The Streets
Of Baghdad
By Dahr Jamail
19 November, 2004
Dahrjamailiraq.com
We
had our daily car bomb today when a suicide bomber drove his car into
a US patrol as it passed near the Yarmouk police station. Several Iraqis
were killed, with no report yet on US casualties. I felt the rumble
even though I was on a street far away from the blast-at least 5 miles
distant.
Walking and driving
on the streets Baghdad I find myself in a sea of chaos. Traffic is mayhem
for many reasons. The current fuel crisis being the lead cause. Lines
at petrol stations stretch for miles at some of the stations. A common
scene at these lines is that of people pushing their cars because they
are already out of gas or to save what precious little may be left in
their tank.
The fuel lines that
stretch in the busier parts of the city cause huge snarls of traffic
as it is squeezed into one of the remaining lanes left open.
Another reason is
military patrols and searches. Oftentimes when we are caught in crawling
traffic, we come upon several Humvees blocking one of the lanes as they
are searching a store or guarding troops who are doing a small foot
patrol.
Iraqi reaction to
military vehicles in the city continues to be cold. Actually, more than
cold-it has become notably hostile.
I was walking with
my interpreter along one of the main streets of Baghdad when a couple
of different times patrols rolled by of two Humvees with guns pointing
out the windows at people and the machine gunners atop them swinging
their guns back and forth at the rooftops of buildings. Each time men
nearby said to nobody in particular, Get off our streets with
your guns, You arent here to protect us you bastards,
or as one man laughed to his friend, Cant you see we have
no weapons of mass destruction? Now go home!
A little later a
group of two white SUVs full of (I presume) CIA and/or mercenaries
followed by a GMC with several large antennae rolled down the road with
their guns pointing out the tinted windows at pedestrians. As the GMC
passed, the back was open because inside was literally a machine gun
bunker-a black metal shield covered the opening, with a small rectangle
on the top portion which had the barrel of a large caliber machine gun
hanging out of it.
I noted several
Iraqis around me shaking their heads who watched this entourage pass.
Several blocks away
several large explosions are heard in the general area from which theyd
come.
Highways around
Baghdad are filled with places where the guardrails have been mashed
down by tanks. Other places find destroyed overpasses. The point is
there is no reconstruction of the damage.
Later this evening
a friend stopped by my room to visit. He is a Christian man who had
hoped that the attack on Fallujah would have quieted the resistance.
But he is sickened
by the US-installed interim government, and their utter futility to
fix anything in his war-torn occupied country.
He said, The
government only cares about themselves. They are obviously not here
to help Iraq. It is such a simple thing to fix a hole in the street,
you can just bring asphalt and fill it with a shovel
and they cannot
even do this. You can see the city is rubbish
so how can they fix
the big problems like the fighting? Fallujah is now a disaster and the
resistance is everywhere around Iraq. They can do nothing because they
are powerless. There is no army or police here worth anything. This
is worse than the war in Lebanon. There is no solution.
Dahr Jamail
is one of those very few independent journalists in Iraq. His travel
and reporting expenses are covered by the donations he receives from
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