Baghdad Journal

Baghdad's Shame: Story Published

As of last night Salon.com published our story about how children are dying because of major problems with the distribution of medicines.

Echoes

Sitting here at a 24-hour Internet cafe in the relative calm of the Shmeisani district listening to Tracy Chapman ("Talkin' bout a Revolution"), it feels like we are now in a distinctly different time, as though the swirling, rushing madness of Baghdad existed hundreds of years ago and now the city of Baghdad, like Ur, Babylon, Nimrud and other great cities before it, has been reclaimed by the silent desert sands.
But the sounds of that city still echo in my head -- nontangible but compelling proof that we were indeed there. The mad honking in the street, the gunfire, the deep, friendly revving sound of generator engines rumbling to life, the faint chant of the muezzin drifting on the wind five times a day. The voices are there too. I can almost hear the chatter, the animated discussions that often sound like shouting, the alveloar snap of the tongue, kind of a Tsk sound, when we've said something stupid or wrong.

But mostly I remember the laughter, often tear-inducing laughter, with our guide and friend Abu Abdullah about the silliness of life in a city under occupation, about the wide culture gap between the Americans and their Iraqi wards. The fact that we always seemed to interupt ministry apparatchiks right in the middle of their doing nothing -- they were often found sitting smoking at their bare desks in empty rooms as though they were waiting for us to show up so they could declare they were unavailable.
We went looking for Dr. Kareem, the electricity commissioner, at the Ministry of Oil maybe eight times. We never got clearance to see him, probably because we were freelancers but we did get permission to visit a chief engineer by the name of Nahfa'a in the Baghdad electricity dispersement office, some five miles away. But when we go to the office looking for Nahfa'a, we are told by Muhendis Nabil, sitting in his bare office, that Nahfa'a is back at the electricty commission in a meeting with Dr. Kareem. Suddenly I was seized by the twisted idea of taking Muhendis Nabil and slapping him on his office chair-fattened ass with my legal pad until he screamed for mercy, or more likely, for more. As we were walking out, Abu Adullah said a very wise thing. We had pleaded to this man, this muhendis, for pity's sake, for the people's sake, tell us what is up with the power outages, man. He picked up an official-looking piece of paper from his desk and waived it in the air. I am not allowed to talk -- only Dr. Kareem can talk or give permission. "What would you do if you were in my shoes? I've been to see Dr. Kareem like 20 times?" OK, so I lied, but eight is bad enough. "It is not my responsibility," he said. As we were walking down the stairs, I could see the look of disgust on Abu Abdullah's face. "This man, he is the bitch of chaos." That means Muhendis Nabil will not combat the chaos that has gripped this city. He'll get into bed with it instead.
Many say that these do-little bureaucrats were mostly lower level Ba'athist functionaries under the old regime who got their big chance when Bremer fired their bosses under his deBa'athification scheme. Sabah, whose genetically modified dog Rocky is probably still out on the streets terrorizing the people of Baghdad (see "Sabah's Dog"), was angry. "They took away the top ones and moved the bottom ones to the top. But there is no change. Still they are the Ba'athies."

Our only consolation? After a series of rejections, after driving hither and yon in the 120 plus heat these half baked notions seemed like the funniest things.
Of course, in the end, it's not all that funny. Adam and I are just tourists here. We always had the option of cutting bait if things got too hairy. But the Iraqis, like Abu Abdullah, are stuck there forced to bear the Venusian heat without air conditioning, forced to eat semi-spoiled food because refrigeration is often unavailable, forced to risk daytime kidnapping and carjackings, which are a daily occurance in the capital. That's leaving out the fact that the CPA government has barred virtually itself inside Saddam's palaces, luxury hotels and ex-government offices and has in many ways mimicked the actions of the dictator himself.
So we've left it all behind. We leave wiser, but more frustrated, with a sense that things are far from being finished, especially in terms of our work.
We leave with the sounds of Baghdad still ringing discordantly in our head. So much so in fact that in our Amman hotel the night before we leave, we are certain we hear gunfire. We rush out to the balcony and see that it's only the Safeway across the street shooting off fireworks into the sky. Perhaps they are celebrating some new Western product launch or perhaps they are celebrating the fact that Diana Karzon, a Jordanian, has just won the pan-Arab version of American Idol on Mustaqbal or Future TV. Either way, Iraq feels like a million miles away, in a place where they don't have fireworks -- only real bullets.

Goodbye to Zeke and the Guns

In room 201 above us Zeke and Eli were smoking hash. Our last night in Baghdad, I went up to take Zeke [see The Devil's Palace part I] the empty coke bottles he wanted for The Barn, the small café he was building within Camp Victory which made him smile thinking, calculating about a dollar a day for each of the 7000 troops living within the compound. The Pakistani, Sangi, and the Kurd, his name I never knew, were sitting with them. But they hadn't smoked. They are Muslims. Eli mixed tobacco and hash in the ashtray in front him, and pulled the filter off the emptied cigarette and rolled everything in the "strongest and thinnest rolling papers in the world" or so he said. Zeke ate from a plastic tray of pumpkin seeds and peanuts. He offered. The Kurd with green eyes the color of Caribbean coral reefs and not the azure blue of the Dead Sea, and Sangi stood up and went to the couch behind us, pushing aside a 9mm and sitting in its place. The guns at night were usually all over the apartment. They brought out the Uzi, the 9mm, the 357 Magnum, the MP5 machine gun, some of them loaded, some of them old without a safety. They played with them like toys and pretended to be spies, CIA. They cradled their guns and imagined espionage.

Zeke was talking about perspective, though I wasn't sure how he got onto the topic, talking about how everything is relative, how a broad landscape fills the eyes the same way a woman's body lying next to you in a bed can fill the eyes and be just like a landscape, saying the whole world, depending who's perceiving it, could be beneath his fingernail--that philosophy.

I tell them I'm going downstairs to get Brandon. Actually you're not going anywhere, Zeke told me. He wasn't going to let me go. He would drug me and cut out some of my organs, he said, to sale on the organ black market.

I pretended to really believe him, like I believed he was not the man I knew him to be before, and reacted to the mask he was trying to put on though not really succeding at getting it to fit his face (he said when he was in Los Angeles he had people telling him he should be an actor but he didn't care a fuck about acting) because his other face kept coming through and I could see he was who he was, the halfhappy heartbreaking nihilist Argentinian adventurer, the kind of good guy that would give a kidney to his brother maybe if he was in the right mood.

When I tell him about the police we saw shooting, he said, "You loved it. You love the adreniline rush, because otherwise why would you come here unless you were crazy. Maybe we're all crazy. Maybe that's why we come here." His eyes were red and closing, but one more than the other, so it looked like he was winking. His hair was mussed like a justwaking boy, but not like some one crazy, more like a philanthropic opportunist, he and they were here working for the Saudi millionaire because of contracts with the U.S. government, because of $3000 leases for Ford Explorers and Toyota Landcruisers for the military, more than 120 of them leased in two months, you add it up, you figure, and that's the number, the reason why they were here. And they had other contracts with the U.S. and were looking to grab more, money the main reason, nothing to do with being crazy.

The power shut out. And we were in the dark smoking hash. Eli had the joint, the orange cherry on the end of it illuminated his face, the only thing we could see in the dark. With his slicked-back gelled hair he looked the devil's son. The Kurd laughed his devil laugh. Zeke began to tell more ghost stories, a story about Saudi Royalty kidnapping people in Turkey or Peru or some other country when one of their family members needed an organ transplant. They cut their organs out and sewed the person back up and let them go. If it wasn't a vital organ they live, if it was then it was their bad luck, he explained. Then the Saudis shipped the organs on ice in coolers back to Saudi Arabia. He says there's great money in it. He was bullshitting, said he wanted to go into the business, had a connection through his Saudi employer. For a second i bought the story, he'd talked about lots of business ideas. With my encouragement he was thinking about salvaging buying collecting scrap metal. I even called my brother in Little Rock who works for a scrap dealer there and told him that a man who knew nothing about scrap metal but had other kinds of contracts with the U.S. government wanted to got into business with him. When the lights came back on I could see in Zeke's face that he was lying about the organ business.

Brandon knocked and was welcomed in. He sat at the table with us, looking tired and not ready to leave in the morning. We had started a lot here and finished less than half of it. I tried to convince him to stay, maybe because I wanted to stay myself. Zeke, Eli and Sangi were moving into a house soon. They offered us a rentfree room if we wanted to stay longer, but we were set on leaving, getting back to Berkeley, to school which was starting in three days, which we were all the more indifferent about after three weeks well-introduced to Baghdad.

"You think there's any hope for this country?" Zeke asked, then answered his own question, "No." I told him I think there's lots of potential but Iraqis have a long way to go, a simple answer to avoid too much talk which I wasn't in the mood for. The Kurd and Sangi were speaking in Arabic, almost whispering behind us, their voices like a forgotten radio beneath our conversation. "You know what they are talking about," Eli said. "They're talking about religion." They smiled when they heard Eli talking about them, then they dove back into their whispering.

Just before Brandon and I left the room, Zeke mimiced the muzzein call to prayer. He succeded in pissing off the Muslims in the room. They smiled, but I could tell they were offended, but they loved this man so they were trying to let it go, that he profaned what they so wholeheartedly believed, or maybe their belief wavered enough that they allowed it. Still Sangi castigated him. "Come on Zeke, man! You fucking guy," he said. "What? What? Brandon just wanted to know if I could replicate the sound of the muzzein because I've been living in the Middle East for seven years." He was telling one of his fictions. Sangi didn't buy it. "Do you even know what it means, what you're saying?" he asked Zeke. Zeke said it was the public call for all Muslims to come to pray. Sangi was standing, happy his friend knew what he was mocking. It was a good time to say good-bye.

Last Night in Baghdad

A policeman leaning out of his car was shooting. We didn't see him at first, so we didn't know it yet. We were out late last night making arrangements for our trip to Amman. After more than three weeks in Baghdad we were leaving.

Abu Abdullah, Brandon and I coasted through the dark as if the constant Baghdad knife-to-the-throat danger were not in the air of the Al Mansur. Our windows were down. Warm air flowed through the car and it felt as good as an Al Hamra Hotel nightswim. Pop! The three of us slid down into the seats, bullets in the air and our fear from the ignorance about where they were headed. The same sudden hyperawareness I had on that day near the railroad tracks in the Kadizmiya with the soldiers chasing after gunfire [see Riding With the 1-13]. I saw the police cars first, their red and blue lights swirling in the night black. Most of the street lights were out in Al Mansur, but there was a fluorescent blue light on top of a building illuminating a parking lot and some of the street. One of the chasing police cars drove through the light and I saw the policeman leaning out of the passenger window firing his gun. Pop! His arm stretched out in front of him, the gun bucking in his hand and him trying to steady it as he fired.

There were two other police cars behind the one shooting following each weave and swerve. I could barely see what they were chasing: something swerving and without lights, it's beatup shape shifting in the dark like something that wanted to disappear. Pop! Pop! The noise loud now, the gun adjacent to our windows on the other side of the street. We tried to push down more into the car out of sight. The bullets flying in the opposite direction. The cars flying through the night, the policeman still sitting in the window on the door. It all happens in a few seconds, and then the cars are gone towards the busy center of Al Mansur.

"This is your last night," Abu Abdullah said. "I like to make it interesting for you." He laughed a little, his intense, almond eyes betraying the laughter. I was thinking of my own death then, contemplating it the way Baghdad had forced me to for the last three weeks. "It's better knowing that you are alive," I said to Brandon, "Rather than not knowing you're dead." And if the nothingness is knowable, then it is a different kind of knowing. Actually, I've thought about that Nothingness each day. At first, it was a kind of weight. Then, with time, it became a daily meditation that put me in touch with where I was.

At the next intersection we made a U-turn and drove in the opposite direction, far behind the police chase. We pulled in front of the Al-Madinah Al-Munawara Company for transportation, the parking lot full of white Suburbans. We were out late because there had been a mix up between Lamis in Jordon, Jameel, wherever he was, and a driver they were talking to in Baghdad. In the end we needed a driver, so we made plans with Hidr at Al-Madinah. Abu Abdullah haggled with Hidr over the price. Hidr pleaded, his hands out begging, saying something about too many of their vehicles were in Jordan, plenty of businessmen, journalists and diplomats leaving Baghdad and not enough returning. Abu Abdullah sat cool in his BMW while still argueing, his face cold and obstinate, until they agreed on the price, then he was as warm and grateful as a kind brother. $170, he said, and it sounded like the right price to leave.

It was close to 10 and the streets were emptying. The only people out were running their cars hard. Too dangerous to slow down. Too risky to stop, especially for fools like us taking their time at the curb. We pulled into traffic and Brandon began dreaming out loud of a shwerma and beer. I was dreaming of getting home in one piece.

Our black car with its tinted windows like a shadow driving through the night. We start to make across a main thoroughfare. A car raced towards us, not breaking. Abu Abdullah didn't see it or didn't realize how fast it was coming on or didn't believe in the kind of maniac behind the wheel. The car barrelling toward us layed into the horn, one long, annoyed honk growing toward us. I saw the car crashing right into the passenger side door where I was sitting. Abu Abdullah reluctantly stomped his foot on the gas--I know he takes the other car as an affront and he won't be pushed around--and pulls and swerves out of the cars path. My heart like a rabbit's foot thumping up against my chest. I halfway don't believe I will make it out alive.

Not more than a couple kilometers for our hotel, we stopped again for shwerma and beer. We stopped on the side of the road where men standing in the dark sold beer from dirty and chipped styrofoam coolers. Abu Abdullah orders two beers from him and shouts the order to someone else who runs back into the dark, down a driveway and into a compound. Abu Abdullah said the house used to belong to a Baath party official, but after the war when the Baathists fled, people begin reclaiming their stolen houses and property. With three hot lamb shwermas already in my lap, I grap the beer cans from the man who thanks, You have my heart, he said in Arabic.

As we drove the last kilometer to the Alrabiya, we began to say good-bye, exchanging gratitudes. Abu Abdullah said he hoped Brandon and I understood his people and that we will speak well of them when we return to the States. He wanted us to know that just because "some do bad things" it doesn't mean all Iraqis are bad. I know he was trying to talk about the condition they're in, arising from underneath the repression and cruelty of Saddam Hussein and now dealing with the reconstruction of their country through an occupation by a foreign power, people who may mean well, but have different ideas, different ways of thinking and acting. His manface melted into something child-like and injured, helpless, something pleading and desperate, a face I'd seen before in Iraq when Iraqis weren't pretending like they had everything under control in their crumbled, bombedout, no security world. "We don't know freedom," he said, "Some one has to teach us."

We said we will email to stay in touch. I wrote our email addresses down on a sheet of paper including Abu Abdullah's, the one we helped him open at an Al Mansur internet cafe a few days before. He wanted us to call Jameel when we arrived in Amman, so that he knows we made it safe. Jameel was robbed on the Amman highway last week, when bandits forced his driver to pull off the road. We don't know this at the time, but he must. Good-bye Abu Abullah, our friend, our guide through Baghad. Thank you for keeping us safe. The man confidence and strength returned to his face. Perhaps we will meet again one day, he said. Perhaps.

At the U.N. II

There are about 15 camera tripods set up in a long row at the edge of the drive the journalists have taken over, maybe 100 meters or so from the Canal itself. The front of the blue and white four story building had collapsed. IN the driveway, there were maybe 100 or so of us rushing like eddies in a swirling river, quickly amassing around anyone who might have some information and then rushing off again. I don't know what the collective noun for journalists is but in this instance it should be a multi-eyed beast, perhaps a"shoggoth," to borrow a term from H.P. Lovecraft, who was describing a shapeless horror "much vaster than any subway train with a myriad of temporary eyes forming and unforming." That would work. And what's more this "shoggoth" was hungry.

A young Army officer stopped momentarily to speak, he was immediately surrounded, even though he had nothing to say, except "We'll let you know." Humvees blocked off the road to the Canal, perpendicular to the driveway we were in. A large black soldier wearing gogglelike glasses told us to keep back. He was trying to talk to the lady in the cream colored outfit, who had fainted and lay limp on the ground, her face covered with dirt, bits of brush and streaks of mascara. Fire engines roared down the road to the Canal. Huge black medical military helicopters were landing behind us, kicking up thick a thick soup of dust, rocks and weeds. People coughed. Old Iraqi men in wheelchairs were on the other side of the road. Had they been wheeled out to watch the show? I wondered. Then I saw some of them were shaking uncontrolably, some had blood on their dishdashas. They had been injured in the blast somehow but it was difficult to tell what was due to their original spinal injury and what was due to the explosion. Soon enough they were engulfed by reporters. I cheated and recorded someone's translator saying that Ali Hassan, the craggy faced man, sitting stiffly in his wheelchair below us, his limbs contorted and bloody, was having lunch with his fellow patients at the spinal cord treatment center next to the Canal where U.N. headquarters was and suddenly the roof fell in. The old men in wheelchairs were quickly abandoned by the crowds when soldiers started bringing the victims in stretchers. They were trying to get these people, by the looks of them European U.N. workers with nasty head injuries, to the helicopters. I couldn't believe it but the soldiers couldn't get through for a minute or two, blocked by the "shoggoth."
It was sickening. No one would move -- or maybe they couldn't move, such was the press of press people.
In the middle of all this were your typical overcurious Iraqi youth, teens who hounded you for cigarettes. Some of the journalists were interviewing them, although the ones who surrounded me were asking all the questions. Where you from? CNN? America, good. I finally asked them about the Canal. No, they hadn't seen the blast. They didn't even give it a moment's notice.
Suddenly a huge hand clasped my shoulder. I turned to find Zaid, our buddy from Iraq Today, a bearlike Iraqi guy who graduated from Baghdad U. He was distraught, there was rage in his wide dark amber eyes. "Can you believe this shit? I can't fucking believe it," he said as we walked around the driveway aimlessly following the thick flow of people. "I can't fucking believe it. I want to kill someone. I need to kill someone for this, man." Coming from Zaid, or "Beast" as his friends call him, it was no idle threat. He repeated this at least three times. "I know a fedayeen guy in my neighborhood and believe me, if I see him tonight, he's a dead man." We walked to the gate of the spinal cord injury clinic. The gate was blocked. So was the road to the Canal.
We see a dark blue U.N. vehicle with orange lettering trying to get past the crowd, back down the road. Inside we see the people inside leaning against the windows, not able to sit up under their own power, their eyes, heads, arms are wrapped in gauze. The car horn is blasting away as one man, an Iraqi, tries to stick his head into the cabin and talk to the victims. I'm not sure if he's a journalist or not but finally the car races off and he falls back.
One tall British guy, a cameraman, has a nosebleed. No, not from the blast, from the sun, he says, chuckling. He seems to know Zaid. "Let's get the Iraq Today take on this disaster," the bloody nosed Brit says, turning the camera on Zaid, who rolls his eyes at me. "I think it's fucked," is all Zaid says and then moves on.
Soon there are loudspeakers ordering us out of the driveway. A humvee, acting as a snowplow, pushes us back onto the main road and across, to the suspect minefield. Doctors, their shirts covered in blood, appear looking a little dazed. The masses surround them. We have seen 15 casualties thus far with our own eyes. They say there are many more, mostly from the broken glass of the windows.
Some family members show up, anxious for word of their relatives inside. The bloody shirted doctors are quickly dropped in favor of the weeping Iraqi mother. She turns away as I take her picture. "No pictures!" Zaid who was talking to her, screams. For a second I think he'll forgo doing his Fedayeen neighbor and kill me instead.
I then see Hassan, Zaid's boss, interviewing witnesses in Arabic, his shirt damp with sweat. He says it was a suicide bomb in a cement truck. The U.N.'s own vehicle. No word yet on deaths. He decides to go to the hospitals and check. We cross the pedestrian bridge, and walk down the highway road where the Reuters guys parked. All the apartment windows we pass have been blown out. BBC announces later that windows within a 2 kilometer radius were broken and I believe it. Hassan, another Iraqi Today reporter and I hail a taxi and ride to the Kindi Hospital where many of the victims were taken. Zaid takes a different taxi to another hospital.
In the car, Hassan calls his mom and reassures her he is OK. There was a press conference on the food for oil program at the time of the blast and journalists are among the casualties. I remember a redhaired woman with an ABC badge around her neck weeping under a tree back at the driveway. I now realize her colleague was probably inside.
At the hospital I see Haider from Reuters. He tells me there is no doubt the U.N. envoy is dead. He just got off the phone with a source in the Pentagon he says and it's true. Anyway, he wouldn't have been taken to this dreadful place. There is an Iraqi man on a gurney sitting outside. His open wounds bleed freely onto the cot. Photographers lean over him and shoot him as he groans incoherently. Of course to Haider this is nothing. "You obviously weren't here for the war," he says, grinning. "There were people outside lying on the ground, in the courtyard, line after line of them stretching out to the road."
I go with Hassan inside to the ward. There is a mustached man, an Iraqi, lying in a bed, his head bandaged, wheezing that sounds like a high pitched girl's protests. Obviously something has punctured his lungs. His friend lying on the bed with him, hugging him, holds an oxygen mask to his face and tries to get him to breathe. It doesn't sound like anything is going in, just the high pitched wheezing.
His eyes are glazing. He is looking at me, it seems, but I don't think he is seeing me, or Hassan or the doctors standing around his cot. I have the sinking feeling that this man is now dying. He is in pain, no doubt, as his uneven breathing weakens. His friend whispers gently in his ear and rocks him back and forth. In the corner, Hassan is talking to a large Bosnian guy lying face down in the last cot. His bare back is covered with little bloody cuts. The Bosnian -- Drako, he says his name is -- was hit by thousands of shards of glass but was able to walk out on his own power. He was lucky he says. Blood drips from his forearm onto the floor. A doctor appears and pushes us away. "He is tired. Let him rest."
We go over to the morgue at the back of the hospital. It's really just a small concrete outbuilding with two concrete slabs in it. Two Iraqi men who died in transit lie peacefully on the slabs, their faces uncovered. "They look OK," somebody says. Indeed, I can see nothing that looks fatal on their bodies, just some drying blood on their dusty hands. But there they are motionless on the slab. I linger for awhile to take it in, and yes, to take photos. The reality behind the numbers game. Twenty dead in U.N. Compound blast. Here are two of them. As we leave, the other, more seasoned journalists slap me on the back as if I just lost my virginity. In a way, I guess I did. "You should see some of the things I've seen," says Hassan. Then a look of surprise and maybe pain flashes across his face as he remembers something: "Or maybe you shouldn't."

At the Al Coquette

For two days political party leaders and members attended Democracy workshops led by the National Democracy Institute in the banquet hall of the Al Coquette. Twenty-five new and old political parties were represented including the Brotherhood and Peace Party, The Yazidi Party (the Yazidi clan have been oppressed and killed by all ethnic groups in Iraq), the New Democracy Party, members of the old Communist party, a Shia Party leader, and two parties dedicated to pushing women's rights.

At the U.N.

I have Abu Abdullah drop me off at the Conference Center where the CPA and Governing Council holds many of its meetings. The new rules are that you must be an hour and a half early to press conferences given by General Sanchez or Ambassador Bremer. Our acquiantance, Hassan Fattah Pasha, a guy raised in Berkeley who started an English weekly paper in post-war Baghdad, was late to one of these meetings and was then arrested -- face on the ground, plastic ties around the wrists behind his back, the whole works -- when he protested. For once, I am on time, but gnash my teeth when I see on the big white board upstairs announcing that all meetings have been cancelled today. Apparently, Sen. John McCain is in town today so Bremer bowed out in deference to the good senator, just in case he wanted to hold a press conference himself. Only problem is that McCain never showed either.

Dejected I walk down the long corridors of the Conference Center and pass a group of Iraqi guys who work for Reuters waiting to interview some CPA honcho on the latest capture in the Ba'athist deck of cards. I give them my condolences about Mazen Dana, the cameraman who was killed by the troops at Abu Ghareb Prison some days ago. Reuters has lost five journalists since the beginning of the war, most of them cameramen.
I go downstairs and am in the middle of buying a coke from soldiers behind a thick pane of glass when I hear a commotion from outside. A soldier in full gear bursts in saying "It was a huge explosion -- We've got at least 100 casualties. We need to evacuate this building NOW."
Grabbing my can of Coke I run up to where the Reuters team is sitting, still waiting for the interview. I tell them what I heard -- but of course I have no idea what got hit or where. One of them tunes into his scanner. "Canal Hotel, that's U.N. Headquarters!" he says. And they grab their gear and rush for the stairs. I ask if I can tag along.
They call themselves the three "-Er"s -- Haider, the reporter, Kander, the cameraman, Mazen Dana's replacement, and the driver, a big guy who accelerates and swerves into oncoming traffic with such zeal that I quickly forget his name and sink low into my seat, praying for a second chance. We see the smoke from a distance. Black Hawks are already circling. Haider is telling me that he was three feet away from the man who was shot and killed by troops in front of the Rabiya. "It was so random, it could just as easily been me," he says. He has been here since the war and has seen everything already. Maybe that's why he's so cheerful.
We stop on the far side of the highway to the Canal, the front of which has collapsed. There's a pedestrian bridge over the highway but Army troops are blocking anyone who tries to pass, including a middle aged woman -- primly dressed in a cream business outfit -- who becomes hysterical. She shouts, she pleads with the soldiers, she falls to her knees, as the three -Ers -- sporting blue flak jackets under their yellow "Reuters" vests -- maneuver around her.
We opt to cross a dirt field between the highway and the hotel. One man from the car shouts as I start to stomp through the dry crumbly mounds of the field. "Don't go! Don't go! Bomb!"
"Yes, I know. Bomb," I say pointing to the smoking remains of the hotel.
"No, no! BOMB." He says, pointing at my feet.
"Oh yeah, this place was probably mined before the war," Haider shrugs as he passes me. "But there isn't really another way."
I follow behind the -Ers, and step by step we make it across to the pandemonium on the other side. A mass of journalists is getting set up along a driveway to the National Spinal Cord Injury Clinic, which is adjacent to the U.N. compound. (To be continued, Abu Abdullah is waiting and we have to go back to the hotel and pack -- leaving tomorrow early for Amman)

The Road to Duwiniya and Musings on the Condition of Animals

There was a donkey carrying a bundle of dry twigs and reeds on a dirt path that ran parallel to the road to Duwiniya. "That is a spoiled donkey," Salaam said. "This is no good. A donkey should not be spoiled. He will ruin the other donkeys." We drove through Al Kassam, a small town with a big mosque--one of the holier mosques in Iraq where one of the prophet Mohamed's grandsons is buried. We drove through a busy marketplace that made good use of the beasts of burden. Donkeys pulled flat carts stacked with bricks, scrap iron, beat-up gas tanks, chopped palm wood, long blocks of melting ice, and mountains of grapes. Some were stooped over in the sun eating hay, others listlessly blinked their eyes resigned to their donkeyfate, waiting for their owners to mount the carts and beat them into traffic again.

In Al Maseeb the donkey situation was much the same. Their rump checks were calloused from their drivers hitting with sticks as thick as baseball bats. They would strike their donkeys as if they meant to kill them, and the donkey's would pick up speed before falling back into the same slow trot, what they could manage on the roads as hot as grill fires.

There were men in dishdasha (white robes) walking out of the market place, their hands gripping the legs of chickens (like the plastic sacks your average American carries from his local Wal-Mart) and the chickens hanging upside down flailing wildly, throwing feathers.

Outside of town we passed a large camel crammed into the bed of a small Nissan pick-up. It sat on its folded legs, as contained as it could be, trying to keep its long neck from spilling over the side.

Near Hilla there were lots of goat-herders roaming over the baked, biblical fields under the mid-morning sun. The goats were accompanied by an old man or young boy walking between the date palm groves, near the bombed tanks and trucks of Saddam's defeated army. The goat-herder in the middle of his flock. The goats must keep him good company, looking to him to move them, to find them good fields of fresh grass. On the other side of Hilla, we passed a beat-up taxi with three men crammed into the front seat, a large, wooly goat standing in the back, it's head sticking out of the halfway rolled down window.

In Duwiniya we were looking for a plate of dijej and timman, chicken and rice, when we passed a boy clubbing the ass of his donkey. The donkey's ribs poked out like the support poles of a tent, and it had a bloody dripping hole in his rump. The boy was beating the sore place with a stick as thick as a club, the end of it as blunt as a sledgehammer. The donkey barely moved, giving up on life perhaps. Salaam asked me if I remembered the animal rights activist who was trying to sue the whole of the Middle East for Their treatment of donkeys. I hadn't, but it seemed like a hard case to win.

Back in Baghdad I found myself eating skewered chicken in a restuarant full of caged, unsinging birds. I was eating heartily with Rahman and Brandon, and I told them we should free the birds who were sitting stonestill in their perches. Rahman said it wasn't a good idea because inevitabley the canaries and lovebirds would end up skewered on some one's plate, he joked, they would make for a full belly. The electricity went and we were sitting in the dark shoving lamb and chicken in our mouthes, the cook in the kitchen fanning the fire in the brick oven so that I could faintly see my friends faces in the orange light below the caged birds somewhere in the pitch black.

Technical difficulties

Our Internet modem is kaput. So we're stuck using Internet cafes in the middle of the day. Cannot write long now -- will do a proper entry soon -- but there's too much to do with too little time in the day. Adam is on the road to Duhwaniya today, riding with Salam Feleyeh, one of the former exiles who we met in the States. Salam is doing a needs assessment for the schools and is going to Duhwaniya to collect surveys on underage kids who have left school. I am working on an electricity story around Baghdad, and, as long as I'm here, perhaps a story about the booming Internet cafe business in Al Mansoor. Also will be attending a press conference with Bremer later. THere are one or two things I'd like to ask him...

The Man on the Tank

Something hit the back of the car, and we ducked forward and down. Maybe we drove over a land mine and the car hadn't yet come apart. We could be dead soon. Abu Abdullah slammed on the breaks and then something hit again, the sound ear-splitting. We ducked again. I looked back, but couldn't make out anything at first, the light blocked by some form I couldn't identify. We rolled forward a foot or two, then I could see there was a line of tanks and humvees, each one crowned with a man behind a gun. They must be shooting. "Oh my god, they're shooting," Abu Abdullah said, waving his hands wildly above the wheel. They must be trying to kill us. Then I saw the man atop the tank.

He had a stupid, amused look on his face, and he was pitching his arm forward, throwing rocks. Bang, another hit, rolling hard up against the glass. "They're throwing rocks," I told Abu Abdullah, who still didn't know what was happening. He pulled off the road, and the convoy sped by. "I think they were shooting," Abu Abdullah said. "I think they shot my car." Even when I told him again what happened he didn't believe me until we got out the car to see the damage. There were two small dents and two long scratches on his trunk. He ran his finger over them, clearing a small path to see better the marks the man on the tank made.

He didn't speak. Back in the car, he sat and fumed, and the anger was a growing fire in his eyes, in his clenched jaws. He gripped the steering wheel as if he wanted to rip it off. He pulled back into the road, into the traffic, went slowly at first, letting other cars race by us.

We could see the convoy down the road ahead of us. "Oh my good, if I had a gun right now I would shoot," he said. "I would shoot, and he would be dead. Believe me." As we drove, he picked up speed, and asked me if I would excuse him, he just needed five minutes to do something he said. The convoy had turned and was out of sight, but he raced after them. He knew their patterns. Every day he had seen them for the past four months. "There are two days," he said. "One of them is, Their day. One of them is, Our day. Today may be Their day. But Our day is coming." When we approach a trafficlight-less intersection full of chaos, he pushes the gas peddle to the floorboard and we weave through cars coming from all directions. At the next intersection, there is a rare traffic cop, holding his hand up for us to stop. Abu Abdullah slows the car, then swerves around him almost hitting him not caring before he has to swerve again around a gaping pot hole. "I didn't see him, this one throwing rocks," he said. "If I had my gun."

We drive fast over the Tigres. "They are not here," he said. "If they were you could see the tracks of the tanks." We turned around in the intersection near the football (soccer) stadium and raced back over the bridge, threading the needle through more intersections until we saw them, the four tanks sitting in the shade of trees outside a hospital. They are parked in pairs. And there is a space between the tank pairs, the concrete there broken and charred. There is some debris, but not much. Soldiers are gathered around the black place, looking into it as if it were a campfire they wanted something from. "There was an attack," Abu Abdullah said. "They were angry, so they were taking it out on the people." He stopped at the next intersection, rolls his window down and lights a cigarette, letting the smoke burn his eyes. He winces: "I'm not angry now. I got my revenge. The Iraqi resistance." His face is still hard, murderous. "Now you see the two faces of Iraqis," he said to me, as he drove slowly in the direction we came from. We passed the tanks again, but he doesn't look at them. "When you treat someone kind, he will be more kind than you," he said. "When you treat someone unkind, he will be just like an animal." He took a deep drag on his cigarette. He needed to talk now, to release the anger, though he held onto the humiliation so as not to feel even more of it. "I don't care about my car. My car is nothing," he said. "But they are humiliating people. We are a generous, welcoming people, we have thousands of years of civilization, we have a history, all things that We have that They don't have."

We were close to the Al Hamra Hotel, where I was meeting some one for an interview. It was late in the day, and the streets were settling, though the black market gas vendors were still out whirling their syphons at people and the soft-drink boys stood behind their styrofoam coolers and palettes of Pepsi the way they had been all day. "Most of the resistance will come, not because they don't like Americans, but because American troops love to be hated by Iraqis," Abu Abdullah said. He said he believed the troops were baiting Iraqis the same way Bush did in his speech in May, where he said, "Bring 'em on," talking about the resistance attacking U.S. troops. He doesn't understand this, why they would want to taunt the people into a fight. "Most of Iraqis hugged the U.S. troops when they first came here," he said. "When they would go from one place to another, they give them a thumbs up and wave. It is not like this now."

The Devil's Palace, part II

We head down Saddam's private highway, built especially as an escape route to the airport from the Republican Palace. We hit another Coalition checkpoint, this one in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, erected after the Iran-Iraq War (here, of course, they say "Iraq-Iran War").
"No civilian cars allowed on this road unless they have a military escort," the young MP tells Zeke. "Sorry, sir. No exceptions." As if on cue, the MP then waves a Chevy pickup driven by non-military types on.
Even though Zeke has driven down Saddam's highway every day for the last 10 weeks, he keeps his cool. The MP offers to get his seargant, who is lounging in the tent at the side of the road. "No, no man. I don't want to get you in trouble," Zeke says to the MP," You stay here, I'll go talk to him." Zeke walks over to the tent and a few minutes emerges with the sarge. Both are smiling. "He's OK," says the sarge.

Zeke gets a lot of mileage out of being nonchallant, good-looking and, of course, Argentinian. Squinty eyed, a lit Marlboro hanging from his mouth, tufts of his thatched hair firing in different directions, he looks like a stoner who just woke up after a particularly good all-night party. Indeed, he's totally out of place among the other military contractor types, many of whom are starchy and humorless by comparison.
"It's simple," he says. "I know how to talk to people."

Right behind the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is another monument to the folly of the Iraq-Iran war: Saddam's Victory Arch, formed by two bronze hands erupting out of the ground each holding an enormous scimitar, which points at the other and crosses in the middle. We ask Abu Yusif, the driver, to stop and Adam jumps out, camera snapping. It is a thing to behold. The allies would have no ID on Saddam, Looie tells us later, were it not for the fact that Saddam ordered his thumbprint carved into the bronze hands of the Qows al Nasser, the Victory Arch. I was amazed. For one, I had no idea the Iraqis were victorious in their unholy war against the Iranians. For two, how stupid of Saddam to leave his fingerprints lying around, enlarged 1,000 times for everyone to see!
"C'mon c'mon man, you are going to get me killed!" screams Zeke as Adam shoots a goofy holiday snap of him and I and Sanjiv, Zeke's partner and fifth man in the car, in front of the arch. Two military convoys have driven by without a word but it's true: we stick out like Saddam's bronze thumb.

We continue on towards the airport. Zeke points out the places where soldiers were attacked by rebels. The highway is such a favorite spot for ambushers that the U.S. cut and burned all the surrounding trees and foliage to deprive them of cover. Still the attacks continue.
Airport security is handled by the Custer Bottles company, a private contractor out of Texas who hire mostly fomer special forces guys and ex-Gurkhas, the best of the bad asses. As we head into the airport area we hear a sharp concussion behind us and instinctively duck down in the taxi. It's the army destroying ammo, we figure. Looking back we see a mushroom like cone of smoke rising from the direction of the airport.

Zeke takes us to the Temporary Motor Pool office in Camp Victory, a U.S. army base situated on the airport grounds. But Camp Victory looks like nothing but a bunch of reeds and concrete rubble, suitable for its optimistic name. We keep being told by Iraqis that ever since George Bush declared victory on May 1, the Americans have been losing the war.
It is in the TMP where Zeke does most of his business. His company rents out some 100 or so Ford Expeditions and other high end SUVs to the military at $3000/month. We figure he must be raking in the dough, but he shakes his head. "Insurance here is a bitch. We barely break even," he says.
After some business with his mechanics and the two soldiers who work in the TMP, Zeke takes us to the Al Faw Palace, one of Saddam's newer palaces where the Army is now headquartered. "The soldiers are there, 30 to a room, they sleep there, they hang their underwear and socks on the windows to dry," says Zeke. "If Saddam were to see this, believe me, he'd kill himself."
The Al Faw Palace is named after a southern town that was occupied by the Iranians and then won back in a bloody siege that cost thousands of lives. It is set on an artificial lake, so still it looks like blue-green glass. All around the lake are Roman-style villas. Some of them are still being built. We are shocked to see Coalition hired construction crews all around the lake finishing the job that Saddam started. "Looks like Hyde Park," says Zeke with a laugh.
Zeke takes us to the entrance controlled by the Australian forces. They greet him warmly and say, "No worries, mate" when he asks if Adam can photograph the palace. They have five of Zeke's SUVs in the parking lot outside. We walk in to the circular shaped main hall whose ceiling is eclipsed by the largest crystal chandolier I've ever seen. It must be four stories high and looks like a glowing UFO in decent.

Near the main entrance, which the Americans now use as a gym, sit a titan-sized throne, guarded by 10 foot tall copper colored coffee pot. On the back of the huge chair is a minature carving of the gold domed al Aqsah Mosque in Jerusalem. The Arabic inscription written in gold in a parabola shaped line under the minature reads: "Victory is from God and soon we will retake Jerusalem." I sit on Saddam's throne. It is not at all cozy. You can't lean back for all the busy, Israel-themed rodomontade behind you. Adam takes my picture. A nice souvenir. Everyone takes their turn. But when Adam goes to take Abu Yusif's picture on the throne, he waves his hands frantically and stands up, away from the evil furniture. "He is Shia," explains Deena, an Iraqi woman working as a translator for Zeke, later when we are all back at the TMP. "He says if Saddam comes back and sees this picture of him on his chair, he will be angry. I tell you, Iraqi people believe Saddam is like a devil. Every day we hope for him to die but he will not die. Even now we believe this."

The devil's palace, part I

It's early morning. A soft grainy light hits the buidling tops but it's still cool and breezy on the street below. We're in line to enter the grounds of the Republican Palace, the nerve center of the Coalition Provisional Authority. There are five of us crammed into a small orange Honda taxi suffering from a cracked windsheild and a bad tank of gasoline. Meanwhile, Adam and I are trying our best to look like engineers. That's the ruse our buddy Zeke (see previous entry "Three days of images") has cooked up for us to fool the MPs at the gate. But beyond sitting up straight, adjusting our glasses, and trying to act serious we have no idea what engineers, who are new to the palace and have no ID badges, are supposed to look like. I have put lots of pens in my shirt pocket for good measure, but I suddenly realize I haven't shaved for days. As we roll towards the cement blockade, the barbed wire, the grim-faced GIs in full gear in front of the white sign with red lettering saying: "No unauthorized personnel," we think maybe this wasn't such a brilliant idea.

"Ahh, shit man," said Zeke, "mostly we get Latino guys at the gate. Forty percent of the military are Latinos, they don't give a shit, they're bored out of their minds. When they see me, a Latino brother who is saying, 'Que pasol, amigo?', they laugh and wave me through! No problem."
That was five minutes ago. Zeke is now looking among the grim faces for his Latino brothers, but they are all white, and all of them are checking IDs. "I don't know any of these guys," he says. "We may be in trouble."
But when the taxi finally sputters up to the gate, the guards seem more suspicious of Abu Yusif, Zeke's Iraqi driver, who is still getting his paperwork processed through the military. Zeke flashes the all-important "no escort" badge in his "Iraqi Freedom" badge holder and promises he'll have Abu Yusif's credentials straightened out by the next visit. Nodding robotically, they let us go.

The grounds of the Republican Palace is actually a small town, two square miles of tree lined boulevards and parks, triumphal arches and monuments to the megalomania of Saddam Hussein. The palace itself seems to be a mile long, marked by four huge iron busts of Saddam dressed like a medieval Arab warlord in a chainmailed helmet. We park behind the palace. At the palace gate itself there is another checkpoint. Zeke has to call one of his friends at Kellog, Brown and Root, to come out and escort us back inside.

The palace is laid out in gray and white marble, but in the KBR wing, they have grafted their own sense of reality on top of that, building bare wooden walls and doors over the marble to give it an office feel. But the KBR walls only go up 7 feet or so -- nowhere close to reaching the high vaulted ceilings. So one is left with the impression that the little people of Munchkin City have taken over the palace. Tyson, the services manager who Zeke wants to talk to, is in a meeting. We wait in a makeshift lobby with a sign -- really just a plain piece of paper on the wall --listing the instructions for using the KBR employee "moral phone:" You can only use the moral phone with your own credit or calling card. You can only use the moral phone for 10 minutes. You must exercise noise discipline. Soon a man sits down and picks up the cradle of the phone on a nearby desk in the lobby. He is wearing a fishing cap that reads "St. Lucia." He speaks with a heavy accent when we ask him about the meaning of a moral phone. He has no idea what that is and what's more, he says, he can't get through to anyone on this damn phone.

Tyson is still busy. Zeke decides to take us on a tour of the rest of the palace. We walk by rows and rows of mobile homes. KBR, USAID, the CPA all get free rent at the palace, he says. We are questioned by a guard at the main entrance, a Nepalese in shades and with an Australian army wide-brimmed hat. Zeke says he's an ex-Gurkha. The Gurkhas fought in Iraq for the British during the World Wars and the Gulf War, but their regiments were downsized after the Brits left Hong Kong in 1997. Now many Gurkhas are back here working as security guards. This Gurkha seems satisfied when we flash our blue passports and in we go, into the sanctum sanctorum.

Inside, it's like the Emerald City of Oz, we walk down marble halls, past US AID offices, cafeterias, a KBR barber and beauty shop, until we feel tired out. Zeke says we've only seen perhaps 3 percent so far. I have the sense that even though no one seems to notice these four civies, two of them without Iraqi Freedom (tm) badge holders, we are being watched step by echoing step down the marble corridor. Zeke stops us in front of an ornate glass door which has gold leaf inlays of Koranic writing encased in it. He tells us this is Saddam's chapel. We furtively peek inside and see a huge mural, 15 feet high at least, depicting missiles emblazoned with Iraqi flags blasting towards heaven. This was Saddam's idea of god. His god was a SCUD.

Back at KBR, we meet Tyson, a young, large headed, puppy-eyed guy who looks like my resident director back in college. He needs a back-hoe desperately. The one he ordered came with its back end in a shambles. Can't trust these damn suppliers, man. Zeke says not to worry -- he just happens to have one back-hoe coming from Nassariya tomorrow. He'll hook him up, he says. Tyson looks eternally grateful. On our way out we are almost run down by a musclar giant with a tatoo that reads "death" on it. Definitely not one of the munchkins. He marches by and disappears through one of the makeshift wooden doors. Who are these guys, we wonder, as we leave the palace and its millions of eyes.

Birthday in Baghdad and Bremmer's Hand

After four days roaming hospital wards--some of the worst suffering I've ever seen--I have a kind of hangover. My stomach was sour this morning for the first time since Amman. Didn't fall asleep last night until four a.m. Then I was swimming in a summer-warm Gulf of Mexico scooping sand dollars from the ocean floor. I brought them to the surface for light, to let them breathe. After a second I let them go and swam back down into the blue with the sand dollars floating around me. The most peaceful dream I've had since I arrived two weeks ago.

I woke without covers, because four days ago one of the housekeepers stole my top-sheet, which had been the flat sheet I'd ripped from the other bed in the room (apparently there's a One Bed, One Sheet policy), and I never use the thin blanket which scratches like a big Saltine. It was my birthday. The heat was already overpowering the air conditioner. I sweat. I was in Baghdad. I was a bit depressed about the fact. But I got over it when I stumbled out of bed and into the living room and Brandon behind the computer sang me a little birthday diddy kind of funny.

I settled my stomach around noon with a mushroom omelette and a Coke, in time, I hoped, for a follow-up interview with Hassan Fattah Pasha. An Iraqi-American, Pasha is the editor of Iraq Today, the only English-language newspaper published in Baghdad. He grew up in Berkeley, though his family figured prominently in the modern birth of Iraq. His family left in 1963. I spoke with him this morning via a satellite phone with a bad connection. He told me he'd been arrested yesterday just before the U.S. picked Iraq Council president, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, was to brief the press. The details of Hassan's arrest lost in the ether. Later when I talked with the newspaper's managing editor Mustafa, he summed up the situation this way: "It was like the scene at a club, man, where you que up"--he's an Iraqi-Brit--"to wait to get to the front, and when you finally get there, your name is not on the list. So when they won't let you in, you que up again, hoping you'll get a different doorman. The guard working the door to the press conference was the asshole doorman. He was even letting in more women than men into the press conference. I don't know why it was such a problem to get in to see Jaafari." Mustafa's most recent editorial is entitled, "Lions Led by Donkeys."

The interview with Hassan never happened. I had difficulty getting in touch with Abu Abdullah, who was off dealing with his own business. While I wait for the phone to ring I chat downstairs with the small gang of building managers: Guis, the one who has had heart surgery,and the matronly woman always behind the counter, and the royal-looking man with eight children. Late nights when I can't sleep I often go downstairs to talk with them. They are a kind of mixed Christian and Muslim family always inviting me for tea, breakfast and lunch. The man with eight children hands me the rest of his Mountain Dew--a liquid I would never think to drink, I drink gratefully--and ushers me outside. I think he is going to drive me to my interview, but instead he tries to hail one of the beat-up taxis racing down the street. I tell him it is too risky for me to get in a taxi. I slap my camera bag. "Alibabas?" he asks and smiles. Yes. "Habibi," he says, a term of endearment, sometimes used between friends. He offers to go with me, but I refuse, not wanting to impose. We walk back inside and he invites me to lunch with him and the others. I sit and they feed me rice, bread and potatoes, a kind of birthday lunch without any of them knowing.

The owner of the apartment building, who had been counting dinars and dollars in his office in the back, comes in and sits with us. He flicks on the television. Some 80's, evening soap opera with translation in Arabic. Nobody watches it. The owner asks me what I do for a living. He asks me what I did before I came to Iraq. Then he tells me you doesn't trust the media. Not Al-Jeezera. Not Al Arabiya. Not the Western media. "They all tell lies," he says, though he watches the news every day to stay connected, educated. He then asks me why the Americans are making life so difficult for Iraqis. He didn't want me to answer so much as he wanted to communicate, to have me listen.

At that moment, I think of the venting people in the Al-Wiya hospital ward the day before [see Of Mobs and Men]. One man sitting on his sick son's bed told me to enjoy the Petrol the U.S. was stealing from Iraq. "Bil A'afiya," he said--I hope you have a good stomach to eat it. Abu Abdullah has used the same expression, though usually before meals that may prove difficult to digest.

The owner of the building tells me more of his ideas, these about Bremmer, about the American soldiers roaming in his home. He folds a small stack of dinars over his fat index finger and counts. He hands money to the apartment managers as they leave the table in front of the TV. Two visitors come in he doesn't know or doesn't know well enough, and immediately he shuts his mouth. Still there is little trust here with people sharing strong opinions. He invites me into his office. He wants to talk more, though in private.

"They say they give us freedom," he says, "But what freedom? What does Freedom mean? It is only an idea. An idea They have. Saddam is gone, but we are still the same. We still have the same mind, the same fear." He presses a finger to his head. "This is the same. Electricity, power, water, this can be fixed in a month, in two months, in a year," he says. "But the Peoples' minds cannot change so quickly." He says Saddam crushed the will of the people. He ruled from behind the walls of his palaces, closed off from the people. He tortured the spirit of Iraqi people, he says.

He says Bremmer and the Coalition Provisional Authority live behind the same walls. It's true: the Coalition's compound is located in one of Saddam's palaces. Bremmer and other adminstrators sleep in air-conditioned trailers on the palace grounds. Companies like Bechtel and Haliburton's subsidiary K.B.R. also have palace space. Lately, the C.P.A. has been at work building a security wall as a buffer between them and potential enemies. The owner says, Like Saddam, they plan in secrecy without consulting the people. He says he doesn't know of one civil institution, including hospitals and schools, Bremmer has visited since he arrived. He says "the Americans" make their own decisions without thinking of the people. He thinks it is the wrong message for the Americans to be ruling Iraq from a place that has become the symbol of their humiliation and disempowerment.

"You must start with the human," he says. "Then you can rebuild people's minds. But Bremmer and the Americans, they don't listen. They are behind a huge wall. And we can't touch them. They live in Saddam's palace. Behind the same wall. They don't know who we are. They don't ask us what we want. If I could just say to him, what I'm saying to you. If I could take Bremmer's hand and walk with him, touch him, then I would know he's not the enemy." He stretches his arm out and pretends to take Bremmer's hand. "But the American's are above us talking down, shouting orders. How can I reach him if he is way up there? How can Bremmer see me?" He says this is the occupying power's biggest mistake. "Saddam has taught us that the American is enemy. We were told lots of things. But I am a Christian. I am different from Muslim. I am more open," he says quietly. Some of his Muslim companions are in the next room. "But still, Saddam is gone, but we are still suffering from him. I still look and see you, American, you are the enemy." He points at me, but we're talking like new friends. He looks deeply hurt, like he wants to cry. He forces himself to hold his head up, a man tired of humiliation. "You have to start with the basic," he says. "That is, the Human. What does freedom mean to Iraqi people if we are not free in our minds?"

Of mobs and men

We did many things today, but two things stand out especially. 1) We went to yet another hospital and this time we were mobbed by angry Iraqis who thought as Americans we might be able to talk some sense into L. Paul Bremer and 2) met the inventor of the inflatable penile implant (who also happens to be the newly appointed Iraqi Minister of Health). He's clever, this inventor/doctor person. Adam says he defused my line of questioning with his teeth, which he'd show us in a wide Cheshire grin at the end of every answer. This may be true.

I was still chuckling about the penile thing when I should have asked him the hard questions. This clever man even set us against each other. I got miffed at Adam for mentioning I was a softy in the interview and brooded in the back seat as we drove to our next assignment. It took some really bad dijej shwarma from the Spinich for us to move on as a team.

The Spinich is a trendy, Popeye-themed restaurant close to the Bab al Muadham district which, oddly enough, has no spinach dishes to speak of. They only have Iraqi kebabs and shwarma, like the kind we eat -- and then immediately swear off -- every lunchtime. Shwarma comes in two varieties, lehem, meat, and dijej, chicken. Adam and I, we do the dijej. But with the food-spoiling heat -- cooler today at about 124 degrees -- and the electricity being cut every three hours, meat and chicken doesn't stand much of a chance staying fit for human consumption there on the rotissery spit for too long. We invaribly arrive at a restaurant just when the dijej, or chicken, decides to get funky.

At the children's hospital, we try to give the parents some candy -- Skittles along with other individually wrapped hard stuff -- for their sick little ones. I give the bag of candy to one lady in a black hajib who looks the most matronly.

But the others in the ward immediately swarm around us saying they didn't need any stinking candy, they needed faloos, money, al-kehreh , electricity and Detol, a kind of detergent to clean the filthy puddles on the floors of the hospital. What could we do for them, they asked Abu Abdullah. These American journalists. What could we do? They wanted us to bring their complaints -- and there were many in that stiffling hot, airless ward -- directly to Ambassador Brahmur, as they called him. They had waited for the "mother of nations" to get the country set on the right course, they said. And they waited, for one, two, three, four months. And so far, leshay, nothing, but this bag of crappy candy. I wondered, as we made our escape, how widely the Cheshire cat man, the newly appointed Minister, this inflatable penile implant inventor, would smile in front of the people in that ward.

A drive in the country

We are headed to the hospital near Old Deahlah Bridge, some 50 Kms south of Baghdad. Once we are across the New Deahlah Bridge, which has been blown out of existence and rebuilt as a clattering metal one laner, we hit the open countryside on the Saddam Highway. It's like jumping into a time machine -- going backwards fast. Men in dishdashas, boys, sheep all jostle for small slices of shade provided by the few deciduous trees that dot the landscape. The buildings we pass shrink in size until they are simple mud brick dwellings that are the color of sand. The ones that have no windows or doors look as though they could have been built by the Sumerians 20,000 years ago save for the palimpsets of shop signs faded by the wind and time. Then we see a severly damaged armored humvee hanging precariously off the bend of an offramp and are snapped back suddenly into the present.

That is only the latest destruction, brought on earlier in the morning by an improvised explosive on the road which, we learned later watching al Arabiya, injured two soldiers. We follow, in reverse, the battleground the Coalition troops made on their way to Baghdad in April. The sides of the highway are littered with abandoned truck and bus parts -- chasses, cabins, axles. There are so many that Adam tells our driver Abu Abdullah to go into the scrap business. Abu Abdullah laughs but then says he did try shipping 12 truckloads of iron to Jordan and was turned back by U.S. soldiers guarding the border. "They said nothing leaves Iraq, orders from the CPA," Abu Abdullah replies not without a note of bitterness.

Finally we arrive to al Wafaa, the town with the old bridge. The hospital must be near by. The town is a forsaken place with trash everywhere. Sunburnt leathery faces wrapped in dirty kaffiya watch us suspiciously. Attacked by flies and the heat, vendors at the farmers market cover their meat and fruit stalls with rags and pieces of cardboard. Abu Abdullah asks directions quickly from the best dressed man on the street -- his shirt reads "fashion club." The man points in one direction and Abu Abdullah guns the BMW down the street. He says we mustn't tarry in a lawless place like this.

At the hospital, we find three doctors sitting in a bare office -- no phone, no papers, no computers. Just a desk and some chairs. They all speak English well. They say the hosptial was looted after the war. Everything from AC units to lab equipment was stripped off the walls. Two nearby clinics -- one for TB and one for AIDS -- were destoyed. They say the medicine was stolen too. And they say they've been waiting for a certain drug, one they really needed. It's for combating rabies. They say a crazed dog, frothing at the mouth, broke into a nearby family's home a month or so ago and bit all the children -- five sisters. The doctors were unable to treat them and now one of the girls has already died. Can they get the drugs? We ask. Yes, but it is too late, they say. The drugs will do them no good now. They are simply at home, one by one they wait for their death. We've been visiting hospitals for several days now and each time we leave one, we've felt helpless and ashamed and exhausted. This time is no exception.

Her Baby is Very Sick

A woman at a children's hospital in Baghdad
says the life of her ill son is in God's Hands.

Jordanian Embassy the Day After

The death toll from the car-bombing rose from 11 to 17 today.
All those killed in the attack on the Jordanian Embassy were Iraqi.
The explosion yesterday blew a vehicle straight into the air
and onto the roof of an adjacent house.

Three Days of Images

I.
A man who works downstairs tells me he rushed two Iraqis to the hospital yesterday after the humvee exploded in front of our apartment. He witnessed the whole scene--he tells me about it today over a breakfast of sweet tea and bread. He has images in his mind. He tells me he saw two American soldiers who had their legs severed from the blast. This image stays with him. Other people in Baghdad had their images too. Yesterday produced lots of images, real and imagined. An AP photographer I spoke to said a soldier had his knee cap blown off in the same incident. A San Francisco journalist still had the image of the severed head of a little girl from the Jordanian Embassy car-bomb a few hours before, as he drank his tonic water and laughed uncomfortably in the Al Hamra Hotel cafe later that night.

Graham, the Getty Photographer, and his wife, "She's a shooter too, man," had their images, but they weren't talking about them. He was lounging poolside. His wife was swimming. He was waiting to order beer. "He's fuckin' lyin' man," when I ask him about the little girl's head. "I didn't see anything like that." But other reporters saw the same scene, the detail about the little girl was written into Reuters and AP stories. The war photographer doesn't believe the image. He sent his images back to London. They were already in circulation on the web, would be in tomorrow's newspapers. "This is what we come here for man," he said.

II.
Two days ago we were in Al Waiya children's hospital, talking to a man whose son stopped eating just after the U.S. bombed Baghdad during the first Gulf War. The son, Shwakat, was 6 months old at the time. Now 13, he is totally wasted. His skin is a powdery white, his eyes roll into the back of his head, his bony hands are like dead crabs on his chest. His father spoons him milk from a small glass, then squeezes his nose to get him to swallow. The father has a haggard face. He wears a wool, grey glove on one hand, the hand holding the milk. He's angry at the U.S. for bombing, he's angry at Saddam, at his sons, who starved the people of Iraq. The boy wheezes when he breathes. Like a weak, boy Christ he bleeds from his ankles. He wears diapers. There's a generic cartoon character on his t-shirt which reads CIRCUS. He's epileptic the doctor informs us. He has permanent brain damage. I could post the photographs, but their affect is numbing, too real, or not real enough. In life, he looks like the worst suffering boy, a horror. In the photographs, he looks like a puppet created in a Hollywood studio.

III.
Last night I dreamt Brandon and I interviewed Saddam Hussein. Then I dreamt I was in Oakland, in a bad part of town, when a fight broke out and some men began to beat the hell out of each other. The image of a man taking a pipe to another man's head, and the blood, and the glass on the street, like the shop glass everywhere in front our building.

IV.
The nervous face of the soldier from Virginia a few days ago in the shop next door to the Alrabiya. His skinny face, his beady eyes alert, wary. He kept shifting under the weight of his 40 pound vest and gear. The image of his captain haggling over the price of DVD players they were buying there. The Virginia soldier watching the door, blocking the back half of the store. He holds his gun across his chest, with his finger near the trigger. I see his face, when I imagine the injured soldiers.

V.
Mohammed, an Iraqi driver working for businessmen in the apartment , told us last night he pulled one of the injured soldiers into the lobby of the Alrabiya. The soldiers leg was broken. The man who translated for the driver said, "Then he caressed the soldier. He was crying from fear. Mohammed wiped his tears. He caressed him and wiped the blood from his face, from his arms."

VI.
The Basqe Argentinian's 9mm Berreta, the clip out on the table downstairs in the living room last night. Bullets next to a brass fish, next to an ashtray. He bought the gun from the U.S. military. Also on the table, a No Escort badge with his passport image. He has all access to Saddam's palaces, to CPA headquarters. He works for the Saudi businessman, who has a work contract with the U.S. government. Ezekequial Garat, the Argentinian, the son of an ambassador, tells us a story of a soldier finding five of Saddam Hussein's Mercedes. The soldier drives over them in a tank, destroying them completely. The image of the flattened cars sticks with him. He thinks it's a story, a good story, one for the newspapers.

VII.
This morning there is a charred hole in the ground where the humvee was parked. There are people sweeping the sidewalk across the street, sweeping the glass and rubble. The building edifice is burnt and full of holes. I photograph the scene. I want the images, the story in them. The glass blown out of every window. The young man dumping a wheel-barrow full of trash in the charred hole in the middle of the street. The satellites still standing on the sidewalk. The sun rising above the buildings, the hot dust in the air above the street.

Bad day

Helicopters are flying close tonight. I can hear the whump whump of the propellers concuss on the windows as they pass by. They are buzzing our building every five minutes; probably because some hours ago, in broad daylight, resistance fighters blew up a humvee right outside the Rabiya, our hotel. Thankfully we were attending a press conference at the Iraqi Forum and listening to General Sanchez, commander of forces here in Iraq, talk about the attack on the Jordanian Embassy earlier, which killed 12 people and injured scores. Coming back from the conference, we find several blocks of Karada Kharij closed off, guarded by tanks and armored cars while choppers circle overhead. Clouds of smoke are coming from somewhere up the street, but we aren't sure exactly from where. What the hell is going on? Is it our building that's on fire? We wonder. I have that sinking feeling in my stomach -- more like plummeting, really -- and for once it's not the food we've eaten: We have read tons about the attacks on U.S. troops of course and we drive by the places they have occurred daily. But now they have fallen on our doorstep.

A soldier at the blockade tells Adam the road wouldn't be clear for a couple hours but he won't tell him what happened. Feeling helpless, we move on. At the Hamra Hotel some two miles away, we try to call our hotel, but it's busy. Adam visits the AP guys in their hotel room office. They are "in the thick of it," he says. What they hear is a humvee was completely destroyed in the attack, with two soldiers dead and another without a kneecap. We have a beer at the Hamra cafe with another journalist who was just at the other scene -- the Jordanian Embassy bombing -- which is across town from our hotel. He said he saw smoking car parts 300 yards away from the blast site. That's how he could tell it was a car bomb. In addition to car parts and debris, he said he also stepped over a small girl's severed head on his way to the grisly scene at the embassy.
We call our hotel and upon receiving word that the road is open, we drive back. Our driver/translator Abu Abdullah was right in saying over and over to us that no place is safe in Iraq, but even he didn't know how right he was. Karada is a place where many troops came and shopped. They had been relaxing their guard a bit as they did so, interacting with the shop owners and exchanging jokes with the Iraqi kids who would gather in droves to talk to them. As we pull in front of Rabiya, we see the twisted, upturned concrete on the median where the humvee had been. Some windows of the hotel lobby have been broken, most likely by the impact of the blast. In the lobby, we talk to an eyewitness. His name is Mohammed, a driver for the military contractors who are staying in the apartment above ours. He tells us that the rebels put an IED in a flowerpot and used a remote control to detonate the bomb. The blast sent the vehicle flying in the air, Mohammed said. But the soldiers figured it was a RPG attack from the three-story yellow-brick buidling directly across from our hotel. The soldiers then went crazy, unloading everything they had on the three story building, causing it to burst into flames. AFP reported there was return fire. That the resistance was everywhere firing their kalishnakovs at the troops below. But Mohammed says there was no one but the merchants and shoppers, one of whom was shot in the head in the confusion as the soldiers fired wildly -- perhaps at no one. People stood over him screaming for help but he bled to death on the sidewalk. The story about this attack has been dwarfed by the embassy bombing so we are unlikely to see much more detail about it. In the meantime, we are OK. The choppers have left the area, for all is quiet, save for the faint whistle blowing of the night watchmen on our street, the first comforting sound I've heard all night. Now I'll try to get some sleep.

Sabah's dog

We visit the home of Sabah Abdi Abdulla, octogenarian and former national weightlifting champion of Iraq. Sabah is Abu Abdullah's father-in-law. He greets us in his wood panelled den which is filled with five decades worth of gold trophies, banners and faded photos of him and other, equally barrel-chested men toting dumbells. Dressed in a white dishdasha and an embroidered arakcheen or cap, the little wizened man can still bench 90 kilos.

So happens he graduated from the University of Florida, Gainsville in 1958 with a BS in Physical Ed. We are brought into the dining room. On the table is an enormous metal serving tray with three large cooked fish on it. Adam says the fish look like flounders since they are splayed open and lying flat on the tray, but they are shehboot, carp, blackened with a heap of curry on them. We eat reluctantly. The meat is white, moist and soft and full of bones. I feel I can taste the murk of the Tigris River in every bite. Sabah rips big chunks off the carcass. The bones and dark green prehistoric scales disappear off his plate as he chews.

Hot and queasy, I try to focus on something else. Sabah is talking about his dog Rocky. Not the ferocious German Shepherd he owns now, which we hear from the back yard barking away at the sputtering sounds of the Honda generator. No, Rocky. His Iraqi dog. Brown and black and huge Rocky was. "I gave it two growth injections," Sabah says. "And it grew to an incredible size. It got so big it no longer fit in its house."
Abu Abdullah remembered that Sabah once tried to get him to pet Rocky as the old weightlifter held the dog by the neck. "C'mon, go ahead," Sabah told him as he wrestled with the beast. "I've got him." Abu Abdullah excused himself and inched away.
It soon became apparent that the steroid-injected dog was uncontrollable. "The men who came to the house to cut the dates from the palm trees asked me to tie the dog. He broke through so I tied him with two chains."
"Did that help?"
"Sometimes," he says, chewing on his fish.
Finally Sabah gave Rocky to the janitor of a nearby school. In the first night, the dog broke free from its bonds and bit the janitor twice, once in the arm and again in the backside as he fled. The next morning, as the children entered the school yard, Rocky was like Godzilla on Toyko. He bit another adult and a child and then stormed out of the school yard, saliva running from his fangs, never to be seen again. "The janitor said, 'I asked for a dog and you brought me a lion.' " Sabah recounts this without a smile but I can see there is a mischevious glint in his deeply set sloe eyes. Sabah, like a Dr. Frankenstein, created his own pumped up similacrum and has let it loose upon the world.

On the Roof

It was after curfew, close to midnight. There were two men in the street. One limped, the other listed. They walked slowly in the orange light of the street lamps. They might've been drunk, but most likely they were wounded.

When they passed, the night watchman, watering the sidewalk across from the Alrabiya, blew his whistle. In the next block down Al-Karrada street a man wearing a dishdasha and holding a small club whistled. And then another man, somewhere we couldn't see, did the same.

Meanwhile, a small pack of stray dogs roamed the empty streets and the trash blew like something alive and growing. Fighting cats screamed in someone's yard. Generators rumbled as loud as diesal truck engines. A convoy raced down the street with soldiers behind guns locked into the tops of humvees. Two young men without shirts ducked down and lied flat in their makeshift, rooftop beds. "How did they know the troops were coming?" Brandon said. When the trucks and troops were out of sight, the two sleeping on the roof brought their heads up and looked around. They spotted Brandon and I. I didn't like them knowing we were there on the roof, so we retreated to our rooms.

Security has been a problem since the end of major combat was declared May 1. Brandon and I found out later that neighborhoods like this one in the Al- Karrada district have hired their own watchmen. They blow the whistles all night to alert the alibabas, the thieves, that the people are watching, protecting their sleeping neighborhoods. Their whistling had nothing to do with the military convoys.

From the roof I can see the street in the larger city, much of which is not safe to roam. So we're confined to our apartment, until we have an escort to take us out to help avoid the dangers, the threats, what ever they might be. We've been fortunate enough not to see any shit go down, but that leaves us feeling maybe it's not so bad, that it's safer than the stories. But we've been trying to get clear on what the dangers are.

Yesterday, we attended an American Town Hall Meeting at the Iraq Forum Conference Center led by the U.S. Consul officer, Beth Payne [see entry "Welcome to Baghdad"]. We were after information about our security. It was the first meeting for "private American citizens" working and living in Iraq.

When Brandon and I arrived thirty minutes late, we quietly joined the 40 others in the room. Payne was finishing up an initial briefing on what the consul could and couldn't do for us--no assurance of medical emergency evacuation unless you have your own private insurance and no passports issued---then introduced U.S. Army Captain Steven Barnhart, who was there to give us a slide presentation on security problems and safety issues. He had a shorn rectangle of orange hair on a square head and no neck. He talked from the throat.

Captain Barnhart opened up by giving his contact info. "If you need to get in touch with me, I'll be glad to tell you what the bad guys did over night," he said, then proceeded with the presentation. "My goal here is to make you smart, or smarter, than you were, regarding security issues. It is dangerous in Eye-raq, and especially to be an American in Eye-raq, it is dangerous," he said, pacing back and forth in front of the room. "So, you may know many many things, but you may see one more thing here that'll make you a little bit smarter, to keep you alive one more day in Eye-raq."

He nodded to the soldier behind the slide projector. He began by telling us things to watch out for: spiked-metal strips in the road, children throwing rocks, blocking traffic, potholes filled with mines. Don't drive over potholes, trash or dead animals, he said, they all may be packed with explosive devices. "Anything in the road you do not recognize, including sandbags, trash, etcetera, it could be an explosive device in side of it." (As I write this, there is news of an American civilian contractor killed today from an "anti-tank" mine near Tikrit, according to Reuters. The report reported he was the first American civilian killed since Saddam's regime was toppled.)

There's a slide for WMD, chemical/biological agents contaminating food, water, sodas, and cigarettes. "They haven't had that many opportunities to use chemical or biological weapons, but if they see they have an opportunity to use them they will, to poison our food, our water," he said.

Careful of a new threat: exploding coke cans filled with shrapnel. Don't take cigarettes from strangers; they may have incendiary devices concealed within. Don't attend to the sick or the dead, they may be acting. "As Americans, we're pretty humane. Usually we would stop and try to help that person. But this may be a set-up to try to kill you," he said.

They like to throw grenades from bridges; they like to toss them into car windows. Keep your windows up, hopefully you have AC. And they like to fire RPGs--rocket-propelled grenades. "You've seen these in movies like Clear and Present Danger or something or another," he said. "Just watch those explosive devices--they aren't good for cars, they aren't good for people." We should beware of vehicles attempting to ram us. "If you've lived in Iraq you know there are point-blank assassinations going on," Captain Barnhart said. "So keep your eyes out."

One slide tells us that a "variety of criminal gunmen remain at large: criminal elements, regime elements, and transnational terrorism." Travel anywhere in Iraq entails a risk, Captain Barnhart told us. Recent pattern of attacks continues to occur at night--over 80%--and in the early morning. With his slide presentation concluded, he opens the floor to questions.

I ask Captain Barnhart if he can tell us how many people have actually been the victims of crimes in the last couple of weeks. With so many potential dangers, threats, I want some idea of my actual risk.

He said he had some data he could share with me back at the office, but can't tell me anything off the top of his head. Payne jumped in and said, "There's not an organized crime statistics bureau that's keeping crime statistics."

I pressed on. "In general what have you heard," I asked. She sidestepped the question by telling us how she's planning to compile the incident reports into coherent data, and in the meanwhile, if any crimes occur against us please report it to her.

"So you can't tell us what our biggest threat might be?" I was determined to push a concrete answer out of them.

"Kidnapping...," Payne said.

"...and car-jacking," Captain Barnhart added.

"And car accidents," Payne said. She said two Americans died in car accidents in the last week. "Car accidents are your biggest threat, are your biggest risk, to be perfectly honest." Somehow our biggest threat escaped Captain Barnhart's slide presentation. I was thinking if he was trying to help us stay alive, he wasn't doing a very good job. (It's custom here not to wear seat belts. Iraqis have enough worries.) "What we're not seeing is private Americans being targeted as private Americans," Payne added. "But there's a lot of crime here. Based upon my experience overseas, I would place the criminal element risk here as something similar to Nairobi."

Captain Barnhart was still pacing the floor: "To be a little bit of a Chicken Little, 'The sky is falling, the sky is falling!,' I'll remind you just before we came here into Iraq, Saddam released the whole prison population, a thousand that we know of, prisoners, criminals, hardened criminals, released to go out and do bad stuff." Chicken Little was right about the prisoners, which Saddam released in October before the U.S. began their initial bombing, but he was wrong about the number. There were tens of thousands of murderers, rapists and thieves released, and it does seem now they're swarming Baghdad. Al-hamdu-lillah, we haven't seen them in action.

On the roof a few days ago, Brandon and I could see a kite rocking gently in the hot wind, ascending into the early evening zenith. Beyond it, in the distance, helicopters hovered. We could hear the faint sound of their blades chopping the air. There was a crescent moon descending in another part of the sky. Traffic was thinning on the street below, but people were still flowing in and out of the shops.

I felt safe overlooking Baghdad, above the streets, standing with the satellite dishes and antennas. When the light disappeared an hour later, a military convoy raced down the street. We heard shots popping off in the smaller streets behind the Alrabiya. Brandon and I flinched. We hunkered down on the roof to investigate--they sound like the gunshots we think we hear in our sleep. After a few seconds, we realize that the streets of Karrada have been beseiged by bored kids lighting firecrackers.

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 he