March 19, 2004: Marching to Antar Square.

Five years ago today, I stood on the roof of a restaurant in the Adamiya neighborhood of Baghdad, shooting pictures of thousands of Shia Iraqis protesting the occupation of their country.

The war was one year old that day. Today is the sixth anniversary of its onset.

The important clerics and politicians marched in the middle of the fast-moving throng, while young men on the periphery locked arms to create a wall, to protect those in the middle against suicide bombers. Members of the nascent Iraqi police force stayed close to their vehicles, parked on the sidewalks. The police nearest me and my colleagues glanced at us nervously from time to time; Westerners on a roof were targets.

The US Army, usually ubiquitous on the streets, wisely choose to make itself scarce that day. American tanks might well have sparked a riot. The sidewalks and rooftops were lined with men carrying assault rifles.

The demonstration was meant to be a display of unity between Shias and Sunnis; it had been arranged by a shakily ecumenical political movement headed by Sheik Jawad al-Khalisi, an imam who frequently acted as bridge between Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Moqtada al-Sadr, and Sheik Harith al-Dhari, a Sunni cleric renowned for packing a pistol under his robes and whom US forces frequently used as

March 19, 2004: This man posed for me, then decided I was CIA and tried—with about 10 of his friends—to take my camera.

a liaison in hostage negotiations with Sunni militants.

But it turned out to be a mostly Shia affair. Maybe the Sunnis had boycotted because of rumors that al-Sadr himself would speak in Antar Square, the terminus of the march. Who knows. In any case, Al-Sadr did not show. Instead, one of his deputies, Sayyid Hazim al-Araji, spoke to 2,000 or so protesters. I can’t remember his speech now, but this is how I described it at the time:

…[his] speech followed a predictable course, touching on points that nearly all Iraqis seem to understand and believe: The U.S. military occupation must end; free elections must be held at the earliest opportunity; the [Interim Governing Council] is filled with puppets, Iraqis whom the U.S. pulled out of exile and installed in power in order to ensure a compliant body with which to negotiate reconstruction contracts and a permanent military presence in the country. He made a good joke at this point, one the crowd appreciated; with a deft and subtle twist in the Arabic, he rendered the phrase “governing council” to mean “governed council.”

When it was over, the energy among the dispersing crowd was still high and aggressive. We—a half dozen Western journalists—were alone in the emptying streets. Targets again. A policeman ushered us into the back room of a restaurant, where we stayed for an hour, until the mood had settled. We returned to the Agadir Hotel, whose first- and second-floor windows had been shattered by a bomb blast that had brought down another hotel two nights earlier:

As our interview with al-Khalisi neared its end, the sheik took a call on his cell phone. When he hung up, he told us that the Lebanon Hotel, just a block and a half from where we were staying, had been destroyed by a car bomb. Seven people were killed and a couple dozen more were wounded. The blast blew out the windows on the first and second floors of our hotel. No one was sure why the Lebanon Hotel had been targeted. Peter Jennings flew in the next day to do a report from the scene, and a correspondent for Pacifica radio told me over dinner that he’d watched Jennings berating his driver in English, though Jennings is supposed to speak proficient Arabic.

While we were having dinner, a hotel two blocks from the restaurant was attacked with a rocket-propelled grenade. The blast shook the windows. Two more hotels were attacked that night as well, but not so devastatingly as the Lebanon. The staff at our hotel looked nervous, especially the watchman who stood in front of the hotel with a rifle all night. What was he supposed to do if a car bomber decided to drive into the lobby?

March 19, 2004: Young protesters in Antar Square.

The next night, the insurgents returned to their regular targets, firing rockets and mortars into the Green Zone, where Saddam’s palace now serves as the heavily barricaded headquarters for the [Coalition Provisional Authority]. They may have been drawn back to that mark by the brief presence of Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose apology for the killing of two Arab journalists at a U.S. Army checkpoint the day before was greeted by a walkout by all the Arabs attending his press conference.

Al-Khalisi assumed that the violence was welcomed, if not encouraged, by the American coalition. “Chaos,” he told us, “pushes people toward any authority.”

The violence and oppression of that time seemed hopeless, brutal, and endless in every sense of the word: It never stopped, and it accomplished nothing. It seemed intolerable, not only for the dozens of Iraqis I interviewed but for the US soldiers I met. How could it last another year? Two years? Five?