Once known for idyllic palm gardens, the conflict had turned Baghdad into a city of barricades and traffic jams. More and more checkpoints to thwart terrorist attacks began blocking the traffic as we got closer to the city centre. The expressway meandered through sparsely-populated deserts, dotted with eulogies to the Prophet, his family, and the fallen anti-ISIS fighters, with hardly any human habitation over swathes of territory.Ī sense of uneasy calm en route to the city gave way to palpable tension as we entered Baghdad. Boots on the ground and armoured vehicles became ubiquitous as we approached the city after driving kilometres and kilometres without any traffic on the well-maintained expressway. It was not until we travelled to Baghdad, the national capital around 180 km north of Najaf, that Iraq began appearing increasingly war-torn. They constantly reminded people in the region, where the bulk of the volunteer fighters were signing up to fight ISIS, about the conflict in the country’s north. The region’s main attractions-mausoleums of the Prophet’s relatives-markets and hotels around them were full of pilgrims from across the world. They regularly reverberated with salutations upon the Prophet and his family as pallbearers would bring bodies of fallen anti-ISIS fighters for funeral services and provide grim reminders of the bloody war.īanners celebrating fallen fighters virtually on every lamppost and TV screen in public squares beaming visuals of successes from the frontlines were among other outliers. Much of Central Iraq appeared normal at least on the face of it. There were barely any visible signs of the war against the terrorist organisation masquerading as a caliphate- the so-called Islamic State aka ISIS. Iraq hardly looked like a country in the middle of an existential war as we drove from Najaf, the port of our entry, to Karbala, 75km away, in February 2016 as part of a group of journalists covering the war on ISIS. The violence had begun to ebb by 2016 but corroded car bomb hulks, and abandoned, bombed out and bullet-riddled buildings represented the horrors Baghdad, the city of about seven million, had suffered
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