SBS Dateline | Tales from Karrada

Meet Fouad Hady, a former film student in Iraq who returns to his home country every so often to document the changes there.

This week he films in the well-to-do suburb of Karrada, near the Green Zone. It houses many diplomats and politicians, making it a target for insurgents. Fouad doesn’t dare leave the house without three security guards for protection.

The people he films painfully demonstrate what life is now like for ordinary Iraqis:

• A street vendor who was seriously injured by the US bombing campaign in 2003 but is yet to receive compensation. “If you go out in the morning you don’t know if you will return in the afternoon. It’s very miserable.”

• The man who lost nine family members when a suicide bomber attacked a wake, and was then robbed while he lay injured. “Then they put me in a truck and started piling injured people and corpses on me. I almost suffocated.”

• The mother who mourns her son, an Iraqi solider, who was killed when the US army fired on his vehicle. “They came to save Iraq but the killing – intentional and unintentional – is going on.”

Fouad's story is a disturbing but powerful social history of a suburb that was once affluent and peaceful, but now knows nothing but constant power cuts, precious little running water and the continuous threat of insurgent attack.

On air: 27th August 2008