Iraqi unable to shake the feeling of homelessness
DISPATCH FROM BAGHDAD
Reporter is able to get back his Baghdad home from squatters, but the plundered house and the state of the country leave him feeling bereft.
BAGHDAD — My family's home was taken over by insurgents 19 months ago. On Sunday, we got it back.
Until a couple of months ago, the people who had settled into my parents' house were strangers. They were a Sunni Arab family displaced from a predominantly Shiite Muslim neighborhood during Baghdad's sectarian conflict. Like a lot of Iraqis, they went to somewhere friendly to their sect and moved into a vacant house. In this case, it was our home, in the west Baghdad neighborhood of Adel.
Then, the Iraqi government issued an ultimatum ordering squatters in Adel to leave by Sept. 2. Luay Mahmoud, the man staying at my home with his family, called and asked whether I could talk to security officials so they would let him leave safely with his belongings.
I agreed.
My good friend Caesar Ahmed offered to come with me Sunday to my old neighborhood. The drive there was uneventful. There was no excitement on my part. It was as if the last 19 months and the ordeal of losing a house, first to gunmen and then to squatters, had never happened.
The neighborhood hadn't changed much, with the exception of Iraqi soldiers and their armored vehicles manning every corner in place of the Sunni fighters and other gunmen who once controlled the area.
We reached the gate of the stucco duplex just before 11 a.m.
"It looks fine, huh?" Caesar said as we stood there.
"Looks fine from the outside. God knows how it looks from within," I answered.
A small man in his late 20s or early 30s approached from the other side of the gate. We cordially greeted each other.
Luay Mahmoud, who had lived there about a year, was soft-spoken and seemed decent. I had feared I would lose my temper when meeting him, but it was as if my emotions were depleted. I didn't feel anything. I wondered whether Mahmoud and his family weren't victims, just like me and my family.
Most of my mixed Sunni-Shiite family had left Iraq in the fall of 2006 because of the violence. I'd stayed behind and kept watch on the house until January 2007, when Sunni insurgents took over the neighborhood and its homes. Over time, the insurgents had been driven out, and squatters had moved in.
Inside, the heavy furniture was still there, but everything else was gone: the chinaware, crystal, silver, family pictures, Persian rugs and God knows what else.
Mahmoud insisted that this was how it was when he got here. We found some of the doors upstairs broken down and pocked with bullet holes.
