Baghdad Iraq

Relieved Iraqis went to mosques on Friday free from the fear of allied bombs. For many, it was a pilgrimage of mourning. In the Kadhimain district of Baghdad, site of a Shiite Muslim shrine, the faithful knelt in the Great Mosque of Kadhimain to give thanks for peace. "People prayed for peace and to teach our people to understand what happened," said Ali Mohammed, a Baghdad University history professor. "Our people have to rebuild themselves first and then rebuild their country."

America met Baghdad at the outset of the 1991 Gulf War with CNN correspondent Peter Arnett's live coverage from atop the Al Rasheed Hotel. A dozen years later, the beginning of another American war in Iraq came to us largely from reporters broadcasting live from another hotel, the Palestine. Those hotels -- complete with correspondents in the eerie light of antiaircraft fire -- have become landmarks in our collective memory. But the hotel that captured, or at least housed, the collective soul of a generation of correspondents in Iraq's wars was a stubbier, scruffier cousin, the Al Hamra.

It's hard to find on the dial. Its signal is jammed and its studios have to move to avoid bombs, rockets and cruise missiles. There's no sports news or top-40. The announcers seem to have taken voice training at the School for Drones. But for most of the world, Radio Baghdad is the main conduit for Iraq's side of the Gulf War. Every day diplomats, intelligence agents, journalists and tens of thousands of Arabs search for the official Iraqi radio over at least five shortwave bands.

It was lucky for us that the suicide bombers struck first at two other hotels, and that the one who targeted our hotel was forced by security guards to fight his way into the compound. Alerted by the two explosions minutes earlier on Monday, and then the popping of automatic gunfire immediately outside, most staffers of the Los Angeles Times bureau had taken cover in an inside corridor when the bomber detonated his vehicle outside. The blast left a 30-foot crater in the tarmac, destroyed walls and windows around us and demolished at least two houses nearby.

The trees in Baghdad's parks are all stripped bare, dismembered for fuel by the city's millions of freezing and hungry. The meandering Tigris River, long since poisoned by pollution, has become both well and latrine for the Baghdadis, now living without power, sewage systems or clean drinking water for nearly two months.

No one was sure what set off the enormous fireball that consumed a crowded neighborhood gas station and the big fuel-storage tanks behind it. It could have been a stray spark, a downed power line, thieves' bungled siphoning or a burst of gunfire by Iraqis celebrating the return of electricity to their neighborhood.

Don't be put off by the sign, which reads "Cent al B ghd d Stat on." And don't worry about the gun-toting men who emerge from the dark and board the train as it sits in predawn silence at the huge, domed station that has seen grander days. They're there to protect passengers riding Baghdad's first commuter train, an experiment in urban renewal in a city as broken as the rusted station sign but struggling to pull itself together.

The assassination of a provincial governor and the first major car bombing in Baghdad since Iraq's interim government took power gave fresh evidence Wednesday of insurgents' intentions to carry on their rebellion. Osama Kashmoula, governor for five months of Nineveh, the northern province that includes the city of Mosul, was ambushed with machine guns and grenades while traveling in a convoy north of Tikrit in an area known for its loyalty to ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Lt. Gen.

BURSTS of AK-47 fire hissed past them from several directions at once, showering the U.S. and Iraqi soldiers with pulverized cement and slapping spider-web fractures into their Humvees' bullet-resistant glass turret-guards. The joint security forces, undertaking what officials described as a major counterinsurgency operation, were in pursuit of 70 "high-value targets" in Baghdad's crowded Fadhil quarter, a Sunni Arab neighborhood of multistory tenements along the east bank of the Tigris River.

Chris Klein-Beekman was a jovial Canadian who planned to settle in Iraq. Sahir Khuhir Salim was a somber, love-struck Iraqi desperate to get out of the country. Just before 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Klein-Beekman, 32, program coordinator of UNICEF's Iraq operations, walked into the U.N. headquarters for an appointment. Salim, 31, was parked in front of the building, the former Canal Hotel, waiting to give a neighbor a lift.

Suicide bombers struck almost simultaneously at three landmark Baghdad hotels Monday, killing 37 people, nearly half of them after a shootout between security guards and militants outside the residence of several major Western news organizations. The midafternoon attacks -- which authorities quickly blamed on Al Qaeda associates and loyalists of the Baath Party that ruled Iraq under Saddam Hussein -- echoed three large-scale suicide bombings last year in which assailants' coordinated strikes sowed panic and chaos in the capital.

It started in the Green Zone, with Iraqi soldiers ordering restaurants to stop serving alcohol and confiscating bottles from politicians at checkpoints. Then, mysterious signs began appearing across the rest of Baghdad declaring alcohol sinful and warning of damnation for those who drink. Finally, the crackdown came. Phalanxes of soldiers and police officers descended on the nightclubs, cabarets and bars that had proliferated across the capital in the last two years and symbolized for many a return to normality.

A car bomb exploded Wednesday near several restaurants in a Shiite neighborhood of northwest Baghdad, killing at least 34 people and injuring more than 70, police and hospital officials said. The blast appeared timed for maximum civilian casualties, going off about 7 p.m., when many Baghdad residents take advantage of cooler evening temperatures for shopping and dining in outdoor kebab restaurants.

Tens of thousands of supporters of an anti-U.S. cleric burned an effigy of former President George W. Bush on Thursday and demanded that U.S. troops leave Iraq, in a rally marking the sixth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad to U.S. forces. Cleric Muqtada Sadr, whose Shiite Muslim militia fought U.S. troops intermittently until a cease-fire was declared last May, had called on Iraqis to turn out for the protest at Firdos Square, where a statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled on April 9, 2003.

Don't be put off by the sign, which reads "Cent al B ghd d Stat on." And don't worry about the gun-toting men who emerge from the dark and board the train as it sits in predawn silence at the huge, domed station that has seen grander days. They're there to protect passengers riding Baghdad's first commuter train, an experiment in urban renewal in a city as broken as the rusted station sign but struggling to pull itself together.

When the minibus neared Hurriya, my neighborhood, the door jammed. The driver had to stop twice to fix it. We passed the Iraqi army checkpoint without delay. The driver was rushing to make up for lost time. The bus terminal loomed ahead of us. I turned my head to gaze at the appliances and clothes in the shops. The evening sun had receded behind the buildings and the street was alive with women and children shopping. On my way home from work, I always walk from the bus terminal past the vegetable and fruit vendors and shish kebab restaurants in the market, not just to shop, but to chat a few minutes with some of the sellers who are my childhood friends.

The sounds of gunfire burst onto American television Wednesday as Cable News Network dominated extraordinary live coverage of air strikes that launched the U.S.-led war against Iraq. The air raids began about 3:30 p.m. Los Angeles time in the expected action after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein refused to obey a U.N. mandate to pull his forces out of Kuwait.

After nearly 48 relentless hours of surgical cruise missile strikes and bombing runs, Baghdad resembles a ghost town, its inhabitants having fled or in hiding, its sprawling residential districts largely intact but empty.

Love is in the air in Yousif Mohammed's shop. So is death, but that's OK, because Mohammed's business is selling flowers, and in Baghdad, where bouquets rarely top shopping lists these days, weddings and funerals are his mainstay. It wasn't always like this. Before the war, Iraqis loved buying fresh flowers to brighten up their homes and offices, or to present with a flourish to the objects of their affection.

For months, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Luis Falcon patrolled the downtrodden neighborhoods of Baqubah, where Sunni Muslim extremists had tried to create an Islamic caliphate. One day, he came upon a young girl sitting in an old, oversized wheelchair, blood crusted on the stumps where her legs had been. Her name was Shahad Abbas Aziz, and on Friday, the 12-year-old sat patiently in a clinic in Baghdad's Green Zone while doctors measured what remains of her legs.