COURIER-MAIL: Life is a
war zone
Saturday, August 30, 2003
Former Courier-Mail reporter Michael Ware, now
Time magazine's Baghdad bureau chief, finds the Iraqi
capital has everything and nothing in common with
Brisbane
'You have your gun. The rest you have to leave to
Allah'
The tell-tale thud of an explosion ripples through
the baking afternoon air. The sound rolls over
housetops like a beach break, washing over a woman in
a headscarf draping laundry on a balcony and boys
chatting with a guard nursing an AK-47. A moment
later it laps the farthest edges of the western
suburb of al-Mansur, dissolving into the traffic din.
No one looks up, save for one of the boys, who
glances over his shoulder.
The chattering of automatic weapons a while later is
barely a distraction. Unless luminescent tracer
rounds whiz overhead and the firing moves this way,
it's not a concern. Explosions and the punchy
staccato of brief firefights or bursts from a weapon
are daily beats in the rhythm of family life. This is
nothing; this is Baghdad.
Mansur is an attractive suburb, like the Kenmore of
Baghdad. Quiet, palm-lined streets carve up blocks of
well-kept middle-class homes. It's home to good
families from educated, professional backgrounds.
Most here were members of Saddam's Ba'ath Party. They
had to be. Any half-decent job required it. It
doesn't mean they were complicit in the regime; they
just had to survive it.
With the rest of the city, Mansur now suffers under
the weight of American occupation and endures a
war-ravaged economy stripped by years of sanctions,
outdated and continually sabotaged infrastructure,
social disorder and the fear and loathing that comes
with it. Basic services barely function; electricity
is rare and random, the police are ineffective,
hospitals struggle to make do. Simple errands become
a grind. It's life lived in the midst of a guerilla
war.
Near Mansur runs a highway, serving Baghdad much as
the Western Freeway does Brisbane. It's the main
route to what was Saddam International Airport, now a
formidable US base. American convoys ply the
laneways. The resistance -- a collection of Ba'ath
loyalists, Fedayeen Saddam fanatics, disgruntled
citizenry and Islamic militants -- use it as a
killing ground. The GIs have dubbed it "RPG
(rocket-propelled grenade) Alley". Improvised bombs
are planted by the road, remotely detonated for
passing Humvees, triggering ambushes by hidden
fighters who blast away with RPGs and machineguns
before melting back into the population.
The resistance strikes everywhere. This month a bomb
slipped under a parked Humvee sparked a three-hour
gun battle in a bustling shopping district. There's
no pattern, no discerning where is safe, where is
not.
The constant sniping attacks play on the soldiers'
nerves. "We know every time we leave the gate it
might be us that's hit with the next RPG or IED
(improvised explosive device)," says an exhausted
Sergeant Carlos Gomez.
The stress parlays into jittery mistakes. On July 27,
Zaid Imad Khazalalrubai, a stringy 13-year-old, was
in a small white sedan with his brother Mohammed, 16,
collecting the family's monthly food ration. The boys
stumbled on a makeshift checkpoint of Humvees sealing
off a house as the Americans' elite and shadowy Task
Force 20 -- the Saddam Hunters -- raided in a hail of
fire.
As Zaid's car edged past the "Checkpoint Ahead, Move
Slowly" sign the jumpy soldiers opened up, pouring a
torrent of high-velocity rounds through the
windshield. The boys survived by ducking down, but as
Zaid leant out of the car to brush the glass from his
hair, a bullet pierced his forehead, killing him
instantly. Four other civilians died that afternoon
in a few mad minutes.
"First there was this," a woman cried at the scene,
gesturing to a scar of land where houses were hit by
missiles in the war, "12 of us slaughtered. And now
there is this, five more dead. This is too much."
It was too much for Zaid's brother Mohammed. "I'll
take revenge from those American sons of bitches. The
Americans will not escape with impunity," he swore by
Zaid's coffin the next day.
More was to come. Shortly before 11am on August 7,
the suburban quiet was ripped apart by a terrible
shudder that slammed doors and splintered windows. A
thick black tower of smoke loomed over the treetops
to the east. The Jordanian embassy, 1.5km away, had
been hit by a massive car bomb.
Scorched bodies littered the footpath outside the
embassy. Streams of injured, clutching gaping wounds,
staggered in the haze. Neighbours with garden hoses
hopelessly battled flames roasting cars on the road.
As many as 19 people were killed, more than 50 hurt.
Walking from the scene, former businessman Ali
Shaheen shook his downcast head.
Ali, like everyone in his street, is a prisoner in
his home after dark.
There is no law, no order. Police patrols roam the
streets but they are too few, and the looters too
many.
Homeowners defend their properties themselves. There
is no 000 number to dial for help. Every house has at
least one AK-47 and a cache of ammunition. Crimes are
reported by pulling the trigger.
"You have your gun," says Ali. "The rest you have to
leave to Allah."
Last October Saddam emptied his prisons of every
murderer, rapist and thug, all of them time bombs
primed to go off with the fall of the regime, when
not a single cop was on the streets.
It's impossible to gauge the scale of the crime wave,
though Marwan Sadeeq has a measure. He bought a
second-hand Mercedes-Benz before the war for $US5200.
Carjackings are so rife, and deadly, he hasn't driven
it for months. "Mercedes are a prime target and no
one wants to be caught in one. I can't sell it out
for more than $US4000," he laments.
Rape and the kidnapping of women are at obscene
levels. Last month a young woman frantically pleaded
for the police to look for her friend who'd just been
snatched. They did nothing. Desperate, she implored
an American patrol to help. The GIs returned to the
spot but the abductors were long gone.
Yet somehow some vestiges of normality are returning.
The US-run Coalition Provisional Authority has
rallied crews from the vast army of the unemployed to
sweep the streets for a handful of dollars a day.
Garbage trucks are making their rounds and
construction workers are scurrying over destroyed
buildings. University exams have been completed and
results posted.
Much is still to take hold. Stores are brimming with
cheap electrical goods and new satellite dishes are
sprouting in shopfronts like mushrooms. Yet there are
too few with the cash to buy them. "Window shopping
is doing a booming trade," quips Ali.
For Baghdad's inhabitants the electricity supply is
the barometer of the US administration's success.
With short, irregular spurts of power -- two hours
here, three hours a day later -- they are scornful of
CPA chief Paul Bremmer and the fledgling government
he is forging from the rubble.
They have been sweating on him to get it right.
Through July and August temperatures sat above 50C
every day, falling to the mid-40s at night. The city
didn't sleep. Tempers frayed. Industry faltered.
Former electrical engineer Omar Kamal is watching his
friends go out of business, their plants idle,
starved of electricity. "My neighbour operates an
industrial gas production plant," he says, "supplying
the metalworkers and all kinds of businesses. Before
the war he pumped out 1500 cylinders a day; now he's
managing 200 a week."
Foreign firms are not venturing into Baghdad. A US
contractor was killed delivering mail near the city
of Tikrit. The international aid organisations are
pulling out or scaling back in the wake of the
devastating bombing of the UN headquarters earlier
this month. Iraqis working with the US military and
journalists are branded collaborators, traitors.
Their names appear on death lists. Many have been
assassinated.
Foreigners are not immune. A Red Cross worker has
been killed and journalists are targets. A
correspondent was gunned down at the national museum
by a man who stole up behind him in a crowd and put a
pistol to the back of his head. A Reuters cameraman
was shot by US soldiers, his camera mistaken for an
RPG launcher.