On the fifth of November 2006 Saddam Hussein was found guilty of committing crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to death by hanging.
Saddam faced 'specimen' charges - specific examples of the egregious cruelty of the regime that he led. He was accused of ordering the execution of 148 men and boys from the town of Dujail north of Baghdad in 1982, and with "the widespread and systematic persecution" of the people of the town.
Dujail was attacked with helicopter gunships, and entire families were subjected to interrogation, beatings, or torture by electric shock. They were collectively punished for an alleged plot to assassinate the president while he was on an official visit to the overwhelmingly Shi'ite town.
Ahead of the verdicts in the Dujail trial, an indefinite curfew was imposed throughout Iraq to prevent clashes between opponents and supporters of Saddam Hussein.
The police used their discretion to allow essential trips to hospitals or to buy food - and in our neighbourhood they allowed us to move around to report the curfew, but only on foot. There were police checkpoints at main intersections.
The streets were so quiet that I could hear birds singing. Wide dusty avenues were mostly empty, the silence broken only by the occasional sound of generators and children clattering by on bicycles. Dogs wandered about. A donkey clopped by, pulling a cart loaded with cooking gas bottles.
At a rudimentary kiosk a twelve-year-old boy called Issam, wearing a grubby Zinedine Zidane football shirt, was selling chocolate bars, washing powder, soft drinks and cheap plastic razors.
The manager of a stationery store, a Shia Muslim who didn't want to give me her name, unexpectedly defended Saddam Hussein, and pleaded: "God Protect Him!" Seeing how surprised I was to hear this from someone whose community he had treated with contempt, neglect and violence, she demanded:
"What is better now? What security do I have? What future do I have with bombs and killing? We need a strong leader."
Another woman's opinion of Saddam was very different:
"I am Kurdish. Kill him! Kill him!"
Further down the street two men sitting on white plastic chairs next to a kebab stall told me what they thought of Saddam Hussein.
One said that hanging him would change nothing, and might even bring more danger because well armed ex-Baathists would take revenge.
His friend disagreed. "His support will disappear if he dies. It's like a car - if you disconnect the battery, it can't move anymore," he said.
When the guilty verdict was announced there was celebratory gunfire in Baghdad city centre, and cheering and dancing in the street in the mostly Shi'ite suburb of Sadr City. And in the mostly Sunni Adhamiya district of the capital, much of it loyal to Saddam, there were violent riots that were only brought under control with the help of American troops.
On December 30th 2006, with a black cloth bag over his head and a thick rope noose around his neck, Saddam Hussein was dropped through a trap-door and hanged until he was dead.
Saddam's trial was shown on television. His death was not. But one of the official witnesses to the execution filmed his last moments with a mobile phone - and posted the footage online. It shows the noose tightening around his neck as he dropped.
The footage was gruesome, but it was unambiguous evidence that he really did die. In a country where many had refused to believe that his sons Uday and Qusay had been killed until they saw their dead faces on TV, this mattered.
The execution of Saddam Hussein took place more than three years after he had been captured near Tikrit, his home town. The Americans who found him described his hiding place as "a spider hole camouflaged with bricks and dirt." It was about eight feet deep (two metres) and had a pipe fitted with an electric fan to pump fresh air down into the hole. Saddam had several weeks’ growth of beard and looked more like a hermit than a president. He had two guns with him, but he offered no resistance. Swabs of skin were taken from inside his cheeks, for DNA tests to make sure it was him and not one of his presumed 'doubles'.
The Surge
Between 2006 and 2008, Iraq experienced the worst violence since the invasion in 2003. The most cautious estimates are that thirty thousand civilians died violent deaths in 2006, twenty-six thousand in 2007, and about twelve thousand in 2008.
Sunnis fought Shi'ites, Shi'ites fought each other over the growing influence of Iran, Iraqi Kurds fought both Shi'ites and Sunnis. And al Qaeda in Iraq was in league with former Baath Party members and Saddam supporters, with the common aim of driving US forces out of the country and undermining the majority Shi'ite government.
Al Qaeda also occupied several mostly Sunni districts of Baghdad, where they imposed fundamentalist Islamist regulations in a foretaste of what was to infect parts of the country in 2014 when al Qaeda in Iraq spawned the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
This intensifying hell raised an obvious question for the Americans - with all this killing, what is the point of your presence here in Iraq?
To get a sense of what some Baghdadis were thinking, I spoke to shopkeepers and customers on one of the main streets in the centre of the capital.
Opinions were varied, and candid. The first man I spoke to thanked the Americans for being "liberators." A man from the western suburb of Ameriya, which had been occupied by Al Qaeda, told me that the security situation was so bad that there was nothing the Americans could do about it. A third man simply said: "America and Al Qaeda are brothers - they are both killing Iraqis."
Between April 2003 and the end of 2007, four thousand Americans were killed in Iraq.
During the first six months of 2007 the number of US troops in the country was sharply increased from 132,000 to about 170,000, in what was described as a 'surge'. One of the most noticeable effects of this was an increase in the number of US military patrols, from about ten thousand a week to more than thirty thousand. They started catching insurgents before they could blow themselves up and murder people.
In the capital, the surge was more formally known as the Baghdad Security Plan. But there were parts of Baghdad where it was easy to dodge the checkpoints. Spotting an American roadblock ahead of us one day, our driver made a neat detour down a couple of back streets and re-emerged on the main drag the other side of the checkpoint.
If we could do that...
But mostly the Surge worked.
Civilians Killed
In the month before the surge: 1,440,
In the month after it began: 265.
Kidnaps: down from 139 to ten.
Death squad executions: down from 519 to 22.
It was at about this time that there was a rare entry on the BBC notice board where daily deaths were usually recorded:
In fact, it turned out there had been one dead body that day, but not 'found': he was a car bomber stopped by Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint. In video footage he was seen lying dead next to a blue van that he'd crashed into the base of a lamp post. He was shot for refusing orders to stop. Images from a camera on a bomb-disposal robot showed the device that it defused - initiator explosives, and five 155mm artillery shells wired together alongside seven large cooking-gas cylinders. A big bomb.
Other terrorists did reach their targets. Salam al-Zobaie - one of two deputy prime ministers, and also a Sunni politician who had dared to support the mainly Shi'ite government - narrowly escaped being killed in a coordinated car bomb and suicide bomb attack while he was praying at home. The bomb send debris hurtling against the building. It was closely followed by a suicide bomber getting into the house & detonating an explosive belt. Television pictures showed pools of blood on the floors, walls pock-marked by debris, and furnishings ripped to pieces.
Shrapnel hit Mr. Zobaie in this stomach and chest, but he survived. Few of his family did. The explosion killed two of his brothers, his bodyguard, and six others.
Mr. Zobaie and his party were deeply unpopular with former Baathists who regarded him as a collaborator with a government under American occupation. As a leading Sunni Mr. Zobaie had been prepared to work with the Shi'ite prime minister Mr. Maliki. Maliki denounced the attempted murder as an attack on the reconciliation process.
Threatening Letters
At the women's section of Baghdad University there was more death and distress to report. When I visited English lecturer Shatha al Jeidi, she was grieving for four colleagues who had been murdered.
"You just can't help crying," she said to me, "Every time I leave my house I think of inevitable death, I think that at any moment I may die, that I may never see my family again."
I wondered how this climate of fear affected the ability of her students to study effectively.
"She is sensitive, she may have seen somebody dead in the street, then she comes here - of course it's really hard for her to do well."
Sometimes, depending on when they could reach campus safely, students sat the same exams on different days - and were trusted not reveal the questions to their friends.
At the education ministry, civil servant Nabil al Mirah told me there was evidence that the relentless violence in Iraq was already corroding academic standards - teachers afraid to go to work, and families preventing their children from going to class in case they were killed on the way. He said he'd done that himself:
"I stopped my 15-year-old son from going to school because there'd been so many bombs in that neighbourhood. He goes to school sometimes, and the rest of the time his mother and I teach him at home. He goes to school when we're not afraid."
"When are you not afraid?" I asked.
"When there's been no significant bombing for two days, then I let him go to school."
On the bookshelf above Shatha al Jeidi's desk in the English department at Baghdad University there were photographs of colleagues who'd been murdered.
The motive was often revenge: "If a student fails or we give her a low mark, we're afraid that something may happen to us. We receive threatening letters. I received an envelope with my name on it, with a bullet in it."
She told me that she had once found a message scrawled on the wall, "Warning: You risk the same fate as Rafi."
Rafi's was one of the framed faces on the bookshelf - a middle-aged man with moustache, gold-rimmed spectacles, and kind eyes. He'd been warned that if he dared to fail any of his students he would be killed.
He ignored the warning and continued to mark exam papers honestly.
As he left his home and got into his car to go to work one morning, he was shot dead.
A fellow lecturer Nejat al-Juboury wrote a paper for a university journal called The Ecology of Fear. This is part of it:
“This ecology of fear has also transformed Iraqi life. As Iraqis are anticipating a new era of democracy and freedom, waves of intimidation have arisen to crush their hopes. Violent oppression of men and women is spreading across Iraq, a weapon of mass mental and physical destruction. Three years after the invasion of Iraq, women remain no better off than under the rule of the previous regime. Post-war insecurity has proved to leave them at risk of violence, curtail their freedoms, scare them to death, and force them to live miserably in violent environments.”
Nejat told me tearfully she had visited Britain ten times for academic courses:
"I enjoyed myself in the UK, but now I feel.... so.... angry. At everything. Not at you personally, but now: We Don't. Trust. Anyone."
Everybody dies at his own time
A pharmacist, Haithem Kassim, reflected ruefully on how peaceful his life had been under Saddam Hussein.
"I was able to go out late at night," he told me in fluent English, "I could drive my car wherever I wanted, visit my friends safely, but now I can't do that. I was living a much easier life then than now. I didn't have any problems because I had nothing to do with politics - I was just busy studying and working. I was leading a nice normal life, much nicer than now, I can tell you."
As he spoke, the lights went off in the pharmacy. Another power cut. He sighed.
"This is a disaster. If you think about it, major nations came here in 2003 and more than four years later we don't even have reliable electricity. It's sad, really sad."
Across the road from Haithem's pharmacy, I sat at Laith's café with three regulars - Salah, an engineer, Ahmed, a car salesman, and Khaled, who owned a small factory making cooking pans. Salah told me life was getting better: "90% better now." But Ahmed and Khaled disagreed, saying the improvements in security were fragile and that the city wouldn't feel safe until Sunnis felt they had a full role to play in the government.
Twenty-four hours later, close to the junction between Laith's café and Haithem's pharmacy, two car bombs exploded killing sixty-eight people. Just another day in Baghdad. Fortunately, Salah, Ahmed and Khaled were not at the café that evening. But when the first bomb exploded, Haithem was in his shop and was persuaded not to go out to offer help in case there was a second explosion.
There was a second explosion.
The front window of his shop was shattered and medicine bottles knocked from the shelves and smashed. After the sixty-eight corpses had been taken away and the blood hosed off into the drains, Haithem shared his thoughts about this startling event:
"Five years ago, we didn't have any experience of this kind of behaviour. We'd never seen an explosion in the street. It's a new thing for Iraqis that there are people slaughtering innocent people in the street."
Little boys were playing football in the street as he spoke..
Café owner Laith al Ameri's response to dozens of deaths so close to his business was to be determined to stay open. He installed pot plants and a small fountain to make his smoking terrace more inviting.
"This is my livelihood," he told me, "I have to keep going." A tear rolled down his cheek as he said, "I lost my sister and my aunt in another explosion near here. But life must go on. Life never stops in Baghdad. I have to go on. Everybody dies at his own time."
Laith reflected too on the wild mood swings of his city during the years since the invasion.
"After the fall of Saddam," he said, "everyone was happy. It was the end of persecution. But the happiness was followed by chaos. There was no order, no control, no security. But here in Karrada, this didn't divide us. We stayed together. We didn't split into Sunni and Shia. We didn't fight."
The following afternoon, there was another bomb nearby. It killed two people and broke the doors and windows of numerous businesses. One was a print shop. As the owner Abu Sajad swept up the shards of glass he screamed his fury and indignation into my microphone - fury at the Americans and the British and at the bombers:
"Is this the freedom that America has given us? Under Saddam Hussein we never saw anything like this. And - these people who kill innocent people claim to be real Muslims!?"
I offered him my sympathy. And my apologies.
He replied, "No, no, not you - your country."
An Iraqi soldier stopped us filming the mangled wreckage of a car that had been destroyed by the bomb. The prime minister Nouri al Maliki had told the army not to allow the media to spoil the official narrative that he was getting to grips with the violence in Iraq.
He wasn’t. And not being able to film it didn’t stop us saying it.
Talking to Terrorists
In parallel with the Surge, a new movement evolved, which would eventually be called the 'Awakening', or 'Sahwa'. To US forces they'd be known as the Sons of Iraq.
Many people in areas controlled by al Qaeda in Iraq had grown weary of the cruel and punitive austerity imposed on them by their fundamentalist occupiers, and approached the Iraqi government offering to join the armed forces and help to fight al Qaeda.
Thanks to an Anglophile Iraqi government spokesman, I was able to report this key development early in its gestation. At the time, Saad Yousif al Muttalibi was international affairs director at the ministry of national dialogue and reconciliation - and what he revealed to me was a bold plan.
"We've already established links and contacts with major insurgent groups and in one case we are almost into the final stages. We are continually receiving calls from insurgent groups."
He emphasised that the first approach had come from the ‘insurgent groups’ themselves. Essentially, this was a rebellion against al Qaeda in Iraq. But it was potentially controversial - these people were insurgents who had been killing Iraqis and Americans; were they now to be treated as a legitimate resistance movement against al Qaeda?
"At this stage we consider them as insurgents but we hope to be able to call them resistance. But that requires that they lay down their weapons and enter the political process and become a political resistance force."
These groups also shared aspiration of the Iraqi government - to free Iraq of American troops.
"We share with them," said Mr. Muttalibi, "the same goal of getting American troops out of Iraq so that we can have a political relationship with the United States and the West, not a military relationship."
I asked him if any these new resistance groups had been in any way associated with Al Qaeda.
"No. Al Qaeda are basically psychopaths with weapons; we can't talk with them."
Even so, I suggested, some of these suddenly eager potential allies must have blood on their hands.
"We are talking to Iraqis who we hope are not involved in killing Iraqi civilians."
“How can you be sure of that?” I asked,"You're talking to these people who you describe as insurgents; some of them must have been involved in killing civilians."
"You can never be sure," he went on, "but it's very similar to Northern Ireland where the British government talked to the IRA, and eventually released them from prison. That's what we want to achieve here. Our basic aim is to stop the violence and if that means providing amnesty for a group of individuals, then let it be."
I asked him about the inevitable objection - that one should never talk to terrorists.
"That is an over-simplistic view. You do sometimes need to negotiate in order to understand what the terrorists want. They may have legitimate concerns."
Mr. Muttalibi's remarks were all in fluent unambiguous English, slightly tinged with an accent from west London where he has a second home.
The initial impetus for the Awakening movement came from tribal leaders in Anbar province west of Baghdad, where they had joined forces to fight back against al Qaeda in Iraq. They felt their traditional power and influence had been undermined, diluted and diminished by al Qaeda. And many simply resented the oppressive puritanical restrictions that the ferociously fundamentalist Islamists had imposed on them.
The Anbar Awakening was set up by a prominent local sheikh, Abdul Sattar Abu Risha. US General David Petraeus - who had masterminded the 'surge' in Baghdad - helped do it.
But in an interview in Baghdad with the BBC's foreign editor John Simpson, General Petraeus strongly underlined what he regarded as a key element of the emerging Awakening movement - that the initial approach had come from Iraqis not from the Americans. But it also suited the Americans, as Iraqis rooted in the community in places like Anbar were in a far better position to take the fight to al Qaeda than US troops whose presence in the country was still widely resented.
The Awakening
About fifteen months after Muttalibi revealed the intention to incorporate insurgents into the Iraqi armed forces, the Awakening had become an official new militia, with its own uniforms.
But its al Qaeda enemy was fighting back. The day after he was seen on TV sitting next to President George W. Bush the founder of the first Awakening council Abu Risha was assassinated.
But al Qaeda fighters in Anbar were eventually suppressed. They were also driven out of parts of Baghdad. One afternoon during Ramadan in 2008, I went to a part of the capital that I wouldn't have dared visit a year earlier - a street which had been the front line between two districts of Baghdad at war with each other. One was Fadhil, which had been occupied by Al Qaeda; the other was Abu Saifain, previously occupied by members the Shi’ite Mahdi army.
Fadhil had been controlled by al-Qaeda for months. Using a mosque as their headquarters, they put snipers on rooftops and bombarded the nearby Shia neighbourhoods with mortar shells. In one battle, nearly two hundred people were killed. This was in a densely populated urban area close to the centre of Baghdad.
Eventually local people - the Fahdil Awakening, and neighbouring Shi’ite representatives from Abu Saifain - came together in common purpose to drive out the extremists on each side. Mr. Muttalibi told me that one of the Awakening leaders from Fadhil, who had visited the national security council to discuss tactics, was "very frightened, simply for being with us."
When I visited this former front line, there were hundreds of cheerful relaxed people in the street - Sunni and Shia together, walking and chanting and beating drums. Families leaned out of windows of buildings scarred by the impact of gunfire, and waved and smiled and placed their hands on their hearts. The crowd whooped and whistled as a yellow crane removed a high concrete anti-blast wall that had been installed to keep al-Qaeda fighters and the Shi'ite militia apart.
Sections of the wall were lifted from the ground and swung aside, accompanied by vigorous drumming and triumphant blasts from a trumpet player held shoulder high.
At this interface, there were two Awakenings - one for the each communities. Their representatives climbed onto the base of the crane and gave speeches. The deputy Sunni Awakening leader Khaled al Qaisi was greeted with cheers as he told the crowd,
"Iraq is one country, one family - Sunni, Shia, Kurd, Christian, Turkmen. It doesn't matter who you are, this is one nation."
He climbed down from the crane and repeated the message to me in English, ending with:
"The people of Iraq are one family, they are no different. Thank you very much, Sir!"
The local Shi’ite leader Faris Abdel Hassan (on the right in the photo, next to Khaled al Qaisi) told me the people of his community had not been fighting against their "Sunni brothers" on the other side of the wall, they had been fighting the Mahdi army militia.
But it was the Sunni Awakening group in Fahdil which had done the most to calm the area - by fighting al Qaeda forces and killing them, or driving them away. US Colonel Craig Collier told the Stars and Stripes newspaper, "This was the critical first step in the eventual reconciliation with their Shia neighbours." It also allowed American aid into the area for reconstruction and economic development.
But there was an aspect of the new Awakening movement that worried its leaders, a concern that presaged its eventual failure; only a fifth of its membership would be absorbed into the Iraqi security forces. The Shi'ite prime minister Nouri al Maliki didn't trust the Sunni Awakening groups; he regarded them as a front for the insurgency, or as Baathists in disguise, and he resisted accepting many them into the armed forces.
But the Sunni Awakening leader from Fadhil, Khaled al Qaisi, warned, "My advice to the government is to incorporate all the Sons of Iraq into the security forces. Otherwise Al Qaeda may lure them back."
There was similar unease in Ameriya, a suburb in western Baghdad where al Qaeda had held sway for many months until local people turned against them. I visited a new checkpoint into the area. It was being operated by uniformed Awakening movement militia, with the Iraqi army in the background. One driver I spoke to was angry that checks were delaying his journey home from work by about an hour every day, but others appreciated the new sense of security that they provided.
The Awakening leader in Ameriya, Abu Ibrahim al Azawi, (front, in the photo) was also concerned that only a fifth of his three-hundred-strong militia would be absorbed into the armed forces:
"That's just sixty of my men," he said to me, "What about the others? What will they do? They fought Al Qaeda here too, they suffered the same as everybody else, it's no good paying them just to sit at home - they might become bad people again like before."
Al-Qaeda was already returning to some of its menacing behaviour, threatening members of the new Awakening movement. While I was sitting with him, Abu Ibrahim's mobile phone trilled with a text message from a former associate who'd joined al-Qaeda:
"We will put you in the sewer," it read, "like all unbelievers who sell their souls for dollars."
The message continued: "You are the shoes of the worshippers of the cross."
"They are dreaming," Abu Ibrahim snorted.
I walked down an Ameriya street wondering if anyone would stop to talk to me. Most just met my gaze, nodded politely, and walked on. But one man did stop. He was about forty years old, tall, dressed in a simple white dishdasha robe, and was holding his six-year-old daughter by the hand. He didn't want me to use his name, but told me about some of the absurdities that the local community had endured under al Qaeda rule: smoking in the street was strictly prohibited, and grocers were not allowed to display cucumbers alongside tomatoes as such displays were deemed to be suggestive of male anatomy.
This friendly man was also keen to offer the advice - the warning - that I'd already heard several times: that unless all former insurgent fighters were absorbed into the armed forces, there would be trouble. Those young men were still armed, had lost their status, and would soon get bored and might be tempted back into al-Qaeda - if only for an income. "Killing is a career," he said.
An intelligence source reported that al Qaeda were offering to pay recruits $300 a month more than Awakening members received from the government.
The local Awakening’s deputy leader in Fahdil Khaled al Qaisi was host to American forces when they came to witness the concrete wall between the two communities being removed. But his leader Adil al Mashhadani wasn't there the day I first visited the area. When I went back to Fadhil a few months later, I learned why.
On the surface, the local Awakening fighters appeared to be in control. Khaled al Qaisi, strode into Fadhil wearing a striped polo shirt and with a revolver stuck into his belt - alongside Faris Abdel Hassan, the Awakening group leader from the neighbouring Shi’ite district of Abu Saifain.
A boy on a bicycle watched them admiringly. Awakening members who had previously been insurgents fighting with al Qaeda in Iraq conducted vehicle searches at a checkpoint. We filmed them.
Faris the local Shi’ite leader - not visibly armed himself - arrived in a pickup truck, with two men with rifles standing on the back of it. He and Khaled al Qaisi greeted each other with hugs and with kisses on the cheek.
Many of the buildings around Fadhil's marketplace were still pockmarked the impacts of gunfire. I walked around the area early one Saturday afternoon and found the mood cheerful and friendly. Shops were open, children played, and men in a small café concentrated on games of backgammon. A smiling woman in a black abaya sold fresh fish from a large old wooden cart at the side of an alley.
Behind an alluring display of bananas, cucumbers and shiny red apples, the grocer Ahmad - cigarette in one hand - told me security was good.
"Why?" I asked. "Sahwa," he replied, the Awakening.
But about an hour later, the mood turned.
Iraqi security forces supported by US troops arrested the one man I had not been able to meet on either of my visits - the leader of the Fadhil Awakening group, Adil al Mashhadani.
His men responded with fury, indignation - and gunfire. Awakening fighters and the Iraqi army shot at each other. Market stalls were abandoned, families sheltered in their homes, snipers fired from rooftops, an American helicopter watched overhead, and Iraqi TV news showed men in uniform running through the narrow alleyways of Old Baghdad, ducking for cover.
A photograph published on an official government website showed Mr. Mashhadani standing in an office at the Ministry of the Interior with his wrists cuffed in front of him. He was wearing a beige polo shirt with his name scrawled in English onto a strip of white tape stuck to his chest. A press release from the Multi-National Force in Iraq said he was suspected of operating a militia unit - in partnership with al Qaeda - which had been deployed to kill Iraqi security forces with roadside bombs. They also believed he'd led mortar and rocket teams, and had "extorted bribes in excess of $160,000 a month from the citizens of Fadhil." (at the time £113,000).
The Iraqi authorities made another serious accusation - that Mr. Mashhadani maintained links with remnants of the former Saddam Hussein regime and was in charge of a new military wing of the Baath Party. Under the new Iraqi constitution, the Baath Party was proscribed.
This was all another reminder of the dangerous grievances which began to brew in 2003 when the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Armed forces and banned the Baath party, suddenly depriving them all of their status, their power and their income.
It also reminded me of what the former oil ministry man Sabah Jumah had said about those hundreds of thousands of unemployed military and civil service professionals:
"What should they do? Sit in their kitchens with their wives? Do you expect them to smile and dance? They can do anything and they can do everything."
The engineer in Ameriya who had told me "Killing is a career" was right. Within two years, hundreds of Awakening recruits had gone back to working for al Qaeda. But this was also because the Shi'ite government had dissolved most of the Awakening councils, suspecting them of being a devious mechanism for returning Sunnis to power.
And the Awakening leader in Ameriya, Abu Ibrahim, should not have snorted with such confident derision at the al Qaeda text message warning that he would soon be in the sewer.
Al Qaeda tracked him down and killed him.
The Fahdil Awakening leader Adil al Mashhadani was eventually sentenced to death and executed - not for running an al Qaeda unit but for murdering a young girl. He killed her after what he said was disrespect shown towards him by the girl's mother - she had publicly begged him to stop killing people in her neighbourhood. He took his revenge for this perceived loss of face with chilling cruelty - by killing her daughter.
After Mashhadani was arrested Fadhil was placed under curfew for three days, the Fadhil Awakening group was disbanded, and 150 of its members were given jobs in the Iraqi security forces.
Other Awakening members were offered vocational training courses.
In Adhamiya, the centre of Sunni Baghdad, some of the students I met at a technical college were former Awakening fighters who had previously also fought for al Qaeda.
The course was coordinated by the US military and run by a Baghdad construction company Adnan al Mosawy. The former fighters learned the basics of electricity in order to qualify as generator repair mechanics or solar power technicians. In a city where there was still no reliable electricity supply, but an abundance of sunshine, these skills were in great demand. The apprentices were also taught how to make simple solar water heaters - pipes painted black in a box painted black and covered with a sheet of glass. Even on the grey day when I was at the college, these rudimentary solar heaters raised the temperature of the water from 20°C to 60°C. Some of the students were so impressed that they were already making solar water heaters for their homes - and hoping that the neighbours would notice, and commission them to make more.
This was a potential virtuous circle in an unstable environment where the future of former Awakening and Al Qaeda fighters had still not been fully resolved. One in five of the Awakening fighters were due to be transferred into the Iraqi army and police, and the plan for the rest was that they would have to find civilian jobs.
And - did it matter that these electricity students had recently been al Qaeda fighters? Evidently not. Hazem al Rawi, administrative manager of the construction company running the course, told me,
"We don't choose the students who come here and we don't go that deeply into their background."
The US military co-ordinator for the training scheme Captain William Murphy was confident that none of these men had been dedicated ideological insurgents. In any case the danger that they might be attracted back to al Qaeda wasn't a problem unique to Iraq:
"Unemployed people tend to be opportunistic wherever they are, and criminal activity is often a way of putting food on the table for themselves and their families."
The Business of Death
In 2008, the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) opened a branch in Baghdad for journalism courses and hostile environment training.
From half way up a ladder as he helped decorate their new office, its country director Hiwa Osman explained,
"Foreign journalists get hostile environment training before they come here; Iraqi journalists need it too, and we believe in quite a few cases that if reporters had received some security or first aid training it might have saved their lives."
The Baghdad offices of the daily paper al Sabah (The Morning) were now protected by high concrete anti-blast walls and a checkpoint with a red-and-white barrier at the entrance to the staff car park. But this had not stopped a determined suicide bomber from getting in. He parked his car between the concrete walls and the main printing area, and detonated his bomb. Amazingly, only two people were killed - one by a slab of concrete that fell onto him as he sat at his desk.
Al Sabah's editor Falah al-Mishaal told me,
"All over the world journalism is known as the business of trouble. In Iraq it is the business of death."
Twenty-two of his staff had been killed in other attacks - journalists, printers, drivers. A survivor of another car bomb attack on the paper, journalist Mortala Salah, told me:
"We try to tell the truth and the terrorists don't like it."
Terrorists also don't like being ridiculed. The newspaper's cheeky response to death threats was to publish them.
al Sabah was financed by the Shi'ite government, but the editor Mr. al-Mishaal insisted nevertheless that it was robustly independent.
If so, it was an exception.
Hiwa Osman at the IWPR said that when he wanted to find out what was going on in Iraq, he had to buy six or seven newspapers and sift through the lies and omissions before he could get what he felt was an accurate picture. The institute's objective was to train journalists to report impartially and objectively, uninfluenced by political, religious or sectarian bias - and to fact check.
"This is urgently needed in Iraq," he said, "We have evidence that a lot of sectarian killings took place soon after inaccurate reports appeared in the media."
But it took courage to be an objective journalist in increasingly sectarian Iraq. A Baghdad reporter Salaam Jihad told me he'd been threatened many times, and had been chased by armed militants.
"I am a cat with nine lives," he said, half smiling, "I may have lost five. But I have four more."
Curtain up
At the National Theatre in Baghdad the cast were rehearsing Bring The King, a satire about the corruption and political paralysis that followed the removal of 'King' Saddam Hussein.
Scene: the Iraqi parliament. Chaos, confusion, everyone talking at the same time.
From the wings, a shout: "What time is it?"
The members of parliament all cry: "It's salary time!"
Stampede.
Exeunt omnes.
An old man staggers onto the empty stage exhausted. He's carrying a blue plastic barrel suspended from his shoulders. It has one word on it, in Arabic and in English: Oil.
The man is in despair. "I feel I've lost my country, even though I live here. I don't need politics - I need bread, I need water."
The writer, producer and director was Haider Monathir. Sitting in the dusty empty stalls of the National Theatre (which was looted after the 2003 invasion) he told me life in Iraq had been ruined by overpaid politicians who solved nothing:
"They are political teenagers."
One of the actors, Iraqi star Zahra Beden, was excited that evening performances were soon to start again after months with none:
"It's a good sign that people are coming out in the evenings, going to parks, walking by the river. We have to go to the theatre, we must not lose hope. Theatre is life."
Another actor Haqer Shok complained that Iraq was diuviding along sectarian lines. It was a new phenomenon; he was Sunni, his sister was married to a Shia man.
"Sectarianism is a disease," he told me, "We caught it like we catch the 'flu. But it's not deep rooted, so we will shake it off."
The next time I met Haider Munathir and Zahra Beden was in Britain. They were playing Capulet and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. It was a co-prodction by the Iraqi Theatre Company and the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was performed in Arabic, with English surtitles - with Romeo as Shi’itea and Juliet as Sunni.
And Paris as a suicide bomber who kills them both.