"For us, things feel back to normal," said her husband Adnan, 32, as he held their only surviving child, a 2-year-old daughter named Bunayah..."The Americans did us a great favor by getting rid of Saddam," Adnan Hamid said. "We owe them. And I don't think they will abandon us."
On April 8, the day after residents of Sadr City welcomed US soldiers, Fedayeen Saddam fighters rained shells onto their neighborhood in retribution. One exploded in the Hamid courtyard, killing Mohammed, 6; Rokaya, 4; Aya, 3; and Adnan's sister, Amal Hamid. Shrapnel ravaged both legs of a relative, Kaiss Hamid...
Shyly placing one hand on her stomach, she said they will name the child after Mohammed or Aya, depending on whether it's a boy or a girl. The tentative order restored to the Hamid household has also come to Sadr City and has won coalition forces a measure of peace. Despite the headline-grabbing Shi'ite clerics who denounced the foreign troops and the riots last month after US soldiers in a helicopter ripped a religious flag from a tower, the slum's neighborhoods have seen sweeping improvements in the quality of life under the US occupation.
The military says it has already spent $600,000 in Sadr City rebuilding a town hall, a municipal office building, and three police stations. The results so far: Recently electricity ran uninterrupted for four days, unheard of during the Ba'ath Party regime. An independent municipal government now collects daily the garbage which perpetually choked the area's streets.
And in the Hamids' quarter, at least, the nightly gunshots and fear of crime have subsided. Adnan Hamid and his friends sit in white chairs on the roadside long after midnight, talking politics and work...
Each week, the Hamid family listens to tape-recorded sermons from the great mosques in Najaf and Kufa and follows the factional arguments between clerics who encourage cooperation with the US-led occupation -- and for now hold sway over the Shi'ite street -- and those who promote anti-American resistance.
The debate does not seem that relevant to his life, Adnan Hamid said. He turns away from the stack of cassettes; Bunayah has just poked her newborn cousin Rokaya in the eye with a stuffed yellow duck.
"Why would we fight the Americans?" Adnan said, laughing and waving his hand to take in his wife, daughter, sisters, and home. "They did us the greatest favor of all."
