A drive through Iraq

[Chewbacca]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Apr30.html

I found this article on google. I think it provides an interesting view of present day Iraq.
Nice to hear civilian aid workers finally got the go ahead to enter southern Iraq a few days ago. Godspeed to them!

[ 05-01-2003, 01:28 AM: Message edited by: Chewbacca ]

[Chewbacca]

Here is the article from the link above, I didn't realize it required a sort of reservation when I first posted it.


ON THE ROAD TO

BAGHDAD, April 30

Donald Rumsfeld flew military air from Kuwait City to Baghdad today for a firsthand update on what was going on in occupied Iraq. This correspondent took the same voyage, by rental car and taxi. It took a bit longer. But it is the scenic route across Iraqi flyover country -- a 400-mile swath of desperate poverty and ravaged infrastructure where security for the citizenry is fleeting, long-promised humanitarian aid has been painfully slow to arrive, joy abides, and so does seething anger.

Here, then, is a look at what the American secretary of defense missed during his brief, two-stop visit. Let's start just across the border from Kuwait, in Safwan, where the Gulf War peace treaty was signed in 1991. We reach it Tuesday afternoon, in a gleaming Mitsubishi SUV.

A swarm of children, grimy and begging for water, trail our car as we slow down to cross a ditch on a thinly paved road a few miles north of town. Ping, ping, clang, clang. We halt the car. A boy of 10 approaches and seems to know exactly what has happened. He reaches under the wheel well and instantly locates the small square piece of sheet metal, riven with a nail, that's implanted in our tire.

This inconvenience seems a bit too convenient. Is this a setup? We roll ahead cautiously, but the tire is going flat. Suddenly, youngsters professing not to be thieves -- "No Ali Baba," they say -- materialize: 10, then 20, then 30. They want money, they want water. They bang on the SUV's windows.

Three British Army soldiers on patrol notice our predicament and agree to stand guard with automatic weapons while the boys mill around, fetching planks and clutching pipes with which to help us change the flat.

There's a coalition tanker truck nearby, offering plenty of water, the Brits say, but the young people here look desperate. Few are working, after all, and evidently there are no schools in session. We use our own jack but decide to reward two industrious boys by paying each a dollar. It's a mistake. A frenzy erupts at the sight of the cash.

The children, many barefoot and wearing castoffs, clamor for food and water. We pass out a few bottles. They want more. "Get out of there, you," commands a sunburned sergeant, Mark May, pushing one boy aside. Nia Owers, a staff sergeant, tries her best to distract another group, leading them away from the vehicle.

The Brits provide the only security in southern Iraq, guarding gas stations, water depots and Iraqi police headquarters. Soldiers like Owers and May are weary of this duty. "I just want to get home as soon as I can," May says, squinting in the wicked desert sun.

We drive into the center of Basra, where looters have set up a marketplace. They're selling tiles, iron bars, trowels, drill bits, lengths of pipe, anything of possible value.

"Thank you, mister," a boy calls out, pinching his fingers together in a gesture seeking money. Moments later, somebody hurls a rock at a window of the SUV. We drive faster, looking for a small hotel we've heard about near the Shatt al Arab waterway.

Someone's put up a banner between two palm trees near the water: "Thank Allied for Their Help to Get Rid of Saddam. Iraqi National Accord." (That's an exile opposition group cultivated by the CIA.)

The Sheraton, once the town's best hotel, offers a view of military statues that gesture menacingly toward Iran -- a monument to Saddam Hussein's supposed victory in the Iraq-Iran war. Now the Sheraton sits charred and looted. Thieves have even wrested most of the gilt lettering from the hotel sign. Children play on its rooftop, smiling and cheering when they see some Americans.

British sentries aim machine guns our way when we stop to ask directions. We travel another few blocks to find tonight's lodging -- a small hotel with a garden and good security. The price is right -- about $8 a night -- but there's no electricity, at least not today. On Tuesday the electricity inexplicably went off in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, at 6 a.m.

The traffic lights don't work even when the power's on. Garbage festers in the streets. Goats graze at dumpsters. After darkness descends, crackling bursts of AK-47 gunfire ring out in the distance. Sometimes those are celebratory rounds. Sometimes scores are being settled, British soldiers say.

The power returns at close to midnight. In the morning, the line at a downtown gas station is 50 cars long. Vendors line the streets, offering motorists plastic receptacles full of gas. A few storekeepers sweep out rubble while others sell sodas, sundries and satellite dishes -- a hot item here. Eggs and produce are for sale.

Though Saddam's face has been erased from just about every public location -- except on the highest streetlights, where residents cannot reach -- the mainly Shiite Muslim residents remain wary of the coalition's intentions. Some even worry that Saddam's Baath Party may yet return.

"The suffering of 35 years is not easy to remove," says an engineer named Sabah Abdul Rehman, wearing a dress shirt and slacks. "They didn't capture all the Baathi. People are looking and watching, frightened. The Baath groups are saying, 'Don't cooperate with the British and Americans, you'll be sorry. Saddam will be back.' "

It's the same refrain heard weeks ago after the coalition secured the south. The British and Americans say they don't want to occupy Iraq for long. But who will follow them?

We hear that Secretary Rumsfeld will be landing at 9. We hire a taxi driver -- Mahmoud and his sturdy 1990 Chevrolet Caprice -- and take off for the Basra International Airport, a modern, German-built facility about 20 miles from the city. It's a bit too remote for Rumsfeld to glimpse local color, but it is headquarters for the British command in this area.

Rumsfeld shakes hands with the troops and confers with British commanders for about an hour. Some Russian and American reporters, not part of the traveling press pool, ask press officers how the humanitarian operations are going. The answer: They're gearing up to make Basra the relief headquarters for the impoverished south, but that's the same answer as a month ago.

A few days ago this area was declared safe -- "Phase 4" or "permissive," in military lingo, allowing U.N. and nongovernmental relief groups to set up shop. A spokeswoman for the U.N. World Food Program says its staff is still seeking a secure place to relocate from Kuwait.

"There will be frustration," says Maj. Peter Griffiths, a gray-haired, weary-looking British Army spokesman. "There's confusion after a war. But it will get better -- things will sort themselves out."

A rail line serving the port of Umm Qasr should be running soon, thanks to repairs by British Army engineers. Czech troops have opened a hospital's recovery ward. Schools are being refurbished, too.

"There's a bit of a vacuum until the nongovernmental organizations can arrive," says Maj. James Kelly, another British military spokesman. "We can only fill that vacuum for so long."

Next stop, a Basra police station, which is mobbed by Iraqis hoping to have crimes investigated by the British Army. A harried Arabic translator says he's ready to quit: The Brits don't pay enough and the work is endless. Just today the British began paying Iraqi public sector employees $20 a month.

By now Rumsfeld is winging north. We decide to follow him -- in our white and orange taxi, which is emblazoned "Mecca Transport Co." Mahmoud, a father of four, has retrofitted the car with a huge extra fuel tank in the trunk. He likes our offer: two passengers, paying $200 each, with expenses covered, including an overnight stay at a Baghdad hotel. He just wants to get there before nightfall.

It's dangerous, he says. There could be "Ali Baba" on the roadways.

As we steer north, a favorable omen blares from the radio: "You've got a fast car," Tracy Chapman sings on Radio Sawa, the U.S.-funded Arab-language propaganda station. Indeed, on the six-lane highway to Baghdad, the taxi is hitting 65 or 70. It's hard to tell. The speedometer has no needle.

We zoom past military convoys loaded with tanks, artillery shells and cargo containers, past buses with no windows, a few implausibly brand-new Mercedes and commercial trucks that all seem to be loaded with luscious ripe tomatoes.

This part of the windshield tour offers little but scrubland, dust devils and power lines for about 100 miles. It's like Nevada, except for the occasional herd of goats or donkeys that wander onto the highway. We almost hit one donkey.

Part of this desolate route once passed through a watery expanse the size of the Everglades -- drained by Saddam in part to punish the Madan, the Marsh Arabs, who assisted a Shiite insurrection against Baghdad in 1991.

Not far from the town of Samawa, a small hut woven of reeds sits next to a concrete dwelling. It's a vestige of the Madan, who once built floating villages made of reeds.

We're not far, either, from the reputed Biblical Garden of Eden in the famed Cradle of Civilization, where science and language emerged thousands of years ago. At a rest stop, men beg to use a journalist's satellite phone. It's a fabulous item here, where nobody has cell phones -- Saddam forbade them -- and most of the land lines are down, too.

Farther north the landscape goes green: grasslands, palms and cows emerge. Barefoot children scamper near a mosque. Others pick at the ruins of a tractor-trailer that appears to have been blasted off the road. Conjure the poorest Caribbean island you've ever visited, then add in the crumbling mud and brick hovels of Pakistan. That's the midsection of Iraq.

Women wear burqas -- they're devout Shiite Muslims. Many tote small children. A man in a full-length white dishdasha stands near the roadside gesturing with empty packets of military rations. He's hungry. A boy makes the "drink" sign with his fingers as the U.S. soldiers steer their fuel tankers, Humvees and supply trucks toward Baghdad. Other children wave and smile. One wears what look like Army-issue sandstorm goggles.

At many small compounds, people fly green flags and black ones emblazoned with homages to Imam Hussein, the great martyr of Karbala. Both are potent symbols for the suppressed Shiite majority.

"We call for democracy," somebody has emblazoned in English on a concrete structure near the road. "We want to take free of our wealth."

We find a secluded gasoline stop with only a few jitneys and taxis in line. We top off with about 20 gallons -- for $1.25.

At a fork in the road about 100 miles south of Baghdad, there's a roadblock. U.S. troops have banned civilian vehicles from the main convoy route to the capital, another speedy six-lane highway. So we navigate dusty, rutted roads through unpopulated groves until reaching the town of Al Hillal.

The sun is getting low. Our progress is slowed by donkey carts, pedestrians and circa-1974 Toyota Coronas, Volvos and Fiats. Open sewage canals and smoke from trash fires roil the air. In the distance a brown, perfectly round smoke ring has mushroomed several hundred feet over the landscape.

"Looks like ordnance disposal," says my taxi-mate, Cesar G. Soriano, a former U.S. Army sergeant and now a reporter for USA Today.

The sun glows peach red on the dusty horizon. In barren fields near the roadside, young men play soccer while onlookers cheer.

We enter a traffic-clogged market in Al Mahmoudia, about 40 miles from Baghdad. Here the older male residents favor religious headgear. All the women seem to be dressed in burqas. There's a huge portrait of Saddam dressed as a holy man. His face is missing.

The sun is sinking fast. Our driver considers stopping for the night with friends in this town. The call to evening prayer issues from mosques. Then Mahmoud gets a bad feeling about the crowds in the street. He doesn't want to risk stopping. We press on for the capital.

The outskirts of Baghdad look and smell like Gary, Ind.: smokestacks, industrial complexes, a haze of traffic fumes. Dilapidated pickups haul construction rebars, pipes and other building materials.

It's dark now: we're into our eighth hour on the road from Basra. Huge patches of Baghdad are without power. We're headed to the famous Palestine Hotel, which Mahmoud can find in the dark because he's brought journalists there before.

The hotel, once the target of U.S. tank fire, is a military as well as a media center now. Behind concrete barriers and concertina wire, soldiers with M-16s and machine guns stand guard. Scouts from the Army's 3rd Infantry Division patrol nearby streets.

Some troops are bunking in looted buildings with no power. We check into a double room: $90 with breakfast included, U.S. dollars, please.

As in America, a bellman switches on the TV and proudly displays the view from the window -- in this case, the fallen Saddam statue. There's only snow on the set. Stand on the balcony for a few moments and you'll hear gunfire somewhere in the city.

Donald Rumsfeld is gone. We've missed him by several hours, of course. He met with troops and saw a power plant during his visit. He taped a radio and TV message for the liberated public that is now under uneasy occupation.

"Iraq belongs to you," he informs them. "The coalition has no intention of owning or running Iraq."