The antiques section of Baghdad, called Midan, is near Mutanabi Street. In the 1930s, al-Gadeer antiques shop was a nightclub. It went through various metamorphoses as a storage building before becoming a shop in 1992. Radha first began selling antiques in 1977 and today makes about ID 300,000 per month.

After the 1990s embargo, people started selling their antiques for money, Radha told us. They don’t get as many antiques in these days, he says, because the economy isn’t as strapped.

In the past, laws prevented antiques dealers from selling any pictures of the 1960s president Abdul Kareem Kassen, or anything related to religious places. And dealers generally never sold artifacts because “we love our country,” Radha says, so people would try to get things back to the museum. Radha recently went to Baghdad museum officials and offered to establish a cooperative agreement between antiques stores and the museum to help recuperate looted religious and other cultural items. “They didn’t pay me any attention,” he said.

We were very happy for the Americans to come in because we’ve been living in a situation of terror that no one can imagine. We heard all these stories that when the Americans came in, life would be better, but we were only living a dream.

When Saddam Hussein would build an institution or a building, he would build the walls high, so we didn’t know what was behind it. We thought the walls built by Saddam Hussein would be destroyed, but instead the Americans expanded the walls. They put barbed wire around it and added more concrete.

After all of this disarray, I just want to live in peace and safety. For myself, I would be happy if I lived in a house I owned, and if I had a job to insure my future. I want to be a teacher, but I can’t because I studied Turkish, and there is no Turkish department.

I remember my brother’s death in 1982 in the Iran-Iraq War. They didn’t consider him a martyr because they had been transferring bases, and he was in a car accident. So we didn’t get any of the benefits usually for families of martyrs, like payments, a car, land, a salary. We got nothing because he didn’t take a bullet in his head.

To be Iraqi today is to be rid of cruelty and slavery. We were liberated from injustice. We have some kind of freedom now, but we didn’t get all the freedom the Americans promised us. It’s not a perfect freedom. I’m not talking about an extreme freedom, because it should be within laws. But we did get the freedom to express our opinions. As proof of that, I’m talking to you now. Before, I could be immediately executed.