By Paul Danahar
BBC Middle East bureau editor
When I first met Rena she was quietly sobbing in the corner of her bedroom.
Her sister, Mona, was perched on an old wooden chair in fluffy, baby-blue pyjamas picking shards of glass from what remained of her windowsill. And she was furious.
“If Bush thinks his soldiers will be welcomed with flowers and music, then he is thinking wrong,” she told me.
“We will treat them like robbers who are breaking into our homes.”
It was March 2003, just a few days into the war that would topple Saddam Hussein and almost pitch this country into the abyss.
“Why do they do this” wept Rena. “We love the British.”
Their flat looked like a bomb had just hit it because, well, one just had. But while her sister tidied up, Rena just watched.
She was carefully turned out with her hair brushed up into a grand bouffant. She may have been the elder sister but she was also the famous one.
Years after the glory days of her singing career had ended she was, and still is, a household name in Iraq.
When she opened the door to me this month I barely recognised her.
Kidnap
Her hair was a mass of tangles and knots. She peered around the door like a frightened child as my Iraqi colleague reminded her of our visit seven years ago.
IRAQ INVASION TIMELINE
- 17 March 2003 UK’s ambassador to the UN says the diplomatic process on Iraq has ended
- 20 March American missiles hit targets in Baghdad, marking the start of a US-led campaign to topple Saddam Hussein
- 9 April US forces advance into central Baghdad, statue of Saddam pulled down, looting begins
- 16 July Commander of US forces says his troops face low-intensity guerrilla-style war
Analysis: US plan for invasion
Iraq invasion plan ‘delusional’
The only thing that stood out in her now gloomy and bedraggled little home was the photograph of her son, Ahmad, in pride of place on the living room wall.
“They kidnapped him in 2006,” she said. “They would ring and I could hear them beating my son. We paid thousands of dollars but we never got him back.”
Tears welled up in her eyes. “We don’t even know where his body is.”
The family believed the local clerics hated Rena because she was a performer, which even back in the days of Saddam was considered a slightly disreputable profession for a woman.
The death threats eventually drove her sister Mona to move out and stay with a brother.
I asked Rena the inevitable question. Was her life better before the war or now
“I don’t want to talk about politics,” she said, “but every day is dark… see how we live.”
Winning and losing
I had left Baghdad a few days after watching the now famous statue pulled down and had not been back since.
I say “now famous” because I had watched it being built a year earlier.
Before 9 April 2003, it was barely a landmark in Baghdad; it only became famous because it was the closest one to the hotel the journalists were staying in.
It is one of the many misunderstandings about the invasion and the country that the US administration thought it was liberating.
I watched the Americans win the war and start losing it again within hours.
Their troops stood idly by as banks were robbed and buildings were burned.
“We were producing literature, art and architecture when Bush’s grandfathers were living in caves like animals”
**Naji Sabri
Former Iraqi foreign minister **
The night after the statue came down, people were blocking off their neighbourhoods and taking the law into their own hands because the Americans wouldn’t.
It was downhill all the way from then on.
He rarely said anything intelligent, but back in March 2003 the then-Foreign Minister Naji Sabri accurately summed up the Iraqi people’s sense of themselves.
“We are an ancient country,” he said. “We were producing literature, art and architecture when Bush’s grandfathers were living in caves like animals.”
Iraqis prided themselves on bringing civilization to the world and then, in the years following the war, lost their own.
‘No women safe’
The barbarity inflicted by Iraqis on Iraqis is what this country is now famous for and it will take another generation to shrug that image off.
The wide roads I used to drive around are now choked with corridors of concrete blast-proofing.
Back then it was rude to ask somebody’s religion. But in today’s Iraq, according to my friends, it is the first thing people want to know.
Men are afraid to let their children and wives walk around alone.
“Nobody would abuse a woman in the street back then,” a friend told me. “Now nobody thinks their women are safe.”
And like Rena, whose name I have changed at her request, few people want journalists to publish their real details or photographs any more.
Something good had to come of all this, and I found it in Sadr City.
Hope for better
The last time I was there it was called “Saddam City”, a deliberate insult to the Shia community that lived there.
It is still a run-down, garbage-strewn place but people on polling day were out in force because their opinion finally matters.
It is one of the few achievements that can be claimed so far from the invasion.
The Iraqi people paid for it dearly and they were not going to let the threat of bombs and bullets deter them.
The final tally for that poll will soon be out but the country’s politicians are already squabbling over the result.
The last time they dithered and rowed over who had won, the capital literally burned.
One has to hope they won’t squander that trust again.
According to the 19th-Century French conservative Joseph de Maistre, “people get the government they deserve”.
The people of Iraq have so far been the great exception to that rule.