By the end of 2009 Iraqis were taking stock and hoping for better days.
There had already been six years of violent loss, much of it enabled by the incompetent management of the occupation. Tens of thousands of people had been killed in explosions, shootings and sectarian executions. But there was a sense in Baghdad that the traumatised city was cautiously emerging from its torment with a determination to be normal and to have a good time.
At the football ground where I'd once watched a game halted by a sandstorm so dense that the players could barely see the ball, there was a new artificial grass surface and teams in full kit with numbers on their shirts. On the touchline, in bright sunshine, spectators sat with babies in buggies, or stood cheering their teams.
One evening under a full moon, members of the Alwiya sports and social club sat beneath palm trees with glasses of tea, cans of soft drinks or imported lager, playing bingo. Electric fans cooled the hot night air, a band played Iraqi music, a girl in a white dress danced on the stage.
The club has a restaurant, several tennis courts, a swimming pool and a banqueting hall. It was founded in 1921 (as The British Club) with the help of the adventurer, diplomat (and spy) from London, Gertrude Bell.
Shops, kebab stalls and hubble-bubble cafés in the neighbourhood were doing good business. The latest widescreen TVs were on sale ,with satellite dishes and decoders... and, of course, petrol generators as the electricity supply in Iraq had still not caught up with demand.
When I asked people my usual question, "How is your life now?" the answers ranged from confidence and happiness to fear and anxiety.
One afternoon I collected opinions in Abu Nawas park on the banks of the Tigris river. More than a thousand years ago, Abu Nawas was an Iraqi who wrote poems of love during the golden age of Baghdad when the city was celebrated for its writers, scientists and mathematicians.
Children played on new swings and slides in renovated playgrounds newly planted with grass. Abu Nawas park, for years a desolate dust-bowl inhabited by stray cats and dogs, had been reborn.
"Life now is much better," said some of the people walking in the early spring sunshine, "We have democracy and freedom."
But others were wary.
Mohammed was walking along the path by the river with his two-year-old son Ali sitting on his shoulders.
I asked him, "Do you feel safe?"
"No," he replied firmly, "We stay at home all day almost every day of the week. We have no choice. But we have to come out sometimes. Our children are forgetting how to play."
Two women, Zaineb and Zahara, tell me:
"Now life is okay; fifty-fifty, Alhamdulillah (Praise be to God). But we still worry when our children go to school or when our husbands go to work - we worry all day until they get home. But it is a little better. Until recently our husbands wouldn't allow us to go out on our own like this, but now they do."
But then Zahara added,
"Just as you think it's getting better something happens that changes your mind: a friend - a medical student - was kidnapped two days go. Every day is different. You don't know what's going to happen tomorrow."
Those conversations were in Arabic, with the help of an Iraqi interpreter.
A scientist walking in the park with his two young children, Dr. Adnan, spoke English:
"It's nice here, but the situation is precarious, unstable."
A few days earlier, someone attached a magnetic bomb - known as a 'sticky bomb' - to his car. A neighbour spotted it protruding from under the vehicle. An Iraqi army bomb disposal team defused it.
"I believe I am a target because I am educated," said Dr. Adnan. He had already received a warning - a bullet in the post.
So, confidence varied. The really bad days were not long gone and many people feared that they might return.
A shopkeeper Abu Qusay (also speaking in English) encapsulated what I sensed was the majority view.
I asked him:
"Which is more important - freedom or security?"
"Security."
"Do you have security now?"
"No. So I have no freedom."
There was also chronic unemployment, and the monthly food rations weren't reaching many of the people who needed them most: more and more Baghdadis no longer had a fixed address to which the parcels could be delivered - sectarian threats had so frightened them that they’d abandoned their homes and had gone to live with friends.
Some were living rough just beyond the city limits of south-east Baghdad, on a wide patch of arid wasteland where rubbish and builders' rubble had been dumped.
They slept in tents, or in shacks made from plastic sheets or rush matting. This desolate place with no name was home to dozens of families. At night, they told me, there were so many mosquitoes that it was hard to sleep. By day there were swarms of house flies. I saw one little girl with half a dozen flies on her face, three of them clustered in the corner of her mouth. Nearby a young boy was rinsing his hair with water from a communal hose close to a crater full of dark stagnant liquid that smelled of human waste. It was hard to keep the tents and the shacks clean. A woman in a black abaya swept litter and dust from the ground in front of her shack.
Some of the men here worked as taxi drivers, and many walked the streets begging for money. Most of the families I spoke to said they'd come here because they'd been threatened with violence if their didn’t leave their homes.
Back in central Baghdad the same day, a woman compared these new times with the old days under Saddam Hussein.
"It's worse now than it was then in every respect," she said, "he was cruel, he was bad, but he was the lesser of two evils."
One response to my question, "How is your life?" was concise, and in unambiguous English:
“Fucked up, absolutely fucked up. They fuckin' destroyed our life, our future, our country. That's all I can say."
Widows
In a Baghdad cemetery widows in black abayas placed flowers next to gravestones adorned with fading photographs of the dead.
There were so many recently widowed women in Iraq that they were referred to as 'a time bomb'; thousands had lost their husbands - to the 2003 war, to the occupation, to the insurgency and to sectarian violence. In this conservative society, the sudden death of so many breadwinners was more than tragic, for many it was an economic catastrophe.
In Ameriya in west Baghdad, the al Ethar charity was set up to find new husbands for them. Its chief executive Hanaa Badrani told me she was trying to locate partners (and step-fathers) for two thousand widows with seven thousand children. Most of the women were uneducated and had no qualifications.
Umm Fatima was hoping to remarry. She had four children. Her husband had been shot dead at a petrol station three years earlier by men wearing military uniforms. She told me no one had been arrested, and she still had no idea if they were real soldiers or not. She thought it essential that she remarry, mostly for the sake of the children:
"They miss their dad," she said, "and sometimes when they meet a man, they ask him to give them a hug."
But an Iraqi feminist and human rights activist Hanaa Edwar challenged the assumption that widows are always better off if they remarry.
For their own dignity, she believed, "women should feel they are capable of doing anything that their husbands did" - and to nurture and protect their children without the help of a man.
In a culture of "narrow tough traditions and paternalistic tribal norms", she said, it was imperative to encourage women to be independent: "We need to build a new look, a new image for women in society."
Culturally Hanaa Edwar is a Christian Iraqi; I wondered how she’d respond if anyone objected that the lives of Muslim women were none of her business.
"I am just an Iraqi," she replied, "I don't bother myself with religions. I am a citizen and an international human being."
During Saddam Hussein's days - and especially during the war with Iran in the 1980s - Iraqi widows received a pension, and often a rent-free home as well. After 2003, the pension remained but its value reduced in real terms as inflation took hold, and it was frequently siphoned off by corrupt officials.
I had also noticed that those 'narrow traditions and paternalistic norms' were not confined to mosques - in Christian church services in Iraq, there was often a visible division between men and women in the congregation, with most of the men at the front and most of the women at the back.
Dates and drought
By 2009 there was another crisis - a persistent drought. Rain was so unusual in Baghdad that during one electric storm I switched on my audio recorder just to catch the sound of raindrops bouncing off a roof. The severity of the drought was apparent even close to the centre of Baghdad - at a date plantation (an unexpected haven of peace and quiet by the Tigris river) the crop was severely dehydrated.
Apart from oil, dates are one of Iraq's most important exports.
The date farmers were two brothers - Idris and Sarieh Alaa ad-Din. They owned about fifteen hundred date palms, with molokhia and mint growing between the trees. Molokhia (also known as Jew's mallow) is a dark-leafed vegetable similar to spinach; it and the mint ‘fix’ nitrogen in the soil to provide extra nutrition for the date palms.
Iraq used to produce about three quarters of the world's date crop, but that's been overtaken by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran - with Pakistan not far behind.
By 2009 many of Iraq's date palms had become alarmingly dry. Iris and Sarieh had once been able to rely on a good date crop every year - now it was only every second year. They said they had previously harvested up to fifty tonnes of dates every autumn. In 2008 they only sold thirty tonnes, and this year they'd had none.
Iraq was receiving a lot less than half its normal rainfall; the two farmers told me that the last time there'd been any serious rain in Baghdad had been six months earlier. This had another effect on the date harvest - rain not only nourishes the palms, it washes away pests that can damage the crop. Now, the insects were thriving and the trees were not.
Another sign of serious drought was that the Tigris flowing through the centre of Baghdad was shrinking from its banks.
Initial appearances were deceptive. Ducks quacked. White birds clustered near dark green rushes that shifted gently in a warm breeze. A kingfisher plopped into the water, emerged with a small fish, and darted away. And men on single skulls with sliding seats skimmed along the water.
We were detained on the river bank by police for about three hours for failing to apply for written permission to film the river.
A friendly moustachioed middle-aged policeman gave me a glass of tea, chatted about better days, and led me down the embankment steps. He indicated how high the river had been just six years earlier - half way up the steps. Now it only just reached the lowest step. The surface of the river was so far down that there were wide patches of dry earth between the water and the embankment. Abandoned boats lay high and dry where the water level had been. Sandbanks which had once been below the surface now stretched high above it.
The Tigris - and the Euphrates, to the west - were 50% to 70% lower than they had been ten years earlier. At the National Centre for Water Management in Baghdad, senior engineer Zuhair Hassan Ahmed showed me graphs of the levels of the two rivers over the previous decade. The hand-drawn lines for each river for 2008 and 2009 confirmed that their levels were well below the mean.
An Iraqi agriculture specialist told me the shortage of rainfall and river water had created "a serious disaster.”
But drought in Iraq was only part of the problem. The shortage of water for each river, engineer Ahmed explained, was caused both by lack of rain and by reduced snow melt far to the north in the mountains of Turkey where the rivers rise.
Another factor was a series of dams on the Tigris and the Euphrates in Turkey and in Syria, reducing flow and extracting water for farming before the rivers even enter Iraq. The largest example of that is the hydroelectric Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates in Turkey, which also provides irrigation for cotton plantations in Turkish Mesopotamia.
(The dam is below-left in my photograph)
In some places, this chronic lack of rain was turning farmland to dust. Baghdad had always suffered serious dust storms - about eight a year; now there were more than thirty, and the air of the capital often turned a sinister bright orange.
In southern Iraq, river flow was so sluggish that salt water from the Gulf was reaching further upstream, contaminating wells in and around Basra with salt water. And just to the north of Basra, the drought was hampering attempts to re-flood the vast marshes that had been drained by Saddam Hussein.
Sabotage
The soundscape of Baghdad was a cacophony of cars and trucks and emergency sirens, low-flying American helicopters, occasional gunfire and explosions, the clatter of petrol generators, and the drone of large diesel generators providing entire neighbourhoods with a reliable alternative to the fitful public power supply.
Improbable tangles of electricity cables stretched away from the generators towards apartments, shops and cafés.
The confident prediction I’d heard seven years earlier from an American military engineer - "Within the next 48 hours we're going to be able to have rolling power throughout the city." - had turned out to be laughable.
In Basra, in 2010, fury about "Kahraba makou" (“No electricity”) burst onto the streets. Stones flew, men tried to break down the heavy steel doors of the local council offices, its windows were smashed, the Iraqi army arrived, two protesters were shot dead. A recording of the confrontation sounded like a shootout on a battlefield. The electricity Minister Karim Waheed resigned. His job was absorbed into the ministry of oil under Hussein al Shahristani, who promised substantial investment to improve the power system - new equipment and new power stations, and work to upgrade the electric grid.
He also promised that he would deal with the corruption that had led to funds intended for investment being stolen by officials.
The electricity supply never caught up with demand. This was the legacy of neglect, sabotage, sanctions, and years of war. In some cases, improvements were was also delayed by insurgents killing power workers and engineers - in 2004, in an attack on Baghdad South power station, twenty members of the engineering and technical team were murdered.
When I visited Baghdad South in 2008, only two of its four turbines were turning. Engineers Safa and Hamza told me the high-voltage line had been damaged many times by terrorists - "We fix it, they destroy it again." And economic sanctions after the 1991 Gulf War had made it almost impossible to import spare parts.
I was in Baghdad one summer when the temperature reached 50°C (120°) in the shade. There was seldom any city power, and there were many days when generators were running almost continuously; the grid couldn't handle the demand from air conditioners in hundreds of thousands of homes.
Iraqis often asked me how it was possible for the richest country in the world to be able to build elaborate military bases, obtain fleets of strongly armoured vehicles, fly massively expensive helicopters and jet fighters and remotely controlled surveillance drones….and yet, apart from a few gas-turbine units (lower left in the photo) , never built new power plants for Iraq.
Why, many wondered, didn't the United States have the foresight to address the electricity problem? If they had, much of the violence might have been prevented and thousands of lives saved. Because of the incessant power cuts from the start of the occupation of Iraq, electricity - the 'nerve of modern life' - was one of the first topics I wanted to investigate in 2004, and it stayed high on my the list with little change on almost every subsequent visit over a decade and a half.
Haifa Street
For several years Haifa Street in west Baghdad was a no-go zone. But security improved and one morning I had an appointment there with Jassem Mohammed Al Sharifi.
He walked along Haifa Street smoking a cigarette and holding a bunch of letters in one hand. Mr. al Sharifi was a Baghdad postman. Iraq's postal services were being slowly restored.
"Life is back on track, " he told me, "people feel good, thank God."
But he still chose not to wear his uniform. He didn't need to as he'd been doing this round for 28 years and most of the locals in Haifa Street would know who he was - but for about four years this wide street had been a Baghdad front line, one of the most dangerous places in the city. It had been taken over by al Qaeda in Iraq. It became known as Grenade Alley.
In 2008, after months of intense fighting, American forces drove al Qaeda out.
With phlegmatic understatement, Mr. al Sharifi told me that his ability to deliver the post had been 'limited' during those days. There was indiscriminate shooting, no one could move around safely, and the area we were sitting in had been abandoned.
Now there were flowers. Children crowded round us as we talked, and showed off impressive hand-stands.
"We did have security under Saddam Hussein," the postman added, "but it was security in a climate of fear. Now, in safe areas like this, the fear has gone. And we have new freedoms - freedom of speech, freedom to write. I am happy with this beautiful life. There are cars on the streets and people walking around - that's all we want."
There was some new graffiti on Haifa Street that reflected his hope that the beautiful life would endure. It read (in Arabic) Death to Terrorism!
That sentiment was also expressed in official government advertising on a billboard on the side of an apartment block. It showed a man in the despair of bereavement, throwing his head back with his hands covering his face. Across this image, written as if in dripping blood, was a caption: Terrorists you are not real Muslims!
As I sat on a low concrete wall making a note of this, a man came out of a shop to offer me a plastic chair to sit on. And a child with an empty plastic bottle filled it from a hose that was being used to water some newly planted flowers.
The Ultimate Insult
One day on a visit to Iraq in December 2008 President George W. Bush was standing behind a lectern at a live televised news conference alongside the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The two men shook hands.
A young Iraqi reporter for al-Baghdadia TV, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, stood up - seemingly to ask a question.
Instead he threw one of his shoes at Mr. Bush, shouting:
"This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!”
Bush dodged the leather missile.
Mr. Zaidi then threw his other shoe at him, yelling:
“This is from the widows, the orphans and all who were killed in Iraq!”
Mr. Maliki stretched his hand in front of the American president's face to make sure the shoe didn't hit him. Security guards streamed into the room, pulled Mr. Zaidi to the ground, kicked him, and dragged him away screaming with pain.
Quite soon, George Bush was smiling and providing a key detail: "It was a size ten."
In Muslim countries, throwing a shoe (or pointing the soles of your shoes or feet at someone) is a grave insult; shoes are assumed to be dirty, are customarily taken off before entering someone's home, and must be removed before going into a mosque.
Later that day, in the courtyard of al Baghdadia TV, two drummers and a trumpet player sounded a welcome for their suddenly famous reporter. Wearing a scarf in the colours of the old Iraqi flag from the Saddam Hussein era, Mr. Zaidi moved slowly forward through a throng of well-wishers, colleagues, photographers, reporters and TV cameras. Small children danced up and down to the rhythm of the drums. Three sheep had their throats cut live on TV to celebrate his release on bail. He became a celebrity overnight. Crowds marched through parts of Baghdad with shoes held up on poles. He received offers of marriage, and his TV station promised to build him a new home.
But his popularity didn’t prevent his prosecution. He was charged with assaulting a head of state, and given a three year gaol sentence - later reduced to one year. He was let out after nine months. The media were invited to witness his return home to his Baghdad apartment. Aunts ululated and his young nephews and nieces waved Iraqi flags, and rehearsed a chant ready for his return:
"Bush! Bush! Listen well, we said goodbye with a pair of shoes."
In the street, six sheep were assembled for celebratory sacrifice (and for kebabs). On the open-air corridor outside the apartment another sheep awaited its fate. It was provided with a bowl of water.
As the day and the heat wore on (and Mr. Zaidi didn't turn up) his family handed out soft drinks to waiting reporters. Non-Muslims and the non-observant accepted eagerly but for the rest it was Ramadan and a fast is a fast even if the temperature is 40°C in the shade.
The national hero of the shoes never did come home that day. The six sheep in the street were taken away, leaving just the one animal upstairs.
Mr. Zaidi's protest even inspired a computer game - Sock and Awe. In a Baghdad internet café I watched several customers playing it. The mouse moved a shoe from side to side to aim it, Enter launched it, and cut-outs of Bush and Maliki ducked down. It was realistically hard to hit them - despite the injunction on the screen, "Hit president Bush with your shoes! Do it!".
Danger? What danger?
Almost exactly six years on from the 'shock and awe' bombing of Baghdad in 2003, a group of adventurers had booked an all-inclusive holiday in Iraq with a British travel company. Inclusive of long delays at checkpoints.
Exhausted and footsore, they ended their visit at the Ishtar-Sheraton hotel in Baghdad which had enjoyed few visitors since it was attacked in 2005 by a suicide bomber driving a cement mixer packed with explosives which blew out most of the hotel's windows.
Five British tourists, two Americans and a Canadian spent two nights in the hotel at the end of a tour of Iraq which embraced not only deserted historic sites but some towns where extreme violence was still possible.
The group consisted of a civil servant, a businessman, a retired sub-postmaster, a retired American probation officer and an archaeologist from London. I imagined them as the cast of an Agatha Christie thriller - Murder in Mesopotamia, perhaps. But since they had all survived it would have to be a lesser known work of hers (an actual one), They Came to Baghdad.
They'd travelled the country from Erbil in the north to Basra in the south, taking in Babylon, the site of Ur of the Chaldees, the Arch of Ctesiphon and the holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala.
In Baghdad on the last day of their trip they set off to see Saddam Hussein's hubristic parade ground, five kilometres from the hotel. On the way their minibus was held up at a checkpoint for two hours.
Another day, on the road between Najaf and Nasariyah in the south, they spent six hours at checkpoints. But they felt it was worth it for the places they saw, and for the generous welcoming people they said they'd met wherever they went.
None of them seemed concerned about security. "It never occurred to me to think it was a risk," said the 77-year-old archaeologist from north London, Bridget Jones. "I'm an optimist. I think it'll never happen to me." She admitted she had heard "a couple of explosions", and then confided that she'd prefer to be killed by a car bomb than die on a geriatric ward, or in a 'home'.
Jo Gilbert, the retired probation officer from America, accepted that there was a danger of being kidnapped and killed, but - with a nervous laugh - said she was prepared to take the risk.
Geoff Moore - the former sub-postmaster, from Otterburn in the north of England - listened to some of his travel companions grumbling about dirty lavatories and the lack of hot water in their hotels, and quietly commented:
"Come on! You've got to put up with something haven't you? It's quite wonderful to be here."
In a dusty tent below the crossed swords at Saddam's parade ground, a civil servant from Yorkshire, Tina Townsend-Greaves, bought a couple of souvenirs - a baseball cap marked "Iraq" and a battery-operated model of the Lion of Babylon whose eyes lit up.
"My friends certainly think I'm a bit mad - but I tend to go on holiday to places like Afghanistan, so I think they're used to it!" said Tina as she flipped back her long blonde hair and grinned.
The British tour company, Hinterland Travel, asked the Iraqi authorities to supply them with two armed guards. They were told they would have to travel with twenty-five - and pay for their board and lodging - or with none at all.
They chose the low-profile and arguably much safer option; no guards at all. They all got home in one piece after their seventeen days in Iraq.
Very Dangerous Individuals
During the six years that followed the 2003 war, US forces detained more than 100,000 suspected terrorists. Most of them were held at Camp Bucca, a ‘theater internment facility’ far out in the southern Iraqi desert between Basra and Kuwait.
Seen at a distance from the air Camp Bucca looked like a small town with grid-pattern streets. As the helicopter drew closer, rows and rows of huts came into view, and dozens of watchtowers and compounds surrounded by razor wire.
Bucca was first established by British Forces, who named it Camp Freddie. When US forces took it over they re-named it in honour of a New York City fire marshal Ron Bucca who died in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center.
When Bucca first opened there were just a few tents surrounded by razor wire fence. But the internment camp grew ever larger, and at its busiest in November 2007 it held more than 22,000 prisoners. The day I visited there were a hundred and eighty of them left, all in Compound 16.
Small groups of young men in loose white trousers and yellow tunics walked briskly round a fenced enclosure in hot autumn sunshine. It was 48°C and there was no shade.
They looked fit and healthy. They were classified as 'red detainees'. General David E. Quantock - Commander, Task Force 134 Detainee Operations - told me he had no doubt they were dangerous:
"We have so much intelligence on these individuals that we know in fact that they are very dangerous, that most of them have blood on their hands. Some of them of been here two or three years."
"Two or three years without facing any due process?" I asked.
"Well you'll understand that we were allowed to take in security detainees. There's many short memories out there. The insurgency was wicked and killing many of our soldiers, killing innocent Iraqis - innocent Iraqi civilians by the thousand - and all of a sudden we're concerned right now that they may not have had the right judicial review? I mean we know for a fact - for a fact, not just a guess, for a fact - we know that they are very dangerous individuals."
A former Bucca detainee, Kathir Majid, was held there for three years without charge or trial or compensation. He was accused of carrying out sectarian killings for the Mahdi army militia. He told me no evidence was presented for the case against him. He described his lengthy detention as ‘abuse’.
From January 1st 2009 Americans were no longer permitted to keep prisoners indefinitely without trial. That privilege was transferred to the Iraqi authorities.
One of the prisoners at Bucca when it was under American command was Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.
He was set free. He was not regarded ‘for a fact’ as a very dangerous individual.
Abu Bakr al Baghdadi went on to found ISIS, which invaded Iraq in 2014. They occupied Iraq’s second city Mosul, where Baghdadi declared the establishment of its ‘caliphate’ in 2015.