The Rough Guide to Baghdad (Page 2)

Ten days to sovereignty--the city waits. I awake, as usual, in a sweat to the sound of a rumbling boom. The big explosions are usually in the morning. This one sounds close. "Car bomb!" yells a colleague down the hall. Four of us are bivouacked in a cheap, almost empty Baghdad hotel run by a friendly but thuggish man from Falluja. The accommodations--along with our recently grown beards, dark tans, locally purchased cloths and preference for beat-up old cars--are all part of a low-tech "security strategy." If most Western journalists live in walled compounds with armed guards and still get kidnapped or shot up, we figure, do the opposite. Go local, blend in, try to pass as Iraqi, to the extent we are able.

"Abu Talat called," says my colleague. "The bomb was right by where his wife works. He's headed over. We're outta here in five minutes." At al-Rashid Street, in old Baghdad, blocks from the Central Bank of Iraq, we find the aftermath. It wasn't a car bomb, just a big IED (improvised explosive device) set to hit a money truck. But the timing was off by a few seconds--commuters took the blast instead. Four are wounded, one may have already died.

Iraqi cops and bank security men with Kalashnikovs mill around a shattered wall and some twisted metal gates, while two Arab TV crews shoot video. Thirty feet away sits a victim's shattered car. Looters are already at work stripping the salvageable parts. The cops pay no attention.

Thanks in part to police inaction, kidnapping, carjacking and murder have imposed an informal dusk-to-dawn curfew in many parts of this city. The director of the Baghdad morgue tells me that he sees an average of at least 600 unsolved murders every month, adding, "There are many more cases we don't receive." In a city of roughly 4 million, this translates into a crime rate about ten or fifteen times higher than the most violent cities in America--and this has serious economic consequences.

"Little things create big economic problems," explains Asaad Witwit, an elegant but casual Iraqi burgher, who owns four factories, three of which are currently closed. "Security is the biggest problem." We're meeting in the riverfront offices of the Iraqi Federation of Industry, a lobby group for private-sector manufacturers. Witwit is a leading board member. As we speak in English, three of his colleagues are commiserating and working the phones in fast, angry Arabic. The federation just bought a new truck-sized generator for its building, but the machine was stolen before it was even delivered. (US contractors deal with such problems by giving their mobile phone numbers to local sheiks so they can have first dibs on buying back their gear.)

Iraq's badly battered infrastructure is another problem, explains Witwit. "For example, you cannot make paint if you do not have clean water. Salts and minerals in the water ruin the paint. Or to make ice, or to can food, or process meat, you need clean water. We don't have that," he says philosophically. Behind him his colleagues rage on in Arabic about the "son of a whore" who sold them the generator and then most likely stole it back himself.

Then there are the cheap imports that have flooded the country since the US invasion. Witwit's sole working factory is a plastics plant that makes thermoses and coolers, but he has laid off most of his thirty employees because Chinese and Iranian imports are driving down prices. To upgrade and retool requires capital. "We need loan programs, investment, but the Americans do nothing. They only talk about the free market."

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