In the second installment of his "Anbar Awaken" series, Michael Totten explains how and why the city of Ramadi in Iraq is awakening from the nightmare that was its fate while the capital of AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq). One of the surest signs of life returning to normal, he says, is a certain kind of business that has come back in recent weeks:

I photographed a freshly painted cell phone store that looked new. “That’s when you know life is coming back to normal,” Sergeant Hicks said, “when they open a cell phone shop.” “It’s amazing for us to see people out on that street buying and selling things,” Captain Phil Messer said to me later. “That never happened for the first months we were out here. Literally zero businesses were open. People were scared sh**less of Al Qaeda. If you pissed them off they would show up at your house in the middle of the night, rape your women in front of you, kill your sons, and say you will not help the Americans. Huge numbers of these people just fled to Syria.”