Just Another Day: Living In Baghdad

There is perhaps no place in the world today where it is harder for an average person to get through an average day than in the city of Baghdad. It has become a living hell, with daily car bombs, mortar attacks, hundreds of kidnappings and murders every week.

The problem is, in order for Iraq to have peace and security, the capital must first be made secure, which is why President Bush chose to send in more troops.

As correspondent Lara Logan reports, many in Baghdad fear it is an impossible task, given how chaotic the city has become, with terrorists, insurgents, and now a brutal civil war tearing the society apart.

There couldn't be a better metaphor for what it's like living in Baghdad today: without his gun, Mahmud won't even attempt the drive.

He calls ahead to friends and neighbors to make sure the roads are clear of danger. And he tells Logan he never goes the same way, changing his route every day.

It's just a short drive, but he can never know how long it will take to get there. He cracks the window so he can hear if there's gunfire or mortars nearby. The day 60 Minutes went with him, they never made it to school – they didn't even make it out of their neighborhood, because the military had blocked all the roads.

Asked if his children are afraid, Mahmud tells Logan, "Believe me, they are afraid. Because when I told them, 'Tomorrow we'll not go to the school.' He will be very, very enjoy about this."

The only time his children ever really get to leave the house is to go to school. Otherwise they stay home.

"What kind of life is that?" Logan asks.

"No life," Mahmud says.

Mahmud's family lives on the edge of Adamiya, a violent neighborhood overtaken by hardcore insurgents and under constant attack by Shiite militias. It's off-limits to Western civilians, so the images for Logan's report were filmed by an Iraqi cameraman.

For the interview, the family had to come meet 60 Minutes, traveling across town for the first time in three years – a risk they said was worth taking to tell their story.

Asked about his daily life in Iraq, Mahmud tells Logan, "If I want to talk about this, I don't need 60 minutes, I need 60 million minutes to told you how do we live."

60 Minutes went with Mahmud, who lives off his small military pension, to see what it takes to do a simple chore like getting gas for his car.

What drivers in Baghdad face are massive queues; on the day 60 Minutes accompanied Mahmud, the queue at the gas station stretched for four miles. Sometimes, Mahmud says, he has had to wait in line for three days, sleeping there and waiting.

"And then when I come they say there is no fuel," he tells Logan.

But none of these hardships compare to the fear he has for his family, in a country where civilians – even children – are victims of kidnappings, or worse.

"When they take my boy, just they will kill him," Mahmud fears. "But when they take girl, no. They do other thing maybe."

Mahmud fears they will rape her which, he says, would be worse than killing her – because, in Iraq's Muslim culture, rape of a daughter brings shame on the victim and the whole family.

When 60 Minutes asked Mahmud's teen-aged daughter Rheem what the hardest thing is about her life, she said it is seeing things she can't forget.

All of his children, Rafif, 11, and 13-year-old Mustafa, have seen things no parent wants their child to see. "One day, we see there's two fighter, they killed two boys in front of us," Mahmud explains.

Mahmud says the two fighters just shot the two people in the street and left their bodies on the road. "And they see the blood of them," he explains.

His children remember the incident, and his daughter wept when asked about it.

It's a story heard over and over in Iraq. And no one has been spared, not even the most privileged.

Dr. Quoresh al-Kasir is one of Iraq's most prominent surgeons, and was a guest of President Bush at the White House in 2004. He and his family lived on Haifa Street, an upscale Sunni area, where fighting broke out in January between the mostly-Shiite Iraqi army and Sunni gunmen.

"The Iraqi Army tried to kill my family and my kids," Dr. Quoresh explains.

That was when CBS News first spoke to Quoresh. He and his family were trapped by the fighting, and CBS broadcast his desperate cry for help on the Evening News.

"The snipers were on the other building," Quoresh explains. "When the shots started to come through the windows my sons and my daughter, you know, they were in front of my eyes, expecting at any moment the Iraqi army comes and shoots my children."

His wife Nala, sons Zaid and Taif, and his daughter Dina still can't believe they survived.

"What was it like for you that time, when you were stuck in the apartment, trapped there during the fighting?" Logan asks Dina.

"I feel I will be dying," she recalls.

Her brothers nod in agreement. "'Cause this is the end," Zaid adds.

"You thought it was the end?" Logan asks.

"We are all are crying, me and husband, and my son, and my daughter all are crying that time," Quoresh's wife Nala remembers.

As the fighting raged for 10 days, they all hid in the bathroom of their dark apartment, without heat, electricity, and running short of food.

"We were so hungry at that time," Quoresh remembers. "So my wife said, 'Quoresh, we had to had, I don't know, the kids are hungry.'"

"I go to the kitchen and prepare something to eat," Nala explains. But out of fear of the snipers, Quoresh's wife couldn't walk upright past the windows.

"So she crawled and went to the kitchen. And then we sat in the bathroom near the restroom. We ate," he remembers.

The day after the CBS News report about the doctor and his family's plight was broadcast, the U.S. decided to launch a rare rescue mission, sending in soldiers from the 4/9 Cavalry to save them.

With U.S. helicopters hovering over Haifa Street, a convoy of Bradley fighting vehicles drove down the dangerous road to Quoresh's house. When soldiers yelled to locate them,

"We heard the helicopters starting to come to the area," Quoresh recalls. "My sons and daughter said, 'Oh, Baba, the American started to reach the area.'"

"I remember that. It was a moment really, it was a start of a new life," Quoresh says, describing his feelings of the rescue.

Quoresh's daughter Dina says the rescue was "like a dream."

His life was saved, but Quoresh lost his home and almost everything he owned. He says he was targeted because he's a doctor.

Nearly 200 physicians, including 15 of Quoresh's closest friends, have been murdered by those intent on destroying Iraqi society, which is one reason why 18,000 Iraqi doctors – half the physicians in the country – have fled for fear of ending up like many of the people who pass through their hospital doors.

Asked why he remains in Iraq, Quoresh tells Logan, "This is the big question that I have been asked from so many people."

"And what's the answer?" Logan asks.

"And the answer is that I love Iraq," he replies. "Yeah. This is my country."

Dr. Quoresh hasn't forgotten the people they left behind on Haifa Street. He and his family told 60 Minutes they witnessed Shiite fighters executing unarmed Sunni civilians, evidence of the growing hatred between the two sects.

Baghdad today is a divided city, something that's not so obvious in some neighborhoods that look pretty much like they used to, blending easily into one another. But in other areas, it is a different story. There are now distinct sectarian borders between some neighborhoods. Many have been ethnically cleansed, carving up the capital along sectarian lines and separating Sunni from Shia.

Mahmud's neighborhood used to be mixed, but he says fellow Sunnis have forced out most of the Shiite residents.

"So, overnight with no warning people were just forced to leave their homes, just told to go?" Logan asks Mahmud.

"Sometimes 'Now you have 10 minutes to leave your house,'" he tells Logan. If they refuse and don't leave, Mahmud says, they get killed.

For Mahmud this is one of the most distressing things about the new Iraq. "We don't need this. We don't need this. Why if I am Shia or Sunni. What's the different? I am Muslim. That's enough," he says.

Many Iraqis feel the same way, but the body count from Shiites and Sunnis killing each other tells a different story. Families on both sides have been devastated.

Mahmud says he has lost 14 family members. Asked what happened to them, he says, "Someone who was killed by shooting. Someone he killed by a militia."

Asked if it's hard for him to think about them, Mahmud says, "Yes, believe me. It's very difficult."

Like most Iraqis, Mahmud is so desperate for security, he would like nothing more than for the new U.S. security plan to work. With the troop surge, U.S. soldiers are now a constant presence in dangerous neighborhoods like Adamiya for the first time. But with al Qaeda terrorists determined to see the U.S. fail, and the ongoing cycle of revenge killings between Sunnis and Shiites, many Iraqis are skeptical.

"Why did they come?" Mahmud wonders.

"The new plan will not change anything?" Logan asks.

"Believe me not," he says.

Asked if he is going to leave Iraq, Mahmud tells Logan, "Now? Yes, I will leave Iraq."