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.

From “Democracy” to Police State

by Karen Button

After six months, I’m back in Amman, Jordan and signs of urban growth is everywhere. The future bus station across from my hotel, a few connected walls before, is now near completion, with an opening date set in March. New buildings are being constructed across the city and the sounds of pilings being driven is part of the background noise. I’m told 400,000 people moved to this desert crossroad country of six million last year alone.

What has surprised me most though, is the increased numbers of Iraqis here in Amman, all escaping the nearly unbearable living conditions, compounded by a violence that is not only lethal, but ever more indiscriminate.

After meeting with just a few Iraqis on my first days here, already I have several meetings set up with those who’ve recently fled what’s left of their Iraq. Many are doctors who’ve fled after either being threatened with kidnapping or having survived kidnapping, adding to an exodus of academics who’ve been targeted by criminal gangs or worse. Many believe that secret police, both Iraqi and American, are behind some of these abductions, others believe they are common criminals, and still others believe it is the religious fundamentalists causing much of the problem…some claim the Mullahs of Iran want control of Iraq. This is not without some substantiation. Many of Iraq’s Shi’a are followers of the High Council of Islamic Revolution party, most of whose leaders follow Tehran. However, supporters of Iraq’s Muqtada al-Sadr, who is a strong opponent of US occupation and representative of the poor of Baghdad, is growing.

Also present though is al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group of jihadists never before known in Iraq prior to the US-led invasion. Though wading through the resistance’s various factions is impossible, more complicated still is the multiple layers of the so-called legitimate armed forces—forces that include what an Iraqi contractor for the US Department of Defense who I met on the plane-ride over called “grey fox,” the secret security forces set up by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld that only he and Mr. Bush have any knowledge of or jurisdiction over. A group of operatives made doubly dangerous by receiving their orders from a man who’s made it clear he has no time for such trivialities as international treaties and laws governing war and the treatment of human beings. (This contractor also offered me a job, saying I could make upwards of $900,000/year.)

Add to this unholy mix the mercenaries—most prefer the ambiguous term “contractor”—which constitute the second largest force in the Coalition (or Collision as one Iraqi friend recently mispronounced it, but I thought rather prescient) of the Willing. To give an idea who these people are, take the case of retired British commando, Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, who, according to a Boston Globe report, is known for his illicit arms deals in Africa and commanding a “murderous military unit in Northern Ireland.” His “past work includes a ‘psychological campaign’ against the inhabitants of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, who were complaining about environmental destruction from a copper mine on their island.” The Pentagon awarded Spicer’s company a $293 million contract for “coordinating security” in Iraq.

Also operating a campaign of terror are the US-trained Iraqi secret police force known as the Wolf Brigades. CIA operatives, Shi’a-run Iraqi secret prisons, US and British troops with prisons of their own, and religious armies, such as the Badr Brigades, followers of Iran’s al-Sistani and the Medhi army who follow the Iraqi Shi’a leader al-Sadr all combine to form a deadly fabric of daily violence.

How many of the 400,000 recent arrivals in Jordan are Iraqis? Hard to say. But I’ll soon meet a large number who come together weekly to discuss Iraq, their situation here in Jordan, and what their future holds. Many of them, I’m told, are doctors, professors and teachers, business leaders, and other professionals.

“Iraq is being emptied of all our educated ,” one man tells me. “How can we ever re-build our country without these people?”

The Tightening Noose Around Iraq’s Fledgling Democracy

by Karen Button

Many have feared that the December 15th elections would not give Iraqis the democracy promised since the invasion of their country in 2003. It seems they were right to worry.

Since the elections, a number of key events have taken place, which bear highlighting.

Visa Requirements Tightened

Tougher requirements for visas was announced a week after the election. The Foreign Affairs Ministry, in a statement that defies logic, claimed, “Before, the Iraqi authorities easily granted visas to most applicants, which led to an increase in foreign insurgents coming into Iraq, especially Arabs.”

Apparently, before now foreign fighters were not only applying for visas, they were being granted them too easily. Who this will actually affect are NGOs, journalists, and business owners, many of whom are now living in Amman, Jordan and travel between the two countries.

Khalid Sumayre, a senior ministry official, went on to declare, “From now on, if a journalist wants a visa, he has to have a security detail to provide him [sic] with protection.”

Journalists at Risk/News Censored

At the same time, the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists released their annual report, calling Iraq the most dangerous place for journalists in 2005. Since the start of the war, 60 journalists have been killed, 41 have been Iraqi. Of those, 13 have been killed by the US, prompting calls by journalist rights groups for investigations whether or not they were targeted killings.

An additional 22 media workers have been killed while working. 36 journalists have been kidnapped in that same time period; most were released. One, Jill Carroll of The Christian Science Monitor, was abducted January 7th and is still being held. Her interpreter was shot dead. Also disturbing is the frequent detainment of journalists—particularly Iraqis—and the confiscation of their work by US forces, such as what happened to Ali Fadhil on 8 January.

Fadhil, an award-winning reporter working for The Guardian and Channel 4, was investigating accusations that “tens of millions of dollars worth of Iraqi funds held by the Americans and British have been misused or misappropriated,” according to The Guardian.

“The director of the film, Callum Macrae, said yesterday: ‘The timing and nature of this raid is extremely disturbing. It is only a few days since we first approached the US authorities and told them Ali was doing this investigation, and asked them then to grant him an interview about our findings.’

“The troops told Dr Fadhil that they were looking for an Iraqi insurgent and seized video tapes he had shot for the programme. These have not yet been returned.”

IMF Loan First Step Toward Privitization

In late December the International Monetary Fund unsurprisingly weighed in by granting a $685 million loan to Iraq to rebuild their war-ravaged country. In exchange for Iraqi’s paying for their own reconstruction, the IMF demanded the government end oil subsidies and open the country’s economy to private investment.

In response to IMF pressures, Iraq’s outgoing government increased fuel prices nine-fold, causing demonstrations and riots across the country. Police fired upon a crowd of 3,000 protesters in Nassiryeh and killed four during riots in Kirkuk.

When Iraq’s Oil Minster, Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum, protested, he was given a “forced vacation.” According to the blog DailyKos, al-Uloum asked, “Is this how we repay the Iraq citizens who risked their lives to participate in the elections, by raising fuel prices in this way?”

Ahmed Chalabi, former CIA informant and convicted embezzler, replaced al-Uloum, leaving no question that the US will benefit over Iraqi citizens in regards their oil. In closed-door meetings members of Iraq’s interim-government and representatives from the US and the UK have been negotiating Iraq’s oil future. If the current plan is signed off on, Iraqis will lose control of more than 85 percent of their oil resources to foreign multinationals according to a report entitled Crude Designs by researcher Greg Muttitt.

Though Iraqis have no desire to privatize their oilfields, they may have no choice. In a country whose resources have long been nationalized, there has been no public discourse about the future of their oil.

The noose around Bush's democracy experiment in Iraq continues to tighten.