BY NORA BOUSTANY
The Washington Post
BAGHDAD — As another confrontation with the United States begins, life for most residents of the Iraqi capital is a gritty, intense, often depressing struggle — a survival campaign that starts anew with every dawn, and that continues unabated until well after the moon has painted its quivering reflection on the Tigris River.
If Baghdad needs a visual metaphor, it would be the fountain whose central statue — of a magical genie — was intended to gush water from its raised arm. It fell into disrepair, and like everything else here was given an improvised, makeshift repair, one in which the flow of water was rerouted. Now, instead of issuing a triumphal, life-giving spray, the bronze genie cries a river of tears.
“There is no one to help me,” Qassem Mahdi Khodr, 39, said one recent evening in a dim Baghdad cafe. “I feel alone.”
Mr. Khodr fought for Iraq during the disastrous war against neighboring Iran, and ended up spending 16 years in Iranian jails as a prisoner of war before being repatriated last April. At the time, the Red Cross workers who were transporting him asked three times whether he wanted to try to seek asylum in some third country instead. He firmly declined: He wanted to go to his homeland, nowhere else. Over time, though, his patriotism has been redefined by experience.
Mr. Khodr was a decorated soldier in the war but now cannot find a job. He spends his days looking for odds and ends to buy, like used tape recorders, which he can repair and try to sell for a profit. “It takes eight hours to make a thousand dinars (less than one dollar), and less than a second to spend it,” he said.
When he was a young man in the early 1980s, Iraq's currency was strong — fortified with oil wealth — and Baghdad's night life was electric. While he was away, everything changed.
“I asked about the bars and was told they are all closed.”
His family, which used to live in a four-room house, now is crammed into a one-room shack that houses nine people.
“Did you see the movie, Dead Man Walking?” asked an archaeologist who did not want to be quoted by name. “Well, that is the Iraqi people. Dead man walking.” Of the prospect of military strikes, she said: “Let them hit us. .Ç.Ç. Either we will die, or something will change.”
