Nothing Easy About Being the Mayor of Baghdad

The municipal headaches that greet Alaa Tamimi each morning might send many big-city mayors diving under the covers.

Services are woeful, starting with a drinking-water supply that is only about two-thirds of what is needed for his city’s 5 million residents. And a fourth of the metropolis isn’t linked to the chronically leaky sewer system.

Few stoplights work, and traffic is horrendous -- in large part because of the closure of several key routes by a force beyond his control: the U.S. military.

Security is abysmal, with the constant threat of mortar strikes, car bombings and assassinations.

Making matters more difficult, Tamimi must make do with a shoestring budget and a confusing chain of authority that can exclude him from decision-making.

And he wanted this job.

Tamimi, a 52-year-old structural engineer with no political background, is Baghdad’s first mayor since the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein, who used to pick mayors from among family members and cronies.

The post brought Tamimi back from an eight-year exile. When he applied early this year to be Baghdad’s mayor -- a job advertised in Iraq’s main newspapers -- Tamimi was a planning advisor to the emirate of Abu Dhabi in the Persian Gulf.

He was among more than 90 applicants, a list whittled down to eight finalists before the City Council chose Tamimi this spring for an open-ended term.

During his first months in office, Tamimi has focused on the nuts and bolts of running a city amid considerable disorder. He has tried to rein in trash-haulers who dump illegally, cleaned up some landmarks and tackled traffic problems.

If these seem modest initiatives, it is because Tamimi’s powers are limited. He does not control the police, for example, giving him little sway over the crucial area of security, and he has no authority over the spotty electrical system, which is under the national government.

Still, Tamimi’s success in improving daily life for Baghdad residents -- who make up a fifth of the country’s population -- will undoubtedly influence how they view the new interim national government, and the nation’s overall prospects for peace and democracy.

In an effort to create normalcy and ease traffic congestion, Tamimi has appealed to the U.S. military to remove some of the concrete barriers and concertina wire surrounding the so-called Green Zone, a four-square-mile area in the center of the city that includes the U.S. Embassy and Iraqi government offices, secured to prevent attacks.

The mayor says conditions are safe enough to reopen a crucial downtown bridge and a key boulevard. He wants U.S. officials to reduce the zone so the city can begin retaking control of its central district.

“I want them to shrink this area so that it will not affect the circulation of Baghdad,” Tamimi said in an interview in English.

U.S. officials previously said they were aware of the mayor’s concerns, but believed the security climate had to improve before any barricades could be removed.

American officials said early this month that they were discussing the issue with Tamimi and other Iraqi officials in hopes of finding a compromise. But they declined to comment further, citing the “ongoing negotiations.”

Tamimi speaks energetically and isn’t bashful about touting his credentials, noting that he could just as easily answer a reporter’s questions in French, perfected during doctoral studies in Paris years ago. He is the first Baghdad mayor, he says, to hold a PhD.

“I’m fit for the job,” he declared.

So far, Tamimi has encountered frustrations as formidable as his to-do list.

His $85-million budget is tiny for a city of Baghdad’s size. By comparison, Los Angeles, with a population of 3.7 million, has a 2004 budget of about $5.3 billion.

Some of the tasks Tamimi is eager to tackle -- construction of a subway system, for example -- fall under the jurisdiction of national ministries, rather than the mayor’s office.

Tamimi said he had found himself at times omitted from decisions on projects spearheaded by civil-affairs units of the U.S. military, such as paving streets in certain neighborhoods.

“There’s interference between their project and our plan,” he said.

The Americans handed power to Iraq’s interim national government in late June but remain a powerful presence, with the military often serving as the closest thing to a functioning local authority.

And though there is a Baghdad City Council -- along with smaller-scale neighborhood committees -- the evolving roles of Iraq’s new government bodies are not always clear, Tamimi said.

Still, he said, the disarray is also a sign of exhilarating societal change.

“We have problems at all levels -- confusion problems,” Tamimi said. “But I like these problems because it’s the first year of democracy.”

Tamimi said his immediate goal for the city’s 9,000 employees was restoring services such as trash pickup to levels existing before the invasion in March 2003.

But Baghdad’s municipal systems -- such as a sewer network that sends about 525,000 cubic yards of raw waste into the Tigris River daily -- were in disrepair long before the first bomb fell, he said.

Reconstruction efforts are further complicated, Tamimi said, by the theft of more than two-thirds of city-owned vehicles and equipment by looters as Hussein’s regime fell.

The mayor also said he would like the city to play a greater role in U.S.-financed reconstruction projects.

Tamimi favors having American aid for Baghdad allocated to the municipality to dispense rather than to private contractors that have been hired for rebuilding -- an idea that faces long odds. He said the city would agree to hire only U.S. firms, but could save money.

“We know our city and we have plans,” he said. “We should participate more in this regard.”

Robert J. Callahan, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, noted that the governor of Najaf had taken “a direct hand in how money is spent” in that province, “so there is some precedent” for local Iraqi officials to at least have a strong advisory role.

But he said no decision had been made on Tamimi’s suggestion.

The mayor’s personal safety remains a daily concern following assassination attempts on various Iraqi officials.

To visit Tamimi, a reporter had to meet up with his press aide by car on a pre-assigned street, then be escorted around the corner, where a pickup truck carrying mayoral bodyguards led the way through a neighborhood to the barricaded home where the mayor awaited.

Tamimi was not involved in Iraqi politics before leaving in 1996, but he considers his neophyte status an asset. Iraq “needs technocratic people like me,” he said.

He said there were thousands of other Iraqi exiles with useful skills who were free of past political affiliations. Tamimi said his experience as mayor might help them decide whether to return, too.

“They are waiting to see what happens to this poor mayor,” he said.

*

Times staff writers Edmund Sanders and Thomas S. Mulligan contributed to this report.