Angry Iraqis say country is grinding to a haltThe Guardian
April 19, 2004
By Luke Harding in BaghdadStanding next to his dirt-encrusted mini-van, Abu Duraid could barely conceal his fury yesterday. "Have a look at my car," he said, brushing the desert sand off the rear windscreen wiper. "My tyres are sagging. It's not built for unpaved roads. My poor bloody car."
In normal times, Mr Duraid, a taxi driver, takes an hour and 15 minutes to drive his passengers from Kerbala to Baghdad. Yesterday, it took him more than four hours after the US military abruptly announced that it was blocking off two of Iraq's major highways.
The road north out of Baghdad to Samarra and Tikrit is now off limits. So is the route south to the two holy Shia cities of Kerbala and Najaf. Setting off from Kerbala yesterday at 9am, Mr Duraid found the way shut off by US troops. "There were a lot of them. They had blocked both sides of the road," he said.
Instead, he was forced to take a zig-zagging detour on a potholed mud track, through fields lined with date palms. He arrived at Baghdad's central al-Alawi bus station at 1pm. "I'm very angry. This is bad behaviour by the United States. We should at least have a way for coming and going."
He added: "Why do they do that?"
Announcing the coalition's decision on Saturday, the US military spokesman Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt said the roads had been blocked off "for the foreseeable future" to prevent insurgents from planting bombs on the side of the road - a favourite tactic - and from attacking the US supply lines.
The roads had also been closed so they could be repaired, he said. "We've got to fix those roads; we've also got to protect those roads," he said, claiming that civilians would be directed around the closed sections.
However, Iraqi drivers heaped scorn on the military's explanation. "They are lying. The Americans are always lying," a taxi driver, Adnan Saad, 45, said. The real reason for shutting the road to Najaf, he suggested, was to prevent armed supporters of the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr from travelling to the city from Baghdad.
Mr Sadr, who initiated a Shia uprising this month against the US-led occupation, is holed up in Najaf, with US forces poised outside vowing to kill or capture him.
"The Americans have been tearing down portraits of Sadr along the road," another driver, Saad Abbas Hussani, said. "But the posters are Shia sym bols. We will make a war against them."
Either way, the blockade adds to the sense that the Iraqi capital is virtually marooned, an island surrounded by chaos and turmoil. Since the uprising in Falluja began nearly three weeks ago, the highway west out of Baghdad has been considered too dangerous to use, especially for foreigners, who have been kidnapped or murdered.
Yesterday the US military revealed that this route to the Jordanian border had been closed off as well. The coalition also said it had shut down a stretch of the main road to Turkey, from Baghdad to the town of Balad 42 miles further north. Also closed was a 90-mile stretch of the main southern highway connecting Baghdad with Basra and Kuwait.
The only way into Iraq now is a daily flight by Royal Jordanian airlines. Even this route, though, is not safe, with the airport road to central Baghdad under frequent attack. Over the weekend a previously obscure Sunni resistance group, Saraya al-Jehad, vowed to turn the road into a war zone.
Yesterday, at Baghdad's second bus station, in the suburb of al-Nadha, drivers said that few passengers wanted to go anywhere.
"They are afraid that the Americans are going to shoot them on the road, or that the resistance will launch a mortar attack and will hit them by mistake, or that they will get stuck in another city and not go back home," Salah Mohammad, 37, said. He added: "The country is grinding to a halt."
Even the road south to British-occupied Basra is not safe, Hassan Abdullah, 26, a taxi driver, said. He had been travelling between Amara and Basra three days ago when armed bandits tried to stop his car. "I didn't stop. They shot into the air," he said. "After that I drove at 200kms an hour."
Mr Abdullah said the passenger with him had been "scared to death".
"When we got to Basra he paid me extra."
Back at al-Alawi bus station, passenger Hassan Ghutafa, 55, said he was still optimistic he would make it back to Najaf, where his wife and 12 children were waiting for him. "The situation is terrible," he said, standing next to deserted drinks stands. "But by the power of God I will arrive safely."
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