In "Beyond Baghdad," airing Thursday, February 12, on PBS, FRONTLINE(r) correspondent Martin Smith travels the length and breadth of Iraq for five weeks, interviewing everyone from tribal sheiks and ayatollahs to politicians and Iraqi soldiers. "When Saddam was captured, we were in Nasiriya in Southern Iraq," Smith says. "There was a small street demonstration and some bullets were fired into the air, but I couldn't help thinking that the news meant more in Washington than in Iraq. Most Iraqis know that even with Saddam captured they still have a long, hard road to travel." "Beyond Baghdad" reveals a seriously fractured Iraq, where modest successes in nation-building have been offset by widespread inter-ethnic and sectarian rivalry, frustration, and violence. "Having visited every major city from north to south, I sense a great ambivalence among Iraqis about the shape of the As Washington continues to celebrate the capture of Saddam Hussein, FRONTLINE takes viewers on a journey across Iraq to reveal just what it will take to stabilize the volatile nation and accelerate the transfer of power to the Iraqi people.nation they wish to form," says Smith. "The Iraqi people survived a ruthless dictator for 35 years. Now they seem paralyzed and very distrustful of one another." On each leg of the journey-his third to Iraq since the war ended-Smith finds a unique set of problems. He begins in the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, where a sense of subdued optimism about U.S. efforts is undercut by anti-American violence and fears of an Arab-Kurd civil war. In the rebellious Sunni lands of central Iraq-the heart of the Iraqi resistance-U.S. troops are bunkered down and reconstruction efforts are largely on hold or invisible. Further south in the sacred Shia cities of Kufa, Najaf, and Karbala, there are deep divisions between moderate and radical Shias over whether Iraq should be an Islamic republic or a secular state. The trip ends in the marshlands near Nasiriya, where Smith discovers old Shia resistance fighters bitter that the Americans have favored returning exiles over those who stayed and fought the war at home against Saddam. "As impressed as I was with the American military and the efforts they are making, Iraqi expectations are extraordinarily high," says Smith. "Even if the Americans do everything right, the problem is it may not be enough. The whole experiment can still fail."
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