Some Good News From Iraq...For a Change...

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Notice, this is not an AP article.

Long, but good read:

Families' lives measure pace of progress in Iraq

Thu Mar 17, 6:14 AM ET   Top Stories - USATODAY.com
 

By John Diamond, Sabah al-Anbaki, Mohammed Hayder Sadeq and Elliot Blair Smith, USA TODAY


Until recently, it was a bad sign in the al-Taie household when the generator went silent. It generally meant thieves had stolen the family's power source.


Lately, the silence signals something else: Electricity is flowing again to their middle-class neighborhood in Baghdad, so the generator has switched off automatically.


Two years after the U.S.-led invasion that brought down Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime, progress for typical Iraqi families is measured in small increments.


The al-Taie family has nearly continuous electricity. For the al-Zubaidi family, lucrative jobs in the new government mean an improved lifestyle. But the Muhaisens, a poor family, have not benefited much; they complain about the escalating prices of food and the dangerous roads, which keep them from tending to family graves in a city 100 miles away.


Some changes are apparent: Streets in the capital are lined with fruit markets, furniture sellers, sidewalk kebab stands and neighborhood coffee shops. The number of cars in Baghdad has more than tripled in the past two years. U.S. troops remain a regular presence, but Iraqis increasingly regard the troops as part of the scenery. "I like the guns I see with the American soldiers when they pass in the neighborhood," says 10-year-old Ahmed Abdullah al-Zubaidi.


The outside world has penetrated what was once a closed society. Most homes have satellite television, which brings in Arab news stations and Western programs. Satellite dishes were outlawed under Saddam. Thousands of people now carry cell phones, also forbidden by the former regime. Computers and televisions are pouring into a country starved by years of war and sanctions.


Defying the odds, about 8 million Iraqis came out to vote in national elections Jan. 30. Wednesday, the newly elected Transitional National Assembly met for the first time. People can now speak freely.


Some Iraqis still have not fully adjusted to freedom. When 75-year-old Radiyah Abbas Ali, the matriarch of the al-Zubaidi family, speaks of Saddam, she lowers her voice and looks left and right, as if someone were listening in. "The most important thing is that we got rid of Saddam," says Ali, a mother of 13. "Deaths after deaths, this is what Saddam offered. He did not give us anything."


Political and economic freedom have come at a cost. The al-Taie family can afford four cell phones. But, worried about constant violence, they use the phones mostly to keep track of their extended family. "Explosions are everywhere, and we need to be sure that everyone, especially the children, is safe," says Zaid al-Taie, 38, an engineer who works for a private contractor.


Insurgents continue nearly daily attacks, often with devastating suicide bombs that target Iraqi police and soldiers. Government officials are frequently assassinated. Oil production is struggling, hampered by both inefficiency and sabotage. Lines at gas stations are still long. The Baghdad airport - once named after Saddam - is closed to most commercial flights.


Saddam's reign of terror is over, but most Iraqis are still nervous, vacillating between fear and hope. "If we surrender to fear and terror, we will lose," says Amira Ahmed, 43, the daughter of the al-Zubaidis.


Despite the dangers, Amira commutes from a middle-class neighborhood in Baghdad to teach at a school in Sadr City, a Shiite Muslim slum of garbage-strewn streets. "Nowadays, my fellow teachers come to school from various and distant places with greater determination to continue despite the risk," she says firmly.


The experiences of individual Iraqis can vary dramatically based on ethnicity, location and luck. Some members of the former ruling Baath Party have seen their families' status and income plummet. Some families had loved ones imprisoned or executed under Saddam, losses that cannot be made up by his ouster. There are wealthy Iraqis riding the wave of economic freedom and poor Iraqis trying to cope with rising prices and the loss of the Saddam-era safety net.


USA TODAY visited several families to gauge how Iraqis have fared in the two years since Saddam was ousted. These are their stories.


The al-Taie family


The al-Taie household is a cluster of three generations, a common arrangement in Iraq (news - web sites). The patriarch, Fadhil Abdul Ridha al-Taie, 74, is a Shiite; his wife, Khawla Assim al-Rawi, 66, is a Sunni Muslim. They share several modest houses inside a walled compound with their three sons, all married. There are three grandchildren and two more on the way.

   



The family got the land in 1965 from the government, which steered choice jobs and land to Sunnis. Khawla is retired from a Baghdad bank where she worked as a branch manager. The job and the connections it brought gave her access to property in the quiet al-Harthiya neighborhood.

The 9,149-square-foot lot is packed. There is one large home flanked by two smaller ones, each two stories high. The large house has a small garden in front.

Family meals are group affairs, and the Iraqi diet, with a few exceptions, would require no major adjustments for Westerners. Saddam's demise has not changed mealtime for this family. For breakfast, there are eggs, cheese, bread, jam, honey, tea and milk. For afternoon and evening meats: grilled meats, especially chicken and lamb, along with salad, yogurt, vegetables, rice and fruit.

Various family members contribute separate dishes during meals. They also help one another with cooking, shopping, cleaning and the family budget.

For dinner, a white tablecloth covers the wooden dining table. The three youngsters - Ihssan, 11; Lina, 9; and Merriam, 6 - eat at a small plastic table and cheerfully ignore increasingly strident demands by the adults to be quiet. "Stop it!" demands Ali Fadhil Abdul Ridha, 39, eldest of the three sons. His son Ihssan teases back: "Or what?"

 
Essam al-Sudani, AFP
Members of the al-Taie family watch television at home.
 

A beat-up 1979 Datsun is parked out front. The father and the three sons take turns using it for shopping or visiting friends. "We would like to change it, but we don't have enough money," Fadhil says.

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There are many such cars on Baghdad's streets, though since the war there has been an influx of updated imports, including Mercedes-Benzes, a brand largely restricted to the dictator's inner circle in earlier times.

Fadhil is retired, but two of his sons work for the government and draw salaries of several hundred dollars a month. Under Saddam, government officials earned significantly less.

Despite the abundance, there are daily reminders that all is not normal. The extended family takes part in an informal crime watch. They are on the lookout for burglars and also kidnappers who have been making a brisk business out of abducting people, particularly children, and holding them for ransom. Last year a 12-year-old in the neighborhood was snatched and held for a week before being released on $30,000 ransom - several years' income for a middle-class Iraqi family.

The al-Taies have one landline telephone but have purchased four mobile phones for security's sake. "We need to contact each other when we are out of the home," Ali says. Ihssan, Ali's son, lives close enough to his school to walk. But he is driven there. "We prefer to send him by bus in order to be sure that there is always someone taking care of him," Ali says.

Ihssan's school has improved. He is getting training on computers the school has acquired since the U.S. invasion. "We are part of this world, and we should catch the developments out there, or at least some of them," Ihssan's grandfather says cautiously.

The extended family keeps the household going on a total of about $80 per week in expenses, which covers food, clothing and other costs. The home is paid for. The elder couple used to receive less than a dollar per month in pensions. Now their combined pensions are about $215 per month, and their children's salaries add about $400 more per month.

During the Saddam era, the al-Taie family was sufficiently well off to attend various social clubs, including the Ministry of Oil club. Their lifestyle then was supported largely by money generated by Khawla's sale of her gold jewelry.

These days, because of safety concerns, family members don't go out much. They have satellite TV and keep the channel turned mainly to news stations such as Al-Iraqiya. Satellite dishes were banned under Saddam. Now families can choose from hundreds of channels.

"My husband doesn't like to watch movies or songs," says Khawla, the grandmother. "This has been a problem for me since (our) engagement."

The family members seem more worried about the present than the future. They are optimistic that the insurgency will eventually be defeated, but that doesn't mean they are casual about stepping outside. "From time to time, we hear some shooting," Fadhil says. "I think it is between the police and the thieves or insurgents ... nearby."

Though the family members are observant Muslims, they regard themselves as secular, and they decry what they see as creeping religious extremism in Iraq's daily life.

Suicide bombers were almost unheard of in Iraq. Now they are attacking almost every day, egged on by insurgent leaders and radical clerics who promise the bombers paradise as martyrs. "Those mullahs and clerics always leading people to their death, look how they are encouraging those young people to die," Khawla says.

Long suppressed by Saddam and previous Sunni-dominated governments, the majority Shiites now have political power. Most Shiite leaders are preaching tolerance, but some secular Iraqis see growing signs of fundamentalism.

One of 6-year-old Merriam's classmates covers her head with a hijaband warns Merriam not to play with the boys because they are "devils." Such peer pressure on Merriam angers Fadhil. "If it ever happens again, I need to see the principal," Fadhil tells his wife.

Western-style dress for men and women is common in Baghdad, and in families that do dress conservatively, girls generally don't wear head coverings until their teens. "Until now, no one has forced any female in this family to wear the hijab," Khawla says. "But I am sure this day will come."

The Muhaisen family

A pair of shoes made for a young girl are nailed at the entrance to the squatter's shack in central Baghdad where Zahra Khamis Muhaisen, 53, and her family live.

Two years ago, U.S. bombs rained on the city, turning the night sky red. But the dusty plastic shoes, considered a good-luck talisman in Iraq, served to keep the house and its occupants safe.

Zahra's neighbors fled the airstrikes, she says, but she and her family stood fast and came through unharmed. "Do you know why I stayed?" asks Zahra, 53, her arms muscular from work and her skin dark from the sun. "Because I believe the best place for a rock is where it lays."

It is one of many blunt assessments the hospital cleaning woman makes about life.

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When American soldiers arrived here, Zahra says, her husband ordered her to lock herself and her daughters away. "I replied: 'The Americans did not come for me. They came for Saddam.' "

Yet Zahra says postwar Iraq is neither better nor worse than during Saddam Hussein's regime.

She is a Shiite Muslim but recognizes no difference between Sunnis and Shiites. She says the ethnic rifts people speak of emerged only recently, as political posturing. For that reason, she takes no great pride in the ascendancy of Shiite political and religious leaders.

And though her husband, Ali Alaibi Karim, 60, works as a caretaker at the mosque across the street, for which he receives about $20 a month in gratuities, Zahra does not believe that religion - or religious parties - will save her and her family.

Rather, she observes, as a woman she's not allowed to attend services at the mosque. And it's her pay of about $65 a month that supports the family of eight. "When the truth is to be spoken," she says, "I speak the truth."

Zahra has four daughters and two sons. She recently withdrew her children from school because she cannot afford to send them.

About 15 years ago, Zahra took advantage of a government literacy campaign. It taught a rudimentary alphabet. "I could not stay in that program for more than one week," she says. Today, she cannot read or write more than her name and her father's name. The children can read and write. She's uncertain whether they'll go back to school. "It all depends on the money," she says. "I don't have the money."

Zahra's family eats rice and lentils, mostly. Seven chickens provide eggs for the family. Zahra says the family rarely has meat. "Forget about meat. It's too expensive." Sometimes they get food donated by the mosque or neighbors. "That is when we taste meat."

Food prices are much higher now, Zahra says. She cites increases in the price of a single egg - to the equivalent of about 10 cents, from about 4 cents before the war - and in the price of rice, to about 20 cents a pound from 6 cents.

Zahra says that her neighborhood is safe but that she doesn't feel secure walking at night and doesn't let her daughters go out. Her greatest fear is kidnappers.

She used to visit the graves of family members buried in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad. Now her daughters won't let her go because of dangers on the road.

"When things went bad on the road to Najaf, the girls stopped me from going any more," she says.

The al-Zubaidi family

In 1993, Col. Abdullah Hussein al-Zubaidi, an Iraqi army physician, was abruptly fired from his job as director of Kut Military Hospital. The charge, say his relatives, was participating in a conversation in which someone else criticized Saddam. "They arrested him and tortured him for a crime he did not commit," says his wife, Amira Ahmed al-Zubaidi.

For Abdullah, 65, regime change has brought no relief. Suffering from chronic depression, he remains in his room and does not join family discussions. He is on medication. Amira had to quit her job as a schoolteacher to take care of him.

The extended family lives in a comfortable Baghdad neighborhood. Before 1985, when Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay started confiscating land alongside the Tigris River near here, there were few strangers seen in the largely Shiite neighborhood of Zuwaiyeh. The word itself means "the corner," and refers to a sharp bend along this stretch of the Tigris.

Behind a metal gate in a yellow brick wall, the al-Zubaidis live among uncles, aunts and cousins. As with the al-Taie family, this is a three-generation household. Preteen children dart about chasing soccer balls. Matriarch Radiyah Abbas Ali, 75, slowly shuffles out the back door to see how her pickled dates, stored in a sealed drum in the backyard, are progressing.

Radiyah lost one son, Salman, in the Iran (news - web sites)-Iraq war of the 1980s.

The year before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, another son, Nazar, deserted from Saddam's 51st Mechanized Infantry Division, positioned in southern Iraq directly in the path of the coming invasion. He was caught and issued a red military identity card labeling him a deserter. It was a badge of shame in Saddam's world, one that would prevent him from getting a good job in the private sector.

Now the identification card is a badge of honor, something he shows prospective employers to prove that he was no friend of the old regime. When coalition forces crushed his unit in Basra during the opening days of the war, Nazar, 35, shouted to his family, "I won, I won!" He turns to his mother during a recent interview and says, "See, Ma, you did not lose me."

She replies, "Yes, I know, and may Allah and Ali keep you safe always."

Prayers and blessings from the Koran are framed in elaborate Arabic script in the entry hall, and portraits of the holiest Shiite imams hang on the living room wall.

In the small yard around the spacious but plain two-story home are orange trees laden with fruit, date palms and ficus trees; inside is an array of potted plants. The television is tuned to soccer matches and motorcycle races that mesmerize the children while the adults talk.

As everywhere else in Baghdad, there are safety concerns. Mortar rounds fired at the heavily fortified Green Zone across the river sometimes fall short and land in their neighborhood.

But the ouster of the dictator brought one immediate improvement. U.S. troops kicked looters out of a large building that had been used by Saddam's bodyguards. Now the place is a community center for the district. It has sports facilities and computers with Internet access.

Most of the talk is not about politics but matrimony, revolving around when Nazar, the youngest son, will marry. The women do most of the talking.

"Let us marry him off, Mother. What are we waiting for?" asks Amira Ahmed, one of Nazar's four older sisters, all of whom are teachers. "Let him collect some money, daughter," Radiyah replies.

Nazar has a future bride in mind, but his first indulgence after getting his job was the purchase of a television. Most middle-class men need to save about $1,000 before marrying, though a bride would bring a dowry to help with starting a household. The couple would live in the family compound.

Amira taught before the invasion and got her teaching job back recently. Now she earns $400 a month, much more than she used to make. Post-Saddam, government jobs pay well and are highly prized.

She says she paid a kickback to an official at the Education Ministry to land the job. Such bribes are illegal but common. "He asked me for $400, and I accepted," she says. "You know, that is the way things sometimes go."