It is hard to imagine a more dilapidated or depressing city. Lara Marlowereturns to the Iraqi capital
BAGHDAD WAS neglected through 12 years of economic sanctions, bombed into submission, and then left to stew in crime, misery and mass murder for the past five years. The shopping malls and pristine tower blocks that some dreamed of when the US army rolled into the Iraqi capital never materialised.
Gutted buildings teeter over streets that reek of sewage and smoke. After five years of US occupation, it is difficult to imagine a more dilapidated and depressing city.
The US security contractor looked out the window as we approached Baghdad International Airport. "I can't see the ground," he said. "We might have to turn around and go back to Amman."
In the event, we landed in the fog-like sand and disembarked into a netherworld where gritty, reddish-grey sediment shrouds buildings and vehicles and sticks to the skin in the 38-degree heat.
The sand storm had forced the cancellation of all flights into Baghdad for three days, and I'd become acquainted with the security contractor during the long wait at Queen Alia airport. I'll call him "W" - his first initial.
Like US president George W Bush, he's from Texas. A former non-commissioned officer, he wears a pin showing intertwined US and marine corps flags, and his business card reads "Semper Fi" (always faithful).
There are tens of thousands of security contractors like W in Iraq, a veritable army of mercenaries. W specialises in closed circuit television systems, but he also organises PSDs - private security details; in other words, bodyguards.
Most of his drivers and gunmen are Ukrainian. W's company charges $1,000 (€642) for the 16km (9.94-mile) run down "Route Irish", as the airport road is called - nobody seems to know why. Blackwater, the biggest security company, with contracts to protect the US ambassador and other high-ranking officials, charges $7,000 for one escorted trip down the airport road.
Blackwater is in bad odour with the other security companies.
Last September, its agents killed 17 civilians in Mansour. Because US contractors in Iraq are immune from prosecution here, they were whisked out of the country. "It was a slap in the face of the Iraqis," says W. "And things got more difficult for the rest of us; we call it Blackwater fallout. Before, we could fire on a vehicle if it sidled up to us. Now we're forbidden from shooting before they open fire."
W arrived in the autumn of 2003 and has seen the country go from bad to worse and, then, thanks to the "surge" - the influx of an extra 30,000 US military - over the past year, back to bad.
"I lived in [the Sunni Muslim neighbourhood of] Mansour for the first couple of years," he recalls. Doug Berg, an American security contractor who was kidnapped and beheaded, was a neighbour. "They sawed off his head and videotaped it. When you see that footage, it's hard not to hate them all."
Though he looks younger than his 71 years ("I don't smoke and I don't drink," he explains), W fought in Vietnam during the 1968 Tet offensive.
"Charlie [the Viet Cong] used zappers - satchel charges - bags of explosives. They used to come up to a hootch and toss it in. With a suicide bomber, the explosions are more destructive."
Somewhere along the line, W says, the fighting spirit went out of the US. He has nothing but scorn for his grandson, who was stationed in Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit and has since left the army. "He's a wimp," W says of his descendant. "Always whining. After the second World War, you didn't hear soldiers complaining about stress disorder and depression."
W lives in the Green Zone. Three months ago, he says, the military discovered an insurgent observation post on the second floor of one of Saddam's ruined former palaces inside the zone. The insurgents "mainly hit the [US] embassy, the helicopter landing zone, the PX [military shopping centre] and Black Hawk FOB [forward operating base]".
Now the military know why: "They discovered a well-equipped position with a clear view of these targets, a GPS [global positioning system] and grid co-ordinates mapped out. The army waited in ambush for them to come back, but they never did; they'd been warned. The Green Zone is totally infiltrated."
Like the rest of the capital, the Green Zone is segmented and paralysed by the permanent, impossible quest for security.
Some western correspondents no longer go there, because it can easily take two hours in Baghdad traffic to reach the outer perimeter by car, then more than an hour on foot to cross the last few hundred metres.
Security for at least one part of the Zone is subcontracted to an outfit called Triple Canopy.
Their agents wear grey camouflage and tote submachine guns. The first layer of guards I encountered yesterday were Ugandan, and we communicated in a broken mix of English, French and Arabic. After several more X-ray machines and pat-downs, I reached a new layer of Peruvian mercenaries, who spoke to me in Spanish. They too wore Triple Canopy flashes.
The Peruvians manned the most exotic X-ray machine I've seen - like a vertical MRI brain scanner with a rotating glass door. I had to put my already thrice-searched handbag in a wire cage for it to be tested by a sniffer dog.
I finally reached the US unit that handles press accreditation, in air-conditioned bunker offices beneath a concrete car park. They never hear the explosions, said a National Guard reservist who joined up so the US government would finance her degree in disaster preparedness.
As I headed back out towards the Red Zone, a Kurdish peshmerga militiaman guarding the parliament building pushed me into a shelter made of parallel blast walls with a concrete ceiling. A half-dozen of us squeezed into the narrow equivalent of an old-fashioned trench.
The incoming rocket and mortar alarm had gone off, an Iraqi in a suit and tie explained.
We grew tired of waiting and walked briskly through the desolate no-man's land, where rubbish blows between the blast walls and catches on concertina barbed wire. I heard no explosions, just the constant roar of US warplanes overhead.