The bustle is like that of a children’s playground on Sunday. Dozens of young people of all ages run around the Ishtar Gate, painted blue like the original, which gives access to the new Babylon that Saddam Hussein built on the ruins of the old one before the US invasion. Some take photos in front of the square building with two gold-edged towers. Other younger ones take selfies without fully understanding that they are in one of the most famous cities of antiquity. The original doors, recalls Maki Mohamed, are in Germany.
“I almost prefer it to be that way, at least there they are preserved”, says this man who does not let go of a small brochure where the maps and images of ancient Babylon are reconstructed. “This arch is the old entrance to the fortress,” explains Maki Mohamed, opening one of the pages and showing a reproduction of the original construction. There you can see a high arch that was practically buried when the new part was built. On some bricks of the new walls it reads: “This was built by Saddam, son of Nebuchadnezzar, to glorify Iraq.” It refers to Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled Babylon around 604 BC and was famous for his obsession with building and improving the conditions of the city.
Maki Mohamed goes downstairs and enters through a small corridor that gives access to a series of covered vaults impregnated with a strong smell of bats. She explains that the temperature inside is minus 15 degrees and shows the depth of the rooms with a green laser. “Some Germans believe that these are the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” she says. Other investigations say that these would be in the province of Nineveh, in northern Iraq.
But for Maki Mohamed it is not important. He is especially concerned about the preservation of the place, which, although it has been temporarily declared a universal heritage by Unesco, does not have a clear future. From time to time he stops to repress young people and children, many from the area who, in the absence of parks, come to play. “Get off of there! Those walls are not for walking ”, he yells to no avail when he sees them jump over the old brick walls, some of them with cuneiform inscriptions and forming a kind of labyrinth.
For doing something similar he was arrested by the Americans, who in the first years of the invasion built one of their bases on the esplanades around this historic place. One day in October 2003, he saw a soldier pick up one of the bricks. She told him that it did not belong to him and his attitude had a direct reaction from the invading troops, who handcuffed him, took him to a detention center, interrogated him and tortured him. To demonstrate it he lifts up his shirt and shows some marks on his arms. Everything would last two months, but Maki Mohamed does not forget it. Not so much because of the torture or the humiliation but because of the pain he felt from having the troops settle there with their heavy vehicles and their helicopters taking off and landing non-stop. The commitment of the Americans was to protect Babylon from looting, but he points out that the presence of troops directly affected the building, especially the oldest part.
“For me this place is my life. I was born here. My father, my grandfather, my whole family has been linked to Babylon,” he explains. He is 56 years old, has always worked as a guide in the area and is emphatic in stating that he has never moved from the area. When Saddam Hussein became infatuated with this place in the 1980s, his family was one of the main people affected. In another attempt to follow in the footsteps of Nebuchadnezzar II, he ordered the construction of a summer palace overlooking the ruins of Babylon and the Ephrates River. For that he paid money to the leaders of his small town, Kwresh, to abandon it, and right there he created an artificial mountain on which he built his palace.
“I went in with the workers, I ran into Saddam six times, I was obsessed with this place,” explains Maki Mohamed. What remains of the palace is open to the public. It was looted after the invasion by thousands of Iraqis who repeated this ritual in all of Saddam’s buildings. They assumed they were getting back what they had stolen. The walls are painted with thousands of graffiti, a couple of them from foreign soldiers who used the building for at least two years. The marble-floored halls are used by the same young people who run through the ruins to ride bicycles or do tricks on skates. Iraqis began to come more frequently since the US withdrawal, even in the days of Islamic State, and the number of visitors has grown in the last two years, including foreigners, who are already arriving in drops.
“Lord of the bicycle, get out of there,” Maki Mohamed shouts again. The young man turns a deaf ear.