Looking for the New Baghdad

Andalus Abdel-Rahim Hammadi, a Baghdad school-bus driver, has this much in common with John McCain: both men gambled on the U.S. military's "surge" in Iraq long before it looked like a sure thing. If the Arizona Senator risked his presidential ambitions on it, the stakes for Hammadi were higher: his life and the lives of his wife and two young children. Last summer, as the final batch of 30,000 additional American troops requisitioned by General David Petraeus was arriving in Iraq, the bus driver and his family left their refuge in Syria to return home. It had been nearly two years since they fled their neighborhood, al-Dora, after al-Qaeda in Iraq terrorists killed the wife and son of Hammadi's brother. His friends and fellow refugees in Damascus warned him that Baghdad was still too dangerous, with dozens being killed daily in sectarian tit-for-tat attacks. But Hammadi, 46, was counting on the increased U.S. troop presence to calm things down. "Nobody can stand against the power of the American military," he says. "I thought that once they increased their forces, the [terrorists] would not stand a chance."

Going back to al-Dora was out of the question: it would be six months before al-Qaeda in Iraq would be driven from the neighborhood. But in nearby Saydiyah, Hammadi found a family heading in the opposite direction--to Syria--and offered to live in their house as an unpaid caretaker. He borrowed some money to buy a dilapidated minibus. Ferrying kids to and from school brought him a meager $10 a day, but it was better than living off handouts from cousins in Damascus. His wife Shada, 30, supplemented the family income by baking bread and selling it in the neighborhood. The couple were happy their children Ibrahim, 5, and Sajda, 4, would be able to grow up "as Iraqis, not as refugees," Shada says.

The Hammadis were settling into their new life when I left Baghdad last fall after spending the best part of five years covering Iraq. Unlike the bus driver, I was far from sanguine about the surge; I had seen too many military plans promise much and deliver little. But by the end of the year, Hammadi's optimism was looking prescient. Sunni insurgents I had known for years--men who had sworn blood oaths to fight the "occupier" until their dying breath--were joining forces with the Americans to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq. The vehemently anti-American Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had agreed to a cease-fire with the U.S. military, and his ill-disciplined militia, the Mahdi Army, seemed to be keeping its end of the bargain.

All these factors contributed to a steep drop in the frequency of insurgent attacks and suicide bombings, along with the rates of U.S. and Iraqi casualties. But remarkable as they are, the statistics don't tell you about the lives of ordinary Iraqis like the Hammadis. So in mid-March, I returned for a two-week visit to get a firsthand feel for the changes. It seemed the perfect time to take soundings: the fifth anniversary of the start of the war and a little more than a year since the start of the surge.

The New Baghdad

The first sign of change comes when I board the Royal Jordanian Airlines flight from Amman. It's an Airbus A320, and that is good news. It means the flight will not end with the heart-stopping corkscrew landing that characterized all my previous arrivals in smaller, more nimble aircraft. If Royal Jordanian is willing to use a large jetliner, it can only mean that the likelihood of a missile attack has greatly diminished.

Driving into Baghdad from the airport, I see other changes. In commercial districts, more shops and businesses are open than there were a year ago. Shoppers are taking the time to haggle with vegetable vendors--a contrast to the furtive, hurried transactions I remember. There are no queues at the gas stations. Baghdad even sounds different. In my first two days, I hear no explosions or gunfire. At the TIME bureau in the Jadriyah district, we get four to six hours of electricity a day, up from just two hours. This means there are long spells when you can hear the sounds of the city--traffic, the calls to prayer--instead of the constant roar of generators.

And the city looks different too. In our neighborhood, there are several new restaurants and kebab stands. Here and there, apartment buildings have received a fresh coat of paint. Even the concrete walls that crisscross much of Baghdad, erected by the U.S. military to protect neighborhoods from sectarian militias, have been prettified. The government has paid artists to paint huge, brightly colored murals on the walls, so a drive now takes you past bucolic scenes of farmers planting rice, fishermen in the marshes, peasants dancing in verdant valleys. The walls give Baghdad a somewhat disjointed feel, making it less a city than a series of contiguous fortresses.

Still, they have served their purpose.

Within the walls, many Sunni neighborhoods that were once the focal points of sectarian violence are now policed by armed locals organized by the U.S. into Awakening Councils--or Sahwa, in Arabic. Many are former insurgents who are happy to accept salaries ($300 per month, paid by the U.S., not the Iraqi government) from the men they once hoped to kill. They are nominally under American supervision but increasingly operate with a high degree of autonomy. The Sahwa are one part vigilante and two parts mafiosi, but like the walls, they too serve a purpose. In Sahwa-protected neighborhoods like al-Dora, Adhamiyah and Amariyah, sectarian killings are way down.

Pax Americana

But perhaps the most remarkable change of all is in how Baghdadis view the U.S. military presence. A year ago, Hammadi was in a minority: most Iraqis living outside the Green Zone saw the Americans as the main cause of their country's problems. Now, says Ali al-Dabbagh, spokesman for the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, all the credit for the decline in violence is going to the U.S. military: "People think the Americans are like Superman, who can do anything."