Haven of peace in Iraq eyes Baghdad with envy

Published on Saturday 17 April 2010 20:58

IN A country where war, terrorism and internal strife have been a way of life for more than 20 years there remains one region of Iraq that seems to have escaped such ravages.

Far to the south of Baghdad, on the junction of the Tigris and the Euphrates, lies the area of Halaichiya, distant in perspective and place.

In a country invaded, occupied, wrecked and not yet rebuilt, it has the distinction of never having seen an American, much less a soldier. Basra, to the south, is far away. Only the Iranian border, ten miles to the east, draws interest. That leaves Halaichiya in an unusual situation, watching events in the country around it unfold with a cinematic quality.

"Life is as you see it," said Obeid Jabbar Hlayil, the sheikh of the village of 200 people. "This is how we were and how we are, from the reeds to the river's mud."

It is rare to find a place untouched by war in Iraq, where the carnage was once as staggering as it was numbing. In Halaichiya, reached by boat across waters that ebb and flow like a tide before joining the Shatt al-Arab, a beguiling sense of the ordinary still reigns. Halaichiya, in a way, remains innocent.

"This was our land in the beginning," said Hashem Shabeeb Hassan, a father of 18 children, who guessed his age as "38 or 40". "This is where our forefathers were."

Along the sun-baked river banks, villagers harvest tamarisk, its scented, slow-burning wood a favourite for cooking a fish speciality known as masgouf. Fishermen stand thigh-deep in marshes casting nets into waters still plied by a traditional boat called the chakhtoura. Outside houses, piles of manure from the village's water buffalo dry in the sun, soon to serve as fuel to bake bread and ward off mosquitoes.

Visitors are welcomed on a dozen Persian carpets unfurled across the ground, then served steaming, sweetened buffalo milk and freshly baked rice-flour bread.

"The only thing that has changed are the mobile phones," said Karim Mohaysin Hassan, his words slurred in a mumble that comes from having only two teeth.

There are, in fact, other telltale signs of the 21st century. Karim Hassan – who blurted out "I'm old!" when asked his age – charges his telephone each night on a generator that villagers run for a few hours, or however long a litre bottle of petrol lasts. When it runs out, the smattering of satellite dishes are turned off. Packaging for Swiss-made antibiotics and empty Al Deera Cola cans litter the ground next to huts built of reeds, mud and an occasional length of canvas or a rusted strip of corrugated iron. One villager has a white Toyota pickup.

"But don't we deserve a school?" asked Shabeeb Hassan, illiterate like his children.

A resident of Baghdad, fortified as it is behind blast walls and beset by blackouts, might smile at the notion of Iraq being a land of plenty. That, though, is the sense here, a fractured lens of rumours, tall tales and the fleeting images of occasional television.

"I've only heard good about the rest of the country," Ahmed Khalaf said.

Friends gathered on the Persian carpets nodded. "Najaf is so beautiful," volunteered Saddam Mshiji, listing other Iraqi towns. "So is Basra. So is Amara."

"They all have paved roads," said his friend. "What about us?"

Another villager, Leabi Ishghayeth, pointed to the dirt road skirting the long-ago battlefields of the war with Iran. "When a single drop of rain falls, it turns to mud."

Far more than the American-led invasion, the war with Iran that ended in 1988 remains a part of life here. Shrapnel severed Karim Hassan's finger. Winds and rain have yet to erase the earthen military fortifications. Mines still claim the wandering water buffalo. The Americans, on the other hand, are more myth, confined to imagination.

"Can you compare me to an American?" Hassan said, stretching his frail arms forward. "If they saw me in America, they'd throw me in the garbage and burn me.

"I think about them and I die of envy," he said, laughing.

There is the same distance when it comes to the Iraqi state, tangible only in the occasional raid on nearby smugglers and a lonely army checkpoint, itself no more than a pile of sandbags topped by a heavy machine-gun a mile or so away.

Not everyone could recognise prime minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Iraq's most powerful Shiite politician. But most people here know his name, an emblem to them of loyalty to the state and their sect.

"We have a saying here: 'Whoever marries my mother, I call him father,'" said Hlayil, the sheikh. In most versions of the proverb, you are supposed to call him uncle, not father, but the meaning remains the same: you are left to accept what fate has delivered.

"He's the only one we know of," Khalaf said.