Twenty years after the US invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the Ba‘thist regime, what kinds of historical narratives are starting to emerge among residents of Baghdad about the events of the recent past? How have their experiences with the new Iraqi state over the past twenty years colored Baghdadis’ perceptions of what their lives were like under Saddam Hussein, and how are they making sense of the profound disruptions their city has undergone in the years since 2003? We conducted structured interviews with sixty residents of Baghdad across four different neighborhoods in December 2022 and January 2023 to better understand how Baghdadis are perceiving, interpreting, and narrating changes that have taken place in their neighborhoods during their lifetimes. In light of these interviews, we offer preliminary insights about the politics of memory in contemporary Baghdad: how history, memory, and collective identities intersect in different ways for Iraqis in different parts of the city.Footnote 1 How do residents of different Baghdad neighborhoods identify and describe the “good times” and “bad times” of the recent past, and what factors are influencing the construction of their historical narratives?
One important factor in shaping the construction of narratives about the past, we argue, is the localization of collective experiences in different neighborhoods. Being attentive to the unique ways in which Saddam's authoritarian governance and the violence of the US occupation and sectarian civil war played out differently across the city landscape helps explain variations in historical framings that do not necessarily correspond to sect, but to collective, localized experiences rooted in particular urban spaces. Although we are still early in the process of conducting and analyzing oral history interviews in Baghdad regarding post-2003 changes, our preliminary analysis emphasizes the importance of spatial analysis for analyzing topics like collective memory and identity formation.Footnote 2
Different neighborhoods of Baghdad had sufficiently varied experiences of authoritarian rule, local governance, and violent disruptions to produce distinct historical narratives based on their collective experiences and positionality within the city. This is not to say that national projects to frame collective memory are irrelevant. We acknowledge that individuals generally do connect and interpret their personal experiences in relation to larger communal, regional, and national narratives and historical frameworks, although theorists of memory and collective identity remind us that the relationship between individual and collective memories is never straightforward.Footnote 3 However, turning our attention for now to the neighborhood level allows us to highlight the fragmentary, divergent, and inconsistent qualities of collective memory formation and the disconnect that exists, in many cases, from the historical frameworks pushed by sectarian political parties in national politics.
Interviews
We conducted structured interviews in four different neighborhoods, identifying fifteen respondents in each who were selected using snowball sampling.Footnote 4 These women and men were long-time residents of their neighborhoods, many since birth or early childhood. Their ages ranged from forty to eighty-four years. Speaking to a broad swath of “ordinary” residents of Baghdad enabled us to move beyond elite formulations of historical narratives as top-down political projects to see what kinds of collective memories about the past may be emerging within different social circles.
The first neighborhood we selected was al-Kadhimiyya, a historic middle-class Shi‘i neighborhood that is connected to the Shi‘i shrines for Imam Musa al-Kadhim (d. 799) and Imam Muhammad al-Jawad (d. 835). We also interviewed respondents in al-Adhamiyya, an affluent Sunni neighborhood built around the Sunni shrine for Imam Abu Hanifa (d. 767). We also selected two low-income neighborhoods: the first was al-Fadhil, a small Sunni neighborhood located in al-Rusafa on the eastern side of the Tigris. The final neighborhood was Sadr City, a vast, mostly low-income Shi‘i neighborhood that was constructed on the outskirts of the city in the mid-20th century to house (and surveil) Shi‘i rural migrants from the southern provinces of Iraq (Fig. 1).
Figure 1. Map of Baghdad, annotated to show four selected districts. Original map: “Baghdad,” National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, 2006, Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas at Austin, https://maps.lib.utexas.edu/maps/iraq.html.
By focusing on neighborhoods with different sectarian majorities, our purpose was not to emphasize the role of sect in shaping collective memories of the past, but the opposite. Our findings challenge the usefulness of sect as an analytical category, adding our insights to a strong body of scholarship on this point.Footnote 5 Even a superficial glance at interview data from the two Shi‘i districts of al-Kadhimiyya and Sadr City, for example, quickly shows how differently residents of these areas view the past.
Narrating the “Good Times” and “Bad Times”: Pre-2003
Overall, interviewees from all four neighborhoods remembered the pre-2003 period as a better time than the post-2003 period. These findings give some credence to the much-reported phenomenon of “authoritarian nostalgia” in Iraq today.Footnote 6
Question: Which period was the best in terms of the provision of public services?
Question: Rate your overall satisfaction with the pre-2003 and post-2003 periods on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being “highly satisfied.”
However, the content and the narrative framing of these recollections about the pre-2003 period varied significantly between these four neighborhoods, complicating a simple story of nostalgia by generation (the youth) or by sect (Sunnis).
Unsurprisingly, residents of Sadr City offered the most scathing views of the pre-2003 period. Sadr City suffered in several ways under the Ba‘thist administration: politically, the neighborhood was known to harbor opposition groups and so experienced more intense scrutiny by security forces, and economically, it was neglected as a low-income district. Sadr City residents were more likely to describe the pre-2003 regime as a time of “terror,” when “fear was pervasive.”Footnote 7 When asked to rate their overall level of satisfaction with the previous regime, half of the respondents rated the pre-2003 period as 0 out of 10. Some respondents explained their very low ratings in terms of politics: “Because I don't love Saddam and the Ba‘th Party.”Footnote 8 Others described abuse at the hands of regime security forces: “We lived in terror and fear of the regime. I was arrested and tortured.”Footnote 9 Others remembered the deprivations in the sanctions era and the impact that had on the quality of their lives: “The previous regime only brought wars, poverty, sanctions, and hunger.”Footnote 10 The relatively low level of development of Sadr City's infrastructure in the pre-2003 era in comparison to the rest of the city also was noted: before 2003, “the roads weren't paved, water and electricity were weak, and health services were almost nonexistent. The cost of living was terrible.”Footnote 11
However, it is notable that, although many residents of Sadr City were highly critical of the former regime, there was not one coherent, consistent narrative about the pre-2003 period. Forty-two percent of interviewees from Sadr City indicated that the pre-2003 period was the “best” time in recent years for governance and services. One woman in Sadr City noted that although she had been “dissatisfied with the political situation” under the Ba‘th Regime, she nevertheless appreciated that there was “complete stability and security.”Footnote 12 Another woman in Sadr City recalled that “everything was safe, secure, organized, and generally quiet,” with little crime.Footnote 13 Others in Sadr City assessed the past positively in comparison to what came after 2003: “There was good security. It's considered a quiet and stable period when you look back after what happened.”Footnote 14 In contrast to the seven interviewees who rated the pre-2003 era as 0 out of 10, four interviewees rated that period as a 7 or higher, and one woman in Sadr City rated that time as a perfect 10. These responses indicate that the historical narrative advanced by the Da‘wa Party or other national Shi‘i parties, one that emphasizes Shi‘i persecution under the Ba‘th Party, has not been consistently adopted even in a district like Sadr City that is often viewed as having been badly repressed under Saddam.Footnote 15 The range of opinions within a single district reminds us of how additional factors, such as personal history, religiosity, political orientation, gender, and so forth shape the way any given individual perceives the past and can cause deviations from collective historical narratives.
It also is inescapable that evaluations of the pre-2003 period are highly colored by interviewees’ grievances in the present. Scholars in the field of memory studies and oral history remind us that “oral history, though documenting an often private, always personal past, is nonetheless also very much about a community's present conditions, needs, and desires” and that “representations of the past are shaped by relations of power in the present.”Footnote 16 In all four neighborhoods, present-day grievances of corruption, inadequate services, bribes, and broken infrastructure weighed heavily on how respondents viewed the past, and this also helps explain some of the more positive recollections by Sadr City residents. One respondent from al-Kadhimiyya clearly linked memories of the past with assessments of the present, stating: “Good services were established in the time of Saddam. There still has been no development since then.”Footnote 17 Others compared the past and present in relation to the reliability of electricity: “Services were provided and organized. Especially electricity—it was always available. It's completely the opposite of the situation today. Now we rely on generators.”Footnote 18 One man in al-Adhamiyya recalled how “Back then, the sewers didn't overflow, the streets didn't flood in the rain. The streets were always clean.” (Flooding streets from winter rains was a repeated example across many interviews, which was likely because these interviews were conducted in the winter—another example of the power of the present working on memories of the past). He attributed the good working order of infrastructure to the low levels of corruption before 2003: “The state was strong and in control. The citizen had rights because there was no bribery, corruption, or wāsṭa [personal connections or nepotism]. The law was above all.”Footnote 19 Similarly, another remembered with some bitterness that officials used to address issues in their neighborhood without demanding bribes: “If there was an electricity outage or issue with the pipes, they [the municipality] would address it. And they did this without a bribe,” in clear reference to issues of corruption in the present.Footnote 20
Although the different recollections about the pre-2003 period were striking within neighborhoods, as seen in the range of viewpoints expressed in Sadr City, comparing historical framings of the past between neighborhoods reveals further insights into collective memory. Comparing the perspectives of residents in al-Kadhimiyya and Sadr City, for example, illustrates the limited utility of understanding historical narratives about the past on the basis of sect alone. Residents in the low-income Shi‘i neighborhood of Sadr City recalled that services were “lousy” (radi’) and that complaints about problems with sewage or electricity outages were unlikely to be fixed, helping to explain why respondents gave the pre-2003 period the lowest average rating of 3 out of 10.Footnote 21
However, residents of the more affluent Shi‘i neighborhood of al-Kadhimiyya recalled the past in very different terms. Respondents from al-Kadhimiyya rated the pre-2003 period as a 5.5 out of 10, and more than half chose the pre-2003 period as the “best” era for governance and services in their lifetimes. “Life at that time was easy,” said one woman. “We had the services we wanted. There was no crime then, because everyone lived under the rule of law.”Footnote 22 Another from al-Kadhimiyya recalled that they had no issues with infrastructure or services because the Baʿth Party officials in their neighborhood were “strong and serious.”Footnote 23 One remembered how local Ba‘th party officials rushed to fix a small pothole in al-Kadhimiyya prior to a visit by a government minister to the district, eager to show that everything was in proper order even down to that level of detail.Footnote 24 It is notable that recollections by residents in al-Kadhimiyya were positive, but not fond—several used adjectives like “severe” to refer to Ba‘thist officials in al-Kadhimiyya, and one man specifically mentioned how the regime targeted suspected members of Shi‘i resistance groups living there.Footnote 25 However, the overall appraisal by residents in al-Kadhimiyya was that the community benefited from many aspects of local governance and state services under Saddam. “The Ba‘th Party firqa (neighborhood-level office) controlled everything, from services, protection, and security. They provided everything the residents needed,” one 50-year-old man stated.Footnote 26
In short, recollections of the pre-2003 period across the city contained considerable nuance. In analyzing the politics of memory, we can see that all recollections of the past are not necessarily strongly politicized, at least when it comes to memories of everyday life and daily governance concerns. It also is evident that Shi‘i narratives of victimization were far from the only or even the primary factor influencing how residents of Sadr City and al-Kadhimiyya framed the past (see also Amir Taha's essay in this roundtable). Nor did we see evidence of Sunni neighborhoods adopting strong narratives of persecution under the new government in their recollections of the 2003–8 and 2009–19 periods.
If not on the basis of sect, how else can we analyze the different kinds of narratives about the past circulating in these four different neighborhoods? Building on the Bourdieusian analysis used by some scholars when conducting spatial analysis, the cultural capital of each neighborhood also may have influenced how the regime governed each area and how invested the state was in providing services and in being responsive to the residents’ needs.Footnote 27 For example, al-Kadhimiyya is a respected district due to its connection to the historic shrines, and it also is well-regarded for its gold markets and other commercial networks. In contrast, popular cultural narratives of Sadr City since its founding in the mid-20th century have often reinforced notions of the district's criminality, marginal social and economic status, and political opposition to the ruling order. More work is needed to thoroughly analyze the different factors contributing to collective memory and historical narratives across Baghdad, but collective experiences on the basis of neighborhood positionality and socioeconomic class deserve careful consideration.
A City of Walls: Divergent Narratives about 2003–2008
The way that the politics of memory vary across the city's landscape is particularly evident in comparing narratives about the 2003–8 period, when the experiences of different districts during periods of violence diverged even more sharply. The events of the US occupation and the sectarian civil war in Baghdad were not evenly distributed across every district of the city. Sadr City was the site of several battles with US forces, for example, and residents recalled seeing US soldiers clash with the Shi‘i Mahdi Army militia in their neighborhood.Footnote 28 Baghdadis described certain neighborhoods as “hot spots” in the sectarian fighting, frequently targeted by car bombings, assassinations, and forced displacement by armed groups.Footnote 29 These were often located on fault lines between areas that had been “cleansed” by warring Shi‘i or Sunni militias. The Sunni neighborhoods of al-Adhamiyya and al-Fadhil were both located in close proximity to Sadr City and other Shi‘i neighborhoods controlled by the Mahdi Army, and this resulted in numerous attacks on their neighborhoods and the rise of Sunni armed groups within their communities. In contrast, residents who lived in al-Kadhimiyya reported a relatively quieter experience during the sectarian civil war. One woman explained how she felt that al-Kadhimiyya was “far from the chaos and very secure,” so much so that the district was called a “white area” (al-minṭaqa al-bayḍā’) because of its relative stability.Footnote 30
Finally, each neighborhood was literally isolated from the rest of the city for a period of several years starting around 2007 because the US erected concrete blast walls to encircle different districts in an effort to improve security. Checkpoints monitored the few available entrances into and out of each neighborhood, and only those who had valid residency cards were allowed to enter. Each neighborhood became an island unto itself. In many ways, then, Baghdad's different neighborhoods experienced intense but highly localized upheavals as battles between the US forces, anti-American insurgents, and sectarian militias concentrated in different districts and blast walls prevented the movements of Baghdadis across the city.
It's little wonder that most residents of Baghdad described 2003–8 as the “worst” epoch in their lifetimes due to the US military occupation, insurgent violence, sectarian killings, and the collapse of state functions. Several respondents personally witnessed sectarian killings and large bombings. One man in al-Fadhil described seeing a female doctor murdered for her sectarian identity, and another recalled how mortified he was to see corpses lying in the garbage.Footnote 31 One man in al-Kadhimiyya recalled how he and his neighbors regularly discovered bodies floating in the Tigris River near their homes.Footnote 32 Several interviewees lost friends and family members.
Those who survived the violence were left to fend for themselves in the aftermath of state collapse. One woman in al-Kadhimiyya stated: “We had to take care of everything by ourselves. It was the worst time in the history of Iraq.”Footnote 33 A man from al-Adhamiyya described the period from 2003 to 2008: “It was chaos. Every family sat in their own home, afraid to go out. There was an absence of security and a presence of fear and anxiety, and there was no one to help. We had only ourselves,” he stated. “The country ended.”Footnote 34
So it is striking, in contrast to the traumatic memories that most Baghdadis shared, that one-third of interviewees from Sadr City named 2003–8 as the best period in recent memory, at least when it came to services and local governance. In Sadr City, residents described the relative abundance of basic provisions and services, such as food, medicine, and fuel, despite the shortages of essential goods elsewhere in the city. All of this was possible because of the monopoly on local governance achieved by a non-state actor, Muqtada al-Sadr, through the work of his Sadr bureau and the Mahdi Army militia during this period.
In the period from 2003 to 2008, the Sadr City district may have enjoyed some of the best services in the entire city of Baghdad. The two wings of Muqtada al-Sadr's operations—the Mahdi Army and the Sadr Bureau—worked in tandem to provide resources and a measure of security. In the recollections of Sadr City residents, the Mahdi Army provided security and stability by going after criminals, while also protecting them from attack by Sunni militias. If someone was a victim of theft, for example, the Mahdi Army would respond to the crime and even help recover the stolen money.Footnote 35 As for the Sadr Bureau, several interviewees specifically remarked on their successful efforts to distribute petrol and propane to the district at a time when the rest of the city was experiencing acute shortages of fuel: “Every area of Baghdad was suffering from a gas and petrol shortage, but it was available in our area because the Sadr Bureau was providing it.”Footnote 36 When it came to an electricity outage in the area, one resident recalled that a member of the Mahdi Army came out to repair it “in a way that was almost official,” like a government representative would do.Footnote 37
Another striking aspect of the Sadr City interviews was that it clearly emerged that the Sadrists were the only authority that operated in the district between 2003 and 2008. Interviewees described the Sadrists as “controlling” the district or “ruling” the district. Residents remarked on how the Sadrists involved themselves in every matter in the district, big or small, even in family disputes over inheritance.Footnote 38 This was very distinct from how any other state or municipal actors were described anywhere else in the city in the post-2003 era, where a multitude of weak and minimally effective actors operated to provide less-than-satisfactory services. Not every resident of Sadr City personally supported Sadr: some made sure to point out that there were both “good and bad” aspects to the Sadrists’ work, including the Mahdi Army's role in sectarian killings. Others were positive about the work of the Sadrists between 2003 and 2008, but were critical about the direction of Muqtada al-Sadr's career since 2009, which moved away from local service provision and toward national politics. A few were more overtly critical, recalling fierce battles near their house between US and Sadr forces, or complaining about some shortcomings in the services promised by the Sadr Bureau.Footnote 39 However, there was remarkable consensus among the interviewees that the Sadr Bureau's services were overall robust, prompt, free, and effective, especially when compared to the rest of the city.
The distinctive positionality of Sadr City becomes even more evident when we compare the recollections of Sadr City residents to those from the Shi‘i district of al-Kadhimiyya. Although these two large districts share a common sectarian affiliation, there are few other points of commonality in relation to socioeconomic class or cultural capital, and even the built environment and aesthetic of the districts. Although Muqtada al-Sadr effectively controlled Sadr City through the activities of his Mahdi Army militia and the social services of the Sadr Bureau, residents of al-Kadhimiyya kept his organization at arm's-length. None of the respondents mentioned interactions with or affinity for Muqtada's organization, and al-Kadhimiyya residents did not receive the benefits of the social services, fuel, and aid distributed through the social wing of the Sadr Bureau. Instead, several respondents mentioned receiving some financial support and services from a different religious leader entirely, Ayatollah Husayn al-Sadr, a relative of Muqtada who staked out a conciliatory posture with the Americans. One man recalled that Husayn al-Sadr helped provide financial assistance to low-income residents and worked to procure petrol and gas canisters when the neighborhood experienced a fuel shortage in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion.Footnote 40 Another man in al-Kadhimiyya recalled him playing a role in getting the streets paved in their area.Footnote 41 These two men appreciated the work of the ayatollah in trying to provide residents with a “satisfactory life.”
However, the reach, scope, and capacity of Husayn al-Sadr's operations in al-Kadhimiyya were much less than those of his relative Muqtada in Sadr City. Ayatollah Husayn possessed less economic, social, and cultural capital than his nephew, and this limited his capacity to act as a kind of substitute government in the al-Kadhimiyya district in the same way that Muqtada did.Footnote 42 Most residents of al-Kadhimiyya reported that they felt there was “no one” who effectively filled the vacuum in state services and local governance left by the overthrow of Saddam. “This was a difficult period because of the absence of the state, security, and services. Citizens had to take care of issues for themselves,” recalled one woman.Footnote 43 Another echoed, “In this period of destruction and ruin, everyone had to rely on themselves. This was the worst time by far.”Footnote 44 Unlike several residents of Sadr City, none of the interviewees in al-Kadhimiyya thought 2003–8 was the “best” time.
Conclusions
This recent round of sixty structured interviews across four neighborhoods of Baghdad points to the importance of continued research and theorizing about the relationships between collective memory, politics, and identity formation in Iraq on a local level. Building on the earlier work of Eric Davis about the construction of national identities through both top-down and bottom-up processes, further research is required to understand what kinds of subnational collective identities are being formed (or reconstituted) in highly localized contexts based on collective experiences of violence and social and political upheavals over the past few decades.Footnote 45
Although much good work has already been done to critique simplistic and static understandings of sectarian identity in Iraq, the viewpoints collected through these interviews contribute to these findings by contrasting narratives about the past from different Sunni- and Shi‘i-majority neighborhoods. It immediately becomes evident that the politicized sectarian narratives offered by political parties in the post-2003 era have not been internalized in a coherent, complete, or widespread way. Rather than look to categories of identity, we point to shared historical experiences localized in different neighborhoods across Baghdad as a way to explore the factors that influence the ways that Baghdadis in different areas have conceptualized the past. The unique positionality and divergent historical experiences of Baghdad's different neighborhoods is a particularly illuminating lens through which to understand the different kinds of narratives about the past that may be coalescing and circulating across the city.
Acknowledgments
We wish to express our appreciation to the sixty Baghdadis who generously shared their time, insights, and stories with our research team. We are grateful to Achim Rohde, Eckart Woertz, and all of the organizers of the conference Iraq Twenty Years after the US Invasion: Memory Politics, Governance and Protests, held in March 2023, for the opportunity to develop this research project and to receive feedback on our findings.
