Baghdad - Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It goes like this. An Indian shaman visited Baghdad in the 1990s, when Iraq was suffocating under international sanctions targeting then-dictator, Saddam Hussein. He tried to convince a group of Iraqis that magic was real and that he could control it. But an Iraqi soldier, who had survived both the Iran-Iraq war and the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, wasn't convinced. “What do you call an entire family who lives a month on a government salary worth one dollar?” he asked. “That’s real magic,” the Indian reluctantly replied. That’s Iraq. A country that lives on the magic of its people, on their mystifying capacity to survive miseries flung at them over the last 1,400 years. I myself witnessed only the last few years, landing in Baghdad in 2017 to take up a post as Arabic correspondent for Agence France-Presse.