By Michael Holmes
January 15, 2014
Baghdad, Iraq (CNN) – Even in the darkest, deadliest days ofIraq’s war, you’d find people still hopeful it would all work out. That the killings would stop, the bad guys would be routed and a stability of some sort would return.
A US armoured vehicle burns in Baghdad after a bomb attack.
(Photo courtesy of bbc.co.uk)
That the Americans would leave with their Humvees and their private security companies and the country would — perhaps — get on with the freedom the U.S. promised upon Saddam Hussein’s removal.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki promised as much, and pledged an inclusive system for all. Power-sharing politics and making all Iraqis — Sunni, Shia, Christian — feel they shared national values. Now, there a plenty of Iraqis who believe he had his fingers crossed when he said such things.
Just over two years ago, I watched as the last of 110 or so U.S. military vehicles crossed the border from Iraq and into Kuwait — the same border crossing I’d gone through in at the start of the war in 2003 with a U.S. Marine convoy headed to the Iraqi capital.
I’ve had nearly a dozen trips in between and now here I am, back in Baghdad. The city feels much the same as it did during some of those other trips — and that’s not a good thing. Actually, it feels worse.
The U.S. departure may have ended the war for Americans, but for Iraqis, the violence, the bombs, the shootings and the torrents of blood barely skipped a beat. A lull here and there, periods of what might (for Iraq) pass for stability, but really, the deaths never stopped. More than 8,000 people were killed here last year, mostly innocent civilians, according to the U.N.
The feeling in Baghdad today is one of dread — dreading the next car bomb or suicide attack or assassination.