Once-Bustling Baghdad Boulevard Dallies in Disrepair

Baghdad's Rasheed Street once hosted cinemas, artisan shops and smoky cafes playing classic ballads. (AFP)
Baghdad's Rasheed Street once hosted cinemas, artisan shops and smoky cafes playing classic ballads. (AFP)
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Once-Bustling Baghdad Boulevard Dallies in Disrepair

Baghdad's Rasheed Street once hosted cinemas, artisan shops and smoky cafes playing classic ballads. (AFP)
Baghdad's Rasheed Street once hosted cinemas, artisan shops and smoky cafes playing classic ballads. (AFP)

Behind the dilapidated storefronts and collapsing colonnades of Rasheed Street lie the treasures of the Iraqi capital's cultural boom years: old cinemas, artisan shops and smoky cafes playing classic ballads.

But with young Iraqis listening to modern music and spending hours in hipster-style coffee shops, the boulevard that bustled non-stop in the 1970s is at risk of being passed over, said an AFP report Tuesday.

Authorities have tried to revive the street in recent weeks by removing the security checkpoints and concrete blast walls that lined Rasheed for years.

Announcing the move, Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi extolled: "Rasheed Street is the memory of Baghdad."

Despite his government's best efforts though, it may be reduced to only that.

Decades ago, the street's Umm Kulthum Cafe was packed with wistful young men listening to the sultry voice of its namesake, the Egyptian "queen" of Arabic music.

"Coming here was a daily tradition for us. We used to have a lovely time," reminisced Abu Haidar, a retired army serviceman in his seventies.

It was so busy that customers -- writers, men on their way to or from work, and those seeking solace in the music -- struggled to call over harried waiters to order muddy coffee and sweet Iraqi tea.

Now, it only fills up on Saturdays, the traditional day for meeting up with friends in cafes, when older men chain-smoke and sip hot drinks on wooden benches under framed portraits of Iraq's unseated king, Faisal II.

"After all these years, this coffee shop is the only place we can go to remember," said Abu Haidar.

"We hope it can escape extinction."

Some date the street's deterioration back to the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

"I started coming here in 1971, but after 2003, it was ignored," said Tareq Jamila, 70, another cafe customer.

"You wouldn't find the old pioneers, who used to sit in the coffee shop and actually understand Umm Kulthum's songs."

The invasion and sectarian violence that followed saw several bombs planted near Rasheed Street, with the last explosion in 2016 killing more than two dozen people, said AFP.

Other historic areas of the capital similarly fell into disrepair during the years of bloodshed, with Baghdadis often filled with nostalgia for the past.

The floor of the abandoned Mekki Awwad theater, further south in the capital along the winding Tigris River, is blanketed in dust and litter.

It once hosted boisterous nighttime shows, but the rows of numbered seats have not been occupied in years.

Art galleries dotting the neighborhoods between the theater and Rasheed Street have shuttered their doors one after the other.

As one of Baghdad's first cinemas, Al-Zawra had long been a legendary stop along Rasheed -- but it too lies unused now.

Last year, young Iraqi artists organized a walking tour through their capital in an effort to revive some of its historic districts with their own art installations.

Along the tired two-storey buildings of Rasheed Street, one photographer hung new versions of decades-old pictures of Baghdad's heralded past.

But instead of looking up at the photographs, most shoppers were more interested in the tables selling watches, shimmering carp and fake Adidas, reported AFP.

Another Umm Kulthum-themed cafe has opened on Rasheed, choosing one of the singer's nicknames -- Al-Ustura, or The Legend -- as its name.

Although its traditional yellow-brick walls and stained glass windows are "falling into ruin", the original Umm Kulthum is soldiering on, said Said al-Qaissi, 65.

"No one has considered renovating or preserving this place which celebrates art," said Qaissi.

While the cafe's elusive owner rarely makes a public appearance, young waiters dish out tea to older gentlemen in sweaters and berets, lost in awe of Umm Kulthum's voice and their own distant memories.



A Family Digs Through Trash for Bits of Food, Showing Gaza's Growing Desperation

The Taeima family is among more than two million Palestinians who are on the brink of famine after 19 months of war between Hamas and Israel. The high risk of famine has generated international outrage against Israel over its nearly three-month blockade and escalating military offensive in Gaza. - AP news
The Taeima family is among more than two million Palestinians who are on the brink of famine after 19 months of war between Hamas and Israel. The high risk of famine has generated international outrage against Israel over its nearly three-month blockade and escalating military offensive in Gaza. - AP news
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A Family Digs Through Trash for Bits of Food, Showing Gaza's Growing Desperation

The Taeima family is among more than two million Palestinians who are on the brink of famine after 19 months of war between Hamas and Israel. The high risk of famine has generated international outrage against Israel over its nearly three-month blockade and escalating military offensive in Gaza. - AP news
The Taeima family is among more than two million Palestinians who are on the brink of famine after 19 months of war between Hamas and Israel. The high risk of famine has generated international outrage against Israel over its nearly three-month blockade and escalating military offensive in Gaza. - AP news

With flies buzzing all around them, the woman and her daughter picked through the pile of garbage bags for scraps of food at the foot of a destroyed building in Gaza City. She found a small pile of cooked rice, a few scraps of bread, a box with some smears of white cheese still inside.

Islam Abu Taeima picked soggy bits from a piece of bread and put the dry part in her sack. She will take what she found back to the school where she and hundreds of other families live, boil it and serve it to her five children, she said.

“We’re dying of hunger,” she said. “If we don’t eat, we’ll die.”

Her rummaging for food is a new sign of the depths of desperation being reached in Gaza, where the population of some 2.3 million has been pushed toward famine by Israel’s nearly three-month blockade. The entry of a small amount of aid in the past week has done almost nothing to ease the situation, The AP news reported.

Before the war, it was rare to see anyone searching through garbage for anything, despite the widespread poverty in the Gaza Strip.

Since Israel launched its military campaign decimating the strip after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, it has been common to see children searching through growing, stinking piles of uncollected garbage for wood or plastic to burn in their family's cooking fire or for anything worth selling — but not for food. For food, they might search through the rubble of damaged buildings, hoping for abandoned canned goods.

But Abu Taeima says she has no options left. She and her 9-year-old daughter Waed wander around Gaza City, looking for leftovers discarded in the trash.

“This is our life day to day,” she said. “If we don’t gather anything, then we don’t eat.”

It's still not common, but now people picking food from trash are occasionally seen. Some come out after dark because of the shame.

“I feel sorry for myself because I’m educated and despite that I’m eating from the trash,” said Abu Taeima, who has a bachelor’s degree in English from Al-Quds Open University in Gaza.

Her family struggled to get by even before the war, she said. Abu Taeima has worked for a short time in the past as a secretary for UNRWA, the main UN agency for Palestinian refugees and the biggest employer in Gaza. She also worked as a reader for blind people. Her husband worked briefly as a security guard for UNRWA. He was wounded in the 2021 war between Hamas and Israel and has been unable to work since.

Israel cut off all food, medicine and other supplies to Gaza on March 2. It said the blockade and its subsequent resumption of the war aimed to pressure Hamas to release the hostages it still holds. But warnings of famine have stoked international criticism of Israel.

It allowed several hundred trucks into Gaza last week. But much of it hasn’t reached the population, either aid trucks were looted or because of Israeli military restrictions on aid workers’ movements, especially in northern Gaza, according to the UN Aid groups say the amount of supplies allowed in is nowhere near enough to meet mounting needs.

Abu Taeima and her family fled their home in the Shati refugee camp on the northern side of Gaza City in November 2023. At the time she and one of her children were wounded in a tank shelling, she said.

They first headed to the strip’s southernmost city of Rafah where they sheltered in a tent for five months. They then moved to the central town of Deir al-Balah a year ago when Israel first invaded Rafah.

During a two-month ceasefire that began in January, they went back to Shati, but their landlord refused to let them back into their apartment because they couldn’t pay rent, she said.

Several schools-turned-shelters in Gaza City at first refused to receive them because they were designated for people who fled towns in northern Gaza. Only when she threatened to set herself and her family on fire did one school give them a space, she said.

Abu Taeima said her family can’t afford anything in the market, where prices have skyrocketed for the little food that remains on sale. She said she has tried going to charity kitchens, but every time they run out of food before she gets any. Such kitchens, producing free meals, have become the last source of food for many in Gaza, and giant crowds flood them every day, pushing and shoving to get a meal.

“People are struggling, and no one is going to be generous with you,” she said. “So collecting from the trash is better.”

The risk of catching disease isn't at the top of her list of worries.

“Starvation is the biggest disease,” she said.