Cleaning Up After Combat, a Street at a Time
BAGHDAD — Lakes of sewage-blotched stagnant water and piles of rotting garbage still dot the streets of Sadr City. But for residents of Baghdad's vast Shiite Muslim slum, it's the filth they don't see that gives them hope.
"Just a few days ago, you couldn't walk this street because the sewers were overflowing. Now they've taken care of it," said a mattress merchant in his mid-50s, who identified himself only as Abu Mustafa. "As long as there is security, the rest will follow."
Modest reconstruction and cleanup efforts are proceeding in the district, home to 2 million, thanks to seven weeks of relative tranquillity after months of violence. A tenuous peace agreement has held since mid-October, when firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr told his Al Mahdi militia to lay down its arms.
Thousands of workers have cleared fetid trash from about half the streets of Sadr City as work on $134 million in projects finally forges ahead. Two newly revamped pumping stations have removed raw sewage from some parts of the district.
The rest of Baghdad, and large sections of the country, may remain vulnerable to daily insurgent violence. But in Sadr City, police patrol the streets, Al Mahdi volunteers direct traffic, and workers in orange jumpsuits fill in hundreds of craters left by roadside bombs.
Still, the relationship between the Americans and Sadr's forces, who staged deadly uprisings across Iraq, is far from cooperative. The two sides remain deeply hostile toward each other, and coordination is nonexistent.
Sadr representatives are still bitter over the continued detention of hundreds of Al Mahdi fighters -- a violation, they say, of the cease-fire agreement reached after weeks of clashes in the capital. The U.S., meanwhile, appears determined to handle the reconstruction in a way that provides as little cash, power and prestige to Sadr as possible.
Zeidan Rubaie, the director of Sadr's economic office, complained that U.S. planners were "neglecting" Sadr's people and downplayed the extent and efficiency of the work accomplished so far.
"A little simple cleaning and trash removal," he said with a shrug. "Their work is very slow."
Charles Hess, director of the Iraq Project and Contracting Office in the U.S. Embassy here, acknowledged the disconnect between the Americans and the people who control the district.
