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Suddenly, a war without a
border
By Paul Belden
TREBEIL
BORDER CHECKPOINT, western Iraq - "Passport!" I yelled,
my hand in the air as I stepped into the road in front
of the ruined guardhouse. To my left, rising out of the
desert sand in incongruous splendor, the twin curving
white stone archways that marked the easternmost extent
of the republic of Iraq. To my right, belching smoke and
trailing a dust cloud, a weatherbeaten tanker truck
rolled slowly in my direction out of the kilometer-wide
no-man's-land beyond which lay Jordan. The driver leaned
out the window, gave me the once-over, started laughing
his ass off. He hit the gas and blew right through. So
much for my attempt to take over customs duty.
It probably could have worked if I'd only been
wearing an Iraqi army uniform - which burned me to think
so, since procuring such a uniform would have been easy.
There was a whole roomful of them for the taking not a
quarter mile away. In fact, everything in this extensive
government desert compound where the Iraqi border
officials had worked and lived until just the day before
was for the taking. This was Thursday, April 10, and I
was in the middle of exploring my own private slice of
liberated Iraq.
According to Jordanians with
whom I spoke that had spent the past few days peering
across no-man's-land, the Iraqis had showed up for work
the day before, but then for some reason had decided
they'd had enough. "No food, no water," speculated one
security official. "Run away, all run away."
Where they'd gone, nobody knew. Baghdad,
probably. Or wherever they had family.
This had
left the Jordanians in a bind; they had felt a little
delicate about allowing a 70-strong convoy of reporters
to just go through without somebody on the other side to
check them in. They had kept the reporters waiting in
the desert for half the day while waiting for some word
to come from the Interior Ministry in Amman. No word
came, and finally a bright young thing named Mara who
worked for Romanian state television started to cry
uncontrollably. "I'll lose my job," she sobbed to the
puzzled men in charge. "Please! You have to let us
through! You just have to!"
And so they
let us through. Stamped our passports and let us out
into ... nowhere.
We drove across no-man's land
and into an abandoned dream city rising from the desert.
It consisted of a cafeteria mess hall, a medical
complex, several dormitories, a main reception hall, a
VIP room, many store houses and a mosque.
I'd
been through this border crossing just six weeks before,
and it was very strange to just stroll around the desk
where I'd been kept waiting for six hours the last time
through and start pulling papers out of the drawers.
There was a Bedouin out front selling
rocket-propelled grenade rounds for $10 apiece. There
was a plastic bag of fresh dates open on a dinner table
next to a dish with the pits still sloshing in the
juice. There was a VIP room with beautiful stonework of
the emperor Hammurabi leading a chariot charge. There
was a two-meter-high stack of trays holding fresh brown
eggs. There were Bedouins breaking glass on the other
side as they entered to loot.
There was a
friendly but scared German shepherd dog trying to make
friends. There were zig-zag trenches dug into the sand.
There was a guardhouse where the men checked passports
that had been utterly destroyed by an air strike. That
night we slept in the open under a desert sky so clear
and bright you could see forever. The next day we set
out in the direction of the rising sun, with the famous
Egyptian imam Abt Abed al-Basset singing the Koran in a
doleful howl over the tape deck. It was the perfect
soundtrack for a new adventure.
(©2003 Asia
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