416: Iraq After Us

Ira Glass

The US has been in Iraq for seven years and I realized the other day, when I heard this clip of tape that I'm about to play you, that I've never even really understood what Baghdad looks like.

Ira Glass

This is Larry Kaplow, a journalist who reported from Baghdad for the first six years of the war. He went back this summer, with one of our producers, Nancy Updike. They spent a month in Iraq.

Ira Glass

So it's like Miami, except these concrete blast walls that honeycomb the city, 12 feet tall, giant great dominoes, thousands of them, creating a kind of endless maze. They fully enclose entire neighborhoods. Which means that to run errands, or go to your job, or do anything normal outside your own neighborhood, you go through checkpoints each time you cross from one place to another, over and over. Even the soldiers at the checkpoints find these checkpoints so depressing that lots of them are decorated with fake flowers, bleached by the sun, in strands and bunches.

Now the other thing about the way the city looks, Larry says, and he's back in the States. He's actually sitting right here with me in the studio, is that with Saddam Hussein gone, Baghdad is now clearly a Shiite city. It's been majority Shiite for generations, but you couldn't tell before Saddam fell, because Saddam led a regime dominated by the Sunnis, and they tried to paper over the religious differences between the two groups.

Ira Glass

Now, the Sunnis are the minority in Iraq. Saddam Hussein was Sunni. And now that he's out, the overwhelming majority of the country, the Shia, are in control. In the past in Iraq, Shia and Sunni lived side by side and they inter-married. Since the invasion, as we've all heard, there have been been periods of Sunni and Shia killing each other. So, today are they're getting along?

Nancy Updike

So he's Shia, he's got Sunni friends, he has a Sunni girlfriend. And he told us this story about a Sunni friend of his who owed him $200. And they were going to lunch to settle up this debt. The professor suggested a fish restaurant in a Shiite neighborhood, that would be safe and comfortable for him. And the friend, the Sunni friend, wanted to go to a neighborhood called Al Adhamiya. Just a year ago, the professor would never have gone to this neighborhood. It just would have been too dangerous. But he let himself get talked into it.

Nancy Updike

So the professor is sitting there with his Sunni friend in this pizza restaurant, this is all just a few months ago, and he's trying to keep the conversation on politically neutral subjects. How things are going at the university. And then an Iraqi army convoy passed in front of the restaurant's window, and his friend watched the convoy pass, and made a comment.

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life distributed by Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass. This August, when the United States declared an end to combat operations in Iraq and pulled back its troops, officially lowered the numbers to under 50,000, one of the things you didn't get very much in the coverage is that you didn't hear many Iraqi voices. So Nancy and Larry spent a month in Iraq and talked to lots of people. Because we wanted to understand, with the US pulling back finally, how are things going? How well is the country emerging from the war? How are people feeling? What's Iraq going to be like, after us. That's our show today, in three acts, stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, What Just Happened? Lots of us understand it's still kind of a mess in Iraq right now, but the specifics of that mess are a little vague. And, to get a grip on that, let's start with the story of one man, and everything that this one man has seen since the invasion. The man's named Abu Abed. Nancy tells this story.

Nancy Updike

Here's what I knew about Abu Abed when I met him. He was an Iraqi who had fought with the Americans in Baghdad during the surge, and he'd become a small legend. The game changer who help the US drive al-Qaeda out of one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Baghdad.

Nancy Updike

This is Colonel Dale Kuehl. The US commander of the area in Baghdad where Abu Abed fought al-Qaeda.

Nancy Updike

Two years after helping the US route al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Abed was living like a fugitive. A suicide bomber tried to kill him in Baghdad, and he and his family fled Iraq for Jordan. It didn't help. They had to change addresses every couple of months. Abu Abed was attacked in the street. They were getting death threats from al-Qaeda, including a note handed to his son at school. His wife was stabbed during an attempt kidnap their son. A few days before I got in touch with him, Abu Abed paid a smuggler $50,000 to get him, his wife, and their two children to Sweden.

Abu Abed, whose real name is Saad Oraibi Ghaffouri Al-Obeidi, has letters full of praise from American generals saying he should be allowed to come to the US. General David Petraeus, former top commander of the war, wrote one for him. But America turned him down flat, no explanation, even now. Abu Abed sits on the edge of a couch, unshaven, in cropped khaki pants, khaki shirt, and sandals.

Nancy Updike

Sweden is still deciding whether he can stay.

Nancy Updike

The Iraq war has had one question at its heart, with an answer that keeps shifting, who is our enemy? Abu Abed has gone from being a central character in US strategy to an exile sleeping on a friend's floor. And those are only two of the roles he's played in the Iraq war. At every turn in the war, every change in US tactics or strategy, Abu Abed has been there, either benefiting or getting pounded. He's a living catalog of the seven years of decisions, successes and failures, that have made up this war.

During the first phase of the war, Abu Abed was our enemy. He was a captain in Saddam Hussein's air force. In intelligence, he says. His country was being invaded. Then the war very quickly entered its second phase, the insurgency. IEDs, car bombs, sniper attacks. The insurgency was led by Sunnis, many of them former Iraqi army officers. Abu Abed was a Sunni and a former Iraqi army officer. But he insists he was never part of that. He never fought the US. I asked him about it so many times, he got exasperated.

Nancy Updike

This has been Abu Abed's official position for years, so it's hard for him to back off it. But a US army captain, who later befriended him says Abu Abed told him the truth. He did fight the US, he was part of the insurgency. But to make things even more complicated, he was also reaching out to the US, as early as 2004, feeding them information. Like any smart gambler, he was placing more than one bet. In this early stage of the war, the insurgency, one of the coalition force's main tactics was raid, arrest, interrogate. Which happened to Abu Abed. He was picked up in a neighborhood sweep.

Nancy Updike

I confirmed with another US officer that Abu Abed was arrested early in the war. Abu Abed says he was interrogated by American civilians, private contractors.

Nancy Updike

Abu Abed says the civilian interrogators held him for around 20 days. They were insisting they knew who he was. They kept calling him a name he remembers as something like "Shaddat," and they wanted him to admit it. Nothing he said could convince them otherwise. Abu Abed says the torture and interrogation ended when he was suddenly switched to a different room.

Nancy Updike

By 2006, the war had changed again. Many Iraqis now refer to that early insurgency as the "Honorable resistance," to distinguish it from what happened next. Iraq turned into a sectarian war that was basically a gang war. Sunni gangs, often allied with al-Qaeda, versus Shiite gangs. And if you were a regular person, trying to live your life and weren't in one of the gangs yourself, the differences between them seemed mainly stylistic. One man told us, "The way you know al-Qaeda is coming up to your house to kill you, is that their addressed like ordinary guys, and shouting "Allah hu akbar." The way you know a Shiite militia is pulling up to your house, is that they're dressed all in black, and shouting the names of Shiite saints.

Abu Abed's neighborhood in Baghdad, Amiriyah, is a Sunni stronghold. A place where members of Saddam's military got nice houses and had lived well back in the day. Some Sunnis in Abu Abed's neighborhood joined forces with al-Qaeda against their common enemies. The Shiite militias and the Americans. In fact, at the height of its power, al-Qaeda declared Amiriyah its capital. They appointed their own finance minister, education minister. The new Iraqi government was desperate.

Nancy Updike

This is Saad Motallebi, an adviser in the current Iraqi government.

Nancy Updike

But then something changed. People started to hate al-Qaeda. In Amiriyah, al-Qaeda kidnapped and brutally killed an older Christian couple who everyone liked. Abu Abed saw a friend whipped in the street.

Nancy Updike

Al-Qaeda went into Iraq seeing themselves as liberators, overplayed their hand, and alienated people. And that's when the American forces and the Iraqi government got their big break. The sons of Iraq, also sometimes called the Awakening or the Sunni Awakening.

Nancy Updike

This is Colonel Kuehl again, whose area of command included Amiriyah. Before the Sons of Iraq showed up, the US had been focusing, for years, on a failed plan, recruiting and training the Iraqi army and police to get them able to secure the country. When they stand up, we will stand down. It wasn't working. In fact, it was making things worse. The police force we were building, which is overwhelmingly Shiite, had pockets of Shiite militias who would kidnap and kill people, often without bothering to change out of their uniforms. Abu Abed says two of his brothers were killed by a Shiite militia.

In Amiriyah, the Sons of Iraq started in late May, 2007, when Colonel Kuehl got a phone call from a local leader, a Sheikh and an Imam, who Kuehl had chewed out 10 days earlier, following an IED attack on his men. Kuehl had told them, "You have to help us fight al-Qaeda."

Nancy Updike

What followed was a quick initial victory and then a furious counter attack by al-Qaeda. The Imam called Kuehl for help, and the US forces went in and pushed al-Qaeda back, and then--

Nancy Updike

Abu Abed has dozens of photographing from his time fighting alongside the US military. The photos were among the few things he insisted on bringing with him when the family was smuggled to Sweden. In the photos, Abu Abed is leaner than he is now, with a mustache. He looks relaxed and energized. A man whose talents are in demand. The more he shuffles through the photos, the happier he gets, telling war stories.

Nancy Updike

It's a most animated I ever see him.

Nancy Updike

Every American we talked to who fought with Abu Abed said he was an incredible soldier. One, Captain Brian Weightman, described his as fluid. That 1% who can remain calm in the middle of hair-raising chaos, able to inspire men, Weightman said, including him. Some Americans called him a brother. Once the Americans embraced the Sons of Iraq, it forced the Iraqi Army to work with them. And in Amiriyah, the three groups together were an unstoppable force against al-Qaeda. In the midst of this triumphant military campaign, in which Abu Abed was a crucial partner, trusted every day with American lives, two US captains Abu Abed worked with came to him and said they'd been told to take him to some meeting with some people. So Abu Abed went to the meeting, not thinking much of it.

Nancy Updike

It was the group of civilians who had interrogated him in 2004. The same people he says beat him, hung him from his arms, and held him captive for as long as they wanted. Those same people were now smiling at him, and saying how glad they were to see them. Abu Abed tried to stay calm.

Nancy Updike

Colonel Kuehl published a long rebuttal to the story, saying the overall picture of Amiriyah it showed was wrong. The Sons of Iraq seemingly running rampant, with little or no supervision by the US military or the Iraqi military. His rebuttal did not, however, refute any of the specific incidents the story described. In fact, he concedes that some of them happened, though he doesn't believe Abu Abe put a gun in a child's mouth.

When the story came out, Kuehl was furious at Abu Abed. He believed Abu Abed's vanity, his desire to build up his own reputation as a tough guy, was putting the entire Sons of Iraq project at risk. He called Abu Abed in for a talk.

Nancy Updike

This is Saad Motallebi again, the government adviser who talked earlier about how he worried they might lose control over Baghdad. He's talking about the Sons of Iraq, they were the crocodile he saw. Armed men, not under government control, roaming the streets. The US military had a solution to that. They thought the Iraqi government should absorb most of the Sons of Iraq into their security forces, the police and the army. Make those mostly Shiite forces represent the country as a whole, by adding Sunnis. But to many in the Iraqi government, the Sons of Iraq were insurgents, period. And its leaders like Abu Abed were former officers from Saddam Hussein's army.

Nancy Updike

Abu Abed says he and other Sons of Iraq wanted to form a police force in Amiriyah. He says they were prevented by the government.

Nancy Updike

Meaning Shiite.

Nancy Updike

The Iraqi government essentially won this argument, in part because the US was eager to move on to a new phase of the war, the phase it's still in-- achieving political stability so the US forces can leave. What this meant for Abu Abed is that when he talked to US military guys, there was a new catch phrase, Iraqi sovereignty. Meaning, if the Iraqi government wants to put someone else in the police in this area, instead of you and your guys, that's their business and we're not going to intervene. He says this was different from what the US military had been saying to him before this point.

Nancy Updike

The more successful the Sons of Iraq were in neutralizing al-Qaeda, the less necessary they became. They made themselves obsolete. Kuehl saw this coming and tried to warn Abu Abed. Later, Kuehl led a big effort to try and get him to the US, rallied a network of churches and people and vouched for Abu Abed personally. But Kuehl was blunt with him when they were recruiting for the new police force in Amiriyah.

Nancy Updike

General Petraeus added a handwritten note to hit type-written letter of recommendation supporting Abu Abed's application to the US. The notes says, "He risked everything to stand against al-Qaeda in Iraq, and he's paid a heavy price. We should help him." He underlined should. A lot of Iraqis have helped the US and paid a heavy price. And we've turned many of them away for any blemish, or seeming blemish. And who has more blemishes on his record than a fighter? The Sons of Iraq, our alliance with them, was a big success for us. And this is the mess that goes along with it.

Abu Abed's old neighborhood, Amiriyah, today is mostly calm, but bleak. Some of the buildings are pitted by gunfire and crumbling from bombings. There isn't a Sons of Iraq leader in Amiriyah anymore. Abu Abed's successor was blown up by a suicide bomber a few weeks before we got to Iraq. One of the few Sons of Iraq foot soldiers left in Amiriyah was working at the check point into the neighborhood. He hadn't been paid in two months.

US and Iraqi officials say the Iraqi government has stalled on services in Amiriyah and others Sunni areas, in part to undermine the popularity of Sons of Iraq leaders. The US has been pushing reconciliation in Iraq, saying it's key to stabilizing the country. Trying to get Sunnis and Shiites, plus the Kurds, to work together and share power. It's not working. The Chief of the US reconciliation program in Baghdad told me.

Sons of Iraq, especially its leaders, have been arrested. Some are being killed, sometimes with their families, by al-Qaeda, by other rivals or enemies. Some, like Abu Abed, have fled. There's an arrest warrant out for him in Iraq now. Some US officials believe the charges are politically motivated. The cold fact is that Iraq may not need reconciliation to have stability, depending on how brutal the Iraqi government is willing to be, and we're willing to let them be. If they put enough Sunnis in prison, or drive them out of the country, while welcoming the few they do feel able to work with, the Shia majority might be able to run the country without ever reconciling with the Sunnis. Which might be fine with us, if Iraq were our only war. In Afghanistan, Afghan fighters have raised the issue of what's become of the the Sons of Iraq in meetings with the US, according to an American officer who served in Afghanistan.

Everywhere we want local fighters to help us, they're going to ask themselves, how will we end up?

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike. Coming up, what is that crushed garbage under foot everywhere in Iraq cities? And other things that nobody has told you about life in Iraq today. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Today on our show, Iraq After Us. Reporter Larry Kaplow and one of our producers, Nancy Updike, spent a month in Iraq this August as US troops were ending their combat mission. And they traveled around the country interviewing many, many more people than we will be able to fit into one hour today. To try to understand how things are going in Iraq, in this half hour of the show we are going to hear two more stories, two more acts from the stories that they gathered. And we are going to go straight from one to the other. And we're going to start with Act Two, Politics as Usual.

One of the biggest political challenges facing Iraq today has to do with something that's so basic, and that is that for decades the country was run by a dictator. And even before that dictator, before Saddam Hussein, there were other strongmen, and there were kings. Government in Iraq has basically meant somebody at the top imposing order and control on everybody below. And the United States has tried to convince Iraqis that democracy means distributing that power. Sending it out of Baghdad, out of these big, central ministries, and sending it all over the country. Giving political power to local mayors, and newly formed provincial councils. Iraq is divided into a bunch of provinces that are kind of like states.

But Iraqis are not used to that. They're used to top down. Nancy and Larry went to Diyala Province, just north of Baghdad, to see whether the old mentality has changed at all. They started at the bottom rung in a top down government-- the mayor's office in Diyala's capital city Baqubah. Larry tells this story.

Larry Kaplow

The mayor's office is behind blast walls and barbed wire. And it's not really a municipal building, it's basically a large house at the end of a residential street. Inside there's a short dusty hallway with scuffed walls, in a small foyer with a few loose metal chairs. And it's filled with people, maybe 50 of them. People are literally pressed against a plexiglass divider at the end of the hall. An old woman shouts, "I'm not a dog, I'm a human being."

Larry Kaplow

Nancy, our interpreter Sarah, and I approach a man who tells us he was injured in a bombing back in 2006. He's a Shiite and they were usually the targets. After more than a dozen operations on his leg, a doctor classified him 70% disabled, and he can't work his farm. So he's here hoping to get a note from the mayor to help get compensation promised by the government.

Larry Kaplow

A million Iraqi dinars is about $850. The man with the leg injury, and everyone else here, wants to see the guy behind the plexiglass divider. It's kind of like The Wizard of Oz, they're hoping he can solve their problems. But when we get back to see Abdullah Al-Khayali, the mayor of this district of 500,000 people, it turns out, like the wizard, he's mostly powerless.

Larry Kaplow

Al-Khayali tells us he doesn't control what's happening on the city streets. The police force answers to the army, not to him. The schools and the hospitals are run from Baghdad. He can't authorise big public works projects. It's not so different from how it all worked under Saddam, and there's no plan for that to change. He still depends on the central government for almost all his money, too. Definitely no hospitality budget. He points to the table in front of us.

Larry Kaplow

He says the tea is no big deal, he's just trying to make a point. Al-Khayali in his mid-30's, and he's charming. Both times we see him, he's dressed like he is going to a nightclub instead of City Hall, in perfectly coordinated suits and ties and even socks. He's dapper, but beleaguered. Take the issue he says everyone's complaining to him about-- roadblocks. The Iraqi Army has barricaded all the roads into the center of town. They're meant to prevent car bomb attacks, but they've completely choked off the downtown.

Larry Kaplow

Just imagine if an army blocked all the traffic to your downtown without consulting the mayor or anyone else.

Larry Kaplow

One thing he does have a say in is who gets houses that the United Nations is giving away. They're supposed to go to refugees whose homes were destroyed. It's a US funded program to bring back people who fled the violence. But we heard he was giving some of the houses to relatives, even if they still had homes. So we ask Al-Khayali, expecting a sharp denial.

Larry Kaplow

In Iraq, family comes first, because family might be the only thing you have to fall back on. All the other institutions are so fragile. The next rung up the government ladder, above City Hall, is the Provincial Council. If the provinces in Iraq are like states, the Provincial Council is like the State Legislature. The Council meets in a fancier building the mayor's office, much fancier. Tea and water flow freely. But that doesn't mean it works any better.

Larry Kaplow

Meet Ahmer Thamer Mustafa Al-Khirke. He's a member of the Provincial Council, but he's mastered the political art of being outraged like he's some man on the street. Sarah couldn't keep a straight face as she was translating.

Larry Kaplow

It was a fascinating interview. Picture Al-Khirke, a trim 54 year old in a dark suit, in the imperious bearing of the army general he was under the old regime. He had two main points he wanted to make. One, I live to serve the citizens of Diyala. In fact--

Larry Kaplow

And two, my allies and I refuse to me with the other members of the Council.

Larry Kaplow

We spent most of an hour trying to understand how Al-Khirke could serve the people of Diyala as an elected representative, without participating in the political body to which he was elected. But to Al-Khirke, this whole line of questioning was beside the point. What's important to him, is that his party didn't do well in local elections about two years ago. They got three out of 29 seats on the Provincial Council. But by early this year, the mood had shifted, and the party, lead nationally by Ayad Allawi, did very well in the national election, the one held this past spring to choose Iraq's new Parliament and Prime Minister. So Al-Khirke is threatening to call a do-over.

Larry Kaplow

It's as if the Republicans in America looked at their poll numbers and asked for a do-over of the 2008 Presidential election right now.

Larry Kaplow

He's saying, "No, the law says that if a third of the Provincial Council wants a new election, they can petition the Parliament to call a new election." Which is true, but trying to do that would throw Diyala into many more months of paralysis and drift, which is what the bombers and militants want, too. They've killed 381 people and wounded over 1,000 in Diyala so far this year.

Larry Kaplow

This is politics in Iraq today. All these institutions are so new and so weak, and the politicians don't see the point of working together and compromising. For them, you're either in charge or you're not. Like in the old Iraq. And if that's your mentality, with everything in flux, if you're not on top, the most sensible strategy is to stall until power shifts again.

Nancy Updike

Act Three, Today in Babylon. Iraq is stable now. In geo-political terms, Iraq is stable. We saw that when we were there. Kids go to school. People with money go out to dinner and take vacations. Men go hit the night clubs in Baghdad and drink beer. Young couples have fancy deafening weddings.

Larry Kaplow

But stable in Iraq just means it's not flying into pieces anymore. Stable means stable enough for us, the rest of the world. For people who live there, it's still dangerous, frightening, and just plain difficult. There aren't enough jobs. Huge numbers of people survive on a couple of days of work a month, or they live off relatives. Officials expect bribes for everything, passports, business permits, police protection. The prisons are horrific.

Nancy Updike

There isn't enough clean water. The entire country is carpeted with trash that seems to be 90% flattened water bottles. And there are still bombings and killings. 200 to 300 dead per month. That's a tenth of what it was three years ago. But imagine if a dozen or more people were being blown up by bombs each month in any US city, for seven years. You don't get used to it. Iraqis haven't developed some special mid-East super immunity to violence just because they've seen a lot of it. Larry and I talked to so many people who were just exhausted by relentless, low-level fear.

Larry Kaplow

So we made it our mission to seek out people who are happy and plowing ahead in spite of at all. We stopped in at a shop in Abu Abed's old neighborhood, Amiriyah.

Nancy Updike

It was full of women, and stocked floor to ceiling with herbal remedies of every kind including--

Nancy Updike

An actual snake oil salesman. His shop was clearly a hub for women in the neighborhood. He joked around with them while he told them how to take the medicines, threw English in.

Nancy Updike

After the women left, I started to ask my first question.

Nancy Updike

He was checking her bag to make sure she hadn't left a bomb behind.

Nancy Updike

Within five minutes, he was telling us how during the worst of the violence, three years ago, his older brother had been kidnapped and the family impoverished itself to pay $17,000 ransom.

Nancy Updike

They killed him anyway.

Nancy Updike

Hussein is the name of a Shiite saint. He was killed by a Shiite militia.

Nancy Updike

Dulami, his last name, is the name of a large Sunni tribe in Iraq. The man started to cry, and went to the back of the shop to collect himself.

Larry Kaplow

We didn't give up on our mission, but the reality was almost any person we talked to in Iraq was only one or two questions away from despair. Even our translator, Sarah, who was always sunny and joking around, broke down during an interview. It happened after a man we were talking to, a Sons of Iraq leader in Diyalah, plucked a tissue out of a box to make a point.

Larry Kaplow

Sarah was an interpreter for the US Army during the surge. And she was wrongly accused of aiding the insurgents, put in prison, and by the time the charges were dropped, she'd been blacklisted and couldn't go back to work for the US, one of the few decent paying jobs in Iraq. She's the only bread winner for two boys. Her husband was killed because of her work with the Americans.

Nancy Updike

We went to what seems to be the happiest place in Baghdad. Zawra park, which is a big amusement park, with rides and places to picnic. In the rest of Baghdad this summer, you might get an hour a day of city electricity. But Zawra park is always lit up, like any carnival midway. It was packed with groups of young single men and families.

Larry Kaplow

One family was having a night-time birthday picnic, with cake and candles, for one of the women's two-year old granddaughter.

Larry Kaplow

The park costs money. The cake and the outing were a big deal for this family. They are Shiites from Sadr city, the poorest part of Baghdad.

Larry Kaplow

Of course, this being Iraq, where hospitality to strangers is a national creed, the family insisted we join them for cake. And we were two minutes in, I clocked it, when they started telling us there version of the snake oil man's story. An aunt, chased down and killed by some of her Sunni neighbors, the rest of the family driven out of their home.

Nancy Updike

I asked them what they thought about the US. These were people who had been terribly oppressed under Saddam Hussein. At the same time, many more Shiite civilians have been killed in the last seven years than Sunnis or American troops. The woman I was talking to clammed up, and had to be coaxed by our translator. Finally she said--

Nancy Updike

I said, "Let me have it."

Nancy Updike

There's a quote from the US military's counter-insurgency manual, the text book for the strategy that help turned the Iraq war around. It says, "Sometimes societies are most prone to unrest, not when conditions are the worse, but when the situation begins to improve and people's expectations rise." The worst violence in Iraq ended about two years ago. But in those two years, Iraqis haven't seen their daily life improve at all. Their relief at not being in constant danger has worn off, and now they want more than just survival. They want to move forward with their lives. But they can't.

Larry Kaplow

We did eventually find someone who didn't cry. A soft spoken man named Faraz Khaldoon with a shiny spacious store, full of ice cream soda and canned goods from Syria and Turkey. Even condiments from the US. But even him, when we ask him how it's going, he says with a laugh--

Larry Kaplow

In the six months since he opened his shop, two bombs have gone off nearby, one of them shattering his windows. The city's decrepit power grid surged and started a fire in the store. And bombings in the market downtown led the Iraqi Army to close off a bunch of the roads. So when he tries to restock his store, to run his business, it takes a Rube Goldberg series of motorbikes and trucks.

Nancy Updike

He told us the same thing a lot of people did. The snake oil salesman, our translator Sarah, people in the mayor's office, the park and stores, hardworking middle-class people. He wants to leave Iraq. Most of these people won't be able to leave. But they want to. And there are a lot of them.

[MUSIC - "WEN INTI, HABIBIT UMRI? (WHERE ARE YOU, THE LOVE OF MY LIFE?) BY HUSSAM AL-RASSAM]

Ira Glass

Our program today was reported in Iraq by Larry Kaplow and Nancy Updike, produced by our senior producer, Julie Snyder, and Jonathan Menjivar, with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Jane Feltes, Sarah Koenig, Lisa Pollak, Robyn Semien, and Alissa Shipp. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our office manager. Production help from Shawn Wen. This song you're hearing is by Hussam Al-Rassam, one of the biggest Iraqi pop singers. It's a love song.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our program by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he is not just our boss. He is not just a great public radio professional. He is also a part time professional mind reader.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

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