BAGHDAD — The drive from Amman to Baghdad, as before, was long
and arduous. Everything was as I remembered the trip just one year
before until we passed through Jordanian customs and approached the
Iraqi border. There, the charming statue of Saddam riding a horse
with missiles mounted on its side that I found incredibly amusing
last year had been mostly torn town. Adjacent to it across the road
still stood a somewhat more diminutive depiction of Saddam as the
reincarnation of Hammurabi, a tradition he quite fancied.

The real shock came at the entry gate. I had heard since the
previous summer that there was absolutely no border control on the
Iraqi side. We encountered several men in plain, dark clothing with
kuffiahs wrapped around their heads to keep off the drizzling rain.
Several approached our taxi, yelling at our driver Khalid. They
wanted bribes. Khalid yelled back and drove on. The unarmed
“guards” were powerless to stop us. Khalid turned to me and my
travel companion, Anderson Schnieder, and laughed, “Finished!” That
was the Iraqi border control. No American soldiers, no passport
checks, no weapons, no legitimate guards. It’s a good thing no one
found our cache of heavy weapons and 30 Saddam Feddayeen fighters
stashed in the trunk. The real danger in Iraq is the highway from
the border to Baghdad. Twice we came within inches from death
ourselves.

Initially I was terrified by stories of taxis being stopped at
makeshift roadblocks and robbed by bandits. We had left Amman at
midnight so as to be in Iraq during daylight hours, and another car
with Khalid’s friends was traveling with us for added
protection.

Instead, Khalid was our major threat. On two separate occasions
while speeding down the flat highway at 200 km/h, he fell asleep.
The first time he woke up just moments in time to veer away from
the median. The second time, I had to grab the wheel, as I saw he
was barreling into a slow moving truck just ahead of us. Indeed, a
cursory glance at any section of the 500 km stretch of highway
shows dozens of blown tires and twisted guardrails from previous
accidents.

We finally reached Ar-Ramadi, the western end of the so-called
“Sunni Triangle” and one of the major hubs of resistance against
the Americans. Khalid’s friends in the other car lived there, and
we joined to help transport various goods they had bought from
Jordan to trade. We entered the city passing by the Al-Ahram base,
now used by the Americans. For my first sighting of an American
soldier, situated in a tall guard tower, I rolled down the car
window and snapped some shots. Once he saw me, the soldier sprang
to life and aimed his M-60 at me. I suddenly realized how jumpy
they were here and how foolish my move was. Khalid laughed about it
for some time.

In the other car was Bilal Ashreef, a 22-year-old son of a local
tribal sheik, and being the only one to speak English among his
family, he quickly warmed to us. He was studying law at Saddam
University, but now had taken to bringing in goods to sell from
Jordan with his uncle. He said of his contentious city, “It’s okay
here, except for the bombing.”

After some Pepsi and cake, Anderson, Khalid and I set out for
Baghdad.

As we were getting into the car, a few bursts of automatic
weapon fire broke out in the distance. No one noticed at all.
Anderson turned to me and laughed. “That’s the problem here — no
one cares anymore.”

As we left Ar-Ramadi toward Baghdad, we hit journalist pay dirt.
As we entered the town of Khaldiyah, I looked at the raised medium
separating the highway. I kept looking for spots where the
resistance may have planted Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in
the past. When I looked up ahead, though, there was a plume of
black smoke and several local ambulances waiting. Anderson and I
urged Khalid to let us to get out and investigate on foot as a
crowd quickly gathered.

As we passed through the local gawkers, we came upon a large
armored U.S. convoy guarding the site of a large explosion.
Something in the distance was burning furiously, but it was hard to
make it out. An Abrahms tank stood guard facing the townsfolk and a
Bradley APC watched its flank. Anderson and I cautiously
approached, yelling whether it was okay to approach. The two
soldiers on the tank at first paid us no notice. Then the barrel of
the massive machine swung in our direction. Woah. We stopped and
called out again. This time the two soldiers on the tank reached
down, one grabbing an M-16 and the other a .45 pistol. Well, that’s
a hell of a welcome, I thought. They then dismounted and approached
us. They were not happy to see us.

“Don’t take any video!” a captain quickly barked at me as they
came near. Anderson and I identified ourselves with our press
credentials. Anderson was a Brazilian photographer, working
freelance. Each of us held one legitimate and one fake press pass
of sorts. I had long heard that press passes weren’t necessary, an
American passport being enough, but these guys were a little more
serious. “Come over to the tank. It’ll be safer there.” At this
moment, we could see U.S. soldiers running in formation across the
road about 300 m ahead and breaking into houses. A dull thud must
have blown off a door, as soldiers soon emerged hauling any Iraqi
men found in the neighborhood. It’s their typical practice to round
up all adult males within a few blocks of attacks on U.S.
convoys.

The captain of the tank got a radio call to collect our
information. “Get their ID numbers and who they are working for,”
he yelled out to Pvt. Young, who was standing with us. Pvt. Young
obliged and examined our press credentials. He seemed a little
leery of a Brazilian and a man from Wisconsin there as
photographers.

“They sent you all the way over here just to take some photos?”
he grilled me.

Well, I explained, we have our assignments, but we just stumbled
upon this scene on our way to Baghdad. We couldn’t not stop, you
know. We’re the press — we’re vultures! My humor didn’t amuse
him.

I began to understand their hostility toward us, though. We were
incredibly lucky to see this scene, since usually the press doesn’t
find out until hours after an incident.

A local Iraqi stringer for Reuters ran up. He was given the
short shrift and looked upon with suspicion immediately. Anderson
and I both noted that it was incredibly odd how the American
soldiers treated minor Western freelancers compared to someone
working for Reuters who happened to be local. The Americans were
rather rude to the man and became more conciliatory to us. We
continued to take photos, although not much was happening after
some half dozen Iraqi men had been detained on the side of the
road. The Americans decided to widen their perimeter, and a squad
of soldiers and MP’s from the 82nd Airborne advanced toward us,
yelling for us to move back. Just as we began to move away, an MP
yelled at us to approach. They wanted our information, too.

“The colonel wants to know your names and who you work for!” a
sergeant yelled as he approached. All they seem to do is yell. I
asked if there had been any casualties.

“I’m not at liberty to say!” was the reply.

Indeed, the colonel puffed past with his M-4 carbine close to
his chest. He looked at me and, without pausing, screamed, “And
don’t you be taking pictures of my tanks! Got it?!” I gave a feeble
“Okay.” A crash course on Army press guidelines, I guessed.

A female Army photographer then came up to us — the only
soldier who didn’t yell. “How did you guys get here so fast?” I
guess we really had been lucky. She then told us who to speak to at
the press liaison office to get an explanation of the incident.
Otherwise we were not to ask any questions of soldiers.

The MP Sgt. passed by and added, “You guys from America are
generally okay. It’s just those guys from Al-Jazeera that we have
to watch out for. They’ll find a way to turn this into propaganda
against us.”

We moved back to where the locals had gathered. The scene wasn’t
as frantic as before, with troops milling about and the Abrahms and
Bradley guarding a row of Humvees as black smoke continued to burn
in the distance. One of the younger locals had shouted that two
helicopters had gone down and killed five soldiers. He gave a big
thumbs up with a smile. I wound up standing next to this person as
I was shooting, and he continued to try to talk to me.

He called the soldiers a certain insult I couldn’t understand in
Arabic. His English was worse than my Arabic, however, but I
finally understood him to say that American people were his
friends, but that he hated the soldiers. I said I understood. He
then got a little more cryptic. “Saddam is our friend, and is
friend of Americans.” I wasn’t quite following, especially when he
went into more in Arabic, but I just nodded and claimed to
understand. It was just easier that way.

I wasn’t so interested in photographs of the soldiers in action.
Although Anderson and I had the first photos of what proved to be
another fatal attack on a U.S. convoy, it wasn’t as if we were
about to send them off to some press office. Instead, I maneuvered
to get photos of Iraqi children staring at the U.S. soldiers. The
contrast was quite stunning and said a lot more than I could.

It turned out that three U.S. paratroopers were killed in the
attack, and as per usual, the Americans responded with random
gunfire that killed a few civilians.

We eventually moved on, returning to the cab and our long
journey to Baghdad. To circumvent the now-blocked road, we had to
go around the city and passed by an old Iraqi airfield. Dozens of
pillboxes and bunkers were scattered around the dried grassy hills.
The year before, U.S. artillery approaching the town had blown
apart the large facility, and ruins were all over along the dirt
path we took back to the highway.

As we sped through Fallujah, another major center of resistance,
we came upon yet another traffic jam at the edge of the city. There
had been another bombing earlier, and Iraqi police and a few
Humvees were just pulling out. If we accidentally came upon two of
these incidents in just an hour, I wondered how many were going
unreported.

Finally, we entered Baghdad. It was peculiar passing by so many
landmarks and seeing the differences. Most shocking was perhaps the
various buildings I recognized from the year before that I had
known to be apartment and residential buildings. Several had been
gutted by fire, blasted by tank shells, or simply reduced to
rubble. U.S. Humvees stood guard in front of gas stations and small
government facilities. The entire hotel area where I stayed the
year before around the Al-Fanar was a city of tall concrete slabs
and razor wire. I finally settled into the latest place for
independent journalists to hang out, Aghadir Hotel, further down
Sa’adoon Street and away from the targeted hotels and American
bases. I found a few other like-minded people working here
independently and took a room.

Almost the instant the sky grew dark, rifle and pistol fire
broke out fairly close by. It was the only incident that night, but
it was a stark reminder of the change in Iraq now. No one goes out
after 9 p.m. By 11 p.m., the city is a ghost town, even though
there is no more curfew. Take taxis everywhere you can.

I woke up this morning at 6:45 a.m. to the concussion of an
explosion off my balcony windows. The Al-Shaheen Hotel down the
road had been bombed with three dead, according to the latest
reports.

It’s good to be back!