Ten Minutes
By Robert Fisk
14 August, 2005
The Independent
It was the same lunatic corkscrew landing
in the same little Lebanese plane, barrelling down into the sandstorm
of Baghdad airport. Piloting his 20-passenger twin-prop aircraft - from
Flying Carpet Airlines, no less - Captain Hussam has three things on
his mind: American helicopters, pilotless reconnaissance drones and
incoming missiles. So we all scan the dun-coloured runway and terminals
and the grotty slums beside the airport road for the tell-tale pink
flame surviving pilots have sometimes caught sight of.
But we landed safely
and a scruffy bus took us to the terminal where I bid the customs officer
Salaam Aleikum and he cheerfully asked me if I was a Muslim. "English,"
I replied, which seemed to be good enough to him. He couldnt break
the airline security string on my bag so he waved me through. Then there
came The Airport Road. We all need to put this in capitals these days.
As my Iraqi fixer put it very well: "Its really just a matter
of luck." Sometimes you glide safely across to the city, sometimes
you get caught up in a firefight, sometimes - like poor Marla Ruzicka,
the American girl who tried to count casualties - you are too close
to a suicide attack. "Im alive," she cried just before
she died.
So we concentrate
very hard on The Airport Road. The Americans have put a squadron of
Bradley Fighting Vehicles on the central reservation and Iraqi army
units on each side of the highway. But they still get bombed. "The
Iraqi armys a joke," an American computer salesman in Baghdad
tells me. "It was the Iraqi army which kidnapped me near Nasiriyah.
They tried to sell me to the insurgents for $10,000. Then one of my
employees came and told the officer I was half-Iraqi, taken to America
as a child, that I was a member of the Dulaimi clan - and you dont
kidnap Dulaimis - and the officer couldnt read English so didnt
know my real name."
So Im not
keen on stopping for Iraqi checkpoints. We drive across the Tigris,
waved through by a policeman in a hood - cops and insurgents both wear
hoods which makes life a little tiring - and arrive at the grim little
hotel where The Independent has its office. Extra security now. More
armed men on the gates - most are Kurdish - and a guard who wants to
search my bag. He, too, cannot cut the airline security string on my
bag and waves me through. So a piece of string twice stopped my baggage
being searched. Very comforting.
My Iraqi fixer offers
to buy groceries for me but I decide Ive got to buy them myself.
Once you let Iraqis buy your food on the streets, tell you what people
are saying, come back to you with their observations, you have entered
the pointless hothouse of hotel journalism, the reporter with the mobile
phone trapped in his room who might as well be broadcasting or writing
from Co Mayo. So we slink off down side streets to the Warda grocery
store in Karada. Its a broad street with lots of men languishing
on the pavements, many holding mobiles. Thats how its done
these days. A guy with a mobile sees an American patrol, a police unit,
a foreigner, and squeezes the dial pad and a bunch of gunmen in a car
not far away roar round to blow themselves up or kidnap the stranger
- for money, for execution, for politics.
The Egyptian diplomat
murdered last month had stopped at a newspaper stand. So we say, "10
minutes". Thats all Ive got in the grocery store. Sugar,
Arabic bread - a big queue so I squeeze through and grab two loaves
and hear someone mutter ajnabi (foreigner) and I go for the Perrier
bottles, the tinned fruits, the sardines, and I push up to the counter.
Eight minutes. "Change
in Iraqi money?" Doesnt matter. Wrong reply. Too desperate.
Should have said "Iraqi". Three boxes of bottled water. Nine
minutes. Your time is up. Out into the oven-like heat, into the car,
a sharp turn to the right, into another alleyway. Ten minutes. Made
it.
My fixer looks at
me from the front of the car - I am in the back, reading an Arabic newspaper
to partly conceal my face - and puts his finger in the air. "Another
suicide bombing in Baghdad. An attack on a police patrol. Four policemen
dead." Welcome back to the city of one thousand and one nights.