Baghdad, Adjured For Bright Morning!

n past when we decided to spend summer vacation, we usually as a members of small family, voted to go to Baghdad because; it is the Capital most beautiful place in Iraq has electricity 24 hours, has some good places that we had liked to go,That was in Saddam's regime, Iraq was limited by Baghdad & his own city only (Tikret); the rest Iraqi cities were neglected;  then after 2003 we waited to breathe the freedom, for new honest Iraqis leaders to rebuild the new Iraq, new future, new life, waited for a new chapter for our country, but we faced many problems , terrorism is on the head of this list, absence of rules & laws, buildings arson, water pipes damaged, electricity wires were burning, we were drowning into deep darkness, then we had the first election in 2005, & we kept dealing with same issues, then the second election in 2010 & what has done throw these 7 years, did they fix our power issue? did they fix our water issue? did they solve the security issue? those who are unemployed? did they solved the medical system? did they fix accommodation for poor people?

Do you know there is a quarter in Baghdad called (Hey Al-Tank), where houses made by tins plates & people lived in, imagine how can they live there in winter & summer???
Is this new Baghdad?
What about the garbage everywhere, did they fix it???

Kids playing with garbage!

Do you know how we get water in our house, not just by water's motor only but we use a pump too to get water & I believe most Iraqi families have it to get water, is this new facilitation for Iraqis???
We are in 2010 but living in 1940!

According to Kurdistan region (north of Iraq) has grown a lot since 1991 when they separated & has their independence from Baghdad control, of course they suffered, had issues between tow biggest parties, their was a civil war inside, but at the end they realized that will not help them to live a good life or solve their issues, with each other after Saddam’s attacking them in many differences crimes one of them was Halabja . They started to take actions, responsibilities of their own lands, spend money to develop their services, utilities, dealing with foreign companies, for rebuilding & investments, achieved such good  projects. 

One of the most popular mall in Erbil.

 I can tell Erbil is growing fast especially those last 5 years, & with new technology with higher specifications through world, you can see different race from all people, European, middle east & Arab people too, Erbil now opened to the world & we don’t forget there are many NGO  &  UN offices , all that helps it to be in the first place in my opinion.

Erbil is part of Iraq where Baghdad is but, when I go to Erbil, the first words went out from my mouth “Wow, we must be somewhere else not in Iraq”!!!

Not just  new buildings that amazed me only but, people who lived their, feeling responsible about Erbil's beauty & how they followed rules & working together to get it better & better...

Erbil airport.

The sense of new Architectural buildings & Urban-design, street's paved & you can see alot of green areas, clean streets,where is that in Baghdad? We see garbage everywhere, not just Baghdad, other cities too.  7 years after 2003 & billions of US and Iraqi dollars spent and no "visible improvement" at least the basic one like electricity & water issues, adding it the education issues, cultural one & the biggest one security problem. & I think there is a huge gap inside our security system, why they couldn’t protect these structures from terrorism?
The fundamental security system in our government is suffering & should heals this leak .

So, if we are comparing Erbil with Baghdad, Yes we had a damaged war that destroyed Baghdad’s landmark & elevation, but then what? Should we stop on that & be sorry for what happen? What happen is happened, we can’t just sit & feel sorrow to what happened!

Last event in Al-Rashed street in Baghdad.

Erbil & Baghdad now, two different pictures in same country. Very different faces about Iraq, one has developed very fast, expanded with new projects & one is laying down under corruption & politicians chairs fighting. 

Who should blame about that? people who went to give their votes for those leaders?? Or blame leaders for their lies on us?? Or blame US. government for this war? Or blame Saddam in his grave about what we gained from his political system & how he drawn Iraq to this situation? & till when we will keep blame this or that?

We should move on & fix our issues, by ourselves first,& stop blaming that will not fix water or power issues, will not keep us safe, we should really get plans, educated people by media, T.V, NGO & volunteers.
Government should get busy, leaders should work together forgetting their inner issues, think about what people need.

But, who will listen? Do they really care & listen to the people??? Do they see where is Baghdad now???
I wounder till when we will see Baghdad raised again!

ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
Notice: I changed the title from "Baghdad, Where Are You?" to "Baghdad, Adjured For Bright Morning!"