BAGHDAD — The crowds at the restaurants are thinning out. Parents have started to escort their children to school again. And cellphones are ringing more often than usual, with family members checking in just to ask, "Are you OK?" or "Is everyone safe?"
After a string of high-profile bombings and other attacks that killed 355 Iraqi civilians and security personnel and 18 U.S. troops last month nationwide, a pall has descended upon Baghdad, a lowering storm cloud swirling with echoes of the darkest days of Iraq's civil war.
Above all, there is a sense of dread, rooted in the terrifying possibility that the calm that had brought the capital back to life over the last 18 months might have been just a lull.
"I feel a shadow of danger on the horizon, that the old days are coming back again," Nidal Shahar, 36, said as she watched her children play in a nearly empty park along the Tigris River that would normally be crowded with families in the early evening hours. "It's like we're seeing the early phases again of the sectarian war."
It is still too early to declare an end to the hard-won security gains of late 2007, achieved after the U.S. troop buildup, the Sunni Awakening revolt against insurgents and the cease-fire declared by Shiite militias. Iraqi officials say they are confident that Iraqi security forces can cope after the scheduled withdrawal of U.S. forces from Baghdad and other cities by June 30. The U.S. military says it has no plans to delay the pullback.
Entire neighborhoods that had been in the hands of insurgents have been brought under government control. Militias have been driven from the streets in a largely successful campaign by enhanced Iraqi security forces. The dumping of mutilated bodies by the dozens on city streets has become a thing of the past. And although the death toll rose in April, the numbers pale in comparison with November 2006, when 3,462 Iraqis died in violence, according to the United Nations.
According to the U.S. military, the number of attacks remains low. What has changed, officials say, is that insurgents appear to be trying to grab headlines by causing a large number of casualties. In the worst of the recent attacks, two suicide bombers killed 71 people among crowds of pilgrims at Baghdad's main Shiite shrine.
