Making melodies amid Iraq's staccato blasts

Baghdad: I first noticed the shop nearly two years ago, because of the guitar and the spray of pink plastic flowers hanging on the wall outside. A yellow and red stairway led to the door.

It was a defiant display of colour in a tense city of grays, blacks and browns.

More remarkably, the store appeared to be selling musical instruments at a time when religious extremists were attacking anything that hinted at Western decadence.

Several times a week I would pass the corner shop, always peering upward to make sure the guitar and flowers were there, always vowing to visit.

The time was never right, until now. But as I learned from shop owner Faiz Khalil, he might be confident enough about the future to have added even more outdoor displays, but he's not confident enough to call the shop by its original name.

That would identify it as a Sunni-run business in a mainly Shiite city, where calm is spreading but where trust remains as rare as the French-made oboe on his store shelf.

So the store named Khalil has become the store named Sadiq.

Sense of uncertainty

His wide grin and friendly banter hide what he acknowledges is his deep sadness about the situation in his country. He soothes himself by listening to violin music, because it too is sad. "It reflects life," Khalil said.

Call it distrust, fear, wariness or suspicion. Even now, with violence down about 80 per cent in the past year, the sense of uncertainty is epidemic among Iraqis.

I thought back to February 2007, when the first of an additional 30,000 US forces were arriving in Baghdad to quell sectarian bloodshed. I went on a patrol with some as they tried to coax information about neighbourhood militiamen from residents. The people we met, both Shiite and Sunni, lived in terror and wanted protection, but they were afraid to give much information to the troops.

"Everybody has a weapon," one man told us that night. "I don't even trust my brother-in-law."

That the distrust remains so entrenched here was as jarring as the guitar and the pink flowers outside Khalil's store. It comes through in conversations with ordinary people as well as with high-ranking officials.

"If I was pressed to define Iraq, in a word that would be 'fear' - another way of saying 'distrust'," US Ambassador Ryan Crocker said last month during an interview. The Shiite are afraid of the past," Crocker said, referring to the repression of Shiites by previous regimes, including Saddam Hussain's Sunni-led government. "The Sunnis are afraid of the future - a future in which they are no longer calling the shots. And the Kurds are afraid of both."

Trust has grown somewhat. US forces get tips on where to find weapons caches or suspected insurgents. Some people are moving back to homes they fled during the worst violence, banking on things remaining relatively stable.

But society isn't letting down its collective guard, and most people here say that won't happen until Iraqis have more than a graph showing declining death tolls to help them feel safe. "Trust and safety is the same thing. If there is no trust, there will be no security," said Abd Kareem Jao Khalaf, a psychologist and social scientist at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University.

He said Iraqis had been let down by long-broken promises of basic services such as electricity and clean water, and had seen too much violence - everything from neighbourhood killings to bombs in the parliament building - to have faith in the future.

In his music store, Khalil tries to have faith despite the Molotov cocktail hurled through his window last year. The firebomb hit a back room used to store his most expensive instruments. Items worth thousands of dollars were lost.

The Iraqis who once came regularly to buy bows for violins, reeds for clarinets and traditional ouds to strum have fled. Either that, or they're using their money to buy food, said Khalil, who has had his own store since 1979.

His new customers are ignorant of music but have money to spend, probably because they are involved in abductions, robberies or other crimes, he said.

The best thing he could find to say about life now was that killers no longer ruled the streets. "Maybe it's temporary," he said. "Maybe they're committing other crimes now. But the killing is less."