Wed, Mar 09, 2011 page9

• Baghdad neighborhood welcomes fall of US-erected blast wall

  • By Jack Healy / NY Times News Service, BAGHDAD
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  It is just one wall in a city of thousands — a line of anonymous gray blocks running, like a scar, through one of Baghdad’s most violent neighborhoods.

  Built about three years ago to prevent attacks on passing military convoys, the 4.8km long blast wall in the sprawling Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City gradually took on a life of its own, becoming an emblem of people’s anger and despair at years of killing and military occupation.

  The wall may have tightened security, but it also dammed off a pocket of merchants and barbershops, cloistering about 1,500 residents of one corner of Sadr City behind a concrete curtain. Stores closed. Houses were abandoned.

  Over a mural of marshes, rivers and palm trees painted on the wall by US-financed Iraqi artists, residents spray-painted their own message: “Killing is the answer.”

  However, recently a bulldozer and crane rumbled into the neighborhood and, with little fanfare, began a task that astonished the old men and children who gathered to watch from the sidewalk — they took away the wall.

  “We called it our Berlin Wall,” said Saad Khalef, 41, as he surveyed the newly uncovered ground where the walls had stood, as crushed and pale as the skin beneath a bandage. “Now we can breathe easy. Yesterday, I felt a breeze coming through, I swear to God.”

  RESTORING NORMALCY

  Iraq’s government has been removing blast walls little by little since late 2008, trying to restore a semblance of normalcy to this bunker city of 6 million people.

  The tentative approach of the Arab League’s annual meeting — postponed from this month until May because of the region’s instability — has prompted Iraq to increase its efforts as it prepares to play host. The government has uprooted many walls inside the heavily protected Green Zone and torn down sniper netting from highway overpasses, hoping to present a less martial capital for visiting leaders.

  The walls are coming down along the eclectic Palestine Street in eastern Baghdad, with plans being developed to tear down others in Shiite neighborhoods in the city’s north.

  “We’re so happy, from the bottom of my heart,” said a woman who gave her name as Um Qasim, or mother of Qasim, as she crossed the busy thoroughfare in Sadr City that had been bisected by the wall. “I hope that they’ll give orders to lift them all.”

  There is little chance that will ever happen. Baghdad remains a maze of walls and attackers have exploited the government’s attempts to remove barriers near government offices or other high-value targets. In August 2009, huge truck bombs exploded outside the Foreign and Finance Ministries, killing scores of people in a spot that had once been protected by concrete barriers.

  On Sunday, government officials in the northeastern province of Diyala announced that they would remove all the walls ringing residential neighborhoods and public markets and reopen roads that had been blockaded for three years. Security experts in the area responded warily, predicting more suicide attacks.

  However, along Sadr City’s Gas Station Road, the dusty, prosaically named boulevard where the latest wall was being carted away, few people worried whether its removal would spur militant attacks. The neighborhood has come back to life in small and -surprising ways as violence faded and the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia loyal to the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, loosened its grip somewhat.

  Anything, residents said, was better than the tall slab that had cut them off from the rest of Sadr City.

  NEIGHBORS DIVIDED

  Neighbors complained they were cut off from family members and friends who lived on the other side of the street, that a five-minute trip to the hospital or police station could take more than an hour or two if security forces blocked the two checkpoints leading in or out of the area.

  “You couldn’t go out if the main gate was closed,” said Hussein al-Saadi, 75, who said he had lived in the area for five decades. “An open country is beautiful. This was a disaster.”

  “It was like we were in prison,” Khalid Hussein, 34, said.

  Residents said that grocery stores, barbershops and appliance stores flanking the main road began to close and people began moving to neighborhoods that were more permeable and less shaken by regular gunshots, mortar fire and the kidnapping of children.

  “All of the stores are dead,” said Hussein Faleh, 41, pointing to a row of padlocked storefronts and “For Rent” signs. “Look at them — all of them empty.”

  Hatif Odah, a local real estate broker, said home values slipped about 20 percent after the walls went up. He said he had closed his offices after the walls were erected and had only recently moved back.

  As the cranes slowly lifted the 2,500 slabs and bulldozers and work crews scraped away years of accumulated detritus, children played soccer and people handed out candy to the soldiers standing guard. A few days earlier, one resident said, they had slaughtered a sheep to celebrate.

  It is too soon to say whether any of this will help the neighborhood stitch itself back together after so many seasons of war and privation, whether the families that fled will move back or whether the local government will move back into the neighborhood to clean the streets and clear hills of trash and rubble from the empty lots. Residents said they could not see that far into the future.

  However, from his shaded fruit stand, where flies swirled around ripe tomatoes, Mustafa Qadim, 16, said he could at least see across the street for the first time. He looked out across the road, at an empty lot, a rusted steel skeleton and a building scarred by shrapnel. That was the view.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

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