Baghdad Coming To Life
by Dave Price
The “protect the population” benefits of the surge tactics continue to be felt by ordinary Iraqis:
Baghdad - There is big excitement on al-Marifah Street. City workers are installing a new transformer to bring power to a part of the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Saidiyah that hasn’t been on the city’s electrical grid for more than a year. “A year ago, dead bodies lay on this street for days; no one dared to pick them up. But now we are getting lights and shops have opened back up,” says Mahdi Jabbar Falah, a 40-year resident who has just moved himself and his family of nine back to their house.
….
“Last year, this was a ghost town,” he says, “but now I feel we are alive again.”
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“You can’t say there’s perfect safety here now, but it’s much better than before when you didn’t dare go out on the street,” says Ali Latif, a young Shiite who returned to Saidiyah in January after leaving for six months. “There are still terrorists here, but now they stay more hidden,”
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Back on al-Marifah Street, grocery merchant Ibrahim says the people – and the Iraqi Army – are not ready for the Americans to go. “The Americans are testing the Iraqi troops, and our sense of security is still very new so the people would be very nervous if the Americans left,” he says. “No, their presence is still 100 percent necessary.”
I hope Obama is listening. It would be a tragic irony if he was the second Hussein to ruin Iraq.
