Blogging from Baghdad
Two Iraqis who live in Baghdad blog about what life there is like now.
From Salam Pax on Dear Raed
“The most insane city, I just can’t imagine a city where so much explosive metal is lying around. The latest in the line of stories which at the moment could only happen in Baghdad is an explosion the Karadah street, just off the main road. A photographer walks down that road and sees someone lying on the street with loads of blood around him and missing one leg. No one wants to get near him. The guy had a hand grenade in his pocket, the idiot. And somehow the detonator goes off, boom, bye-bye leg. The funny thing was that there were some people around the guy who looked around very nervously.
No one would tell you what was going on. Until you meet the friendly small shop owner who knows everybody. He says the actual explosion happened in a tea-shop down the road where lots of no-good types meet. And the guy’s hand grenade blew up in that tea-shop but his “friends†were so anxious that no one comes in that tea-shop, snoops around and finds god knows what, they clean the place up real fast, drag him to the other end of the street and leave him there.
Why would he have a hand grenade in his pocket? Well, many reasons. I don’t think he is the fedayeen type, like that taxi driver I met a couple of days ago. It just happens to be the weapon of choice for house robberies, you can’t say no to a man with a hand grenade, can you?”
From Zainab on Real Women Online. (Edited slightly – typos, syntax, spelling)
“When you think thoroughly about it you find it logical & reasonable, during the past regime there were safety & work chances (money) BUT, THERE WAS NO FREEDOM, now there is freedom without safety or public services with very very mini work opportunities , so normally they prefer the past time of Saddam. They just want to live their life that’s all, they even start wishing they were born in very poor country which doesn’t draw anybody’s attention.
Now we keep hearing news about incidents of Americans being missing or killed in different parts of Baghdad or other provinces, also the Iraqi popular resistance movement have called other liberation movements abroad to come and work together for Iraq’s liberation, sparks, sparks, of big fire why all that should happen? All you have to do is forming a decent real government! Is that hard to be done? Or has it been postponed for some hidden reasons which we can’t realize now but maybe later on we can, only God knows.”