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Lion of Babylon -> RE: Who is Iraq's best candidate for PM? (11/11/2007 5:11:34 PM)
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As you can see from the report below, things have improved since I recently took office!
quote:
BAGHDAD, IRAQ — It's Thursday night, the end of the Iraqi workweek, and Fami Ameen is scrambling in his crowded Assassin's Gate liquor store as customers clamor for everything from beer and whiskey to ouzo and arak, the popular local alcohol. Call Ameen an unexpected beneficiary of the "surge."
For decades, Iraq had a reputation as a modern, secular society that liked to drink and knew how to party, from wild hotel discotheques to genteel members-only social clubs. But after the fall of Saddam Hussein, extremists unleashed waves of firebombings against liquor stores, even killing owners, because alcohol is forbidden under Islamic law. Just a year ago, Iraqis' taste for alcohol, and the businesses that sated it, were written off as a casualty of the country's new Islam-dominated order.
But violence in Baghdad has dropped in recent months under the U.S. military's security crackdown. With new shops like Ameen's opening in secured areas near fortified Western military outposts, some retailers even say their sales have declined, because they now have so much competition. In one dubious measure of the progress, they say their biggest fear is no longer the militias that targeted them for religious reasons, but the criminal gangs that would kidnap them for their revived fortunes. Ameen, 27, a burly man with a big mustache, recalls arriving at his old liquor store in east Baghdad one morning three years ago, only to discover it was gone. "It was blown to smithereens, just like that," he said.
He had a second shop in the mostly Shiite district of Karada but closed it out of fear it would suffer the same fate. He then moved his businesses to the Assassin's Gate, an ornate sandstone arch just outside the entrance to the heavily fortified Green Zone. Two months ago, he consolidated into a larger space across the street. Some tipplers are particularly happy that the dry spell might be over.
A 47-year-old construction worker and Sadr City resident, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition he not be named, told of how he was beaten last year by the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, after his brother complained to the militia about his drinking. Now that the Iraqi army has supplanted the Mahdi fighters, he said, he no longer has to hide his liquor under his car seat when driving into his neighborhood.
"The situation is now better than before. I carry the alcohol in a black plastic bag, and no one cares what I have in the plastic bag," he said. "I always drink, even at my work, at home at night, and even in the morning. I will never stop until the Judgment Day."
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/5290739.html
[image]http://images.chron.com/photos/2007/10/26/8684320/311xInlineGallery.jpg[/image]
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