Baghdad Journal

To Baghdad in the Morning

It's arranged, Brandon and I leave for Baghdad tomorrow. A driver will pick us up just before sunrise. We'll stop on the Jordan-Iraq border, then race at 150 km for 12 hours non-stop.

"Don't worry, I will take care of anything you want," Jameel, a friend of Lamis's, told us in the lobby of the Lotus. "Don't worry." He is a Jordanian businessman. He has had an office in Baghdad for 25 years. Before the U.S. invasion he traveled back and forth weekly. "I like Baghdad much more than Amman," he said. "Even during the war."

We'll leave most of our money with Lamis. We'll leave equipment we don't need for the first week. There is a slight chance we might be robbed, so better to take less. Jameel can bring us what we need later when he comes from Jordan. Much safer that way.

He has been to Baghdad five times in the last couple of months. He said he only had a problem on one of those trips. He was traveling with a convoy when the car in front of him was shot at--bandits tried to pull the car over without success. "Don't worry," he said. "Everything will be fine."

Jameel has found us a good place to stay, the Al Arabia, for a good price, and is working on helping us find a driver/translator for Baghdad.

Jameel said when he first visited Baghdad after the end of major combat troops were smiling, milling about, drinking pepsi's and eating ice cream with Iraqi children. Now, he said, they are much more tense, holding guns out in front when Iraqis approach. The soldiers don't commingle as much. (Four soldiers were killed yesterday and another killed today.) "They will not last too much longer," he said of the U.S. occupation forces. Especially if the Shia rise up, he said, the U.S. troops will be gone in two months.

No more cyber tunnels for us. From here on out we'll have to rely on our satellite modem, which we connected for the first time last night in Aqaba.
The satellite is in the southern sky, so a room facing the south is a must. We'll blog via the stars--thuruya--next time, perhaps in a day or two.

Here we go.

Posted by Adam Shemper at July 27, 2003 09:12 PM | TrackBack