A few hours outside Baghdad in the middle of Iraq’s vast western desert is a sight that could understandably be mistaken for a mirage: a long, sandy beach filled with thousands of people swimming and dancing barefoot under the hot sun without apparent care.
A disc jockey — “Mr D.J.,” he calls himself — is shouting into a microphone over a thumping Syrian dance song and blurts out something remarkable in its ordinariness.
“A shoutout to everyone from Baghdad!” he says in Arabic.
“Yeah!” responds the crowd that has gathered around him.
“Everyone from Adhamiya and Sadr City who came from Baghdad, show me what you got!” Mr D.J. yells, referring to two neighborhoods in the capital — the first almost exclusively Sunni, the second nearly entirely Shiite.
In response, energetic dancing breaks out all around, and Sunnis and Shiites share a rare moment of careless bliss together.
It is amazing, but it is real: For the first time since the outbreak of the sectarian war in 2006, Iraq is enjoying a beach season.
The water at Lake Habbaniya in Anbar Province is muddy, and today, a sandstorm has blotted out the sun. Back home, few people have air conditioning or dependable electricity. And already this month, hundreds of Iraqis have died in the violence that continues to envelop the country.
All that, say the sunbathers, is why a day at the beach is so important.
“I’m here to get away — from the bombs in Baghdad, from the sound of generators,” said Aya Alshemari, a 22-year-old college student who, despite wearing a modest T-shirt and jeans, was drawing the gazes of dozens of male beachgoers. “We’re here to have a good time. There’s no difference between Shiite and Sunni. We are all Iraqis.”
Most people had driven their cars right onto the sand, pulling up next to the water. And because it is Iraq, each vehicle has been carefully checked for explosives and every beachgoer frisked for a suicide bomb vest.
On this particular August day, though, there is nothing more harmful than 46°C heat and high-calorie food: beef and lamb kebabs, biryani, fried kibbeh. A few young men take furtive sips of cold beer.
First Lieutenant Uras Saad, an Iraqi army officer who is responsible for the lake’s security checkpoint, said there had been no acts of violence at the beach since it reopened this summer.
But the area has not always been calm. Lake Habbaniya is in Iraq’s Sunni Arab heartland, and until a year and a half ago the area had been a stronghold for al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an insurgent group that has made a specialty of brutal attacks against Shiites across the country.
That troubled history seems far away at this particular moment. A young woman wearing a black T-shirt and blue jeans has just emerged from the water. Her heavy clothes may not make for the most comfortable swimwear, but as she emerges from the lake, she is still smiling happily.
Like most women here, she is showing little more skin than her bare feet. Some women wade into the water wearing the hijab and the abaya. Most of the young men go shirtless with baggy shorts.
“I want to wear less, but my brothers get mad at me,” said the woman, Maha Abdul-Wahab, 23.
The beach is divided into two sections, one reserved for families, the other for young men.
It is the family section where most of the young women sit, usually under the watchful eye of an older brother. And it is to the family section that the gazes of many of the unaccompanied young men return every few minutes.
RSS