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Iraqis, US soldiers guarded about what's in store for 2004
Jordan Times, Wednesday, December 31, 2003
BAGHDAD (AFP) — It was two days to New Year and men stepped around the pool of blood and body parts from the latest Baghdad bomb blast. Most looked bleakly to 2004 as they scrubbed away the blood on the pavement and swept away the shards of glass from their storefronts.
Some of the men worried about Fuad, their local cigarette seller who was badly wounded in the neck, belly and arm when the bomb blew up at 8:50am (0550 GMT) by his makeshift plastic stall in the Karrada neighbourhood.
They also pitied the dead man none of them seemed to know, whom they had just lifted up in a wood stretcher, his face dismembered, a gaping hole where his eye and forehead were, and carried to the nearby mosque.
They prayed that the same fate would not befall any of them in the days to come.
US soldiers stood poised with M-16 rifles, shooing children and young men from the rubble in the middle of the street where the bomb had exploded.
Some of the men blamed the tragedy on the Americans. They prayed US troops would leave and never come back. Others hope the Americans will stay and rebuild the country.
The US soldiers scanned the street for bombs, like the one that narrowly missed killing their colleagues driving in all-terrain vehicles Tuesday morning.
Despite the ugly day, the soldiers spoke brightly about 2004.
They believed there has been gradual progress in Iraq since they arrived last April.
But in the next minute, one of the soldiers wondered aloud why some Iraqis on this street refused to help them find out who was behind the bombing.
Neither the Iraqis nor the Americans seemed to fully understand one another, with the gap still huge eight months after former dictator Saddam Hussein was toppled in April.
Haidar Abu Iqlam sat by the counter of his smashed hamburger and falafel restaurant where broken glass mixed with pickles on the floor.
Iqlam was grim about the future. He wanted the Americans to pay for his blown-out windows. He said he expected violence in Iraq as long as the soldiers stayed, and that more would be caught in the crossfire like his friend Fuad.
“The New Year will be worse. There'll be more attacks,” said Iqlam, a member of the country's Shiite Muslim majority, brutalised under Saddam.
“It's a terrible situation.”
Jamil Yunes Mohammed, 42, was also cleaning the glass out from his small kabab restaurant.
“I hope the violence will stop,” he said.
Like Iqlam, Mohammed thought about Fuad.
He had known the cigarette seller since he showed up on their block in Karrada in March. Fuad had told him his son suffered from a rare blood disease and Mohammed respected the fact that the man worked so hard to save money for his sick child.
Like everyone, Mohammed heard the story that Fuad had whispered to the few gathered around him: “Take care of my wife and children” before an ambulance carried him away.
Still, Yunes is sure it will get better.
“We need time. We need to build a new system, new institutions. It takes time building things. The Americans should have a remedy, they will find a solution,” he says.
In Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, north of Baghdad, one American soldier said he and his colleagues have been trying.
“We've accomplished a lot but there's still a lot to do,” said First Lieutenant Don Calderwood, 37.
He and his fellow soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division arrived in April and never expected to be greeting the New Year in Iraq.
“I thought I'd be home with my family right now,” Calderwood says.
Another 4th ID soldier, Sergeant Jared Jablanski, 20, doesn't mind staying in Iraq until next April when the entire division will be replaced.
“I'll have as much fun as I can before we leave,” he said. “I think it's getting better. I hear that at least 75 to 80 per cent of Tikrit is with us now.”
On the street where the Baghdad bombing occurred, Sergeant Stephen Ray Cook also thinks it will get better in 2004, at least part of him does.
“Until now, it has no choice but to get better ... but it's still going to be a ghetto,” said Cook, a reservist from California.
He admits some things have got worse in the past few months. A fuel crisis and power shortages again grip areas around Iraq, but he thinks they will sort themselves out.
“It'll go up and back down. It's like the stock market.”
But thinking about men like Iqlam who ask for compensation, but do not help find the bad guys, makes him frustrated.
“It makes it easy to lose sympathy for these people,” he said, glaring momentarily.
“They only think about themselves. They've got to get out of their box and realise in general it's way better than it's been.”
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python (Alquds, 1/25/03. |
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