A little over a year ago, then-Baghdad Bureau Chief Dean Yates, my former boss, wrote an entry on this blog entitled ‘Is the war in Iraq over?’

Before he wrote it, Dean went to a famed Baghdad park to take the pulse of ordinary Iraqis, who were then cautiously venturing out to public places for the first time in years, a tentative sign that Iraq was finally emerging from height of the violence unleashed by the 2003 invasion.

For someone who covered the much of worst of the Iraq war — the car bombs, the suicide attacks, the sectarian executions that peaked in 2006 -2007 – from our sand-bagged bunker, it must have been a small miracle to see families dotting Abu Nawas park, a green stretch of trees, swings and benches along the banks of the Tigris.

Last night, I went back to Abu Nawas, named after a poet and bon vivant of the 8th and 9th centuries, to watch Iraqis celebrate Eid, the four-day holiday marking the end of the Muslim holy month.

This time, it was a cross between Disney World and Woodstock.

We joined hundreds, if not thousands, of Iraqis as we walked along a path overlooking the river, where a yellow crescent moon gleamed back from the barely-moving water.

Packs of young men in tight T-shirts, their hair slicked back, sat on a railing checking out the other teenagers. There were vendors selling nuts, grilled meat and cotton candy.

Some families had claimed patches of the crowded lawn for picnics and others sat at plastic tables eating freshly baked meat pies. Under a tree, men smoked nargile, the water pipe stuffed with sweet tobacco. Farther on in the darkness, a crowd of men and boys danced to the sound of drums.

We were shoulder-to-shoulder with other revellers as we turned to walk home.

In a city dotted with checkpoints, where uniformed men with AK-47s stand at every corner, I didn’t see one policeman or soldier. There was none of the fear or swallowed resentment we’ve become accustomed to seeing on people’s faces as they hurry down the sidewalk or line up to be frisked.

But were other people thinking, as I was, how easily such festive gatherings can turn into tragedy? Suicide bombers continue to strike at crowded mosques, markets or tribal meetings. It was a remarkably quiet Ramadan, but  Iraqi civilians are still unsafe in the most ordinary of situations.

On Aug. 19, almost 100 people were killed at the Foreign and Finance Ministries in two huge truck bombings. People were cut down at their desks or on their way to work.

The question remains, 14 months after Dean’s blog, whether or not the Iraq war is over. What will that mean? Is the war over when the world’s attention shifts to another conflict hundreds of miles away? Is the war over when U.S. casualties plummet and it’s suddenly safer for them in Amara than in some American cities? Will national elections in January cement the positive trajectory of the past 18 months, or will they re-ignite violence and undermine hopes for a secure, stable Iraq?

I don’t have a good answer to those questions. I know it would be hard to tell the families of those killed on Aug. 19 – dubbed “Bloody Wednesday” by Iraqis – or the 126,000 U.S. troops still stationed here that the war is over.

Maybe the best response another question. What will feted Abu Nawas, and the whole of Baghdad, look like a year from now?

(Reuters photo by Thaier al-Sudani: Iraqi men celebrate the holiday marking the end of Ramadan in Baghdad)

A spate of bombs targeting churches in Baghdad this week has Iraq's minority Christian community trembling at the prospect of being the next victim of militants trying to reignite war.

Iraqi Christians, one of the country's weakest ethnic or  religious groups, have usually tried to steer clear of its many-sided conflict. For the most part, they manage.

While Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims killed each other by the dozen at the height of Iraq's sectarian conflict in 2006 and 2007, Christians were rarely targeted, although sometimes they were.

(Photo: A policeman at the site of a car bomb attack on a Baghdad church, 13 July 2009/Saad Shalash)

On Sunday, in apparently coordinated attacks, five bombs went off outside churches in Baghdad, killing four people and wounding 21, including a number of Christians.

Iraqi Christians or "Messihi", as they are called by an Arabic word related to the Hebrew term "Messiah,"  number around 750,000. That makes them a tiny minority in a Muslim nation of 28 million. They are mostly concentrated around Baghdad and the violent northern city of Mosul, which is still struggling to shake off al Qaeda and other Sunni Arab insurgent groups.

Historically, though, they have got on well with their Muslim compatriots. Under Ottoman rule, non-Islamic faiths were generally respected. More recently, Saddam Hussein used to draw attention to his Chaldean Christian Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz, currently doing time for assisting Saddam's mass murders of Iraqi merchants, as an example of the Baath party's religious tolerance.

But partly because they are small, Christians are an easy target. About 2,000 families, an estimated 12,000 people, fled Mosul after a campaign of threats and attacks on Christians there in October last year, but many have since returned.

(Photo: A man cleans up after a bomb attack on a Baghdad church, 13 July 2009/Thaier al-Sudani)

"Attacking Christians can have a big impact on public opinion, because they are a minority and the international media will take this news seriously. That's what the extremists want," William Warida, a Christian and chairman of a Baghdad human rights organisation told me. "And some extremists just don't want the existence of Christians in this country at all."

The country's Christians fall into roughly two denominations, the majority Chaldeans under the authority of the Vatican and the minority Assyrians. "We are like one family, with two brothers: one is Chaldean, one is Assyrian. I have four grandsons: two are Assyrian and two Chladean," says Assyrian Christian parliamentarian Yunadim Kanna. According to the Rome-based news agency Asianews.it, both Chaldean and Assyrian churches were attacked.

Many Iraqi Christians from both branches speak Syriac-Aramic, a semitic tongue related to old Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.

Today, many of them live in exile in Jordan or Syria, scared off by the chaos unleashed by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

(Photo: Mourners grieve at funeral of bombing victim, 14 July 2009/Mohammed Ameen)

"After Sunday, the Christians that were thinking of coming back from outside, now maybe they will change their minds," said Warida. "This was a message to them not to come back."

The Vatican's procurator for Chaldean Catholics, Chorbishop Philip Najeem, gave the same analysis in an interview with Vatican Radio.

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

-Tim Cocks is a Reuters correspondent based in Baghdad.-

For the U.S. military, it's the million dollar question -- or rather the $687 billion question, according to a recent estimate of the Iraq war's total cost. Is Iraq now stable enough for them to take a permanent back seat?

The short answer is no one knows. The only way they were ever going to find out was to leave Iraq's own forces to it and hope the whole thing doesn't come tumbling down. They started doing that on Tuesday when they pulled out of Iraqi cities.

It's been an encouraging start. A big bomb in Kirkuk cast a shadow over Iraq's celebrations of its new-found sovereignty, but since then things have been relatively quiet. Militants might try to take advantage by stepping up attacks, but for the moment they seem content with celebrating a "victory" over the occupation -- and setting off the odd bomb, of course.

The United States' coalition partners have for the most part long since departed. British forces handed over southern Iraq to the Americans in April, but since 2007 their 4,000 odd troops left had been largely confined to Basra airport anyway.

And one thing the crystal ball gazers have learned about Iraq's hugely complicated, many-sided conflict is that the past is rarely a reliable guide to the future.

When optimists thought Iraq was poised to enjoy democracy after the fall of Saddam, it spiralled into years of bloody insurgency and sectarian killing. Later, just when it seemed all hope was lost and Iraq would have to be partitioned, things starting getting dramatically better.

The idea that Iraqi forces aren't ready to take on the country's security usually centre on claims that they are untested, not well trained or infiltrated with militiamen.

But few deny they look more professional and integrated now than anyone would have thought possible two years ago. They might still be full of militiamen, but those militiamen are no longer kidnapping or killing political rivals, as in the past.

And there are clearly some things the Iraqis do better. For one thing, they know the language and understand the culture.

When I was on a U.S. patrol in Iraq's troubled Diyala province, a U.S. unit nearby accidentallly shot and wounded a civilian in Jalawla town, forcing them to vacate it because a public outcry would put other soldiers at risk of attack.

What they had done is fire a warning shot at a vehicle after the driver failed to heed a command -- in English -- to stay back. But few Iraqis in rural areas speak basic English.

The real test will be when U.S. pulls all combat forces out, under President Barack Obama's orders, by September next year.

Many Iraqis I've spoken too seem convinced the insurgents are just biding their time, sharpening their knives and stockpiling explosives waiting to reignite the conflict.

But whether or not Iraq can look after itself, at some point the Americans have to say: Look, we've done our best to get the lid back on Pandora's Box. Now it's over to you.

It started with "assalaamu alaykum" and ended with "may God's peace be upon you." Inbetween, President Barack Obama dotted his speech to the Muslim world with Islamic terms and references meant to resonate with his audience. The real substance in the speech were his policy statements and his call for a "new beginning" in U.S. relations with Muslims, as outlined in our trunk news story. But the new tone was also important and it struck a chord with many Muslims who heard the speech, as our Middle East Special Correspondent Alistair Lyon found. Not all, of course -- you can find positive and negative reactions here.

(Photo: Iraqi in Baghdad watches Obama's speech, 4 June 2009/Mohammed Ameen)

Among Obama's Islamic touches were four references to the Koran (which he always called the Holy Koran), his approving mention of the scientific, mathematical and philosophical achievements of the medieval Islamic world and his citing of multi-faith life in Andalusia. These are standard elements that many Islam experts -- Muslims and non-Muslims -- mention in speeches at learned conferences, but it's not often that you hear an American president talking about them.

Two religious references particularly caught my attention because they weren't the usual conference circuit clichés. One was his comment about being in "the region where (Islam) was first revealed" -- a choice of past participle showing respect for the religion.

The other came when he said Jerusalem should be "a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer." The Sura al-Isra is the Koran chapter about Mohammad's Night Journey to heaven, which tradition says started in Jerusalem on what Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary and Jews the Temple Mount. It was an interesting way to cite Islamic tradition to say Jerusalem should be "a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together." The interjection "peace be upon them" had both an Islamic tone and an interfaith touch.

(Photo: Palestinians in the Gaza Strip watch Obama's speech, 4 June 2009/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)

Obama also gave the American Muslim population estimate -- 7 million -- that prompted him to tell a French interviewer earlier this week that the U.S. could be considered "one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." He didn't repeat that phrase in his speech, however, possibly because the figures don't back it up. Figures for Muslim populations are dodgy because many countries don't keep such data. Recent estimates of the U.S. Muslim population range from 1.8 to 7-8 million, so he's taken about the highest figures around. If those figures are correct, the U.S. would still only rank only about 30th on the list of countries with the largest Muslim populations. That's way down on this Wikipedia list, with Azerbaijan and Burkina Faso. That's nowhere near the really big Muslim populations like the top three Indonesia (195 million), Pakistan (160 million) and India (140 million). Maybe that's why his speechwriters backed off the "one of the largest" claim.

The end of the speech also had an interesting twist. Obama reached for one of the quotes from the Koran that Muslims cite most frequently when they call for tolerance among peoples: "The Holy Koran tells us, "O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another."

(Photo: Egyptians in cafe watch Obama's speech, 4 June 2009/Asmaa Waguih)

But he followed it up with quotes from the other two Abrahamic religions: "The Talmud tells us: 'The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace.' The Holy Bible tells us, 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God'."

What did you think of Obama's speech?

Here's a short video about the speech:

In 2003, when U.S. troops stormed into Baghdad and the statues of Saddam Hussein were pulled down, I think I must have been elated like many other Iraqis. Today, after the six years of bloodshed and slaughter set off by the U.S.  invasion, it’s hard to remember that feeling, which must have been one of enormous relief and joy.  Instead I am left with mixed emotions, grateful that the horror of Saddam’s rule ended but also deeply saddened by the horrors that followed his fall.

  I was eager to live in an Iraq without Saddam. I always hated his brutal rule of Iraq. He had taken us into wars in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Iraqis might also easily face death if they spoke out against Saddam or criticized his government. But if you kept your mouth shut and did not join any political party other than his now outlawed Baath party, you most probably would have been left alone.
    When Saddam was ousted by the invasion, and Baghdad fell to U.S. troops on April 9, 2003, I thought then that Iraq would finally be at peace after a long period of tough times. I never imagined what followed. It never crossed my mind that tens of thousands would be slaughtered simply for being a Shi’ite Muslim or a Sunni, the two Islamic sects in Iraq. Millions would flee their homes. And that bombs laid by insurgents would mow down thousands more.
    I sometimes wondered why did we get rid of Saddam if the killing continued, although for different reasons?
    The violence has begun to ebb, but still my relatives and friends are scattered to the winds.
    As an Iraqi journalist I have explored the social impact of war on my country. I have interviewed orphans and widows, and people whose limbs were blown off by bombs. It has left my heart full of more pain than I ever thought it could bear.
    I have also seen Iraq, amid the violence and fear, embrace new freedoms in politics and also in life: we have cellular telephones and satellite television, both restricted or banned in Saddam’s time. Saddam’s government had long lists of forbidden items.  One of them was satellite television. Anyone caught watching international news shows could be sent to prison for six months.
    It is clear to me that Iraqi society would not have been allowed to develop had Saddam remained in charge. Now despite the dark years that have passed, we can at least cling to hopes of better times. We have a parliament that we elect, and not one-man rule.
    This week, an Iraqi appeals court reduced to one year a three-year prison sentence handed to an Iraqi journalist who dared to throw his shoes at former U.S. President George W. Bush. I was impressed and had to raise my hat to the independence of the judiciary. I asked my parents what they thought the journalist’s sentence would have been had he committed the same offence during Saddam’s times. My mother answered: “He would not only have been executed without trial but all of his family would have been erased from the Iraqi map.”

By Aws Qusay

I’ve long since told my family to stop phoning me in a panic
every evening when they don’t know where I am.

I’m not dead, I’m in traffic.

I live just 15 km from the Reuters office in Baghdad. But
nowadays, with the Iraqi capital divided into countless
mini-cities by concrete slabs and roadblocks, my commute across
town usually takes two and a half hours, sometimes three.
Traffic barely moves at all.

“The entire distance we just crossed, the gear shift was in
first gear,” the minibus driver told me the other day.

Before 2003 we didn’t have traffic jams in Baghdad, except
on a few major routes. Today, the entire city is choked. Partly
it is because of the checkpoints, concrete slabs and razor wire
roadblocks that snarl the streets. Partly it is because of the
convoys of military vehicles or 4×4’s of VIP’s bristling with
gunmen who shove everyone else to the side. Sometimes there’s a
bomb that shuts part of the city down. Mostly, the traffic is
just a result of too many cars and not enough road.

So, I spend the equivalent of about five full days a month
in traffic, listening to music on my headphones as the bus
crawls past checkpoint after checkpoint. A friend pointed out
that my daily commute across town each way takes about as long
as flying to Cairo.

When I can, I walk instead. It’s faster, and it can be nice
to listen to music and cross the Tigris River at sunset.

But usually, after a day’s work, I find myself on the
minibus.

The old and tired find the jam a good chance to take a
snooze. Nervous people talk about their suffering. One man
lights up his cigarette, choking the rest of us with the smoke,
which just adds to the smoke from the cars outside the window.

I grumble to myself about him: does he think smoking his cigarette
is a way to indulge in “freedom and democracy”? And I wait
to get home.

I still remember what my father-in-law told me that fateful day in 2003, as we sat riveted by the sight of American soldiers on television pulling down the iconic statue of Saddam Hussein from its pedestal in a Baghdad square.

My father-in-law, whose brother had fled Iraq after being jailed for a few days after Baathists took the power in 1969 and who was never a Saddam supporter, was reflective.

“The only thing I fear is that a day will come in which we will regret Saddam’s fall,” he said.

During a visit a couple of months ago to Jordan, where my children, my wife and her parents have lived in self-exile for almost two years, I asked my father-in-law whether he had come to regret the end of that era.

“Unfortunately, yes,” he said, his voice filled with disappointment. Since then, I haven’t been able to drive his response from my mind.

For five years, I have been asking myself the same question: how did it come to be that Iraqis like my father-in-law, driven to live as an illegal immigrant outside Iraq, rue Saddam’s fall?

I can say without hesitation that many Iraqis share my father-in-law’s feelings. Not because they supported Saddam, although there are many who still do, but because the hopes of a better life that were born in April 2003 have been crushed.

Iraqis today spend a great deal of time comparing their lives today to the situation before 2003. It’s not a winning comparison. Unbelievable bloodshed, a lack of basic services from electricity to clean water, and widespread unemployment have made life hellish for many Iraqis.

It is true that there is less violence today than there was a year ago, but assassinations, bomb attacks and other grim acts still occur on a daily basis. All this casts a dark shadow on the security situation in Iraq and reminds us of the fragility of Iraq’s vaunted turnaround.

A conversation with any person on any Iraqi street will be one marked by disappointment. Anger is particularly sharp at Iraq’s political class, which is now locked in a fierce power struggle at the highest levels while most ordinary Iraqis struggle to simply get by.

Many Iraqis describe their regret for having voted in parliamentary polls in December 2005 for politicians they now feel have little regard for anything but their own advancement.

After waiting for decades for democracy, many believe it has brought nothing but chaos and bloodshed, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis and the displacement of millions more. Three successive governments that have ruled since 2003 have delivered empty promises but little more.

These concerns and many others are what lie behind a growing desire for a strong, powerful ruler like Saddam. Many Iraqis believe that they need such a strongman to bring stability to this complicated country.

An Iraqi I once interviewed in Baghdad commented to me that the only thing that had changed in Iraq since 2003 was that we had replaced one dictator with many.

One of my Iraqi colleagues, who stayed here in Baghdad when his family fled to Amman three years ago, says we don’t have a future because there is no clear vision of what Iraq can become.

Even I, someone who makes a living from the printed word, cannot seem to find the right terms to describe how so many Iraqis came to long for Saddam.

With such unbelievable destruction and death across Iraq, it makes one wonder whether in 10 or 20 years we will be gazing up at statues of Saddam in an Iraqi square once more.

 As soon as my plane landed in Baghdad airport earlier this month, I was struck by how much appeared to have changed since I left in March after more than three years’ reporting in Iraq.

 Flights were landing from across the Middle East — Beirut, Amman, Damascus and Dubai — bringing many Iraqis back home after the Muslim Eid al-Fitr holiday.

 The dark, third world airport, packed with Iraqis still fleeing violence when I left seven months earlier, was cleaner, better lit and more efficient. For the first time, guards were using X-ray machines to check incoming bags.

 Baghdad itself had also changed.

 For a city that used to shut down at 5 p.m., it seemed to be full of life once more. I have never seen it looking more beautiful.

 Iraqis were gradually but cautiously returning to their normal lives, spending time at parks and restaurants and going out at night. They seemed less worried about Sunni-Shi’ite conflict.

 The mood amongst the Iraqi staff in the Reuters news bureau was different too. Each one has been touched by the violence that swept the country over the past five years and most had moved their families abroad. Many had to stay in shared rooms in the bureau because it was too dangerous to travel to and from work each day.

 Now, these rooms are only occupied when employees visit from outside Baghdad.

 You can sense hope in the air.

 Some people attribute the drop in violence to the anti-al Qaeda Awakening – the Sunni forces that now control the once restive Sunni Arab areas. Others link it to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s defeat of the Shi’ite Mehdi Army militia, loyal to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

 Many Iraqis say all they wanted from a “new democratic Iraq” was security. But for years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, even some of his opponents have yearned for the stability they felt under his rule.

 Could their hopes finally be realised?

 Conversations with senior Iraqi officials in the past few days suggest the optimism may be premature.

 Shi’ite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish politicians spoke of “bad news” ahead. They talked of deep political divisions, and assassinations ahead of the provincial elections expected in January.

 A senior Sunni Arab official, wishing me a happy Eid last week, said: “I wish I could mean this. Nothing has really changed since you have last visited.”

 A Shi’ite official pleaded: “Please be careful, we are expecting lots of problems. Don’t be fooled by the current security situation.”

In downtown Beirut, resurrected from the rubble of the 1975-90 civil war, one is spoilt for choice of smart restaurants, trendy bars and lively clubs. Performances by sexy Lebanese divas and belly dancers contribute generously to Lebanon’s gross domestic product by attracting Gulf Arab tourists enchanted with Lebanese talent and beauty — not necessarily in that order.

There is isn’t a single international designer who has not found his or her way to Beirut’s elegant boutiques and jewellery shops. On the other hand, Lebanese designers such as Elie Saab are dressing Hollywood stars these days.

On the streets of Beirut one can see the latest Mercedes, Jaguars and BMWs jostling with Maseratis and Ferraris, even before they appear in Europe. Appearances aside, Lebanon has one of the best-educated peoples in the Middle East, with its young men and women having a global reach into the worlds of business, banking and academia.

It was comforting to see downtown Beirut teeming again with tourists enjoying the delights the city can offer. Beaches were packed with Beirutis in bikinis and hotels were overbooked with returning visitors who left during the crisis that erupted between the pro-Iranian opposition led by Lebanon’s influential Shi’ite Hezbollah and the U.S.-backed Sunni-led Lebanese government after the assassination in 2005 of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. This crisis has been put on hold following a Qatari-brokered agreement in May.

Yet underneath the glitzy facade is a country mirroring the real currents of militancy and Sunni-Shi’ite sectarianism unleashed by the Iraq war.

The conflict in Iraq has brought back to the surface the historical Sunni-Shi’ite feud throughout the Middle East. It overthrew a Sunni dictator, brought Iraq’s Shi’ites to power and tipped the balance of power in favour of Shi’ite Iran and its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

This, in turn, has incensed Sunni Arab countries and left a bitter legacy across the Arab world, Lebanon in particular which is traditionally a proxy battleground where regional forces settle their disputes.

In Lebanon, the Sunni-Shi’ite rivalry is in danger of taking a vicious turn. Fundamentalist Sunni Salafi groups have established a foothold in the northern city of Tripoli, which admittedly had been a hotbed for Sunni Islamist groups in the 1980s before they were crushed by Syria, then the dominant power in Lebanon.

Now these forces have found their way to the southern city of Sidon and to eastern Lebanon and some Palestinian refugee camps.

Added to the Iraq war factor is the humiliation inflicted on Sunni prestige in May by Hezbollah when it overran West Beirut, traditionally a Sunni bastion, after a row with the government. That proved without a doubt that they called the shots in the country.

As a result, Sunni groups are seething, with some tilting towards radical Islamism.

The growing influence of these groups is no longer just in the poor neighbourhoods of Tripoli but it has reached the more affluent parts of the southern port city of Sidon — through mosques and preachers setting out to indoctrinate young Sunnis.

A friend recently recounted how her nephew and some of his friends, all American-educated and from affluent Sunni conservative families, were victims of this indoctrination and turned into zealots after attending prayers at a mosque near Sidon.

“Now he spends his days in his room reading the Koran and listening to militant chants. In his eyes we are non-Muslims and following the infidel way of life. Nobody is able to communicate with him or get through to him,” the friend told me.

Lebanon, it seems, is being used once again by its politicians and their regional patrons as a laboratory.

Anti-Syrian Sunni Lebanese politicians, backed by Sunni heavyweight Saudi Arabia, have not only ignored the growing influence of Salafi groups but have courted them in some instances in their attempt to roll back the rising tide of Shi’ite influence embodied by Hezbollah.

Syria, which after the 2003 U.S.-led war encouraged and facilitated the flow of jihadists to Iraq and into Lebanon, has warned of growing Islamist militancy in north Lebanon and said a vehicle used in a suicide attack in Damascus last week had crossed into Syria from a neighbouring country, implying it could have been Lebanon, Jordan or Iraq.

With these local and regional actors playing with fire, how long before their policies backfire

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave that bottle of water in the vehicle,” Captain Adam Canon told me as I got out of the Humvee. We were about to meet some Iraqi army officers in the northern city of Mosul, one of Iraq’s insurgent hotspots. “It’s because it’s Ramadan. The men we’re about to meet haven’t had anything to drink in this heat the whole day and there’s still three hours to go.”

I was embarrassed not to have thought of it myself, but I was also encouraged: U.S. troops have often been accused of failing to understand Iraq’s cultural landscape.

Canon then managed a short chat with the Iraqi soldiers we met in their native Kurdish (later, in Arabic, he exchanged pleasantries with an Arab policeman). He engaged in small-talk with every Iraqi we came across on our tour, despite a packed schedule, before getting down to business (it’s rude not too). He embraced them on leaving. It was all common courtesy, but it bucked a common perception of U.S. troops as culturally insensitive.

In his book about Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone compound in the year after the 2003 invasion, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City”, former Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran writes: “At the cafeteria at the Republican Palace … a buffet featured … a bottomless barrel of pork: sausage for breakfast, hot dogs for lunch, pork chops for dinner. Hundreds of Iraqi secretaries … were Muslims and were offended by the presence of pork. But the American contractors kept serving it.”

Iraqis have other complaints. They say U.S. troops often shouted or hurled abuse at tribal leaders when patrolling neighbourhoods: a grave insult to a dignitary. In raids, they have kicked down doors to houses and hauled everyone out, including women — a big taboo. “They would frisk women, enter the bedroom, rumble through the wardrobe where the women keeps bedclothes. This enrages the Iraqi man,” said Basim al-Azzawi, a Sunni Arab tribal leader in northeast Baghdad.

Some Iraqis say they noticed a change after General David Petreaus took over as U.S. commander in February 2007. (Petraeus handed over command last week to General Ray Odierno.)  A counterinsurgency expert, Petraeus had won plaudits for working closely with local leaders in Mosul in 2003. Instead of barking orders at local dignitaries, U.S. troops have been taking a more measured approach, the tribal sheikhs say.

Recently, when U.S. troops wanted to take a woman in for questioning in his district, Azzawi says, they asked a tribal leader to approach a male in the house first. While this is hardly proof of a big cultural shift, it’s hard to imagine such care being taken in the heady days of 2003.

And U.S. military officials point out they haven’t been the only parties to make cultural blunders. “People say we’re culturally stupid and we are. But not as culturally stupid as al Qaeda,” said Major John Oliver in Mosul.

Sunni Islamist al Qaeda tried to supplant the centuries-old Sunni Arab tribal structure in parts of Iraq and enforced a puritanical brand of Islam alien to Iraqis. They also bombed barber shops and cut smokers’ fingers off. The result: Sunni Arabs sheikhs joined forces with the U.S. military to deal a major blow to the militant group.

But not all American soldiers have taken the message to heart. In May, a U.S. sniper enraged Iraqis when he used a Koran for target practice at a firing range near Baghdad. President George W. Bush had to apologise.