The New Baghdad

The ghost of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra may still prowl Princesses’ Street by night, but hardly anyone in this affluent neighborhood in western Baghdad would recognize him. Born in 1919, Jabra was displaced from Palestine in the Nakba and relocated to the Iraqi capital, where he lived until his death in 1994. In his adopted city he became a prolific writer, painter, publisher, and university lecturer; in 1951 he cofounded the Baghdad Group for Modern Art. 

A flâneur since childhood, Jabra had crisscrossed the fields of Jerusalem reflecting on “the relations between things, between abstract ideas,” as he recalled in Princesses’ Street: Baghdad Memories.¹ He kept up this practice on Princesses’ Street—so named because the Hashemite Princesses Badia and Jalila once lived there in a still-standing villa. He strolled up and down the one-kilometer stretch of elegant bungalows, in the shade of eucalyptus and palm trees, undeterred even by the American air raids of 1991. One day he came across a rose bush after bombs had fallen: “Here was blooming life, with a promise of a greater bloom…and above us were the damned flies coming from the regions of hatred and death, buzzing with omens of murder and ferocity, and demanding our blood.”

That Princesses’ Street is no more. In 2003 the dictator who rose from humble origins to oversee development in the 1970s and lavish accolades on artists like Jabra was toppled. After the fall of Baghdad—and with it, the state and its security apparatus—homegrown and foreign assailants turned the country into a killing field. In April 2010 a car bomb exploded outside the Egyptian Embassy, killing seventeen people, including two of Jabra’s relatives. His house, which he designed himself, lay in ruins. Looters snuck in and plundered whatever they deemed valuable. In a dispatch in The New York Times, the late Anthony Shadid walked among the rubble, mourning the loss of books and artworks. He recalled a line from the pre-Islamic poet Imru’ al-Qais. “Halt, you two…and let us weep, for the memory of a beloved, and an abode.” 

No trace of the bungalow remains. When I visited last summer, the guards of a nearby villa pointed to a smaller house being constructed on Jabra’s plot. The sidewalks he once described as overflowing with gardens were crowded by diesel generators, security booths, and four-by-fours. The eucalyptus trees are gone. Security guards loitered around and closed-circuit TV cameras scanned the few pedestrians. Many houses were quiet and seemed deserted, with unkempt yards and dead cars in the driveway. Much of the old Baghdadi elite and the middle class fled during the American occupation and the years of sectarian violence that followed. The incoming nouveau riche—who profited from the patronage and corruption networks that emerged after 2003—favor kitsch and grandiose architecture. A new villa is rising nearby with bizarre hints of neoclassicism, possibly another overpriced restaurant. 

It’s not just Princesses’ Street. After two decades of atrophy, Baghdad, a city of over ten million, is once again a major building yard. Roads are being widened and paved. New overpasses soar above congested thoroughfares. Al-Jadiriyah—a bourgeois residential neighborhood that also houses the Bauhaus campus of the University of Baghdad—is now home to “Italian” boutiques, gelato parlors, and obscure militia bureaus. A futuristic skyscraper for the Central Bank, designed by Zaha Hadid, looms on the eastern bank of the Tigris, which divides the capital into a western half, al-Karkh, and an eastern, al-Risafah. The building, out of sync with its residential milieu, has a rippled façade ostensibly echoing the waves below. 

Parts of both Abu Nuwas Street, which embraces a stretch of the al-Risafah bank, and old Baghdad, up through al-Rashid Street to the north, have been rehabilitated. There is a refurbished park, with a children’s playground and barbecue grills, just off the riverbed from the Green Zone, the enclave with major governmental buildings. Further downtown, buildings near al-Mutanabbi Street dating from the Abbasid and late Ottoman eras have received an overdue paint job. In 2007 a car bomb killed dozens and turned poetry collections in the street’s legendary book market to ash. Now Baghdadis line up for photographs by its famed cafes in the evening.

This redevelopment is by no means inclusive: it appears to be orchestrated in part for tourists and Western diplomats. In fact, much of the city’s old core remains in ruins. Gargantuan sliding gates have been fitted at several entry points to the Green Zone—as if to demarcate a safe space. The purpose of all this construction, then, is less to preserve the past than to project the image of a capital that is stable, thriving, and open to foreign investment. In this sense, Baghdad’s construction boom holds clues about the nature of the current Iraqi regime.

The earliest efforts to modernize Baghdad date back to the Tanzimat or “reform” era, beginning in 1839, when state bureaucrats set out to remake the Ottoman Empire along European lines. In 1869 the French-educated Midhat Pasha assumed the pashalik as governor of Baghdad province; in his three-year stint he introduced the first newspaper, a horse-drawn tramway, and educational reforms. He also drew up plans to tear down the city’s eleventh-century walls to make way for tree-lined boulevards. This “Haussmannization of the periphery,” the scholar Caecilia Pieri writes, was intended to emulate “the Grand Boulevards of Paris and the Ring in Vienna.” (The roads were never built.)²

In 1917 the last Ottoman ruler, Khalil Pasha, inaugurated what would later become known as al-Rashid Street, cutting through al-Risafah. A prominent road whose colonnaded façades sheltered pedestrians from the elements, it was initially conceived for military purposes, facilitating the movement of troops and carriages during War World I. Two parallel ropes were stretched from what is now the central marketplace of Bab al-Sharqi to al-Maidan square, a distance of about three kilometers, and demolition crews knocked down some seven hundred houses lying in between. “Only the homes of those who could afford serious bribes were spared,” Justin Marozzi writes in Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood.³

After the Ottomans’ defeat in World War I, Baghdad fell under the control of the British, who installed Faisal I to govern their mandate as the king of Iraq. In the early years of the Hashemite monarchy, Western-style hotels and shops popped up across the city. The British spy and adventurer Gertrude Bell helped set up the first museum, becoming the director of antiquities, which allowed her to determine which Mesopotamian artifacts were taken to England. When the sun went down, the new Alwiyah Club welcomed Western socialites and the local elite. 

At the time, landed notables supported the regime in return for tax exemptions and political favors. The economy largely depended on agriculture; manufacturing was limited to small urban workshops like in Baghdad’s quarter of Bab al-Sheikh, which was to become a hotbed of communism, as the Palestinian historian Hanna Batatu has shown.⁴ In the late 1920s and early 1930s, as the ripple effects of the global depression reached Baghdad, colonial advisers pushed the Iraqi regime to introduce additional taxes and slash public spending. Railway and port workers in southern Basra saw their wages fall. In the countryside new irrigation pumps allowed landlords to over-cultivate and draw excessive water. Peasants migrated in droves to shantytowns on Baghdad’s periphery. 

The conditions were ripe for unions, which organized workers and staged strikes. Communism—as a version of the story put forward by Batatu and the political scientist Tareq Ismael has it—was first preached by the Comintern emissary Pyotr Vasili to the future secretary of the Iraqi Communist Party (1941–1949), Yusuf Salman Yusuf, and his peers. The underground movement spread from the south to the capital like fire.

Iraq gained de jure independence in 1932. But it remained, as the historian Charles Tripp writes, Britain’s “imperial project.”⁵ Royal troops stayed on the ground as part of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930, which granted Iraq token sovereignty over its state apparatus in exchange for British control over its armaments and its military. In 1934, when oil was first extracted from the fields of Kirkuk, the British-owned Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) kept the profits.

For fifteen years the British ran the Department of Public Works and occupied the position of Government Architect. They introduced a modern cadaster, assigning addresses to individual housing units, and laid out wide streets that were easier to police. Walking along al-Saadoun Street—a commercial avenue to the south of al-Rashid that once hosted cinemas—you can still see the crumbling rows of precolonial houses with bay windows of intricate wood, known as shanasheel. Houses like these often had inner courtyards where women sat in private. In the summer, a centuries-old tradition of sleeping on rooftops lived on. In the name of modernity, parts of these quarters were levelled to make way for more easily monitored residential grids and public spaces.

The 1940s witnessed mass demonstrations known as al-Wathba, or the Leap against an ill-disguised extension of the 1930 treaty. These protests, writes the historian Orit Bashkin, were “an outcome of the noticeable changes in the urban landscape”: as new bourgeois neighborhoods spread, workers’ quarters were left in decay—a class wound pried open on the streets.⁶ According to Batatu, the poor in eastern Baghdad “still lived in squalor, ate polluted food, and drudged long hours at impossible wages.” In 1949 Yusuf and other party leaders were hanged for advocating communism, a tendency deemed subversive and in collision with Moscow.⁷ This decision hardly stifled dissent, and soon new mass demonstrations began.

This disruption, and the specter of Soviet Communism and later Arab Nationalism, led the strongman Nuri al-Said to establish the Development Board in 1950. After he negotiated a better revenue-sharing agreement with the IPC—income from oil exports ascended from 13 percent before 1950 to nearly 40 percent in 1955—nearly 70 percent of its revenues were earmarked for the board’s modernization projects. In its first phase the board commissioned public infrastructure, irrigation works, and flood-control structures; these initiatives created jobs but also invited Western consultancy and financial influence.⁸ In 1955 Iraq signed the Baghdad Pact, a cold war military alliance backed by the UK and the United States. With a budget of $1.4 billion for its second phase of development (1955–1960), the board invited Western starchitects and urban planners to present their ideas for the capital.

Gio Ponti was commissioned to design the Ministry of Planning, Le Corbusier a gymnasium, and Walter Gropius the University of Baghdad. The Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis presented his designs for the capital and other cities, modeled after the principles of what he would later describe as ekistics, or the science of human settlements. These were horizontal extensions designed to serve as satellite suburbs, with wide roads and a space for limited gatherings. Some housing units were built along these lines in northern Kirkuk. Another scheme was later adapted to transform the shantytowns of eastern Baghdad into Madinat al-Thawra, or Revolution City, after the revolution that toppled the monarchy in 1958. Today it is the center of gravity of the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s cult following.

In a short-lived tenure that ended with his own execution in 1963, the army officer Abd al-Karim Qasim introduced progressive civil laws and engaged in unsuccessful negotiations to nationalize the IPC (his nationalization decree had no effect on IPC production in main sites in Kirkuk and Zubair). Iraq now leaned away from the West and Doxiadis, a representative of the World Bank, was dismissed in a bid for cultural autonomy. Instead, Qasim gave Iraqi artists and architects prominent commissions to paint murals, design sculptures, and erect buildings. Rifat al-Chadirji developed a style of “International Regionalism,” incorporating ornamental and functional elements from Mesopotamian and Islamic architecture into his domesticated modernism. In 1959 he designed the Monument to the Unknown Soldier, an arcuate abstraction representing an anguished mother bending over the body of her martyred son. Two decades later, now acting as adviser to the mayoralty, al-Chadirji oversaw its destruction at the behest of Saddam Hussein, who ordered a statue of his likeness built in its place. It would be infamously toppled in 2003. 

Al-Chadirji also designed the “banner” for Jewad Selim’s Freedom Monument at al-Tahrir Square, a bas-relief mural of twenty-five bronze figures flowing from right to left like a line of Arabic, and depicting the 1958 revolution and its achievements. “No single artist has had so much influence on art in Iraq,” Jabra wrote of Selim, who died suddenly at the age of forty-one, before his creation was complete.⁹ The structure remains a revered landmark, but some of al-Chadirji’s buildings were maimed or destroyed during the 2003 invasion and the war with ISIS ten years later. His Federation of Industries, an unmistakable high-rise in al-Khilani Square, has a two-tiered façade studded with minimalist windows projecting outwards in an allusion to the shanasheel. It is now riddled with bullet holes and partly obscured by a billboard—a blatant affront to a man who gave the city so much.

After usurping power in a 1968 coup, the Baath Party nationalized the IPC and spent heavily on infrastructure. In 1979 Hussein replaced his cousin Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr as president, and soon the public sphere was cluttered with murals of his likeness, political sculptures, and palaces of obscene grandeur. Mohammed Ghani’s Arabian Nights statues went up across Baghdad and state-of-the-art hotels were built in preparation for the 1982 Non-Aligned Movement conference, which was relocated to India after the war with Iran (1980–1988) broke out. 

In 1979 a special edition of the Ministry of Culture and Information’s quarterly Al-Mawrid was dedicated to the capital. The head editor, Abdul-Hamid al-Alwaji, described Baghdad as a “gift” from its founder, the Abbasid caliph Mansur (750–775), to Saddam Hussein. The Baath leadership, the magazine reported, had left “an imprint” in every corner of the city, with housing complexes and manicured gardens, hospitals and bridges, and a new airport.¹⁰ Haifa Street—which Pieri describes as an emulation of Rome’s Via Triumphalis—was laid over the bulldozed ruins of an ancient neighborhood in al-Karkh. Along Abu Nuwas Street, named after the Abbasid poet, mansions dating from the early twentieth century were demolished to make way for presidential guards’ quarters. 

The war with Iran left the Baathist state bruised and indebted. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 the US imposed sanctions that further stymied economic revival. Apart from Hussein’s tower near al-Nisour Square, a communication center with a revolving restaurant that was bombed in 2003 and has sat in disuse, little was built besides the grandiloquent mosques of the ostensibly secular regime’s “faith campaign,” which was clearly trying to coopt potential dissenters.

It was the invasion of 2003 that truly disfigured the city. US aerial bombing turned buildings into cadaverous sentinels, which stood abandoned for years. The occupying forces and later the national security apparatus set up checkpoints that became permanent. After briefly resisting the Americans, both Shia and Sunni militiamen turned their guns on the people. Hundreds of thousands fled, were martyred, or received death notices (including my own family). Suburbs were cleansed of mixed communities by assassinations and displacement campaigns, becoming either Sunni or Shia ghettos sealed off with concrete walls.

Many of the houses of people who had been murdered, displaced, and exiled were taken over by warring groups or corrupt politicians. Some remain empty, relics from an ecumenical past. Real estate dealers moved in to purchase others at dirt-cheap rates, then mutilated the properties. Elegant villas made way for ghastly apartment complexes and makeshift shops, as migrants fled to Baghdad from peripheral towns and housing prices rose. Sidewalks were reclaimed for buildings. Gardens disappeared; palm trees fell. All this placed further strain on the sewage system, the water supply, and an already inefficient power grid. 

For almost two decades, the main parties and their armed wings were focused on consolidating political power and enriching themselves. Apart from expansions of Shia and Sunni religious sites like the Kadhimian Shrine (and now Abu Hanifa Mosque across the river in al-Risafah), where working class houses from the Ottoman and monarchial eras were levelled, no serious reconstruction was attempted. Public administrative buildings were run down, the streets potholed. State-run hospitals were notoriously underequipped, unhygienic, and so unsafe that fires broke out at them. 

The researcher Omar Sirri has written that, during Nuri al-Maliki’s two terms in power, from 2006 to 2014, Baghdad “experienced rapid privatisation of state-held lands with little public knowledge of any transaction details.” Various factions expropriated properties belonging to Baathists or religious minorities. The investigative journalist Safa Khalaf told me that they also seized government lands by forging official documents or fabricating legal verdicts. This resulted in a schizophrenic urban landscape dotted with shopping malls, retail stores, and gaudy restaurants side by side with old villas. Meanwhile, a quarter of the population was below the poverty line.

Public discontent finally exploded in an uprising on a scale unseen since al-Wathba in 1948. In October 2019 young activists of diverse backgrounds took the streets to demand “a homeland” where one could live and work in dignity. The state security forces and various militias murdered over five hundred civilians. Eight weeks after the demonstrations began, Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mehdi resigned. The caretaker prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, promised to bring those “who spill Iraqi blood” to justice. But a Human Rights Watch report (to which I contributed) noted that the killers were not held accountable, even if the state provided some material compensation to the wounded and victims’ relatives.

Early elections were held in 2021. After months of deadlock—and deadly clashes in the heart of Baghdad between al-Sadr’s followers and rival Shia factions—Mohammed Al-Sudani emerged as the new prime minister, backed by the Coordination Framework, a sobriquet for a mélange of Shia parties close to Iran. Thanks to increased oil revenues, state budgets now hovered around $150 billion, up from $89 billion in 2021. Developmentalism is Al-Sudani’s ideology, “a government of services” his mantra. In a recent interview with state television he described Iraq as a “workshop,” boasting that nearly nine thousand infrastructure projects are completed or underway, including a port on the Persian Gulf.

But this has not been accompanied by progress in the realms of democracy and safety. Dominant conservative lawmakers have amended the Personal Status Law, legalizing unregistered marriages and allowing girls aged fifteen or younger to marry. Armed groups remain unchecked, and any online dissent is unforgivingly persecuted. It is exactly this political reality that this renaissance intends to normalize. If the state previously responded to civilian dissent by promising development in the future or by self-servingly citing the challenges posed by ISIS and other extremist groups, today, my interlocutors say, it points to its own accomplishments, as if belatedly redeeming the state-building project that began in 2003. 

Ahead of the 2025 parliamentary elections, all this construction is winning the state allies among the foreign press and diaspora academics. Locals, however, see these projects as spatial disfiguration. Or, as Khalaf puts it, “an assault” on the public sphere. It is no surprise that the Internet is awash with satirical takes on “al-Sudani’s Bridges.” 

In 2023 Reuters reported that a rehabilitated corniche along Abu Nuwas Street had been partially reopened—a sign, it claimed, that the city was receiving a “makeover.” When I visited last summer, children romped at a playground as their parents watched from manicured gardens. It was just before sunset, and further down the street old men drank heavily among swings in desuetude and mounds of debris. Ghani’s Arabian Nights statues looked haggard, among plastic litter and nylon bags. Besides ever-present security personnel, it was eerily quiet. The same sights prevailed this January, except that more green spaces have been awarded to private businesses. Just down the road near Hadid’s new Central Bank building, a parallel highway is being built beside the Tigris, further alienating Baghdadis from their river.

Over the decades the areas flanking Abu Nawas Street to the east and further north toward the city center have been socially decimated, not least because of the impact of UN sanctions that prevented private businesses from importing commodities and gave rise to an informal economy. After 2003, terrorist attacks and state neglect did the rest, turning much of the downtown into a daytime market. Cinemas, bookstores, and boutiques were turned into warehouses. When the bustle stops, the old core becomes ghostly. On my last visit to al-Saadoun Street, where my uncles ran a pharmacy for decades, men bought booze from secretive windows and women lured men into shady cafes. The same establishments have since been forced to close, following another restriction on liquor sale and consumption.

Public squares have become a particular government target. Al-Sudani, taking a leaf out of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s playbook, is paving them over with highways, closing spaces for demonstrations. Al-Nisour Square—where Blackwater employees massacred seventeen civilians in 2007—is one example. In 2019, as I reported on the uprising, students were repeatedly denied the right to protest there. Now a grid of tunnels and an overpass run through the square. Beyond suburban Baghdad, palm groves have been razed to make way for shopping malls and private apartment buildings. 

Unlike in Egypt, where Sisi’s military steers the development projects, it’s hard to pinpoint who is constructing what in Baghdad. Political and armed groups have established fiefdoms, each with their own businesses and patronage networks. Real estate, Khalaf told me, is also how the political elite prefer to launder the money they pilfer from oil exports. He said some properties are effectively owned by political groups, even if individual actors and companies are listed on the papers. In the end these cities have come to resemble less a housing solution than “islets carefully constructed to guarantee sustained corruption.”

The anthropologist Kali Rubaii says this trend predates al-Maliki’s time: it was initiated by Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority (2003–2004), which “privatized so much of what is public.” As a 2014 study by Yousef K. Baker shows, Bremer’s 112 laws included deregulation, lowering tariffs, and opening markets to foreign investment and international financial institutions. 

ISIS is remembered for destroying Assyrian artifacts and archaeological sites in Nineveh province, but now the Iraqi state itself is also taking aim at the past. In 2023 in Basra the three-hundred-year-old minaret of al-Siraji Mosque was demolished to ease traffic. The governor, Asaad al-Idani, supervised the process himself. Hasan Fawi, who campaigns online for the protection of heritage sites in the province, told me that the act is “emblematic of the dominant culture ruling Basra today,” which has become a green-less “city for merchants.” 

Baghdad’s heritage is being similarly disregarded. The government is constructing a new overpass close to the tomb of Zumurrud Khatun, the wife of Abbasid Caliph al-Mustadhi (1170–1180) and mother of Caliph al-Nasir (1180–1225). The mausoleum features an elaborate conical dome rising from an octagonal base engraved with geometric shapes and filigree. When I visited last July, parts of the base had already fallen off. Aided by scaffoldings, the dome stood among a pile of rubble. The surrounding graves, in a cemetery named for the Sufi sheikh Maruf al-Karkhi (750-815), seemed desecrated; at least one was darkened by a fire. The diggers were gone. Holes had already been made for the highway’s piers; outside the walls of the cemetery, where the shrine is located, trucks unloaded material for construction. When all the work is done, the dome will no longer dominate the skyline, and commuters will be cruising above the dead.

Meanwhile the state is erecting its own monuments. On a warm May morning I visited al-Madina City Stadium, a new 32,000-seater opened in 2021 in eastern Baghdad. Hundreds of supporters, mostly wage laborers from impoverished quarters, had congregated outside the gates for tickets to the evening’s soccer match between Al-Zawraa SC and Al-Quwa Al-Jawiya (Air Force Club). They stood in the blazing sun for hours, waiting for the counter to open. As they crammed between the narrow railings they could see someone who was evidently a celebrity—I recognized him as a social media influencer—being welcomed into the stadium in his SUV. They waited and waited, until their bitter, subdued grumbling burst out in scurrilous chanting against the government and “this charade.” Behind the stained windows of the ticket office, a small room with a few chairs and lifeless air conditioners, the staff held out their smartphones. They filmed the scene, laughing.