FALLUJAH, Iraq >> A couple of streets away from the new buildings and noisy main road of the desert city of Fallujah, there was once a sports stadium. The goal posts are long gone, the stands rotted years ago.

Now every inch is covered with gravestones.

“This is the martyrs’ graveyard,” said Kamil Jassim Mohammed, 70, the cemetery’s custodian, who has looked after it since 2004, when graves were first dug for those killed as U.S. troops battled Iraqi militias. “I stopped counting how many people are buried here, but there are hundreds, thousands of martyrs.”

As Iraq marks the 20th anniversary Monday of the U.S.-led invasion that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein, the dead and the maimed shadow everyone in this country — even those who want to leave the past behind.

The United States invaded Iraq as part of its “war on terror” announced by President George W. Bush after the al-Qaida attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Bush and members of his administration claimed that Saddam was manufacturing and concealing weapons of mass destruction, though no evidence to back up those accusations was ever found. Some U.S. officials also said Saddam had links to al-Qaida, a charge that intelligence agencies later rejected.

Today, Iraq is a very different place, and there are many lenses through which to see it. It is a far freer society than it was under Saddam and one of the more open countries in the Middle East, with multiple political parties and a largely free press.Iraq » Page 8

“The living conditions are not good. The electricity is still bad,” said Mohammed Hassan, a 37-year-old communications engineer and father of three who supervises the laying of internet lines in a middle-class neighborhood in the capital, Baghdad, for which he is paid $620 a month. “I have hardly enough to get to the end of the month, so I cannot see much of a future,” he added.

“It’s a pity. We always wanted to get rid of Saddam,” he said. “We know Iraq is rich, and we hoped it would get better. But we did not get what we were hoping for.”

Iraq remains indelibly scarred by a civil war, an insurgency and the almost constant upheaval that the invasion unleashed, which continued even after U.S. troops pulled out in 2011. Two major cities — Mosul and Fallujah — have been largely destroyed, and damage is visible in almost every major town throughout central and northern Iraq.

About 200,000 civilians died at the hands of U.S. forces, al-Qaida militants, Iraqi insurgents or the Islamic State terrorist group, according to Brown University’s Cost of War project. At least 45,000 members of the Iraqi military and police forces and at least 35,000 Iraqi insurgents also lost their lives, and tens of thousands more were left with life-altering injuries.

On the U.S. side, about 4,600 troops and 3,650 American contractors were killed in Iraq, and countless others bear physical and mental scars.

The Iraqi state’s weakness after the U.S. invasion made it fertile ground for powers in the region and beyond to cultivate their geopolitical ambitions. Among them were neighboring Iran and Turkey, along with the United States itself.

But Iran proved most adept at exploiting the power vacuum left by the removal of Saddam and at exerting influence inside Iraq for its own goals. Iran spurred the creation of a parallel military force that was long outside the control of the Iraqi government. These mostly Shiite militias have tens of thousands of fighters, including some who are loyal to Iran.

Ryan Crocker, a former American ambassador to Iraq who was involved in the planning of the war, said he suggested reaching out to the Iranians to U.S. diplomats and military leaders.

“I saw no evidence whatsoever at any point that anyone was really thinking about the depth and breadth of the Iranian factor,” he added.

Freedom, unemployment

Today, roughly half the population of nearly 45 million was born after 2000 and did not experience the strictures and frequent brutality of life under Saddam, who was captured by U.S. forces in late 2003 and, after an Iraqi trial, executed.

“Saddam Hussein was the Hitler of our times. He was the most brutal dictator, tyrant, that we have experienced,” said Barham Salih, Iraq’s president from 2018 to 2022 and a longtime member of the Iraqi opposition who, like many others, saw up close the torture and executions that Saddam used to keep political opponents in check.

“Once he was gone, suddenly we had elections,” Salih said. “We had an open polity, a multitude of press. Those things had not been seen in a long, long time in a place like Iraq.”

Such things are certainly rare in the Middle East. More recently, both have started to come under threat in Iraq as well, largely from Shiite Muslim parties.

“If you put things in context, there have been a lot of positive developments,” Salih said.

More than 1 in 3 young people in Iraq are jobless, according to the World Bank and the International Labor Organization. There are few private-sector jobs, which means that most people seek government positions. But there are not enough of those to go around for Iraq’s fast-growing population.

About one-quarter of Iraqis live at or below the poverty line, according to Iraq’s Planning Ministry.

Corruption

Government corruption has become entrenched, rooted in a system of sectarian and ethnic distribution of power that the United States pressed Iraq to put into place after Saddam fell.

The occupation marginalized the Sunni Muslim sect, which had formed the core of Saddam’s power base, his military and his intelligence services. That benefited the country’s Shiite Muslim majority and the Kurdish minority, but fueled a tenacious Sunni insurgency against the U.S. occupation that began soon after the 2003 invasion.

The conflict soon morphed into a sectarian war, targeting Shiites who formed fighting groups of their own that expanded over time into the numerous Shiite militias that hold sway today.

The power-sharing system among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds that was put in place by the Americans is regarded by many as having undermined from the start any hope of good governance. But Crocker and others said that at the time, it seemed the only way to ensure that all sects and ethnicities would have a role in governing.

That U.S.-imposed framework became the basis for the current system of government, with factions competing for access to power, money and patronage.

“The government now is a coalition of rivals” for government spoils, said Sajad Jiyad, an Iraqi political analyst and nonresident fellow at the Century Foundation, an American research institute.

He and other experts say corruption has become so institutionalized that not only the positions of ministers but also many lower-level jobs and contracts require payments.

To get a government job, most Iraqis either have to know someone in a ministry or political party, or pay someone in a party or in the department where they want to work, or both.

Zainab Jassim Zayre, a 30-year-old radiology technician who works in Baghdad, got her job before such payments became routine. She said students are now being asked to shell out as much as $30,000 for a position like hers, which pays at most $800 a month.

“People suffer from this system — not all people,” she said. “If they are middle class or rich, maybe their families can afford it. But the poor people cannot. This is injustice, and if they borrow, it takes them so long to pay back.”

Ongoing threat

Even day-to-day safety is not a given everywhere in Iraq. In Diyala, a sprawling, largely rural province northeast of Baghdad, sectarian fighting still goes on. Just a week ago, eight people were killed, and since January, more than 40 people have died in sectarian killings.

An analysis by U.S. military commanders in December found that there were “more than 20,000 ISIS leaders and fighters in detention facilities in Iraq,” calling this “an ISIS army in detention.”

In one corner of Fallujah’s cemetery lie the 27 members of the Dhahi family who were killed when a U.S. aircraft bombed their house April 6, 2004, during heavy fighting. One of the smallest graves bears three names, those of three infants who died in the bombing and were buried together.

One family member who survived, Waleed Dhahi, now 23, was found alive in the rubble. His immediate family — both parents, three brothers and a sister — were not so lucky. He lost an eye and has shrapnel deep in his leg.

For him, the U.S. invasion was a crucible of loss.

“My opinion of the Americans is negative, because if someone comes and kills my family and I don’t have any power to fight them, it leaves a hatred,” he said. “Of course, life continues, and we must start again. But I lost my family, and that has affected me, and sometimes I wish I had died with them.”