A Dozen Different Cities at War with Each Other
Baghdad Under Surge
PATRICK COCKBURN, Counterpunch
March 15, 2007, Baghdad.
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| Jadriyah bunker, as seen from press hotel AL-Hamraa hotel By TwoCrabs |
I stay in the al-Hamra Hotel in the Jadriyah district of east Baghdad which lies in a loop of the Tigris. It is almost entirely Shia but is considered one of the safer areas of Baghdad; not that this is saying a great deal these days. I walked around looking at its defences. There are big blast walls and armed sentries at every point. But buildings just outside the walls smashed by two suicide bombs in November 2005 have not been repaired. Heaps of smashed concrete lie on the ground.The people who lived in the ruined houses mostly worked in the hotel and six of these were killed. One of them had a job in a bakery on the ground floor of my block of the hotel and another was the son a receptionist I talked to every day. I looked across a wide stretch of broken ground towards a bunker, built by Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, and now one of the headquarters of the Interior Ministry. Somebody with me said sharply: "the guards in the bunker are getting nervous because you are staring at them." We scuttled for safety back into the hotel.
Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006.
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