Baghdad goes underground with USD3bn metro plan

[John Ashworth]

Baghdad goes underground with $3bn metro plan

Rail proposal to connect Shia and Sunni areas seen as sign of growing confidence

Martin Chulov in Baghdad
The Guardian, Tuesday November 18 2008

A year ago it would have been unthinkable. After all it was a city where driving to work became a life or death decision and where residents were cooped in enclaves amid murder and mayhem.

But yesterday the mayor of Baghdad surprised everyone by announcing plans for an underground train network that will literally carve a swathe through the city's sectarian lines.

If investors sign up, the world's most violent capital will soon have a $3bn (£2bn) metro. Sabir al-Issawi, Baghdad's mayor, said money had been set aside in next year's budget for a feasibility study.

And if that goes ahead, the Iraqi government has earmarked funding that it claims could build most of the two mooted train lines without private help. Even the country's eternal optimists were last night calling the plan ambitious, but lauding its audacity.

In a city where raw waste often spills from an antique sewer system, where power goes off hourly, no postal service exists and where public transport has long been a fantasy, lofty ideas have recently been capturing imaginations.

In October, planning got under way for an above-ground commuter train line in the city's west, which is set to remove thousands of cars from an approach into Baghdad known as bomb alley. And throughout the weeks since, a series of roads, and one highly symbolic bridge, have again been reopened to cars and pedestrians. The al-Aaimmah bridge linking the mostly Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiya and the predominantly Shia district of Khademiya was opened last Tuesday three years after nearly a thousand Shia pilgrims died in a stampede on the span.

Berlin-style walls put in place to keep Shias and Sunnis apart, have been gradually coming down. A 5-metre high barrier separating the Shia area of Abu Safeen and the Sunni zone of al-Fudal, was removed almost two months ago. Violence has yet to return.

Baghdad's civic planners seem intent on making connections. But the small steps they have taken so far pale next to the grand plan for a metro.

A train line under Baghdad was first flagged under Saddam Hussein during the 1970s, but shelved owing to three decades of war, blockades and invasion.

One of the new proposed subway lines would run 11 miles from Shia-dominated Sadr City in the east to Adhamiya in north Baghdad. The other would traverse 13 miles and link mixed central Baghdad to the primarily Sunni western suburbs.

Both lines would have 20 stations each and run through a patchwork quilt of sectarian neighbourhoods, which largely remain divided, despite the security improvements. Bombs still rattle Baghdad daily, but on a much smaller scale than the violence that ravaged the capital throughout 2006-07.

"If anyone suggested a train back then, they would have been sent to one of Saddam's old mental homes and never heard from again," said an incredulous Umm Fatimah, 41, from the suburb of Karada. "Even now it does seem a bit crazy, but not as crazy as then.".

Another Karada resident, Nazem al-Qasemi, said something had to be done to sort out Baghdad's chronically clogged arterial roads. "Look at it," he said, waving a hand at a gridlocked roundabout. "Even if this is just talking, at least it's giving us hope."

The project's engineer Atta Nabil Hussain Auni Atta, of Iraq's transport ministry, said old 1970s blueprints for the underground line were being redrawn to bring it up to speed with the specifications of modern railways.

"This is one of Baghdad's most important projects and we hope that investors will join it," he said. "We have called for tenders from them and we have some money to contribute from the government. We are planning to start work as early as next year.

"This has been postponed so many times because of war and chaos but this time we are sure it will happen."

Meanwhile, the Iraqi government last night formally signed an agreement with America which commits US forces to leave Iraq within three years.

Iran, which has been a key backer of Iraq's Shia political bloc, appeared to back away from its earlier objections to the deal, paving the way for a more seamless implementation than most observers had anticipated.