Page 3 of 3 ROVING IN THE
RED ZONE Baghdad up close and
personal By Pepe Escobar
runway: one never knows when the
"Islamic Emirate of Iraq" may decide to test drive
one of its new al-Quds 1 guided missiles.
The pattern of going round in circles is
mirrored on the ground in the taxi ride from the
airport via the eerily desolate,
coalition-approved ring road to the first
checkpoint, bordering the immense, sprawling US
Camp Victory nestled behind huge walls and barbed
wire. For a foreigner,
hanging out at this checkpoint for more than a
minute is already madness. "It's full of spies,"
and kidnapping would be a foregone conclusion.
The badge syndrome becomes more apparent
in one of the safest places in the Red Zone: it
had to be a mini-Green Zone, in the Shi'ite
Karrada neighborhood. A group of no more than 10
houses, including two hotels, is protected like a
bunker. Inside this normality amid chaos, the
prominent inhabitants had to be armed-to-the-teeth
private security contractors - the shadow US army
in Iraq. Exit a group of bulky, burly South
African mercenaries who had been sipping tea in
the hotel lobby over piped music. Enter a group of
Nepalese Gurkhas in T-shirts whose first activity
is target practice at the hotel entrance.
This Red Zone film set (which would cost a
fortune and months of work in Hollywood), "safer
than the Green Zone", quips an Iraqi security
guard, is the essence of Baghdad gulag territory:
blast walls, badges, barbed wire, watchtowers,
non-stop security checks, body searches, giant
power generators, containers, dilapidated houses
(some "for rent", no takers), crumbling pavement,
pools of stagnant water.
Security is
provided by one of the private companies based in
the compound. Baghdad condo living is expensive:
power cuts are continual (most of Baghdad has no
more than two hours of electricity a day), so
energy is at a premium and fuel costs 88 US cents
a liter. A medium-sized, three-storey hotel
consumes 1,650 liters a day. Sometimes buildings
have to run for two or three days on generator
only.
Muhammad is a night watchman in this
"secure environment". During the day he lives in
the real world, in Sadr City, one of the world's
top slums. He says he faces no problems coming to
work every day: after all, he has a badge. He is
glad to confirm Muqtada is in Iraq, not Iran, as
the White House claims. He complains heavily about
"Wahabbis killing women and children" - a
reference to the "Islamic Emirate of Iraq"
proclaimed by al-Qaeda. And he fears a return of
the Ba'athists. For his part, a Christian Kurd
head waiter confirms Christians are coming in
droves from explosive Dora - where ethnic
cleansing by the Islamic Emirate of Iraq is in
progress - to live in safety in Karrada: "East
Baghdad is safe, but the west is very dangerous.
Iraq is finished."
For Kurds and
Christians in Karrada, the former Ba'athist, US
intelligence asset, interim prime minister and
"Butcher of Fallujah", Iyad Allawi, is the closest
to a solution to the Iraqi tragedy: "We need a
strongman. He would eradicate the militias." They
see a weak government and endless party squabbling
as the biggest problems - an implicit criticism of
the Iran-affiliated religious parties, the Supreme
Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the
Da'wa Party. They also recognize the split inside
the Mehdi Army - and the good nationalist
intentions of Muqtada.
Slaughterhouse Apaches always
drown the cry of the muezzin just before
sunset. The curfew has been pushed back to
10:00pm. But even by 5pm the streets are already
deserted. Cultural life is non-existent. The
artisans in the souk al-Rashid are gone. The
booksellers on al-Mutanabi are gone. The windows
in countless buildings remain smashed. The
al-Rashid telephone exchange, or the Ministry of
Finance, or the Ministry of Planning by the Green
Zone, remain post-modern cement deconstructions,
Swiss cheese-style.
On Saadoon Street,
once one of the main roads, most businesses are
closed. Saadoon though exhibits a prime Baghdad
contribution to post-modern art, worthy of a
Venice Biennalle: the landscaped blast wall,
featuring colorful scenes of lakeside, mountain or
pastoral bliss. The wall, of course, serves the
pedestrian purpose of protecting the infamous
Baghdad Hotel, a well-known headquarters of US
forces.
In Mansur - former abode of the
Baghdad grand bourgeoisie - streets are also
blocked by checkpoints and a few houses harboring
politicians or businessmen are enveloped by blast
walls. The restaurants on Mansur Avenue are all
closed. The whole neighborhood fits the pattern of
a film set in ruins. It's impossible to eat a
masgouf - grilled carp - by the Tigris, on
Abu Nawas Street, a former favorite Baghdad
pastime: the restaurants are all closed. Saydia
used to be a good, relatively upscale Baghdad
neighborhood, ethnically mixed, with lots of
Ba'ath Party officials but also average civilians.
Most houses are now abandoned, the streets empty,
only a few stores open.
There may not be
as many sports utility vehicles with tinted
windows whose occupants distribute Kalashnikov
rounds at random - or as many car bombs in
markets. But the overwhelming majority of
Baghdadis, Sunni or Shi'ite, have absolutely no
trust in the capacity of the Maliki government to
minimally assure their security.
Abdul
Samad Sultan, minister of migrations, insists that
over 1,000 self-exiled families have returned to
their neighborhoods, mostly in Madaen, Mahmoudiya
and Shaab. But that's nothing compared to figures
in a recent report by the non-governmental
organization International Medical Corps,
according to which 540,000 Iraqis had fled their
homes from the February 2006 bombing of the
Askariya Shrine in Samarra to early 2007. Eighty
percent of these - as can be easily confirmed in
Damascus - are from Baghdad.
Every Sunni
one talks to accuses the Mehdi Army of chasing
them out of formerly mixed neighborhoods, while in
Yarmouk hardcore Sunnis of the Islamic Party are
advancing their ethnic cleansing of Shi'ites.
Until recently, a gruesome ritual was being
performed in Yarmouk - the showing off of the
cadavers of the day at noon, or guerrillas telling
families to look for their relatives as if they
were in Bala, a well-known second-hand market
("you look inside the bags, and you can match an
arm with another, or a leg with a foot").
In explosive al-Amriya, in west Baghdad,
flags of the Islamic Emirate of Iraq are on full
display, and the writing is - literally - on the
walls: "Long live al-Qaeda." Women are being
forced to wear the niqqab - which covers
the whole face - and gloves at all times, and some
women have already been executed, accused of
spying. All across town war widows - women who
traditionally were supposed to stay at home
raising the family - now have become mechanics,
parking valets or electronic appliance repairers.
Sunni Heitein and mixed Sunni-Shi'ite
al-Ameel are adjacent neighborhoods. The ethnic
cleansing of Ameel has been persistent for the
past four months. It all started - as almost
everything in Iraq - as a tribal conflict, between
the Sunni al-Janabi tribe and the Shi'ite
al-Megasis tribe. Fighting with Kalahsnikovs,
mortars and rocket-propelled grenades would go on
all day, even during the Friday jumma
prayers. In the end, Sunnis were forced to leave
Ameel for good. The neighborhood became a ghost
town, now virtually sealed off by the Iraqi Army.
Iraq's per capita annual income plunged from
$3,600 in 1980 - when Iraq was still a model
developing country - to $860 in 2001 after 10
years of United Nations sanctions, to $530 at the
end of 2003. Now it may be even lower than $400.
Unemployment is at 60%. Thieves are desperate:
there are not many more flush Iraqis left to
plunder. The only lucrative business is to kidnap
and resell foreigners.
An extremely high
percentage of exiles are businessmen, technocrats,
intellectuals, scientists - all fleeing
fundamentalist or confessional carnage, whether it
comes from militias, death squads, mafias, killers
disguised as policemen, Saddamists or
Salafi-jihadists. The absence of skilled workers
and professionals is staggering. A well-known
secular intellectual, whose identity must be be
protected, has been insistently courted by the
Maliki government: they have offered anything he
wanted, even a ministry. He declined. The Sunni
Arab resistance also offered him anything he
wanted. He also declined. No one knows how much
longer he can maintain his independence.
Most of the 5 million or so poor souls who
have remained in Baghdad are the disenfranchised,
the unemployed, the miserable, the wretched, like
scores of old, frail men in their battered
gallabie and keffiah begging in the
middle of the hellish traffic, among the
decomposing cars, the donkeys, the slaughtered
sheep by the curbside and the endless machine gun
toting convoys of Iraqi police ("They are worse
than the Americans").
The UN has done next
to nothing to help these millions of exiled Iraqis
- not to mention the wealthy Arab emirates, or the
Wahhabi millionaires in Saudi Arabia. After the
total implosion of social life, Iraq has reverted
to pre-modernity. Baghdad, once the pride of
Islam, has reverted to the status of the saddest,
most desperate of global capitals. No wonder the
motto - even from secular, well-educated Shi'ites
- is ubiquitous: "Iraq is finished."
So no
one can say that half a trillion dollars - so far
- courtesy of US taxpayers, has not served a clear
"creative destruction" purpose. And this is only
the hors d'oeuvres. The Baghdad gulag is yet to
reach full fruition. Iraq will be finished one
mini-Green Zone at a time.
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