In quieter Baghdad, perils still lurk

Many Iraqis who fled Baghdad are beginning to return, unaware of what awaits them in a city altered in the sectarian warfare.

By Sam Dagher

from the December 24, 2007 edition

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I had plans to interview Amoura for a story about Iraqi families who had decided to return to Baghdad from Syria hoping to find a safer city than the one they had left.

Amoura, a mother of five, came back on Nov. 26, just one day before the Iraqi government chartered buses from Damascus to return hundreds of other refugees as proof the situation was indeed improving. And it has.

In December, violence has dropped 60 percent since June, according to the US military. The Associated Press reports that 600 Iraqi civilians and security forces have been killed this month, compared with 2,309 in December 2006.

Yet, the city's landscape has been drastically altered as a result of the sectarian bloodshed here. Many returning refugees find they are shut out of their old homes and while violence has dropped, the perils of war still remain.

Before we could meet, another car bombing went off in another Baghdad neighborhood on Dec. 12. It killed Amoura and four others.

Her story is that of the agonizing calculations – and sometimes miscalculations – that Iraqis have grown so accustomed to making since the start of the war in 2003.

The mother of four boys and a girl, Amoura (her children insisted that only her nickname be used), fled to Damascus in July 2006 after she had been displaced twice in Baghdad. First she had to leave her home in the southeastern neighborhood of Baghdad Jadida, where a bitter sectarian turf battle was raging.

Amoura, the sister of one of the Monitor's employees in Baghdad, is a Shiite and was married to an ex-Army officer who was Sunni. He died in 1992. The names of their children reflected their intersectarian union, which was proof that that kind of relationship once didn't matter in Iraq.

But the family became more out of place in their own home as sectarian battles began raging, redrawing neighborhood boundaries all around them. They received threatening notes telling them to vacate or they would be killed.

Amoura fled to what she thought was the relative safety of a predominantly Shiite enclave in the capital's Karrada district. But there she found another threat: car bombs that went off almost daily. She eventually decided to join the stream of Iraqis fleeing to Syria.

With the little savings they had, the family rented a small apartment in Jaramana, a section of Damascus full of Iraqi refugees. To make ends meet, the eldest son waited tables at a local restaurant, the second son worked at an Iraqi bakery, and another took up tailoring. None were able to enroll in a Syrian school.

"It was tough, very tough," the eldest son told me when I went to pay my condolences at his mother's funeral.

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