Rebuilding Iraq: Baghdad

RealClearWorld presents a special series of original, exclusive blog posts by the boots on the ground in Iraq - Baghdad, Anbar Province and beyond. These bloggers include American Marines, soldiers, support personnel and government administrators. The posts also feature exclusive, on-location photographs of Iraqi lives as seen through the lenses of the bloggers.

These posts are provided exclusively to RealClearWorld by the U.S. Department of State. The views expressed in these posts are the bloggers' own sentiments.

Rebuilding Iraq

Part Four: Baghdad

It’s 117 degrees, you’re 8 or 10 years old, what’s the most fun thing to do? Go in the water, right? Or you’re 20 years old, madly in love, and desperately want a place to go and sit with your boyfriend/girlfriend without all the relatives around. Where can you go? How about a big park with lots of open space and benches? With plenty of places to hide?

Down at the end of the Karada peninsula, right along the Tigris river, the Iraqi government built a park in 2003, just before the war, that quickly became a popular entertainment destination for Baghdad residents. They came by the thousands to enjoy its two large lakes, playgrounds, open areas for walking, kiosks selling food, and even music festivals at night. Damaged and then looted during and after the war, the park was reopened by the Ministry of Tourism sometime after the initial fighting stopped, but the violence of 2005-06 made it impossible for people to get out an enjoy such luxuries as a park.

Again, the facilities were looted and deteriorated to the point that the lakes drained out into the river, rusting paddle boats and jet-skis collected in a corner graveyard, and nobody could enjoy it. 

The brigade I work for set out to do something about this and put together a reconstruction project to renovate the pumps, refurbish many of the facilities, and get the park ready for people to use it again.  Our contribution was to help broker a deal between the Ministry of Tourism and the next door University of Baghdad to resolve a property dispute, and then to help in several small ways to get the project completed. 

Finally, on Friday August 22, everything was ready.  This was in Karada district, and the district council there organized a big district festival.  Officially, it was called Karada Day, although it really took place in the late afternoon and evening.  (We fondly called it Karada-palooza, although Karada-vaganza was also thrown around.)

The festivities started with a “marathon” -- actually an 8 kilometer run through the streets of Karada ending up at the park. We got there around 4:30 in the afternoon and the first runners began arriving around 5:30 p.m., having run for the better part of an hour in 115 degree heat! 

The only-in-Iraq part of the run came next.  After the first few runners crossed the finish line, here came several hundred more, escorted by a phalanx of motorcycle cops and police trucks belching fumes into the air for the runners to breathe. 

Everybody -- strong runners, wheelchair runners, kids gasping their way to the finish line, motorcycles, police trucks, even fire trucks -- tried to fit through the narrow finish line.  Runners were careening off of pick-up trucks, wheelchairs collided with motorcycles, and race officials desperately tried to orchestrate the finish while dancing around the vehicles and runners. 

Miraculously, nobody was hurt, and the runners were soon parading around proudly to the applause of many guests.

The inclusion of so many wheelchair runners was a nice touch, though it was sobering to realize that most of these participants were men who had lost one or both legs, most likely to terrorist violence. 

Once the race was over, there were the usual speeches and ribbon-cutting that you would expect at an event like this.  A small marching band played an Iraqi anthem, kids in costumes danced an Iraqi folkloric dance, and artists showed their wares at a small exhibit set up in the grass.  Many of the runners, at least the boys, decided to test out the lake and found it greatly to their liking!  One enterprising young man managed to get one of the jet-skis working and took turns giving rides to the younger kids.  And once the formalities were over, people stayed for hours into the evening, and as we were leaving just after the sun went down, we could see hundreds of parents, children, and people of all ages streaming into the park. 

In the language of post-conflict reconstruction, this was an important “return to normalcy” event.  That residents of Baghdad could and did gather in such large and enthusiastic numbers for such a visible event really brought home how much security has improved in the capital and how strongly most of the people here want to live their lives free of worry over their basic security. We were not sure how this big event would turn out but as we left we knew it had been enormously successful in ways we couldn’t have predicted.

Read the Entire Series at RCW's Rebuilding Iraq Blog