Basra Enjoying Some Simple Pleasures Again

Ice cream and balloons reappeared Friday on Al Jazzaer Street.

Eleven days after the Sheraton Hotel and the university were ablaze and helicopter gunships rattled low, families strolled in the evening in a peaceful scene suggesting that small joys had begun to replace looting and chaos in this battered southern city.

Yosef Khalday, 36, said he decided Thursday it was time to reopen his popular Canary Restaurant, so he had a man pull down the bricks from its front window, even as he worried that looters might show up during the night.

“I had to be the first,” said Khalday, mindful of his friend and rival at Fatoota Restaurant, a block away. “We have to start life again.”

But no looters came. And by Friday evening, Al Jazzaer Street was once again a colorful ribbon of cafes and sweet shops, with large, placid crowds thronging for the silkily rich ice cream that is a national favorite.

“This street is a very important street to Basra,” Khalday said. “All the restaurants and shops are here. All the families are walking here.”

Between 40% and 60% of Basra residents now have power and water as the city gradually returns to normal.

Basra was once a lush, beautiful city, with an elegant old quarter and a strip of restaurants and casinos along the Shatt al Arab waterway. As a holiday and weekend destination, it had a thriving nightlife and drew visitors from throughout Iraq and Kuwait.

Older residents say their best memories are from the 1960s and 1970s, before Saddam Hussein became president in 1979.

Now, as the city warily comes to life after the war and decades of Hussein’s control, people are beginning to imagine how the future might look, and whether they might recover that revered past.

“It will take time, not less than five years. We need the whole of society to take part in rebuilding. We need democracy and freedom,” said Abdeen Hasan, 75, sitting in his friend’s soda shop, gazing contentedly at the passing throng on Al Jazzaer Street. He’s a retired financial manager who once worked for British Petroleum.

There used to be 2 million palm trees in and around Basra, locals say. They even boast that the palm trees in California came from here.

“In that time, an Iraqi man held the world in his hand,” said Mowaffak Abdul Ghani, 66, sitting on a bench with a friend, referring to the 1960s.

Basra today is a dusty, ramshackle city where rubbish is piled at every corner and donkeys strain to pull carts with oversized loads.

Even the most imaginative visitor has difficulty conjuring a picture of the old Basra, as painted by Falah Abdul Hassan, 35, who works the cash register at the Canary Restaurant. All around was green and lush, he said.

“There were horses and trees and green everywhere. Then the war started [in 1980, with Iran] and the tanks used the area and damaged the land and all the green became desert,” he said.

The water flowing to Basra and through people’s pipes got saltier. Many fish disappeared from the waterways. In 1980, the government closed a waterfront strip of casinos and restaurants called the Corniche because a palace had been built nearby for Hussein.

“He took the best area and just kept it for himself,” Ghani said. “No one could say anything or they’d cut your throat. The words ‘no’ and ‘why’ were not in the dictionary under Saddam’s regime.”

Taxi driver Fasel Hassan, speaking excitedly and waving his arms, pushed himself loudly into the conversation: “Back [in the 1960s and ‘70s], everything was allowed. But from the 1980s, there was no freedom to do anything. There were a lot of checkpoints and security and they’d do whatever they wanted to you.”

Some residents are optimistic that the city can be rebuilt, its former charms restored.

“It will come back to what it was,” Ghani said. “But the most important thing is that the coming regime tries to understand the people of Basra, so that we feel part of the country and part of the rebuilding process.”

In the jam-packed souk -- a flea market where looters Friday displayed the wares they stole last week -- one man hissed at passing foreigners: “No good Americans! Hate Americans! Hate British!”

But others had a different view, sometimes expressed in creative ways. Mortoda Abdula remade his sausage-style kofta into round shapes.

“They’re hamburgers,” he proclaimed proudly. “This is a new hamburger for a new system in Iraq.”