BAGHDAD — Stray bullets streaked through the sky. Mortar shells and rockets thundered into residential areas sapped of street life except for the few people willing to venture beyond their front gates.
A walk in his own backyard proved deadly for one man. He was hit by a wayward bullet in his neighborhood in Baghdad, where fighting between Shiite Muslim militias and Iraqi and U.S. forces has revealed how shaky Iraq's security situation is.
An around-the-clock curfew was eased today, giving Baghdad's 6 million people the freedom to move about for the first time in four days. Psychologically, though, the lockdown is likely to last far longer. Iraqis had embraced a relative calm in recent months, only to find themselves prisoners in their homes and offices.
For five years, U.S. and Iraqi officials have cautioned that progress takes time. Just as it seemed that progress on the security front, at least, was tangible, everything turned around again.
The capital's normally traffic-choked streets were deserted. People risked being caught in crossfire, walking for hours to check on relatives or reach their jobs. Neighborhoods resembled ghost towns.
A Times staffer walked several miles Sunday to reach the funeral of his brother-in-law, who had been killed in crossfire. Mahdi Army militiamen loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr had used bricks and the trunk of a palm tree to block the entrance to his destination, the southwestern neighborhood of Bayaa. They let the staffer pass after he explained that he was going to a funeral.
By Sunday night, kitchens were low on food. The few neighborhood markets open had quadrupled prices of the scarce goods available. Generators were running out of fuel. People who had been at work when the curfew was imposed Thursday night were missing their families. Patience was wearing thin.
About half a mile from Leith Abass' home in Shula, a northwestern Baghdad neighborhood, masked gunmen loitered. Occasionally, they traded fire with U.S. forces positioned on the overpass of a nearby highway.
Food came from a tiny shop across the street from his house, but every visit to the market was risky.
"There is shooting every now and then around us, and it starts and ends very rapidly," Abass said in a phone interview. "You never know what could happen."
There had been no electricity for four days, and his generator had run out of fuel, forcing Abass to buy some from his neighbor "just so I could listen to some news and cool the water in the refrigerator."
