Baghdad Comes Alive

The generals have good reason to be, as one officer puts it, "wary of that 'Mission Accomplished' thing." (He declined to be identified criticizing the commander in chief's May 2003 gaffe.) Their biggest concern—other than a Qaeda resurgence—is that the Iraqi government has been slow to take advantage of the relative peace to restore services and speed reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis. "Security and stability has created a window of opportunity the government needs to seize," says Lt. Col. Steve Miska, the outgoing deputy brigade commander in charge of the long-troubled northwestern part of Baghdad. The capital's neighborhoods have calmed in large measure because each is now dominated by one sect or another, with tens of thousands of U.S. troops temporarily holding them together (or keeping them apart, as the case may be). "We cannot sustain the surge," says Miska—and once we go, the two sides could well turn on each other with renewed fury.

Meanwhile, though, I can contemplate activities that were once unthinkable: like going out to dinner. Baghdad's famous mazghouf restaurants, selling barbecued river carp on the banks of the Tigris, have come back to life. At one of them, called the Karrada Sports Club, owner Mundar al Haidar recently checked the big circular pools of live carp, and watched as his workers splayed the fish on staves to grill them over a bonfire made of lemontree wood. They were preparing for the evening rush, when these days the restaurant fills to capacity. "You go out now and you feel safe," he says. "The only explosions are far away. I myself left here at midnight last night." Haidar even invited me to lunch at his home, something both of us would have considered foolhardy, even suicidal, only last summer. If insurgents didn't kill me before I left, they would have killed him after.

People who have long lived like fugitives can now do the most normal things. Zuhair Humadi, a high-ranking Iraqi official who lives in the Green Zone, recently attended a public wedding celebration in Baghdad without a massive security detail. The Shorja bazaar in old Baghdad, hit by at least six different car bombs killing hundreds in the last year, is again crowded with people among the narrow tented stalls. On nearby Al Rasheed Street, the famous booksellers are back in business, after being driven into hiding by assassins and bombs. People are buying alcohol again—as they always had in Baghdad, until religious extremists forced many neighborhood liquor shops to close.

This, however, is the new normal. Baghdad's safest neighborhoods are those with blast walls around them. A thousand mini Green Zones have bloomed on the urban landscape, tormented fortifications of steel, concrete and barbed wire. Once wide boulevards are subdivided to channel traffic into search lanes, and divided again by barriers to slow suicide bombers. Both Shiites and Sunnis still take long, circuitous routes to work to avoid each other's neighborhoods. Salih al-Moussawi is a young Shiite doctor from Yarmouk, which became an all-Sunni area after five Shiite greengrocers were set afire and burned to death in public last April. He fled the area then, and avoided it until recent weeks. "Now Yarmouk no longer terrifies me," Moussawi says—he goes shopping there. But he's not ready to move home.

Sunni neighborhoods like Yarmouk have been quieted largely by what the military calls "concerned citizens groups," volunteers who have sprung up all over Baghdad and are being paid by the Americans to combat Al Qaeda in their districts. Many of them are former Iraqi insurgents. "It's huge," General Fil says of the impact of these groups, which go by various names in various communities—the Awakening, Freedom Fighters, Knights of the Two Rivers. In Baghdad, the U.S. military says it has forked over about $17 million to the volunteers, to enroll some 67,000 fighters. "That's less than the cost of one Apache helicopter, and it's done a lot more good," says Fil. "I don't know how many hundreds of lives it's saved."

The volunteers have even calmed neighborhoods like Ameriyah, in western Baghdad. When tribal sheiks in Anbar province declared war on Al Qaeda, this is where its fighters fled; last spring it declared Ameriyah the capital of its Islamic State of Iraq. It was already a bad place, and by last May it was arguably the worst place in Iraq—14 American soldiers died there that month in a series of attacks. Now the district has gone three months without a U.S. casualty or a single "sigact," military-speak for significant action.