Bird's-eye On Baghdad

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eeping up with the daily, nightly, weekly, and yearly suicide bombs and gunfights and political machinations in Baghdad neighborhoods with names like “Makes-No-Sense” and “Complicated-to-Read” is starting to confuse us. If you are a smart person who makes a living out of following the situation, sure, they fall into a body of knowledge and you get it. But for Eddie Lunchpail and Johnny Coffee-and-a-Donut (and us), trying to get a grasp of what’s going on by reading the regular coverage of Iraq is like trying to learn to multiply by ordering tapes of the Feynman Lectures. And you know what else? The reporters who write those dispatches don’t get it either. If they did, they might have told us what Baghdad looks like. Do you know what it looks like, even? Anyway, stepping off the soapbox, we asked Zeyad to tell us about the basic layout of the city. The rules, again, were no research and no deep thinking. Just tell us what the locals know off the top of their lovely, well-oiled heads of hair. MAP AND CAPTIONS BY ZEYAD KASIM