Baghdad, Iraq: 10 years after Saddam
In March 2003, the US-led coalition invaded Iraq. The Observer's foreign affairs editor was there – and has visited at regular intervals since. A decade on from the fall of Baghdad, he returns to find a changed city and speaks again to some of the ordinary Iraqis he first met a decade ago to find how their lives and their country have fared post-Saddam
Qaislaz Zubaidi is eating lunch with his family in a pleasant park on the banks of the Tigris. He asks me to join him and we watch as a pair of scullers from the Iraqi Rowing Union sweep past on the river's brown current. Zubaidi, 47, is in real estate and successful by the look of him. He is a member of the Shia sect; 10 years ago, he was an officer in the defeated army of Saddam Hussein, his city newly under US occupation.
"I didn't give up until 11 April, two days after the fall of Baghdad," he says smiling. "There were only four of us left. The radio had gone silent. There was no communication. No one to ask for orders any more. We sat down and decided things had come to a dead end. So we left. I didn't feel relief or anything; I just felt negligent for abandoning my post. Then I got home to chaos and looting."
Zubaidi talks without bitterness. He tells me he is happier these days and hated his time in the army. "Under Saddam, the state intervened in everything. We were ruled with an iron fist. In those days, I couldn't afford fruit and didn't have a car. Now everything's reversed. We have freedom. We can buy what we like.
"But," he continues, "we don't have stability. The politicians here behave grotesquely. They are climbing on the people's shoulders to benefit themselves and I blame them too for the sectarian instability that we have here again."
We chat a little longer. It is only after leaving Zubaidi and his family that I think about arriving in Baghdad on the day the city fell – 9 April 2003. I remember how, although I'd seen many US and British soldiers over the days of the US-led invasion, by the time I arrived in the capital, Iraqi soldiers such as Zubaidi were gone, their uniforms abandoned in little piles on street corners. In the southern city of Basra, which had fallen a few days earlier, the only Iraqi fighters I came across were the bodies outside the university that locals had covered with carpets. It has taken me 10 years to ask an Iraqi soldier what defeat felt like.
I missed the start of the invasion of Iraq. I was on the wrong border at the wrong time, but I quickly caught up. Reporting for the Observer, travelling independent of the invading US and British forces, I found myself by chance walking into Basra on the day it fell to coalition forces. I followed a British paratroop column I'd run into on the road, waiting to enter the city. Travelling with a couple of colleagues, we continued when the paratroopers stopped and reached the Shatt al-Arab waterway on the city's edge. On the banks, we found a parade of eerie figures, statues of soldiers with fingers pointing towards Iran.
A few days later, the evening Baghdad fell, I was on the outskirts of the Iraqi capital, driving past burning buildings, US tanks and the scattered bodies of Saddam's paramilitaries – fedayeen – and civilians. That night was spent in the grounds of the blue-domed mausoleum built by Saddam just a year before to commemorate Michel Aflaq, founding father of the Ba'ath party. We were invited to stay by occupying troops of the US 3rd Infantry Division after an awkward incident in which they almost killed us.
For four years I kept returning.. Read more:
