FALLUJAH, Iraq — A couple of streets away from the new buildings and the noisy main street of the desert city of Fallujah, once stood a sports stadium. The goal posts are long gone and the stands have rotted away years ago. Now, it’s covered in tombstones.
“This is the cemetery of the martyrs,” said Kamil Jassim Mohammed, 70, a custodian of the cemetery since 2004, when the first graves were dug for those killed when US troops fought Iraqi militias. “I stopped counting how many people are buried here, but there are hundreds, thousands of martyrs.”
As Iraq marks the 20th anniversary of the US-led invasion that deposed dictator Saddam Hussein, an army of ghosts stalks the living. The dead and the mutilated shadow everyone in this Country.
The United States invaded Iraq as part of its “war on terror” announced by President George W. Bush after the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001. Bush and members of his administration claimed that Hussein was manufacturing and concealing weapons of mass destruction, although no evidence was ever found. Some US officials also said Hussein had ties to al Qaeda, which intelligence agencies later denied.
Today, Iraq is a very different place. It is a much freer society than it was under Hussein and one of the most open countries in the Middle East, with multiple political parties and a largely free press.
Still, conversations with more than 50 Iraqis offered an often unsettling portrait of an oil-rich nation that should be fine, but where most people don’t feel safe or see their government as anything more than a corruption machine. .
Many Iraqis see a bleak economic future because, despite its wealth of natural resources, the country’s energy revenues have been spent mostly in the vast public sector, lost to corruption, or squandered on large projects left unfinished. . Relatively little has been invested in transforming public infrastructure or delivering services.
“We know Iraq is rich and we expected it to get better,” said Mohammed Hassan, a 37-year-old communications engineer and father of three who oversees the laying of internet lines in a middle-class neighborhood in the capital Baghdad. He earns $620 a month. “But we didn’t get what we expected.”
Iraq remains indelibly marked by a civil war, an insurgency and the near-constant unrest sparked by the invasion, which continued even after US troops withdrew in 2011. Wave after wave of fighting gave way to political strife, and the country never fully stabilized. Two major cities—Mosul and Fallujah—have been largely destroyed, and damage is visible in almost every major city in central and northern Iraq.
Some 200,000 civilians were killed by US forces, al Qaeda militants, Iraqi insurgents or the Islamic State terrorist group, reports the Cost of War project based at Brown University in Rhode Island. At least 45,000 members of the Iraqi military and police forces and at least 35,000 Iraqi insurgents also lost their lives, and tens of thousands more were left with life-changing injuries.
On the US side, some 4,600 US soldiers and 3,650 US contractors died in Iraq, and many more survived, but with physical and mental scars.
Iraq today is a very different place than the one the Americans found in 2003.
About half of the population of 45 million were born after 2000 and did not experience the restrictions and frequent brutality of life under Hussein, who was captured by US forces in late 2003 and, after an Iraqi trial, executed.
The perceptions of Iraqi youth are shaped by the violence that followed the US-led invasion and by disappointment that their country is not living up to the hopes raised for a more open society.
For many Iraqis, it’s hard to appreciate the positive changes when more than one in three young people is unemployed, according to the World Bank and the International Labor Organization. There are few private sector jobs and not enough government jobs for Iraq’s rapidly growing population.
About a quarter of Iraqis live at or below the poverty line, says Iraq’s Ministry of Planning.
The weakness of the Iraqi state after the US-led invasion made it fertile ground for powers in the region and beyond to cultivate their geopolitical ambitions, including Iran, Turkey and the United States itself.
But Iran proved to be the best-versed in exerting influence in Iraq. It spurred the creation of a parallel military force, and these mostly Shiite militias have tens of thousands of fighters, including some loyal to Tehran. Many Iraqis accuse the militias and Iran of undermining Iraq’s sovereignty and democracy because many of them operate outside of Iraq’s military leadership and because many militias are linked to political parties, giving politics a violent edge.
Most worrisome to many Iraqis, however, is increasingly entrenched government corruption. Transparency International ranks Iraq 157th out of 180 countries on its corruption index.
Sajad Jiyad, an Iraqi political analyst and non-resident fellow at the Century Foundation, a US think tank, and other experts say that every party has tried to grab as much of the loot of Iraq’s wealth and power as possible, and that corruption has become so extensive that it is not just ministerial posts that are allocated by party; parties also control many lower-level jobs and contracts associated with a Ministry and use them to reward supporters or gain political favors.
To get a government job, many Iraqis have to know someone who is high up in a ministry or political party, or have to pay someone in a party or department where they want to work, or both. This system, which has become widespread in recent years, has put a price tag on many jobs, say anti-corruption officials and members of Parliament.
Injustice is a word that comes up in almost every interview with ordinary Iraqis. They use it to describe the system of paying for jobs and the difficulty of obtaining any official document without paying something extra to the person who gives it to you; they use it to describe how some neighborhoods have contaminated water—or no water at all.
Even the most basic demand that people make of the government — that it guarantee their security on a day-to-day basis — is not taken for granted everywhere in Iraq. In Diyala, a largely rural province northeast of Baghdad, more than 40 people have been killed in sectarian killings since January.
In a corner of the Fallujah cemetery lie the 27 members of the Dhahi family who died when a US plane bombed their home on April 6, 2004, during heavy fighting.
One surviving family member, Waleed Dhahi, now 23, was found alive in the rubble. His immediate family—his father, his mother, three brothers and a sister—were not so lucky. He lost an eye and has shrapnel embedded in his leg.
“My opinion of the Americans is negative, because if someone comes and kills my family and I don’t have any power to fight them, that leaves a hate,” he said.
Falih Hassan contributed reporting to this article.
By: Alissa J. Rubin
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/world/middleeast/iraq-war-20th-anniversary.html, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-24 16:10:07
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