The twenty-seater minibus was run by Iran Airways, even though they didn’t have any flights into or out of Baghdad. Maybe it was a way of keeping the staff ticking over, and at twenty-five US dollars for a one-way trip of fifty Ks it was a nice little earner. There might be only one commercial flight a day, the one we’d just come in on, but there were plenty of NGO [non-governmental organization] people on the move.
More of us piled in than there were places for us to sit. The four Iraqi women ended up sitting on their cases in the aisle as we rumbled past the sandbagged and gannet-wired security cordon that circled the airport. The vehicle wasn’t air-conditioned, and even with the windows open it was swelteringly hot. It was going to take us the rest of the day to unstick ourselves from the PVC seat covers.
The approach roads into the city looked unscathed by the war, although the Americans were making up for it now. All the bushes and palm trees that lined the road were being cleared back thirty metres or so by local guys with axes and bulldozers so that there was no cover for IEDs [improvised explosive devices] or manned attacks.
The roads were packed with a mixture of new Mercedes, 4x4s, minging old cars and trucks with the wings hanging off. The people inside them were mostly dressed in suits and chinos rather than the traditional dishdash. Quite a few women wore skirts short enough to show a fair amount of leg, and not many were fully veiled; most just had their hair covered. I’d seen more burkas driving through East London; not as many kebab shops, though.
White goods were piled up outside electrical shops, alongside shiny mountain bikes and racks of clothes. New billboards advertised perfume and washing-powder, and there seemed to be plenty of food and computer games for sale on the stalls. I’d seen South American cities that looked far worse than this. Everything seemed pretty normal, if you ignored the seven or eight Blackhawks that thundered over the rooftops on their way back to the airport.
Minutes later, there was no longer any doubt that this had been a country at war. Huge concrete blocks topped with razor wire channelled the traffic as we got nearer the Tigris. A convoy of high-back Hummers appeared. The roof gunners, all in helmets and Oakleys, nervously checked the buildings either side as they screamed past.
Somebody once worked out that enough AK47 assault rifles had been produced to arm every sixtieth person in the world. As we worked our way through the streets it looked as if most of them were in Baghdad. Nearly every shop and building was guarded by an Iraqi in sandals with one hanging off his shoulder, the very same weapon he’d probably been cabbying at American Hummers a couple of months ago. Others also had them slung over their shoulders, their hands full of shopping or their kids.
Some buildings bore strike and scorch marks, with half-burned curtains still hanging where window-frames had once been. Some were no more than heaps of concrete clinging to reinforced-steel skeletons. One whole shopping mall had been flattened, then there was a run of three or four buildings that had remained intact, then more piles of rubble. But for all that, the city wasn’t a wasteland: people were out and about, doing their thing, just as they had in Sarajevo, just as they do anywhere in the world when the shit hits the fan. These guys were just getting on with their lives as best they could. Customers from the teahouses and restaurants overflowed on to the street. News-stands were doing a roaring trade. I’d read there were nearly a hundred different papers in print now Saddam had gone.
As we fought our way on to a roundabout I caught my first glimpse of the great man. There was a tiled mural of him in the centre that had been used for some serious target practice. The small parts of his smiling face that remained had been painted a bilious yellow.
Drivers stopped at the roadside and kids filled up their tanks with black-market petrol from an assortment of plastic containers. It was Baghdad’s answer to the Formula One pit-stop. They smothered every car that came within reach, checking tyres and cleaning windscreens like they were going out of style.
The minibus only had one stop, which was as near to the Iran Airways offices as the concrete and razor-wire barriers would permit. As we clambered out I could see our hotel, the Palestine, less than a hundred metres away. The driver got on to the roof and started throwing down cases. The four Iraqi women stopped gobbing off at each other long enough to give him some serious grief, and he gave back as good as he got.
A couple of AK-carrying Iraqis sauntered over and stood around smoking as we got ourselves organized. Jerry was in the back, passing bags forward. He started laughing.
‘What’s up?’
‘Looks like the Spice Girls don’t wanna be dropped here. They want the other side of town.’
I picked up my daysack, and waited for Jerry to emerge with all his kit. We went through the barrier and started up the street parallel to the hotel, past the shuttered-up Iran Airways and Aeroflot offices.
A line of huge generators chugged away on the pavement, leaking diesel and feeding power to a row of seedy hotels. The road was full of pot-holes and puddles, and hadn’t been cleared of litter since the days when Saddam still had a smile on his face.
28
The Palestine and the Sheraton were now part of a fortified complex at the end of a road sealed off by five- metre-high concrete sections. We’d just turned through a man-sized gap in the wire when we were spotted by a posse of little kids. They came running towards us, nothing on their feet, their arses hanging out of their trousers. They followed us silently, but we both knew better than to hand out cash in daylight. Help one, and about six hundred others will leap on top of you. If you’re going to do it, you only do it at night, and well out of sight of the others. They’d gang up on whoever got the cash and steal it.
We followed the wall for about twenty metres until we joined the end of a queue of news crews, Iraqis, drivers and businessmen with their BG. Half a dozen different languages were being bounced backwards and forwards along the line. There was a makeshift guard post, in what looked like a B&Q garden shed. The checkpoint was manned by a family of Iraqis. Dad vetted the men, Mum the women, and a boy of about twelve was looking through the bags. They all had AKs. Sitting outside the shed on folding chairs were three US soldiers, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, sweating under their helmets and body armour, well-worn M16s across their laps. It looked as if they could all use a lesson from Gaz on community policing.
Once Jerry had finished talking Arabic to the dad, we filed through the gap and turned left between two huge, newly installed concrete walls. Directly ahead was the rear door of an AFV [armoured fighting vehicle], its engine rattling. In front of it was a solid line of nylon containers the size of skips, each filled with sand. Its .50 cal was manned.
We turned left again just short of it, down the road that separated the two hotels. This one was blocked by an M60 tank, also bunkered in behind nylon skips, with a cam net over the top to keep the crew out of the sun. It faced on to a huge roundabout, beyond which I could see the blue domes of a mosque.
I recognized the area at once from news footage. In the middle of the roundabout was a large stone pedestal, all that remained of the giant statue of Saddam that had been toppled symbolically at the end of the war. The roof had given a grandstand view of the shock-and-awe bombing of the government buildings just the other side of the river. Every one of Saddam’s men had moved out of them long before, but it looked great on TV.
I could see now why everyone had got such great pictures: they hadn’t even needed to move off their hotel balconies.
The secure area between the hotels was teeming with news crews jumping in and out of 4x4s, sweating buckets after a day in helmets and body armour. The word ‘Press’ was stencilled just about everywhere there was space.
The Palestine wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Moscow slum. It was sixteen storeys high, rectangular and very plain. A few single-storey sections, probably ballrooms and restaurants, jutted out from the base. Every room seemed to have a balcony, no matter whether you were looking out over the Tigris, the garden or the
