"In Baghdad, along with security come illicit pleasures; Prostitution, gambling, and alcohol return" by Rod Nordland, New York Times | April 19, 2009
Yay, liberation!
BAGHDAD - Vice is making a comeback in this city once famous for 1,001 varieties of it.
Gone, for the most part, are nighttime curfews, religious extremists, and prowling kidnappers. So, inevitably, some people are turning to illicit pleasures, or at least slightly dubious ones.
Nightclubs have reopened, and in many of them, prostitutes troll for clients. Liquor stores, once shut down by fundamentalist militiamen, have proliferated; on one block of busy Saddoun Street, there are more than 10 of them.
Abu Nawas Park, previously deserted for fear of suicide bombers seeking vulnerable crowds, has now become a place for assignations between young people. It is not that there are hiding places in the park, where trees are sparse; the couples just pretend they cannot be seen, and passersby go along with the pretense.
It is a long way from Sodom and Gomorrah, but perhaps partway back to the old Baghdad. The Ba'athists who ruled here from the 1960s until the American invasion in 2003 were secular, and more than a little sinful. Baghdad under Saddam Hussein was a lively place, with street cafes open until 2 or 3 a.m., and prostitutes plying their trade even in the bowling alley of Al Rashid Hotel.
Oh, so other than sitting on top of a mountain of oil and being pro-Palestinian, Saddam really was our guy!
"Everything is going back to its natural way," said Ahmed Assadee, a screenwriter who works on a soap opera.
So all the murder, bloodshed, and death was for nothing, huh?
Men gather in cafes to smoke a hookah and gamble on dice and domino games. On weekends, the Mustansiriya Coffee Shop's back room is crammed with low bleachers set up around a clandestine cockfighting ring. On one recent day, the 100 or so spectators were raucous while watching the bloody spectacle, but they placed their bets discreetly. Gambling, after all, is illegal.
Walid Brahim, 25, a bomb disposal expert with the Iraqi Army, and his brother Farat, 20, an electrician, recently sat side by side at a table in the Nights of Abu Musa bar, on an alley off Saddoun Street, working their way through a bucket of ice and a bottle of Mr. Chavez Whiskey, an Iraqi-made hooch.
"This is great," Walid Brahim said. "We used to buy alcohol and just drink secretly in our house."
The bar is men-only, as most respectable taverns are, but the brothers look forward to an even brighter future. "If this security continues," Farat Brahim said, "within a year all the waiters will be girls."
The local police, weary of years of dodging assassins and cleaning up after car bombs, are blasé about a little vice.
"Today we are dealing with more normal things. All the world is facing such problems," said Colonel Abdel Jaber Qassim Sadir, assistant police chief in Karada, a central Baghdad neighborhood. "Prostitution - this kind of behavior cannot be stopped," Sadir said. "It's very hard to find it in public; it goes on in secret, isolated places."
Actually, not so secret. There are a half-dozen night spots in Karada now where the entry fee is $50. With $150 a week considered a good wage, customers would not pay that much merely for the privilege of drinking.
At the Ahalan Wasahalan Club on Al Nidhal Street one recent night, the owner, Tiba Jamal, was holding court, as she usually does, on the dais at the front of a room with a mostly empty dance floor and lots of tables.
Jamal calls herself the Sheikha - a word she uses to mean female sheik, which does not exist in Arab culture. She dresses in a head-to-toe, skin-tight black chador, and she is adorned with several pounds of solid gold bracelets, pendants, necklaces, earrings, and rings, her response to the financial crisis.
Translation; She is the brothel's Madam. This is progress in Iraq, huh?
The female workers in the nightclub wore rather less clothing, but nothing that would be considered risque on a street in Europe - in August. At one point in the evening they outnumbered the men, as they sat in a big group until being summoned to one of the men's tables.
"It's nice to see people having fun again," Jamal said. One regular customer said, "You can have any of those girls to spend the night with you later, only $100." First, though, patrons are expected to spend a few hours buying $20 beers or even more costly whiskey.
A young woman who said she was 28 but looked 18 sat smoking and downing soft drinks while her "date" drank Scotch. A university student, she would give her name only as Baida, but she was frank about her nighttime profession. "I go out with men so I can get money." To support her family? She seemed stunned by the question. "No, for myself."
Drug abuse, at least, is one problem that has not shown up much, or has stayed well underground, the police say. "The only problems we see are some illegal pills occasionally," Sadir said.--more--"
Oh, I'm so proud of what we've done in Iraq, 'murka!! Aren't you?!!
