Pigeons and Passats

It's Friday today, the weekend in Iraq, and I've had my first really relaxing day so far. I spent most of it with my friend Jamil and his family, up in far north of Baghdad in one of the poorest Shia slum areas, named "the Torch of Islam". The dirt roads between houses are full of sewerage which often seeps into the rooms, and a dozen people live in 3 room houses. It's poor but welcoming. I played with the children, ate a huge meal, debated with the local cleric and learnt all about pigeons.

Iraqis are fanatical pigeon fanciers. In many of their gardens there are flocks of fifty or more birds of every colour and shape. Sometimes they race them, taking them up to Samara or Mosul and letting them find there way home (this was how urgent messages used to be carried before telephones). But mainly they're just for fun, much as people in England keep dogs (which are considered unclean in Islam, and so rarely kept as pets). It was wonderful seeing my Iraqi friends proudly displaying their birds and explaining the lineage and qualities of each individuals. After quite a lot of false starts, I learnt how to catch and hold a pigeon gently, and I've got some great photos which I'll try to post up tomorrow.

Something I've wanted to post about for a while - because it's constituted a big chunk of my time in Baghdad - is the traffic. Firstly the cars themselves. The sanctions inhibited the import of new cars and spare parts for old ones, so Iraqis made do with their impressive technical skills, and kept a fleet of ancient cars running for years beyond their natural lifespans. Apart from the newly imported black BMWs without licence plates (beware), most of the Iraqi cars are battered and misshapen, making strange and worrying noises - but they run pretty well. Practically every other car you see is an identical Volkswagen Passat, reminiscent of the uniformity of the Model T Ford days. These cars have a "Made in Brazil" logo on their rear window - which I'll explain in a moment - and, for not discernible reason, often have a Batman symbol on their boots. The Brazil link explains the proponderance of these cars - apparently Saddam's wife owns (owned?) a factory in Brazil which made these models, so in the 1980 hundreds of thousands of them were imported to Iraq and distributed as part of the regime's patronage to its supporters.

If one assumes that every battered car without passengers is a taxi, you're likely to be correct about 70% of the time, so it's incredibly easy to find a ride in Baghdad. There's no such thing as computerised fair counters, so you haggle with the driver before getting in. It's incredibly cheap for a foreigner. This evening, for example, when I returned from Jamil's house about an hour's drive from my hotel, the fare was less than one and a half dollars. The fares are so cheap partly because fuel is still almost free at about 5c a gallon, and because of the competition between all the taxi drivers (many of whom you'll find have graduate degrees).

The traffic is very congested, partly as a result of the lack of border controls leading to the import of huge numbers of cars from Jordan, and partly because of the collapse in order. Traffic lights get ignored in a country used to regular power cuts which render lights irrelevant, many road surfaces are in serious state of despair, and drivers pretty much ignore any traffic laws. On one of my first days my driver took a short cut by doing a U turn and driving the a couple of hundred meters in the opposite direction to the oncoming traffic on one of the cities' main three lane highways! In the few weeks I've been here there has been a noticeable increase in traffic police, and I feel a deep respect for these valiant people who stand in the middle of crossroads trying to direct four lines of cars, all of whom are trying to push ahead. Although bizarrely the traffic seems to flow quicker left to its own devices without the police, still I appreciate in principal their attempt to bring some order to Baghdad's majnoon (crazy) traffic.