BAGHDAD: Abu Jumaa has watched Iraq’s history play out on the street outside his shop: he remembers the 1930s revellers, a botched assassination attempt that sent passers-by diving for cover and the arrival of US troops.
The 81-year-old sounds sad as he describes how Rasheed Street, the once-bustling main artery of Baghdad’s Ottoman-era old town, has now become a place of violence and despair.
“The street is history now. It has become a garbage heap of bloody attacks and fear,” he lamented, waving his hand in the air as if saying farewell forever to the good times.
Jumaa has watched the motorcades of many leaders roar down Rasheed Street, he has listened to their promises of a better life and has seen the hopes they fostered wither.
Now, as Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki puts the finishing touches to a government meant to unite the main religious and ethnic groups, Jumaa is wary of believing that a change at the top will mean prosperity and peace.
“When I saw US military vehicles rumbling down the street, I recalled the history of this place,” he said.
“I realised that I might be dead before I see more Iraqi government convoys pass by.”
The history of Rasheed Street mirrors Iraq’s upheaval.
In its glory days in the 1930s, well-heeled residents came here to watch musicals at hotel nightclubs, perhaps arriving in one of the double-decker buses imported from Britain.
Today, thick concrete blast walls divide the lanes of the street, once one of the city’s main thoroughfares on the eastern side of the River Tigris.
These days, just venturing out in Baghdad — known as the city of peace in ancient times — means taking a risk as suicide bombers and death squads stalk the capital’s seven million people.
Rasheed Street was built in 1916 to facilitate troop transports during the First World War.
When Britain governed Iraq as a League of Nations mandate before the country won formal independence in 1932, its engineers used Iraqi prisoners as workers to pave the street.
Rasheed was then also home to several newspapers, which reported that Iraq’s first king, Faisal, was the first person to drive a car down the street.
There are still several markets, including a book fair, but they close early. Private cars are banned and heavily armed police man checkpoints at the intersections.
Jumaa remembers the day he watched a defining moment in Iraq’s history from his shop: a young Saddam Hussein and fellow plotters trying to kill then military ruler Prime Minister Abdel-Karim Kassem.
It was 1959, a year after Kassem overthrew the British-backed monarchy and had the king executed.
The assassination bid failed, and a wounded Saddam fled abroad, only to return four years later after a coup toppled Kassem, whose statue once stood opposite Jumaa’s shop.
“I was here on the street when the Baathists shot Kassem, and I saw one of Saddam’s comrades get killed,” Jumaa said.
“People ran for cover as the prime minister’s car was sprayed with bullets.”
In 1968, Saddam’s Baath Party seized power in another coup, beginning more than three decades of increasingly brutal rule, which ended after the US-led invasion in 2003.
But any belief that Saddam’s ouster would improve the situation soon evaporated as Iraq descended into an inferno of ethnic and religious violence.
This is the new turmoil that Jumaa sees on Rasheed Street.
“I stayed open until 10 (o’clock) four years ago, but now I close my shop at around two in the afternoon and try to hurry home.”—Reuters
