BAGHDAD — It's Thursday night, the end of the Iraqi workweek, and Fami Ameen is scrambling in his crowded Assassin's Gate liquor store as customers clamor for everything from beer and whiskey to ouzo and arak, the popular local alcohol.
Call Ameen an unexpected beneficiary of the "surge."
For decades, Iraq had a reputation as a modern, secular society that liked to drink and knew how to party, from wild hotel discotheques to genteel members-only social clubs. But after the fall of President Saddam Hussein, extremists unleashed waves of firebombings against liquor stores, even killing owners, because alcohol is forbidden under Islamic law.
Just a year ago, Iraqis' taste for alcohol, and the businesses that sated it, were written off as a casualty of the country's new Islam-dominated order.
But violence in Baghdad has dropped in recent months under the U.S. military's security crackdown. And although many stores are still shuttered, their faded Carlsberg awnings caked with dirt, the booze business has rebounded, as Iraqis negotiating the gulf between their faith and their proclivities strike a delicate balance, discreetly traveling from all over the city, and even other provinces, to the remaining liquor shops.
"People were reluctant to make the trip before the past six months, but now they are encouraged with the somewhat alleviated security," Ameen said. "My wish is that the trend would continue, and we could go back to the prewar levels of distribution -- perhaps even more."
With new shops like Ameen's opening in secured areas near fortified Western military outposts, some retailers even say their sales have declined, because they now have so much competition. In one dubious measure of the progress, they say their biggest fear is no longer the militias that targeted them for religious reasons, but the criminals that would kidnap them for their revived fortunes.
Ameen, 27, a burly man with a big mustache, recalls arriving at his old liquor store in east Baghdad one morning three years ago, only to discover it was gone. "It was blown to smithereens, just like that," he said.
He had a second shop in the mostly Shiite district of Karada, but closed it out of fear it would suffer the same fate. He then moved his businesses to the Assassin's Gate, an ornate sandstone arch just outside the entrance to the fortified Green Zone. Two months ago, he consolidated into a larger space across the street.
