IRAQ: Peace in the sky

The flight out of Baghdad was crowded, full of happy people soaring above soldiers, sticky bombs and barbed wire. The treacherous landscape fell away, becoming a speck in the desert as the Iraqi Airways jet broke through clouds and found blue sky, heading west toward Cairo.

Iraqis were in the aisle before the seat belt sign was turned off.

Dozens of cameras appeared –- clunky video cameras from Saddam Hussein’s time rattled alongside slender, new cellphone cameras. The plane became a kinetic puzzle of miniature movie-sets. Fathers and uncles were directors, posing families and recording an adventure, perhaps only a brief respite, but an escape from the sounds of gunfire and explosions.

One of the pilots landed the role of leading man. Everyone wanted a picture with him. He was big and broad, but patient, allowing girls to hold his arms; grown men to scrunch beside him and smile; children to strum the insignias on his shoulder boards.

Cameras meandered on long tracking shots, beginning at row 2 and cataloguing faces until row 25. Everyone was important, a player, dressed-up, passports in pockets, the Pyramids fast approaching.

Iraq is safer these days. Violence has dropped. The streets are no longer the narrow, desolate killing fields they once were. But there is still much danger, and all it takes to understand that is to board a plane with Iraqis and watch smiles appear like magic when cameras pop up on the way to cruising altitude.

--Jeffrey Fleishman, somewhere over Iraq

Photo: An Iraqi Airways pilot. Credit: AFP.

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