Iraq restaurant's fortunes rise and fall with violence
The doors are open again thanks to a tentative calm. But the owner worries about what will happen if U.S. troops leave the Baghdad neighborhood.
BAGHDAD — Faruq Tamimi looked with satisfaction at the crowd of customers filling his restaurant. They were all there, the ones suspected of ties to Shiite militias and the ones suspected of links to Al Qaeda in Iraq. They dug into burgers dripping mayo. All of them knew people who had been involved in the killings that had destroyed his west Baghdad neighborhood in the last two years.
It didn't bother Tamimi. For a moment, he could dream big: He wanted to add an ice cream parlor and cappuccino bar to Sun City Foods, with its jaunty postmodern-Flintstones exterior, its fish tank, shiny red chairs and tangerine-and-lime-striped walls. His waiters wore matching orange shirts and zigzagged through the maze of tables, balancing trays of Pepsi.
But Tamimi grew nervous when pondering a future without the U.S. soldiers who have enforced the tentative peace in the neighborhood, one of the last two Sunni-majority districts on the highway to the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala.
"Only God knows what will happen if the Americans leave," Tamimi said.
The death and rebirth of Sun City Foods is very much a story of Baghdad's civil war. The restaurant opened in January 2006, a month before militants blew up the venerated Shiite mosque in Samarra, an attack that set off a torrent of sectarian violence. A year later, the restaurant closed because of the Sunni-Shiite conflict.
With the Saidiya neighborhood one of the beneficiaries of last year's U.S. troop buildup, the restaurant recently unbolted its curvaceous swinging doors for a reopening that had the pomp of a state ceremony.
Tamimi wants to believe in the newfound calm, but he knows his fate is tied to whether powerful Sunni and Shiite parties decide to pick up guns once more.
It is a key question and one with no easy answer: In testimony before Congress last week, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker called for a pause in American troop withdrawals this summer to determine if the reduction in Baghdad's violence can indeed be lasting.
Tamimi, who dresses in dark gray suits, white shirts and loafers, remembers the early days of Sun City Foods two years ago as a golden time. The restaurant's name just came to him. Sun City Foods. He liked the ring of it.
