Baghdad memories: what the first few months of the US occupation felt like to an Iraqi

On 9 April 2003, I stood on the roof of my building in Baghdad, looking at the clear sky. The city was quiet; the Americans had stopped their bombing early that morning. In the distance, I saw a helicopter, hanging low over the houses. Unlike the chubby Russian ones that we were used to, which swayed left and right like giant flying rams, this one was nimble, like an angry wasp.

Thirty-five years of Saddam Hussein’s rule had dissolved overnight, collapsing without a trace. Baghdad, that city of fear and oppression, was free for an hour, suspended between the departure of the dictator and the arrival of the occupiers.

In the years preceding the war I had been living in a small room, barely large enough to hold a single bed, a writing table and a trunk. A nook at one end housed the sink, the stove and the toilet. For decoration, I had painted one wall a bright orange-red, which amplified and radiated the hot Baghdad sunlight. The old air conditioner had died and I had no money to fix it. In the summer of 2002, the room was stifling hot, and I felt the walls were closing in on me. I hadn’t paid the rent for six months. As an architect working in private practice, I was paid $50 every few months. In the years of sanctions, I was doing ugly work for ugly people who had the money to afford their ugly houses. I wanted to leave the country, to travel and walk through the streets of different cities, but I was a military deserter, and without documentation I could not get a passport.

I had not been tortured by the mukhabarat, the regime intelligence service, nor did any of my family vanish into a mass grave, but like the rest of the nation, I was trapped with no hope and no prospects. What if, we wondered, the Leader were to become mortally ill one day? How would our lives change after his death? Would we be ruled by one of his sons? Would that be better than this? Worse? In the years before the invasion, I had felt that my life was seeping slowly away in that hot and oppressive place I called home. Now, aged 28, it seemed that a different life might be possible.

I went down to my room to listen to the news bulletin when the neighbour came knocking on my door. “The Americans are here,” he said with excitement.

“Yes, I heard on the radio that they had reached Hillah,” I said, referring to a city 60 miles south of Baghdad.

“Hillah?” the neighbour said with a grin. “They are here, down in the street.”

I went down, and I saw a few boat-like armoured amphibious vehicles spread around the intersection near my flat, as if the shores of Normandy lay just behind the buildings. They were slung with the soldiers’ large backpacks, covered in dust. Descending from one of these boats were American soldiers, like the ones we’d seen on TV, in my street, in my own city.

The soldiers spread across the road, knelt on a single knee and pointed their guns at us, the handful of people who stood watching them. Behind the soldiers came men dressed in blue vests and carrying big cameras. Their helmets bore the letters “TV”.

I sat on the kerb watching as the soldiers trained their guns at the buildings around them. One of the men in blue, tall with a bald head, and carrying two cameras with large zooms, was moving gingerly towards us, like a wildlife photographer approaching a herd of wild animals, not wanting to scare them away and yet not sure if they might charge him. He squatted a few feet in front of me and trained a long white lens at me; fuck off, I shooed him away, I didn’t want to become an item of news, another face of a defeated nation. The soldiers climbed back into their armoured boat-trucks and started driving down the road, past the national theatre and down Sadoon Street. A small crowd of men and children followed.

The armoured vehicles and the crowd moved slowly, passing in front of the Vatican embassy, where a papal diplomat, dressed in his black cassock with a purple sash around his waist, stood observing the invading army. He shook his head in disbelief and muttered to anyone who cared to listen that this was bad, that this was an illegal occupation. On the other side of the street, a chubby middle-aged Iraqi man, standing at the entrance of his shop, sputtered insults, but most of the crowd that followed the Americans was excited. The old and decaying regime had fallen. The armoured column came to a stop in front of the Meridian and Sheraton hotels, where most of the international media had set up base. In front of the hotels stood a large statue of Saddam, his right arm stretched awkwardly into the sky, inviting looks of scorn and spite from the crowd below, like someone still lingering uninvited long after the party was over.

I stood there watching, along with a few other Iraqis and a much larger crowd of foreign journalists, as a handful of enthusiastic men began banging at the plinth base of the statue with hammers and metal rods, succeeding only in cracking the marble cladding. It was taking the men a long time, and the journalists were getting bored, when one of the armoured vehicles, with a large crane on the back, started reversing into the middle of the square. A marine climbed to the top and dropped a thick rope around the neck, and then he pulled out an American flag. No, no, you can’t be doing this, I gasped, at least allow the facade of liberation to last for a day. But no, with all the arrogance of every occupying soldier throughout history, he covered the face of the defeated dictator with the flag of his victorious nation; briefly, but long enough to seal the fate of the invasion in the eyes of many.

But then, why shouldn’t he raise an American flag? Maybe in all the declarations and justifications of the war by leaders and commanders who spoke of liberation and democracy, the act of that marine was the most honest; he understood the war as a conflict between the US and Iraq – a conflict that he and his countrymen had won. It was his right to plant a flag.