When sun sets, Baghdad a city of mixed fortune

updated 5:45 p.m. ET Dec. 11, 2007

BAGHDAD - Strings of bulbs festooning the Imam Kazim shrine’s four majestic minarets light up the sky over Baghdad’s Shiite Kazimiyah neighborhood, attracting thousands of nighttime worshippers.

Coffee houses and restaurants are packed with customers along nearby streets, where turbaned clerics, chador-clad women and families buy furniture, toys and clothes in teeming shops. The district’s gold market, the largest in the city, does brisk business until well after dusk.

But a drive from Kazimiyah over an unlit Tigris River bridge into Azamiyah, a Sunni stronghold, reveals only darkness and no signs of life along the main road. What nightlife does exist stays strictly within a walled area of about two square miles, heavily patrolled by Americans. One glaring exception: Kasrah, a Shiite enclave, with its lively outdoor market and coffee houses.

Night is the time when the Shiite dominance of the capital becomes most apparent following the sectarian “battle of Baghdad” that displaced tens of thousands of Sunnis and reshaped a city where the two sects had lived in relative peace.

As violence has eased over the past month or so, some neighborhoods, mostly Shiite, have regained much of their old confidence. Residents shop and eat out until as late as 9 p.m., more than four hours after sunset. Shiite neighborhoods enjoy the protection of both Shiite militiamen and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces.

Karradah, a Shiite area in central Baghdad, has come closer to normalcy than any other Baghdad neighborhood. Thousands have been crowding its commercial heart after dark, shopping for the coming Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha in its colorfully lighted boutiques, dining on freshly cooked kebabs and falafel or buying fruits and vegetables from street stands.

Games played on bomb shelters
In some Shiite areas, nighttime can find teenagers playing soccer on the roof of a bomb shelter or Iraqi soldiers shooting pool next to a checkpoint. One evening in Kazimiyah last week, men from a local religious music band were on the street beating drums. Others were smoking water pipes, getting haircuts or shopping for electronics.

By contrast, many Sunni districts, particularly west of the Tigris, continue to look like war zones. Sunni areas saw a disproportionate amount of Baghdad’s fighting, most recently a U.S.-backed effort by residents to expel the most extremist of Sunni groups, al-Qaida in Iraq.

Hadi Mizban / AP Iraqi men beat on drums at the fruit market in the Kazimiyah neighborhood in Baghdad on Saturday evening.

The Shiite-dominated government, complain some Sunnis, is always slower in devoting resources to their areas, and city workers have been afraid to enter Sunni neighborhoods to sweep the streets, collect trash or fix power cables and sewage pipes.

In Sunni areas where security has improved, residents now venture onto the streets during the day — traveling to work, shopping for food or visiting relatives. But signs of life mostly vanish by 6 p.m., with many people fearful of being kidnapped by a lurking Shiite militia or a resurgent al-Qaida in Iraq.

Members of the two Muslim sects once lived near each other in the same Baghdad neighborhoods. Nowadays, they live strictly in separate districts, carefully patrolled and ringed by tall, concrete barrier walls in some places. Shiite victories have shrunken Sunni areas, which often look deserted because many of its inhabitants fled Baghdad for exile in Syria or Jordan.

Travel between neighborhoods, a risky endeavor even during daylight hours, is rare after sunset — particularly when it involves a trip to or through a district inhabited by followers of the other sect.

Taxi driver Anmar Abdul-Hadi accepts rides only inside his neighborhood of Ghazaliyah, a former Sunni insurgent stronghold in western Baghdad. Even with that, the 30-year-old father of two makes a point of returning home by 8 p.m.

“I leave Ghazaliyah only in emergencies, and even then I don’t venture out too far,” he said.

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