Baghdad night life peeps over parapet

BAGHDAD: Cooped up in a pressure cooker of strict evening curfews for more than a year, Iraqis play dominos and sip tea as kids queue for ice cream, lapping up an extra two hours before home time at 10 pm.   

At the concrete walls guarding the entrance into Karrada, once a wealthy Baghdad district of bustling shops and restaurants but today a shadow of its past glory, Iraqi soldiers continue to wave cars through the checkpoint.   

It's 9:30 pm. Last week the roads would have been empty, but not since Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced the 8:00 pm to 6:00 am curfew was being relaxed by two hours at night and an hour in the morning.   

Shops are staying open longer. Families linger over fruits at street market stalls. Pavement braziers flicker through the night air, gently grilling Mazguf, fresh water carp and perhaps the only culinary speciality in Baghdad.   

"We are happy," admits restauranter Abbas Hussein. "This is a first step. We hope things will go on like this and people will start to go out again, although alot of people are still frightened," he said.   

Chilling execution-style killings carried out by shadowy sectarian militias may be on the decline in Baghdad since Iraqi and US troops launched a massive security crackdown eight weeks ago but big bombings remain a major threat.   

Yet confident progress is being made. The Iraqi authorities decided to ease the daily curfew in Baghdad from 10:00 pm and 5:00 am as of Wednesday.   

"Before you went out and kept on looking at your watch. It was like somebody was always following you," says 27-year-old Yasser, who works for a software company.   

"Before it was hard to go out. I finish work at 6:00 pm. I would go home, take a shower, change and it was already 8:00 pm. So, most of the time you just stayed home. It wasn't worth the trouble to go out," he says.   

"When you went out with friends, most of the time you would have to sleep at their place, because you didn't have time to go back home. Yesterday everybody went home to his own place," he adds remembering the trials of the curfew.   

"Once I came back from work late. My family was out of the country. There was no food and I had no means of getting some because of the curfew ... I had to wait till the morning to eat," he adds.   

This week, he and his friends went out, taking advantage of their newly found freedom even if in years gone by it would still have felt like a ridiculous imposition to go home before midnight.   

Their first indulgence was a cafe, to drink coffee and smoke shisha, the water pipe that experts warn is more lethal to your lungs than cigarettes but is an indelible social fixture in the Arab world.   

"We are very, very happy. We feel more free. It's nice to be able to go out when it's dark," says Yasser.   

Operation Fardh al-Qanoon (Imposing Law) was launched on February 14. By June, there will be around 90,000 Iraqi and US soldiers on the streets.   

"I hope the measure will be extended. I don't want them to cancel the curfew. It's a good thing. But maybe extend it till midnight," says Yasser.   

Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh has already said the authorities intend to ease movement by lifting the concrete barriers that completely surround some districts of Baghdad to prevent car bombings and militia movements.   

For this week, however, the streets have emptied well before the end of the curfew at 10:00 pm as people hurry back to the safety of home.

"It's more free for us to go out, you know, and come back a little bit late. It was like jail, only in the day-time could we go out, just spending all night doing nothing. The best thing we did was watch TV," says 28-year-old Ammar.   

"Now we can go to the market, get food, see some friends," he adds.