When sun sets, Baghdad a city of mixed fortune

Self-imposed curfew
Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, violence and crime have forced many Baghdad residents to hunker down at home beginning in the late afternoon. If they had electricity, many spent the long winter nights huddled around the TV or heaters. They spent their summer nights on rooftops to escape the city’s unforgiving heat.

Many are afraid of the dark. In a city once known throughout the Arab world for its busy night life, the setting of the sun now meant criminal gangs and death squads prowling for prey on dark streets, and jittery soldiers at checkpoints becoming nervous — and occasionally trigger happy.

“Night and darkness still fill us with fear,” said Mohammed Maguid, a 30-year-old civil servant from the mostly Shiite eastern Baghdad district of Baladiyat. “They make us think of the killings.”

It’s a time when people tend to pace or bite their nails. Breathing quickens. What passes for routine during the day becomes complicated and fraught with danger at night.

The sight of U.S. Army Strykers, for example, inspires awe even in daylight, but the giant eight-wheel fighting vehicles look a great deal more menacing in the twilight as they perilously speed past motorists eager to go home but stuck in traffic.

At a mass wedding party recently held at a Baghdad hotel, the host pleaded with guests to settle down quickly so the party gets under way and everyone can go home before dark.

“Settle down please, time is not on our side,” he told the 70 couples and their guests.

The call for the sunset prayers serves as the final warning that night has arrived.

Despite the resurgent nightlife in Shiite areas, reminders of the war are never far off — and the Imam Kazim shrine is no exception.

Prayers and war sounds
The recital of Quranic verses blaring from the shrine’s broadcast system mingled one recent evening with the rattle of gunfire and the scream of a warplane invisible in the night sky.

Hadi Mizban / AP Iraqi men smoke water pipes in the Kazimiyah neighborhood in Baghdad on Saturday evening.

News of a deadly bombing in Karradah in the early evening of Dec. 5 traveled quickly to Kazimiyah, forcing some storekeepers to close earlier than usual and the streets to empty.

The bomb in a parked car along the busiest stretch of Karradah’s commercial heart killed 18 people and wounded 38.

It was not a particularly heavy death toll by Iraq’s grim standards, but enough to undermine the neighborhood’s soaring confidence.

“Karradah is sad,” said Karim Mohsen, who lost a friend in the blast. “I rushed to help him immediately after the blast, but one of his legs was missing. I looked for it, but could not find it. He died before I could see him in the hospital the next day.”

Soon after the bombing, storekeepers swept broken glass and debris in the darkness. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, people looked subdued. Many sat and drank coffee, watching others shop for groceries or walk briskly home along side streets.

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