Living With The Fear

By Johanna Mcgeary/Baghdad

These days Mohammed Amin Radhy opens his pediatric clinic only three days a week, for three hours at a time. In the new Baghdad, it's a life-or-death journey just to travel the 3 1/2 miles from his home in the elegant Mansour district to his office in a dicey part of the city near Tahrir Square. And when he does go to work, he encounters grim suffering he never expected to see. On a recent weekday a woman, swathed head to toe in a black aba, tugs her wailing child up the pitch-black stairs to the clinic. As usual, the electricity is out. She feels her way along the lightless hall until they reach the office, a dim, dingy room with a desk, a sink, a scale and an ancient examination table covered by a dusty black cloth. Everything in the once fine clinic was looted or wrecked a year ago.

Dripping with sweat, Dr. Radhy waves a straw fan at his face as he examines the child in the sweltering morning heat. The little girl has whooping cough, a disease rarely seen over the past decade among middle-class children like her. In the past year, says the doctor, poor hygiene, malnutrition and a lack of vaccines have spread such ailments into every neighborhood. Parents, fearful of braving Baghdad's streets, "wait to come until the child is very bad," he says. This girl has arrived in time to be cured by available medicine.

Back home that afternoon in the sanctuary of his high, airy living room, Dr. Radhy says his family begs him not to return to the clinic. He is 74, retired, and can keep his family comfortable on his savings and income from inherited real estate. He holds plenty of cash on hand "because you never know what might happen." When Baghdadis leave their homes each morning, they know that a bomb or rocket or gun might add them to the city's lengthening civilian-casualty list. Traffic adds hours to the peril, as cars move at an agonizingly slow pace through improvised checkpoints and blocked-off streets. "My family says the profit is not enough, the suffering of the journey too great," says Radhy, who travels in the anonymity of a rattletrap city taxi because kidnappers often target doctors who can afford ransom payments. "But if I do not go, a lot of people will get no care at all."

If the Radhys lived almost anywhere else in the world, they would enjoy the easy lifestyle of well-to-do professionals. But here in post--Saddam Hussein Iraq, nothing is normal for any family in any neighborhood. For the well off and well educated, the past year has been a shocking plunge into the abyss. The rules of civil society have broken down just as badly as the country's power grid. Assault, robbery, rape, kidnapping, suicide bombing, carjacking and street battles are now commonplace. Baghdadis live in permanent fear, locked for safety behind high walls and guarded gates in dreary isolation. Young girls don't go out, and even wives accompanied by their husbands rarely venture more than a few blocks. Inside the barricaded residences, life is a mix of boredom and burden as families cope with the aggravations caused by sporadic electricity, backed-up sewage and water that might come on only at 1 a.m. The interim Iraqi government that took power two weeks ago inherits a country desperate to alleviate the misery.

For Ferial Radhy, 62, the doctor's wife, the worst thing is the constant worry. "I do not feel safe, ever," she says. Like most women stuck in the house, she is plagued with nervous anxiety, and her imagination conjures up the most nightmarish dangers. Her street is shared by several high-ranking Iraqi politicians. That means guards armed with Kalashnikovs sit in front of many gates, and one end of the road is closed to cars. But it also means the street is a target for insurgents and criminals. Stray bullets sometimes drop into the garden where her grandchildren play. Last fall the family added five more feet of solid concrete to their shoulder-high perimeter wall and topped it with concertina wire. Even so, they fear intrusion. The other night, at 2 a.m., a guard next door suddenly opened fire, jolting the Radhys awake. They had no idea why he was shooting, but the doctor and his son Ali grabbed their pistols and stood guard over the property for the rest of the night.

Fear has crept into the family's very blood, says Dr. Radhy. "We can't eat well, we can't sleep well," he says. "We don't even want to work." Almost every member of the family is suffering from chronic depression, unable even to imagine how things might improve. "The young cannot think of tomorrow because they see only a dark tunnel," he says. Every night Ferial says she prays to God for a better future. "I just keep waiting," she whispers. Her daughter Nafret, 38, puts an arm around her shoulders. "If we don't have any hope," Nafret says, "how can we be human?"

Among all the potential dangers, the most frightening is the threat of kidnapping (see following story). While Western TV concentrates on the few foreign hostages, hundreds of Iraqis have been taken captive, usually for money, and some have been killed when their families could not meet the ransom demands. A neighbor's 9-year-old son was playing outdoors a few weeks ago when a man in a minibus stopped, got out and asked the boy for help restarting the vehicle. The youngster agreed and got into the front seat when the man asked him to push the starter. Before he could do so, an observant neighbor ran in front of the van shouting to the boy "Out!" As the boy fled, the driver jumped back into the car and sped away. "We didn't know if it was a kidnapping or a car bomb," says the doctor. "But that's the kind of danger we face every day." He knows two men whose sons were kidnapped and released after payment of large ransoms. Both families immediately left the country.

The lack of security is driving the country's best and brightest to leave, or at least send their children away. It's a particularly cruel option for Iraqis used to living together in extended clans. The doctor has two married daughters living abroad, and Nafret's dour husband Firas, 40, says his family would leave too if they could afford to. The couple and their two children share the home with Nafret's family. Firas can see no way out of Iraq's current misery. "Everything is bad," says Firas. "Very bad." He and his father-in-law squabble over whom to blame. "Real victory is raising suffering people up. That's what Bush promised," says the doctor. No, replies Firas, "he said only freedom and democracy. We have freedom and democracy, and we're worse off." But Firas insists today's troubles are the toxic legacy of Saddam. "After 40 years of damage by Saddam," he says, "Iraqis don't know how to use freedom." The doctor retorts, "If you keep blaming Saddam, we will not go forward." Radhy does not lash out at the U.S. the way many Iraqis do, but he is troubled by the occupation's failure to bring much more than hopeful notions to Iraq. "We keep asking ourselves," he says, "how a country as great as America, after one year, can't keep electricity running, can't keep us safe, can't bring us clean water. These questions need explanations."

Nafret sighs. Quarrels are to be expected among families cooped up so much of every day, unable to relieve the tension with a night out at a restaurant or by visiting friends. The children, she says, fight constantly as well because she must say no to almost everything they ask. "They don't behave normally anymore," says Nafret. "All they can do is watch Spacetoon." She kept her son home from kindergarten last year because she was worried about his safety. He missed nothing, her husband interjects, because everything about the school "is very bad." The only entertainment for kids and adults is endless television. In most houses, small private generators keep the TVs going through the daily blackouts. With school out and summer heat above 110DEGF every day, young people stay up to watch TV in the cool of the night and then sleep till noon. Many Baghdad kids, notes the doctor, have acquired a pasty yellow pallor. Some are getting fat from lack of exercise. His son, an engineer who refused to work for Saddam and now cannot find a job, is hugely obese from years of idleness. The doctor chafes that he cannot use the Internet to refresh his medical knowledge. After years of being cut off from outside contact under Saddam, he had hoped that by now he could tap into foreign research. But the phone lines are too weak to connect to the Web. "I was so hopeful," he says, "and I still find myself contained in a box."

Baghdadis have learned to program their lives around the vagaries of electric power. When it's on, they rush to do everything that requires it, from running water pumps to powering the kids' PlayStation. In Mansour the Radhys have electricity four or five hours a day, no more than during last summer despite repeated promises of improvement. And they never know which four hours it will be, so the women can find themselves doing laundry at dawn or filling water cisterns at midnight. A male in the family has to go out every day for ice to keep food from spoiling.

Nafret worked for the British consul before the first Gulf War closed the embassy. She would like to find a job again, but her family will not allow her to venture out into the city. So she has no respite from the tedium of her days. She can go to the neighborhood food market only when her husband, busy most days at his job at a radio-installation company, can escort her. But buying tea and soap isn't much of a treat. She has not been able to shop for clothes at the nice stores across town in Karrada for more than a year. If she travels just a few blocks to visit friends, she must make elaborate arrangements to be picked up by her husband in his car. Taxis, which are often driven by thugs or terrorists, are far too dangerous. Women who used to go out wearing gold jewelry and makeup no longer display even wedding rings outside the house. Though many women among Iraq's educated middle class now don head scarves as protection from the dirty looks of religious extremists in the streets, Nafret refuses. "That's not my style, and I won't do it," she says. She is bitter about the restrictions that "freedom" has brought her and repeats the cynical saying often heard from Baghdadis: The terrorists are free to shoot us in the streets, and we are free to stay locked up in our houses. "If you can't do anything," she says, "you can't say it's life."

The doctor says he tries to keep the family's spirits up and encourage positive thinking. But that's virtually impossible. "People are so fed up," he says, worn out by the struggle just to survive. His son-in-law stares impassively at him as he argues that the new government can do better in restoring security because its leaders are Iraqis and, unlike the Americans, understand Iraqi society. Nafret mutters her skepticism. Her husband breaks in with a fierce declaration: "They must!" For families like the Radhys, it's that simple.