Return of the ATM?
Without work and a sense of the future, many young men head off to join a militia.
"Your money," I asked. "Do you keep it in cash, put it in the bank? How does that work?"
"In a bank," said Ahmed. "And we exchange some into US dollars."
One of Iraq's biggest private banks has a luxuriously designed office above the Baghdad Stock Exchange and I asked a senior executive how business was now compared to those glory days of the 1980s that Naimah, the estate agent, had spoken about.
"People didn't trust the banks, then," said the financier Mohammed Issa.
His accent was East Coast American and he wore a brown suit with a brightly coloured open-necked shirt.
He would have a panoramic view across Baghdad except the window was blocked by glass cabinets with ornamental displays - again to shield against a bomb attack.
"We had, maybe 4,000 clients under Saddam. Now we have 50,000," he explained.
"We've just set up Internet banking so our customers don't have to risk getting bombed by going to a branch.". He paused for a moment. "Yes, once the war's over, we'll have our ATM machines throughout the country."
