There is no sensation like driving around Baghdad. Outside you can see what
looks like the normality of an Arab street — kebab sellers fanning the
coals, a glimpse of a garish display outside a wedding goods shop, a pile of
fridges taking up the pavement. But a glimpse through a tattered curtain of
a car is all there can be. It is considered far too dangerous for a
westerner to be seen on the road.
In a city where dozens of bodies are found every morning and not a day passes
without apparently random explosions in the streets, any car journey feels
like another spin of the roulette wheel.
Nowhere is safe, especially at the hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints that
litter the streets. We were close to being shot last month by Americans on
what felt like a secure road, the final stretch towards the “Assassin’s
Gate” entry into the green zone, a fortified area guarded by US troops.
The soldiers were responding to an Iraqi military vehicle crashing across the
central reservation and temporarily mistook us for Iraqis. I wish there were
an internationally agreed symbol for “Don’t shoot, I am with the BBC”,
because the decision to open fire is a split-second choice, made before you
have time to explain. Luckily, this time the soldiers made the right choice.
Roadblocks have gained a reputation as one of the most dangerous aspects of
navigating around the Iraqi capital. Manned by nervous US troops, Iraqi
soldiers or insurgents, the only certain thing about these temporary
barriers thrown across most roads in the city is that they will be there —
and they will be unpredictable.
At the last count there were more than 800 official roadblocks mounted every
week in Baghdad. And moving around has become a lottery.
Some are manned by a sleepy soldier sitting in the shade, waving a line of
vehicles through a narrow channel made by barbed wire strung between oil
barrels and other roadside detritus. Others are less professional
operations: there are half a dozen big armed insurgent groups while every
mosque now has its own militia, each of which will slow down traffic by
making a slalom of palm tree trunks pulled across the road. Then there are
the American checkpoints with razor wire, heavy vehicles and impassive US
soldiers in wraparound sunglasses, bristling with weaponry.
The main effect of the roadblocks, other than adding to the general air of
unease, is traffic jams. These have become a new fact of life in Baghdad,
especially around the large central area seized by the Americans for their
green zone.
Unlike the frustration you feel while stuck in a jam on the M25, however,
being held up in slow-moving traffic in Baghdad has more worrying
consequences: sitting in a line makes you vulnerable to attack.
Every foreigner — journalists, aid workers and contractors alike — is a
potential target. Many soldiers in Iraq’s new army have links with insurgent
groups impatient for the American-led liberation/occupation to end, and we
are all seen as fair game.
For all of us in Baghdad, then, the question is how to negotiate the city
safely. Clearly the best way to do this is never to leave the green zone.
However, this is impractical to report on the situation on the ground
where tension between rival Sunni and Shi’ite factions means that every day
fears grow that the country is slipping into a worsening civil war. You have
to leave the zone and drive into the badlands beyond, where car bombs and
roadside ambushes are a part of daily life.
The next question is what vehicle to use. There are two schools of thought.
The first is that in order to guarantee maximum safety you should go for
maximum protection, the other is that it is better to melt into the
background and avoid drawing attention to yourself.
Adherents to the first theory are usually the foreign security contractors.
They are now about 20,000 strong, the second largest foreign force in Iraq,
about three times bigger than the British military presence.
Their main role is escorting construction workers engaged in the Sisyphean
task of rebuilding the country’s shattered infrastructure. They frequently
engage in firefights with insurgents and take far more casualties than is
publicly known, with “dispensable” guards from countries such as Peru, Fiji
and Honduras bearing the brunt of the casualties.
The vehicle of choice for these mercenaries — to whom the US military has all
but contracted out the occupation — is the Mamba, a giant South African
police vehicle, with origins that go back to the dark days of apartheid. The
version available in Iraq is put onto a Ford chassis with a
6 litre engine. The importer describes it as having aesthetic appeal, with
removable storage bins on the sides that make “it appear less aggressive”,
but you hardly see any on the roads here that do not have a gun mounted in a
turret.
And even if the vehicle isn’t aggressive, the contractors who ride in them
often are. The website of one of the better known companies has a video
showing a white Iraqi saloon car being shot off the road as it drives up
behind a contractor’s vehicle, apparently posing no threat. For no clear
reason, the video soundtrack is Elvis Presley singing That’s All Right.
For those who believe it is better to go unnoticed, a shabby Toyota saloon
with a smeared windscreen fringed by woollen tassels, and grey nylon
curtains obscuring the rear windows, is more attractive.
Such people have abandoned their fleets of expensive armoured vehicles to the
safety of the garage.
Besides, armoured vehicles do not provide much protection against the
explosives used here.
Some 20 British soldiers have died in Iraq in incidents involving “snatch”
Land Rovers, which are armoured to the level of B6, about the same
specification of armour in cars available to journalists.
B6 is supposed to stop rifle fire but is not guaranteed to protect occupants
from landmines or a rocket-propelled grenade.
Car manufacturers have been quick to spot the market for low-profile vehicles
that nonetheless offer a degree of protection. Some are now making armoured
vehicles that are disguised to look like a normal car.
There are armoured BMWs, and for $130,000 (£69,000) you can buy a modified
Toyota 4x4 that calls itself a “Land Cruiser just like your mom’s” except it
is armour plated, boasts run-flat tyres, optional gun ports disguised in the
bodywork and a two-way intercom for negotiating checkpoints without having
to wind down the bulletproof window. But they still stick out on Baghdad’s
roads.
As with everything in Baghdad, however, there is always a downside: while
camouflaging yourself in a local vehicle may grant some protection from
Iraqis it can have the opposite effect when confronted by US troops.
One journalist’s bodyguard told me that while driving a nondescript car on
Route Irish, the long looping road that leads to the international airport
from the green zone, he was stopped by an American screaming “Get the f***
out” and pointing his gun. He took some time to persuade the soldier that he
was not Iraqi.
It was at a checkpoint on a slip road to Route Irish that, in March last year,
US soldiers killed the Italian special forces soldier Nicola Calipari who
had just secured the release of the journalist Giuliana Sgrena.
In the complex matrix of decision-making here the choice of vehicle you take
from the garage each morning can mean the difference between life and death.
But the truth is that no matter which you choose — armoured or low-profile —
the risks hardly diminish. As with everything in Baghdad there are no
guarantees. It depends simply on who is manning the first checkpoint you
come across.
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from page one
A TIP: OPEN THE DOOR AND RUN WHEN THE SHOOTING STARTS
Veteran war correspondent Jon Swain’s guide to surviving an Iraqi
roadblock attack
War, in my experience, is a kind of jailbreak. It lifts our taboos. The
exposure to danger becomes routine. Courage becomes a cult. If there is one
taboo not to break, however, if you want to stay alive, it is casualness at
an armed roadblock.
Negotiating a bad one in a war zone is at best tricky, at worst a nightmare
balance of life against death.
Nothing chills the blood as much in Iraq these days as hitting the bad one. It
scarcely matters who mans them: trigger-happy American soldiers, angry
militiamen, criminal gangs or insurgents dressed as Iraqi soldiers whose
kidnapping, torture and throat-cutting have made Iraq’s grim capital a world
of horrors. They are all frightening and to be treated with respect.
In the early days after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, American roadblocks
were the big danger. Approaching Mahmoudia one day near the so-called
triangle of death just south of Baghdad, I got stuck behind a plodding
American army convoy.
US convoys were becoming frequent targets of insurgent suicide bombers, so the
soldiers tended to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. At the end was
a Humvee gun truck with a machinegunner whose job was to keep the civilian
traffic 100 yards back. It bore a sign warning motorists: “Danger. Stay
back. Deadly force is authorised.”
But then the rear gunner, seeing a westerner in the car, waved me past. I told
my driver to drive very slowly and remain alert. The convoy’s tail gunner
might not have informed the troops ahead our car was coming. They would be
taken by surprise and could open fire as we drew alongside. Too late to
offer apologies, then. We would be dead.
This time the convoy began passing a roadblock just as we were reaching the
front vehicles. The next moment was a blur of shots around the car.
At such time the instinct for self-preservation makes one want to cower and
squeeze into as tight a ball as possible inside the vehicle. Somehow one
believes a car is protection.
But its frame gives a false sense of security. Bullets rip through its thin
metal skin like a knife through butter. I have seen the carnage bullets do
to human beings trapped in cars too often to know that baling out is the
immutable rule.
Our car was a deathtrap. Opening the door, getting out, was a hard thing to
do. We did. And mercifully, as we scurried across the ground the American
soldiers on the checkpoint ceased firing, realising their mistake.
In other wars I like to drive myself. Then my life is in my own hands, no one
else’s. I known when I am over-reaching my limits and risking my life. If I
throw my sense of proportion overboard, then I alone am to blame. In Iraq a
driver is essential. There are some wonderful ones, brave, resourceful and
loyal. They know they are dead, too, if they hit the wrong roadblock by
mistake.
My rules about roadblocks have evolved from experience and common sense. In
Cambodia in the 1970s some 25 foreign journalists and photographers out of a
press corps of less than 100 were stopped and killed on the roads in a few
months.
Statistically this is a higher press death toll than in Iraq and they died in
a much shorter time. Even so, there is a special terror about Iraq. In
Cambodia the roadblocks and ambushes were out in the great greenness of the
countryside, encountered driving to and from battlefields. In built-up
Baghdad a rogue one can appear without warning just round the corner from
the hotel.
Travelling is unpleasant and dangerous. The most routine outing can end in
tears unless you keep your wits about you. Iraq may be the biggest story in
the world. Is it worth a greater risk for that? It is true that surviving a
close encounter with death can give a grim physical and mental exhilaration.
But staking everything through lack of common sense at an Iraqi roadblock is
unjustifiable. The place is dangerous enough as it is.
David Loyn is the author of Frontline: The True Story of the British
Mavericks Who Changed the Face of War Reporting, published by Penguin
