For years, Hamid Menhel has trudged through a graveyard in central Baghdad almost every day to tend to one of its few well-maintained tombs. Surrounded by shrubs and a small metal fence, it is the burial site of Gertrude Bell, the British diplomat and explorer whose role in the region a century ago helped enshrine Iraq’s modern state.
The cemetery is hemmed between churches, mosques, government buildings and roads choked with cars on the south bank of the Tigris river, which has been Baghdad’s lifeblood for 3,000 years, but has more recently become a dividing line. The fortified government district known as the Green Zone stands on its northern banks. Here the business of navigating Iraq through its latest crisis — the battle against terror group Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) — is being directed from a safe, insular enclave of Saddam-era palaces and embassies. The rest of the city gets by on its wits.
Iraq’s officials claim that this war is existential and that to win it will preserve the very boundaries that Bell advocated in 1921, after the demise of the Ottoman empire. From his vantage point across the river though, Hamid, 37, believes that much of what has happened in Iraq since — and especially the tumult taking place now — suggests that the country envisaged by the woman in the concrete tomb likely doesn’t exist any more. And, if it does, it may no longer be worth fighting for.
“We can blame empire, occupation, the Americans, Miss Bell, Iran, anyone we want,” Hamid said, standing on a thin crust of dirt amid several tombstones that teetered into collapsed graves. “But the reality is that people here don’t want to live together. Why else would we all behave like animals? “Look around — no electricity, no security, no future. If I want water for the ground here, I have to beg the British embassy for it. The country is finished.”
One year into the war against Daesh, and more than 12 years since the toppling of Saddam Hussain, other Iraqis are facing personal reckonings about their place within a nation in a perpetual search for identity. Across the country, apparently endless dysfunction has led many to retreat to groupings that they feel more confident in — tribes, clan and sects.
“It was OK when there was security,” said Khalil Al Khater, a refugee from the northern town of Tal Afar, who has spent more than a year in a shack near the Shiite city of Najaf. “As long as we were safe, we could forget about the rest of the country not working. But now the army has scattered like leaves on a wind. And, Iraq has split into three parts.”
Since the time of Bell and her colleague T.E. Lawrence, who also played a defining role in shaping contemporary Arabia, Iraq has lived through colonialism, monarchy, totalitarianism, war, occupation and chaos. And throughout all its modern eras, ancient Mesopotamia’s role as a cradle of civilisation has loomed large. But many of its people say, its latest incarnation, from the end of the First World War until now, has produced next to nothing in the way of nation building that can unify disparate groups.
“If all we have are winged horses from the Sumerian period to say we are Iraqis, then that is not a foundation for a state,” said Ahmad Rubaie, a guard at the Iraqi National Museum, which houses most of the country’s surviving priceless antiquities. “Outside of these walls, you’ll find nothing that has been built since the British rule that commemorates the country like all of the things within these walls.”
Not far from the museum, Mohammad Amin Izzat has conducted Iraq’s national orchestra since Baghdad fell in 2003. Back then, it was one of the main institutions under Saddam’s Iraq, and it has endured ever since while other citadels of state have withered. “We are an institution which represents all Iraqis and we have never been a trumpet for anyone,” Izzat said.
In 2012 — a year of relative calm — Izzat decided to assemble the orchestra in a public square in Baghdad. The symphony it played attracted expatriates from all over the world and was hailed as a moment when culture and unity transcended Iraq’s woes.
“People wanted to come to us and enjoy the music and forget about what is happening in the street,” he said. “We Iraqis are people who love to live and want peace but our problems are caused by politicians who want to create division in order to rule.”
Izzat said he too rued the lack of other symbols of Baghdad’s recent past. Occasionally he makes his way to the Shahbander cafe near the river’s edge, which has been a sanctuary for writers, poets, singers and painters for at least 70 years. And for 51 of them, Haj Mohammad has run the cafe, which stands next to the site of a book fair that has been held most Fridays for all that time.
The cafe’s walls are covered with photographs chronicling Iraq’s modern history — a faded shot of Bell alongside an image of the coronation of Iraq’s last monarch, King Faisal. There are politicians at sports carnivals, tribesmen from the southern marshes and proud graduate classes.
Next to the entrance are five more contemporary photographs, of Haj Mohammad’s sons who were all killed by a massive car bomb that targeted the book market eight years ago. “This is all we have left,” he said as customers queued to pay for their tea. “All around us is history,” he added, pointing at the framed memories. “It’s not just about our [family] history. This is about society.”
“All that we knew has been overwhelmed since we were occupied by the Americans. We have felt like we were undressed. We don’t see people buying books, or even textiles any more. We know longer know what is coming for us, or when. Back in the 1950s, we weren’t just living, we were competing with the rest of the world.”
The book fair on Montanabe Street is not as popular as it was. Once a place where all manner of fiction classics could be picked up for small change, religious texts and comic books now seem more prolific. “But you still won’t find anything else like it,” Haj Mohammad said. “It needs to be protected.”
In a palace on the edge of the Green Zone, General Abdul Amir Al Sammari, the man in charge of protecting Baghdad, was upbeat. There had been no major explosions inside the capital’s borders for 10 days and the battle over the horizon had been going better lately.
While state security forces had played a role in the improvement, the general said the dominant reason had been the performance of militia units, who work alongside the military, but often take primacy over them. Iraq’s security tsars largely endorse the role of the militias, known as the Popular Mobilisation Forces or locally as Hashd Al Shaabi, whose numbers are thought to be as high as 200,000 and who nominally come under the authority of the prime minister’s office. Most of the militia groups are Shiites, directly supported by Iran, and their authority is rooted in a call to arms from Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s top cleric, last June.
“From January to June last year, we were isolated and alone,” Sammari said of army units in Baghdad, which at the time were being besieged by increasingly muscular Daesh forces on Baghdad’s western outskirts. “Then came the fatwa of the Marja [Iraq’s highest Shiite religious authority]. As soon as that happened, the street was with us.”
Last month, when Iraq’s military withdrew from Ramadi allowing Daesh to take full control of the city, the militias were sent to surround the city. The pattern had already been set in smaller battles elsewhere in the country earlier this year: whenever the state fails, a parallel force steps into the fray.
Sammari acknowledged that Iraq’s military has rarely had the upper hand in turf wars with Daesh, but claimed cooperation was improving. “It is true that lots of splits have happened that have weakened the morale of the military. We are trying to avoid the forces working as separate units and to unify. It is starting to happen.”
The tussle for power between the ailing state forces and the ascendant irregulars clearly rankles security chiefs, as it does many of Iraq’s politicians. “Any nationalist must believe that the military is the strongest part of the state’s security,” said Sammari. “Anyone who says otherwise is delusional.”
Asked about regular complaints from Iraq’s Sunnis — who lost power when Saddam was ousted — that the Hashd Al Shaabi have consolidated the hold of their rival sect on the country, Sammari responded: “When will they accept that they lost?”
On the other side of Baghdad in the district of Ghazaliya, the leader of the country’s largest Sunni institution has regularly warned of the dangers of the state being subjugated. A spokesman for the Sunni Waqf, Kutaiba Al Falahi, said a failing political process was keeping Iraq’s disenfranchised Sunnis on the sidelines, allowing Daesh to try to claim a role as their de facto representatives.
“Anbar is outside of state control and the Kurds aren’t interested in Iraq as it was drawn a century ago,” he said. “Almost everyone we speak to wants a form of federalism. They want their basic needs filled. The solution lies in real autonomy and authorities for the provinces.
In Fallujah, 20 miles west of Baghdad and the closest city to the capital held by the Islamists, a local doctor who uses the name Abu Saleh said hope of the state resuming control had evaporated. “I have no faith in the government, Sunnis or Shiite,” he said. “They are the ones who put us in the situation we are in now. The majority of people in Fallujah aren’t with Daesh but some are tired and scared of the Army. At least they have their homes now and their kids can go to school. They don’t want to be begging in the streets or begging the government to let them into Baghdad. If we have Sunni tribes who will come inside the city and fight Daesh, we would feel safer.”
Al Falahi said the plight of refugees from Anbar showed the standing of the broader Sunni community in the eyes of the state. “We are all being labelled [as Daesh supporters]. We need the government to look at us like humans. There are refugees [from Ramadi] sitting at the gates of Baghdad and they are not being allowed in, the old the young and the sick, living in tents in this heat, because they don’t trust us. It would be better if the Americans came back. We can’t run the country ourselves.”
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
