Fifteen years ago, Abu Ali was thrilled to see American soldiers enter Baghdad. "The tyrant is finished," he remembers saying, imagining a bright future for Iraq without Saddam Hussein.

But the years that followed have brought only misery, he said, looking at photos of three of his sons killed in attacks in the ensuing chaos.

After the US-led invasion of 2003, Iraq, freed from nearly a quarter century of dictatorship, descended into violence.

Sectarian clashes and jihadist attacks divided families and killed tens of thousands of people, leaving behind wounds that have yet to heal and a lagging economy.

In July 2007, Abu Ali's eldest son, 18 at the time, was killed when a car bomb hit a busy street in Baghdad's Karrada neighbourhood.

He had been selling watermelons to passers-by trying to escape the summer heat.

Six years later almost to the day, the taxi driver's two younger sons, Alaa, 23, and Abbas, 17, were also killed in an attack.

The losses are written in deep lines along his face, aged well beyond his 61 years.

Abu Ali used to dream of lives for his children that would be better than his own, but now he only visits them at the cemetery.

"I go to their graves every week, I feel like they're sitting near me," he said, wearing a white scarf and a traditional beige robe.

- 'Baghdad fell when statue fell' -

Abu Ali's hopes for a brighter future have faded.

"The situation does not bode well... no one thinks of the people," he said. "The parties only seek to win seats."

Things were different before, said Qais al-Sharea, a hairdresser in the capital.

"Saddam Hussein was the strong man, the one who controlled everything and scared the entire world with his chemical weapons," he said.

Each morning, when he opened his salon in Al-Ferdous Square in the heart of Baghdad, the dictator's colossal statue stood guard outside.

On April 9, 2003, Sharea, who had stayed at home that day, watched on television as US soldiers with an armoured vehicle helped a crowd armed with a sledgehammer pull down the bronze statue in front of his shop.

"Baghdad fell when the statue fell," he told AFP at the foot of the giant platform, now covered with rubble poorly hidden by crumpled sheet metal -- the site of a construction project that has so far failed to take shape.

Sharea, 27 at the time, thought "like all young people" that Baghdad would soon be filled with nightclubs and restaurants.

"We (thought) we would travel the world," he said.

But instead of progress and opening to the world, life in Iraq has turned into a case of "one step forward and five back", said Sharea.

Mahmoud Othman, a 65-year-old Kurdish politician who served as a member of Iraq's transitional leadership after Saddam's fall, dreamed of a better tomorrow.

But if "the Americans had a plan to overthrow Saddam Hussein, they had no agenda for post-Saddam", said Othman, who had been a Kurdish peshmerga fighter since the age of 18.

- Corruption and sectarian strife -

State institutions and Saddam's all-powerful Baath Party were dismantled as opposition figures returned from exile.

But corruption and sectarian tensions -- fuelled by militias born in the security vacuum created by the dismantling of the security forces -- flourished.

"We thought we'd have a federal and democratic system, but we've had sectarianism and chauvinism," said Rauf Maaruf, leader of the Kurdish opposition party Goran.

Members of Iraq's religious and ethnic minorities say they have paid the highest price for the past decade-and-a-half of chaos.

"Our country has been going through catastrophe after catastrophe," said the Chaldean Catholic patriarch, Louis Raphael Sako, who has watched his community shrink.

Every institution has been affected, according to Abdel Salam al-Samer, a 58-year-old university teacher for the past three decades.

"The situation in Iraq has deteriorated and so have our universities," said Samer, who has seen political factions interfere in education and colleagues killed by militias.

Five ways Iraq has changed since fall of Saddam
Baghdad (AFP) April 6, 2018 - On April 9, 2003, the US-led coalition overthrew Saddam Hussein. Fifteen years after the invasion, life in Iraq has been transformed.

Here is an overview of what has changed in Iraq's economy, politics, diplomacy, demographics and the Kurdish question.

- Embargo over -

The fall of Saddam's regime effectively ended a 12-year embargo imposed by the United Nations on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Iraq's 34 million people are back in the international trade arena, although nearly eight million residents still live on less than $2.2 (1.8 euro) a day, according to the UN.

With 153 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, Iraq is the second largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

And with a barrel of oil now valued at triple its price in 2003, Iraq's GDP has increased from $29 billion in 2001 to $171 billion in 2016.

But the country has failed to diversify its economy, and the government still draws 99 percent of its revenue from the oil sector.

Since 2003, the oil sector has generated more than $800 billion in revenue, but corruption has cost the country $312 billion, according to the Injah Centre for Economic Development.

- Baath Party gone -

The Baath Party -- single, omnipresent and all-powerful -- has disappeared.

In elections over the past 15 years, Saddam's secular party has given way to a myriad of political forces, many dominated by religious or tribal leaders.

A tacit system of proportional representation reserves top government posts for Iraq's different communities, with Shiites -- two thirds of the population -- previously overshadowed by Saddam's Sunni minority, now dominating political and military institutions.

- Between Saudi and Iran -

Saddam fought Iran for eight years. But today, Iraq's powerful neighbour to the east is allied with many of Iraq's political parties and supports a host of armed factions.

Saudi Arabia, a majority Sunni country and Iran's biggest rival, is attempting to return to Iraq after a decades-old quarrel that began with Saddam's invasion of Kuwait.

Relations between Baghdad and Riyadh have warmed recently with several official visits.

Caught between Saudi and Iran, and neighbours with Turkey and war-torn Syria, Iraq has regularly pleaded not to be used as a battleground in any proxy war.

Relations with the United States have also evolved over the past 15 years. The Americans have alternately been seen as liberators, occupiers, enemies or allies.

Anti-jihadist coalition troops led by the US have worked in cooperation with Iraqi forces against the Islamic State (IS) group since 2014.

- Rise of Shiites -

Once estimated at one million people, including 600,000 in Baghdad, Iraq's Christian community -- which includes Chaldeans, Assyrians, Armenians and Syriacs (Catholics and Orthodox) -- now has only 350,000 members.

Long denied freedom of movement at their holy sites, Shiites -- from Iraq and around the world -- now converge every year for massive holiday gatherings at shrines in Karbala, Najaf, Samarra and Baghdad.

The opinions of the country's highest Shiite authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, carry great weight.

It was Sistani who mobilised tens of thousands of men to join paramilitary units of the Hashed al-Shaabi, which played a crucial role in defeating IS.

- The Kurdish question -

Heavily repressed during Saddam's rule, the Kurds ensured that the constitution drafted in the wake of the US invasion expanded their autonomy in the country's north.

They have since gained territory and prerogatives.

But the 2005 constitution left many questions unanswered and negotiations that followed never came to fruition.

In September 2017, Arbil, the autonomous region's capital, held an independence referendum, despite strong objections from the central government.

The "yes" vote overwhelmingly won, but the fallout split the Kurdish camp and triggered a stern response from Baghdad, which deployed troops and retook disputed areas.

Baghdad nipped the autonomous region's project of a viable economic state in the bud, retaking oil fields that had been seized by Kurdish fighters in battles against IS.

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Iraq condemns 6 Turkish women to death for IS membership
Baghdad (AFP) April 2, 2018
A Baghdad court on Monday sentenced six Turkish women to death and a seventh to life in prison for membership of the Islamic State jihadist group, a judicial source said. The source told AFP that the women, all accompanied by small children in the court, had surrendered to Kurdish peshmerga fighters after having fled Tal Afar, one of the last IS bastions to fall to Iraqi security forces last year. The women told the court they had entered the country to join their husbands fighting for IS in the ... read more