Famous Baghdad street reopens after facelift

By Waleed Ibrahim

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Children played on swings and a band belted out popular folk music to mark the reopening of a famous Baghdad riverside avenue on Saturday, part of government efforts to take advantage of declining violence.

"I have not been on an outing like this for four years," said Rajaa Mahmoud, who came with her husband and children to see Abu Nawas street officially reopened after a months-long facelift.

Scores of U.S. and Iraqi security forces deployed in and around the thoroughfare along the Tigris River, frisking visitors and preventing cars from reaching the area where government officials held a low-key ceremony.

Only a day earlier, a bomb hidden in a box of birds killed 13 people at a popular pet market in central Baghdad.

The $2 million project to rehabilitate the street was aimed at showing Iraqis that a nine-month-old security crackdown called Operation Imposing Law had succeeded in reducing sectarian bloodshed and the number of car bombs.

"The reopening and rehabilitation of Abu Nawas is one of the bright results of Operation Imposing Law," Lieutenant-General Abboud Qanbar, head of the Baghdad security plan, said.

"We will poke terrorism in the eye," he said in a speech.

Qanbar said two bridges, destroyed by bomb attacks, would also be rebuilt.