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Is Baghdad safer? Yes and no.
Although sections of the city remain war zones – and attacks are up outside Baghdad – there are pockets of relative calm emerging.
from the April 13, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
A birthday celebration out
Earlier this week, Ahmed Yaqthan and his wife Samar Mahdi mused about the potential for a suicide bomber to walk into the crowded restaurant where they had ventured out for lunch to celebrate her birthday.
"I say whatever God has fated will happen," says Mrs. Mahdi, who is without a veil and dressed in a fashionable blouse – a rare sight in an increasingly conservative society.
The city's go-areas tend to be in the center and can be counted on one hand. On Tuesday, a day before their restaurant outing, Mahdi and Mr. Yaqthan were huddled for hours at their offices at the state audit board on the city's west bank on Haifa Street, about a mile from the fortified Green Zone. The couldn't leave because of heavy clashes between insurgents and US and Iraqi forces in the Sheikh Omar and Al-Fadhil areas just across the river.
At least seven people were killed, including four Iraqi soldiers, and 16 US soldiers were wounded in the fighting which involved Apache helicopters, according to the US military.
"When things calmed down a bit we just took an alternative route and went home," says Yaqthan, a bespectacled computer programmer speaking over the sound of Arabic pop songs streaming from loudspeakers overhead.
On Thursday, the Sarafiya bridge, one the couple sometimes use to cross over from their home on Palestine Street to their offices, collapsed after it was hit by a truck bomb killing at least 10 and wounding 29, according to a Ministry of Interior source.
The bridge and parliament bombings "are very calculated political messages that are meant to affect the morale of the government and its [international] backers. The claim that the security plan has sent insurgents scattering into the provinces has proven to be false," says Mustafa al-Ani, director of the Security and Terrorism Studies program at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center.
Earlier this week, the International Committee of the Red Cross, one of the few international aid groups operating in Iraq, issued a report that said "The humanitarian situation in Iraq is steadily worsening." Red Cross director Pierre Kraehenbuehl told the Associated Press that there has been no improvement in the security situation in Baghdad.
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