Iraq: Street Traders block pavements and hinder traffic
Baghdad, Iraq 12/11/2016
The streets of the graceful city of Baghdad, named UNESCO’s City of Literature in 2015, are fast becoming an open market where traders have taken every imaginable produce and gismo under the sun, well, literally out into the sun, clogging its pavements and hindering its traffic.
Baghdad, the city that fascinated Hollywood for decades as the setting for films of action, romance and fantasy in the long ago and far away of the Middle East, has probably never resembled that image that Hollywood drew of her.
But the bales of clothes, shoes, electric appliances, mobile phones and every other plausible man-made product – spread out on pavements or dangling from push carts, are certainly turning the ancient capital into a disfigured ugly city.