Reporting from Baghdad — They are the sullen architecture of the "surge," gray armies shrinking the horizon.
Baghdad is a city of blast walls, towering maze-like from the Tigris to the battered, seething neighborhoods of Shula and Sadr City. Concrete sentinels of last year's troop buildup, they seal and sequester. They absorb explosions from car bombs, they bottle up bad guys.
The color of an angry sky, they aren't so pretty, but painters dispatched by Baghdad University's College of Fine Arts, commissioned by the government to decorate the walls, have in the last 20 months turned them into vast canvases for landscapes, portraits, abstracts, images from ancient Babylonia.
The wall on one street in Sadr City stretches nearly a mile. Motorcycle rickshaws zip past the paintings on each of its slabs: oases, mosques, women harvesting wheat, a hawk snatching a rabbit, all unraveling like scenes from an erratically edited film.
"We're painting these walls not for ourselves, but for the Iraqi people," said Asad Sagheer, an art teacher at the university who has infused walls with impressionism and historical realism. "We want to create a sense of beauty amid this violence. Every wall creates an internal feeling, the feeling of agony. So you have to create harmony over that agony with something you love."
Drive across the city and the palette changes: sepia-toned kings of the past, the marshes of the south, the mountains of the north, the Tigris and Euphrates twisting between; and then, Caribbean-like colors rising from blowing garbage and dirt-bald lots: winged creatures, swans, peacocks, dolphins jumping.
The walls are quiet narratives looming over everyday life: Boys with plastic guns peek and play; girls rush to swing sets; black-draped women balance blocks of ice on their heads, water seeping and shining over their veils; and, just beyond, U.S. and Iraqi soldiers, with real guns, hunt insurgents and fuel their Humvees.
In his Karada neighborhood studio, Wisam Rahdi, a sleepy-eyed man with a loquacious manner, talked about walls he's painted, but only after digressing into how he escaped Saddam Hussein's army by fleeing to Malta and speaking of the girl who was shot in the leg because she loved him. They were romantic tales, stories for another day; this is a time of concrete barriers and new armies.
