Imagine peace on the street where you live. I want you to have the chance to step outside your door and know that a random gunshot is not going to find you. I want you to have time to watch the sway of palms in the gentle desert wind that finds its way through alleys and down the boulevard. I want you to imagine there are no slums here, there is no crime, you are not an impoverished resident of a project building pockmarked with mortars and dusty with manmade decay from the repeated assaults of gunfire. Can you?
| | I have often walked
Down the street before,
But the pavement always
Stayed beneath my feet before. |
(crossposted at NION and exme arden)
"Haifa Street was the scene of some of the heaviest resistance when U.S. forces swept into Baghdad in March 2003, and it has remained difficult to control because many residents have natural links to the Sunni-led insurgency. It is lined with tall and relatively new buildings put up by former leader Saddam Hussein to house Syrian refugees loyal to him and members of his security forces."
Kurdish Media
Evoking the essence of a life you've never experienced is like trying reconstruction on an eggshell from within the egg. You try and place pieces together to form curved walls that decorate the mind, frame the substance inside from intangible and emotional impressions. The pieces slip together in brittle puzzle fashion, and sometimes the jagged edges of shells you try to piece crumble further. Now there are gaps left where the shell bits could not be pieced and breaches of light shine in, and air sucks out. The more you try to rebuild the egg, the more the impossibility of the task is evident. What you are left with is something imperfect and asymmetrical and a vestige of what the egg should have become, at least the egg in your mind. Perhaps you have lost sight of what an egg really should be like. The egg you have, the egg you live inside, the egg in which you are now trapped.
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All at once am I
Several stories high,
Knowing I'm on the street where you live.
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But the exercise itself has somehow pulled you away from the relative safety of your own life. Writing about, imagining about, blogging about another life on another continent in another world of another culture can broaden vision and diminish it. You are attempting to see how it could be, who you could be. You see what you have and who you are not and what you are not doing.
"As for the war, a visit quickly makes plain that the latest "quagmire" panic in Washington is widely off the mark. True, the security situation in Baghdad remains a long way from what it should be; but neither do the insurgents control swaths of territory--think Fallujah--as they used to. What's more, the heavy lifting is increasingly being done by Iraqis. "The Iraqi Brigade that owns Haifa Street has done something that we could never do," Gen. Petraeus told me over lunch."
The Chalabi Comeback
Robert L. Pollock - senior editorial page writer at the Wall Street Journal
Monday, August 29, 2005
Wrap your hand around the corner of a sandstone building on the intersection of a narrow cloistered alley and the boulevard, the Purple Heart Boulevard, and feel the grains. Old grains of newer buildings that have not stood the test of time thanks to men of war. It is men of war. Old grains that mix with the ashes of man, deaths new and centuries old. These grains slide across your palm like the raspy grit of pain and death; these grains are families here, they are shopkeepers, they are black-marketers, pickpockets, they were teachers and professionals, mothers and sisters and daughters, sons, fathers, brothers, grandparents. Children. Soldiers. Resistance. Conspirators. Children.
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Are there lilac trees
In the heart of town?
Can you hear a lark in any other part of town?
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This is the dust of torn and tired people. There are people on this street whose proof of existence is shadow and bloodstain on a dirty gray road. There is never enough rain here to wash away memory. This wind is the wind of death and fear and inertia; it mingles with the sweat of commerce and trade when it can, because it must, because life goes on if it evades death and people must live on the street. You can smell it; old death which has married new death, and populated the bazaar. This is the world now and sacred ground is sacred ground, but ground that must be walked on, traded on, mourned on, fought over. It is hell; it has been before, it is hell again now. Hell is fear and hell is evil in the face of innocence launching a rocket at a squad of soldiers who are killing you and they don't know who they are killing and their reasons don't matter because you are fighting for very different reasons. Hell is weary and the hate is the only thing that makes tomorrow's sun rise. You think hate is cleansing, but it washes your hands in blood. A sacrifice and we hear the old gods insist on sacrifice, though we do not recognise they are calling to us.
"Approximately 3,000 troops including soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division launched Operation Haifa Street in Baghdad aimed at the criminal element of the city. The operation was specifically designed as a large raid focused on criminals and criminal activity in Baghdad. News outlets reported two soldiers were injured, 25 enemy personnel were killed and about 250 individuals were detained."
Operation Haifa Street – July 2004
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Does enchantment pour
Out of every door?
No, it's just on the street where you live.
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There have been circling helicopters, ever-present birds of death; anonymous, and by being so, most terrible in thundering, thumping presence. Gunship artillery cannot interrogate running men, fleeing teenagers and every movement at the wrong time is a threat to the foreign raptor in the sky. You run because to run is to live. There are people who cling to what they know. A known and violent devil is always more accomodating to a soul than an unknown and righteous devil from abroad. This street can be occupied; it will never be conquered.
"On the morning of July 7, a 100-person company of Iraqi National Guardsmen ventured onto Haifa Street to set up checkpoints. Almost immediately, they came under fire from the concrete forest of towering Soviet-style apartment blocks that line the wide, four-lane boulevard. After 50 minutes, Task Force 1/9 headed toward Haifa Street to evacuate the Iraqi troops. As a platoon moved toward a former palace of Saddam Hussein's at one end of Haifa Street, another entered the narrow winding laneways of Old Baghdad, dubbed the Maze, and took up positions atop the guardhouses at Sheik Marouf Cemetery. Within a minute, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) burst around them, and 7.62-mm bullets buzzed past in swarms. At the other end of Haifa Street, insurgents stepped out from buildings and let loose their RPGs. Women hurled potatoes onto the street like grenades, duping the Iraqi soldiers into diving to the ground, while male insurgents unloaded machine-gun fire or threw real grenades."
Michael Ware – High Noon on Haifa Street
Time Magazine, August 2004
I want the pavement to heal the cracks that American tanks have made on macadam laid over centuries-old and arcane paths. This macadam where ancestors traded and other armies and other caravans traveled to the center of the City of Peace, Madinatu s-Salam, old Baghdad, on the west bank of the Tigris.
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Let the time go by,
I won't care if I
Can be here on the street where you live.
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They trekked to Babylon from here, and in Babylon, they traveled down a street named Aibur-shabu, "The enemy shall never pass". Do you remember Babylon? Layers of mankind, civilization, wonders of irrigation in a dry and desolate landscape, great Kings, great warriors, fading Caliphs, dying youth, beautiful women, slaves and captives, architecture beyond credulity and missing in time. Babylon.
Babylon has fallen! Aye; but Babylon endures
Wherever human folly shines or human folly lures...
...
All vices, crimes, and mutinies were Babylon’s: and then
All honours, prides, and ecstasies—for in her streets were Men;
And Man by Man must grow apace, and Man by Man must thrive,
And Man from Man must snatch the torch that lights the race alive:
Yea, here and now her citizens, as in the years far gone,
Stone by stone, and joy with moan, upbuild Babylon.
A.G. Stephens (1865 - 1933)
Hammurabi's rule of law (possibly the first ever to be written down) lies figuratively buried under the occupation rubble of US airfields and the coalition's bloody ignorance.
If any one ensnare another, putting a ban upon him, but he can not prove it, then he that ensnared him shall be put to death.
Hammurabi's First Law
A caravan returns to Baghdad, a world away. This caravan rolls up the Boulevard where dreams cannot survive. It is a sand-beige caravan of rolling Humvees and up-armored Bradleys with weapons in the hands of men who have no eyes. This land is old. Why are they here? Does memory serve, were Ottomans sane once? Occupiers have gone mad in Baghdad. The landscape has not changed this phenomenon. This land between the two cities, between two rivers, should be a busy land, a market-driven land, not a desert wash of blood and sand and death.
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People stop and stare
They don't bother me,
For there's no where else on earth
That I would rather be.
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"The other news was that the area of Haifa street had seen an influx of militants from Amiriya sent by the infamous terrorist "Ibn Quoza" who's a former bandit and a wanted criminal.
The curfew in the area has been lifted but only through one passage at al-Talayi' Square and only women and children are allowed on the street so they can shop for food and other needs. She explained that men wouldn't go out because they are afraid the troops might get suspicious and arrest them...'most of the militants are now hiding in basements or in the nearby cemetery...there are many Afghan-Arabs, they are like ghosts; they come from nowhere and disappear just like that. Like I said before, those do not care to distinguish between Sunni and Shia and they'd kill anyone they suspect' "
Baghdad, between Maliki's plan and Bush's strategy
Blog entry for Friday, January 12, 2007 – Iraqthemodel.blogspot.com
Millions have walked these roads, ghosts birthed from the violent womb of human history. Mongols, Persians, Greeks, Romans, infidels, Janissaries, Ottomans, Safavid, Bedouin, Sumerian, Assyrian, Jews, Christians. Shadows. How can this modern caravan compete with what the shadows on this street of death know from lessons taught for centuries? Our weapons and armor are toothpicks against the voices of the old gods that echo in alleys sprayed with religious fervor and sectarian hate. Here, too, "the enemy shall never pass".
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People stop and stare
They don't bother me,
For there's no where else on earth
That I would rather be.
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Shadows are cast in the hot sun high in the noon sky, thrown on roads where shadows should not exist, and ghosts will tell us if we listen that Baghdad was known as an oasis of peace for only a few seconds in the infinity of time. There has always been Baghdad, not so Iraq.
"American military engineers, frustrated elsewhere by insurgent attacks, are moving ahead along Haifa Street with a $20 million program to improve electricity, sewer and other utilities. So far, none of the work sites have been attacked, although a local Shiite leader who vocally supported the American projects was assassinated on his doorstep in January.
But the change American commanders see as more promising than any other here is the deployment of large numbers of Iraqi troops. American commanders are eager to shift the fighting in Iraq to the country's own troops, allowing American units to pull back from the cities and, eventually, to begin drawing down their 150,000 troops. Haifa Street has become an early test of that strategy."
There Are Signs the Tide May Be Turning on Iraq's Street of Fear
John F. Burns – New York Times, March 21, 2005
There are streets that define a neighborhood, and there are streets that define a world. Haifa Street is a street that defines a world; it is a world away from our streets. This street is populated with all the ideology a world can hold and all the good intentions and bad intent that mankind holds for mankind. Sunni against Shi'a. Shi'a against Shi'a. Sunni against US soldier, Shi'a against US soldier. Badir Brigade against Mehdi Army. Sometimes Mehdi against Mehdi. Al Qaeda against whoever gets in the way.
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Let the time go by,
I won't care if I
Can be here on the street where you live.
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A solid immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the displaced fluid.
Archimedes Principle
We will remove the solid sooner or later, because we will have to, and the liquid will rush in to fill the vacuum. Bouyancy will disappear. The force and strength of fluid is not diminished by the temporary displacement enabled by the solid. In Baghdad, on Haifa Street, this fluid will not evaporate in the desert heat. Such fluid will spread and the desert boulevard, the desert sand, the sandstone building you ran your hand across, where you felt the grit of centuries, and the dust of the ancients filled your nose and eyes, this boulevard will not absorb a flood but will increase the volume and every drop of fluid, of blood, of the cries of fear and hate-filled weary people will multiply.
As American and Iraqi forces try (again) to take control of central Baghdad, they find ominous pointers of sectarian problems to come.
Jan. 12, 2007 - The fight on Haifa Street started over 27 dead bodies. "Twenty male, seven female," says Lt. Col. Steve Duke, an American adviser to the Iraq Army. The bodies were dumped a week ago in a side alley off one of the main thoroughfares in Baghdad; they were apparently family members of an Iraqi police chief. The locals were too afraid to remove them, so Duke ordered his team to pick them up. That's about when the insurgents started to shoot from the high-rises at Duke's men, along with the Iraqi Army soldiers who were in the Haifa Street neighborhood. It was, says Duke gruffly, "a big s—t fight,"
"... It also puts U.S. forces in an awkward position of watching over what Kurdish politician Mahmoud Othman dubbed in an interview with NEWSWEEK "sectarian cleansing." The operation in Haifa Street gives a glimpse of what that could look like: U.S. forces teaming up with the Iraqi Army to go after Sunnis, while the Shiite militias stand by and wait for the shooting to stop"
The Battle for Haifa Street
Michael Hastings – Newsweek Web Exclusive, January 12, 2007
Why do we have a place on this street?
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Let the time go by,
I won't care if I
Can be here on the street where you live.
Let me be on the street where you live.
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I'm compelled to talk of a street I've never walked on in a place I'll never go. Egg-building of a troubled mind.