iraq

I arrived at the Taj Hotel in Baghdad's Jadriyah neighborhood at 6:00 am, worn thin by the long flight from Los Angeles. After sleeping until mid-afternoon, I stepped out into the 90°F heat on a simple mission: find falafel, fries, and a place to exchange money. A local bus picked me up and dropped me right across from a falafel shop—a small act of hospitality. Full and settled, I walked beside the Tigris River, watching construction cranes against the sky. Life was visibly moving forward. Yet the mental newsreel kept playing: bombs falling on these same banks 20 years earlier. I was a tourist now in a country I had once protested my own nation for invading. Needing to escape both the heat and the weight of those memories, I returned to the hotel for Nutella cake and Iraqi tea, yet deeply conscious of the complex layers beneath the surface.

The next day settled heavily. We started at Tahrir Monument and the roundabout where Saddam’s statue once stood—toppled in 2003 by US Marines in an image seen around the world. Today, no plaque marks the spot. Only election banners fluttered in the wind. From there, we traveled to the Arch of Ctesiphon, a soaring Persian vault from 540 AD. Nearby lay the relics of a different era: a derelict tourist complex and a museum designed by North Koreans, its walls scarred with bullet marks. Al-Mada’in, our guide remarked, had been a final stronghold against the invasion. It’s one thing to read about war and occupation, another to stand where it happened and touch the pockmarked concrete.