Saving Iraq's Glitziest Neighborhood

By Brian Bennett

The streets of Mansour have no names anymore. They are identifiable not by what is there now but by what used to be. In the center of the neighborhood, our armored humvee circles around the crater that once held a 20-ft.-tall statue of Abu Jaffar al-Mansour, the 8th century founder of Baghdad; it was pulverized by a homemade bomb in 2005. To keep their bearings, the troops have taken to identifying routes by the names of 1980s heavy-metal bands. We drive down Bon Jovi, where the barbershop used to be, and pass Skid Row, which had the best falafel in town. At the end of the block is Poison, which four years ago was Mansour's commercial hub, lined with restaurants, shops, a gym and even a liquor store. Now every storefront is shuttered, and there isn't a car on the road. The mostly Sunni residents who live in Mansour have their own name for this spot. They call it "the edge of civilization."

Judging by the area's desolation today, it seems unimaginable that Mansour was once the ritziest neighborhood in Iraq. Populated by the country's merchant class and many officials of Saddam Hussein's regime, the place had an air of entitlement: houses boasted stone columns, and rosebushes hinted at the lush private gardens kept behind the walls. It was also my home for two years, in 2003 and 2004, when TIME's bureau was located there. But today Mansour is boxed in by bloodshed. To the north and south, the Shi'ite death squads of the Jaish al-Mahdi have pushed in block by block over the past year, warning Sunni families to move or be killed. In response, Sunni insurgents have poured in from Anbar province, bringing with them weapons, explosives and suicide bombers. The warring forces have made my old neighborhood one of the most dangerous areas in Baghdad.

Winning it back will be a critical test of the U.S. military's surge in Baghdad. Under Saddam, Mansour and places like it--neighborhoods with names like Amariyah, Ghazaliyah, al-Adil, al-Khadra--were the purlieu of Iraq's educated Sunni elite. As security has deteriorated and sectarian killings have soared, those areas have been overrun by insurgent groups tied to al-Qaeda. The jihadists offer protection to local Sunnis against Shi'ite death squads in exchange for use of the neighborhoods to launch suicide bombings against Shi'ite civilians. But over the past few months, al-Qaeda has been losing support among powerful leaders in the Sunni community. In an exclusive interview with TIME's Bobby Ghosh on May 12, Harith al-Dari, Iraq's most influential Sunni cleric and a vocal critic of the U.S., said al-Qaeda has "gone too far." He rejects al-Qaeda's vision of a fundamentalist state, saying, "Iraqis will not accept such a system." At the same time, he said, "Sunnis don't know who to believe or trust. They reject al-Qaeda's idea of the so-called Islamic state, but they don't feel protected by the government or the Americans either."

That's why building trust in middle-class Sunni enclaves like Mansour has become a key component of the military's counterinsurgency strategy. "We're in competition with al-Qaeda," says Lieut. Colonel Dale Kuehl, "for who can protect the Sunnis better." Baghdad's Sunni population is largely confined to a narrow band west of the Tigris, extending from Mansour to the Baghdad airport. Kuehl and his 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment live in the middle of the Sunni stronghold, dug into a former police station. A floor-to-ceiling map of west Baghdad in Kuehl's operations center is marked with palm-size red arrows that show the Sunni population being squeezed top and bottom by Shi'ite militia. Coalition efforts to change the minds of disenfranchised Sunnis, Kuehl says, aren't getting much help from the Shi'ite-led government. In the Sunni enclave of Amariyah, for example, his unit spent $180,000 refurbishing the local bank branch so residents could get paid, but the Finance Ministry hasn't sent any cash back to the branch. "There's an effort to deprive Sunnis here of services," Kuehl says.

Still, the U.S. may at last be seeing signs of progress. Compared with the streets last fall, residents tell me, a relative calm has returned to Mansour. Fewer bodies are being found every day, and it is no longer routine to see gunmen shouldering rocket launchers in the street. One reason the violence has subsided, of course, is that many of the neighborhoods that saw the bloodiest sectarian cleansing are no longer mixed.

Even under the most hopeful scenarios, it's doubtful that Mansour and places like it will ever be the same. Pulling out of Kuehl's headquarters, our humvee drives through several inches of dark green sludge that has been seeping out of a broken sewage pipe for a week. We turn toward the center of Mansour, driving along a familiar set of railroad tracks. Looking across the gravel berms, I can see our old street. I see the empty corner where a group of brothers used to grill giant splayed carp, called masgouf, over open coals every evening. Down farther is the flat-roofed house where we lived and worked. I haven't been back there since March 24, 2004, when our bureau manager, Omar Kamal, was gunned down on his way to work, a sign that the war had caught up to us too.

Back on route Poison, heading to the base, the soldiers are venting their fear by ticking off a litany of ordinary objects that might be hiding a bomb. "Man, I hate this road," says one. It's hard to love a place that can get you killed. The tragedy of Mansour is that there once was a time when hope wasn't so elusive.