2005 was election year in Iraq - the first universal adult suffrage democratic elections in the country ever. Election day was scheduled for Sunday January 30th.
There had been national elections in Iraq before the monarchy was overthrown in 1958, but women were not allowed to vote then - and there was voter suppression to make sure the Shia majority couldn't win.
Two days before polling day I was on another embed with a US battalion, travelling in a convoy of Humvees under the command of Captain Steve Gventer.
A year earlier, Capt. Gventer had been wounded twice. His shoulder was pierced with shrapnel when an RPG exploded against a wall near where he was standing. And in Sadr City an insurgent with a machine gun shot him through the calf. He didn't mention either of those two incidents to me, and nor did anyone else. I only found out about them while I was checking the spelling of his name, and its pronunciation (G'venna).
We headed for a street that the Americans had dubbed Restaurant Road after its numerous kebab joints, cafés and juice stalls.
A commercial bank on the road was protected against robbery by ram-raiding by a series of heavy concrete blocks linked together with steel scaffolding. The blocks were plastered with election posters.
Capt. Gventer had been led to believe that the district election office was in the same street - a depot where Iraqi police were supposed to ensure that ballots and ballot boxes were securely delivered to polling stations.
We stopped at a school that he thought was the district election office. It wasn't. No one there seemed to know where the office was. Confusion. He needed find it - to see the ballot papers and to verify the seals on the boxes.
But at least this school would be used as a polling site. So he used the opportunity to give some advice to the Iraqi soldiers and police standing around him with their AK-47 rifles and their handguns - advice about defending themselves over the election weekend.
"When you shoot your weapon you have to aim at targets, you don't just shoot at random, you don't shoot in the air, you aim your shots, don't just spray them."
As his audience listened to the Arabic translation, doubt spread across their faces.
They told the American captain that they didn't have enough ammunition, didn't have enough weapons, and many of the weapons they did have were in poor condition. They were also doubtful that the rudimentary barricades in the street - lumps of rock, and old wooden classroom desks tipped onto their sides - would be enough to stop determined suicide bombers.
"When does the curfew begin?" an Iraqi asked. "I think it starts tonight," replied an American. It didn't. It was to start the following evening at 6 pm and end at 6 am every day for three nights until the morning after the election.
That raised a flurry of new enquiries.
So we'll have to spend the night here before voting?
Yes. The interim government will pay extra for that.
Who will make sure we have food if we have to stay here for twelve hours? And - there's a three-day vehicle curfew. So how do we get to work?
You'll have official permits. (No answer to the food question).
Will an official permit be enough to guarantee safe passage when everyone's nervous and some of the checkpoints may not recognize the permit?
Before anyone answered that one, Lieutenant José Grant turned up to say that he'd managed to find the district election office.
After a Humvee ride to another school, Capt. Gventer finally set eyes on the ballot papers. In a classroom with scratched wooden desks with sloping lids and white ceramic ink wells, there were about a dozen plastic boxes containing the ballot papers - secured with two green seals.
A short drive away, sitting at a table in the open air at a 'mobile command centre' next to a police station in the district of New Baghdad, an infectiously confident American Captain, Clinton Alexander, told me the logistical chaos that I'd witnessed was understandable.
"It's the first time they've ever run an election here. We have a hard time running elections in America. Remember the hanging chads and the butterfly ballots in 2000? Here in Iraq this is the first time ever. And it's good, it's fun."
An intelligence officer, Joe Palermo, said there was evidence to justify that confidence:
"People are looking forward to voting. If they weren't, we would see more indicators of negative atmospherics such as people throwing rocks at Humvees, or new anti-American graffiti, or people shaking their fists at us. We haven't seen very much of that lately."
As we walked back to the ‘trucks' - the Humvees - we passed a washing line with three teddy bears hanging up to dry, pegged to the line by their ears.
We were followed by a troupe of cheerful children. With the help of an interpreter I asked one of them - eleven-year-old Ziya - about the election.
"I have a dream," he said, "that we will have a real government and a perfect future and good schools and everything will be all right and will be quiet."
Where's his head?
Five o'clock on election day morning and US patrols were out on the dark empty streets of Baghdad - tanks, and soldiers in helmets, silhouetted against orange street lighting, their breaths visible in the cold winter air. It was 3° Celsius.
The barrel of one of the tanks was stencilled with a statement in black letters: Adrenaline Rush.
Col. Ahmed of the Iraqi police enthused about the historic significance of the day: "This is the first time there have been democratic elections anywhere in the middle east."
I asked him about warnings that suicide bombers would attack polling stations.
"They are people who have no brains, they don't think."
I quizzed four Iraqis about the elections - Saif, Mohammed and Anwar - all in English:
"I will go and I will vote. It is very, very important for Iraqi people. I will take my family. is very important for me."
- But some people have threatened to kill anybody who votes. Aren't you afraid?
"Yes I am but I will vote, I have to vote for the new future for Iraq. I'm afraid but I'll do. It's my right and I want to do it. It's also dangerous just living in Baghdad, it's dangerous to be in the queue for fuel, it's dangerous to walk downtown because of bomb cars, it's dangerous to be everywhere in Iraq. That's our life, it's our country, you have to live in it."
- Do you think the election will change that?
"Not so fast, it will take a long time. It will take years. We were afraid for 25 years under Saddam. We were intimidated for 25 years under Saddam. The danger now is nothing compared to that."
Voting began at 7 am. At a polling station in Badr al Kubra elementary school in al Muthanna in east Baghdad I met the first person to cast a ballot there, Salah Mehdi Ali Jubouri.
"I got up early to vote, to set a good example. I feel so good, so great ["Kulla zain" in Iraqi Arabic]."
And the suicide bomb threat?
"I am never afraid."
He spoke to me in Arabic, as did one of the first women to vote at the same place, Umm Ali (mother of Ali). This handsome sixty-year-old woman in a headscarf wept with relief as she began to speak, and made a passionate declaration of hope for Iraq.
"I am happy, I am happy [“Ana saeeda, ana saeeda”]. I can't describe how I'm feeling. Please God keep this country safe from north to south, from east to west. I am sixty years old and today is the first day that I have felt that I am a complete human being."
The setting for those hopeful comments was a street lined with palm trees and the sound of doves cooing in the sharp morning sunshine.
After about an hour, we went back to the battalion's base at Camp Rustamiyah to get some breakfast. Fried eggs and pancakes, and orange juice. Apart from the thin weak coffee, those 'home from home' meals in the DFACs were great.
Refreshed, we drove back to the school to see how the voting was going.
About two minutes away we heard a loud thud.
With the Humvees parked at a safe distance, we ran towards the school.
The first thing I saw was two men sitting in the back of a white Toyota pickup - leaning against the cab, one of them bleeding from his head and the other from his legs. Both were gasping for breath. On the ground nearby, the dead body of a man, his limbs at strange angles, a pool of blood near his head, his brain visible through a small square hole in his skull. His brain.
In the street outside the school there were clumps of human flesh, patches of blood, scorch marks from an explosion, and two legs severed below the knee. Socks and trainers were still on the feet. On a muddy verge crunched against a wall there was the headless and naked torso of a large man, his arms and legs blown off and his buttocks smeared with earth and blood. The suicide bomber.
"Where's his head?" I asked an American soldier.
"It's right over here."
The bomber's head lay in the middle of the street. Apart from some torn muscles and skin around its neck, it was intact and undamaged. It had the face of a young man, probably in his twenties - with a wide, pointed, neatly groomed moustache.
A woman in a black abaya came out of her home carrying an empty cardboard box. She placed it over the head. Written on the box in English was the word "Apples."
I was told it was common for the blast of a suicide bomb to project the bomber's head some distance from the rest of his corpse. The explosive force of a suicide belt goes in and out.
About an hour and a half after the suicide attack, the school re-opened as a polling station and men and women - one with a crying baby - waited quietly in line to be searched before being allowed inside to vote. The corpses had been removed, but there were shocked expressions on some of the voters’ faces as they walked past the flesh and blood on the ground around them.
One man in a smart jacket and tie lifted the box from the suicide bomber's head and spat on it.
Two policemen were killed in that attack. The bomber detonated his device as they searched him on his way into the polling station.
About half an hour later, there was another loud thud in the distance. Another suicide attack. Three more police officers died, and the bomber. He blew himself up next to a white wall, splashing it with blood. The corpses were placed in black body bags and laid in a line at the side of the road.
Later, I asked an Iraqi how many people had died in attacks in Baghdad that day.
"How many? Seven? Seventeen? Seventy? I don't know. It's normal. Like the weather."
The next day, with the help my embed battalion commander Col. Lopez Carter, I established the names the five policemen who were killed at the two polling stations:
Abbas Shaash Mohammed
Hussein Jadeh Jassem
Mohsen Belhawi Khleyev
Mehdi Hussein
Ali Khleyev Abdullah
I asked Alla and Zuhair, two young men working as translators for the Americans, if they believed elections would help to stop terrorist attacks on Iraqi civilians.
"No," said Alla, "The election will emphasise the Saddam supporters' loss of authority and power. They were in power for more than thirty years."
Zuhair was fractionally more optimistic.
"Iraq is like a big family, with many brothers and many opinions. The election is only a first step, but it is a good first step, to bring us together to do the same thing, to go and vote."
In Alla's family, only his wife knew that he worked for the Americans; he was careful not to tell his seven-year-old daughter in case she inadvertently revealed his secret at school:
"The terrorists target us, they always look for us."
They also kidnapped children.
Nine-year-old Ahmed, son of Iraqi National Guard (ING) Colonel Hussam Hussein, was kidnapped from outside his school by members of the Mahdi Army militia. He was forced into a car and driven away. They kept this little boy prisoner for two weeks.
"They knew my cell phone number," his father told me, "They called me, they said: we have your son. They said: if you want us to release him, we want the names of everyone you know in the ING. And you must resign from the ING."
Col. Hassam responded in kind. He sent a message to the militia that he had resigned. When one of the terrorists called him again he traced the call, tracked the man down, abducted him, and warned the Mahdi Army that he would force his new prisoner to reveal their names if they didn't release his son.
They released his son.
Extremist Sunni groups including Zarqawi's al Qaeda in Iraq had threatened to wage war against the 'fierce evil of democracy' and to ‘bathe the streets in blood’ on election day.
Mostly they didn't succeed. Altogether in Baghdad that January day, twenty people died in nine suicide bomb attacks on polling stations. Elsewhere in the country, another twenty-four people were killed.
Most of the attacks were by suicide bombers mingling with crowds on foot - their explosive belts concealed under loose robes and almost impossible to detect before they were searched. And then it’s too late.
But the three-day vehicle curfew had worked. I spent much of the day in a Humvee patrol roaming neighbourhoods deserted of vehicles. But not of people. Almost everywhere we went in east and central Baghdad, there were groups of men and boys playing football in the street, using cardboard boxes as goal posts.
The strongest political resistance to democracy was by Sunni Iraqis who had been instructed to boycott the election. But it backfired on them.
Turnout in the Sunni heartland west of Baghdad it was 2%. The overall turnout was a respectable 58%.
Mostly-Shi’ite parties won an overwhelming majority - 180 seats out of 275 in the new national assembly.
The principal Sunni 'block' won just five seats - way below anywhere near an accurate representation of their 20% of the population.
The boycott was an own goal.
Knowing that it would be, some Sunnis defied it. Umm Ahmed, a civil engineer married to a Shi’ite, told me she had felt so intimidated that she had taken advantage of a voting mechanism for Iraqis overseas and had driven a 1,800 kilometre (1,125 mile) round-trip to cast her vote in Amman in Jordan.
Umm Ahmed believed the election result had led to significant 'Sunni regret':
"Most of them regret not voting. Now they have no voice." She said some of her friends in almost entirely Sunni Fallujah and Ramadi west of Baghdad had told her, "We are very sorry that we didn't vote, we are not happy, we are not proud of this."
But she said they had been right to be afraid of the threats to Sunni voters, and that she had been wise to travel the monotonous 600 kilometre desert road to vote in Jordan:
"Those people, they don't discuss with you, they shoot you."
But Abu Mustafa, a teacher who lived in a mixed Baghdad neighbourhood said the Sunnis who did vote locally had “destroyed this wall of fear. For those of us who did go out and vote it was like a celebration."
As it happened there were not many attacks on the small minority of Sunnis who defied the boycott, but in one case in Baghdad there was a taste of sectarian violence to come. As four people were leaving a polling station in a predominantly Sunni district, insurgents noticed their ink-stained fingers, and threw grenades at them - killing them all.
War Without End
The week after the election I was back with Col. Brian Dosa at his reconstruction projects. One Sunday morning I had to do a live broadcast from the main sewage pumping station for the Karrada district of Baghdad. The occasion was a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the completion of ten sewage pumping stations under the supervision of Col. Dosa and his team. Important projects, they helped reduce the number of streets flooded with sewage.
One of the benefits of being embedded with a non-combat engineering battalion was that I was able to meet numerous Iraqis face to face. After the pumping station ceremony, I asked some people nearby how long they thought American forces should remain in the country.
A shopkeeper replied:
"If any foreign forces leave Iraq there will be no Iraq - we need American and British - any foreign experience - to control the country. After 35 years of Saddam's dictatorship, we forgot how to govern the country. I am 35 years old - all my life, there was only one man in charge. This is the first election I've ever known."
Imad, a sergeant in the new Iraqi army, told me he'd been ostracized by his mother for joining up, and that his brothers had threatened to kill him.
Imad was wearing a hat with the No Fear fashion logo.
"Yes, no fear - I'm not scared of anybody. I won't give up the army unless I'm killed."
A few days later near Mosul in the far north of the country police found the bodies of six men dressed in Iraqi National Guard uniforms. They’d been shot in the chest and head.
The previous week, also in Mosul, a suicide bomber walked into a group of Iraqi policeman and killed twelve of them. Mosul was becoming one of the deadliest places in the country. In December 2004, more than 150 corpses were found in the city, most of them of Iraqi soldiers.
In Baghdad, after their overwhelming victory in the January election, attacks on Shi'ites intensified. Some of these murders were so well-planned that they were almost certainly carried out by people with military ordnance skills - most probably remnants of Saddam Hussein's armed forces. One stark example was an attack on a bakery in the mostly Shi'ite suburb of Sadr City in east Baghdad. It began with several cars arriving and parking outside the building as a cordon to stop anyone running away. Gunmen then stormed the bakery and shot and killed eleven staff and customers.
Iraq was back in a vortex of violence.
In Musayyib south of Baghdad a car bomb parked in front of a hospital killed seventeen people and injured nearly two dozen more.
In Baghdad, an explosion aimed at American forces missed its target and blew up a minibus, killing one of the occupants.
And in Basra, Taha al Amiri - a senior judge from the Saddam days who surprisingly had kept his job - was killed as he was being driven to court. Four men in masks stopped his car and shot him dead. The killing was almost certainly revenge. A Basra lawyer told me that Judge Amiri had been "one of the most ruthless and authoritarian judges for Saddam Hussein." A Basra policeman said the judge was so widely hated in the city that few would shed any tears over his death, despite it being a blatant execution.
It was the second execution in Basra in a week. The other was of Abdul Hussein Khazal, a correspondent for a US-based TV station, al Hurra. He and his son Mohammed were shot dead as they left their home.
Mohammed was three years old.
This tempest of violence soon became so routine that it lost its power to shock.
There were car bombs, roadside bombs, bicycle bombs, suicide bombs, snipers, drive-by shootings and sectarian killings. There were mass abductions, minibus ambushes with victims found dead in a field or floating in the Tigris river, torture followed by murder, severed heads left in cardboard boxes, and hundreds of bodies found dumped in the street (and often partly eaten by stray dogs).
Bombs exploded in markets, shopping streets, mosques, churches, and outside police and army recruitment centres. In one case a bomb exploded under the goal mouth of a football pitch where children often played. No children were there at the time.
But children were killed or maimed.
Ten-year-old Mohammed was hit by a stray bullet one evening as he played in the garden of his home after sunset. His father wondered why he had suddenly gone quiet. He found Mohammed on the ground with blood flowing from his neck. A stray bullet had gone through his spinal cord. At first he was paralysed from the chest down, but able to move himself about in a wheelchair. But soon his arms also became paralysed.
Mohammed's father Adnan, and many others I met, said life had been better under Saddam Hussein - brutal and terrible, but nowhere near as hard as it was now. Iraq had become Hell. The horrors were so searing and so frequent that fear had become a virus that distorted and destabilised normal life. A trip to the shops or the walk to school were overlaid with anxiety. Is there a suicide bomber on this bus? Is there a bomb in that parked car? Is that bag hanging from the handlebars of a bicycle someone's shopping or is it a bomb? (Even for those there was an acronym - BBIED: Bicycle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device, pronounced Beebid).
"Under Saddam," Adnan said to me, pacing up and down and furiously chain-smoking, "You knew where the "red line" was. Where is the red line now? Are you standing on it? Am I standing on it?"
He took me into his office and switched on a computer to show me photographs of Mohammed, sitting in a wheelchair and smiling.
"He's a beautiful boy. He wants to be a doctor."
I lost touch with Adnan, and heard from his office colleagues that he died of a heart attack two years after his son was shot. They couldn't tell me what had become of Mohammed.
On stony ground outside a police station three young girls, one of them carrying her baby sister, borrowed my audio recorder and microphone and played at being reporters interviewing each other. Ranin, Raba, Rand and baby Dina, seven, six and five years old, and eleven months.
The girls' smiles belied the sharp desolation of recent tragedy. Five days earlier their policeman father had been shot dead.
When I had to leave, a soldier asked the older sister to hand me back my recording equipment. In an instant, her smiling delight switched to furious rage. She kicked out at the shins of everyone within reach. But not at mine. I tried to imagine the impact on those children of the sudden inexplicable absence of their father - and of the emotional confusion of their and their mother’s grief.
"Stuff happens," the outgoing American defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said about the anarchic disorder which was taking hold in Iraq. That was flippant, insensitive and disingenuous. They were amply warned by opponents and friends alike that "stuff" would happen. Notably, a Pentagon adviser and former US ambassador Peter Galbraith, who had more than ten years experience of Iraq, foretold: "chaos" and "a breakdown of law and order".
In 2006, Galbraith published an 'I told you so' account, with a title that said it all - The End of Iraq - How American Incompetence Created a War Without End.
Back in Basra
A British army 'psy-ops' team let me join them as they monitored a Friday sermon relayed on loudspeakers from one of the few Sunni mosques in Basra.
Their interpreter listened and made some notes. It didn't amount to much. I wandered off, down the quiet residential street towards a large tent decorated with black and green religious flags, erected for ceremonies to mark the Shia festival of Ashura - the main day of mourning for the death in battle of the prophet Mohammed's grandson Imam Hussein in 680 AD.
I peered in.
Despite wearing a quasi-military heavy blue flak-jacket and helmet (required by my embed hosts when out and about with them), I was beckoned inside. I removed my shoes and walked across rugs laid out on the dusty ground, my eyes adjusting to the dark. About a dozen people welcomed me warmly and asked me to photograph them next to a framed painting of the bloody image of the decapitated Imam Hussein.
They were in exuberant post-election mood. Bashar Hameed, a logistics supervisor at a container terminal, enthused about the overwhelming victory for Shia voters, and about their liberation from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein:
"Despite some terrorism, we really feel our new freedom. Now we can speak freely, it's a very nice feeling, we can talk as we like, we can express our opinion, we can vote for whoever we want."
Mr. Hameed asked me why the British army patrol was parked near to the Sunni mosque along the road. When I told him they were monitoring the sermon he said, "They should ask us. We would report any suspicious statements or activity to the police. We watch that mosque."
I went back to the psy-ops team and we drove to one of Basra's poorest neighbourhoods, Five Mile Market. Children gathered round. One little boy was dressed in rags, had no shoes, and his jaw trembled in the cold winter wind. In an electrical supply store stocked with plugs, light bulbs, switches and fuses, Nahed Buslemi told me that poverty and cold children were not new phenomena for Basra: "It was already like this under Saddam."
He taught me a new word: merja - will not return. "Inshallah, Saddam merja."
When I asked him if foreign troops should leave Iraq, he said they would have to ensure security first.
"Then they can leave."
Freedom Don't Come Free
The second (of three) exercises in democracy in 2005 was in October - a yes-or-no referendum to approve or reject a proposed new constitution. I was back in Baghdad on another embed with American forces, this time with an American battalion commanded by a military historian Colonel Kevin Farrell. He told me he had once been allowed to study in the library at Windsor Castle.
Col. Farrell believed he had reduced the number of attacks on his soldier by changing their mindset and their methods -
"How our vehicles travel in traffic, how we conduct ourselves when we're on patrol, improving how we deal with Iraqis instead of treating everybody as a potential enemy or as a suspect. Just smile and do what you would do anywhere - treat them in the same manner that you would want to be treated, with respect."
He believed this humane commonsense approach was encouraging people to come forward with tip-offs. He told me about a man who had provided information about a house where unusual activity was making him feel anxious - people coming and going at all hours, not clear who actually lived there. From the street it looked like a typical Baghdad villa-style home behind a high wall and a heavy metal gate, like the other homes in the street.
Behind that front gate Col. Farrell's team found a Toyota car with artillery rounds in the back wired to a detonator with a trigger routed thorough the vehicle's ignition. Inside the house they found RPGs, mortar rounds, and cell-phones adapted to act as a switch and detonate explosives when they received an incoming call.
Aware that a car coming straight him might be one containing 'daisy-chained' artillery rounds with a cell-phone trigger led Sergeant James Barboa to make a split-second decision one night. He was the 'turret-guy' - the gunner with his head and shoulders exposed outside the top of his Humvee:
"The guy kept on coming at us. I shouted at him a lot of times, fired a lot of warning shots, and then I shot at him with my 240 (machine gun) and that was pretty much it, he didn't get out. Iraqi police showed up on the scene, they searched his vehicle and they found a bunch of beer and liquor bottles. They said, ‘no harm, no foul’; basically he was drunk and didn't heed the warnings."
The death penalty for another drunk driver in Baghdad.
One Humvee had a siren, a microphone and a loudspeaker, to get the attention of drunk (or just dozy) Baghdad drivers. When a vehicle looked as if it might be heading too close, Col. Farrell sounded the siren and his Iraqi interpreter Haider shouted a warning into the microphone
- "White Toyota! Stop! Or you will be shot!".
One afternoon when I was with them, a car lurched chaotically out of a side street and onto the wrong side of the road. Col. Farrell sounded the siren and Haider shouted "Pull over, get out of the way!" into the microphone.
In the turret, Sgt. Barboa prepared to open fire.
It got out of the way.
Col. Farrell couldn't secure official approval for this simple security system so he bought it in a Baghdad market and paid for it himself with dollars. The siren, the microphone and the loudspeaker cost a total of about $100. They were made in Russia.
Haider enjoyed using it. In the afternoons when children were heading out of school, he switched on his mic, gave them a cheery hello, and the Humvee driver tooted his horn. "I think I'm saving lives with this," Haider told me. Turret man James Barboa agreed, and added: "It's good PR too."
As constitution referendum day approached there was a tangibly optimistic mood in Baghdad. Mohammed al Atraqchi, an aeronautical engineer who had gained his degree at Perth College in Scotland, was confident and enthusiastic:
"We want to move forward, we want to catch up with the world," he said.
I asked him if he thought the new constitution might further divide Iraq into Sunni and Shi'ite factions.
"Yes, I am afraid of that - and it is not an important distinction," he replied, "I have many friends & I don't know whether they're Sunni or Shia. I'm supposed to be Sunni but my two brothers are Shia."
Since the invasion, a simplistic assumption had prevailed - especially in the Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer - that Iraq was neatly divided into four distinct communities - Shia, Sunni, Kurdish and the small minority of Christians. This ignored the telling detail that, in 2003 for example, approximately 17% of Iraqi marriages were mixed Shia-Sunni.
On referendum morning as the sun rose and the day grew hot, voters emerged from their homes - families, groups of friends, men and women on their own, all walking slowly in the heat towards polling stations defended by police and by members of the Iraqi army's public order brigade.
I was taken to the same Badr al Kobra school which had been attacked by a suicide bomber on election day in January. Security was a bit better. Before that attack it had been almost non-existent. Now there were blocks of concrete and trunks of dead palm trees to stop vehicles approaching, and corridors of razor wire through which voters had to walk one at a time to be searched. They weren't allowed to carry bags. But it still felt a bit minimal, and mostly for show. I thought it unlikely to deter a suicide bomber. Searches and checkpoints are perfect targets for bombers on foot.
Through the day the mood grew steadily more confident. Iraqi soldiers removed their helmets, policeman took off their bulletproof vests and sat on seats in the shade and gave V-for-Victory signs and the thumbs-up.
One fluent English-speaking voter, Sami (an engineering graduate from Manchester University in England) told me he was "celebrating freedom and democracy." His wife Sabah added, "We are building our country."
"That's history here," said another man," We're making history, that's very good."
I asked him, "In this street in January there was a suicide bomb here - are you afraid this morning?"
"No," he replied, "No. And remember all the people who came here even after the bombing - even more than before. All over the world, freedom don't come free."
A woman called Amal translated her name into English for me - Hope.
"It is very nice day for all Iraqis, it is a hope day."
She and her husband Hamza both said they were grateful to have been liberated from Saddam Hussein but did not want indefinite occupation by the United States.
Nearly ten million Iraqis voted in the referendum, the turnout was more than 60%, and the new constitution was approved by an unambiguous 79%. But the result still reflected the sectarian divide, and was quickly denounced by the losing side as a gateway to elective dictatorship.
Most of the largely Shia provinces voted yes, many of them well over 90% in favour.
Two provinces with massive Sunni majorities and large numbers of former Saddam Hussein loyalists voted No.
It was also the first constitution in Iraq ever to mention sects and ethnic divisions, and many Sunni Arabs felt it was far from the unifying document that they had hoped for. Indeed, it led to a system which used sectarian differences as the basis for making many public appointments - which were then inevitably dominated by the 60% Shia majority. This fed further Sunni resentment.
Defenders of the new constitution pointed out that Saddam Hussein had led an authoritarian, unelected, unaccountable, violent, and essentially Sunni regime which had subjugated Iraq's Shi'ite population for over thirty years - and therefore that redressing the balance was reasonable and only to be expected.
With the referendum's nearly 80% approval, the next step would be new national elections to be held at the latest by the end of the year.
But the eventual political settlement led to the exclusion of so many Sunni Iraqis who had already been 'cancelled' by Paul Bremer that many of them were driven into the arms of al Qaeda in Iraq - and later into supporting its successor, the self-styled Islamic State ISIS.
Big Smiles
In the mostly Shia Baghdad suburb of Sadr City the Americans faced a triple danger - the Mehdi army militia, al Qaeda in Iraq, and being caught in the crossfire between them.
I spent a day with US military engineers who had made a significant difference to the quality of Sadr City life.
Some foreign journalists described the district as a "teeming Shia slum". This was both insulting and largely inaccurate. But it was densely populated, and it had been neglected by Saddam Hussein, who created what he called Saddam City as an Apartheid-style township for Shi’ite workers essential for the functioning of the capital. But he didn't want them as neighbours.
On the map, and from the air, Sadr city appears as an almost square block with grid-pattern streets that looks as if it has been artificially bolted onto Baghdad (upper left in my photo).
To remedy a lack of clean drinking water in Sadr City an American project installed water treatment equipment in its schools, using a combination of reverse osmosis and minimal chlorination. In the school I visited which had eight hundred students, the device yielded up to fifteen thousand litres of water a day. I drank some. It was fine, and didn't taste chlorinated at all.
The project leader was Colonel Jamie Gayton - soldier, economist and civil engineer.
He told me, "Just knowing that there's a clean drinking water here has changed the whole attitude towards us in this neighbourhood."
The schools were provided with decent drinking water, and the students could fill bottles to take home with them at the end of the day.
Col. Gayton’s official title was ‘primary essential services project manager for east Baghdad’. Another challenge his team faced was a consequence both of official neglect during the Saddam days and of the pressures of high population; overloaded sewers, piles of uncollected domestic garbage, and pools of backed-up sewage from blocked or broken drains.
Horses and carts were a common sight in Sadr City, trotting past piles of rotting rubbish or through wide pools of sewage that spread across the entire width of some streets. In a country where summer temperatures were often above 40°C (104° F), this was a serious health hazard.
To initiate major projects efficiently, and to circumvent sclerotic official bureaucracy, Col. Gayton set up a website, baghdadbusiness.org, where he put projects out for tender so that Iraqi contractors could bid directly for the work. A key condition of the contracts was that local people had to get the jobs.
The garbage and the overflowing sewers were tackled together. Residents could leave their rubbish at sites newly designated as garbage collection points. It was taken a way to landfill. Tractors and trailers were bought for the task as most Baghdad garbage trucks had been stolen in the looting spree of 2003 and plundered for parts.
This system swiftly brought some order to the fly-infested chaos of Sadr City's main streets. Once the rainwater drains were no longer blocked with garbage, Gayton's battalion tackled the stinking pools of sewage. They contracted Iraqi firms to clean Sadr City's entire main sewer trunk line, install an additional 'main line', construct a new storm drain sewer, and rehabilitate sewage pumping stations. All employing local people.
These projects created a virtuous circle. Streets free of sewage and garbage could be properly cleaned, local residents and shopkeepers began to feel it was worth sweeping in front of their homes and stores, and the people of Sadr City could go shopping without having to worry about keeping their clothes clean of sewage and dirt.
I asked a group of local residents what they thought about all this.
Their first response was laughter of disbelief that a reporter from Britain was interested in what they thought about anything.
Then they told me that Col. Gayton's projects had improved their lives immensely.
But they also complained that the electricity supply was still chronically bad, limiting the water supply to their homes as it relied on electric pumps.
"But, to be fair, is it at least better now than it was a year ago?" I asked this crowd of about fifteen people.
They all said yes.
But the answer to my final question disappointed Col. Gayton (who had suggested that I ask it):
"Who is best at providing security here in Sadr City?"
Unanimously they chanted, "Jaish al Mahdi.” The Mahdi Army militia of Muqtada al-Sadr.
But the Americans had begun to learn that one of the most likely and most important outcomes of reconstruction and development was improved security, especially if it created significant local employment.
I asked a group of six men digging a trench for one of the new Sadr City sewage lines how many of them had been unemployed before they started working here.
"All of us."
Thousands of lives lost to the insurgency might have been saved if projects like those in Sadr City had been undertaken much sooner.
Jamie Gayton told me that during his battalion's six-month tour in Iraq they hadn’t been attacked once.
Echoing the enthusiasm of Colonel Brian Dosa in Zafaraniya, he added,
"I love being here, I love everything we're doing. I believe in what we're doing and we're having a huge impact on the people every single day. You can't ask for a better assignment or a better mission than this."
This is how he signed his emails:
BIG SMILES
LTC S. Jamie Gayton
Commander, 2-3 BTB
Camp Loyalty, Baghdad, Iraq.
Pressure cooker
The calm around the October 2005 referendum didn't last. Before the assembly elections two months later, the mood changed entirely. I was back in Iraq with the same battalion and commander who had hosted me in October - Colonel Kevin Farrell.
One afternoon, Camp Rustamiyah - the base in southern Baghdad where I was embedded - was attacked with a volley of 107 mm Chinese rockets. As the alarm sounded, I ran out of my Portacabin as instructed to a rudimentary shelter - nothing underground, just a surface ‘hide’ of concrete slabs with anti-blast walls at each end.
Only one of the rockets exploded, nobody was hurt, and damage was minimal.
But.
The previous day, the turret man at the top of an M1 tank was decapitated when a roadside bomb exploded as his convoy was driving by.
He was one of five Americans from that base who were killed in roadside explosions in just eight days. There were also several wounded, with grim injuries. One was in a vegetative state. He had untreatable brain injuries, and his life support was withdrawn. Another lost his left leg and his left arm and was blinded.
I wondered what impact Col. Farrell thought these horrors had on the minds of his soldiers.
“Many soldiers have just accepted that this is the way things are, and are likely to be, for years to come," he replied, "This is the new routine that will be deployed to Iraq for a year and we'll be home for a year or two, and then we can expect to come back here for another year."
One of his men told me,
"This deployment has been a lot more dangerous than the invasion itself, our battalion has lost more soldiers now than then. It does play on your psyche a little bit."
As we headed out of the base one morning Kevin Farrell turned to me and asked,
"Hugh, are you scared driving around Baghdad in the Humvee with us every day?"
I considered the question for a moment.
"No, Kevin, I'm not scared. But I am very alert."
"Good answer, Hugh!"
You are no problem, I am your bodyguard
The final poll in Iraq in 2005 was on December 15th, held to choose a permanent assembly to replace the transitional parliament that had been elected in January.
On December 14th, the mood on the streets felt good. I was being driven around in an American Humvee again. People waved at us, children ran cheerfully alongside. We drove through an area where there was widespread support for the Mehdi Army militia without experiencing any overt hostility. A house we passed was plastered with election posters with the face of the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on them. One poster read, We will break the locks and cut the chains and send the occupiers fleeing from our land.
On almost every available surface - walls, gates, billboards and trees - there were posters for the various 'lists' competing for seats in the new Iraqi parliament. Essentially, the lists were sectarian blocks of Shia, Sunni or Kurdish groups who had agreed to form coalitions to stand for election together - the actual members of the new assembly to be decided later according to the votes cast for each list.
I carried a crib-sheet with me in order to make (some) sense of the massive election billboards all over Baghdad, with faces on them (which I often didn't recognise), but no names, just numbers. The election was an alphabet-soup of numbers.
555 was the main Shi'ite block, the United Iraqi Alliance.
618 was the list for the main Sunni block, the Iraqi Accord Front - dozens of Sunni clerics urged Sunnis not to repeat the fruitless January election boycott.
731 was the Iraqi National List, a muddled attempt at an inclusive almost secular but partly Sunni option for voters who wanted a 'strongman' popular with the security forces - the outgoing interim prime minister Ayad Allawi.
730 was the Kurdish list.
As we passed one of the billboards, a man pressed himself against his black BMW looking anxious that our wide heavy Humvee might damage his smart new car.
My embed host Col. Farrell took me with him on courtesy calls ahead of election day. One was to a senior Iraqi army officer - General Mohammed - who had a TV in his office tuned to an American channel broadcasting a music video of The Pussycat Dolls. One of the US soldiers commented loudly, "I'm not surprised people are upset with us if we send this kind of rubbish around the world." Someone grabbed the remote control and switched to a French channel with adverts for Nutella chocolate spread and Petit Filou cheese.
The next courtesy call was to al Rashad police station in an impoverished district of east Baghdad. There had already been a special voting day for the police and the army, and the commander Colonel Ahmed showed me a finger stained with purple voting ink, and declared himself happy with democracy. Up to a point.
"I am very happy, democracy is a good thing for a Iraq. And this time is very important because it's an election for permanent government not an interim one."
But, I ask him, will democracy displace violence?
"No."
Who is to blame for the continuing violence?
"The neighbouring countries. Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran. They all want democracy to fail in Iraq because if it is successful here they could be infected by it."
He made no mention of the enemies within - the militias, and the Saddam supporters in unholy alliance with the rigid fundamentalists of al Qaeda in Iraq.
One of his colleagues told me quietly that the police and public order brigade standing around us with their weapons had divided loyalties, as this was a strongly Shi’ite district.
"They are Iraqi security forces but at the same time they have to be loyal to the Mehdi Army. To stay alive."
On election day morning I was again taken to Badr al-Kubra school, where the suicide bomber had killed two policemen outside the school in January. No trace of that attack remained, and the road had been resurfaced to cover the violent scorch marks left by the explosion.
As I walked along a voter said to me,
"Insh'Allah I want everything here settled in peace."
- Do you think the election will bring peace?
"Yes."
Hundreds of people walked towards the polling station, men women and children in bright morning sunlight, occasionally shielding their eyes against swirls of dust.
"Good morning, how are you?" I asked anyone who caught my eye.
"Very well thank you, very good, very nice. Everything is alright, everything is peace," said a man with a gentle voice, wistfully elongating the final word.
With so many competing lists, there was a formidable ballot paper with a hundred and six options.
As well as the main lists, there was Brotherhood and Peace, Iraqi Constitutional Monarchy, Justice and Future, The Upholders of the Message, and National Peace.
Sitting awkwardly at children's desks, election scrutineers issued ballot forms and pointed voters to cardboard booths. On one desk there was the obligatory pot of indelible purple ink to prevent multiple voting.
One man said to me, "I am very very very happy, very fantastic!"
Security at the polling station was reassuringly tight. At each end of the street there were coils of razor wire forming corridors that voters had to pass through. There were Public Order Brigade snipers on rooftops, soldiers behind walls near the polling station, and armed Iraqi police on the street.
I was concerned that the American Humvee convoy that delivered me to the school was a potential target that would result in civilian casualties if it was attacked. I suggested that it would be better for me and for everyone if they left me at the polling station and came back a few hours later.
Col. Farrell agreed. "How long do you want, Hugh?" I suggested two hours. Agreed. An Iraqi soldier was assigned to watch my back. He came over with his rifle over one shoulder, shook me by the hand, grinned, and said to me in broken English,
"You are no problem, I am your bodyguard."
I removed my body armour and helmet, left them inside the school, and became normal for two hours. I would be less noticeable without them, and continuing to wear them might make me a target and endanger anyone near me if I was attacked.
There was remarkably little violence that third polling day, partly due to confidence in the legitimacy of the Independent Election Commission of Iraq which had been appointed under the supervision of the United Nations and not of the United States.
The election result was a comfortable victory (but not a majority) for the main Shi'ite block - 128 seats in the 275 seat parliament, with its leader Nouri al Maliki destined to become prime minister.
The three main Sunni lists won a total of 80 seats. The Kurdish block got 55. Turnout was 76%. However, there were so many disputes over the results that it wasn’t until March the following year - fifteen months later - that members of the new assembly were sworn in.
But the imbalance of the Saddam Hussein years had been brought to an end, and Iraq's Shia majority was at last properly represented.
And there was another seemingly interminable delay. After the assembly members were sworn in, it took another six months to agree a so-called "government of national unity."
Sunni resentments continued to fester. And the angry remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime and their mass-murdering fundamentalist al-Qaeda allies had only just begun their campaign of extreme violence against Shi'ite Iraqis, and against the British and the American occupiers.
Stay Alert! Stay Alert!
2005 felt like a long year. On three extensive visits to Iraq in 2005, a dramatic incident in January had taught me - as I'd told Col. Farrell - to be 'very alert'.
I was in the back of a Humvee being driven through a Baghdad suburb. In the front passenger seat next to a large sat-nav screen was battalion commander Lt. Col. Lopez Carter, my amiable and accommodating African-American embed host for the January election period.
Some Iraqi soldiers flagged us down. They said they were concerned about a green plastic bag that had been left on the ground next to a block of flats.
They said they thought it might contain explosives.
Everyone was standing at a safe distance.
Apart from people in the apartments who were peering down at it from their balconies.
"What's it look like with your camera zoom, Hugh?"
I said it looked like a shopping bag with rubbish in it.
"Can we shoot it?" asked one of the Iraqi soldiers.
"I'm not going to stop you," said Col. Carter.
An Iraqi soldier also thought it was a shopping bag full of rubbish.
He walked over and kicked it.
It was a shopping bag full of rubbish.
I wonder now if this had been a ruse to slow us down - to allow preparations to be completed for what happened next.
A few minutes after we drove away from the blameless bag of rubbish there was a loud bang from the roadside.
"We got hit by an IED and small-arms fire at location....."
The gunfire had come from the roof of a three-storey apartment block. On the rooftop there were two men with rifles. The Humvee's top-gunner swung round in his revolving seat and pointed his machine gun towards the source of the shots.
The gunmen vanished.
"Turn around! Turn around!" Col. Carter told the driver.
He did a three-point turn. Clumsily and too fast. We mounted the kerb.
"Take it easy, Sergeant!"
"Roger, Sir."
We were going back to where we'd been attacked.
At the site of the explosion the road surface was scorched black and covered with shrapnel from the bomb. There were lumps of solid tar from a pile by the roadside that had been kept as a reserve for road mending. The bomb had been placed under it.
Some Iraqi soldiers appeared. We stopped. Col. Carter opened his door. We got out.
The only damage the explosion had done was some scratches to the armour and windows of our Humvees. And my ears were ringing.
"The reason this thing was terribly ineffective," Col. Carter told me, "is that they hid it under the ground. They know that we've gotten so good at spotting IEDs above the surface. If you hide them very well, it conceals them, but that reduces the blast radius - because of all the asphalt on top."
I kept a piece of steel shrapnel as a souvenir. It was as long as my hand, still hot to the touch, pointed - and very sharp.
In one sense, I had reporter's luck that day. I thought I had started filming after the explosion. But that evening, when I reviewed the footage, I was surprised to hear the bang and the expletives. Bouncing around in the armoured car the camera had switched back on after the shopping bag incident and was still running when the roadside bomb went off.
For a radio programme I made a few years later I was allowed to use the recording without bleeping or deleting the expletive. My senior editor at the BBC World Service, Liliane Landor, ruled that it had been an understandable response to a violent attack.
But, she told me apologetically, it would have to be bleeped for the internet stream to North America. Puritanical sensibilities? Or contractual obligation? The latter for sure, and maybe both.
I think this quote from this chapter says a lot about why I am enjoying reading this so much "Their first response was laughter of disbelief that a reporter from Britain was interested in what they thought about anything." I have the impression that whereas other journalists might grab the odd quote for their story, Hugh was really out there living and being in Iraq as much as was possible. This shows - the reader feels they are among the real people (incl US soldiers) . So refreshing.
I think this quote from this chapter says a lot about why I am enjoying reading this so much "Their first response was laughter of disbelief that a reporter from Britain was interested in what they thought about anything." I have the impression that whereas other journalists might grab the odd quote for their story, Hugh was really out there living and being in Iraq as much as was possible. This shows - the reader feels they are among the real people (incl US soldiers) . So refreshing.