Gorilla’s Guides

Ikram’s Day

In the morning, Ikram puts on her clothes and sits with her children Essam, 9, and his sister Sara, 4, waiting for the local minibuses that take children to school and employees to work.

Before leaving the house she reads some verses from the Koran for protection, then heads into the streets which she describes as a ”battlefield”.

Ikram lives with her mother and sister-in-law. Her husband has left Baghdad to live in the northern Iraqi town of Sulaimaniya in the Kurdish self-rule zone to escape the sectarian cleansing that erupted last year.

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It takes Ikram about an hour and a half to get her children to school, and from there to travel to her place of work at Baghdad university across the river. She says that the journey would take no more than half an hour were it not for all the roadblocks, which have become more numerous since the Iraqi government announced its crackdown on armed groups in February.

”The first thing I say to my colleagues [when I walk into work] is ‘Thank God for your safety,’” she says. Each day there is at least one explosion, maybe at a market, or a school, a ministry, or on the high street, leaving in its wake body parts and blood without anyone knowing the cause, or what the bombers intended.

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Ikram’s colleague Rawa, 37, from Ghazaliya, has not been able to come to work for two days as her neighbourhood has been undergoing a security sweep. That means her news is the most important, and everyone stops to listen to her first.

Rawa explains how a group of Americans came into their homes and searched them, and took their fingerprints and photos and did retinal scans. “They were relaxed with us. They came into our guest rooms and sat there for a quarter of an hour. They put down their equipment and drank the water they were carrying. Their interpreter accepted tea but all the Americans refused to drink or eat what we offered,” she said.

”They were laughing and friendly, and one of them said to the other that this was a ‘safe place’, but I could not forget that they had entered my house by force and that I had not invited them, that they were occupiers not guests,” she said.

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The conversations go on - about the government’s inability to stop the car bombs, the corruption, the power cuts that last many days, dealing with the owners of private generators and the rising price of electricity, and how they have to get up in the middle of the night to fill up 20 litres worth of plastic buckets in case the water is cut the next day. And in the middle of their conversation there is a huge explosion that shakes the walls.

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Read In Full: FT.com / In depth - Iraqi voices series - Part 1

Abbas’ Day

I live in a house in Sadr City, in the east of Baghdad. I work as a driver. The entire house has three rooms, in which live 15 people - myself, my wife, 11 children, and my son’s wife and children.

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In Sadr City, rubbish is piled high in the gutters and in the central reservations between streets. Rats live in it. Many are the size of small cats. At night they run through the sewers and slip into shops and homes. People are afraid of them, because they may carry the plague. One of my neighbours told me recently he was awoken from sleep by a rat which bit him on the toe.

One of the biggest decisions that every family in Sadr City needs to make is whether to sleep outside on the roof or inside in the house. Sleeping outside can get you killed. At around midnight, every night, we hear the sound of explosions and gunfire as the Americans hunt for the Mahdi Army.

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One night some weeks ago, I was awoken by a series of powerful explosions and what sounded like a screaming child. I thought maybe I should go outside and see if the child needed help, but quickly put this dangerous idea out of my mind.

An hour went by, then there were more explosions and again the screams of a child, so I went to my door and looked out. I saw one of my neighbours running down the street carrying his child.

I asked why the boy was screaming. My neighbour told me that his son was sick. ”Go to the hospital,” I said. ”Can’t you hear the explosions are dying down?”

All the time, I was speaking from the door of my house, afraid to go out. ”The Americans will think I am Mahdi Army and kill me,” shouted my neighbour. I didn’t know what to do, so I went back inside. There was another loud explosion and again the boy screamed.

Every morning on my way to work, I stop by the nearby hospital which is right outside my home. When I see a number of people waiting by the door of the morgue, I know it was a particularly bad night.

One morning about a month ago, one of my relatives informed me that one of my friends had been arrested by the Americans the night before, along with his son, and that the Americans had blown up the house.

I went there and found two of my friend’s children, aged 10 and 12. The Americans hadn’t blown up the home but they had certainly made it impossible to live in. Clothes were scattered on the floor and the little garden outside was dug up, the trees stripped of their leaves and the monthly food ration thrown onto the ground, rice and sugar mixing with the dirt.

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Read In Full: FT.com / In depth - Iraqi voices series: Part 2

Azad Mala’s Day

Throughout Kurdistan, whenever you leave your home in the morning, the first thing you see is usually a construction project - an overpass, an underpass, a hotel, a mall.

The next thing you see is traffic, as now pretty much everyone has a car. The city is full of people coming here to find work, from the rest of Iraq, from Turkey, from the Philippines, Bangladesh or Ethiopia.

As the one stable part of Iraq, Kurdistan is undergoing an economic boom. Things are moving here after more than a decade of sanctions. But I worry about where it’s all going.

The development here feels like a shell, a hollow rind. The government is building lots of impressive new buildings, but does not seem to care much about having an effective workforce.

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Now I teach at a university, and things aren’t any more encouraging. A few of my students are very good. But most don’t seem to care. They can’t even be bothered to conceal their cheating. Recently two students in the same class turned in the exact same assignment. I stapled the pages together, called the two students to the front, and asked: ”Who copied whom?”

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Officials can put pressure on their teachers to pass them. It’s so routine that sometimes they don’t even seem to know that they are cheating. About two months ago I was speaking to a government official enrolled at my school, who boasted about what a diligent a student he was. ”My professor supplied me all five exam answers [before the exam] and I memorised them all!” he said, entirely without irony.

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My main topic of conversation with my wife is budgeting for electricity - how much kerosene to stock up on (usually $300 a month), how much to pay the entrepreneur who runs the neighbourhood generator (usually $50), how much to set aside for generator maintenance ($30 to $50), petrol for my car ($150, at least) - you get the picture.

In 1996, I made $80 a month working for an international organisation, and I could live on it - my rent was $30 a month. Now I make $1,200 and it is still not enough. I pay $700 on rent. Add in the cost of fuel, food, and other expenses and I have nothing left over at the end of the month.

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Of course, in Kurdistan we have stability. The government will play this card with us whenever we question their policies. ”Do you want to be like Baghdad? Thank God you are not like Baghdad.” You hear something like this whenever a citizen goes to complain to an official.

I don’t think that stability is the government’s gift to us. I personally believe that Kurdish society is naturally averse to extremism, to terrorism. But we still here the same implied but very clear message from our government: ”You should leave us to be corrupt, to defraud the country, because we give you stability.”

This government sometimes says that this country will be like Dubai. By this they mean that it will be prosperous, thanks to its new-found oil wealth. Already you can see the signs. For example, Kurds never used to have housemaids or servants. It’s not really part of our society. But now some of the party elites employ servants from Africa or east Asia, just like elites in the Gulf.

I think this country may well one day be like Dubai, where the “sheikhs” control everything, the foreigners are given all the challenging work, and the rest of the population is paid to stay out of sight.

Read in Full FT.com / In depth - Iraqi voices series -part 3