From a cafe owner to a Sunni leader, there is widespread agreement that the country British diplomat Gertrude Bell helped to shape in 1921 no longer exists

For years, Hamid Menhel has trudged through a graveyard in central Baghdad almost every day to tend to one of its few well-maintained tombs. Surrounded by shrubs and a small metal fence, it is the burial site of Gertrude Bell, the British diplomat and explorer whose role in the region a century ago helped enshrine Iraq’s modern state.



The cemetery is hemmed between churches, mosques, government buildings and roads choked with cars on the south bank of the Tigris river, which has been Baghdad’s lifeblood for 3,000 years, but has more recently become a dividing line.

The fortified government district known as the Green Zone stands on its northern banks. Here the business of navigating Iraq through its latest crisis, the battle against Islamic State (Isis), is directed from a safe, insular enclave of Saddam-era palaces and embassies. The rest of the city gets by on its wits.

People here don’t want to live together. Why else would we all behave like animals?

Iraq’s officials claim that the war is existential and that to win it will preserve the very boundaries that Bell advocated in 1921 after the demise of the Ottoman empire. From his vantage point across the river though, Hamid, 37, believes that much of what has happened in Iraq since – and particularly the current tumult – suggeststhe country Bell envisaged doesn’t exist any more. And if it does, it may no longer be worth fighting for.

“We can blame empire, occupation, the Americans, Miss Bell, Iran, anyone we want,” Hamid said, standing on a thin crust of dirt surrounded by tombstones that teeter into collapsed graves. “But the reality is that people here don’t want to live together. Why else would we all behave like animals?

“Look around. No electricity, no security, no future. If I want water for the ground here, I have to beg the British embassy for it. The country is finished.”

A year into the war against Isis, and more than 12 years since the toppling of Saddam Hussein, other Iraqis are facing personal reckonings about their place within a nation in a perpetual search for identity. Across the country, apparently endless dysfunction has led many to retreat to groupings that they feel more confident in – tribes, clan and sects.

“It was OK when there was security,” said Khalil al-Khater, a refugee from the northern town of Tal Afar, who has spent more than a year in a shack near the Shia city of Najaf. “As long as we were safe, we could forget about the rest of the country not working. Now the army has scattered like leaves on the wind, and Iraq has split into three parts.”

Since the time of Bell and her colleague TE Lawrence, who also played a defining role in shaping contemporary Arabia, Iraq has lived through colonialism, monarchy, totalitarianism, war, occupation and chaos. Throughout all its modern eras, ancient Mesopotamia’s role as a cradle of civilisation has loomed large, but many of its people say its latest incarnation, from the end of the first world war until now, has produced next to nothing in the way of nation-building that can unify its disparate groups.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photographs line the wall of the Shahbander cafe, long known as an oasis for free thought and intellectualism in Baghdad. Photograph: Sam Tarling for the Guardian

“If all we have are winged horses from the Sumerian period to say we are Iraqis, then that is not a foundation for a state,” said Ahmed Rubaie, a guard at the Iraqi National Museum, which houses most of the country’s surviving priceless antiquities. “Outside these walls, you’ll find nothing that has been built since British rule that commemorates the country like all of the things within these walls.”

The ​army has scattered like leaves on the wind, and Iraq has split into three parts Khalil al-Khater, a refugee

Not far from the museum, Muhammed Amin Izzat has conducted Iraq’s national orchestra since Baghdad fell in 2003. It was one of the main institutions under Saddam, and has endured since while other citadels of state have withered.



“We are an institution which represents all Iraqis and we have never been a trumpet for anyone,” Izzat said. In 2012, a year of relative calm, he decided to assemble the orchestra in a public square in Baghdad. The symphony it played attracted expatriates from all over the world and was hailed as a moment when culture and unity transcended Iraq’s woes.

“People wanted to come to us and enjoy the music and forget about what is happening in the street,” he said. “We Iraqis are people who love to live and want peace but our problems are caused by politicians who want to create division in order to rule.”

Izzat said he too rued the lack of other symbols of Baghdad’s recent past. Occasionally he makes his way to the Shahbander cafe near the river’s edge, which has been a sanctuary for writers, poets, singers and painters for at least 70 years. For 51 of them, Haj Mohammed has run the cafe, which stands next to the site of a book fair that has been held most Fridays for all that time.

The cafe’s walls are covered with photographs chronicling Iraq’s modern history – a faded shot of Bell alongside an image of the coronation of Iraq’s last monarch, King Faisal. There are politicians at sports carnivals, tribesmen from the southern marshes and proud graduate classes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Montanabe Street, known for its book market and seen as the city’s intellectual heart. Photograph: Sam Tarling for the Guardian

Next to the entrance are five more contemporary photographs, of Haj Mohammed’s sons who were killed by a huge car bomb that targeted the book market eight years ago.

“This is all we have left. All around us is history,” he said, pointing at the framed memories as customers queue to pay for their tea. “It’s not just about our [family] history. This is about society.

“All that we knew has been overwhelmed since we were occupied by the Americans. We have felt like we were undressed. We don’t see people buying books or even textiles anymore. We no longer know what is coming for us, or when. Back in the 50s, we weren’t just living, we were competing with the rest of the world.”

The book fair on Montanabe Street is not as popular as it was. Once a place where all manner of fiction classics could be picked up for small change, religious texts and comic books now seem more prolific, especially mid-week in summer on the eve of Ramadan. “But you still won’t find anything else like it,” Haj Mohammed said. “It needs to be protected.”

In a palace on the edge of the Green Zone, General Abdul Amir al-Sammari, the man in charge of protecting Baghdad, was upbeat. There had been no major explosions in the capital for 10 days and the battle over the horizon had been going better lately. State security forces had played a role in the improvement, the general said, but the main contributors had been militia that work alongside the military and often take primacy over it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Officers talk in the Baghdad operations command control room near the Green Zone. Photograph: Sam Tarling for the Guardian

Iraq’s security tsars largely endorse the role of the militias, known as the Popular Mobilisation Forces or locally as Hashd al-Shaabi. They are thought to number as many as 200,000 fighters, and nominally come under the authority of the prime minister’s office. Most of the groups are Shia. They are directly supported by Iran, and their authority is rooted in a call to arms from Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s top Shia cleric, last June.

“From January to June last year, we were isolated and alone,” Sammari said of army units in Baghdad, which at the time were besieged by increasingly muscular Isis forces on Baghdad’s western outskirts. “Then came the fatwa of the marja [Iraq’s highest Shia religious authority]. As soon as that happened, the street was with us.”

Last month, when Iraq’s military withdrew from Ramadi and allowed Isis to take full control of the city, the militias were sent to surround it. The pattern had already been set in smaller battles elsewhere in the country earlier this year. When the state fails, a parallel force steps into the fray.

Sammari acknowledged that Iraq’s military has rarely had the upper hand against Isis, but claim ed cooperation was improving. “It is true that lots of splits have happened that have weakened the morale of the military. We are trying to avoid the forces working as separate units and to unify. It is starting to happen.”

The tussle for power between the ailing state forces and the ascendant irregulars clearly rankles security chiefs, as it does many of Iraq’s politicians.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Security officers from a Shia militia frisk people entering a memorial for a military leader. Photograph: Sam Tarling for the Guardian

“Any nationalist must believe that the military is the strongest part of the state’s security,” said Sammari. “Anyone who says otherwise is delusional.”

Asked about regular complaints from Iraq’s Sunnis, who lost power when Saddam was ousted, that the militias have consolidated the hold of their rival sect on the country, Sammari responded: “When will they accept that they lost?”

On the other side of Baghdad in the district of Ghazaliya, the leader of the country’s largest Sunni institution has regularly warned of the dangers of the state being subjugated. Kutaiba al-Falahi, a spokesman for the Sunni waqf, said a failing political process was keeping Iraq’s disenfranchised Sunnis on the sidelines, allowing Isis to claim a role as their de facto representatives.

It would be better if the Americans came back. We can’t run the country ourselves Kutaiba al-Falahi

“Anbar is outside state control and the Kurds aren’t interested in Iraq as it was drawn a century ago,” he said. “Almost everyone we speak to wants a form of federalism. They want their basic needs met. The solution lies in real autonomy and authority for the provinces.”

In Falluja , 20 miles west of Baghdad and the closest city to the capital held by the jihadis , a local doctor who uses the name Abu Saleh said hope of the state resuming control had evaporated.

“I have no faith in the government, Sunni or Shia,” he said. “They are the ones who put us in the situation we are in now. The majority of people in Falluja aren’t with Isis, but some are tired and scared of the army. At least they have their homes now and their kids can go to school.

“They don’t want to be begging in the streets or begging the government to let them into Baghdad. If we had Sunni tribes who will come inside the city and fight Isis, we would feel safer.”

Al-Falahi said the plight of refugees from Anbar showed the standing of the broader Sunni community in the eyes of the state.

“We are all being labelled [as Isis supporters ]. We need the government to look at us like humans. There are refugees [from Ramadi ] sitting at the gates of Baghdad and they are not allowed in - the old the young and the sick living in tents in this heat because they don’t trust us. It would be better if the Americans came back. We can’t run the country ourselves.”