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Kan ya makan.....
One hot morning in 2004, a car with five Iraqis aboard was making its way through Baghdad. Today people would call its occupants a 'mixed group' as the five men comprised two Shi'ites and three Sunnis, one of whom was a Kurd. But back then the five all automatically considered themselves to be 'Iraqis' with no consideration of their ethnic or religious backgrounds.
Apart from the driver, that is. He lived in a different district to the others, a place where the beginnings of signs of fracturing were occurring. There was a time when none of the five would have believed that Iraq could slide into the kind of sectarian conflict that erupted later, but each day they met the driver would bring new and more worrying indications of a slide towards division.
He lived in a district where a new influx of former Iran-based Shi'ites was making its presence felt. These were people who had spent years in Iran, who were armed, funded, fed and trained by the Iranians, and whose ideas about the future of Iraq were often fed by dreams of 'revenge against the Sunnis' and the imposition of a 'sharia' type regime that is so often the first demand of those who manage to combine religious fanaticism with intellectual deficiency.
So the experiences of the driver were a kind of barometer of what was developing all over Iraq, in different cities, towns and villages. Guys who would be hard pressed to read a newspaper were now emerging as powerful neighborhood controllers, and, as is their custom, debating furiously such 'key issues' as beard lengths, the correct hemline of robes, and the evils of beauty salons, hairdressers, barbers, cinemas, liquor stores, wedding photographers' shops etc. They had also, of course, launched immediate 'patrols' that pounced upon, warned and then punished any women found out of doors without hijab. And when I say 'punished' I mean anything from whips to acid attacks.
As they set about making their 'brave new world', thanks to a return facilitated by American warplanes, tanks, and tens of thousands of armed American troops, their control over the districts they had decided to impose their stamp on began to take shape in the form of their own private armed patrols and checkpoints. These became points of interrogation for any local trying to get out of or into those areas.
The driver was complaining bitterly about all this, as he defended himself for being late. Nobody had been really that concerned about his being late, but he had always prided himself on his efficiency and felt a need to excuse himself. The areas where the other four men were living were still 'mixed' and had yet to experience the kind of 'rule' that was gradually taking shape in his neighborhood, so he launched into a tirade against the warped brand of sectarian 'sharia' that was turning his district into a place of danger.
As the car moved through crawling traffic a kind of gloom settled on its occupants. The four passengers had not yet faced the daily 'accounting' that the driver had to put up with in order to get out of his own district and as the driver related his experiences a depressing vision of the shape of things to come became clearer.
"They ask me 'Who are the Sunnis here?'," he said, explaining the daily pressure to inform on his own neighbors, people who he had shared all his life with. "Are you Sunni or Shi3a?" they would demand, often asking for proof, such as literature, medals or other symbols. Time and time again he would be asked to explain where he had beeen schooled, which mosque he attended or 'who he knew'. They would interrogate him about his military service, his family, his entire life. And all the while the most pressing thing they seemed to want to know was what kind of a Shi'ite he was. To be acceptable he had to think like them, to 'assist them'. So daily he was pressured to provide information about Sunni Iraqis, Palestinians - even Jews (despite the fact that Baghdad's Jewish population was by that time shrunk to low double figures).
"I never had to wake up and think this way in my life before!" he complained.
"What way?" one of his passengers asked.
"I used to know who I was. I used to get on with all my neighbors. I never had a problem with anyone - but now I am made to account for my whole life, just to pass the tests of these thugs who have installed themselves as our neighborhood guards!" he said, angrily. "Guards? They are more like jailers!"
In an attempt of his own to make up for time lost, because of his lateness, he was weaving in and out of Baghdad's streets in search of 'short cuts'. Some routes were permanently blocked now by enormous concrete barriers or heavily fortified checkpoints, and Baghdadis had quickly learned to make new maps in their heads of alternative ways of criss-crossing the city. It so happened on this particular morning that the driver was now motoring along off the main roads and aiming to join a highway some distance off. The streets he was taking were not busy, and quiet streets had their own drawbacks. Usually the appearance of a 'spot checkpoint' thrown up by occupation troops did not go unnoticed for long, and its location would quickly be signalled from one person to another until in a short time there was a ring of civilian 'warners' placed on street corners and along the length of roads and highways, who would each indicate by a motion of the hand or a tilt of the head the presence of a checkpoint. A driver who had no desire to run into such a checkpoint would have ample warning of its presence, and plenty of time to take an alternative route.
That morning the absence of signallers meant that the driver's short cut took him and his passengers out of one side road and slap into an American checkpoint placed across a main road. The Americans had cleared a substantial area when they took up their positions, so there were no friendly 'spotters' to give advance warning. To left and right was an empty expanse of road, with concrete bollards placed to form a 'funnel' that sent traffic directly towards a waiting team of soldiers, their Bradleys and Humvees strung along the road behind 'stop' signs.
It was a sneaky kind of checkpoint as it could not be seen from the approach roads, and the only 'warning sign' - an absence of traffic or people on the main road ahead - went unnoticed as the passengers listened intently to the grumbling of the driver.....
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