Baghdad’s Blank Slate

Baghdad was cloaked in its familiar shroud of darkness when, in early October, I walked the al-Shuhada Bridge across the Tigris—more a ritual for me than a pastime. Long before Walter Benjamin described the Seine as “the vast and ever-watchful mirror of Paris,” the Andalusian traveler Ibn Jubayr saw the Tigris as “a mirror shining between two frames, or like a string of pearls between two breasts.” That image of splendor has long since dissipated. On the bridge that night, I passed by an old woman in her abaya sat begging on the curb; plastic waste lined the shallow waters below.

I was headed for al-Madrasah al-Mustansiriyah, a scholarly complex that was one of the few Abbasid landmarks to have survived the thirteenth-century Mongol destruction. Inside, an event called the “Arab Architecture Festival” was taking place, hosted “under the patronage” of Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani, as the organizers put it, to “[celebrate] Baghdad’s designation as the Arab Capital of Tourism for 2025.” Police pickups with machine guns mounted on top stood sentinel on both ends of the bridge. Security personnel manned the venue’s entrance, Kalashnikovs in hand. Wading into the labyrinthine, lifeless souqs beyond them was discouraged in the dark. After more than two decades since its “liberation” by U.S. forces, the city still felt like it was locked in a state of latent emergency.

Inside, the former house of learning was lit up like a Beirut cabaret. A drone whirred overhead, filming. My eyes followed its flight; my mind drifted to Gaza. In broken Arabic, one of the organizers soon announced the first panel, disrupting my thoughts. Four Western and diaspora architects, parachuting in from the Gulf and beyond, took the stage. When the sound system malfunctioned soon after they started speaking, I felt relieved and decided to walk away, my visit having lasted less than thirty minutes. I drove home past the towers of Haifa Street. Scarred from years of clashes with the occupation army, they had become an unintended monument to a city’s unspoken trauma.

How could we be celebrating architecture, I thought, when so much of the city’s past was facing the bulldozers? Since al-Sudani assumed the premiership in 2022, major infrastructural projects have transformed the capital into a construction site. With $100 billion earmarked for remaking Baghdad anew, dozens of bridges, flyovers, and tunnels have been built in a frenzy. Along Abu Nuwas, a famed riverine highway lined by parks adorned with Mohammed Ghani Hikmat’s Arabian Nights sculptures, a parallel causeway has opened, blinding the riverbank with concrete and blocking locals’ access to the waterfront. The Palestine Hotel, a beige edifice studded with honeycomb balconies and pointed in the direction of the Tigris like a boat, is receiving a makeover. A landmark where journalists José Couso and Taras Protsyuk were killed by American tank fire in 2003, this piece of history is being torn down for a glass behemoth to take its place. The pronounced end behind all this construction is to ease motorists’ travel in the notoriously clogged city and encourage private investment—a set of promises al-Sudani’s alliance, fittingly named the Reconstruction and Development Coalition (RDC), played on to great success in last month’s elections.

In the process, national memory has come under assault. Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, the eleventh-century historian, once prophesied the cyclical destruction of the Abbasid capital, writing that the city “shall be swallowed up in the earth faster than an iron tent peg sinks in wet ground.” Ten centuries later, it seems like a succession of governments wants nothing more than to drown Baghdad from above. Since 2003, the millions who were murdered or forced to flee have left their homes for the ghosts. Stately neglect, land grabs, and shifting demographics have altered the urban fabric beyond recognition. Today, with no clear intent to stymie the suburb’s metamorphosis, subsequent governments have allowed a landscape of eclectic architecture to be buried under dense new dwellings befitting a Cairene slum. The features of the Baghdad I grew up with—arched doorways, receding balconies, brise-soleil, and whiffs of brutalist ornamentation—are now relics of a rapidly dissolving past. The brick fences of abandoned bungalows are often sprayed with the phone numbers of demolition companies.

Last summer, swathes of al-Harra, a tightly knit working-class warren in the al-Adhamiyah neighborhood, were desolate. The houses, purchased by the endowment that manages the public properties and religious affairs of the Sunni community, were mowed down like casualties in a peacetime war perpetrated in silence. On the opposite bank from the nearby Martyrs’ Cemetery, a silent home where thousands of victims from the sectarian war are entombed, the gilded domes of the al-Kadhimiya Shrine (named after the Shia Imam al-Kadhim, who died in custody in 799) loom over a polluted, claustrophobic horizon. The ever-expanding complex abuts a maze of old alleys. When I last visited the previous summer, the few remaining houses with enclosed shanasheel verandas were also marked with the word hadim—Arabic for demolition—and awaited destruction. This architectural heritage appears to be of no significance to the Green Zone, whose efforts were turned to refurbishing the famed al-Rashid Street with a tramway, redoing its facades into a generic Hollywood film set or an imitation of Doha’s Souq Waqif, and commodifying the past to fulfill the exotic fantasies of Westerners who wouldn’t bother to venture beyond the state-curated slivers of the downtown.

In October, I visited Shurouq al-Abaychi, a candidate with Tahaluf al-Badeel, a coalition of Communists and independents that would suffer a shocking loss in the November elections. Over an istikan of tea at her humble office astride Abu Nuwas, she minced no words when I asked her about Sudani’s development plans. Over the years, she told me, the state has been committing “a crime against Baghdad.” Given the absent debate around, and disregard for, the city’s architectural identities, her words were hardly surprising. If anything, Baghdad is seen by most of its inhabitants as a tabula rasa for top-down machinations, a laissez-faire renewal as insolent to its disregard for common sense as it is to the city’s history.

Al-Sudani’s projects are ill-planned, al-Abaychi continued, casting doubts about the exuberant cost and favored contractors. For years, a minority of clients, militias, and their circles, profiteers of decades of corruption, have been reaping the benefits, purchasing properties at prices unthinkable to the middle and lower classes and cruising to restaurants in their Maybachs and G Wagons. And what of al-Sudani’s mission to reduce congestion? The product of his development has not been less traffic but rather a polluted, anti-human playground where practically no green space has been left un-privatized.

Sudani rose to power on a promise to exorcise the ghosts of Saddam Hussein, whose initials, sad and haa, are still engraved on the walls of his palaces, haunting his victims and foes. But what is the line between working through the past and merely papering it over? The RDC-led government is building a city over a city in its own name, refashioning a new, apolitical citizen-consumer. A generation has grown knowing nothing but the bright monuments of consumer culture. “In Iraq youth awareness of the country’s heritage is distorted by decades of war, sanctions and occupation,” writes the art historian Nada Shabout, “including the U.S. rhetoric of the ‘new Iraq’ that literally deconstructed Iraq and its national memory with the aim of building a nation from the ground up.” In helping manufacture and sell this ersatz irreality, outsiders and diaspora scholars are only helping normalize the abnormal, a misshapen present naturalized by the electoral triumph of traditional Shia and Sunni forces and the ascent of armed groups’ representatives in the November elections. The winners included former PM Nuri al-Maliki’s State of Law Alliance and Sadiqoun Bloc of the armed group Asaib Ahl al-Haq, winning twenty-nine and twenty-eight seats respectively. Al-Sudani’s RDC secured forty-six seats but the prime minister is not guaranteed a second term.

The October 2019 Uprising intended to preclude this irreversible ruination. It brought down the government of Adil Abd al-Mahdi, which killed hundreds of protesters in Baghdad and the impoverished south, and forced an early election in 2021. The Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement ended up winning but eventually ordered his followers to withdraw from politics following armed clashes with the Shia rivals reigning today. Despite their loss, the latter closed ranks under the Coordination Framework and prevailed, placing al-Sudani at the helm. Architecture, the victors came to realize, is a remedy for a shaken coalition to overcome its own impotence, a spectacle aimed at normalizing and elongating its rule. Their projects, however, have not been accompanied by progressive gains in human rights. Until recently, reactionary parliamentarians wanted to have girls as young as nine to be able to marry, and to this day accountability for past crimes and crackdowns against the 2019 Tishreen protests remains absent.

When an under-construction bridge collapsed in the city of Karbala this fall, killing and wounding a dozen civilians, the episode of lethal failure hardly made a ripple. Not only are scenes from the recent slaughtering of unarmed youth seared in the collective memory; today a sleepless (digital) panopticon surveys activism and (online) dissent, and legal retribution awaits critics like fate. Iraqis give credit to al-Sudani for the rare stability, but critics lament that Iraq remains a state with a vast security apparatus and paramilitary units, kept on tiptoes by the presumed threat of Islamic State and Baʿathist remnants, who lend a convenient alibi to pre-discipline future disruptions by the ungrateful.

This year’s elections laid bare the fragility of this status quo. Safaa al-Hijazi, a provincial council member from al-Tarmiyah, a district in northern Baghdad, was running for parliament this year with Tahaluf al-Siyadah, a Sunni bloc. In his last public statement, posted on Facebook on October 14, the young candidate announced that, given the grave injustices inflicted on landholders, the council has ordered all bulldozing and privatization acts in al-Tarmiyah and elsewhere on the fringes ceased. News had circulated of forceful land grabs in peripheral areas, including al-Tarmiyah, whose farmlands were a persistent nuisance for the security apparatus. Later that month, al-Hijazi was riding in his car when a sticky bomb went off, killing him.

Al-Abaychi thinks his murder was linked to his fight against land expropriation. The usual snippets of information communicated at the time said the killing was related to political rivalry within al-Tarmiyah but fell short of naming the masterminds, a routine practice since 2003. Though authorities reportedly arrested five suspects, the story has since fallen in limbo, having thrust conflicts over land into the limelight. Soon after al-Hijazi’s death, Shia commentators resurrected calls to cleanse al-Tarmiyah and replicate the model of Jurf al-Sakhar, the Sunni area whose people were displaced en masse during the fight with Daesh. It has since been under the control of Shia armed factions, beyond the state’s reach.

Jewad Selim’s Nasb al-Hurriyah, the Freedom Monument designed and installed in honor of the 1958 Revolution, tells an odyssey in its bronze reliefs: the struggle of the people against pro-British tyranny. They are mounted on a banner-like platform that the architect Rifat al-Chadirji wished to see hoisted for eternity. During the Baʿath dictatorship, Al-Chadirji himself was unlawfully jailed before being released to advise on construction projects ahead of the 1982 summit of the Non-Aligned Movement. It was then that the capital was embellished with much of its fraught and beloved modernism, including the Monument to the Unknown Soldier by Khaled al-Rahal and Marcello D’Olivo, and Ismaʿil Fattah al-Turk’s Martyrs’ Monument, both erected to honor the fallen soldiers during the war with Iran.

Starting in 2003, many of al-Chadirji’s structures were damaged and bombed; today, his platform for Nasb al-Hurriyah is burdened with the militants’ insignia, a reimagining of Selim’s abstractions plastered on its back. It shows the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, accompanied by the silhouettes of Shia pilgrims and a promise to “honor the oath,” a message directed to their comrades in the Axis of Resistance, even if their guns mostly went silent as Gaza and Dahieh were reduced to rubble in the genocidal war—a sign of comfort in their newfound, lucrative roles within the state apparatus. Underneath the monument riot police loiter in the sun, clutching their batons. Waiting to bash the ghosts of the innocents murdered in the tumult of 2019, I think to myself.  

Nasb al-Hurriyah now stands as another barzakh, a barrier standing between a progressive world and its opposite. But what locals view as a sacrilegious encroachment over Selim’s monument has yet to register among diaspora intellectuals, and collusion with the ruling class persists. As one diaspora researcher, a regular at the annual meetings of the Middle East Studies Association who often asked for directions, told me, “I need to maintain access.” Even the Arab press appears to have been won over by al-Sudani’s campaign. In a recent interview with Al Jazeera the premier appeared triumphant, relishing at the timid questions of a smiling interviewer more interested in his personal life, kids, and achievements than the troubles of his subjects. “Iraq is witnessing an unprecedented development drive,” he said, that could be seen “in every city, district, and town.”

A few weeks later al-Sudani would appear in the ruins of ancient Babylon, addressing his base from the proscenium of a theater dating to Alexander the Great. Back in in the 1980s Hussein, who envisioned himself as an heir to Nebuchadnezzar, ordered one of the ancient king’s palaces to be rebuilt with bricks engraved with his name, driving a wedge in the heart of history before coalition troops erected a base on the site and finished the job. Successive prime ministers, including al-Maliki and his successor Haider al-Abadi, would use the platform for their political stunts, too. Seeing al-Sudani’s latest spectacle, then, must have must have left some Iraqis with a sense of déjà vu.

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