The future of Iraq arrived here in a torrent of tan and green steel last March as thousands of U.S. troops roared across the Kuwaiti border and down the broad main boulevard of this wind-swept frontier town.
A year later, the first mile of the new Iraq is a deadly stretch of potholed asphalt, haunted by kidnappers and thieves and lined by crumbling, looted customs buildings.
Deeper into town, an open-air market is growing and a youth center is in the works, but as in cities and villages across this country, Iraqis believe those improvements are overshadowed by the problems created by the war and its aftermath.
To retrace more than 600 miles of the invasion that began at this border one year ago and stretched through Baghdad to northern Iraq is to traverse a landscape of hard-won successes and unmistakable failures, where Iraqis’ expectations and Americans’ promises litter the roadside among the few rusted remnants of war.
The social and political order that reigned through decades of tyranny has been turned upside down, leaving a nation of radical contrasts: a hopeful home of first-time voters, free thinkers and proud worshipers, and a forbidding land of volatile militias, seething mourners and uncertain loyalties.
America vowed to transform Iraq, and while there is no formal, comprehensive assessment of the country’s condition, the U.S. has delivered small but real progress, embodied by a raucous free press, a wave of local elections and the stirrings of a free market. But Iraq one year later is a country where the people don’t yet know who will govern them, how their leaders will be chosen or how the new government will provide the most fundamental service–public security–after the nation returns to sovereignty at the end of June.
Indeed, there are too many uncertainties to convince a now-prosperous Basra shopkeeper that gangsters will not rule the streets after Iraqis resume control of their country. Or convince the local police chief in Kirkuk that the rivalry between Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens will not tear his city apart. Or assure the U.S. Army colonel who lives in Saddam Hussein’s former palace in Tikrit that the insurgency will disappear.
“I expected I would have a home and a car and be able to take care of my children” one year after the war, says squatter Salih Mehdi Abbas, who lives with his wife and six children in an abandoned customs building in Safwan.
“But the merchants are still merchants,” he adds, “and the poor are still poor.”
A dream deferred
This forlorn town greeted war with high hopes, perhaps too high.
Older folks in Safwan dreamed of a return to the glorious 1970s, when lively trade with Kuwait kept four local hotels booked solid. That was before Iraq’s 1991 retreat from Kuwait left the border sealed, hotels empty and prospects dim.
This war arrived March 20, 2003, as tanks and trucks rolled through town topped with gun-toting American and British soldiers who tossed boxes of food and colorful pamphlets about the importance of cooperation.
“The coalition came to the agricultural union and said they would reconstruct the region. The water network, the electricity, the state-run companies,” says Mohammed Kazhim, 42, a Safwan used-car vendor. “We said security is most important. They said they would take care of security.”
By April 5, British forces had appointed Safwan’s new City Council, one of the first in Iraq. British troops rehabbed the medical clinic. A motel opened, and a frenetic open-air market sprang up to sell used cars and secondhand Kuwaiti furniture.
Problems appeared just as swiftly. Snipers fired at military convoys, and thieves plucked boxes off any trucks that stopped. Looters savaged the old customs buildings that lined the main road, pulling out doors, lights, bricks, steel beams and wiring.
As security deteriorated, the military and civilian convoys found other routes into Iraq. With attention shifting, things in Safwan, a town of 25,000, got even worse. Farhan Tessier, president of the City Council, counted 71 major crimes–homicides, kidnappings and armed robberies–from June 1 to Sept. 1.
“Security is totally lost in Safwan,” admits Iraqi police Maj. Handal Faal, 47, the weary commander who runs the regional headquarters in Basra. He says his fleet of police sedans is no match for local gangs’ sport-utility vehicles, which can easily escape across the desert.
As in so much of Iraq, residents of Safwan blame the U.S.-led coalition, saying the greatest mistakes were the earliest: letting security fall apart and not showing signs of rapid reconstruction. But their complaints also reveal an important gap between the expectations of Iraqis and coalition leaders.
“I told the coalition forces they should rebuild the hotel and the city, but up to now, it has not happened,” says Tessier, the council president. “Frankly, nothing has changed, and it is getting worse. The expectations of Iraqis when the coalition forces came to Iraq were that they would see the true meaning of freedom and democracy and security.”
Occupation officials make no apologies for not rebuilding hotels; they say that is not their job. But the electricity runs well in Safwan, and water is flowing better than it did before the war. The British military says it recognizes the security problems and recently launched raids against a tribe believed to be behind much of the local banditry.
“Things have improved there over time,” says Capt. Sandy Stuart, a British military spokesman. “A good indication of that is that thousands of Iraqi pilgrims just passed through Safwan . . . on their way to Mecca, and we had no major problems.”
Almost all the aid groups have fled. One of the few still daring to visit is Norwegian Church Aid, which still plans a new youth center despite the kidnapping of a staff member, who was recovered unharmed in November.
“People in Safwan feel left out, and there is a feeling of hopelessness,” says Norwegian aid worker Oddbjorn Flem. “They see all these goods passing through, and nothing gets off in Safwan.”
A new year dawns
While the border town descended swiftly into chaos, Iraq’s earliest success story was emerging just 25 miles up the broad, flat highway, in southern Iraq’s largest city, Basra.
In the months after British forces arrived, their low-key approach achieved remarkable success in quelling violence and building public support. A year later, the city is buzzing with vibrant politics, new construction and crowded shopping strips.
But residents are greeting their second year of freedom with mounting wariness. Britain is set to cede control to Iraqis by the end of June, just as an increasingly bold mix of tribes, political parties, religious conservatives, militias and gangsters threatens to disrupt the fragile peace.
Gangland crime is growing, including assassinations and kidnappings. Police officers, some linked to a conservative Shiite militia, are suspected in a string of killings of Christian liquor store owners. Talk of the murky dealings among police, gangsters and religious movements dominates conversations, as many Iraqis wonder whether the hands-off British approach may have been too casual for a city emerging from 35 years of despotism.
“We love freedom, but the future is very unknown,” says electronics store owner Hamad Ali Hamad, 44, who has prospered in the past year.
“It would be impossible to have another Saddam, but I feel there are 200 little Saddams trying,” the well-dressed Hamad says in his shop’s back office, an AK-47 assault rifle leaning against the wall. “This country can’t be controlled unless there is a powerful government, and to this day we have no government.”
Militia leaders have joined the top ranks of the Iraqi security services. But they are seen as militia leaders first, so ordinary Iraqis question their loyalty. In particular, leaders of the police intelligence units are former commanders of the Badr Brigades, the armed wing of a powerful Shiite political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
But British officials say excluding the militias would have guaranteed that they would become a challenge to the occupation.
“We don’t see any other option,” says Stuart, the military spokesman. “We have to keep an eye on them.”
For a glimpse of how those complex alliances will shape Basra’s future, look no further than the Faraj Bureau, a nondescript office on a cramped side street.
“Because I am a tribal chief, I can guarantee the safety of a road,” says the bureau’s president, Sheik Radhi al-Zirgawn, a tribal leader as well as a former Badr Brigades guerrilla. After the war, the Supreme Council officially converted the armed Badr Brigades into a humanitarian organization, but the group never turned in its weapons.
Likewise, the Faraj Bureau is a “humanitarian company that provides security services,” al-Zirgawn says, explaining that the organization makes security guards out of unemployed young men.
For now, al-Zirgawn says, he is a businessman. But make no mistake: He and his men could swiftly become rebels again.
“If the coalition forces don’t achieve the Iraqi demands, it will become a military organization again,” he says, leaning across his desk. “It can change overnight.”
The anger remains
There are many things Khalid Yunis doesn’t discuss with his two surviving children: How their five siblings and mother died on a Nasiriyah highway as the family sped unwittingly into a volley of American bullets. How 7-year-old Mohammed’s small, bald head will never sprout hair because of the burns he suffered when their truck caught fire. And, of course, how their father dreams of settling the score.
“I tell you honestly, if I didn’t have responsibility for Mohammed and his sister, I would like to be a suicide bomber, to kill even one American soldier,” says the burly father, 42, seated on the worn carpet in his living room. “When I see the bombers on television, I wish it were me.”
Fourteen members of Yunis’ extended family were killed, he says, when their speeding truck startled a group of embattled Marines on March 25, during some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. He and his two children spent two months in a U.S. military hospital, and he is grateful for the care. But still, his anger burns.
Civilian casualties are a legacy of war that time has not washed away. Few places saw as much bloodshed, Iraqi and American, as Nasiriyah, a battered southern town astride the Euphrates River where bullet-scarred buildings are a testament to lingering resentment. Nasiriyah General Hospital estimates that at least 1,000 civilians died during 11 days of fighting, which also claimed the lives of at least 30 U.S. soldiers.
“Everyone here is happy to be free–to have no more Saddam–but we will not forget,” says physician Khyadeer Hizber.
That anger over their first contact with U.S. authority helps explain why Nasiriyah’s citizens have emerged as fierce voices in Iraq’s greatest debate: When will the nation be ready to shrug off American guidance and freely elect its own leaders?
Though poor and isolated, Nasiriyah’s home province of Dhi Qar has emerged as a forerunner in the push for free elections, successfully staging city council elections in 11 of its 20 largest cities.
But Nasiriyah’s experience hints of the unruly path ahead for Iraqi democracy. Bright banners for dozens of political parties hang across town: the Islamic Hamas Party and Hezbollah, which claim no affiliations to the militant factions that share their names; the Iraqi Communist Party, the Supreme Council, the Mehdi Army and others.
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That swirl of voices burst into the open when 4,000 protesters, many armed, swarmed the provincial governor’s headquarters in late January, demanding free elections. Gov. Sabri Rumayidh responded by calling in loyal armed tribesmen, and the standoff ended only when Rumayidh ducked out of the building.
“There are a lot of forces who do not want stability in this country,” Rumayidh said weeks later. “I am eager to see democracy, but the people must be ready to do it peacefully.”
Indeed, whether Iraq’s political future unfolds in peace is the central question across the country. If there is any answer, it is most likely to be found 150 miles up the highway from Nasiriyah, in the city that has emerged as the throbbing political heart of the new Iraq: Najaf.
A city alight
A tour guide herds busloads of eager Iranian pilgrims to the foot of the brightly tiled Imam Ali shrine, one of the Shiites’ holiest sites. A 10-year-old boy races between clusters of worshipers, hawking prayer beads and CDs of once-banned hymns. An old Afghan visitor stands silently with his hands upturned toward the shrine he never imagined he would visit.
This city, alight with energy that Saddam Hussein once brutally extinguished, symbolizes Iraq’s most critical postwar evolution: the ascendancy of Shiite Muslims. In the nearly 12 months since Hussein’s fall, Shiite leaders have demonstrated that Iraq’s future will be written as much in the narrow alleys of Najaf as in the official warrens of Baghdad.
But the most astonishing scene is unfolding behind closed doors. American officials and Iraqi politicians who once thought they could define the political future of Iraq now scramble to rally support from Najaf’s small group of reclusive, white-bearded senior clerics.
Led by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, they have demonstrated the power to steer a nation–all without leaving their homes.
“All the people support you, Sistani!” thunder hundreds of young men during one in a seemingly endless parade of demonstrations to support the man most Iraqis have never seen in the flesh.
“The prophet said you must use the sword against those who do not respond to anything but the sword,” says one sign.
Al-Sistani, 73, emerged as a pivotal figure last fall by challenging a U.S.-backed plan to delay direct elections until months after a sovereign Iraqi government could be formed. The ayatollah, who forced the U.S. to seek help from the United Nations in fashioning a compromise, insists he is not interested in politics, only in ensuring civil rights. But his followers don’t seem to make the distinction.
“He is the religious and political leader,” says tailor Majed Al Wadees, 40, as he measures a bearded clerical student for new brown robes. “The people will do whatever al-Sistani orders them to do.”
If there is anything that might push al-Sistani to organize his followers and seek tighter control of the country, it would be continued Shiite bloodshed. The March 2 attacks that killed at least 181 people at Shiite shrines in Baghdad and Karbala struck deep at the heart of Shiite pride, coming amid the observance of one of Shiite Islam’s holiest days. And it was not the first time that Shiites suffered in postwar Iraq.
In a secluded, heavily guarded courtyard, the effects of those attacks are felt in stark terms. Cleric Sayeed Muhammad Hussein al-Hakim sits an arm’s length from a grim-faced bodyguard and recalls his uncle Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, a moderate Shiite leader assassinated in an August car bombing. When he died, he became the latest victim in a clan systematically slaughtered by Hussein.
“He was the 63rd person we lost,” the nephew says.
The August bombing, which also killed scores of al-Hakim followers, could have been the work of rival Shiites or foreign fighters. It remains unsolved. Yet for all the pain that the past year has brought to his family, the younger al-Hakim says his family is most concerned with the future and the forces that could upset Iraq’s delicate balance.
“When you go to the outskirts of the city, you see the poverty, the people who can’t make a living, the children who don’t have books to do their homework. This, even though we are a country of [oil] fortune, and the heart of the Middle East,” he says.
“Shiites have been tested by tragedy,” he says after a pause. “We hope to have a future life with dignity.”
An unfinished victory
No moment was more critical in the struggle for the future of Iraq than the fall of Baghdad. And yet almost one year later, no single goal has proved more elusive than bringing peace and progress to the capital.
The past is undoubtedly over, but many aren’t sure what has replaced it.
“The hole is gone,” says Salman al-Imam, 75. Only a scab of dirt and debris marks the area where at least 14 people were killed April 7, when four 2,000-pound bombs were released from the sky by American-led forces convinced that Hussein was sighted in the home next door to al-Imam’s in Baghdad’s upscale Mansour district.
But the old man’s once grand home remains half wrecked.
Two days after the blast, Hussein’s regime collapsed and Marines toppled his statue in the center of the city, capping the U.S. advance to seize the capital.
Then the looting began, the sacking of Baghdad by its people.
What happened to Baghdad in the past year was yet another chapter in the city’s long history of invasion and occupation. That history goes back centuries, with Mongols, Ottomans and Britons invading and establishing footholds in a part of the world where vast promises of riches and power seduce empires.
Now the U.S.-led coalition has established its place in Baghdad, inside Hussein’s former Republican Palace and its sprawling grounds. The capital’s gray urban landscape is punctuated by enormous concrete blast barriers and controlled by a tangled mix of U.S. troops, Iraqi security and private security guards.
From his home in Mansour, al-Imam has seen the city’s fortunes rise and fall. Despite all that he has lost, he sees hints of a bright future.
“You have to wish for the best, and you will find the best,” al-Imam says. “I have a hope.”
Others have hope too.
Inam Isa, 38, trolled the aisles of an appliance store with her husband, Ismail, 38, and 14-year-old son, Ahmed. They were buying their first washer-dryer, for $170, money saved for months by the family and four others in their apartment building. No question life is better, she said, but not because of washer-dryers.
“Money is not everything,” she says. “With this freedom, we are much better than before.”
Even society’s lowest, the homeless who have taken shelter in ruined government buildings, say that in some ways life is better.
But it remains frightening at the bottom rung of society.
The Iraqi air force officer’s club used to be a swanky retreat for the military’s elite who frolicked in two pools and gathered in huge, glass-enclosed meeting rooms. Now it’s home to more than 600 families, with jury-rigged lights, toilets and households in ghostlike buildings where bricks are charred and the windows have been blasted out.
Children are everywhere. Nobody goes to school. Some teenagers get a few dollars daily to sell vegetables in nearby markets.
“I feel sorry, so sorry that it has all ended like this,” says Shakur Hasun Najem, a sad-eyed 50-year-old who lives with his wife and three children inside an old security office.
They bathe and cook in one room, and sleep in another. Najem, a former bus driver, has been jobless since the war began. His belly is distended. He is ill with a disease he can’t recall. A prescription remains unfilled–he can’t afford the pills.
A delicate peace
Kurdish fighters and U.S. Special Forces troops barely fired a shot in capturing Kirkuk.
But a year later, many Iraqis across the country agree: If civil war strikes their nation, it could easily start here, where faith, belief, old scores and oil wealth put mounting pressure on a tense balance of power.
Kirkuk’s top police officer, Torhan Abdul Rahman Yousef, is charged with keeping the city’s population of Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens from splitting apart. Last December, Yousef was shaken by a rally in which Kurds battled Arabs, leaving at least four dead and 27 injured.
“I was panicked,” he says, sipping sweet tea inside his darkened office. “I thought there might be civil war. I was very sad and very tired.”
Order was restored, yet no one knows for how long. Under Hussein, thousands of Kurds were forcibly removed and thousands more Arabs were encouraged to move in to control the city and its oil fields. Now, those Kurds want the land back and the Arabs out. Factions across the country look longingly at the oil wells that dot the landscape, black gold emerging from the sea of rolling green.
Yousef has to balance all the rivalries and keep order with a force of 5,000, a minuscule presence compared with what it was in Hussein’s time, when the city was secured by 30,000 troops and 7,000 police and intelligence officers.
He says an evolving national policy of apportioning government jobs to various ethnic groups is “like a time bomb.” He is concerned that elections and sovereignty might only intensify the feuds.
“The city is not ready for an election,” he says, and Iraq is “not ready for sovereignty.”
Kirkuk is like a laboratory of ethnic tension. Much of the city’s Arab population lives in squalid, trash-strewn apartment blocks on the edge of town. The Arabs worry that with Hussein gone, they could lose their homes to the Kurds.
“If there is civil war, it is the Kurds who will start it, and we will fight against them. But I hope that doesn’t happen,” says Khalaf Jabbar, 48, a former civil servant who moved from Baghdad in 1988 after being offered a job and housing.
The dream of a good life for Arabs in the north has evaporated. And it’s not just Jabbar who is resentful. Ten young men surround him. They are all unemployed.
Across town, Kurdish mother Awat Mohammed Ali, 35, lives an unsettled life with hundreds of other Kurdish families in and around the city’s main stadium. They have returned to Kirkuk for their land, but they have to wait for authorities to sort out all the claims, a process that hasn’t even begun.
Ali, her husband and their four children arrived six months ago. They built a shelter beneath the stadium seats, a mud-brick hut topped by a canvas roof, with a front door made of tin cans flattened and tacked to scraps of wood.
“Until we find a home, we have to live like this,” Ali says, her weathered hands holding her crying 1-year-old daughter.
Booted out of town nine years ago by Hussein’s regime, the family has been on a nine-year odyssey through Iran and Iraq’s Kurdish north. They returned to Kirkuk hoping to find their home. It had been demolished to make way for a street.
As she recalls her family’s story, Ali begins to cry softly.
“Our life is better without Saddam,” she says. “We have no fear. But we suffer from our situation.”
A hopeful city
Last spring they studied for college placement exams while bombs dropped near their neighborhood. Now, Marwa al-Mosuli and Jawana Ihsan sit on a bench in the quadrangle at Mosul University, two 18-year-old women soaking up the winter sun between classes.
“We just want to live,” al-Mosuli says. “We are fed up with politics.”
In a nation obsessed with its unfulfilled potential, Mosul is straining to be the exception. It is the city where life could be normal, where the future just might work.
Khalil al-Saif runs Mosul University’s computer center. After the war, the center was looted and torched, and the school was left with four computers. Now, the university has a new computer center with more than 1,000 machines spread across the campus.
Al-Saif dreams of 6,000 computers to serve 30,000 students, and he pleads for an American university to help build an intranet system.
He revels in his new economic wealth. Under the old regime, al-Saif made $50 monthly. Now, he earns $500 a month, saving enough to sell his 20-year-old sedan and buy a 13-year-old station wagon.
“Thank you, America, for changing our regime,” al-Saif says.
But he worries that the American forces may be getting too tough as the security situation deteriorates in this area. He is afraid to drive near military vehicles and is upset about neighborhood searches.
“Let them change their ways when they go to look for an enemy,” he says. “Not all Iraq is Al Qaeda. Not all Iraq is the enemy.”
Mosul offers a possible lesson that the longer U.S. forces stay, the more resistance they and those who work with them may encounter. The 101st Airborne Division ran a textbook occupation–setting up a new local government, rebuilding schools, creating jobs–but last autumn the insurgency flared, with deadly consequences.
Recently, a local police station was blown up and the new U.S. commander, Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, survived a grenade attack on his convoy. Occupation officials, who once traveled in sedans, are now ferried in armored vehicles with gunners.
Yet Mosul exudes a sense of optimism, a belief that a good job, housing and security are attainable. It is as vivid as the scene of hundreds of job seekers who gather each morning at the Nineveh Labor Center, where more than 20,000 have found work since June.
The jobs are but a fraction of what is needed to put a local population back to work. But they are a start for people so desperate for employment that an accountant with a doctorate accepted a $60-a-month job to oversee the books at a factory.
“You get a nice feeling inside to give one person a job,” says the center’s director, Sarmad Ghanim al-Yassin, a business professor educated in France. “I’m not rich. But with my team I can do something.”
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Al-Yassin urges people to be patient. In a year, maybe two, the situation will improve, he says. Until then, he will strive to put people back to work, one at a time, day after day.
The marks of war
For Muktam Khazal–as for all of the proud people of Tikrit–the old order ended April 9, when Saddam Hussein’s statue tumbled in central Baghdad. Their era was over.
A captain in the Special Republican Guard’s Air Defense, Khazal says he never fired a shot and fled Baghdad to return to Hussein’s hometown and the heartland of the Baathist regime.
Khazal heard local rumors that the Americans might use tactical nuclear bombs to win the last remaining town in Iraq. But he knew better. His side was beaten. U.S. troops converged on Tikrit, and the city surrendered.
“We can still hear the sound of bombing in our hearts,” Khazal says, long after he traded his military uniform for a merchant’s simple robe.
Newly married, the 30-year-old is looking to the future. “We want to open a new age.”
But nowhere in Iraq will it be more difficult than towns like Tikrit, where the faded main street is lined with tattered shops and restaurants, and the people nurse raw wounds and worries.
“People always said, Tikrit, Tikrit, Saddam takes care of Tikrit,” says Asim Tuaib Hamed al-Asad, a doctor selling computers. “But look at us.”
“For the moment,” al-Asad says, “I prefer the Americans to stay. The situation is not stabilized.”
At Hussein’s former palace, Col. Don Campbell, 47, of the 4th Infantry Division holds court in a wood-paneled office. The lavish compound contains 12 mini-palaces, a hospital, recreation center, hunting lodge and lagoons.
“This is still a very dangerous place,” Campbell says after nearly a year in the Sunni Triangle. “We will win this thing. We have won it already. . . . Since Saddam was captured, more and more people are willing to work with the coalition. They are getting braver.”
Even so, Campbell doesn’t bother dreaming of total victory.
“There will always be an element here trying to kill coalition soldiers,” he says. “It doesn’t matter how many schools we rebuild, how many hearts and minds we’ve won. There is still an element that does not want us here.”
He knows time is his greatest weapon, as each day drives the regime and its bloody history deeper into Iraq’s past.
It will take decades for the country to come to terms what was done during Hussein’s reign of fear–the killings of Kurds and Shiites; the imprisonment and torture of tens of thousands, the wars against Iran, Kuwait and the U.S., and the plundering of a nation’s wealth for a family’s benefit.
What remains are the scars: the marks of war, the grief, the rubble. To reach Tikrit, at last, is to come full circle with a family and a country.
Hussein is jailed, awaiting his fate. His two murderous sons, Udai and Qusai, are dead, killed in a shootout with U.S. troops in Mosul, along with Qusai’s teenage son Mustafa.
Their bodies are buried just south of Tikrit, across the main road from Al Ouja, where Hussein was born. The graves lie in a clearing beneath a date palm. Turned earth and mud markers are all that signifies that the heirs of Hussein’s wrecked regime have come to this place for eternity.
– – –
Iraqis face new problems, promise
A year after the start of the war in Iraq, parts of the country are struggling to maintain order while others have tasted the possibility of better days ahead.
Stages in the taking of Iraq – Movement of coalition, March 19-April 14
Invasion begins – March 19-22
War opens with an unsuccessful air strike on Saddam Hussein’s suspected hideout in Baghdad. The next day, U.S. coalition forces cross into southern Iraq at Safwan and other points along the Kuwaiti border, as air strikes pound Baghdad, Mosul and Basra.
Rapid advance — March 23-27
Despite the ambush of a U.S. supply convoy near Nasiriyah and the capture of seven U.S. soldiers, the march on Baghdad is slowed only by sandstorms. Coalition forces fight a major battle east of Najaf.
Taking Baghdad — March 28-April 8
Coalition forces, aided by Kurdish fighters, spread across the north. Despite sporadic resistance, coalition forces take control of the city in less than a week.
Last holdouts — April 9-14
U.S. troops solidify control of Baghdad. Kirkuk and Mosul soon come under allied control, with Tikrit the last major city to fall.
Status of cities after the war
(2002 estimated population)
Mosul (1.7 million)
Despite its fragile ethnic mix, the northern city is an early reconstruction success story.
Kirkuk (728,000)
The oil-rich city has been the scene of ethnic unrest among its Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen populations.
Tikrit (28,000)
Hussein’s hometown is humbled by his defeat and capture. They also are wary of new Shiite power.
Baghdad (5.6 million)
Nearly one year after its fall, the jittery capital continues to suffer suicide bombings and attacks by opposition forces.
Najaf (563,000)
The city is home to Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, which makes it a power base in the new Iraq. A car bomb outside one of Shiite Islam’s holiest shrines on Aug. 29 killed at least 85 people.
Nasiriyah (535,000)
A Nov. 12 bombing of a police station killed 26, including 19 Italians (this sentence as published have been corrected in this text). The majority Shiite city has recently been plagued by political unrest.
Basra (1.3 million)
It was the site of deadly riots in August as locals protested a lack of basic services and rise in crime. Today the city is thriving economically.
Safwan (25,000)
Town near Kuwaiti border had high hopes that liberation would restore prosperity, but so far residents have been mostly disappointed.
Sources: Global Security, Tribune and news reports
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COMING MONDAY
A soldier who plans to seek conscientious objector status explains why he went AWOL and didn’t return to his unit in Iraq last fall.