Baghdad Journal

A bad case of al-ilizdiham

Abu Abdullah and I set out in his black BMW to visit the electricity plant in the Ameel district of Baghdad. Adam opts to stay in the Rabiya and wait for a call from Ahmed Ibrahim, the former Iraqi basketball star, who we met on the ride from Amman. As Looie (sorry, that's Abu Abdullah's other name) and I drive down the wide busy street of Karada Kharij, he slows down. This is out of character so I shoot him an inquisitive glance and see a large mass of green and khaki camoflage coming up behind him on the left. "You have to make such a slow action in front of the U.S. troops," he says, sullenly as the convoy quickly goes by. "Otherwise you can get shot."

There is always a huge military presence on Karada Kharij, but usually because the soldiers love to shop there. Every morning when we exit the Rabiya, our apartment, we inevitably see a personnel carrier and truck convoy parked on the median with soldiers hefting all sorts of items into the bed of the trucks -- plastic chairs, tables, DVD players, enormous satellite dishes and bench press machines. But today things are different. Lots of military about and not just on the hunt for weight lifting equipment.

We go on, down Karada as the traffic thickens. Soon we can go no farther. One man from the corner tells us to take a side road. I notice there are no cars coming from the opposite direction. We drive down to the next street. Here we are swallowed up by a mad sea of cars -- with rivulets flowing in every direction. ilizdiham. The word for traffic is such a beautiful-sounding word in Arabic, but the reality is ugly. The basic rule of driving on the right hand side of the road is immediately substituted for the baser rule of necessity. Looie nudges his way into the intersection and then this mad sea glaciates and there is no movement whatsoever. We are stuck in the middle. A traffic jam with no rules is something to behold, especially when you are the jam itself. Everyone is blasting his horn. Iraqis honk their horns con brio in normal traffic, as a warning to anyone foolish enough to brave crossing their path. But here the honking reaches an endless crescendo as we inch our way out of the intersection and down a road parallel to Karada.
The cars are inches apart. New faces appear at Looie's window every 5 minutes as the cars pass each other. Soon it becomes kind of a drive-by mixer: There is the fellow BMW driver, a young gelled and coiffed sort who asks Looie to turn his AC on and share the air, there are the two guys in a '79 orange and white taxi (that's as old as Saddam's presidency and looks to be in the same shape -- the piece of crap overheats and has to be pushed down the street), there is the snob wearing an arakcheen, or white embroidered cap, who ignores us and reads the paper with his windows up and then there is the woman in dark sunglasses and a black scarf behind the wheel of a mirafiori who looks furtively around. She seems scared out of her wits. The honking and screaming from the drivers just adds to her fear.
"Just my luck. This is the first time I ventured out with my car," she says in Arabic. "And look what happens."
"What happened up there?" Looie Abu Abdullah asks, nodding down the road ahead of us.
"I don't know. I just got caught in the flow and now I find myself here," she says not really knowing where here is.
Other cars are overheating in the noontime sun which tops 55 degrees C. Men run from their cars and fill bottles from a hose on the side of the road and then put the water in their radiators. Of course the AC doesn't work either since the cars are not moving. Earlier we passed a street vendor selling live mazgouf or Iraqi green carp from flatbed cart with maybe two inches of water in it. "We are becoming like those fish -- cooked alive under the sun," Looie says as we crawl along.
Finally a chance. Someone drives into the oncoming lane and blocks it allowing us to race down the wrong side of the street to another intersection. As we turn, Looie asks a man directing traffic what the problem is. "Qenbela," he says. Bomb. On Karada Street.
We get conflicting reports. Some say the bomb was defused by the U.S. Others say it went off, although we didn't actually hear a blast. And then we hear that when the soldiers went to secure the area, they were attacked by RPGs and machineguns and another soldier died. We couldn't find any of it in the U.S. press so maybe it's all hooie. Maybe not.
But what's good about this, at least in Looie's eyes, is that the military is blocking off the roads for a noble and tangible reason. Usually they block off the roads to protect their own asses.
Then on our way to the electricity plant at neckbreak (read normal) speed, we drive by a roadblock manned by blue uniformed Iraqi policemen who are pulling suspects from their cars and flinging them to the ground at gunpoint. This makes Looie happy.
"In the last three days, the Americans have been making some really good moves -- arresting kidnappers and theives, guarding the Rasheed Bank and now this" he says. I am surprised. This sentiment comes from the man who said when we first met that the Americans had done nothing for the Iraqis and maybe even made it worse than things under Saddam. "At least now they did something instead of sitting and waiting to be killed," he says with a wry smile.