is the same little rivers, full of stinking garbage, with swarms of flies and mosquitoes dancing over them. The same flat-eared goats, muddling through the garbage, the crowds upon crowds of ululating children. "We have no work, no water, no power. Write it, mister!"The curse has not disappeared with the name. Two million people, who wait in their miserable brick huts for the life to begin. That they finally get a share of the underground treasures of Iraq.
The sanctions made misery out of their poverty. And Saddam had no more interest to repair drains. The repression functioned and that was enough. The Shiites were forbidden to hold their Friday prayers in public and to do pilgrimage to Kerbela for the martyr celebration of the Imam Hussein. The silence prevailed.
Now the walls talk. Everywhere you can see graphiti: "Sunni - Shia, one Islam!" The newly created Islamic party IDP occupied an office. And everywhere troops of young men can be seen, with the portrait of the Imams Hussein and plastic bags, pilgrims on the road after Kerbela.
On the "Kurd bazaar" the loot of the last few days is offered among cucumbers and tomatoes. Children hold passport blanks in the air, military papers and permission papers, license numbers and money bundles. Air conditioners, street lanterns and fans from the Ministries lie in the dust. A Kalashnikow costs 30 dollar, the ammunition is no charge.
Shots can be heard occasionally. The Americans call it "Ali Baba fire". In order to deter thieves. To keep the fear at bay.
On 9 April, when the looting in Baghdad began, police stations and administration buildings were first to get demolished and looted . But nobody touched the shops, nobody touched the mosques. Saddam city is also the only part of Baghdad, where hospitals were not plundered.
"I stepped in front of the entrance and said: If you get through here, then I go and I'll never come back again ", says Mowafak Gorea, the chief doctor of the central hospital. Only on repeated demand the interpreter translates also the name of the hospital: "General-Saddam hospital".
Gorea is a man with receding hair, inconspicuous to being nearly invisible: "Then they pulled back for the time being. Each half hour I ran I through the hospital with whistle, looking for looters. We kept operating. First the bomb victims, then the shot and fire wounds from the street fights."
His office is decorated with a kid globe and a bunch of plastic flowers. In the office a Mullah sits as well. Gorea does not seem to think it's worth explaining it.
He is Christian. "Probably the only one in Saddam city", he says He spent the entire war in his 300-beds-Spital, 25 days without interruption. "In the last week of the war week we have thousands wounded treated stationarily." In a room there's still ten corpses, for who nobody has asked for. Gorea will photograph them, take finger prints and bury them.
"The holy men", the doctor bows slightly in the direction of the Mullah, "sent us armed guards." The clergyman smiles. "We are still the only completely functioning general hospital in Baghdad. We have supplies and medicines for two months. I have two generator sets, and at night the only lights in the Saddam city are the windows of the hospital. Friendly hands ", again he nods to the Mullah across the room, "support us with money. We do not need any help from abroad."
"Don't steal money! Visit mosques! Go back to the work! Do not shoot without reason!"
Goreas first contact with the freedom troops was an American tank that left his mark on the main hospital gate.
There are supposedly 120 mosques in Saddam city. The believing have prayed for 30 years and waited for the hidden 13. Imam to come out. Now that the police stations and offices lie in ash, the Mullahs are the only authority.
In the central city place they hang out a placard, announcing in red letters the Fatwa of the Imam from Nadjaf : "Do not steal money! Does not shoot without reason! Visit mosques and pray! Go back to work!"
They made sure that on each street corner there's young men in T-shirts with Kalashnikows. Sometimes they stop cars and examine the trunks. Sometimes they shoot in the air.
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