City Life

A colleague said today (Wednesday) that he and his family spent much of the previous evening making sandwiches and distributing them to motorists in Baghdad trapped in their cars as police imposed stringent roadblocks throughout the city, reacting to a series of bombings earlier in the day.


AP Photo

There was also an attack earlier in the week on a Syrian church, which was where another colleague told me he himself had been baptized.


Reuters

The German Press Agency (DPA) reported streets were in "gridlock" all of Wednesday.


Photo: Michael J. Totten

Strange. Maybe the DPA meant gridlock the previous evening. When I drove around Baghdad today, streets were busy but traffic was moving at a normal pace, and sidewalks were crowded with shoppers, more or less like the picture above. The cloudless sky was a brilliant blue, and temperatures were in the high 70s (20s celsius). Nice day, but for the memory of what had happened the day before in another part of town.