The trip to Iraq in November and December was my seventh assignment to that complicated country. While Iraqis no longer suffer under the dictator Saddam Hussein, are back to pumping oil from their enormous reserves and are free from international sanctions, this was the most depressing that I have ever found Baghdad to be.
It's not just because the radical jihadist group Islamic State has occupied more than a quarter of the country – that's just the last straw. There's a sense of hopelessness pervading the place. Those who are able have all left, it seems; the ones remaining are either the poor, uneducated and needy or the corrupt ones who operate in every ministry, military brigade and police unit bent on profiting from it all.
At least that's the perception.
Meanwhile, the war against Islamic State is being waged almost entirely by Shia militias, since the Iraqi army isn't ready to go into battle. The Shiites have welcomed the chance to rid the country of these Sunni extremists and to get rid of a lot of regular Sunni citizens at the same time.
Many Sunnis, for their part, are looking to make a deal with the IS devil in order to maintain position in Iraqi society.
I caught a glimpse of "society" one day at the Equestrian Club, the horse race establishment started by the British almost a century ago in the shady neighbourhood of Mansour, the one-time home to ambassadors and professionals. Saddam ordered the club moved to the suburbs in order to build a massive mosque in his own name (such was the need to satisfy religious inclinations even then). The mother of all dictators gave the club a nice chunk of land and they had just begun construction on a massive stadium when the sanctions of the 1990s took hold and work ground to a halt.
A shabby makeshift structure was erected, a sloppy track created and it's here, every Tuesday and Saturday that many of Saddam's retired generals and business cronies come to play the ponies, with many of them owning horses in the races.
One of the members of the governing club told me the Kurds were building a proper race track in Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), that would draw a lot of business from Turkey, in the form of both horses and bettors.
Everything is better in the KRG, people in central Iraq say – with good reason. The Kurds have laid the foundation for an independent state and construction there is booming. Like the Shiites of the South, the Kurds are sitting on enormous reserves of oil, and they now have a pipeline to Turkey through which to market it.
Also like the Shiites, the Kurds have abiding contempt for Iraq's Sunni Arabs. It was a series of Sunni regimes, especially that of Saddam Hussein, that kept the Kurds down, that forcibly ripped them from their homes in the Mosul and Kirkuk area and gave their property to Sunni Arab families. In the late 1980s, Saddam's military killed tens of thousands of Kurds in a months-long war of genocide known as the Anfal Campaign. Between 4,000 and 5,000 perished in one day from a poison gas attack in the Kurdish town of Halabja, near the Iranian border.
The people of central Iraq, long the preserve of the Sunni Arabs, believe the country is better off united. No surprise there: Central Iraq has no oil to speak of but always liked to lord it over the Kurds and the more numerous Shiites. These days, many Sunnis complain they'd like to move to Kurdistan but the Kurds won't let any Arabs take up residency there.
Kurdistan has given refuge to about 800,000 displaced people from central Iraq, mostly from the Mosul area, and mostly members of minority communities such as Christians, Yazidis and Turkomen. They've built refuge facilities in Dohuk in the northern-most reaches of the KRG and allowed Christian Arabs to settle into Christian areas of Erbil and Sulaimaniyah, the biggest cities in Kurdistan. They don't want to take in many Sunni Arabs.
While Kurdish life has been boosted by recent events, and Kurdistan has become a boom-town, Shia culture also has prospered and its influence is spreading north into central Iraq. The sombre black tones of Shiism are descending on once secular Shia and Sunni neighbourhoods. Young Shiites in growing numbers are picking up the Koran and reciting religious poetry. Western influences have gone into hiding.
Life for many Shiites has never been so good; the same goes for Kurds. But for the people of central Iraq, especially the Sunnis and the Christians, they say there's increasingly little reason for staying.