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I returned to Baghdad last Monday night, six weeks after my last rotation here as a Monitor correspondent. To get here, I left Amman, probably later than I should have, with a Jordanian driver at the helm of a white GMC truck – the land-boat of choice for the runs to and from Baghdad. A delayed flight had gotten us started from Amman later than I wanted, but I comforted myself that the heavily traveled western road into Baghdad hadn’t suffered from any attacks in recent months. At least none that I had heard about.
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The tempo of violence, particularly suicide attacks, quickened substantially while I was gone, something that’s immediately clear upon my return. On my second day back a suicide bomb struck the small Lebanon Hotel in the center of Baghdad, and on Thursday a smaller suicide attack hit the southern city of Basra. That was followed, again, by another small hotel bombing on Friday night. And while I was gone, foreign civilians had come under attack like never before.
On Thursday I had dinner with an old pal from Indonesia who’s now working for an nongovernmental organization (NGO) doing democracy outreach work with the Coalition. A friend of his, a young American woman working on human rights and women’s rights in the Shiite town of Hilla, was murdered by a group of off-duty police officers on a road outside town last week. Her driver and translator were killed with her. My friend had the awful duty of breaking the news to the woman’s family. He was quite shaken – as were many – by the murder of a driver for the Voice of America, along with his mother and his young daughter, in Baghdad earlier this month. Three Iraqis working for a US-funded radio station in the town of Baquba were killed in a roadside attack on Thursday.
So far, western journalists have been relatively lucky in occupied Iraq. But the feeling of threat is greater than at any time while I’ve been here, including last fall. And as for the Western road between Baghdad and Amman? On Wednesday, an overpass on the highway was dynamited by insurgents.
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