BAGHDAD — Hussain Attar-Bashi watched the American-led invasion of Iraq on live TV, his illegal satellite dish hidden by cloth strategically draped across the roof of his home.
Five years later, Iraqi laws restricting access to foreign television and the Internet are long gone, and Attar-Bashi is among those riding a communications revolution that has swept the country.
Nowhere is that boom more evident than on the cacophonous stretch of road in central Baghdad called Sinaa Street, where Sunnis, Shiites and Christians shop for the latest high-tech gear at stores such as Attar-Bashi's Alreem Computer Center.
The fortunes of Sinaa Street, like those of the nation, rise and tumble with the course of the war. When violence ebbs, business thrives. When violence increases, it suffers.
Merchants such as Attar-Bashi have made a living selling their wares along the broken sidewalks here since the March 2003 invasion, in what would seem to be an irreversible connection to the global Information Age.
But though Iraqis are now free to communicate with the outside world, they are still wary of speaking their minds in front of people who might disagree with them -- even customers in their own cluttered shops. And after five years of war, bombings, kidnappings and slayings, Iraqis still do not feel they can move about freely.
Merchants on Sinaa Street do what most Iraqis do in their spare time: wonder whether the relative calm will last, and compare life now to the lives they had before the war.
Here, Iraqis' newfound freedoms are evident in a variety of goods, including pirated copies of Oscar-nominated films and sophisticated laptops on which to play them. On a recent afternoon, vendors were selling "Alvin and the Chipmunks," "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" and "Juno" alongside religious DVDs and the latest version of the video game "Grand Theft Auto."
Disappointment is also on display. Attar-Bashi, speaking inside his sprawling store on a recent afternoon, said he had welcomed the arrival of the Americans.
"We thought, 'Oh, we'll be free.' We thought: 'We'll be able to go out and talk to anyone. We'll be free.' It didn't turn out that way."
Iraqis see that violence has dropped in the last few months, yet Sunnis still worry about being targeted by Shiite militiamen and Shiites are afraid to visit Sunni neighborhoods.
All are bitter about the violence and hardship the war has wrought and fearful that widespread bloodshed could return.
Along Sinaa Street, young men in jeans swinging shopping bags filled with printers, scanners and other gear pass concrete walls plastered with posters of Shiite clerics. Behind the walls, Iraqi and U.S. soldiers sit atop tanks and Humvees. They watch over streets where battered sedans pass alongside armored BMWs and minivan taxis, whose passengers are frisked for bombs before boarding.
The city's traffic veers past women in black abayas begging for handouts and scatters when convoys carrying soldiers or VIPs tear through, their sirens blaring and their mysterious passengers hidden behind tinted windows.
It is loud and lively, yet missing the frivolities of a normal city, where pedestrians might casually window-shop and where cafes would be filled with couples enjoying a Saturday afternoon.
Attar-Bashi kept his shop closed most of the last two years because of the danger.
A few weeks ago, he began opening every day because of improved security, but his confidence has its limits. He varies the routes he takes to and from work to keep potential kidnappers off his trail, and discourages his grown children from going out themselves.
"They are prisoners in their homes," Attar-Bashi said of most Iraqis, who he acknowledges have boosted his profit by scooping up stay-at-home diversions such as computer games and gadgets.
"It's worrying," he said of the long-term effect of a cloistered society. "But compared to going out . . . well, things here are still not stable."
They are far better than they were two years ago. Of the 170 or so shops on Sinaa Street, about 130 are open now, clustered along a half-mile stretch facing the University of Technology.
Most shut down after the February 2006 bombing of a venerated Shiite mosque in Samarra, which unleashed a frenzy of Shiite-Sunni violence that didn't begin subsiding until late last year.
Mohammed Jouda, a 28-year-old computer engineer and former shop manager, recalled a day in 2006 when nine bombs exploded on the street. Two of the people killed were university students who had been among his regular customers.
The owner of the shop where Jouda worked was shot to death when he resisted a kidnapping attempt. The store remains closed.
Jihad Yaarub began working at a computer shop on Sinaa in 2004. Business "was growing insanely."
"It was so fun. . . . And then bombings started to occur often. Shop owners fled the country and closed their shops," he said.
