LIFE after WARTIME
On a crisp afternoon in late winter, Bassem Qassim, a 55-year-old militia fighter, drives past a checkpoint on the edge of Baghdad, where the city’s clogged traffic gives way to sheep grazing and villagers tending small crops next to their houses.
A couple of dozen miles farther, he stops the car in a tiny hamlet to show how perilously close the Islamic State came to taking the Iraqi capital during its stampede into the country in 2014. He points to a cluster of trees on the edge of a small community. “They were right here,” says Qassim, who fought a fierce battle against the jihadists for 3½ years. “This was our line of defense.”
The sleepy dot on the map does not look like a war front. And yet, after years of conflict, countless fault lines like this crisscross Iraq, leaving riven communities and millions of upturned lives in their wake. Now, as the country digs out from its grueling war against ISIS, it is trying to forge from its victory a lasting peace for the first time since the U.S. led a military invasion of Iraq in March 2003, in defiance of the U.N., to overthrow the autocrat Saddam Hussein.
Fifteen years on, TIME returned to Baghdad to speak to Iraqis of almost every stripe, from battle-hardened fighters and grieving civilians to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. All are trying to determine how they can finally prosper, and whether this relative calm can last. Having all but obliterated ISIS’s caliphate, Iraqis are grappling with a question that had largely receded during years of fighting, and that now looms large over the parliamentary elections scheduled for May 12: Can their country emerge as a functioning democracy, with its Shi‘ite,
