Sunday, September 21, 2003
Surprisingly enough, this is a positive story on the front page of the Boston Globe, about a family in the poor area of Baghdad now known as Sadr City (formerly Saddam City). Good to see this on the front page of a generally Iraqysterical, anti-Bush paper, although it does take until one opens and turns to page 28 of the print edition before one reads that the mortar shell that killed the family's three children came from the Fedayeen Saddam, not the Coalition.
Boston.com / News / World / Middle East / Amid strife, Iraqi family finds hope
Their good will toward the American-led occupation authority -- despite the personal suffering wrought by the war -- might help explain why this sprawling Shi'ite Muslim slum has not risen up in revolt and in quiet ways has provided a bulwark of support for coalition forces.
"The Americans did us a great favor by getting rid of Saddam," Adnan Hamid said. "We owe them. And I don't think they will abandon us."
And read this. They don't want us gone. They have patience, and the electricity was on for four straight days - longer than it ever was under the Ba'ath.
The military says it has already spent $600,000 in Sadr City rebuilding a town hall, a municipal office building, and three police stations. The results so far: Recently electricity ran uninterrupted for four days, unheard of during the Ba'ath Party regime. An independent municipal government now collects daily the garbage which perpetually choked the area's streets.
And in the Hamids' quarter, at least, the nightly gunshots and fear of crime have subsided. Adnan Hamid and his friends sit in white chairs on the roadside long after midnight, talking politics and work.
After the war, Hamid and his neighbors hesitated to discuss politics, the weekly visits from regime intelligence agents still fresh in their minds. Now, they break into laughter as talk turns to the hoped-for capture of Hussein.
Iraqis, Adnan believes, will show the same patience with national reconstruction that they have in painstakingly reclaiming their personal lives.
"You have to give the Americans time," Hamid said. "The infrastructure is old, pipes are rusty, power plants are broken. You can't fix it all in a day."...
"Why would we fight the Americans?" Adnan said, laughing and waving his hand to take in his wife, daughter, sisters, and home. "They did us the greatest favor of all."
