BAGHDAD — I left Baghdad on June 29, 2006. It was time to escape the abyss, to start over. I lived in the capital's safest neighborhood, but even there, people died.
Two months earlier, my wife's cousin had visited our house in Karada in central Baghdad. A car bomb killed him on his way home. A month later, a cousin was abducted; his body was found at the morgue.
The day before our departure for Syria and then Egypt, I locked up our two family homes, and just missed an explosion that killed 14 people.
I described my country as hell. But here I am, back in Baghdad after failing to find decent work outside Iraq and hearing that things had improved here.
I flew in around New Year's. It took only five minutes to pass through customs, and I found a taxi easily.
But on the highway, the checkpoints were two miles apart and masked soldiers hid behind concrete barriers. When we reached the hotel, I called my wife and told her Baghdad was a ghost town. I stayed in the hotel two days before going out.
When I did, I saw that people in my old neighborhood finished their errands and hurried home without laughing or talking to one another. Destruction was on every block.
I visited a doctor friend, who scolded me for returning. "It will never get back to normal," he said. "All the decent people have left the country."
I asked whether there was any hope.
"Maybe in 10 years," he said.
I left the hospital depressed, but went to see a relative, a 60-year-old lawyer who lived nearby. He said he thought life was improving. Shops were reopening, he said; some didn't close till 11 p.m.
People didn't seem to be so afraid of the police anymore, and I noticed that officers had stopped hiding their faces behind ski masks.
I thought back to the day I had left Iraq with my wife, our year-old twin daughters, my mother and my younger brother. I put down a deposit for a large sport utility vehicle that was to pick us up and drive us to Syria. But the night before, the travel agency called to say the driver had been killed on his way back from the border.
Later, I learned the agency had simply found someone willing to pay more.
My brother's best friend, Ayman, came to say goodbye the morning we left. Six months later, Ayman was beheaded; his uncle, a prominent Sunni Muslim sheik, died soon after in a bombing that targeted tribal leaders fighting the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq.
