Thoughts from inside the barrier

An Iraqi employee of The New York Times returns to Baghdad after spending over a year in Syria.

[At the checkpoint near my mother's home] I turned my head to the left and I saw the biggest cement wall I have ever seen, which encircles my neighborhood.
...
[One of the two Iraqi soldiers] inspected my car with an explosive detector device. The other was just looking at us and it seemed that he recognized my mother’s face because he said: “Hi, auntie.”

Now I felt really safe because those people were working properly, not like the security forces in my neighborhood before...

As people say in my neighborhood: “The Americans are now Ansar al Sunna.” Protectors of the Sunni.

Read the whole thing.

h/t The Blog at the Weekly Standard.