Living With The Fear

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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.