Just Another Day: Living In Baghdad

Lara Logan On How Ordinary Citizen Cope In Iraq's Capital





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Baghdad Family Copes With Life

In Full: Bombs, shootings and long gas lines are just some of the obstacles that residents of Iraq's capital city must deal with daily to survive. Lara Logan reports. | Share/Embed


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(CBS) 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."



Days after the 60 Minutes interview, Mahmud and his family stocked up on fuel, packed their belongings, and like hundreds of thousands of other Iraqis, headed for the Syrian border.

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Shooting this piece took two challenging months on the ground in Baghdad and involved five cameramen, two from the United States and three from Iraq. Life in Baghdad is so dangerous now that sending Western camera crews into the city to record daily life is almost impossible for any length of time. While the main interviews for the story were shot by Western cameramen over three days inside CBS' bureau, the bulk of the outdoor shooting was shot by Iraqi cameramen that work for CBS. The work was dangerous.

On the first day of shooting for our Iraqi team, CBS' Raad Akoob entered the dangerous Sunni area of Adhamiya in Baghdad, as mortars fell nearby. He went to the local hospital to shoot the carnage. While he was shooting video, insurgents came into the hospital and angrily demanded he leave. He would be executed if he ever returned, they told him as he fled with his footage, some of which was used in this story. Additionally, CBS cameraman Ahmed Thaar spent days on the ground shooting a 60 Minutes character named Mahmud and his family. Ahmed slept with them, ate with them and traveled the city with them at great risk to himself, all while western producers marked his progress via telephone from the safety of the CBS offices in Baghdad.