In locked-down Baghdad, life moves online

BAGHDAD - The people of Baghdad have moved online to beat the endless daily battle against the fear and isolation of life under lock-down.

Instead of enjoying an outdoor meal at one of the fish restaurants along the Tigris embankment, 28-year-old housewife Dunya Saad spends her evenings at the computer in her living room, chatting with her friends on Yahoo! Messenger.

Most of her relatives and friends live on the far side of the Tigris, and seeing them in person is nearly impossible.

"It's sad not to see your friends like in the good old days," she sighed. "But online chatting has made things better."

Since the February bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in Samarra sparked a wave of sectarian bloodshed, the internet has gone from being a hobby for tech-savvy enthusiasts to a mass replacement for the daily interactions of city life.

In Baghdad, shops close early. Cars are not permitted on the streets after 9pm. Many parts of the city are completely deserted by sunset.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to move to parts of the city where they do not know the neighbours.

"I only go out on emergencies like attending a funeral or visiting a doctor," said Zainab, 35, an office secretary who asked to be identified by her first name. "Honestly, the outside craziness freaks me out."

She has not seen her friends for months. Instead, she meets them over online video-conferences.

"Most of the time we talk about the security situation. Who had been killed, kidnapped, or recently fled the country."

Moving Baghdad into cyberspace has been a feat of free-market ingenuity.

Perhaps the hardest part is electricity. Much of Baghdad had electricity for 12-18 hours a day before the US-led invasion in 2003. Most neighbourhoods now get electricity from the grid for just four to six hours a day.

It means ordinary people have to know their ohms from their amperes and their megabits from their kilohertz.

Most middle class households now have cables snaking down the street to a neighbourhood "generator man" who gives them diesel-generated power for a monthly fee of about US$10 ($15) per ampere. Six or seven amperes are usually enough for a computer, a TV and a fridge. An air conditioner costs more.

A neighbourhood internet cafe will sell a subscription for wireless Wi-Fi access to its satellite broadband hookup for about US$40 a month.

Most Iraqis have only experienced the internet since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The ousted leader officially linked Iraq to the Web when his government set up the State Company for internet Services in 2000. But private connections were banned and the only legal provider blocked access to email and chat sites.

Today, companies have sprung up around Baghdad, taking advantage of new broadband satellite connections that make it possible to establish a mini internet service provider without relying on any centralised infrastructure at all.

Ali Youssif, whose company Infozone runs four internet providers in different parts of Baghdad, says he subscribes to satellite broadband connections from firms in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

One of his providers has a two-megabit-per-second connection -- a similar speed to a single home's broadband link in most Western countries -- which costs about US$7,000 a month over satellite.

It sells access to 200 subscribers across three Baghdad neighbourhoods, earning a total of about US$8,000 in revenue.

Private generators power the Wi-Fi hotspots during the day, with batteries offering up to 200 amperes of power to keep them running without interruption through the night.

For freelance journalist Ammar Ali, 30, the internet is a place to find love in a city where flirting with a woman can get a man kidnapped or killed.

He has only been online for about a year, but he already has a long list of "female friends" with whom he keeps in touch on a nearly daily basis. Some live in other neighbourhoods, some in other countries.

"It's not like reality. But I enjoy it," he says. "It's a good means to escape our miserable reality. At least, until a new morning comes."

- REUTERS