Text size:

Sept. 14: On The Street

By James Rupert | Staff Correspondent

September 14, 2003

Baghdad, Iraq - At midday, the sun was barbecuing Baghdad, cooking people and their cars on the hot asphalt grill of the city's streets. At a big intersection in Waziriya, people also were doing a little self-cooking. From all four directions, grim drivers crammed their cars into the crossroads, with no traffic signals, no signs, no cops to bring order. With all due respect to Newsday's On The Roads Columnist John Valenti and his angry Long Island readers, this was a real traffic jam! Not bumper-to-bumper. It was bumper-to-fender, bumper-to-rear-tire, bumper-to-driver's-door-handle.

Any city gets a little crazy when the traffic lights and rules break down, but as far as I've seen in the past few days, Baghdad's traffic jams are worse than Sarajevo's ever were, worse than Kinshasa or Monrovia.

One of the things that makes Baghdadis craziest these days is that, with car bombs a weapon of choice for some of the anti-U.S. fighters here, the American military has set up checkpoints, roadblocks and razor wire that block many of the main roads the city needs to keep its traffic moving.

For a busy, rushing visitor, the traffic jams enforce a closer look at the troubles of the city. Girls in veils tap on the window to ask for money. The stench of diesel fumes and perhaps raw sewage seeps into the car - even the nice, air-conditioned BMW that I've been riding around in the past few days.

Rather than offering any refuge from the chaos outside, the car was spotlighting it. The Beamer was from a different world, where one really should have leather seats and where people tap on the window to ask for directions instead of sustenance.

Worse, the driver, Ahmed, had kindly tuned his radio to the BBC in English, for my benefit, and we were hearing an interview with a veterinarian in San Francisco who treats diabetic cats with acupuncture. In that corner of life, a key issue is that no one makes acupuncture needles small enough for cats.

If there is a time for consciousness-raising about the problems of kitty acupuncture, this wasn't it. But it seemed churlish to ask Ahmed to turn off the radio he had set for me.

So I bailed out of the car with the excuse that I had to take pictures.

It took a good while, but some traffic police finally showed up. They began banging on hoods and waving arms at uncooperative drivers - and a mere 25 minutes after we entered the intersection, we left it.