Yesterday morning, in the hot glare of midday, Ahmed Adel and his partners were embarking on a journey through Iraq more perilous, in its way, than any soldier’s march.
It looked ordinary enough: their truck was piled high with the deep red tomatoes of Zubayr, on their way to market. But their journey began in a pocket of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the deep south, then passed into an uncertain realm of US-British occupation. If it went according to their hopes, they would re-enter President Saddam’s Iraq again for the market in Baghdad by nightfall.
The western troops making the same journey from the south to Baghdad are risking their lives. Adel was risking both his life and his livelihood, carrying his crop across two unfixed boundaries between two hostile armies, before trying to enter a capital under attack from the air.
By today, the crop will have rotted. Adel and his comrades said they had no choice but to go yesterday. ”This is our source of income,” he said. ”We don’t have any others.”
Normally the journey from Zubayr, a short drive from the head of the Gulf, to Baghdad, would take eight or nine hours in Adel’s truck. Yesterday he reckoned it might take a little longer, maybe 12 or 13.
That was if he could get past the gigantic mechanised force speeding up the motorway towards Baghdad, occupying all six lanes, leaving a cocoa-coloured trail of discarded army-issue Meals Ready to Eat packages on the verge and refuelling by the roadside with its burning hot engines ticking as they cooled.
Adel’s delivery of tomatoes for the markets of Baghdad would have been quite lost among this flying column of marines, towered over by trucks delivering racks of shells and rockets to the city’s gates.
Like a realisation of the most vivid fantasy of one of Hitler’s master tank strategists, the few outsiders to witness this spectacle were seeing a blitzkrieg on an autobahn, an entire gas-guzzling army surging forward in a haze of growling diesel, carrying everything it needed to eat, drink and kill as it went.
No static graphic could accurately represent day four of the US-British invasion of Iraq. The mechanised columns are flowing like water along the narrow channels of Iraq’s beautifully maintained roads, leaving the hard places of towns and cities high and dry.
In some cases, like that of Zubayr, a mainly Sunni Muslim town in the mainly Shia south which lies between Kuwait and Basra, they have left islands of Saddamdom in which the tyrant’s image is still sacred.
In Zubayr, according to Adel and other residents the Guardian spoke to yesterday, Iraqi troops still patrol the streets and portraits of President Saddam adorn public places and offices. Yet Zubayr is — or at least was, for some may have pushed on — surrounded by US-British troops.
As a result, civilians like Adel spend these days knotted in fear, moving from Iraqi-controlled areas where they must not criticise President Saddam to US-British controlled areas where they are afraid not to criticise him, and back to Iraqi areas where they are afraid that anything they said to westerners may be used against them.
”We still love our president,” said one of Adel’s partners, Ali Latif. ”We don’t accept the Americans. It’s our country. We love it.”
Another man who came over to join the conversation at a lonely, looted petrol station west of Zubayr, Khaled Yassir, leaned down to scoop the thick dust in the middle of the road and lifted it to his mouth. ”This is Iraq, this is part of my blood, I love it,” he said.
”This country is dear to us. It’s valuable to us and we are not very happy that American forces have invaded us for something that’s not worth it. It’s all excuses. First they said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, but the inspectors have been here since 1991 and they haven’t found anything. Now they say they want Saddam Hussein to give up power. On what basis, if people accept him?”
Another man, a shepherd, Abu Ahmed, had been trapped in the de facto US-British zone with his family after travelling south to see a doctor about his tonsils. He showed the Guardian a note in English, which he believed to be some form of pass allowing him to return home.
It was a few lines written on a page torn from a small notebook. ”These people cannot travel north!” it said. ”Send them south, or off MSR [main supply route].” It was signed 4th MPs (military police). Abu Ahmed doesn’t live in the south.
Zubayr has not been bombed, although its electricity supply was cut three days ago and as a result the water supply no longer functions.
The owner of the petrol station, a wealthy businessman who lives in Zubayr and did not want to be named or photographed, said of the situation: ”It’s a strange feeling, because I’m in my own country and I can’t move and people are searching me.
”They’re not hurting people, but it’s a bit humiliating, especially if you’re an old man or a prominent man.”
In Zubayr, he said, the townsfolk were divided on whether President Saddam’s regime should go. ”Some think yes, we want to get rid of him, others say, it’s our regime, and we’re not bothering anybody. If we were in your country and starting putting up checkpoints and searching people, how would you feel?”
Like other men of property, he was indignant that the invaders were doing nothing to maintain law and order in the areas they control. The US and Britain are now technically occupying powers in the parts of Iraq they control and are obliged to maintain law and order by the Geneva convention.
He pointed at a group of beaten-up tankers lumbering down the road. ”Look!” he said. ”All those tankers are stolen.”
Many remarkable journeys were begun towards Baghdad from the south yesterday. Little groups of surrendered soldiers from Umm Qasr, the port just over the border from Kuwait partially captured by US-British forces, had been relieved of their guns and told to go home. They were in the early stage of days of walking home, carrying nothing but the clothes on their backs and discarded plastic water bottles they had filled from whatever roadside water they could scavenge.
It was not clear how they would feed and water themselves en route: nor was it clear how the US and Britain were fulfilling their duties to care for them under the Geneva convention.
”What can I do? We’ve no car,” said Fadu Taaban, from Nassiriya, 160 kilometres west of Basra on the road to Baghdad. ”We’ve been walking since the day before yesterday. We didn’t even fire a shot. We gave ourselves up to them and they didn’t bother us.”
By the motorway near Basra, pathetic knots of surrendered soldiers could be seen squatting in the heat of the afternoon as what was, in effect, a single vast convoy of US marines, at least 100 kilometres long, thundered towards Taaban’s hometown.
In fog and dust yesterday evening the marines were crossing a pontoon bridge they have built over the Euphrates near Nassiriya. They would be crossing all night long. Nassiriya is a third of the way towards Baghdad, and the US army’s 3rd Infantry Division is already pushing towards the city from further north.
The advance guards of the two hosts look set to meet — perhaps as early as tomorrow — at the very threshold of the city. These are not good days to be going to market in Baghdad. – Guardian Unlimited Â