8/8/08

"Baghdad looks so beautiful from the sky, the twists and turns of the Tigris, the bridges and inter-twining highways engineered to perfection make this city so special. I'm normally asleep during take-offs and landings but this time I couldn't stop staring. It looks so peaceful it takes a while for it to sink in that this place has been ravaged by war/terrorism for the last 5 years. It's exactly 20 years to the day of the end of the Iraq-Iran war and its hard to imagine what Baghdad could have been without that war, without Saddam and without the Ba'ath Party.

I arrived to Baghdad just before sunset and from inside the plane the city looked busy with cars all over the place but by the time I got out of the airport it was 8:30pm and the city turned into a ghost town. The only other cars I saw, except for the few exceptions, where military or police. The one thing I immediately noticed was there was a lot less soldiers on the street since the last time I was here 4 months ago. This is a good sign of course, less soldiers means a less tense city and every checkpoint from Baghdad to Najaf was manned by polite soldiers who were upbeat and always trying to crack a joke."
Eye Raki