The Walls of Baghdad

But few can see the dome. A spider web of wires delivering sporadic electricity obscures the view. You cant navigate the colonnade. Blast walls block the way. And rarely does the call to prayer filter out from a deluge of car horns.

Its all become trash,broken windows and crumbling buildings, complained Hussein Karim,a porter. Baghdad, added his friend,Hussein Abed,has become a shattered city.

US combat troops finished withdrawing from Baghdad and other Iraqi cities on June 30. But they leave behind a capital that is forever altered by their presence. Augustus boasted that he found Rome a city of bricks and made it a city of marble. Baghdad was another city of bricks,and a coterie of American generals turned it into a city of cement. Their concrete is everywherefrom the sprawling Green Zone to the barriers and blast walls that line almost every street.

In time,though,those walls may matter less than the deeper forces that six years of an American presence hastened. Baghdad is now a city divided from itself. Shiites and Sunnis rarely share neighborhoods. Christians have all but left. Potentates seek refuge in fortresses,and the poor fend for themselves.

From Beirut to Cairo to Baghdad,the Arab worlds great capitals have receded behind walls,psychological and otherwise,that demarcate their sects,ethnicities and classes. Each mourns the disappearance of a cosmopolitanism that seemed entrenched a generation ago.

Destruction is easy, declared Karim,the porter. Building takes a lot more time.

Saddam Hussein brought a coarsely martial style to an earlier Baghdad. The walls of today are more functional,but no less distinguishing. They are without the aggressive permanence of the barriers the Israelis have built to divide themselves from the Palestinians. They lack the political graffiti that made the Berlin Wall so distinctive. Instead they articulate the disparate ambitions in an Iraq that is emerging from war,even as many wonder what it has left.

Paintings on the cement boast an idealised Iraq of Sumerian and Babylonian glory. Vendors use them as billboards for real estate,childrens clothes. The government scrawls on them its authoritarian vision of law. Respect and be respected, one motto reads. Be a hero. Protect Iraq, urges another.

These walls will be removed when the people of Iraq finally wake up again, said Wissam Karim,a 28-year-old soldier walking to his base in Adhamiyah.

Unlike in Cairo or Istanbul,with their imperial cityscapes,remarkably little of Baghdads antiquity has survived. Wars,the flooding of the temperamental Tigris and occasional lightning made sure of that. The city instead seems to draw pride from a culture of memory.

The neighbourhood that unfurls from Rusafis statue was once Baghdads most vibrant,with a mix of Ottoman mosques and markets and British-era apartments. There was fashion on River Street,culture on colonnaded Rashid Street. The tastiest pastries,the best coffee and the most delicious ice cream could be found there.

Today there is commerce of cheap goods: fish from the Tigris asphyxiate in a tub on a car,a pyramid of soft drinks sweats like its vendor,girls dresses splash yellow,orange and pink in a street of gray and brown.

Before the US invasion of Baghdad,there was the eight-year war with Iran. Sanctions followed Iraqs 1991 invasion of Kuwait,wiping out Baghdads once-vibrant middle class.

There are whole generations that have grown up who know nothing but the language of war,confrontation and defiance, said Maysoon al-Damluji,an architect and lawmaker. You see it in peoples eyes.

Baghdadisby which she meant the citys tolerancehave gone. Migrants from the countryside,with the hard rules of hard men,have taken their place. Damluji has a project to restore the swath of urban wilderness around Rusafis statue. Owners would become shareholders in a company that would renovate and resurrect a portion of the city that stretches nearly two miles along the Tigris,from Bab al-Sharji to Bab al-Moadhem. Traffic would be forbidden. Cinemas and stores would share space with parks. We are going to try to keep the social fabric and not turn it over to Starbucks.

There is a famous song by Kazem al-Saher,Iraqs best-known singer,about the capital. Has God ever created,in the entire world,anything as beautiful as you? he asks. His voice then rises,plaintively,as he cries,Baghdad! Baghdad! Baghdad!

Was it ever really beautiful? Damluji paused.

No, she answered. No,I dont think Baghdad was ever a beautiful city. But it was a lively city. It was civilised.

She dragged on a cigarette.

It will take awhile, she admitted. Its far more difficult to build than to demolish.