Byline: Babak Dehghanpisheh (With Mohammed Hayder in Basra)
Omar Hussein was driving with his girlfriend in Baghdad one evening this summer when a big SUV with tinted windows cut them off. Another vehicle with tinted windows, this one a pickup truck, pulled up behind them, and several men piled out wielding AK-47s. As Hussein stepped out of his car to face them, one of the gunmen yanked open the passenger-side door and began yelling questions at Hussein's girlfriend: "Why are you out so late? What are you two doing together?" Thinking fast, Hussein grabbed the apparent ringleader and asked angrily, "Why is your man insulting my wife?" The desperate bluff worked. The thugs backed off, warned Hussein to stay out of the neighborhood and left. "My girlfriend said she would never go out with me again," the 25-year-old car salesman recalls.
Dating can be tough even under ordinary circumstances--and nothing in Iraq is close to ordinary. Going out takes all the determination, ingenuity and nerve that a young couple can muster. The risk of insurgent attacks is only part of the problem. Where Iraqis used to live in fear of Saddam Hussein's secret police, people now are tyrannized by bands of religious vigilantes. Baghdad, once famous for its nightclubs and riverside cafes, practically shuts down after dark. One of the few restaurants that defied the trend was Nabil's, in the fashionable Arasat district. It's gone now; militants blew it up on New Year's Eve 2003. Most parents refuse to allow their daughters outside at night. "It was easier before," says Jihan Mustafa, 30. "There was security. I could even go out with female friends." For Mustafa and Omar Adil, her steady boyfriend for the past two months, dating basically means spending lunch hours together. At night they stay home. "What can you do?" asks Adil. "Walking around is out of the question. Restaurants are unsafe. What's left?"
Baghdad is a swinging town compared with what Basra has become. The sexes seldom mingle publicly in the once wide-open port city. Local college men and women were enjoying a picnic in a park there one day last spring when members of a hard-line Shiite militia, the Mahdi Army, waded into the crowd with steel cables, sticks and rifles. Several male and female students were hospitalized. The hard-liners videotaped the assault and sold copies in the local market as a warning. Salah al-Obaidi, a spokesman for the Mahdi Army's leader, remains unapologetic. "Although we did not accept the way our people did it, we do agree with the principle," says Obaidi. Some of the men at the picnic had been singing and dancing together, and a few women had failed to wear headscarves. Obaidi says Iraq needs an official code of public morality and a special police division to enforce it.
Even under such conditions, romance endures. The owner of one Baghdad gift shop says Feb. 14 has been his busiest day for the past two years; he needs three extra employees to handle the Valentine's rush. Throughout the year, young lovers walk hand in hand at Baghdad's Jadriya Lake, a heavily guarded pleasure garden. Couples share tables at restaurants on the shore, while Baghdad University students flirt in secluded corners. On the final night of Ramadan, last Wednesday, the enclave was bustling with families and singles. Iraqi pop songs rang out from kebab stalls beside the water, and young people cuddled together in boats plying the artificial lake.
Some things have actually made life easier for young lovers since the invasion. In Saddam's day, mobile phones were outlawed and Internet hookups tightly restricted. Now the new technology is everywhere, enabling men and women to get together no matter how bad things are out in the streets. Tariq Ali, a third-year student at Basra University, is an avid user of Arabic chat rooms. "I have two Internet girlfriends that I've never met before," he says. "One lives in Basra and one lives in Baghdad." Mustafa and Adil use their mobile phones several times a day to check on each other. "Anything can happen," says Adil. "A bomb, shooting, kidnapping..."
Mustafa and Adil recently visited Amman together. The high point of their trip was something they never dare to do at home: "We walked and walked and walked," says Mustafa. "It was great. We walked everywhere." As soon as they got back to Baghdad, they had a fight. "It's very difficult for a man and a woman to have a relationship here," says Adil. "But you have to try." That's what makes the world go round--even in Iraq.
CAPTION(S): Love reigns supreme: An Iraqi couple out for a stroll in a Baghdad park; a shop displays romantic greeting cards
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