To mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, the award-winning journalist returns to the city where he was born and lived for 30 years Ghaith Abdul-Ahad , The Guardian , Baghdad was never a beautiful city. A sprawling sea of low rise, dusty concrete cubes with few green spaces, it is a typical Middle Eastern architectural disaster, expanding without any real urban planning from the 1950s. But if you knew the city you could find your corners: a narrow, zigzagging alleyway, an Ottoman courtyard, the shade of a lemon tree in spring. One of my favourites was the Mutanabi book market. The cafes and teahouses lining the old street had became a hangout for journalists, poets and artists, and with them had come the book market. It was here that I used to buy my illegal photocopies of Marx's Communist Manifesto - in Arabic - and Orwell's 1984. Last week, I went back to Mutanabi. To reach it I travelled through bullet-pocked Bab al-Mu'adham, past countless checkpoints: Shia ...