Posted on 12/11/2003 10:25:34 AM PST by Pikamax
Johnson: Impressions inside Baghdad December 11, 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - I expected none of this.
We were shot at not even once. Never in the nearly nine hours we have spent walking and driving through the streets of this city did anyone flash as much as a cap pistol at us.
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This is not the Baghdad everyone has told us to fear, the one they for months have shown on television at home. Not a single car exploded. There were no dead bodies that needed to be stepped over.
Make no mistake, though, this is a hard city, a trash-strewn and dusty, car-choked sprawl unlike anything you likely have ever seen up close. There is absolutely nothing glamorous or lovely here, only wildly different levels of utter poverty.
So it is a city constantly on the hustle, the only language that truly matters is that of the dollar and the dinar.
If you have even a little to spread around, anything in Baghdad is possible. And virtually everything and anyone will be open to you.
Atheed arrived at our hotel at 9 a.m. sharp. He will be our guide, translator and protector, a 30-year-old man found for us by the "fixers" we have employed throughout this journey.
His given name is Atheed Al-Naimy, a computer engineer by trade, and the son of a 20-plus-year Iraqi army general executed by Saddam Hussein eight years ago for conspiracy.
The regime began eyeing and spying on his family, Atheed said, after his father resigned his commission in 1991 in protest of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait.
In 1996, they finally came for his father. They came for Atheed, too. The two were tried together, and both were sentenced to die. For three months they sat in 1-by-3-foot cells on Saddam's death row.
"At the last moment, they came for me and freed me. They executed my father and his friends."
His eyes teared, and he looked away. I put my hand on his shoulder and say that I am sorry. He nods.
"God was with me."
He will take us anywhere we want to go, he says. The coalition has granted him permission to carry a gun, but today he doesn't have one. He waves his hand.
"I am not scared," Atheed says. "Never. In the years after I am released, nothing scares me anymore. Someone comes for me, I might not even run. I know now what happens in my life is not up to me. Inshala. Allah wills it."
Horns replace gunfire
There is an anti-terror rally scheduled in Furdoise Square this morning. We might want to see that, Atheed offers. We climb into the BMW sedan he has borrowed from a friend.
People in Baghdad are either the worst drivers in the world or the hands-down best. Have you ever watched children drive bumper cars? Now you understand. Only without the crashing.
"I would rather drive without brakes than without my horn," Atheed says in all seriousness as we careen along the Karada, a long, bustling shopping boulevard on the east side of the city.
The sound of gunfire here has been replaced by the incessant horn. Cars literally dance on the streets as they feint this way, swing the other.
Guns are not seen. Any Iraqi found on the street with one without a permit is guaranteed three months in prison. Not a place a man wants to go, Atheed says.
We breathe a bit easier.
The Karada is filled with morning shoppers. Sides of goat and beef hang in shop windows, all of it dotted black by swarms of flies. Horse- and donkey-drawn carts dart though the traffic.
The one or two traffic signals that actually work are completely disregarded. We jostle, honk and swerve, yet it is impossible not to see the rows of concertina wire that ring some shops.
These are banks, Atheed explains. The men standing behind the thicket of wire carry AK-47s, pointing them at each man or woman who approaches. In the days after the fall of Baghdad, banks were the first looted.
Two things are readily inescapable here: The sheer number of men, young and old, who do nothing all day but stand around.
"There are no jobs here!" Atheed says emphatically. "Where does a man go? There is nothing for them in Baghdad."
And the gas lines. They are everywhere. In the more dangerous areas of town, it can take as long as 10 hours to get gasoline. Some lines snake almost end-to-end around entire city blocks.
In more pacified areas, the wait is easily five hours. In the Al-Mansoor section of town, a line of cars nearly two miles long sat unmoving. The station at the front of it was closed. Maybe a tanker will show up today.
Saddam scratched out
Empty pedestals are everywhere in Baghdad. One seemingly stands on every street corner. Saddam used to stand on them. Only rusting reinforcing bars rise from them now.
And they will need a Ministry of Renaming Things in the days ahead. Scores of roads, bridges, towers, mosques, government buildings and parks once bore the former dictator's name. It has all been scratched out.
As we careen across the Hussein Bridge over the Tigris - someone had spray-painted over the Saddam, and blasted out his face in a perfect circle in the large stone marker, leaving only his hat - we pass yet another long gas line.
Atheed slows the car to a stop.
"Last night, I got here at 5 and didn't get gas until 9," moans Mukles abid Salih, a 35-year-old laborer in a burgundy Toyota. "This time, I have brought my blanket with me."
He is praying, he says, this time will take no more than four hours. And that the station owner will not run out as he reaches the front of the line.
Blaming the Americans
For all of this, he blames the Americans.
Under Saddam, he seethes, there was always gas.
"Yes, this is a country of oil, but without gasoline," he says. "With the Governing Council and the Americans, there is no acting on the promises they make on television.
"We thought getting rid of the regime would make things fine. But now we see the ex-regime was more merciful than those who govern us now."
Oddly, you rarely see U.S. patrols in Baghdad. At least it is the case on this day.
It is shortly before noon when we reach Furdoise - or Paradise - Square.
Atheed knows an Iraqi policeman standing at a nearby intersection, and he allows us to park beyond the barricade of cordoned-off Furdoise Street.
Just up the street are two Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Overhead, two helicopter gunships circle. "They are watching, to protect us," Atheed tell us.
Hundreds of men have filled the square for the anti-terror rally, which as the day grows longer, becomes apparent is not much more than an Iowa-style political rally.
Leaders of various religious and secular parties alternately take the stand set up beneath the large pedestal from which mobs toppled the statue of Saddam that long-ago spring afternoon.
The throngs of sign-carrying men leap in the air, their hands over their heads, chanting anti-terror slogans, as the leaders at the microphones denounce the insurgents that attack Americans, pledging to fight terror the same way a group of men in Iowa are doing today.
U.S. patrols vanish
The patrols of U.S. soldiers who earlier had sneered at and stared warily at the Iraqis in the square, and completely ignored greetings from American bystanders, have vanished.
For three hours, the men dance and chant in the streets, the gunships still hovering overhead.
And across the street yet another gas line snakes far into the distance. On the sidewalks, other throngs of unemployed men stand about idly.
Night is falling on Baghdad. It is not safe here when the sun goes down, Atheed Al-Naimy cautions as he speeds us back to our hotel.
I ask him before he departs to explain to me what he has seen today.
"For 50 years, Iraq went without freedom and democracy. You can't make it happen in three weeks, three months or three years.
"It takes time."
Bill Johnson and photographer Todd Heisler are reporting from Iraq. johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com. Listen to Bill Johnson on The State of Colorado at 8 a.m. Friday on KNRC-AM (1150).
"Sneering?" What's with this? Does the reporter have to put a little anti-U.S. spin into the article or is this for real? I'm betting the former.
I expected none of this.
This is not the Baghdad everyone has told us to fear, the one they for months have shown on television at home. Not a single car exploded. There were no dead bodies that needed to be stepped over.
Make no mistake, though, this is a hard city, a trash-strewn and dusty, car-choked sprawl unlike anything you likely have ever seen up close. There is absolutely nothing glamorous or lovely here, only wildly different levels of utter poverty.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bagdhad, from the perspective of an American and his Iraqi guide, who escaped execution under Saddam.
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