High-tech and high anxiety in Iraq

On a Baghdad street lined with electronics shops, freedom to access the world has fueled a boom in business, but one dogged by fear and violence.

By Tina Susman
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 19, 2008

BAGHDAD — Hussain Attar-Bashi watched the American-led invasion of Iraq on live TV, his illegal satellite dish hidden by cloth strategically draped across the roof of his home.

Five years later, Iraqi laws restricting access to foreign television and the Internet are long gone, and Attar-Bashi is among those riding a communications revolution that has swept the country.

Nowhere is that boom more evident than on the cacophonous stretch of road in central Baghdad called Sinaa Street, where Sunnis, Shiites and Christians shop for the latest high-tech gear at stores such as Attar-Bashi's Alreem Computer Center.

The fortunes of Sinaa Street, like those of the nation, rise and tumble with the course of the war. When violence ebbs, business thrives. When violence increases, it suffers.

Merchants such as Attar-Bashi have made a living selling their wares along the broken sidewalks here since the March 2003 invasion, in what would seem to be an irreversible connection to the global Information Age.

But though Iraqis are now free to communicate with the outside world, they are still wary of speaking their minds in front of people who might disagree with them -- even customers in their own cluttered shops. And after five years of war, bombings, kidnappings and slayings, Iraqis still do not feel they can move about freely.

Merchants on Sinaa Street do what most Iraqis do in their spare time: wonder whether the relative calm will last, and compare life now to the lives they had before the war.

Here, Iraqis' newfound freedoms are evident in a variety of goods, including pirated copies of Oscar-nominated films and sophisticated laptops on which to play them. On a recent afternoon, vendors were selling "Alvin and the Chipmunks," "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and "Juno" alongside religious DVDs and the latest version of the video game "Grand Theft Auto."

Disappointment is also on display. Attar-Bashi, speaking inside his sprawling store on a recent afternoon, said he had welcomed the arrival of the Americans.

"We thought, 'Oh, we'll be free.' We thought: 'We'll be able to go out and talk to anyone. We'll be free.' It didn't turn out that way."

Iraqis see that violence has dropped in the last few months, yet Sunnis still worry about being targeted by Shiite militiamen and Shiites are afraid to visit Sunni neighborhoods.

All are bitter about the violence and hardship the war has wrought and fearful that widespread bloodshed could return.

Along Sinaa Street, young men in jeans swinging shopping bags filled with printers, scanners and other gear pass concrete walls plastered with posters of Shiite clerics. Behind the walls, Iraqi and U.S. soldiers sit atop tanks and Humvees. They watch over streets where battered sedans pass alongside armored BMWs and minivan taxis, whose passengers are frisked for bombs before boarding.

The city's traffic veers past women in black abayas begging for handouts and scatters when convoys carrying soldiers or VIPs tear through, their sirens blaring and their mysterious passengers hidden behind tinted windows.

It is loud and lively, yet missing the frivolities of a normal city, where pedestrians might casually window-shop and where cafes would be filled with couples enjoying a Saturday afternoon.

Attar-Bashi kept his shop closed most of the last two years because of the danger.

A few weeks ago, he began opening every day because of improved security, but his confidence has its limits. He varies the routes he takes to and from work to keep potential kidnappers off his trail, and discourages his grown children from going out themselves.

"They are prisoners in their homes," Attar-Bashi said of most Iraqis, who he acknowledges have boosted his profit by scooping up stay-at-home diversions such as computer games and gadgets.

"It's worrying," he said of the long-term effect of a cloistered society. "But compared to going out . . . well, things here are still not stable."

They are far better than they were two years ago. Of the 170 or so shops on Sinaa Street, about 130 are open now, clustered along a half-mile stretch facing the University of Technology.

Most shut down after the February 2006 bombing of a venerated Shiite mosque in Samarra, which unleashed a frenzy of Shiite-Sunni violence that didn't begin subsiding until late last year.

Mohammed Jouda, a 28-year-old computer engineer and former shop manager, recalled a day in 2006 when nine bombs exploded on the street. Two of the people killed were university students who had been among his regular customers.

The owner of the shop where Jouda worked was shot to death when he resisted a kidnapping attempt. The store remains closed.

Jihad Yaarub began working at a computer shop on Sinaa in 2004. Business "was growing insanely."

"It was so fun. . . . And then bombings started to occur often. Shop owners fled the country and closed their shops," he said.

Yaarub has seen improvements in security since those bleak days, but the fun has gone out of his job because of the fear that, in a second, something could happen to undo it all.

In October, a car bomb killed three people on Sinaa Street. It was one of 45 car or truck bombings, including suicide attacks, that the U.S. military reported that month. Last month, the total was 24, though a series of recent high-profile attacks has raised questions about whether the relative lull might be ending.

Iraqi officials say the number of civilians killed in war-related violence last month was 633, compared with 1,646 in February 2007.

U.S. officials cite these figures as proof that things have turned around in Iraq, and that five years after the war began, insurgents and militiamen are running out of steam.

But to most Iraqis, the security situation looks good only compared with the 18 months following the Samarra blast. They look at their lives in a visceral way: Do they feel safe going out to dinner or visiting unfamiliar neighborhoods? Can they travel to neighboring countries without being viewed as resource-sapping refugees?

Can they find a doctor in an emergency, or watch TV without cranking up the generator for electricity? Can they count on fellow Iraqis to spend enough money to sustain their businesses?

For most, the answer to those questions remains no.

"People have lost trust in America, really," Attar-Bashi said. "We don't have much faith. They have left things in the hands of the U.S. Army, but you need more than just the Army to make things better here."

The American military has always said Iraq won't be pacified by brute force alone, and in the last year it has turned to former insurgents to bolster security in much of the country. The military is paying about 80,000 of the volunteer security workers $10 a day to stand guard at checkpoints nationwide, but it acknowledges that the program will have to be phased out as U.S. forces withdraw.

A nearly $20-billion Iraq reconstruction fund approved by Congress in 2003 is almost depleted, yet a sixth summer is looming with the country unable to meet its electricity demands. For most Iraqis, that means months of 100-plus-degree days and stifling nights without steady air conditioning.

Aconversation in Legend Lands, Ahmed Izzeden's computer shop on the upper level of a two-story building crammed with similar stores and buzzing with shoppers, illustrated the fears and frustrations that still plague Iraqis.

Each time a customer entered the shop, conversation stopped. Nobody wanted to be overheard speaking to a Westerner, since such an association could prove fatal.

"Silent!" Izzeden whispered to his wife, Jinan, who had joined the conversation and failed to lower her voice as customers strolled through the door.

"Oh, I forgot," she murmured, putting her hand over her mouth.

He and his wife agreed that Iraqis relish the freedom to watch satellite TV, chat online and run their businesses. But they said that in almost every other aspect of life, they feel stifled.

"Before, we used to go anywhere we wanted. Now we have to think if it's worth the risk," Jinan said.

"You have to think that maybe if you go out, it's a one-way ticket," her sister Lamees added.

The two women wore clothes that would blend in on the streets of New York or Los Angeles: black leather boots, jeans, dangling earrings. Lamees wore a black beret atop her long, black hair. Jinan's wavy auburn locks were unadorned.

Both women refuse to wear the head-covering hijab that has become more common among Iraqi women since the end of Saddam Hussein's secular regime, but they are conscious of standing out in a country where religious extremism has taken hold.

"Sometimes I feel like I'm about to explode!" Jinan exclaimed as she described the frustration of worrying about whether her hair or clothing could make her a target. "I want to go to a place where no one looks at me, where no one notices what I'm wearing."

Although violence has diminished in the last few months, the couple said the sectarian balkanization of Baghdad's neighborhoods, which has intensified since the Samarra mosque bombing, still makes it risky for Izzeden, a Shiite, to visit his in-laws in a Sunni neighborhood.

The last time the couple went out for the evening in Baghdad was in 2004.

"You're not in a camp. You're not in a live war. It's supposed to be a city, but it's not," Izzeden said.

Asked why he doesn't leave the country, he became visibly upset. He spent eight months in Dubai, he said, but prefers a hazardous homeland to being among the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees who have streamed into neighboring countries, where they are viewed as second-class citizens.

Contemplating Iraq's future, Jinan said: "It will become better. It has to become better."

Her husband was not as confident.

"Maybe," he said. "Just maybe."