Ghaith Abdul-Ahad - A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle Easts Long War

Hotel room. Baghdad, 2007.

Late at night, I am awake in my hotel bed, listening to the sounds of a city at war: the distant thuds of mortars crashing in the Green Zone, the monotonous din of supply convoys, shrouded in the safety of the dark curfew hours. There are rumblings in the street below, and the howling of street dogs. Dawn will break soon; the clashes will resume. Car bombs will start blowing up in the morning rush hour. The sounds, like the war, have become repetitive, rhythmic and very predictable.

Like insomniacs counting sheep to fall asleep, I play my own game; sifting through the faces of friends from the pre-invasion days, I try to place each one on the sectarian map of a fragmented city. Tonight, I mentally run through a faded school picture, taken on a spring day in 1991, just before the second Gulf War; a group of friends in high-waisted jeans and tucked-in T-shirts, posing in front of the tall, imposing brick facade of the Jesuit-builtsubsequently nationalisedschool. Scrawny limbs, hollowed chests, childish and naughty eyes, and the first traces of moustaches lining their lips.

I try to imagine their lives in the context of the civil war raging outside my hotel room. Who was a Shia, and who was a Sunni? How many were kidnapped and how many killed? How many members of militias and how many in exile?

Those with easy-to-classify family names emerge first. Ahmad must be a Shia. Raid is a Sunnihe used to be proud of a distant tribal relation to the Great Leader, an association that must haunt him in these days of Shia death squads. Basil was Christian and had long since left Iraq. The game is hard, old memories cant always be translated into the latest sectarian terminology, and I fail to place most of my friends on the new sectarian map of Baghdad.

The poet who I presumed to be a Shia, just because he lived close to the Shia shrine in Khadimiya, turned out to be a Sunni from Mosul. He dallied with radical Islam, grew a long beard, and flirted with Sunni insurgents, before fleeing from Shia death squads into Syria. He could have been a useful contact in these days, but when a few years later I met him in Dubai, he drank his whisky neat and was back to writing poetry. The young boys from the high school picture are now scattered between Dubai, Amman, Liverpool and Toronto. A neurosurgeon, a paediatrician, an architect, a civil engineer and a couple of university professors, a businessman who twice made a multimillion-dollar fortune and twice lost it on the stock market. Alas, none is a vicious militia commander; there are no sectarian politicians and no killers among them. They are useless friends in a Baghdad torn by civil war, where one needs contacts among the different fighting groups to help negotiate the multiple front lines. I have become a stranger in my own city.

The hotel bed is narrow with a pale wooden frame, sagging in the middle where two planks are missing. The room is heavy with the dust of two decades of War, Sanctions and Occupation. Two car bombs have left long, thin cracks on the walls; plastic sheeting covers a broken window, and pipes are dripping in the bathroom, where layers of grimy green mould carpet the corners. The hotel was once a fashionable enterprise with the sharp, concrete corners of brutalist architecture, chic seventies furniture and an excellent bakery. The swimming pool, with its deep blue tiles, was elegant and exceptionally clean. The cold, over-chlorinated water frothed in little waves over the edge, and floating eucalyptus leaves would cast twirling shadows on its blue tiles before being scooped up by a diligent staff member. A long-life ago, I swam here every summer. A benevolent, wealthy, formerly Communist grand-aunt paid my entry fees; she also introduced me to Russian literature and ailurophilia. I used to sit at one of the white plastic tables by the poolside playing Uno with other boys and girls. We ate melon, ice cream and sometimes, if we could afford it, croissant sandwiches. When most of the guests left, we stayed behind, racing each other in the pool, or swimming endless laps until it was dark and too cold.