Baghdad during the Second World War years

A remembrance of the experience of Baghdad during the Second World War, is presented mainly from the vantage of the book sellers’ market of Suq Al Sarai, located in the centre of Baghdad near Al-Sarai and Al-Mutanabbi streets. The Suq, long the locale of cultural exchange and a foundry for Iraqi intellectual life, experienced the war in a unique way, with shortages of paper and accessibility to foreign books, journals and voices at the fore, rather than the absence of foodstuffs and other necessities of everyday life made short due to the war. The author notes how the violence and the attendant dislocation brought to this home of ideas and comity was to see itself repeated with even much greater bloodshed in a further violent clash during 2007.