Baghdad duty free

I had a strange, almost bittersweet feeling leaving Baghdad on Tuesday. I'm blaming it on the sand in my lungs. The winds were especially gusty in the morning, and as we proceeded down the airport road, stopping several times for checkpoints and screaming convoys of American military vehicles, the air seemed to get hazier and hazier. It was a sandstorm, though a light one by Iraqi standards.

Kevin, our security adviser, predicted that my flight to Amman, Jordan -- the launching and landing pad of most civilian trips into Iraq -- wouldn't take off on time. "I never think I'm leaving Baghdad until I'm in Amman," Kevin said.

He was right. My flight was delayed more than five hours, which gave me ample time to survey the concourse at Baghdad International Airport. For a start, it was full of people: Iraqi families probably trying to flee the country, employees of the huge military contractors like DynCorp and KBR, journalists, diplomats and smartly dressed Iraqi businessmen. The sandstorm had delayed all flights, so you could barely find a space on the dumpy gray couches that constituted the waiting area.

I killed a few minutes in the duty free, which was better stocked than most duty free shops in Africa. Women in abayas and 20-something American contractors listening to iPods shopped side-by-side for colognes, backpacks and a huge assortment of candy. I noticed that this was the place where unsold 1980s American surfwear came to die. There were BodyGlove t-shirts and boardshorts in every imaginable color, and in another place and time, I might have bought a few.

There was also a drawing for a Harley-Davidson bike. Given that a large proportion of people came to the airport in armored cars -- an airport trip for hire costs $4,500, Kevin told me -- the Harley raffle seemed awfully ambitious. Quite a few people had entered anyway. What the hell -- I filled out a ticket. I'd spent just four weeks in Iraq, so maybe I was still optimistic.

The journey back to Nairobi was a long one. To pass the time, I eavesdropped on a novelistic conversation between two fifty-something DynCorp contractors from the South who alternately swapped Bible worship books and tales of women they'd been with in central Europe (many of them seemed to be Albanian). I inhaled a lot of cigarette smoke in Amman as I studied an Iraqi couple who'd just fled their country and seemed to have trouble convincing the immigration folks to give them a visa.

I slept on the floor of the airport in Dubai and, via GameChannel and IM, followed the end of a disappointing Dodger game with my brother. Finally, after what seemed like three weeks of airplanes and airports, I landed in a drizzly Nairobi and headed home for a few hours, just enough time to unpack and repack a suitcase for another long journey, this time home to the U.S. for a much awaited vacation.

I'm now sitting in Detroit, my sixth airport in my sixth country in less than 72 hours. I just got an email from a friend who hosts a radio show in Kansas City, wanting to interview me next week about my short time in Iraq. I'm sure my family and friends will have questions too. I feel like I haven't processed any of the experience yet, and I don't think I will have by next week or maybe even next month. Right now, that Harley raffle seems like a long, long time ago.

English 101 with the Eagles

This morning Omar, the irrepressible office manager, came into my room with an urgent request. "I hear you speak a little English," Omar said. (This is a classic Omar joke.) "What does this word mean?"

He showed me a notepad where he'd written "colitas." I'd never heard the word before. I knew that colitis was an intestinal disease, but I figured/hoped that's not what he came to ask.

He hadn't. Omar's favorite way to improve his English, which is already quite good, is by listening to music and investigating the unfamiliar words. He'd heard "Hotel California" last night and was clearly listening closely. The opening lyrics, which escaped me the first 5,000 times I'd heard the song, are:

On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air

I knew where this was headed.

We played the song on my iPod and I looked the word up in the dictionary, but it wasn't there. Omar left to take a phone call while I googled "colitas" -- and there it was. Slang for marijuana. Shocking.

For some reason I felt slightly sheepish telling Omar, but by the time I got to his office he and the rest of the staff had already figured it out.

"So he was high when he wrote the song," Omar said. Everyone bust out laughing. Omar's got the vernacular down pretty good too.

Another perspective on the unthinkable

The Arab media are giving prominent coverage to the horrific events at Virginia Tech yesterday. Al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya and Iraqi television have been reporting the story all morning, so that all the staff at lunch today knew that 32 people had been killed and nearly as many wounded in what everyone is now calling the worst shooting incident in American history.

Campus shootings always trigger emotional outpourings in the U.S. Columbine was a touchstone of the 1990s and, depending on what we learn in the next few days, Blacksburg may be one for this decade.

In Baghdad there's an obvious, if not totally apt, comparison. In January, Mustansiriya University, a historic, prominently Shiite school, was hit with a double suicide/car-bombing that killed 70 people and wounded 170 (pictured below). A few weeks later, a female suicide bomber struck, killing 40 and wounding 35. In the midst of so much sectarian killing, the massacres at a place of higher learning were still seen by many Iraqis as something singularly evil.

The difference, besides the body counts, is that most university students in America will show up to class today. Some students who on Tuesdays ordinarily sleep in -- or sleep one off -- might even show up too. The nation's classrooms will be a place for students and professors to work through their feelings about what happened at Virginia Tech. Students at USC or Texas can go to class safe in the knowledge that a suicide shooting spree isn't going to occur on their campuses, and that campus security will be under orders to pay a little more attention, at least for a little while.

In Baghdad, however, the suicide attacks on Mustansiriya were part of a much larger bloodbath. Since the start of the civil war, students have been kidnapped and held for ransom, outspoken professors have been assassinated by rival sects, and few people even risk showing up to class anymore. Many if not most students and teachers have left the country, leaving a generation of young people bereft of an education. The rest cower in fear. In January, attendance at Baghdad University was 6 percent. (While that may fly on some UC campuses, it's plain tragic.)

And it continues. Today, Iraqslogger reports:

On Monday, the same day as the Virginia Tech mass shooting, two separate shooting incidents struck Mosul University, one killing Dr. Talal Younis al-Jelili, the dean of the college of Political Science as he walked through the university gate, and another killing Dr. Jaafar Hassan Sadeq, a professor from the Faculty of Arts at the school, who was targeted in front of his home in the al-Kifaat area, according to Aswat al-Iraq.

I don't point any of this out to minimize what happened at VA Tech, which is unspeakable. It's just what people here are talking about.

One of our drivers, Hussein, a guy who speaks little English but is enraptured by all things American, asked me whether there was any information on the VA Tech killer. I said he was apparently an Asian student. Doesn't matter, Hussein said -- "All the Arabs will be sent home," and everyone laughed. I did too, but felt sad that he immediately made the war-on-terror connection.

I told everyone about the video that CNN showed a few thousand times last night, the video you've all seen by now, shot by a grad student on his cellphone. I said his name was Jamal Albarghouti -- and the whole table groaned. The name was Palestinian. "They're going to have a lot of questions for him," said Laith, a reporter. He kept everyone rolling as he briefly assumed the role of FBI interrogator. "How did you get such a good video? What else can you tell us?" I didn't know what was more cringe-worthy -- Laith's American accent, or the joke he was making.

Two tragedies

The attack Thursday on the Green Zone here in Baghdad was a reminder that nowhere in the city is 100 percent safe. The Green Zone covers roughly four square miles of what used to be the government district, and to describe it I'd say think of a chunk of downtown L.A. from Staples Center to USC blocked off and surrounded by concrete barriers and checkpoints. It's actually not that bleak. It's the only place where Iraqis and foreigners alike feel they can walk around freely. Or at least they used to.

Just as devastating to the people of Baghdad, however, was the attack that same day on the Sarafiyah bridge, where an apparent truck bomb exploded and collapsed a big chunk of the steel structure into the Tigris River. Ten people died, perhaps 30 were injured, and several cars reportedly tumbled into the water below.

The bridge, like the Green Zone, was considered a "safe" area. Built by the British about 70 years ago, it stood as a symbol of the city on postcards and posters during the Saddam era. It was truly beloved. It connected east Baghdad with west Baghdad, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood with a predominantly Shiite one. It was used by Iraqis of all stripes -- students, laborers, many of the people in our office. One of our colleagues, who fancies himself something of a ladies' man, remembered taking girlfriends for walks at dusk near the riverbank and stopping to gaze at the bridge.

Thursday evening, as we focused our energies on covering the Parliament bombing, which was front-page news around the world, I put the Sarafiya in the back of my mind. But my Iraqi colleagues didn't. As they hunted down information for me about the Green Zone attack, which terrified a community of Iraqi and American officials who thought they were relatively secure, my Iraqi colleagues talked about the bridge.

As much as the attack on parliament was a symbol of the war at hand, the bombing of the bridge seemed to symbolize the loss of a better time, and the feeling that ordinary people were systematically losing their own "safe" places. As a Los Angeles Times story points out today, there used to be 10 bridges connecting east and west Baghdad and now there are only 9.

We had the feeling yesterday morning that these kinds of emotions were missing in the immediate coverage of the Green Zone attack, when our story and many others focused on the stunning security lapse and what it meant for the highly touted U.S. "security crackdown" in Baghdad. Leila, our bureau chief, thought I should go and talk to people in the streets about their thoughts on the parliament bombing. I went with two Iraqi colleagues down the street to the site of a recent suicide attack in our neighborhood -- a car bombing that killed five people on a busy street less than a kilometer outside the Green Zone.

The people I met, who'd been there the day of the bombing and recalled standing just a few feet from the blast, had one thing to say about the parliament attack. "Let them feel it," said Abbas Fadhil, a 30-year-old butcher. An attack on the heart of the government could force politicians to do something about sectarian killing. "This could be for our benefit," he said. "This might help to unify their hearts and make them come together."

Maybe not politically correct. But they were the realest words I've exchanged with Iraqis outside our office in the few weeks I've been here. It's famously hard for foreign journalists to move around this city and talk to "real people." My short reporting trip yesterday, which lasted all of a half-hour (even that close to our hotel, we have to be careful), was more eye-opening than hours of phone conversations I've had with Iraqi politicians and American military officials. Abbas's comments led to today's follow-up story.