Twelve years have passed since the terrible decision to invade Iraq in 2003. When I add up all my visits to Baghdad during that time, I find I have spent two full years of my life here. That’s a long time to observe so much bloodshed and misery. But now, for the first time, I am starting to wonder whether things are changing.

The other night I wandered around the main shopping street in Karada, the Kensington of Baghdad. The lights blazed out from every shop along the way and half the pavement space was taken up with goods for sale: shoes, handbags, sweets, jackets, scarves. A river of people wandered in both directions along the street, past the cafes and restaurants where diners leaned back in their plastic chairs and gave themselves over to the pleasures of eating, drinking tea, and talking. The laughter drowned out the blaring horns from the slow-moving, nose-to-tail cars, and children played and danced and tried to drag their parents over to look at the toys on show. There was a certain amount of beer-drinking going on. It was a Thursday night, and everyone was determined to have a good time. They had something to celebrate, you see: This was the first weekend since the nightly curfew had been abolished.

Iraq’s new prime minister, the short and bouncy Haider Al Abadi, is a British-trained engineer who, as an exile from Saddam Hussein, used to run a highly successful business in London building lifts and designing transportation systems. It was his decision to lift the curfew in order to show people in the most practical way that things were getting better. His predecessor and rival Nouri Al Maliki, more gloomy and bitter than ever after being pushed out of office last summer, argued strongly against it. Still, it seems to be working. The people of Baghdad are being given a glimpse of what life might be, if only Iraq could free itself from terrorism.

Inevitably, the Islamic State staged a couple of suicide bombings to remind everyone how short and cruel life can be here. There might have been a third suicide attack to mark the end of the curfew, but the bomber who was to have carried it out was captured just as he was getting ready for his mission. A few days later, my team and I were allowed into a top-security interrogation center near Baghdad Airport to meet the suicide bomber who had failed.

A sign on the wall showed that this was known as Camp Cropper during the American days. At that time it was known, inevitably, by an acronym: It was an HVD, or “high-value detention site.” There were three of these sites worldwide: Guantanamo; Abu Ghraib, in another part of Baghdad, where the American soldier Lynndie England took her pornographic selfies with pyramids of naked, traumatised prisoners, and where the guards laughed as they set their dogs on them; and Camp Cropper. This is where Saddam Hussein was held before his execution. God knows what else used to happen here.