Driving to Baghdad Faster Than Flying

by Karen Button

In an impossibly large and affluent shopping mall in the middle of Amman—where security guards with serious faces have just checked our bags and required passage through a metal detector, measures taken since November’s three hotel bombings—I’m sitting with an Iraqi family who are some of Amman’s more recent arrivals. The mall’s cavernous food court is a meeting place during the cold winter months for Iraqis who come to connect with one another and get news from those just out of Iraq.

Listening, I think how the stories of these people’s lives under the American occupation are impossible to imagine; there is nothing of normalcy, nothing routine…except those things that are of war… checkpoints, house raids and detainments, daily explosions and aerial bombings, poverty brought by high unemployment; and of course the sporadic electricity and water.

But in the midst of this, people continue to live their lives as best they can, going to work if they have it, making meals, and visiting relatives. There is the story a man now tells me about his elderly mother who came from Baghdad to Amman for a visit.

Seventy-two years old and not well, the mother goes to the airport at 2pm for a 4pm flight. Normal enough. Except that departure and arrival times are always an estimate to deter those who would from shooting down the aircraft; contractors seen as collaborators of the occupation and despised by the resistance also use these flights. Plus, the ten-mile journey to the airport is quite dangerous and an imposed curfew shuts down the airport and the road at 6pm.

The passengers go through security and wait for their flight to Amman, but one of the passengers, the Minister of Electricity, hasn’t shown up, so they wait. And wait. Finally, it is apparent he isn’t coming and it is now too late for the 300 or so people to leave; they must stay the night. There are no restaurants, so they go without food and make do with the chairs and floor to sleep. Fortunately, the mother has a cell phone and is able to call her son and let him know she’s not coming. Ahmed, a nearby passenger, promises the son he will look after her.

The next morning, all 300 must stand in line and go back through security to get their passports re-stamped since the date of exit has changed. Today the Minister of Electricity shows up…though in the mix of new arrivals, fortunately for him, no one knows who he is. At last, everyone aboard, they take off for Amman. Turns out though, that the Minister needs to go to Syria, so the plane detours to Damascus first. A two-hour flight from Baghdad to Amman has turned into a 48-hour odyssey. When the mother finally arrives in Amman, she stays in bed for a week to recover.

Now, the son tells me, laughing with typical Iraqi humor, that when his mother left, she has returned to Baghdad by car because it is only a 24 hour trip—faster than flying.