BAGHDAD (Reuters) –
Living in Baghdad’s sprawling Sadr City suburb for the past 15 years, Khodr Abbas, 73, had to walk along a mud and dirt track to get to his home, where he would struggle to get fresh water to flow and waste-water to flush through rickety pipes.
That finally changed last month.
Diggers, bulldozers and other heavy equipment arrived and ripped up ground to lay sewage and water systems that were then topped with fresh tarmac roads and lined with neat pavements.
Similar scenes have played out across the city of more than nine million, part of a push by Prime Minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani’s new government to improve basic services for citizens weary of years of conflict.
Buoyed by high oil prices, relative stability and the support of powerful political factions, Sudani has focused on quick wins to placate a largely young population who have staged repeated protests against his political backers, analysts say.
The push includes improving roads, bridges and sidewalks, removing security checkpoints that worsened traffic, cleaning up facades of buildings damaged by war and revamping parks and promenades that hug the Tigris River that bisects the city.
Electricity supply has also improved, with daily cuts almost absent well into May, when they are usually the norm, though they are expected to return in summer as consumption peaks.
In more than two-dozen interviews, Iraqis said they felt guarded optimism about the future due to the improvement in infrastructure and recent stability that has opened up the country to a trickle of tourists, mostly from Arab states.
Many said these changes were the most significant they had seen since the 2003 U.S. invasion, but still fell short in a state that made more than $115 billion from oil sales in 2022 and suffers from rampant corruption that cripples services.
Sudani “wants to avoid the idea of a protest, which is why he went very hard at things that people can feel (now), not things that will benefit them in 10 years,” said Sajad Jiyad, a Baghdad-based Fellow at The Century Foundation.
“He wants to be seen as the can-do man for all of Iraq.”
A main project to break ground during Sudani’s tenure is a nearly 2.5 km (1.5 miles) corniche along the River Tigris’ east bank, along the Abu Nawas Park, one of Baghdad’s biggest green spaces.