After 15 bloody years, Baghdad is back, but badly wounded
Nabih Bulos writes for Los Angeles Times:
For weeks now, Capt. Ghassan Ghani and his team of workers, cranes and long-bed trucks have stripped away what has been a fixture of this city since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion: the 12-foot concrete barriers lining Baghdad’s major roads and buildings as protection from suicide car bomb attacks.
Ghani supervised one Tuesday evening as a crane lifted one of the slabs, known as T-walls, that had long hulked over a road in downtown Baghdad. As the T-wall swung away, a shock of green emerged — an unkempt swath of palm trees adorning the corner of a government building.
It’s another sign of a city shedding off the vestiges of 15 blood-soaked years that made Baghdad’s name a byword for death, and which culminated last year in the destruction of the militant group Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq.
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