I watched al sahaf on al-jazeera. he said that the US has bombed the Iraqi sattelite channel, but while he was saying that the ISC was broadcasting and if it really did hit the ISC headquarters it would have been right in the middle of baghdad. what was probably hirt were transmiters or something. all TV stations are still working.

Now that was really unexpected. When the sirens went on we thought we will get bombs by the tom load dropped on us but nothing happened, at least in the part of the city where I lived. Air-craft guns could be heard for a while but they stopped too after a while and then the all clear siren came.
Today in the morning I went with my father for a ride around Baghdad and there was nothing different from yesterday. There is no curfew and cars can be seen speeding to places here and there. Shops are closed. Only some bakeries are open and of course the Ba’ath Party Centers. There are more Ba’ath people in the streets and they have more weapons. No army in the streets. We obviously still have electricity, phones are still working and we got to phone calls from abroad so the international lines are still working. water is still runing.
the english speaking radio station on FM is now replaced by the arabic languge state radio program broadcasting on the same wave length. i just say thet because last night just as the BBC was broadcasting from baghdad (yes we have put up the sat dish again) their news ticker (or whatever you call that red band down there) said that the Iraqi state radio has been taken over by US broadcast. We watched saddam’s speech this morning, he’s got verse in it!!

there is still nothing happening im baghdad we can only hear distant expolsions and there still is no all clear siren. someone in the BBC said that the state radio has been overtaken by US broadcast, that didn't happen the 3 state broadcasters still operate.

air raid sirens in baghdad but the only sounds you can here are the anti-aircraft machine guns. will go now.

It is even too late for last minute things to buy, there are too few shops open. We went again for a drive thru Baghdad’s main streets. Too depressing. I have never seen Baghdad like this. Today the Ba’ath party people started taking their places in the trenches and main squares and intersections, fully armed and freshly shaven. They looked too clean and well groomed to defend anything. And the most shocking thing was the number of kids. They couldn’t be older than 20, sitting in trenches sipping Miranda fizzy drinks and eating chocolate (that was at the end of our street) other places you would see them sitting bored in the sun. more cars with guns and loads of Kalashnikovs everywhere.
The worst is seeing and feeling the city come to a halt. Nothing. No buying, no selling, no people running after buses. We drove home quickly. At least inside it did not feel so sad.
The ultimatum ends at 4 in the morning her in Baghdad, and the big question is will the attack be at the same night or not. Stories about the first gulf war are being told for the 100th time.
The Syrian border is now closed to Iraqis. They are being turned back. What is worse is that people wanting to go to Deyala which is in Iraq are being told to drive back to baghdad, there was a runor going around that baghdad will be "closed" no one goes in or out [check the map go from Baghdad in a N/E direction until you reach Baqubah, this is the center of Deyala governerate] people are being turned back at the borders of Baghdad city. There is a checkpoint and they will not let you pass it. there are rumors that many people have taken the path thru Deyala to go to the Iranian border. Maybe, maybe not.
If you remember I told you a while ago that you can get 14 satellite channels sanctioned by the state, retransmitted and decoded by receivers you have to buy from a state company. This service has been suspended. Internet will follow I am sure.

Things on Iraqi TV today:
- an interview with the minister of interior affairs. Turned the volume down, didn’t want to hear anything.

- demonstrations in Iarqi cities

-yesterday the last 500 prisoners from the Iraq-Iran war were being exchanged. I can’t believe they are still doing this, for fuck’s sake that war ended in 1989. every Iraqi family can tell you a hundred heart braking stories about things that happen when you have thought you brother/father/son is dead and he suddenly appears after 10 years.

-

I would have posted something earlier today but there was a lot to do and my brother reminded me that we have to go refill the car and that was two hours of wasted time waiting. It is not as bad as two days ago but the gas stations are still crowded. A couple of hours after I wrote that two police cars were standing near gas stations to keep things in order we went out again and there were more party members wearing their olive-green uniforms with Kalashnikovs in gas stations but today it is back to the police cars. There is a rumor that they will open the “special” gas stations for the public too, there are four of these in Baghdad used only by “them” or whoever has the right ID.
Before I go into what was going on today I really want to thank all the people who have been sending emails and letting me know that they care and worry about what will happen in Iraq, thank you so much. I hope you understand that it takes a bit of time to answer your questions so please don’t be angry if I don’t reply promptly. I print them out for Raed to read and he is totally baffled. some of them I wish I could publish or print and paste on light poles. Thank you very much.
And as a thank you here is a little web-gem. a true ohmigod moment. This is an image I found on [spaceimaging.com]. It is rather large but worth every second. Below I have posted a color coded thumbpix to give you a little info.

The feature most people would recognize when not seen from the top is the grand festival square (which is not a square at all. It is a semi-circle) it is in light blue. This is the one which has two huge intersecting swords at its entrance. The building below the semi-circle is the grand stand; this is the place that saw the big army marches last winter. The road to the right of it is called the Zaitoon (olive tree) Street, it has lots of olive trees obviously. On the green side of that street (the green area is a residential area called Harthiya) live many big wigs, don’t bother you CIA types reading the blog, they are empty now. The yellow area is the Zawra public garden, you see it here during the renovation period. They have just finished working on the garden. The brown longish thing down the left of the image is the clock tower of Baghdad, a very very hideous building and it houses the museum of Saddam’s presents (the ones he got from everybody, there was an article about a couple of months ago in the guardian I think). The blue square is a building that has been hit twice (desert storm and desert fox) after desert fox they decided to do a redesign since it was hit really bad. It is still unfinished but it does look nice. The red area is something I see with you for the first time. This is off boundaries to Iraqis, the whole area is a “presidential Palace”. The Sijood palace can be seen from the other side of the river and it is one of the most beautiful palaces, I really hope it does not get its “havoc recked”. I see it as a museum or some sort of academy in the future, I really like it.

A couple of weeks ago journalists were exasperated by that fact that Iraqis just went on with their lives and did not panic, well today there is a very different picture. It is actually a bit scary and very disturbing. To start wit the Dinar hit another low 3100 dinars per dollar. There was no exchange place open. If you went and asked they just look at you as if you were crazy. Wherever you go you see closed shops and it is not just doors-locked closed but sheet-metal-welded-on-the-front closed, windows-removed-and-built-with-bricks closed, doors were being welded shut. There were trucks loaded with all sort of stuff being taken from the shops to wherever their owner had a secure place. Houses which are still being built are having huge walls erected in front of them with no doors, to make sure they don’t get used as barracks I guess. Driving thru Mansur, Harthiya or Arrasat is pretty depressing. Still me, Raed and G. went out to have our last lunch together.
The radio plays war songs from the 80’s non-stop. We know them all by heart. Driving thru Baghdad now singing along to songs saying things like “we will be with you till the day we die Saddam” was suddenly a bit too heavy, no one gave that line too much thought but somehow these days it is sounds sinister. Since last night one of the most played old “patriotic” songs is the song of the youth “al-fituuwa”, it is the code that all fidayeen should join their assigned units. And it is still being played.
A couple of hours earlier we were at a shop and a woman said as she was leaving, and this is a very common sentence, “we’ll see you tomorrow if good keeps us alive” – itha allah khalana taibeen – and the whole place just freezes. She laughed nervously and said she didn’t mean that, and we all laughed but these things start having a meaning beyond being figures of speech.
There still is no military presence in the streets but we expect that to happen after the ultimatum. Here and there you see cars with machine guns going around the streets but not too many. But enough to make you nervous.
The prices of things are going higher and higher, not only because of the drop of the Dinar but because there is no more supply. Businesses are shutting down and packing up, only the small stores are open.
Pharmacies are very helpful in getting you the supplies you need but they also have only a limited amount of medication and first aid stuff, so if you have not bought what you need you might have to pay inflated prices.
And if you want to run off to Syria, the trip will cost you $600, it used to be $50. it’s cheaper to stay now. anyway we went past the travel permit issuing offices and they were shut with lock and chain.
Some rumors:
It is being said that Barazan (Saddam’s brother) has suggested to him that he should do the decent thing and surrender, he got himself under house arrest in one of the presidential palaces which is probably going to be one of the first to be hit.
Families of big wigs and “his” own family are being armed to the teeth. More from fear of Iraqis seeking retribution than Americans.

And by the smell of it we are going to have a sand storm today, which means that the people on the borders are already covered in sand. Crazy weather. Yesterday it rains and today sand.

impossibly long lines in front of gas stations last night, some even had two police cars in front of them to make sure to no "incidents" occur.
the price of bottled water jumped up 3 fold.
on "shabab TV- youth TV" there were announcements that the NUIS (national union of iraqi students) is selling. water pumps and tanks, hard helmets, small electrical generators and most surreally Chemical-biological attack protection chambers, in the picture they showed it looked like an octogonal barrel layed on its side with two bunks in it and some starnge equipment on the outside. no prices just a phone number.
rumors of defaced picturs of Saddam in Dorah and Thawra Districts (maybe maybe not)
and the cities of Rawa and Anna are so full of people now you wouldn't find a hut to rent, it was pretty safe to be there during the first war and people who have the money are renting placed there hoping that it will be safe this time.
the dinar is hovering around the 2700 per dollar and the hottest items after the "particle-masks" are earplugs, they can't be found in shops and you have to pre-order.

[RANT]
No one inside Iraq is for war (note I said war not a change of regime), no human being in his right mind will ask you to give him the beating of his life, unless you are a member of fight club that is, and if you do hear Iraqi (in Iraq, not expat) saying “come on bomb us” it is the exasperation and 10 years of sanctions and hardship talking. There is no person inside Iraq (and this is a bold, blinking and underlined inside) who will be jumping up and down asking for the bombs to drop. We are not suicidal you know, not all of us in any case.
I think that the coming war is not justified (and it is very near now, we hear the war drums loud and clear if you don’t then take those earplugs off!). The excuses for it have been stretched to their limits they will almost snap. A decision has been made sometime ago that “regime change” in Baghdad is needed and excuses for the forceful change have to be made. I do think war could have been avoided, not by running back and forth the last two months, that’s silly. But the whole issue of Iraq should have been dealt with differently since the first day after GW I.
The entities that call themselves “the international community” should have assumed their responsibilities a long time ago, should have thought about what the sanctions they have imposed really meant, should have looked at reports about weapons and human rights abuses a long time before having them thrown in their faces as excuses for war five minutes before midnight.
What is bringing on this rant is the question that has been bugging for days now: how could “support democracy in Iraq” become to mean “bomb the hell out of Iraq”? why did it end up that democracy won’t happen unless we go thru war? Nobody minded an un-democratic Iraq for a very long time, now people have decided to bomb us to democracy? Well, thank you! how thoughtful.
The situation in Iraq could have been solved in other ways than what the world will be going thru the next couple of weeks. It can’t have been that impossible. Look at the northern parts of Iraq, that is a model that has worked quite well, why wasn’t anybody interested in doing that in the south. Just like the US/UK UN created a protected area there why couldn’t the model be tried in the south. It would have cut off the regimes arms and legs. And once the people see what they have been deprived off they will not be willing to go back, just ask any Iraqi from the Kurdish areas. Instead the world watched while after the war the Shias were crushed by Saddam’s army in a manner that really didn’t happen before the Gulf War. Does anyone else see the words (Iran/not in the US interest) floating or is it me hallucinating?
And there is the matter of Sanctions. Now that Iraq has been thru a decade of these sanctions I can only hope that their effects are clear enough for them not to be tried upon another nation. Sanctions which allegedly should have kept a potentially dangerous situation in Iraq in check brought a whole nation to its knees instead. And who ultimately benefited from the sanctions? Neither the international community nor the Iraqi people, he who was in power and control still is. These sanctions made the Iraqi people hostages in the hands of this regime, tightened an already tight noose around our necks. A whole nation, a proud and learned nation, was devastated not by the war but by sanctions. Our brightest and most creative minds fled the country not because of oppression alone but because no one inside Iraq could make a living, survive. And can anyone tell me what the sanctions really did about weapons? Get real, there are always willing nations who will help, there are always organizations which will find his money sweet. Oil-for-Food? Smart Sanctions? Get a clue. Who do you think is getting all those contracts to supply the people with “food”? who do you think is heaping money in bank accounts abroad? It is his people, his family and the people who play his game. Abroad and in Iraq, Iraqis and non-Iraqis.
What I mean to say is that things could have been different; I can’t help look at the Northern parts of Iraq with envy and wonder why.
Do support democracy in Iraq. But don’t equate it with war. What will happen is something that could/should have been avoided. Don’t expect me to wear a [I heart bush] t-shirt. Support democracy in Iraq not by bombing us to hell and then trying to build it up again (well that is going to happen any way) not by sending human shields (let’s be real the war is going to happen and Saddam will use you as hostages), but by keeping an eye on what will happen after the war.
To end this rant, a word about Islamic fundis/wahabisim/qaeda and all that.
Do you know when the sight of women veiled from top to bottom became common in cities in Iraq? Do you know when the question of segregation between boys and girls became red hot? When tribal law replaced THE LAW? When Wahabi became part of our vocabulary?
It only happened after the Gulf War. I think it was Cheney or Albright who said they will bomb Iraq back to the stone age, well you did. Iraqis have never accepted religious extremism in their lives. They still don’t. Wahabis in their short dishdasha are still looked upon as sheep who have strayed from the herd. But they are spreading. The combination of poverty/no work/low self esteem and the bitterness of seeing people who rose to riches and power without any real merit but having the right family name or connection shook the whole social fabric. Situations which would have been unacceptable in the past are being tolerated today.
They call it “al hamla al imania – the religious campaign” of course it was supported by the government, pumping them with words like “poor in this life, rich in heaven” kept the people quiet. Or the other side of the coin is getting paid by Wahabi organizations. Come pray and get paid, no joke, dead serious. If the government can’t give you a job run to the nearest mosque and they will pay and support you. This never happened before, it is outrageous. But what are people supposed to do? thir government is denied funds to pay proper wages and what they get is funneled into their pockets. So please stop telling me about the fundis, never knew what they are never would have seen them in my streets.
[/RANT]

the big momma of all demonstrations is going on and I will be stuck in the office for ever. maybe i will take a walk and watch the show. Operation "Office Evac" is now in its final phase. any day now.

Today is a public holiday, in the Muslim calendar it is the 10th of Muharam, or Ashura (3ashura2) for Shia Muslims. A pivotal date in the history of Shia. Today is the day Imam Hussein was killed in Karbala/Iraq. Which in the words of Shiapundit “is a time for grief, reflection, and ibadat . Nothing else.”
My mother is Shia from Karbala, so each year we wake up in the morning (it is 1am as I write this) to the sound of the “3azah al 7ussain – the lament of Hussein” from the radio, not very pleasant. And after that we hear the stories of the public laments that used to take place in Karbala, now they are banned. The last three days of the Imam’s life are acted out throughout the whole city of Karbala. I’ll give you an idea of these last few days, I hope the Shia readers will excuse me if I don’t get it fully right:

Basically it is the story of the battle between Imam Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Mohammed, and Caliph Yazid on the Kerbala desert in 680 A.D.
Imam Hussein is to return to Kufa/Iraq after he has been reassured that the people there will help him in his struggle after he had fled to Mecca under the threat of being assassinated by Yazid’s people. On his way back the horse he is riding stops at a certain place near the Euphrates and doesn’t move. When the Imam asks the name of this place he is told it is the desert of Karbala (karrun wa bala2) which roughly means harm and calamity. He tells his followers that this is the place where he will be killed as prophesied. Tents are put up and they are very soon after that surrounded by Yazid’s army. The Imam does not have many people with him and most of them are family members with women and children. We’ll move a bit quickly thru the events now. First their water supply is cut off for three days, and then the battle starts, family members of the Imam die one after the other trying to protect Imam Hussein including his young sons. After all the men have been killed, Yazid’s army moves thru the camp and burns the tents down. Imam Hussein’s head is then taken to Damascus to prove to Yazid that al-Hussein has been killed.

Now imagine this being enacted in real life thru the whole city, to this day there is a district in Karbala called “Mukhayam – the camp” which actually used to be the site of the tents for the play. The most hated role that had to be played is the role of the soldier who will kill Imam al-Hussein, my aunt tells me it usually ends with the people running after him throwing stones until he hides in one of the houses. Groups of lamenters would then move thru the city, from the scary – groups of people hitting themselves with whips on their backs for not being there to help al-Hussein in his tragedy, to the poetry reading groups of students, to the solemn lawyers. People would come from all over Iraq, and from as far as Pakistan to join with their own lamenters. In houses and mosques you would see loads of men and women listening to the “maqtal – the killing of Hussein” beating their chests and crying. There is even special food for these days cooked in the streets.
I have seen nothing of this ever. It has been banned as long as I can remember; it is considered a public unauthorized demonstration. Laments can be held in houses but not the big play in the streets of Karbala. Lately even the cooking of (qima - minced meat with chickpeas) and (Harissa - something which looks a bit like gruel actually) in public has been banned. My aunt just came from Karbala today said that the army is all around Karbala, which happens every year.

-

here is something fun to read, unlike the comments down there where we engage in index-finger wagging at each other. this i got from Douglas who has always been thoughtful and sends me artcles from french magazines or newspapers translated. thanks douglas, this one is exceptionally good.It is about events before the first Gulf War.
if vous parlez francais then go to this link:
[Un après-midi avec Saddam]
if you are no-french-please then go to this link, I hope i have not done a faux-pas by posting your translation douglas:
[An Afternoon with Saddam]
it is on an abandoned blog.
my favourite bits:

......blablabla........“You can tell comrade Fidel Castro,” he (Saddam Hussein) said getting up, “that I thank him for his solicitude. If the troops of the United States invade Iraq, we shall crush them like that,” he concluded resoundingly, stamping the carpet several times with his shining military boots... The audience had ended...........blablabla........Without asking us to repeat what happened again, he (Fidel Castro) only asked the Gallego to imitate with his own feet the gesture with which Saddam had shown how he would crush the Americans.

It's like watching two kids talking about a fight in the playground, me crush you lika cock-a-roach, youyou.
We'd rather not talk about who crushed who. As for the next "Mother of all Battles".... one word (shock'n'awe). learn it in arabic: al-ithara wa al-faza. that's like putting stones in the middle of mud-cakes and throwing them at me, cheater.

In one of the posts down there I wrote that I seem to have only one Iraqi reader, well i was wrong. I have two and a half (half Iraqi half Chinese). what is really exciting is that the second reader is a girl here in baghdad, she's 23 years old and is a computer geek (well, engineer), and she agreed to write something for the blog. she will go by the name "riverbend". pleae give her a warm welcome, i hope she decides to join the weblog and write as often as she can in the next couple of weeks, without further ado i give you "Riverbend"

Salam, you've reminded me that we have to get to duct-taping the windows (did you use an 'X' pattern or the traditional '*'?). [Salam: the * star is good but with particularly big windows I have been using a plus and Xs in each quadrant].We've all been talking about the war, discussing the possibilities, implications, etc. but it really hit me yesterday when I got home and 'lo and behold! There were no pictures or paintings on the walls! So I asked, stupidly, "Where are all the pictures?" I was told that they've been 'put away' because who knew what might come tumbling down if a bomb fell particularly close... I then pointed to a funky black steel chandelier that no one seems to pay any attention to and reminded them that it should be a more immediate worry, not the pictures... It is beginning to look like a Gothic death trap. I have visions of it coming down on my head...
Otherwise, yes, we are living normally- going to work, cleaning house, eating, drinking. Life doesn't stand still every time America threatens war. It gets more difficult, true enough, but it goes on- which, by the way, is driving the foreign journalists crazy. They want some action here and seeing people go about their daily lives is just a waste of time and film, it seems.
Be careful with the gasoline, Salam, a whole family burned to death the other day because their gasoline storing facilities weren't adequate (is that considered 'friendly fire'?)- hope you’ve got it stored in a safe place.[Salam:yeah we saw that on TV, pretty nasty, my mother freaked ofcourse] We’ve stocked up on candles (dozens of ‘em) but my mother is starting to eye my collection of scented candles anyway. So you can anticipate the scene- hundreds of bombs flying overhead, the deafening sound of planes, blended with murmured prayers, in a semi-dark room smelling faintly of… lavender. And that smell will forever be consecrated in my mind along with the rest of the ‘war memories’- candles, duct tape, kerosene lamps and lavender…
On a not-quite-completely-different subject- I had a flash of déjà vu this morning while reading the news- did you read this ? *sigh* Aren’t the Americans *ever* going to get tired of war?
riverbend

the next time,if riverbend decides to join she will be part of this group blog (yes it was supposed to be a group blog but raed is such a lazy bastard). I'll be happy to forward ant mail to her until she makes up her mind whether to put her addy here or not.

sometime ago I promised to show you the new 10,000 Dinar bill, it has been issued around 4 months ago and might become a part of this country's history soon.

please excuse the quality i don't have the scanner at home, if you click on the image you'll see the backside of the bill. what you see beside the picture of the prez is the unknown soldier monument in baghdad.
the dinar hit a new low tonight, $1=2700 dinars. the wholesale markets in Shorjah stopped buying and selling today to see which way the dinar will move next.

A BBC reporter walking thru the Mutanabi Friday book market (again) ends his report with :
“It looks like Iraqis are putting on an air of normality”
Look, what are you supposed to do then? Run around in the streets wailing? War is at the door eeeeeeeeeeeee! Besides, this “normality” doesn’t go very deep. Almost everything is more expensive than it was a couple of months ago, people are digging wells in their gardens, on the radio yesterday after playing a million songs from the time of the war with Iran (these are like cartoon theme songs for people my age, we know them all by heart) they read out instructions on how to make a trench and prepare for war, that is after president saddam advised Iraqis to make these trenches in their gardens.
But in order not to disappoint the BBC; me, Raed and G. put on our “normal” faces and went to buy CDs from Arassat Street in a demonstration of normality. After going first into Sandra’s fruit juice shop and getting what people from foreign would probably call a poor imitation of a banana and apple smoothie, we spent half an hour contemplating the CD racks at music shop. Raed being the master of talk-and-slurp-at-the-same-time technique was trying to steal away my “normality” by reminding me that I will be wasting my 10,000 Dinars because there will be no electricity for the CD player. I explained to him that I am planning on operating a pirate radio station and need to stock on music for the masses I plan to entertain, said in a matter of fact voice and Raed didn’t even blink which made Mr. music_shop_owner look at us very suspiciously at this point so we moved to the next rack. But since I buy the stuff that would otherwise sit and collect dust he didn’t say much and was very happy to take away 12,500 Dinars. I bought five instead of the planned 4 CDs, many thanks to Malaysian bootleggers for providing us with cheap CDs. The deftones, black rebel motorcycle club, erykah badu and the new amr diab (here for audio clips if you are interested) have joined the Pax Radio CD racks.

Other normal stuff we did this week:
- Finished taping all the windows in the house, actually a very relaxing exercise if you forget why you are doing it in the first place.
- installed a manual pump on the well we have dug because up till now we had an electrical pump on it.
- bought 60 liters of gasoline to run the small electricity generator we have, bought two nifty kerosene cookers and stocked loads of kerosene and dug holes in the garden to bury the stuff so that the house doesn’t turn into a bomb.
- prepared one room for emergency nasty attacks and bought “particle masks” - that’s what it says on the box – for use if they light those oil trenches, the masks just might stop our lungs from becoming tar pits. They are very hot items since the word on the trenches spread, you can buy one for 250 Dinars and they are selling faster than the hot cakes of bab-al-agha.
- got two rooms in our house ready to welcome our first IDPs - internally displaced persons – my youngest aunt who is a single mom with three kids because she lives farthest away from the rest of us and another aunt from Karbala in the south. Hotel Pax is officially open for the season, no need to make reservations but you might need to bring a mattress if you come too late.

Other news/rumors:
- Party members are going around the city telling people to stay in their homes if anything happens. Do not go out in the street. Everything will be brought to you, they have dug wells in many places with generators beside them to pump the water out and they will be distributing the water. If there is a need to move out of the house wait until the party car comes to take you. They have gone around and asked which households own more than one car, taken down names and numbers, rumor has it that they are going to appropriate any extra car if the need arises. Anyway you will not be able to drive your car around, people like doctors in state hospitals have been given badges to stick on their cars and so have party members, you will have to have some sort of permission to move around when the curfew takes place the moment an attack starts. Because of that we have issued our own curfew from last Friday, headcount at 10:30 pm. with so many people in the house a roll call is the only way to make sure everybody is here. And we are counting on the Americans to attack at night. If they start the attack during the day they would have mayhem on the streets.

Tips on how to become super popular in the office:
Listen to what everybody is talking about and then surprise with cool info from the web. It helps if Google is still blocked and no one has yet figured out that there is life after Google. Today the million dollar question was who the hell is Barbara Bodine? well the ones who listen to BBCworldservice were asking the rest were just going whatwhatwhat?

The plan calls for a northern and southern sector to be administered by two retired U.S. Army generals, sources said.
A central sector, including Baghdad, will be administered by Barbara Bodine, a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen, the sources said.

We will for the moment try to ignore whether this means a divided Iraq or federalism thrust down our throats or a redraw of the Iraqi map because this will be after all the decision of the invaders liberators, we have the right to remain silent otherwise we get smacked upside the head.
Anyway, Dogpile came to the rescue and I was the internet super hero when I showed them THIS and more ooh’s and aaah’s when I showed the THIS, I should have charged 250 Dinars for each viewing, actually thr biggest surprise was finding out that she was in Iraq in 1983 as Deputy Principal Officer in the US embassy here. General reactions? You can imagine the fear of castration the Iraqi males are going thru at the moment, don’t expect this to be swallowed very easily, and to divert this unease they would just say something along the lines: “she doesn’t look very pretty does she?”. One person who doesn’t actually work here but was dragged by a colleague to see the picture said: “ you know it is their intention to destroy the pride of the muslim man” . Tread carefully is what I say; change shouldn’t be plunked on people’s heads like this, especially when there already is an atmosphere of mistrust and unfriendliness. Someone said this will be like having another Gertrude Bell, I am not sure this is good. [two interesting links: The female Lawrence of Arabia and the Gertrude Bell Project with an amazing photo library, thanks a million for the link A., he is the only Iraqi reader I have apparently].

Article in the CSmonitor.com
you see that woman on the right [piclink] her name is not Janon as the article says, it is Jinan (the name means heavens) and she is the evil witch of the department of architecture. You can see it in her smile. The woman on the left makes the whole engineering college march to her whistle, really very strong and well known women in the college of engineering. One of them has a very eloquent daughter apparently:

"I hope they see us as people," says the increasingly anxious Nihal, in a separate interview. "It's a feeling you can't describe: You worry about yourself, and your family, and aunts and uncles in their houses - it's like your heart is in a million pieces all over the place, and you don't know how to keep it together."

and Jinan kicks ass too:

"It's funny," she says of the cultural disconnect. "Why should we be sitting here trying to convince you that we are OK? Why should I have to make you feel like we are people worth living?"

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The dinar is miraculously keeping its cool and still around the 2360 for a dollar, the lowest it ever got during the last 10 years was 2500 for a dollar but I think we will hit that bottom in the next couple of weeks. A relative of mine who works at a bank says that everybody who comes into the bank is complaining that “al suq waguf – the market is at a standstill”. They are a “private bank” - there is no such thing as a private bank really, they are all partially owned by the state - they have been told to stock on biscuits, dates and water, can’t imagine why, as if anyone is going to come to work when things start dropping on our heads. But to be fair, after GW I the banks opened pretty fast, people who lived near their work place and could walk to work did just that, the banks limited the amount you are allowed to take from your account to 100 dinars which was around $200 or so at the time, today 100 dinars buys me a pack of local chemical-flavor bubble gum. Since we are talking about money today was payday. It is amazing what the sentence “we’re sorry but you know how things are at the moment blablabla” can do to your paycheck, in one single year I have gone down from $200 to $100 and hit rock bottom at $50, in retrospect deciding to go back to living with my parents was the wisest decision I have made for quite a while. My friend G. is getting half his salary in money and the rest in alcohol, really no joke, but good imported stuff which we wouldn’t buy anyway. His fatcat-filthyrich boss turned seriously Muslim and is giving away his stash of the devil’s beverages. Good for us, I say.
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Human Shields Bashing #124

"Basically, they said we are not going to feed you any longer," said John Ross, an American who has been active in radical causes since he tore up his draft card in 1964.

Excuse while I wipe the tears from my eyes. Outoutout. He could have at least say something more in line with his “radical cause”. This is a bit insulting actually for some reason I feel offended. FEED YOU? Why does the Iraqi government have to friggin’ feed you, you have volunteered to “help” in country which can’t feed its own population properly (well it could if it spent a bit less on itself and on people like you). There is another good bit:

The activists accused the Iraqi authorities of trying to use them as pawns in the war with America.

oh, shockhorror, what a surprise. Back to where you came from. Don’t wait for thank you speeches, outoutout.

The bitter flight from Iraq follows a showdown with the Iraqi authorities who demanded that they decamp from their hotels in central Baghdad and take up their self-assigned roles as civilian protectors.

No no, just stay in your hotels, buy souvenirs and make fun of the backward ways of these Iraqis, hope you sent all your friends postcards telling them about the pita and tahini you have been eating while strolling around Baghdad, you tourists. Did you take enough pictures of children begging in the streets to show your friends back home how much you care about the plight of the poor in the third world. Bet they were all shaking hands and promising to see each other at the next “worthy cause” party.
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Today is “mumarasa - practice” day in Baghdad (maybe tomorrow too nope I checked it was a one day thing), all the security forces, police, civil defense units and the like excluding the army are going thru the motions. Besides parading up and down all over the country all units were supposed to go thru the events of an “emergency situation”. The funniest were the policemen; they have been issued army helmets with green camouflage fluff on it. All the main squares and intersections had at least 12 people wearing their full gear, carrying Kalashnikovs and a couple of extra ammunition magazines. There were also firefighting guys with big red cars and Kalashnikovs, everybody gets to carry guns (I don’t get where the myth that firefighters are sexy came from). And other assorted killing machines mounted on cars, some were going around the city some were stationed. They all looked a bit self-conscious and hot because of the helmets. It was around 24C at noon today, pretty warm to be wearing all the stuff they had on.
People in Basra are saying that for them it does feel like war already, lots of raids down there. A couple of days ago in the 7 o’clock local news bulletin they showed a number of Ba’ath party members overseeing the burning of leaflets (the ones which look like $100 bills) they only said it was in the southern parts of Iraq. I wish someone can bring me one of them, imagine the ebay potential it would have in a couple of months time.
There is an incredibly strong rumor that Uday is in Russia (Belarusia), what makes it even more suspicious is this; I wrote that google was blocked from last night, well now it is open but type a search for anything in Russia and you get the “access denied” page on the search results.
And have you seen the speech by Izat Ibrahim in the Islamic Summit today, was that diplomacy in action or what? Calling the Kuwaiti foreign minister a monkey, he actually called him a monkey, and insulting his “moustache” – a very serious offence in Bedouin code, like insulting his manly pride – we have a master in abuse hurling in our government. Although Libya and Saudi Arabia did quite well a couple of days earlier. And they ask why the Arab nations are such a farce; it is because we have kings and presidents who behave like kids in a sandpit.

bigger, better, faster. so stop harassing me about the font size.
and I promise i will have a proper post later today. I have been a bit lazy, my mind is full of fuzz and number 18s, that's your fault. it is a super cool idea really, and will fit with so many conspiracy theories type of stuff, but you'll have to make her tell you about it on the 19th.
since last night [google.com] and [msn.com] are blocked. all the usual news sites are still accessible even google news only the search gets you the "your access has been denied" page.

I wasn’t going to write about this, but since the guardian has mentioned it I won’t be giving away any state secrets.
Have you read this article on The Guardian’s website:
The big match unites a country of two halves
Luke Harding, in Irbil, sees a top Baghdad soccer team take on Kurdish It’s just a filler, nothing really interesting and if you did read it you probably just skimmed over this paragraph:

To reach Irbil, the Baghdad players had to travel across a reinforced Iraqi frontline, past freshly dug army trenches filled with oil, and up into the mountains of Kurdistan.

blink and you miss it. You still didn’t see it? listen: Freshly. Dug. Army. Trenches. filled with oil.
Story time:
A week ago on the way to work I saw a huge column of blackest-black smoke coming from the direction of Dorah refinery which is within Baghdad city limits, thought nothing of it really. A couple of weeks earlier to that a fuel tank near the Rasheed army camp exploded and it looked the same, stuff like that happens. My father was driving thru the area later and he said it looked like they were burning excess or wasted oil. Eh, they were never the environmentalists to start with; if they didn’t burn it they would have dumped it in the river or something. The smoke was there for three days the column could be seen from all over Baghdad being dragged in a line across the sky by the winds. During the same time and on the same road I take to work I see two HUGE trenches being dug, it looked like they were going to put some sort of machinery in it, wide enough for a truck to drive thru and would easily take three big trucks.
A couple of days after the smoke-show over Baghdad I and my father are going past these trenches and we see oil being dumped into the trenches, you could hear my brain going into action, my father gave me the (shutup-u-nutty-paranoid-freak) look, but I knew it was true. The last two days everybody talks about it, they are planning to make a smoke screen of some sorts using black crude oil, actually rumor has it that they have been experimenting with various fuel mixtures to see what would produce the blackest vilest smoke and the three days of smoke from Dorah was the final test. Around Baghdad they would probably go roughly along the green belt which was conceived to stop the sandstorms coming from the western deserts. I have no idea how a smoke screen can be of any use except make sure that the people in Baghdad die of asphyxiation and covered in soot. I think I will be getting those gas masks after all.
Funfact: after the oil wells in Kuwait were set on fire and the whole region covered in the blackest and ugliest cloud it rained for days on Baghdad washing everything with black water from the sky, the marks took a year to wash out. I think Salman Rushdie would have found this very amusing, characters in his novels are always haunted by things past in the strangest ways, the shame of your actions following you and then washing you with it’s black water, no ablutions for you Mr. H watch your city covered with the shame of your actions. We have an expression which roughly translates to "face covered with soot" (skham wijih) which is used to describe someone who has done something utterly disgraceful. Getting your city covered with “skham” once has to haunt you for the rest of your life, now we get “skham from the sky II – the return of the evil cloud”. The world is just a re-run of bad movies, but Mr. W. Bush already beat me to that expression.

It is nice to see the Office of the Iraq Oil-for-Food program rise to the occasion and redo their site. with all the attention it is going to get if the program stays intact after an "invasion" they really needed a better image, their site looked hideous, now they have this nifty map and even pictures go take a look. here is the old site cached, don't you just love google for doing this.

has anyone seen my comments anywhere? sheeesh! after all this time together i get dumped justlikethat.
ze comments vork again.

you know what my favourite part in the last two resolution on Iraq is?
the part where it says "DECIDES to remain seized of the matter." oooh, can't wait for the next episode of (UN drama) the best show this side of the milky way.
you would have thought that an almost-war-declaration would have more dramatic wording than:

ACTING under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations,
DECIDES that Iraq has failed to take the final opportunity afforded it in Resolution 1441 (2002)

they definitely need a better script writer for that show, but I guess that is what CNN and the rest are for.
the wise oracle of gotham predicts that youknowwho will be history by the 18th of march, but she won't say how she got that date, c'mon, spill it, whatwhywhere?. and she also invited me to tea at the Palm Court if I ever came to NYC. Alrighty, who said you can't get a classy date thru the internet?

More Photos.
Not a very bright side of Baghdad, these are a bit like inner city slum. They are not the slummiest slums. These places have character; the photos taken are from the Kadhmia district which is one of the oldest in Baghdad. There is a shrine of Imam Al-Kadhim, who is an important religious figure for Shias. It is a beautiful shrine, if I were ever asked to name 5 most interesting public spaces in the world I'm putting the inner courtyard of the Khadim shrine in that list. You don't have to be in there to pray or anything, there are huge niches within the wall and you can sit there for hours Raed, I and G. (who is a Christian) go there very often and when we have nothing to talk about we go into the main shrine building, take our shoes off and sit by the wall watching people pray, read the Koran and sometimes when someone has had a happy occasion he would go around the shrine heaping sweets in our laps or we have to duck because a woman has decided to shower the place with hard candy. Around the shrine is one of Baghdad's main centers for goldsmiths. But just behind those shops are streets which have houses from 1920's and still have people living in them. This was one of the old rich Baghdad districts, before the colonial times. Many Baghdadi families can trace their roots to this area.
It is not allowed to take photographs in the streets just like that; we were working on a site in the area and were given a permit to photograph the site. Lucky for us the paper did not specify the exact location where we are allowed to photograph G. never overlooks an opportunity like that, these are some of the photographs he has taken.click on small to see big

The shrine has four golden minarets, they are visible from everywhere in the area. Baghdad is flat city these minarets become great orientation guides, you always know which direction will get you to the main street. The women are wearing traditional Iraqi dress, the black Abaya and Shelah which covers their head. Faces are not covered.
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Here you can see the Kadhim minaret very clearly. Do you see those wooden boards sticking out of the wall? This tells you that this was built between 1920 and 30, after that the use of steel I-beams became popular; it was brought into the country by the British. Either the producing company or the importer were called Shellman or something close to that because to this day they are not called I-beams but shellmans (being Iraqis we like our vowels long so it is more like sheeeeelmaaaaan)
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These windows that jut out of the walls have a name, they are called Shanasheel. Al-Sayab one of my favorite Iraqi poets has a poem called “Shanasheel of al-Chalabi’s daughter” written in London one year before he died of tuberculoses. It is a very sad poem. He is the king of pain, really. You can read two translated poems here, I did not find a translation of the Shanasheel poem online. And yes this is the same Chalabi, there is only one Chalabi family in Iraq, it is a very well known Shia family. Ahmad Chalabi’s scandals don’t go unnoticed here. jaa He is a disgrace to a very respected family.
More pictures of Shanasheel in Kadhmia

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I mentioned above that Kadhmia is one of the main markets for goldsmiths, but it also is one of the big markets for everything, I guess people in the west would call them Bazaar. These “souk”s really comply with every unwritten rule about these Bazaars. Very crowded, narrow, winding pathways we call Darabeen. Very loud and everybody is trying to make you buy something. You get the best deals for textiles there but you get lost very easily. I have no idea how my mother and aunts know where everything is; I end up where they sell plastics every time I go there to buy material for pants and shirts. And you would think that in such a place they would be a bit more prudent about selling lingerie with all the women in hijab, you are wrong. Street peddlers stick all sorts of stuff in your face just to get your attention. Anyway, one of the oldest parts of this market is “souk al Isterbadi” and if you keep going along the souk you will reach the part where they sell second-hand clothes.

Now let me tell you something about this. You know the boxes you have everywhere asking you to donate clothes for third world countries? That is a swindle, well, not all the way. The first part is probably all very much in the spirit of kindness and things are really donated to some organization in the “third world”. There things get a bit dirtier, there is a huge international market dealing with these “donations”. Things are sorted out and sold from when country to the next, Iraq gets most of the stuff from Turkey and Syria. It is such a problem here in Iraq the government had to make rules what sort of second-hand clothes you are allowed to import. Underwear is a no-go. I am not saying that it is no use donating these clothes to third-world-aid organization, actually these clothes are the only affordable clothes many people can buy and this has created a sort of income to people who would have ended up with no income at all. Besides, it always makes me smile when I see someone wearing a Cliff Richards concert T-shirt, at least this kind of makes up for the atrocities against taste he has committed.
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The next couple of pictures are from Basra in the south.

Bob Marley gets the second-hand t-shirt treatment there.
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So you are asking why don’t these houses have porches, gardens or something? That is because they all are like giving their backs to the street; the fun is on the inside. These are all Atrium-type houses the courtyard in the middle is open to the sky and usually has a garden and a fountain. Since there is very little rain no one worries too much about covering the courtyard.
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These are the days of crazy weather, very colorful. We had rainy-clouds-grey two days ago, sunny-bright-yellow the day after and desert-sand-red the day after that. But it is warmer generally and the nights are beautiful with a bright moon when you can see it thru the clouds or sand. The moon started waning now and getting closer to that scary “dark of the moon” phase. Most people think if anything is going to happen this month it will start during the darkest nights. We’ll see.
In Baghdad and other cities in Iraq people are busy welcoming the Hajis back from their trip. Cars with green and white flags drive the new Hajis around the city and their houses have the same flags on them. The people who went to Mecca in coaches take quite some time to get back to Baghdad. The funny thing is that even the people who traveled in airplanes are only arriving now. Some of them slept for three nights in airports until they got their chartered flights, and the Saudi government rather has the Iraqis in the airports than roaming. Now we have to go thru the “haj mabrur – blessed haj” games, everybody visiting everybody else, and they give you these little thimbles of water from Zamzam, which is supposed to have some sort of healing and purifying effects on the soul or whatever. People, I want to be the person who does the documentary showing that the Saudi government has been extending the life of that well by adding _tap water_ to it. Some hajis who see me smile when they are giving these little bottles of blessed water as presents decide that a praying rug would be better, they will have to start me on the road to redemption in the first place and the flying carpet from Mecca will be my fast track to Jennah (heaven). My blasphemous ranting aside, becoming a Haj is a big deal. It is an exhausting couple of weeks and anybody who commits him/herself to such an ordeal has at least earned the right to get a special name, and Haji has a nice ring to it. I, personally, have decided to go to Mecca as late in my life as possible, you see if the “Tabula rasa” part of the Haj is right and there is a “god” it makes sense to live life like a pig then go purify your soul in Mecca and live your last days like a saint. I have it all worked out, that is my contingency plan for the remote possibility of the existence of a deity.

A reader sent me an angry email a couple of days ago (not the reader who writes in the comments, someone else) asking me why I dislike the “human shields” so much, he/she actually asked “why do you spit on them?”. Ewww. Now I was never that unfriendly. I have not met any of them in person, which just might happen in the next couple of days, what I dislike is the idea. But since dissing them gets people so exited, here we go and do what [destiny’s child] don’t, “cause their mamma taught them better than that”, we be dissing the shields again on the internet.
One of the latest group to arrive in Baghdad, mostly Europeans, were welcomed to the Rasheed hotel , which is like the Waldorf Astoria of Baghdad, no other hotel is more expensive and exclusive. All of them were wearing T-shirts with what was supposed to be "Human Shields" in Arabic, but they had it all wrong it said "Adra'a Basharia" instead of "Duru'u Basharia" which got them a few giggles and a new name; they are now the "Adra'a" just to show how clueless they are. A lot of funny Arabic these days with all these HS's running around, a van with a foreign number plate standing near the ministry of information has "No War" written all over it in many languages the biggest in Arabic. All over the front of it is says "La Harba" which is wrong and sounds like a night club, my cousin thought that was cute. Anyway, what really got my goat this time was finding out that they get food coupons worth 15,000 dinars per meal, 3 for every day.fifteen thousan.
Do you know how much the monthly food ration for a 4 person family is worth, for a whole month not per meal (real cost, not subsidized) ? 30,000 dinars, if you get someone to buy the bad rice they give you for a decent price. 15,000. What are they eating? A whole lamb every meal? Let's put this within context. Today in the morning Raed, our friend G. and I went for a late big breakfast we had 2 tishreeb bagilas (can't explain that, you have to be an Iraqi to get it otherwise it sounds inedible) and a makhlama (which is an omelet with minced meat), tea, fizzy drinks and argila afterwards (the water-pipe-thingy) all for 4,750 dinars, and we were not going super cheap. A lunch in any above-average restaurant will not be more than 8,000 dinars and that includes everything. 15,000 thousand is a meal in a super expensive restaurant in Arasat Street, in one of those places that really almost have an "only foreigners allowed, no Iraqis welcome unless you are UN staff" sign on it. I will stop calling them tourist when they stop taking all this pampering from the Iraqi government. Did I tell you about the tours? Today was Babylon day. You are really missing it, the cheapest way to do the Iraq trip you have wanted to do but were too scared.
And I have a tip for all freelance journalists who are not getting their Visas. Join your colleagues. It's the best way to get past the visa thing, every third one of these "shields" will be writing an article somewhere. Hurry contact your local "war tourism" travel agent.
Sorry, I just don't get it. What are they doing here?
So, that should get me enough hate mail for the next couple of days.

Enough of that. TV time. the biggest TV event last week was the first [waznak thahab - your weight in gold] show with Noor al-Sharif (no relation to Omar) as show host. Noor is a very serious Egyptian actor, I linked to one of his shows in a post I wrote last Ramadan, this is his first as show host and he totally blew it, he looked scared and nervous. The contestants were calmer and cooler than him, we used to have Aiman Zedan, who is a Syrian actor, do the show and he was a killer. The show is actually on Abu Dhabi TV but our Youth TV just steals it off the air and shows it the next day, state sanctioned piracy, what else can you wish for?

[Back to Iraq 2.0]
I just can’t remember how I stumbled into this weblog, but today reading it was like having my ears tickled from the inside (you know, like that guy on the MTV station break) listen:

By not supporting a democratic Iraq, by appointing con-man and a flim-flam artist Ahmed Chalabi as provisional leader, by inviting Turks to occupy Iraqi Kurdistan and promoting some gauzy ill-thought-out vision of a democratic Middle East imposed by force of arms, the Big Idea idealism, which never rested comfortably on the shoulders of a president who detests complexity, comes off as callow, cynical and ... what are the words? Oh, yes: "Absolute bullshit." The ideas and principles upon which the United States was founded -- "liberty," "freedom," "justice for all" -- and for which we allegedly fought and won two world wars and the Cold War, have become mere words, talking points and awkwardly mouthed slogans used to make a case for a war that no one except for a small junta in Washington wants.

is he good or what? Check out the link, do you see that photograph on the top of that article? This shop [Mazi] is like a legend here in the central governorates, "it’s, like, this huge supermarket where you can buy everything". Baghdad doesn’t have super markets only corner store kind of shops. Every Iraqi who gets to Duhok (they are not many since it is like going into another country) has to keep telling you about it for hours, it’s a super market for allah’s sake and a pretty expensive one at that. Keep your cool. But I don’t mind the presents they get me from there.
I have a bit of a problem with his right side panel, but i guess it's my browser, i have to copypaste the text somewhere else to read it.

I am getting a real kick out of posting this:
THE GUARDIAN IS WRONG, check your sources baby. in the article titled "Iraqi defence minister under house arrest" it says:

He [Lieutenant-General Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Jabburi Tai, minister of defence] is not only a member of President Saddam's inner circle, but also a close relative by marriage. His daughter is married to Qusay Hussein, the dictator's 36-year-old younger son - considered by many as his heir apparent.

Wrong, Falsch, Khata'a. Qusay's wife is the daughter of Maher abdul-Rasheed who is a very important military man. he led the armies which "liberated" the Fao area in the south of Iraq in April 1988. he was put under house arrest a year after that for some reason or other and is now living in the iraqi westren desert raising camels and staying out of politics. Qusay does not have a second wife only saddam has. so their is no use saying that those loony muslims have more than one wife, maybe she is the second missus Q.Hussein.

Last night one independent source in Baghdad contacted by the Guardian confirmed that Gen Sultan was in custody. "He continues to attend cabinet meetings and appear on Iraqi TV, so that everything seems normal," said the source, a high-ranking official with connections to Iraq's ruling Ba'ath party. "But in reality his house and family are surrounded by Saddam's personal guards. They are there so he can't flee."

I, not a "high ranking official", can tell you that his family is not under house arrest, his son is still driving that fancy car around Arasat Street intimidating everybody like all good sons of ministers do.
I first heard this on BBC worldservice this morning and then my father told me he read it on the guardian's online page. I thought I should share that. now excuse me, I have to get back to practicing my funky-chicken moves.

A first on this blog, here comes a quote from the Quran:

"qulna ya nar kuni bardan wa salamen ala ibrahim"
We said, "O Fire! be thou cool, and (a means of) safety for Abraham!"
Surah 21. The Prophets

Plot background: Abraham and the Heretics are having their equivalent of a WWF Smackdown (smashing of idols, miracle face-off, the works) finally the Heretics decide to throw Abraham into the fire and tell him: "let your god help you out of this". Thus the (nar) fire is turned into (bardan wa salamen) coolness and safety and Ibrahim walks out safe and unscathed.
I think I heard that 'bardan wa salamen" quote a thousand times during the last four days. People want to believe that what happened in the Security Council will actually shoo away the ghost of war, I don't think it will. The Blix and Baradei reports are as wishy-washy as the first reports, we can quote the parts that say we're cooperating and the "others" can quote phrases that say the exact opposite. Besides at this moment I think it is not only about the issue of Iraq and WMDs, it's beginning to look like a showdown between the USofA and the rest of the world, we get to be the example.
Anyway to watch the Security Council this time you didn't need to sneak up the dish, just find one of the 4000 Iraqis who have subscribed to the 14 state approved sat channels; the Syrian Sat Channel was transmitting the session live, with translation. Most people listened to it on Radio Monte Carlo, if at all.
Actually most of the people in Baghdad were stuck in the streets waiting for any kind of public transport. This is the first sign of a big organized demonstration. All buses, state and privately run lines, are grouped in various spots in the city to transport the "demonstrators" from their work places to where the show is supposed to take place.
Drop them at point "A" and pick them up at point "B", school kids would just disappear between these two points. There are a couple of excellent ice-cream places in al-manusr where one of the "demonstrations" took place.
This is what it looks like when you are in one of these affairs: you get out of the bus, wait for a mind-numbing couple of hours until they tell to march, you start walking until you see the guy in the front of your group (usually an eager party member) start jumping and try to pump some life into the bored group of people behind him, you shout the obligatory things, pass the stand where the officials and press are waiting then you get back to whatever you were discussing with the person next to you.
The worst experience with "demonstrations" people ever had was sometime during the eighties. I can't remember when exactly but the Grand Festival Square [sahat al ihtifalat] the one with the two intersecting swords has just been opened a short time before and this was the first BIG demonstration there. It was mainly high-school and university students. Instead of the drop here, pick up there strategy they decided that everyone should just wait within the boundaries of the square, guards were all over the perimeter, no one could leave. Then they decided to wait. This was during the summer by noon kids started dropping and fainting. No water and no food and not even a place to sit in the shade. When they realized it was getting serious they brought in trucks with bread and water tanks, you can imagine what it would look like with thousands of hungry and thirsty kids. Total chaos. No one died but many were seriously injured and they never did that again. Demonstrations? No thanks, I have mastered the art of sneaking past the green-clad guards.
Instead of getting trapped in one of the streets they have closed for the demos I stayed home and helped my mother pack things. We have not decided to leave Baghdad if "it" happens but just in case we absolutely have to. We are very efficient packers, me and my mom. The worst packers are the emotional ones. The (oh-let's-remember-when-I-bought-this-thing) packers, we just do it in cold blood, we have done this quite often, we are serial packers. Grrrrrrrr.

It's not only us who are packing. G. (he who reads novels in atmospherically correct conditions) is helping most of his foreign friends to pack as well, we have said our goodbyes to most of them. The French Cultural Center stopped all language courses being taught by French staff and they have said their goodbyes and good wishes to their students. The Russians are locating all 2000 citizens and telling them to leave. (what are 2000 Russians doing in Iraq anyway?), the Chinese embassy which is as big as a small village is empty. If you have read that UN report about humanitarian scenarios you might have come across something the report calls (phase V), from what I understand (phase V) is something like "extreme crisis, get the heck out of there" sort of thing. At the moment UN staff who would not evacuate until phase IV are being told to take long vacations starting with Eid. Notice "vacation" and not "this is officially a phase IV situation, grab your bags and run".

Now, the thing Wired wrote about. Not the emails but the site blocking and 8e6 Technologies, I know I should not bite the bait but I can't help it. My guess is 8e6 Technologies didn't know that it was selling the software to an Iraqi entity, it was most probably done by the French who did the internet setup in the first place. Because I was getting a bit worried about who is reading what, I also did a bit of prodding to find out how they decide what to block and what not and it turns out it is the mess I always knew it is.
Q: Google gets blocked for days at a time, why?
A: The reason is that the Mukhabarat minder at the ISP decides that he does not want to bother with doing his daily random checks and just registers the Google URL as blocked. it takes a couple of days and some paper shuffling until someone explains to him that it is not google that is the baddy and that things can be looked for in other places.
The firewall blocks URLs and terms within a URL or search request, but that only works with the popular search engines. The rest is done with random checks of URL requests going thru the servers.
Q: blocked Arabic sites are more than obviously "hostile" English language sites?
A: there are no special requirements concerning languages for the minder to work there.
Q: they do know their porn sites well.
A: well it is more interesting to check on them than the politics stuff, who wants to read when you can look.
Q: is there a proxy that is not firewalled?
A: of course, Uday's (i.e. the ministry of youth / Olympic committee) .
Q: can I get a username/password?
A: go fuck a cow…..
(well it didn't hurt to ask).

did you know david bowie says "god is an american" near the end of "I'm afraid of americans"?
i mean if bowie says it he must know something, he has connections, i have been told.

I wasn't going to blog until after Eid, but there is this whole "authenticity" thing going on concerning this blog.
the people who have been reading this blog for a while know that we have been there and done that. [the link is old, Al of the Culpepper Log and I are super cool now, he smacks my butt whenever i do something stupid] and I don't really want to go into it again.
To the people coming from WIRED, please always rememebr that I am no authority on anything, quoting me like the journlist did there makes me a bit nervous, salam says this salam says that. big media scares me, trouble is never far away. i hope the article is not part of the print edition that would scare me.
and i am just super grumpy and will regret this post later.

Very bad internet connection the last 2 days, the local servers ping but no pages load, then suddenly for 10 minutes all is super fine but I can barely check my emails let alone read any news before it goes again. Writing this just because it became a bit of a habit, we’ll see if I post it.

Remember the time just before the Gulf War when everybody was rushing around and people were doing their perfunctory “well, we tried but…….blah blah blah” speeches. This is what it looks like now. This is “the re-run of a bad movie” bush was talking about in one of his speeches; believe me I don’t want to sit thru it either, watching the world get in line after yet another bush and his magical flute.

[unrelated funfact: you know the band BUSH ? DJs on the English language radio station in Baghdad (voice of youth) are not allowed to say the name of the band, they have to spell it. “Bee yu ess etch have yet another single out”. I bet all the DJs there thank god there isn’t a band called schwartzkopf, imagine having to spell that everytime you play a song.]
[another unrelated funfact: do you remember this childish joke, in case you don’t know what this is: this is a mosaic of Bush senior on the entrance to al-rasheed hotel, all visitors have to step on it if they want to get in, al-rasheed is where all international state visitors are accommodated, I have seen funny ministry-of-silly-walks like attempts to not step on it, its silly really. Well you can’t see it anymore. They have put a huge rug on it.]

The Adha eid is tomorrow, Haj is over and time will be ticking out. The streets are full of people buying Eid treats for kids and preparing for the Eid feast. My parents, because they are from two different environments, have separate traditions for eid I get to choose where to go for the big lunch, which should be after the Eid prayer in the mosque but since I don’t do that I get a couple of extra hours of sleep.
I will most probably spend the first day with my mother’s family. Tastier food, our favorite caterer Abu-Karam is making the stuffed lamb and he will, as always, drop by to see how well his lamb has been received and have a drink with my uncles, besides, around 30 people and 4 generations make a good party. Big family gathering food fest. Yay.
The war will just have to wait.

Thanks for all the advice on how to get my well-water treated, now I don’t need to worry about that anymore. What still worries me is the air-tight room business, as much I try not to think about it Alan (who started the issue in the comments link) is right. So I guess I have to thank you for offering all the information. It’s just not that easy getting the family to listen, it took me a week to convince them that we need a well. There is one place where I got even more information from, Imshin has posted something a while ago about that issue so I went back to check only to find an even more informative post with a very useful link. (OK, so I am not sure how the proprietors of that site will react if they know an Iraqi is finding their information very useful).
Imshin I hope you and your family will be safe. These days I keep thinking of the lines anya has sent me earlier:

We are playthings in the hands of time
Dancing to music that is not our own.

I have so little control over my life these days let alone understanding where the world is heading to. I hope we all be spared any unnecessary grief.

Saddam has a new photo taken with his sons on the 4th of this month. notice the friendly looking pistol in Uday's belt. a perfect family photo.

CASI [Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq] press release dated 7th January 2003:

A "strictly confidential" UN document, written to assist with UN contingency planning in the event of war with Iraq, predicts high civilian injuries, an extension of the existing nutritional crisis, and "the outbreak of diseases in epidemic if not pandemic proportions."

the document is titled [LIKELY HUMANITARIAN SCENARIOS] and was apparently mentioned for the first time in this Times article (23rd of December 2002):

THE United Nations is making secret contingency plans for a war that would halt all Iraqi oil production, “seriously degrade” the country’s electricity system, provoke civil unrest and create 900,000 refugees, The Times has learnt.

CASI says that it has obtained a draft of this document through a UN source who has authorized the publication of parts of the document. With all the talk about human shields and anti-war protests none of the "human shields" is thinking of a "B" plan. And from what little I have heard most international agencies including UNHCR are saying they are not really prepared or don't have enough funds in case of a "humanitarian emergency" in Iraq, and even if the funds were available, getting the goods to where they are needed is also a problem. It makes pretty grim reading.
There is one term which I have not seen before. [IDPs] Internally Displaced Persons. The report estimates the number of IDPs at 2million. Refugees to bordering countries at around 900,000 to Iran and 50,000 to Saudi Arabia, they would be " from Baghdad and the Centre Governorates" (paragraph 17). I guess the western desert makes Jordan and Syria a bit too difficult to reach but Turkey would probably also see a lot of refugees (well, they have prepared their tents within the Iraqi border there anyway). A more recent article on the UNHCR site says that the expected number of refugees is around 600,000 :

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers, said Tuesday between 500,000 and 600,000 Iraqis are likely to become refugees in a U.S.-led military action in Iraq.
Lubbers told a news conference in Geneva that half of the Iraqi refugees are expected to flee to Iran while the other half are likely to head to Turkey in the north.

makes more sense than going to Saudi Arabia. But there is one little fact that the UN document mentioned above does not state, this is from the UNHCR:

Lubbers said a military conflict in Iraq will also produce a large number of internally displaced people in Iraq fleeing the war but, as in the case of the war in Afghanistan, these people would not be covered by UNCHR since they are not classified as refugees under international law.

so what happens to the 2 million IDPs ?
back to [LIKELY HUMANITARIAN SCENARIOS]
The report summarizes the scenarios by splitting them into two stages Emergency and Protracted Humanitarian Requirements. Here is the list for emergency requirements:

- Bridging, material handling and transport. - Food and necessities for some 5.4 million people.
- Health supplies to treat injuries for approximately 100,000.
- Health supplies to treat the highly vulnerable for up to 1.23 million.
- Health supplies to cater for the ongoing needs of 5.4 million.
- Nutrition supplies for 0.54 million.
- Water treatment equipment for 5.4 million.
- Chemicals and consumables for 5.4 million.
- Sanitation materials and chemicals.
- Total range of services for 2 million IDPs, some of whom may well become refugees. The number that may eventually be in this category cannot be assessed with any confidence.
- Emergency shelter for 1.4 million.
- Family reunion facilities for unaccompanied minors.
- Facilities for 100,000 Iraqi refugees in neighbouring countries.
- Mine Action activities, (demining, UXO clearance, mine awareness).

you notice it doesn't make any mention of possible doomsday scenario if one of the sides uses "unconventional" weapons. I guess if that happens it would be out of everybody's control, rather not think about it.
Here are all the links, take a look at it:
LIKELY HUMANITARIAN SCENARIOS [html version]
LIKELY HUMANITARIAN SCENARIOS [scanned PDF of original]
LIKELY HUMANITARIAN SCENARIOS [4-page PDF booklet]

Lisha has magnetic poetry just for me.
you know I love this, you should check all her magnetic poems.
boy did I miss you, and your site was going crazy the last couple of weeks. hope everything got sorted out, sorry to hear you have lost your novel notes.

Found some old pictures.
mini picture tour time (click on small pix to see larger):

[click me to see photo]
this building was hit by a number of "precision bombs" during the Gulf War. This is now our main link to the internet world. The picture is face on if you could see the side you would notice that a couple of the floors are built with slightly different color of brick, these are the floors that were hit. The Sinek building was built in the late sixties, designed by Rifa'at al-Chaderji, he lives in the States now.
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[click me to see photo]
Another building by al-chadirji, this is one of my favorites. It houses the Union of Industries. this is the entrance to one of Baghdad's main commercial streets. Along this street you can still see the closed offices of all major airlines. Now only one is open (not in this street) the Gulf Falcon is the only airline flying from Baghdad to Damascus and Beirut two times a week.
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[click me to see photo]
View of al-Sinek bridge, this was also hit during GW I. Getting across the river was a major problem during the first year after the war. An old Baghdadi tradition was resurrected. The floating bridge. There is a children's song about a bridge that would run away with every flood and kids running after it asking it to come back, this was during the 20's before the British built the first bridge (maud bridge after general maud who led the British invasion of Iraq, now it is called the bridge of martyrs. maybe tommy franks will get his bridge as well, who knows.). The photo is taken from a balcony in the old Melia hotel (now al-mansur), actually all of them are.
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[click me to see photo]
everybody should recognize this mosque, it is the background to all broadcasts from Iraq. This is the mosque facing the Ministry of Information, all stations have their tents facing this mosque, you see it from another angle of course. the big silhouette that looks like a ziggurat in the background used to be the ministry of foreign affairs, now it is part of the palace complex, a beautiful building, at sunset with the right light it looks like something fit for [Blade Runner]. Luckily it was not hit during GW I, hopefully it gets thru this time as well. If you look close to the right of it (in the red box) is saddam special tower, it was built with amazing speed. Also part of the palace complex.
---------------

[click me to see photo]
this is the approach to the Sinek bridge, on the left is the Ministry of Planning, Architect: Gio Ponti. This was a time when a very sharp city council was commissioning major international architects to do all sorts of projects in Baghdad. We have one of Cobusier's last built projects, the [Saddam indoor sports hall] was finished after the death of Le Corbusier. Walter Gropius designed the University of Baghdad and Mies van der Rohe its mosque. And there is an unbuilt project by Frank Lloyd Wright for an Opera House in Baghdad (it's a tiny picture, couldn't find a bigger one of that sketch). pre-tty cool,eh? now we can't even get world class IRAQI architects to work here.
---------------

8th February 1963
president Abdul-Kareem Qasim is ousted in acoup led by the Arab Socialist Resurrection Party (the first Ba'athist "revolution", later to be called the "fair maiden" of all revolutions), Abdul-Salam Arif becomes president and kicks out the Ba'athists 10 months after they have put him in the president's seat. Saddam is among the group who attacked adul-karim's car in al-rasheed street.
17th July 1968
the second Ba'athist led coup, Arif is ousted, General Ahmad Hassan Al-bakir becomes president, Saddam Hussein is vice president. 16th July 1979
Al-Bakir "resigns", Saddam Hussein becomes president of the Republic of Iraq.

We get a public holiday to contemplate how could there have ever been people who were fooled by Ba'athist ideology.
One Arab nation with an eternal message.
Unity (wahda)
Freedom (huria)
Socialism (ishtirakia)
Sometimes when talking to someone who was there during all this, the generation which had a chance to go out in the streets and affect change, it just slips out:

- Salam Pax: "you were tricked and used, you realize this."
- Parental-Unit: "yes, now what? do you want an official apology?"
- Salam Pax: "no just wanted to make sure you acknowledge it"

only my commie uncle starts shouting abuse at me :-)

Powell speech is around 6pm in Baghdad, the whole family is getting together for tea and dates-pastry to watch the (Powell Rocks the UN) show. Not on Iraqi TV of course, we have decided to put up the satellite dish to watch it, yes we will put it away afterwards until the next event. I don’t exactly like the thought of two months in prison just to have 24 hour BBC (no free CNN on ArabSat which is the only sat we get with our tiny dish).

A quick run thru what is going on in Baghdad before uncles and aunts flood the house. The juiciest bit of news actually happened about a week ago but I was told about it today. A couple of days ago it was rumored that all top officials had their phone numbers changed, well who cares it’s not like I call Saddam every night to chat, but today a friend explained why. Around six days ago the phone lines of the Iraqi air defense units were “attacked”. When you picked up the phone in some of the command units you didn’t get a dial tone but a male voice speaking in broken Arabic. What it said is close to what the infamous email said, don’t use chemical or biological weapons, don’t offer resistance, and don’t obey commands to attack civilian areas and so on. This went on for a couple of hours. Now everyone has new numbers. I have no idea how that is at all possible. I do know that for some rural areas we use microwave signals for phone connections but they can’t be so stupid as to use it for military purposes.
Way to go uncle Sam. This is going to make one hell of a James Bond movie.

The trenches and sandbag mountains I wrote about last week are now all over Baghdad. They are not being put there by the army; they are part of the Party’s preparations for an insurgence. Each day a different area of Baghdad goes thru the motions. Party members spread in the streets of that area, build the trenches, sit in them polishing their Kalashnikovs and drink tea. The annoyance-factor of these training days depend on the zeal of the party members in that area. Until now the worst was the [14th of Ramadan] street, they stopped cars searched them and asked for ID and military cards, good thing I wasn’t going thru that street, I still have not stamped my military papers to show that I have done my reserves training.

Saddam is still meeting officers daily, and we have the pleasure of watching these meetings three times every day. Each batch he meets leaves the place with a 1.5million Iraqi Dinars check and a brand new car. The latest cars to be put in the warehouses I pass by are Toyota Corollas, all white. The warehouse has around 150 of them (we counted the trucks standing outside). It is said that there are a couple of thousand more new cars waiting just outside Baghdad, parked so close to each other when one of them caught fire they couldn’t get to it fast enough, 38 cars burned.

Don’t you just love gossip?

A work related trip to Arbil in the north of Iraq had to be canceled when I found out that if I am going to sit in the same car as a WHO staff member I have to get travel permit from the ministry of foreign affairs, even if it was “local staff” i.e. Iraqi citizen. The permit takes around three days to issue which would have made the whole trip pointless. I really wanted to go. There is no border as such but you go thru an “Iraqi” check point and a “Kurdish” one, and the best way to get thru them without hassle is to travel in an international agency car, but that requires permit from the Iraqis. Bummer.

Door bells are ringing have to go now.

"Players and spectators in the arena
Baffled by our moves and by the world's
We are playthings in the hands of time
Dancing to music that is not our own."
Khalilullah Khalili, afghan poet.

Reader "anya o" sent me those lines.
There are not enough words to express my thanks for all of you. For your kind words, your concern and the help offered.

Diane, having used the words [blogson] and [Salam] in the same sentence, gets to suffer thru all the embarrassing things "blogsons" do: me going on and on about pointless things and frightening her with the thought of me singing "thank you for the music" wearing my best ABBA costume. Thank you.

Jim Henley, man you are fast. And he knows I just have to tell Diane so he sends the email to her as well. Thank you, saying that I have been flattered by your offer is an understatement. Thanks for thinking of me.

Kathy thanks for all the tips and for offering me a blog home. And thank “MommaBear” for me as well.

Al, being the first to throw the (he’s a CIA ploy) thing at me will always give you a special place in my heart. This time he wrote me a poem.
Take it away Al:

Splendor in the Grass

Our ol' buddy Salam, he's a dirty lil' perv
Hussein just can't stop him
Bushy's chances are slim
When he's on a love mission, you know he won't swerve

So our bombs start to droppin' on his city so dear
And the Casbah starts rockin'
While the town folk be gawkin'
In shock as the smoke starts to clear

As the neighbors start looking for their goats most preferred
Past Saddam's charcoaled ass
Follow the bleats in the grass
And find Salam out humpin' the herd

You owe me a new keyboard; my brother spilled his sugary tea on it after he read this now it’s all sticky. Thanks Al

The lady who calls herself “a reader”: thank you, I hope you keep coming and keeping an eye on me.

Emily (I think hawkgirl.blogspot.com) thanks for offering to host my blog.

And finally Jason [shellen.com] from Pyra Labs. I was setting up a blog somewhere else when I got his email. I guess this means I will have to tattoo [blogger 4 ever] on my arm now, maybe right under my [I heart Omar el Sharif] tattoo.

I didn’t post the last couple of days because I wanted to see if they were going to block [blogger.com] as well. If they did that they would have figured out what this is, but since they didn’t it means they are giving blog*spot the geocities treatment. Since the first day internet was offered to the public anything on Geocities has been blocked, later msn communities, yahoo groups, anything on tripod and aol were blocked. The latest additions are livejournal and blogspot. But what happens is that sometimes when you are hopping from link to link a geocities site opens press refresh it disappears, go back and get to the site from the link that let you see the site and it loads again. I have no idea why this is like that but blogspot is the same now. Not that I care. Having had a thousand suggestions from you emailed to me and a techy brother I am now set up with two nifty programs which let me go anywhere I want. This isn’t a state secret, everybody here who wants to use yahoo or msn messengers has looked for things which let you circumvent the proxy, but it’s a cat and mouse game. They know which sites you’re using they block it and you look for another.

Thank you for making the last couple of months just great. for taking the time to read this weblog, to link, write an email or comment. most of you know more about what I feel and think than my family does. for starters none of them know I blog, you do. and Diane just knows way too much for my own good :)
thank you