Feb 16

Chance and lateness combine to put me inside Downing Street, opposite number 10, as the Cabinet comes out. I've just delivered a letter to Tony Blair telling him I'm going to Iraq to act as a human rights observer and gather evidence of likely and actual breaches of the Geneva Convention on protection of civilians. CND and Peacerights have served a "letter before action" - the first stage of the legal challenge process - and although countries like Britain and the US frequently flout international law with impunity, I want Tony to know people are still holding him accountable for the effects of his war on ordinary Iraqi civilians.

So I've delivered the letter and Sky News want an interview, which is why I'm waiting behind the barriers when they all come out. The Sky reporter shouts "Is it a united cabinet, Mr / Mrs..." whatever at each member as they come out. They all pretend they can't hear. They've all been in there debating whether to kill thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and now they're filing past me in their smart suits, chauffeured safely away from impertinent questions. Robin Cook appears: he of the ethical foreign policy. That makes me quite cross. I don't recognise Geoff Hoon but the reporter calls out to him. Geoff Hoon is one of the cabinet's chief warmongers.

"How many Iraqi kids are you going to kill Mr Hoon? They're going to die because you're going to stop them getting food or clean water Mr Hoon. It ceases to be a collateral effect when it's foreknown and inevitable, Mr Hoon. It becomes genocide Mr Hoon."

Expelled from Downing Street for asking a minister a couple of questions. How naughty.

Next to me on the plane is a Palestinian man who was studying on a scholarship in Sweden when the 6 day war made him an exile. He can visit Jerusalem on a Jordanian passport now, but he can never go home. The owner of the taxi company that takes us from Jordan airport into Amman city tells us that 750,000 people have left Iraq through the border with Syria, since the border with Jordan was closed. He's moved most of his cars from Amman to Damascus because that's the route people are taking now.

It strikes me, as I make my own journey: how frightening, how dislocating, to leave knowing you might never be able to come home.

Though it's dark for most of our 960km journey to Baghdad, there are trucks and tankers on the road without lights. Literally without them, not just without them switched on. Others have no brakes - or none to speak of - and simply have to sound their horns constantly to warn whatever is in their path. There aren't any spares, but life has to go on. Likewise the street lights are not on until the outskirts of Baghdad. If you look closely, there are no lights: only poles.

The inside lane and the roadside are liberally ornamented with the remains of tyres. On my last visit I saw what those tyre remnants mean. People can't afford new tyres: 60% of them have little or no income aside from the food ration. Bald tyres blow out and the driver loses control of the car, which careens across the road till it finds something to crumple into. No flowers, just torn rubber marks the spot.

Baghdad, though, seems surprisingly solid. All the talk of cruise missiles, uranium bunker-busters, carpet bombing and the rest made the whole city precarious in my mind, but Saturday is a gloriously sunny day and people are going about their business. We talk to a few people about the risk of bombing. There are shelters but no one wants to go in them after the coalition bombed a civilian shelter last time, burning or boiling over four hundred people who were trapped inside their sanctuary. Inside a building is a bad place to be. Somewhere wide open is the best bet – a field, a park, the riverside. We walk down along the riverside, past feral dogs and a group of boys playing football.

Ahmed and Mohammed are still where they always were, outside the Al Fanar. Ahmed’s face has matured – he must be 16 now, but he’s still very small. Saif isn’t there. I wonder – he had what looked like melanomas on his face, but Ahmed says he’s fine. There’s another boy now, a smaller boy, Hassan, shining shoes now on their pitch. The soles of his trainers aren’t attached to the rest anymore and his feet are too long for them. I try to ask what size he needs, but our mutual language isn’t up to it yet. I go looking for Muna, but her money exchange isn’t there any more. I check a couple of times, up and down the street, in case I’ve just missed it, but she’s gone. I wonder, but I’ll never know.

Our “minders” are two women who work at the language school at Baghdad University. Rana is a couple of years older than me. Her mum was a teacher and her dad was in the army. Her younger sister is at the university now, studying science. She, like so many of the young people, loves Westlife and the Backstreet Boys. Sura is a year younger than me. Sura covers her hair, Rana doesn’t. It’s personal choice, Sura says. Some women get pressure from their families to cover their hair, much like some women in Britain get pressure from their families to dress modestly, rather than the compulsion of, say, Afghanistan.

The fashion is for outlining the lips in a bold colour but not filling in the line. Both women wear delicate eyeliner and chunky heels. Were we married, they wanted to know. Why not? Did we have boyfriends? Neither of them is married. Rana just hasn’t found anyone. Sura confides in the back of the taxi that she’s in love with a man who’s already married, so they can only meet and talk, but no one else will do.

Most of the time we’re left unminded but I’m travelling with Julia, an independent film maker, and any time you want to film something you’re supposed to be accompanied by someone who’s officially approved. It’s all part of the everyday surveillance of every aspect of life in Iraq, no matter who you are, but at the moment there are so many journalists in the country that there’s less attention left for the likes of us.

Over the evening bread and hummus in the Al Fanar hotel we’re entertained by a woman at the next table who works for Oprah Winfrey. She’s just set up an interview with Huda Ammash who is, she says, a powerful woman and the voice of Iraqi women. The name is familiar. She’s one of the highest ranking people in the ruling Ba’ath party. She was interviewed by Scilla Elsworthy, head of the Oxford Research Group, who was out here a few weeks ago. The Oprah woman doesn’t want her to say the same as she said to Scilla. She wants her to “break out of the box”. Huda, it seems, is gaining, or being given, quite a lot of credibility.

Oprah-woman carries on to tell her companion about the Non-Aligned Students and Youth Organisation conference. Julia and I had been chasing visas for weeks before we heard about this conference and as soon as we registered we were given visas. She says there are over 1000 students going to the conference and not one of them is female. Surprised, Julia and I check under the table that we’ve not undergone any changes in the last hour or two. No, we’re still female. And this woman is part of the process of telling the US what’s going on in Iraq.

Feb 18
Student March

The gang of lads asked my name, then dissolved in giggles, slapping each other’s shoulders, when I told them mine and asked theirs. Overcoming their shyness, they asked where I was from, how old I was, what I thought of Baghdad, and we danced down the street together to the clatter of drums and hand clapping.

It was an anti-war march, organised by the students at the Non-Aligned Students and Youth Organisation (NASYO) conference. A Japanese group carried a banner saying “Japan – Iraq. Peace and Friendship” in both English and Japanese, chanting “No to war. Yes to Peace.” The Nigerians were in national costume. The Belgians were out in force. Australians, Estonians, Swedes, Turks, Mauritians and a plethora of others were there. Conspicuous by their absence were the 27 US students who had registered to attend the conference but withdrew at the last minute, apparently under persuasion from the US State Department. It remains illegal under the US sanctions for its citizens to even travel to Iraq unless as journalists or UN personnel.

I marched with a group of young Iraqi women, clapping their hands and chanting. The students we met in the colleges were roughly half and half men and women. Probably around two thirds of the women covered their hair, but many wore trousers and make-up. Like their male counterparts they were shy at first, then friendly and welcoming, keen to practise their English and eager to know what I thought of their city.

I bounced up and down clapping hands with a mixed group, to the bugling of an old man behind us, once we halted outside the UNDP building, and a small boy dived into the middle of the melee and began break dancing. Over the noise we exchanged names and favourite English football teams – mainly Liverpool and Manchester United for them; Brighton and Hove Albion for me. Julia Roberts is popular here, with both men and women, as are Westlife, N-Sync and the Backstreet Boys but even so, that’s not an excuse for bombing these people.

A tribe of young men were jumping up and down, going round and round in a circle, chanting, one hand on the shoulder in front, the other punching the air. The rage against Bush was tangible as they chanted “Down, Down Bush” and “Down, Down USA”. Their glee was genuine as I expressed my view that Tony Blair was a muppet. Many of their chants and banners praised Saddam and there was a large banner saying “Saddam is our Choice.” Like the pictures in every shop and office, this is perhaps more a matter of expediency than political preference.

People’s eyes say different things from their mouths and they talk when they know no one else can hear. The feeling is that they want genuine democracy, greater freedom, but if the choice is Saddam or the USA, they will take Saddam. They do not believe, even when they speak freely, that the US and UK will be “liberating” them. Some are angry at the way weapons inspections have been carried out. They tease, says Sura. They tip out bins in colleges as if that is where the evidence of a weapons programme would be hidden. They are aggressive.

It was as intense an experience as any in my life, to march with the Iraqi students and to feel their anger and their powerful energy. During the march it started to rain, despite the bright sunshine. The sun was over the river Tigris, and I looked for a rainbow opposite. I couldn’t see one. If it was there, it was hidden by the UN building.

Feb 21
Bomber Blush

I wish you could see what I can see. From my window there is a sculpture of a magic carpet, with two people kneeling on it, leaning forward, looking up, taking to the air. To the east there is a mosque with an ornate blue mosaicked dome and minaret, behind which the sun rises, and from which the muezzin calls five times a day, blending with the ubiquitous car horns, the sirens and, after dusk, the wild drumbeats and trumpeting of bus-borne wedding parties. Everyone wants to get married before the war, just in case.

To the south and west is the Tigris, calm, enormous and reflective. Palm trees rise along every street. The moon is waxed to half, fading out across a diagonal. A journalist from home rang: “It must be hell,” he said. No. No, it’s beautiful, stunning, alive, filled with gentle, welcoming people who ply you with tea and the constant riotous noise of cars and horns and the horse drawn gas carts whose driver bangs out a rhythm on the canisters to call people to bring out their empties.

British and US citizens have been advised to leave Iraq. Those on non-essential business have been advised to leave Kuwait, Israel and Palestine as well, because of increasing tension in Iraq. Radio Five Live rang us at midnight to ask for a comment on the “unrest”.

“The what?”

Why the concern for a few British citizens? Who will warn the nearly 25 million Iraqi citizens to move out because of the rising tensions; to leave unless their lives here are essential. And where would they go? Our friend Ghazwan was upset because it’s the clearest indication that an attack is imminent; more imminent than usual, that is. As Odai told us, they’ve been about to be attacked for about as long as he can remember. He was 11 in the first gulf war.

Odai took us to a residential area where sewage pipes are being laid. During the last Gulf war, the electricity generating plants were destroyed. Since then there has been a deficit of about 2300 megawatts in electricity supply (UNICEF Iraq Situation Analysis 2002). When the electricity cuts out, sewage pumping stops. The pipes get blocked. In some cases the pipes have ruptured. In others, sewage has backed up, overflowing through inspection covers and flooding the streets. As of 2002, half a million tons of raw sewage are dumped into fresh water bodies every day (UNICEF, as above). The system couldn't be repaired without excavations and replacements.

Replacement pipes were blocked for a long time by the sanctions committee of the Security Council. They stacked up in the central reservation in the road. They are almost as wide in diameter – about a metre and a half – as I am tall. I've lived in smaller places. The Sanctions Committee doesn't have to give reasons for its refusals so I've no idea what the perceived military use of sewage pipes was: surely not a "Supergun" – I can only think of one thing you could fire out of a pipe like that.

To install the pipes involves excavating a pit. Because the water table in Baghdad, or at least in that part, is quite high because of the river nearby, they have to constantly pump out the water as they go. They lay concrete at the bottom and water carries on seeping up, so the pumping has to carry on all the while the concrete is slowly drying. It's taken months to lay a two-kilometre stretch to link the area to the main sewer. Now and then it hits me as strange to see so much building and renovation going on in a city which is likely soon to be rubble.

The new pipes are metal, whereas the old ones were concrete, and much smaller in diameter: they are piled across the road among the excavation rubble. Even so it's doubtful whether the piping will survive the bombing, never mind the power generation plants, so people will be without sewage disposal again.

Water pipes, too, are being laid all over the city. Lack of clean water has created a plague of gastrointestinal diseases – UNICEF states that 70% of infant and under-five mortality is caused by acute respiratory infections and diarrhoea. The water picks up contamination as it flows through corroded or broken pipes. When the electricity cuts out it flows back down, then back up, and so on, until it reaches families unsafe for drinking.

There is little doubt among people I've spoken to that the power plants will be destroyed. Back up generators are in place but can’t provide as much power as it would take to get an ongoing supply of water through to homes.

Wells have been dug around the city, at mosques and churches, hospitals, schools, colleges, on streets and in gardens, for emergency use. We went to see a well on a bit of waste ground at the end of a residential street. It consists of a chunky engine, a pump and a load of pipes. The water will still need boiling or chemical treatment before use, so those who can are buying gas cylinders to boil water on. Even so, the UN estimates that just 39% of Iraqi people will have access - albeit rationed - to water in the event of a war.

The food ration has been distributed for April and May already. In the next few days the 40,000 ration shops will be receiving the distribution for June and July. In the last war the food warehouses were destroyed. If they're hit this time the plan is that they'll be empty, and that people will have a stockpile for as long as possible.

In the back of one of the ration shops, three men were weighing out bags of rice containing one, two or three people's shares for a month. Tea is loose in green carrier bags, likewise in a single, double or triple monthly quantity. Sugar, lentils, beans and detergent are stacked in similar piles. People have to bring their own containers for vegetable oil or ghee. Soap and powdered milk are pre-packed. Flour is bagged and stored separately. Some of the ration shops have flour, others don’t and customers have to go to a separate flour agent. For children under five there are also cans of baby milk.

A man came in with his ration book. There is a coupon for each month and the agent tore out the two for April and May. For those who have money, there’s other stuff on the shelves – lemon juice, tomato sauce, drinks. The proprietor explains that if there isn’t enough powdered milk for the entire country then no one gets any at all. They can’t split the packets without spoiling the contents and it can’t be given only to some of the people and not others. There are no vegetables, fruit or animal products because they cannot be distributed on a monthly basis, never mind in February for July. Micronutrient deficiencies are rife, according to the UNICEF situation analysis, with 70% of women suffering anaemia.

Some people talk about going out to the country when the war starts, where they expect the bombing to be less intense. Others say they will stay and defend their city. What I haven't yet heard anyone say, even in private, is that they're looking forward to their "liberation" by the US. Ghazwan points out that the British and US governments are putting pressure on the Turkish government to join the war, despite the overwhelming opposition (about 90%) of the Turkish people. They're subverting Turkey's democracy even as the EU demands greater democracy as a condition of Turkey's entry.

He refers to Bush and Blair as a single entity – Mr Blush. Blush is pushing for war despite the objections of his people. Both countries now lock people up indefinitely without trial, or even interview. Britain's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2001, the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 and Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001 combine to allow retention and disclosure of a wide swathe of communications data and personal information, as well as the taking of fingerprints for an array of reasons unrelated to crime and maintenance of those prints permanently, where before they were destroyed if no conviction was made.

Ghazwan thinks it’s a bit ironic that such a country calls itself a democracy. He’s an interesting man. He gets a lot of information about what’s going on outside from an illegal satellite dish which, periodically, he gets caught for. He expresses a lot without overtly criticising the Iraqi government, revealing more than most people dare to while seeming to put a positive spin on something.

"We have a dictatorship,” he says. “You’re supposed to be a democracy. What kind of democracy is it you are going to bring us with your bombs?”

Feb 23rd
Cardamom Coffees

Over cardamom coffees and lemon teas in the Baghdad coffee shop where the 1958 revolution was plotted, amid the echoing clatter of the old men slamming down dominoes onto the tables and the fragrant smoke of narghilas, our companions, two final year medical students, said they would go to the hospitals if bombing begins, to do whatever they can to help. Suraj will leave his flat, because it is next to the telecommunications tower, and go to stay with Shawkat. They say they will still come to the coffee shop and smoke and play dominoes and backgammon and chat, no matter that the bombs are falling.

People here seem to talk less about "the situation" than people in Britain, but yesterday I drank tea with a young woman called Soulaf, who talked about the bombing in 1991, when she was 13. Her four-year-old cousin cried constantly throughout the bombardment, in terror for his life. Her voice quivered and I could tell she was trying hard not to cry. She wiped her eyes, trying not to smudge the black eyeliner, and I looked for a tissue – I've been stashing them wherever I go – but the one in my pocket was fluff-ridden and unappealing. I asked if they carried on going to school. She said people still went to work, but the schools were closed, and when they reopened she had to study by candle light because there was no electricity.

A couple of days ago the New York Times published a story saying that the Iraqi people want war. Obviously I don't know the thoughts of every Iraqi person, even if they had a homogenous national opinion, but today I went out on one of the human shield buses to a Baghdad power station where some of them are going to be staying, attempting to protect it from attack.

All the way from Abu Nawas Street to the power station people were waving, cheering, giving thumbs up and peace signs. The media often suggest that demonstrations in Iraq are arranged by the government, and perhaps some are, but there was no compulsion today to pay any attention to the red double decker buses painted with peace messages. People were genuinely glad to see buses full of foreign peace activists and to know people cared enough to be there. After the welcome we've had already, I didn't doubt that this was the right place to be, but if I had, it would have ended then.

On the way to the power station I met Maya, from Serbia. She's living in Syria, studying Arabic language and literature for a year, and travelled in with the human shield buses. I hesitated a while before asking her about her experiences in the bombing of Serbia, because I thought she'd be sick of talking about it, but she said hardly anyone even seemed to remember or know that Serbia had been so recently at war.

"I am a bit jealous, to tell the truth, that there are so many people here and there were not any in Serbia, but I think it's good."

I thought maybe it was because a lot of people didn't really understand the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, whereas people know what this one is all about. She believes the Iraqi people are in a worse position than were the Serbs under Milosevic, but she does not see war as the answer. There are ways to support people without killing them, ways to solve problems that do not involve bombardment and destruction of everyday life.

She said she was going back to Syria quite soon, partly because she has exams coming up, but also “I couldn’t go through that again, the bombing.” A US reporter from the National Geographic Channel was sitting next to us on the bus up to the power station, telling us all how it was going to be. He knows, because he’s been everywhere and done everything, that all the people will hide in basements as soon as bombing starts and we won’t see anyone. That’s what happened in the last war and it’s what will happen this time. He also knows all about the bombing of Serbia, because he was there too. Maya, evidently, is just confused when she thinks they carried on with day-to-day living.

Carl, a 72-year-old former Melody Maker journalist from Bradford, said that during the blitz in London they all used to walk around the streets, carrying on with their business with a kind of fatalism. He said one day he heard a roar and then, low enough that he could see the pilot, a plane flew over bearing Swastikas on the wing. He said he flung himself to the ground as it passed, not realising till the danger had gone that it was strafing the street he was walking down.

Carl has been to Palestine as well, and talked about how, despite the curfews, people go out and do what they need to do. Foot patrols are rare, and tank patrols can be heard from a mile away, so there is plenty of warning to take cover, and life goes on. It’s not good, it’s not glamorous, but they survive. National Geographic Man was adamant. I cynically suggested that he was probably right, but perhaps his knowledge didn’t extend much further than the immediate vicinity of the Al Rasheed Hotel, the international journalists’ ghetto.

This time, there are peace campaigners here from Jordan, Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Congo, Chad, Nigeria, Sudan, South Africa, Mauritius, Japan, China, India, Sri Lanka, Korea, Brazil, Argentina, Greece, Russia, Estonia, the Balkans, the Czech Republic, Germany, France, Belgium, Britain, Ireland, Canada, the US, Australia: bring me an atlas and I’ll try to find you a country that’s not represented.

Denis, from Congo, told us he came here in solidarity with the Iraqi people because the US was doing much the same in his country and his organisation thought it was important to send someone over. US agents, Denis said, have for years been coming into Congo and arming, funding and training opposition fighters to destabilise the country and gain control of the minerals, especially coltan, used in high-tech electronic equipment.


A Very Brief Background to the Congo Situation

Like Iraq, Congo is damned by international interest in the substances that have been found under the people’s land. Unlike Iraq, the wealth from the minerals has never been nationalised and the population has gained nothing but war from the diamonds and minerals.

The col-tan that Denis talked about is columbo-tantalite ore (also called niobium-tantalite), an easily mined black gloop. The processed tantalum powder is used in space technology, the aviation and atomic energy industries and in games consoles, laptop computers, mobile phones, pagers and other luxury electronic items.

Because of high demand, much of it relating to mobile phones and the Sony Playstation 2 when it was first available, the price of coltan was about US$200/kg in late 2000. The cost was higher still for Congolese people whose land concealed the ore. Armed groups seized the land and killed those who got in the way. Three-, maybe three and a half, million people have been killed and two million or so displaced as the mining funds all sides in the Congolese war.

After Belgium’s vicious 51-year colonial occupation ended in 1960 with a death toll of between 4 and 8 million people, the CIA orchestrated the murder of the elected leader, Lumumba. They installed Mobutu Sese Seko and, alongside the World Bank, funded him, personally as well as politically, despite his murderous treatment of the Congolese [Zairean] people.

You could write the script yourself – you’ve seen this one before. When Mobutu decided to keep the goods for himself, from the US corporations and World Bank, the US engineered his departure. In what most outlets obediently saw as Africans fighting among themselves, Rwandan and Ugandan forces invaded, bringing with them a new president, Kabila.

When Kabila ordered the foreign troops out of the country, the Rwandan and Ugandan troops invaded the east of Congo with US backing. Human Rights Watch reports that the Rwandan army looted the supplies of coltan and seized the mines, using child and forced labour and making at least US$250 million which has funded their war.

Three groups of companies process col-tan: HC Starck of Germany, Cabot Inc. of the United States and Ningxia of China. They get it from traders who buy it at posts either controlled by militias or taxed by them. The International Peace Information Service reports that Finmining, a Swiss-owned company which has bought Congolese col-tan, is registered in the Caribbean's tax-free haven of St. Kitts and is a partner of Rwanda Metals, a corporate front for the Rwandan Patriotic Army.

Other corporations are linked with militia-run companies: the Belgian Cogecom bought coltan from SOMIGL, a monopoly established by the occupying army, funding it to the tune of $3 million. Companies commonly deny knowingly dealing with the militias, but industry representatives admit they can’t really know what the sources are, so it’s a fairly feeble assertion.

H.C.Starck, a subsidiary of the German Bayer corporation, was accused in a UN report of trading with the Rwandan army-linked former arms dealer Mrs Aziza Kulsum Gulamali, as were Belgian multinationals Cogecom and Sogem. Starck threw its teddy in the corner and insisted it’s not true and that Starck supports efforts to stop illegal mining in the Congo. Who knows?

The UN report called for a ban on purchasing goods from occupied parts of Congo, saying the exploitation of mineral resources and the conflict are mutually driven but a US official said it was unlikely that the Security Council would approve a ban on the import of col-tan, preferring to verbally condemn and urge. Not the most surprising twist in the plot. However the official expressed his approval that the new draft of the report condemned Zimbabwe – currently on the US’s not-coming-to-my-party list - for its involvement in the Congolese mines, albeit at the [installed] government’s request in the non-occupied part of the country.

Imagine if minerals had a memory. Imagine if, when you picked something up in a shop, the stuff came to life and you had to look at all the effects – on people, on the environment – of that product arriving in your hands, from the sourcing of raw materials, through the manufacturing process, including packaging and transportation. Imagine if they sold it at cost price – what it really cost to make it. Imagine if, all the while that a Sony Playstation 2 was in your room you couldn’t help but see the knock-on effects of its existence, radiating out. Would it still be called entertainment?



There are marches, protests at national embassies, theatre shows and concerts, football matches, blood donor sessions, link-ups between students in different countries, and so on. Not all are human shields – there is a range of organisations out here – Balkan Sobranie, Voices in the Wilderness, the Christian Peacemaker Team, to name but a few, as well as independent activists like me.

As in Palestine, this is the United Nations of the people: a growing, inspiring, determined, well-informed collective of ordinary people not prepared to accept abuses of others’ human rights, who will not be disempowered by politicians who refuse to listen to us.

Yesterday I was able to interview Carel de Rooy, the head of UNICEF in Iraq, about the current situation, the preparations being made and likely humanitarian effects of war. He said that if Iraq’s power stations are damaged or destroyed there will be severe knock-on effects on the entire civilian infrastructure.

I wrote a few days ago about the sewage system. Mr de Rooy explained that the system is currently in a much worse position to withstand attack than it was in 1991 and the effects of any interruption to the already deficient electricity supply will quickly become critical.

He said that water is being stored in tankers and emergency generators have been installed at water pumping plants, which will operate as long as fuel stores last, but these will not be adequate for the needs of the population, with an average share of 15 litres per person per day for all needs, compared with an already insufficient 150 litres per day. The wells we’ve seen dug in communities will help, even if only by providing water to wash with, so that all potable water can be used for drinking and cooking, but even so a leaked UN document estimates that just 39% may have even rationed access to water in the event of war.

Mr de Rooy explained that the 12 years of UN sanctions have left the population highly dependent on the state. The government food ration is distributed to every resident and other essential goods like electricity, water, petrol and some non-ration foodstuffs are so heavily subsidised as to be free or almost free. Many people are employed by the government, which has created jobs to fill some of the gap left by the large scale collapse of private sector industry under the intense suppression of the economy. Again this dependence makes the civilian population far less capable of withstanding attack than they were in 1991.

Many are malnourished, 22.1% of children suffering from moderate to severe stunting or chronic malnutrition and a quarter of babies being born at low birth weight, indicating maternal malnutrition and some 70% of women are anaemic. UNICEF is supporting the country’s primary health care clinics in conducting door-to-door vaccinations, first polio and then measles, beginning with children under 6 and then covering the 6-12 age group. Therapeutic feeding is intended to “beef up” the kids in preparation for war, but the fact remains that children are much weaker than in 1991, when their parents were, for the most part, in good jobs and they were healthy and well fed. UNICEF’s national staff have been trained up to run the programme themselves, so that when international staff are ordered out, the programme will continue.

Asked whether he had any message for Tony Blair and George Bush, Mr de Rooy said that he did not concern himself with politics but with the children of Iraq. He pointed out that the effects which he talked about were already well-documented.

According to the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war, effects cease to be collateral and become intentional when they are inevitable and foreknown. It is prohibited to attack or destroy objects indispensable to the civilian population, and the presence of military objectives within a population does not deprive it of its civilian character. There is already a 2300 Megawatt per day deficit in Iraq’s electricity supply. Any attack on any power station will be a grave breach of international and British law. Any attack on a telecommunications tower next to a block of flats will be a grave breach.

And Tony, we’re here, and we’re watching you.

Feb 25
Dinner with Saddam

Last night I sat down to dinner with Saddam Hussein. Remarkable, I know, and what’s more, he propositioned me. He said that he had always dreamed he would make a love relationship with a Christian girl. I quickly disabused him of the notion that I or Julia were available for any such thing and we all carried on as before. He’s studying French literature at the University of Baghdad and his father named him after the then-vice president 27 years ago, predicting that the Big Man would go on to greater things, back when he was genuinely popular with a lot of people. His dad died last year of oesophageal cancer caused by being gassed in the war with Iran. There’s a seven year latency period before the cancer starts to show.

Saddam was translating for us in a meeting with the National Union of Iraqi Students (NUIS), who are now responsible for us. You have to have an organisation which is responsible for you in Iraq, and if you want to film anything you have to be accompanied by a representative of that organisation, so we had to get their approval for our plans. All these things take time and time means hospitality and hospitality means food and as far as I can tell there is no phrase in the Iraqi Arabic dialect which translates “I am not hungry thank you”, so dinner it was.

Saddam struggled valiantly to explain what we wanted to Jalal and Sirwan, a Kurd from Sulemaniya, from the NUIS committee, but there were baffled looks all round when he informed them that we wished to conduct a door-to-door immunisation campaign against measles in the poorest parts of Baghdad. Beginning again we managed to establish that it was not us but the primary health care clinics who were conducting the campaign. We were only asking permission to go out with them.

In any case, all these things take time to organise, and we have a few quiet days. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m not taking this seriously, but yesterday we were taken for a picnic. We met Majid at the Student and Youth Conference last week. His brother Raed is an architect and has just come back from a spell working in Jordan. Their mother is Iraqi, their father Palestinian and they lived in Jordan for several years before moving to Iraq.

Raed used to work in an Iraqi satellite TV station while he was at university. 50% of the programmes had to be “political” and a further 15% news. What, we wondered, might a political programme in Iraq consist of? Raed’s description sounded more or less akin to Songs of Praise. There wasn’t, he said, much room for discussing politics. Julia suggested it might be quite scary to be a journalist in Iraq. The brothers laughed. “It’s quite scary to be an Iraqi.” But still Majid said life is better in Iraq than in Jordan.

We drove out to a man-made lake, in which two palm trees stand improbably on island pedestals. Raed explained that they were there before the lake was built, so they were left there. On mounds, between the lake and the engineering college opposite, an anti-aircraft gun and a radar emplacement have the look of museum pieces. Khaki men fiddle about with them while passers-by ignore them as everyday sights. As we drove up to the toll booth, just past the mounds, Raed muttered, “Don’t speak English now.”

We’d heard about a boat that goes up and down the Tigris with music and dancing – some kind of party boat, a night-club maybe. The brothers had heard of it and laughed when we said we’d like to go. “It’s not a night-club,” Majid said. “It’s a nightmare.” It’s really crowded and sweaty and it smells bad: thus far it sounds like most night-clubs, but apparently kids stand on the bridges waiting for the boat and drop stones on it, so you get rained with broken glass and nails. “You have to wear a helmet.”

In 1991 the government decided to close the night-clubs, and since then young people go out to the theatres for dances. Alcoholic drinks are kept concealed under the seats, behind the drinker’s legs until no one is looking, or else disguised as some innocuous soft drink, but by 10 or 11 o’clock everyone is loud and silly and a bit unsteady on their feet because Iraqi beer is cheap and strong.

As for the cinemas, fabric banners outside depict the sort of films on offer. “Life After Sex” declares one, with a picture of a blond couple under a bed sheet. It’s mainly men who go to the cinema here. On my last visit, in August 2001, Muna, who ran a money exchange, said the women used to go to the cinema, but now all the films were pornographic. The brothers say all the films are from the 1970s, but most films are available on bootleg before they even reach cinemas in the US.

When we got in the car, Avril Lavigne was playing on the stereo. Living in Jordan, Raed had access to all the major films, unrestricted internet service, McDonalds, all the consumer stuff of life in western capitalist economies. He says he would like to see more freedom in Iraq, and that would include some American things. Out of fear, he says, a lot of people won’t tell us they want rid of Saddam but he believes more or less everyone does. But, he says, “We don’t want America to come along and impose its system, its Pax Americana. We don’t want them to come and rescue us.” He doesn’t believe that the US intends to act in the best interests of the Iraqi people, but even if they did, he doesn’t want “liberating” by a foreign army.

As for their family’s preparations, their house is stocked with food and water and guns but not to excess, as they say some families are doing. Each house is “an independent state” equipped with all necessities, but one family friend showed them the shopping list of provisions to be got in for the war, and the list included coffins. “I said what do you want coffins for and he said in case someone gets killed. I don’t know what do they think they’re going to do – bury them in the front garden and just carry on.”

The brothers joke a lot about what might be coming, as do many people – a satirical gallows humour that testifies to the spirit which has brought the Iraqi people still smiling, still warm and welcoming through over twelve years of sanctions. It reminds me of the stories Carl from the Human Shield group told me about the London blitz.

Majid suggested going to a tower nearby for the view. Raed thought it a very bad idea. The tower overlooks one of the presidential palaces. Bringing two British people there isn’t likely to be good for your health. Instead, still giggling over the possibility of climbing up the tower with a telescope and peeping at Saddam in his bath, we went for Turkish coffees and a narghila. The joke itself, had you been on the street and overheard, would be a beheading offence.

The basic set up of a narghila is that there is coal on the top, on foil, over a mixture of fermented fruit or other flavouring and tobacco then a long neck leading down to a bulbous bit at the bottom, containing water. You inhale through a pipe and pull the smoke down the neck, through the water which makes the smoke less harsh on the lungs and also makes the sound which gives the implement its nickname elsewhere in the world – hubbly bubbly.

This one was mint flavoured and the top part was fringed with strings of beads. It was maybe three or four feet tall, and the mouthpiece was shaped like a cobra. In a narghila shop on Al Sadoon Street there were smoking mixtures in strawberry, apricot, banana, cardamom, vanilla, liquorice, coffee and an almost endless array of others, beside rows and rows of narghilas from the simple glass to the exquisitely decorated; from handbag size to full scale pillar and in any colour you like but mostly blue.

There was a plume of thick black smoke over the city all day yesterday and on our way back the lads realised what it was – an oil refinery on the south of the river. I don’t know where or how it caught fire, whether it was serious or what was being done about it, but it was still burning this morning. The air was no worse than usual: it always reeks of petrol fumes because petrol is freely available and almost free of charge and there are far too many cars, mainly knackered ones, often made out of two even more knackered ones, cannibalised and welded together across the middle.

Today, among other missions, like sorting out our visa renewals, we went shoe hunting. There’s a little boy who begs by the Press Centre whose shoes are almost entirely detached, top from sole, with the backs flattened and his heels hanging over the end. We drew round his foot on a piece of paper and obtained an exceedingly unhelpful broken line and some mud to help us on our search. In the end we picked a couple of pairs of trainers in different sizes, reasoning that there were plenty of other street kids needing a whole pair of shoes. As it happened, they were both too big.

Shop after shop is closed down, with a thick metal grille across the front, bankrupted by the high unemployment and low wages left after twelve and a half years of sanctions. Most trade is now doen on the street, the goods laid out on tables. There’s loads of stuff for sale, if people can afford it. You don’t have to look at the label to find out where things are made: they’re made in China. The buses, the tractors, the fire engines, the clothes, shoes, fake designer belts, cosmetics, toys, household items. At a push, you’ll find something made in Syria, but overwhelmingly it’s Chinese. There used to be a fleet of British Leyland buses, but the UK companies refused to supply the spare parts. By cannibalising, they kept a dwindling fleet running for a while, but in the end the whole lot were scrapped and replaced with Chinese.

Yet everywhere, “Hey Mister. Welcome.”


Feb 26
I Wonder

I wonder what it looks like when the first missile hits a city of 5 or 6 million people. The second bite of an apple is much like the first: it tastes like the first, it has the same texture, smell, sound as you chew it. But until you’d taken that first bite, the first time you ever ate an apple, you couldn’t possibly have imagined those sensory experiences. Of course, with a missile strike, there’s always the risk that the next one is going to land on you. But still I wonder what the first one looks like; what it sounds like, how the air smells and tastes on your tongue, what it feels like: does the earth shake? Does the air?

And if the skyline is collapsing, can you still find your way, or is it like the end of a festival, when all the familiar landmarks have been dismantled and you can’t tell which direction you’re walking in? A few days ago there was a sandstorm and the air went orange and the sun was almost blotted out. Will the smoke do that too? Will there be any passers-by to stop for directions?

Will the area near the embassies be the safest? Even in the insanity of recent bombardments, where hospitals, schools, wedding parties, de-mining projects, civilian air raid shelters and flocks of sheep have been destroyed, blowing up someone else’s embassy is still seen as a bit of an international faux pas.

People are reluctant to go into the shelters – the mere mention of Al Ameriya evokes a shudder. To stay in a house, upstairs or downstairs, is to risk being crushed, which leaves outdoors, as far as possible from a bridge, oil refinery, telecomms tower or anything along those lines, but somehow that feels a little too exposed. Many talk about going to farms in the countryside.

Some people contemplate fighting in the streets; worst of all, the suggestion is, someone might put guns in the hands of the beggar children. Waiting for a war to start gives people far too much time for conjecture and conjuring of worst case scenarios. But there are premonitions in the air: the night before last we were shaken awake by a boom and a roaring sound and the earth seemed to wobble. We stumbled to the window but the street was normal. This time it was only thunder. And an oil fire burned for two days. Apparently it’s deliberate burning of some kind of top layer of the oil, but it fills the sky with black smoke.

Over dinner in the Al Fanar, Patrick talked about Vietnam. He volunteered, before the draft came in, gung-ho on John Wayne and killing Commies to save the world. He got off the plane and saw poor people. “I thought, ‘Is this my enemy?’ It was just poor people killing poor people for the agendas of rich people.” He said it turned him from being a proletarian cog in the machine to raging against the machine for a lifetime, using art, books, films, everything he can.

This time too, the poor of Iraq will fight the poor, the working class of the US and UK, because they, in the main, are the people who join the forces: people who can’t find decent jobs in their own neighbourhoods and want to do more than sign on and rot away in call centres. They’ll fight for the agendas of the rich. Rupert Murdoch’s 137 news titles all take a pro-war stance. The boss says a drop in oil prices will be better than a tax cut.

Hollywood is complicit. Soldiers are heroes in Hollywood and there is always an enemy who looks like the US government’s scapegoat of the moment: a few years ago the hero’s nemesis was Eastern European; now he is an Arab. Hollywood, Patrick says, helps build the armies, expostulates the idea of saving your country and the world from the other, who is dangerous.

Patrick doesn’t have to wonder what the first missile strike will look like. He’s bitten into that apple many years ago and hasn’t forgotten it. He loves the kids on the street out here. They’re bright and funny and resourceful and brave and they’re not his enemy.


Feb 27
Well Digging

There is a small hole, maybe 8 inches in diameter. Out of it protrudes a metal pole, reaching about a metre and a half above the ground. At the top is a crossbar, with a man either end, walking it round in circles. At some point a third man jumps up onto the middle of the crossbar, holding himself with straight arms, hands at hip level, feet crossed around the vertical bar for balance, as the other two continue turning the crossbar.

After a while – a couple of minutes - he jumps down and they all bend their knees, shoulder the crossbar and push it upwards till it comes loose from the earth at the bottom of the hole, and they pull it out using heavy wrenches for grip on the slimy metal. At the bottom is an oval shaped bit, filled with a more or less oval shaped lump of sandy clay. This they chip out with a spade and scrape the spoil out of the way.

Lowering the pole back into the hole, two of the men step back and the third hurls it downwards so it will stick into the hard clay at the bottom. Shortly – maybe about four metres down, they strike water. They carry on down, because the water gets cleaner and more plentiful lower down. As the hole gets deeper the exposed part of the pole gets shorter, till the man in the middle is sitting on the crossbar instead of jumping up onto it, and then another length of pole is screwed in between the crossbar and the bit.

A problem arises when the pole becomes detached in the middle while the bit is firmly stuck in the bottom. Several times the men attempt to screw the pole back in, finding the lower part, reattaching the two and turning the crossbar till the join seems secure, but when they lift, the top part comes away with no resistance and the bit remains where it is. They tie a plastic bag around the end of the upper part, to make it slightly wider in the hope that it will be enough to make the two parts grip, but again the top part lifts without the rest.

The top part is laid across a table where the old screw thread is sawn off and a new one shaved on. The process of reattaching is repeated and the three men take the strain again. This time the crossbar does not lift without a struggle and finally the earth yields and the whole arrangement comes out of the ground. The bit is chipped out and the digging goes on.

I’ve taken a couple of pictures of a 6-year-old pixie by the name of Zainab, who at first would only peek around corners at all the strangers but will now give me shining smiles with her bright brown eyes. I’m sitting on the floor, back to the wall, fiddling with a slim metal spiral shaving from the making of the new screw thread when she comes to me. I hold out the new jewel and she takes it and we smile at each other. She tucks her long, thick hair behind one ear and holds down her blue skirt as she drops onto her knees so she is kneeling on the hem.

I find another spiral and a curl and make them into the beginning of a chain, carefully squeezing the curl into a complete ring so that it bends without breaking. Completely absorbed for a minute, I look up to show Zainab and find her likewise occupied. We can’t communicate linguistically but we can happily make spiral chains together, hunting between the paving stones for more bits and joining them, holding it up to survey our work, Zainab humming quietly the tune that’s playing in her head.

The hole in the ground reaches a satisfactory depth and the pole is laid aside. Holes are drilled in a plastic pipe, like a drainpipe, about four or five inches in diameter, and this is lowered into the shaft. Bags of pebbles are emptied around it, holding it in place. Water fills the space around the pipe, rising as the stones displace it, overflowing and quickly soaking into the bone-dry earth. A flexible plastic tube, half an inch in diameter, is fed into the pipe and pumped up and down until muddy sludge dribbles out of the top. A few more pumps and there is a flow.

It will take four or five days to flush through so that the water is clear and then a sample will be sent away for testing: there may be harmful bacteria or too much salt in the water for drinking, but if it can only be used for washing it will free up the family’s supply of potable water for drinking. Of course, if they are desperate, they will drink it no matter what it contains.

A metal tool is used to make a screw thread on the end of the tube for the pump to be attached. It will have to be a mechanical pump, because if there is no electricity to power the normal water pumping system there will be none for the well. It’s right outside the kitchen and bathroom for convenience, as far from the sewage pipes as possible.

The well diggers have been busy. This team has dug about 25 in the last week. The water system depends on electricity. In the last war, the power stations were bombed so this time, those who can raise the necessary $25 are getting wells dug. Elsewhere they are being made on street corners, in colleges, anywhere there’s a patch of ground.

“All my life,” says the owner of the garden, “I’ve turned on a tap and water has come out. Now I have to rely on this hole in my garden.”

Feb 28

Nursing isn’t a popular job in Iraq. Before 1991, there were barely any Iraqi nurses: they were all foreign – from the Philippines, Egypt, Jordan, anywhere. They all left when the first Gulf War started, leaving a gap which, even 12 years later, is not fully filled. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), together with the Iraqi government, the Iraqi Red Crescent Society and others, has been training nurses but, “You can’t just replace that whole structure, just like that.”

Likewise ICRC has been rehabilitating hospitals ever since the last Gulf War. It is able to import materials and pay local labour in a way which the Iraqi government, constrained by sanctions, is not. But still, even after eleven and a half years “It is not enough. How can it be?” asked Roland, a senior official of the ICRC delegation in Iraq. The delegation has been here since the Iran-Iraq war, assisting with the humanitarian need, initially focussing largely on needs relating to prisoners of war, then on that relating to sanctions.

“People don’t believe there have been power cuts here for twelve years,” Roland said. “They say how can there be power cuts every day, and then when they come here, they see there are power cuts every day.” He felt the situation was already unacceptable from a humanitarian point of view. There are enough poor countries in the world without deliberately impoverishing rich ones.

ICRC will stay throughout any conflict and will be watching all sides, attempting to ensure compliance with humanitarian law, which all sides - US, UK and Iraq – have been known to flout. Roland said he was glad there were international peace activists in Iraq because of the attention drawn to facilities like power stations and their importance to the civilian population. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but it can’t be overemphasised – as Roland pointed out, once the power goes, the water, the sewage, the hospitals are all compromised.

It’s hard to predict where people will go if they leave their homes or how many will be displaced. Jordan has already closed its border to Iraqis leaving on any but essential business. Turkey’s border is closed. Iran’s is alternately said to be closed completely or to be open to those with visas, which take three or four weeks to get. It’s illegal under the 1958 Refugee Convention, for a country to close its borders to refugees from war but then, Roland said with a smile, neither of our countries can really lecture anyone on treatment of refugees. (He’s French, I’m English).

He’d just come back from a trip to the north, where journalists are training with the troops in camps and will follow any invasion, showing the war to the world from the military perspective. The “embedded” journalists dress and increasingly talk like the military, boasting about what “we”, rather than “they”, the soldiers, were going to do. A lot of them were eager for “something” to happen – for the war to start so they could get their story. He wondered if they’d ever seen a war. He grew up in a France destroyed by war, where people were still afraid.

Kirkuk is one of the largest cities in northern Iraq. In recent years its population has become increasingly Arabic as Kurdish people have been forced to leave and replaced by people sent there from elsewhere in Iraq. The Kurds claim Kirkuk as part of Kurdistan and its former residents want to go home. It has Iraq’s largest oil field so they are unlikely ever to be given control of it.

Another NGO official who has lived in Iraq for many years wonders what will happen to the Kurdish people at the hands of Turkey. Turkey’s record of treatment of the Kurds is no better than Iraq’s: the languages and culture have been suppressed with even Kurdish names being banned by the Turkish authorities. Turkey has made repeated incursions into Kurdish northern Iraq during the existence of the No-Fly Zones with the complicity of the British and US air force commanders who police them. The Kurds within Northern Iraq speak several different languages and are by no means homogenous.

One of the Turkish peace activists was fuming yesterday, reading on the internet that the US had started unloading its troops and weapons and stuff in Turkey. More than 90% of Turkish people oppose the war, but the government seems to have been more swayed by an agreement with the US that, on any northern front, Turkey is entitled to have twice as many troops as the US has. The US intends to bring 40,000 troops through Iraqi Kurdistan.

Would there be mass demonstrations on the streets in Turkey? He doubted it. It’s hard to get more than a couple of hundred people out on a march over there, because they all get arrested and they disappear for three or four months. As well, he said, there’s not much tradition of individual action. People mainly ally themselves with one or another political party, so if you don’t want to be part of any of those structures, you mainly don’t protest.

The point is that we – the UK and US – have actively decided to bring 80,000 Turkish troops into Iraqi Kurdistan: a gross betrayal of the Kurds whom we have, albeit tenuously, claimed to be protecting for the last 12 years. We’ve made a deal with a country which we know commits appalling oppression against the Kurds and the rest of its people and which has long sought greater power in northern Iraq. Turkey has the finest toys a US military “aid” budget can buy.

Roland, from ICRC, pointed out that the Iraqi population is not homogenous: five or six different languages are commonly spoken, there are Yizidis, Armenians, Zoroastrians and others, as well as Kurds and Shias and Sunnis, with different cultures. They have been held together with an “iron fist” since Britain created Iraq out of the former Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. Guns have been widely distributed.

Another official, from the UN Office of the Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq (UNOHCI), made the simple, stark statement that, “People are going to starve.” He talked about a little girl, a street child, who gets up and feeds her younger brothers and sisters in the morning and then buys sweets on her way into the commercial part of town to sell. She makes two, maybe three thousand Dinar a day to buy food and tomorrow’s sweets. A Euro is worth about 2,400 Dinar. On her way home she buys bread, tomatoes too on a good day, and feeds the younger kids again. The man from UNOHCI has no doubt there will be civil unrest, sooner or later, especially in the poorer parts of Baghdad: Saddam City is already like a fortress.

Medicins Sans Frontieres are here too. Their briefing includes diagnosis and treatment of a whole list of horrors: sarin gas, chlorine gas, nuclear bunker busters, depleted uranium. Biological weapons, it says, cause more fear than real emergency, but bunker busters – hard, deeply buried target (HDBT) missiles cause intensive radiation within a certain area, as opposed to normal nuclear weapons which detonate above the ground and send their radiation much further. The bunker buster fireball penetrates into the ground and sends out a fountain of debris.

There’s also a book on surgical treatment of war wounds to limbs. It’s grim. I’m not squeamish, but it’s grim. I didn’t look for long. I knew, of course, that war mangles bodies, but seeing the practical preparations for the effects of bullets, cluster bomblets, debris, landmines and so on makes it all seem both hideously real and grotesquely unbelievable: is this really what my government is planning to do?


March 1
Prince Adnan’s Emporium

“Come, Madame. Come in. Just look. No buy.”

And before we knew it we were drinking sweet tea with Prince Adnan in his rug-and-copper shop in the Baghdad copper market, opposite the Al Khalaf Mosque on Rasheed Street.

“Prince because I am from family of King.” He indicated the picture on the wall of the former King Faisal, installed by the British. “I met him one year, when I was seven years old, he was few years older.”

He showed us a photograph of himself as a young boy with his father, surrounded by rugs and copper. Another is of an extremely muscular young man. “This when I was bodybuilder. You think the face the same?” I took the picture from him and held it up next to his face. Maybe.

“My father had shop in London. Old Curiosity Shop. Before 45 years. I like English people very much. You have good heart.”

He said he loves dancing. He’s 62 and his wife 65. She won’t dance with him anymore – she says she’s too old. He asked was it the same in Britain. Did people still dance when they were 60? Did their wives dance with them? He was going to a party that night. He said people didn’t go to public places to dance very much, but to parties in each other’s homes. “I don’t like the people so much – just the people I know. When I was young, always if anyone want party, then call Prince Adnan, but now, I am old, still dancing, but not stay out so late.”

The lamps hanging near the entrance were what drew us into Mr Kerim’s shop. It’s the way here that people are addressed as ‘Mr’ and their first name. Apparently it was decided that surnames should be used less to cover up the fact that so many of the figures controlling the country were from so few powerful families. More often than not, the same goes for women, as in ‘Mr Joanna’. ‘Jo’ is too short for most people to get their tongues around. Kerim was a teacher in the Institute of Technology, but he made better money in the souk, so he gave it up and took on the family business.

On the wall, in a frame, is a licence dated 1918, certifying that Kerim’s grandfather had the formal approval of the British colonial authorities to run his shop. There’s a black and white photograph on another wall of his father and grandfather sitting on the step of the shop, the grandfather about mid forties, as Kerim is now. He has three children aged 15, 13 and 10, two boys and a girl, all in school. He said he hopes the oldest will take over the shop, then added, “If still here.”

He thought he would try to get all the goods from his stall to his home before the war. He has a car, so he reckoned he could move everything in two days. “It is my livelihood,” he explained, almost apologetically. “Many things in shop,” he added.

He wasn’t wrong. Nearly all available floor space was covered with tall lamp stands, statues and tables piled high with things: a five-in-one arrangement of lamp, candle holder, ashtray, pen-holder and goblet; a tray with a match holder, ashtray and tobacco box, pots, pans, daggers, swords, a giant tortoise with removable shell for storage, every one of them intricately shaped or engraved or patterned. More things hung from the ceiling: lamps, scales, necklaces.

Over loud banging from a nearby shop, Kerim explained how some of the things were made: copper plates with pictures sculpted into them in relief, made by hammering the plate over a template; blackened, ancient looking Aladdin-style oil lamps depicting genies. “This not old. This new, but dip in acetate to make it look old. Other people here tell you this old. I tell you truth. British, American, German, Francee, used to come here, they like things that look old. Russian, he come here, he like shiny things.”

He pointed to a tall, curvaceous stand and explained, “Here put silk, then oil, then light it, and then you can put shit on the top.” He indicated an extravagant lamp shade in another corner. “Shit.”

The shop was more or less horseshoe shaped, curving sharply back on itself to reveal yet more things. This part used to belong to Kerim’s mother’s father, while the first part belonged to his paternal grandfather. When they both came into Kerim’s possession, he knocked a hole through and made them into one. In the first part the ceiling is a chaotic assembly of overlapping sheets of corrugated metal. The second section has round tree trunks of about four inches diameter by way of boards. “Many things in shop,” he said again.

Mr Ghassan’s shop was mainly rugs, heaped neatly along every wall.

“UN?” he asked.

“Laa. Ana rasoule