SULAIMANIYAH, Kurdistan Region, Iraq — Baghdad hasn’t changed all that much since I last saw it three years ago. It is still the “City of Cement,” an excellent title my late colleague Anthony Shadid had used for an article. Huge concrete blocks placed to thwart car bombs encircling the Green Zone and its vicinity had long turned the once fabulous and legendary city of yore to a full-fledged “City of Cement.”

If Baghdad is a “City of Cement,” then the highways linking the city to other parts of the country can be called “Routes of Checkpoints.” So much so that in some places you pass through three checkpoints within 100 meters (328 feet). Traffic jams for ordinary people form long queues of cars and trucks. If you have special passes or cards given by military intelligence, you can take the liberty of driving in the opposite lane, never mind the oncoming traffic, creating an additional danger to already hazardous traffic. And there are many people enjoying those rights.

Fallujah, but only 60 kilometers (37 miles) west of Baghdad, is in the hands of al-Qaeda using the name of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Ramadi, the capital of the large Sunni province of Anbar, is another half an hour away from Fallujah. Although recovered from al-Qaeda, whose Arabic acronym is pronounced as “daish,” Anbar had made it miserable for US occupying troops after 2003. It is one massive zone of trouble, of Sunni tribes on roads to Syria and Jordan, whose allegiance will never be fully known, nor whether it is going to change on any given day.

If you don’t turn toward Fallujah from Mahmudiyah, about half an hour south of Baghdad airport, and continue southward, you can legitimately ask, “Am I in Iraq or at the beginning of Shiistan?”