.S. News & World Report, NASIRIYAH, IRAQ–It is quiet these days along the banks of the Euphrates River in this sluggish southern city. At dusk, only the clicking of nightly backgammon games at outdoor cafes and the occasional political rally punctuate the calm. This tranquillity contrasts with the Nasiriyah that Americans may recall as the place where Pfc. Jessica Lynch's 507th Maintenance Company convoy was caught in a deadly ambush. The city also was the scene of some of the heaviest clashes of the war, with American tanks and helicopters trading fire with Iraqi guerrillas. Bullet and mortar scars mark the walls of many riverfront homes.
Adam Ebadi Falleh still lives with his family and his brothers in one of these once grand homes, even though its second floor was burned out by an American tank shell. Upstairs, amid blackened walls, all that's left are the melted remains of videocassettes, electronics, and even a child's bicycle. Soon after the war, Falleh says, several Americans visited his house and pledged to help him rebuild. But then the Marines pulled out, replaced by Italian soldiers, and now he wonders what became of their promises. Falleh, who cheered Saddam Hussein's ouster, expresses disappointment with his American liberators and frets that “there is no hope.”
Having defeated a dictator, the Bush administration now faces an insidious foe: disillusionment. Many Iraqis, long accustomed to a strong-fisted central government, look to the United States to repair the war damage and restore order and predictability to their lives. As Nasiriyah's residents see it, the American occupation has yet to revive the local economy, restart state factories, or provide new jobs for the thousands of former soldiers idled by the Army's dissolution. Downtown, very few damaged buildings have been rebuilt, and even the town's amusement park, also partially in ruin, has been turned into a military base for the Italians. “The Americans promised us a lot,” says Aziz Muslim al-Sufi, who heads the Islamic Democracy Trend, a new local political party, “but didn't give us anything yet.” Adds Sheik Abdul Razaq Mohammed Sadr, a leader of one of the tribes in Nasiriyah's outskirts: “I believe a month or two will be the end of our patience.”
The threat might not be quite that urgent, but Nasiriyah is a good place to gauge the mood of ordinary Iraqis. It is the kind of place where U.S. officials expected the friendliest reception after the war–and largely got it. Deep in the Shiite heartland, the city was the victim of brutal oppression under Saddam. When the Marines arrived, there was some initial hostility sparked by the deaths of several hundred civilians during the battle for the city. But the welcome quickly grew warmer, and Nasiriyah has been spared many of Baghdad's well-publicized problems. Attacks on coalition soldiers have been rare, and the city has had electricity 24 hours a day.
Great expectations. Even here, though, goodwill has its limits. Sabah Mohsain Kadim, a high school history teacher, is exactly the type of person whose support the Americans were counting on. Trailed by Saddam's secret police for three years and briefly imprisoned, Kadim risked further punishment by watching illegal satellite television, dreaming of the day Saddam would be gone. He expresses admiration for American soldiers: “They came from across the ocean and fought the biggest dictator in the world.” But that doesn't suffice when he perceives little evidence of reconstruction in his impoverished hometown. “If the Americans do not fulfill their promises,” he warns, “they will be burned from the fires of the Iraqi people.”
In fact, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority has rehabilitated some of the local schools and helped restart local hospitals. And more help should be coming soon. Congress acted last week to give President Bush $20 billion for Iraqi reconstruction (though a Senate majority defied the president by voting to give half the aid as loans). Further, last week's unanimous United Nations Security Council resolution urges economic assistance from other nations and accepts the U.S.-led military force in Iraq. A place like Nasiriyah makes clear why rebuilding is a costlier and more urgent task than initially acknowledged by the Bush administration.
The CPA is embarking on a crash program to show progress in Nasiriyah. A top priority: to reopen some of the smaller state-owned firms, such as factories making cement and other building products, in the next few weeks to jump-start the local economy. Next, the CPA will begin rehabilitating some of the local government buildings. “If by the end of the year, you don't see an army of workers achieving results, we will have failed,” says a CPA official.
Such projects cannot come too soon. Kudair Hazbr runs Nasiriyah General Hospital, where Lynch was treated before her now famous nighttime rescue. Hazbr was excited when an eager American military doctor began helping him restart the hospital's operations following the war. But after a few weeks, the American doctor left Nasiriyah, and the rest of the U.S. troops followed. Now, he receives little in the way of supplies or equipment from the coalition, and he says the Italian troops show little interest in helping the hospital. “We imagined that after six months, Iraq would be like Kuwait,” he says. “Americans can bring tanks and planes to Iraq at a high speed, but they do not address our needs with the same force.”
On the surface, at least, Nasiriyah has been more peaceful than much of the rest of the country. CPA officials and residents credit efforts by tribal leaders and militias run by several political parties. But more quietly, some residents complain that the political parties use their militias for personal gain and that security has deteriorated since the Italians arrived. The new Iraqi police are accused of being as corrupt as the old force. Hazbr says that fights break out regularly in the emergency room at night but police rarely respond. Militias belonging to different parties have also barged in and searched the hospital, once even beating a doctor. The Italians, Hazbr says, do not protect them despite having a base 100 yards away.
Thamya al-Sadoon had her own run-ins with the political parties. A dynamic, modern 20-year-old woman, Sadoon had already reluctantly taken to wearing her head scarf ever since the war for safety reasons. (“I look like my grandmother,” she complains.) But her family has been fending off several political parties that have been trying to drive them out of the temporary home they've lived in since their house was destroyed in the war. Sadoon says that one of the parties even briefly kidnapped her father. “I don't trust the Iraqi police,” she frets. “We don't feel safe.”
One of the more organized (and, for the Americans, most worrisome) parties has been that of Shiite cleric Moqtadr al-Sadr. Dotting the city are portraits of Sadr and his father, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, revered as a martyr after his 1999 murder by presumed agents of Saddam. Sadr's militias quietly roam the streets here, but they have become more assertive elsewhere. In a private clinic shared by several physicians, the doctors discount Sadr's threats to form his own nationalist government as antics, noting there are other religious leaders with more legitimate credentials. They counsel patience. “Iraqis want to wake up in the morning and have everything be changed, rather than change it themselves,” says Mehdi al-Khaffaj, the orthopedic surgeon who treated Lynch when she was a prisoner of war.
Contradictions. But in the cramped, dingy waiting room, the patients are impatient. “The Americans have failed,” fumes one, voicing support for Sadr. “He is a religious leader and he knows better than all of us.” Still, when pressed, even he admits that if the Americans can bring jobs and security, he would refuse any call by Sadr to stage resistance to the occupation. Nasiriyah is full of such apparent contradictions, especially when it concerns the American presence.
For Ahmed, a security guard, it is confusing and something of a love-hate relationship. One of his daughters lost her hand to a U.S. bomb during 1998 airstrikes. And in the days after the war, one of his sons stumbled on an unexploded cluster bomb and nearly lost both legs. U.S. military doctors operated to save the boy's legs and cared for him for nearly a month. But by the time Ahmed went back for a second round of surgery to ensure his son would be able to walk, the Americans had packed up their field hospital and moved out. Now, he hopes to find an Iraqi doctor to perform the operation. His son's legs, with chunks of flesh carved out of both, bleed regularly, and hobbling on crutches is painful for him.
Ahmed's wife is both angry and grateful. “If the Americans were still here, we wouldn't have this problem,” she says. “Of course, if we had taken him to an Iraqi hospital, they simply would have amputated his legs.” Ahmed also seems disappointed that the Americans pulled out of his hometown. But, strangely, he seems mostly to miss the American nurse who cared for his boy and showed him some perhaps unexpected kindness. Displaying a picture of a red-haired nurse in fatigues, Ahmed sighs. “I am in love with her.”
Iraq By The Numbers
Schools rehabbed by the coalition: 1,500
Number of schools in Iraq: 13,500
Vaccinations given to children: 22 million
Children in Iraq: 11 million
Electric power generation in megawatts, prewar: 4,400 April: 1,275 October 6: 4,518
Electricity transmission towers down, end of war: 100 Now: 600
Soldiers in Iraqi Army, prewar: 430,000
Now: 700 2004 goal: 30,000-40,000
