July 30, 2003
Enter Abu Abdullah
Luckily for us we have an alternative to Two-Buck Farid (see last entry). Abu Abdullah, a business associate of Jameel's, offers his services for the month. The business will run fine without him, he says. Unlike Farid, this man has no reason to try to scam us. He chainsmokes strawberry flavored cigarettes, drives a black BMW525i with tinted windows and lives in the upper class Zayoona District. Abu Abdullah comes to the Mosafer Tuesday morning to take us to al Rabiya tourist apartments on Karrada Kharij, closer to the center of Baghdad. On our way down a busy dual carriageway, a humvee bounces over the median and pulls out directly in front of us.
The soldier in the passenger seat of the humvee holds out his right hand to say stop and holds the M16 in his left to say "stop or else." I feel a chill watching the guns pointed at us. Adam wants to take a photo -- the humvee is within 10 feet of our car -- but he too is frozen in place, not wanting to provoke the soldiers. For a second it seems so surreal, like these men -- boys really -- in their sunglasses and stone cold glares are impersonating Keanu Reeves in the Matrices or Will Smith in the MIBs. Abu Abdullah rolls his eyes in a look of utter exhaustion, as if to say, this is how they always treat us. Two more hummers and a truck move into our lane directly in front of us and rumble off. We are allowed to move again but I think Adam and I leave something there on that road for good. The remainder of our innocence, perhaps.
After we drop our stuff at the apartment -- it is indeed nicer than the Mosafer -- and go out for a quick tour of the city. The skyline is punctured by four huge chimneys belching fire and smoke from the Baghdad Refinery. We pass a large number of men and boys in dishdashas selling containers of gasoline on the road. "There are so many days that there is no gas at all," says Abu Abdullah. Gasoline is 20 dinars a liter at the gas stations but the wait is eight or so hours. On the black market it is 150 dinars per liter, but the quality is poor. "Listen to that," Abu Abdulllah says while we are idling in traffic. His BMW is shuttering from the low grade fuel in his engine. Frustration runs high. More than 70 percent of the gas is imported from Saudi Arabia, a painful irony not lost on Iraqis.
We drive over al Jadreeah, one of five bridges spanning the Tigris River, into the posh Qadseeyah District of southern Baghdad. The road is lined with palms. We pass Al Abed Palace, destroyed by the coalition. We pass al Maahmoon communications center, destroyed by the coalition. We pass into the Mansour, a district named after Baghdad's founder, the Abbasid Caliph Mansour, who built the city from the ground up in the 8th century A.D. We drive by the city block that was wiped out when the Coaltion tried to target Saddam with a missile strike on April 7. More than 14 civilians died in the blast, which left nothing but a rubble-filled crater. Now it is nothing but a dirt lot.
We drive under an arch which used to have the painted image of a smiling kaffiyah'ed Saddam on it. Someone covered Saddam's face with green spraypaint and wrote "al Jaban," over it. The Coward.
There is another huge landmark smackdab in the middle of the Mansour: the shell of a half-built mosque called Grand Saddam Mosque, started in 1995 in the midst of a humanitarian crisis in Iraq which is still not over. The mosque, which was projected to cost more than $1 billion, was to be Saddam's greatest achievement, built on the site of the Muthena Airfield, destroyed by the Allies in first Gulf War. Its minarets would rise 280 meters in the sky, so that the mosque would be the "closest to god." The mosque once built, would cast the illusion of floating on water, on a large manmade lake whose outline would take the shape, if viewed from far above, of the Arab World. "The Saddam Jama'a Kabir was supposed to be a symbol for these days, of Saddam's rule in Iraq," says Abu Abdullah as we drive by the structure whose construction has been now permanently suspended. "He wanted his name to last forever and I believe it will, but on the black list of history."
Posted by Brandon Sprague at July 30, 2003 12:44 PM | TrackBack