March 13, 2003
Baghdad
Rich flee from capital as panic grips city's poor
By Janine di Giovanni
Residents' studied indifference to attack has given way to palpable alarm
NEAR the al-Rasheed bridge, opposite the Ministry of Information, a group of boys who usually play football after school are frantically making sandbags by shovelling earth into plastic sacks and stacking them into a makeshift bunker.
“We came here straight from school; we heard they needed help,” Ahmed, 13, said breathlessly. “No one told us to. We want to do our part.”
His friend, Khalid, 12, agreed nervously: “Everyone has to do something now to prepare. We hope war is not coming, but we think it will.”
Over the past week the fatalistic Iraqi attitude of maktoub (“it is written”) has deteriorated into anxiety and fear.
While the Government of Iraq continues to court France, Germany and Russia, hoping that diplomacy may avert a war, its people are facing up to the reality that the next few days or weeks may be catastrophic.
People who previously laughed off the bombing, saying that they had managed to survive before, are now running for cover. If there were any delusion left that war was not imminent, the jets that screeched across the clear Baghdad sky a few mornings ago have given them a sharp dose of reality.
“Tell me where to go, where can I run to?” begged a frightened city hotel bellman who a few weeks ago scoffed at the notion of war. A tennis coach and a waiter at the hotel said their goodbyes the day before.
“Maybe this is the last time we meet on Earth,” said the waiter, who was taking refuge in a northern village. “May God preserve you in what you will soon endure.”
To counter their anxiety, Baghdadis are making efforts to prepare. Sales of guns and ammunition are going up. Most Iraqis own firearms.
“Let the Americans come!” one official howled. “There are ten million Iraqis who will greet them on the streets with our guns.”
Sandbags and bunkers have appeared, guarding ministries and palaces. Wells and garden shelters are being dug. Soldiers, young, middle-aged and old, are everywhere: on street corners, at bus stations and in cafés drinking tea and balancing AK47s on their knees.
People are leaving. At al-Khur bus station in the el- Alawi neighbourhood, twice the number of buses have left for Jordan over the past few days. “We used to send one bus every day at 4pm,” Safah Jasim, the station director, said. “Now we send three or four.”
Those who can afford it are hiring large vehicles and packing their families and possessions for either a ten-hour drive across the desert to Jordan or an eight-hour drive northwest along the River Euphrates to Syria. But the cost can be prohibitive — more than £125 for the journey, several months’ salary to many.
On Abu Klam Street, Abir’s air-conditioning shop is locked, iron shutters over the windows. The owner, Abir, a Christian and a popular figure on the street, fled for Syria at first light yesterday with his wife, Leyla, a hairdresser, and their three children.
His parents and his younger sister, Hannan, tearfully helped the family load the large vehicle that they rented for £136 with their two-month ration of food, mattresses and cooking pots. They left in a convoy with three other families and plan to rent a house together in Damascus until the war is over. The rest of the family have to stay behind: they don’t have the money to rent a vehicle.
“They were terrified for the babies,” Hannan said. “We don’t know if we will ever see each other again. We don’t know if the next time will be in heaven.”
On Kerrada Street, a well-dressed couple from the northern city of Mosul sat drinking banana juice near the site of the first bombing in Baghdad in 1998, a residential street levelled by a rocket. Suad and Kareem are making their way home, a four-hour drive, because they fear the next few days are crucial. “War could start at any moment,” Suad said. “We are all going to die eventually, but no one wants to get incinerated by a missile.”
Kareem said that civilians in Mosul feel particularly vulnerable because they fear not only the bombing and the Americans, but Kurds and Turks, both of whom have made no secret about their intentions for the oil-rich area.
The cafés and restaurants are still full of tea-drinkers and men smoking hookahs, but now the conversation is not local gossip: it is of rumours that President Bush has an electronic bomb that will vaporise computers, telephones, electricity grids — and people.
Another fear is that Mr Bush will use gas or chemical weapons. It is a startling change from the attitude of the past two months, when Iraqis refused to admit to any fear or concern.
“Please help me. Please tell me how to get out, we are terrified,” whispered a war veteran, who rolled up his sleeve to show a grave wound from fighting in 1991. “We can’t endure another war. We can’t survive.”
Hannan said that most people would stay in their homes, push their mattresses in front of their windows, wait and pray.
“We are now entering the time of the radio,” she said. “We live day and night by the news. Right now, there is nothing but bad. And very quickly it will get worse.”
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