Despite oil and greenery, Iraq was still very impoverished

BASRA - We headed to Iraq by land through the Abdali Kuwaiti-Iraqi boarder point. Our first encounter in Iraq was a village of Bedouins, same as the ones present on all frontiers between Lebanon and Syria, with children anywhere waving their hands to all the cars that pass.

Our next stop was Iraq’s second largest city, Basra, which took us 30 minutes from the Kuwaiti border.

Nothing was destroyed in Iraq except for some rare official buildings used by the Baath party, but one can clearly notice the traces of twelve years of sanctions: everything needed maintenance including cars, buildings and the infrastructure.

We were told that Basra was once called the Venice of Iraq. I noticed however two statues that were saved the rage of Iraqis after the downfall of the regime. One was Abdul Karim Qassem's, the leftist general who launched the first coup d’état against the Iraqi Monarchy in 1958. The other was Al-Farahidi’s, the famous medieval Arab scientist.

Other decorations included pictures of Shiite clerics such as Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim, Head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).

Of all the Iraqi cities that toured during my visit, Basra was the poorest. It clearly suffered from the 1980 - 88 Iraq-Iran war and seemed to had been abandoned by the Iraqi deposed regime. 

The first thing that came to my mind as I saw Basra’s poverty since I come from South Lebanon, was that these people really deserved the title “the deprived” (Arabic Mahroumeen) much more than the Lebanese movement headed by Lebanese Speaker Nabih Berri.

A very common scene in Basra was cars lining up in huge queues in front of gas stations although there was no fuel shortage in Iraq. Yet it is said that owners of gas stations were causing the shortage to control prices and sell fuel in the black market.

  I passed by Basra’s office of local governorship. the building happened to be the villa of Ali Hassan Al Majid, better known as Chemical Ali, the number five most wanted person from the former regime.

After Basra we moved north through a flat and never-ending highway in the middle of the desert.

We only saw a few destroyed and burnt Iraqi army vehicles and tanks which our vision routine from time to time. 

Another common scene on our way were convoys of trucks loaded with cars imported from Dubai. These convoys were escorted by US military.

After two and a half hours the highway became a two-lane road passing through green agricultural fields and swamps with never ending palm forests and small agriculture-based towns

We reached and stopped for the night in the city of Hillah. Nothing special here except the nice weather as we could feel that people were relatively living fairly in better conditions than there compatriots in Basra.

 After spending the night in Hillah, we took a one-hour drive to Baghdad. We reached its southern suburb, very similar to most impoverished and crowded southern suburbs in the world.

In Baghdad we saw nice roads with greenery on the left, the right and the middle. US troops were cleaning, cutting and burning the dead bushes between the trees so no Iraqis could hide and shoot at them.

We then reached residential complex that once belonged to the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The complex was so big that we lost our way three times by car inside it.

The offices of our human aid agency was inside Saddam’s recently killed son Oday’s palace. Inside the palace we saw prefabricated houses erected in its garden Oday’s palace was destroyed by missiles creating holes with a 5-meter diameter in the ground.

Inside the palace we could still find traces of luxury such as golden mirrors, gates and toilets along side marble Turkish bath, cohiba cigars with a barber room, a dentist room with dentist chair and equipment, a satellite TV program magazine where he underlined the timings of Lebanese satellite channel programs on LBC such as el-Layleh Layltak and Nharkom Said.

We then went to the main Saddam palace, the Sojoud Palace, with four huge busts on its four corners, representing Saddam in Saladin’s outfit.

Saddam's palace was sort of intact. No need to talk about the luxury inside. There was a huge meeting room with a huge massive wooden table that American troops turned into a cafeteria.

Every room in the palace had a printed paper posted on its door each indicating the kind of office such as The Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Oil.

Then came Saddam’s room: A huge  room with a golden throne in the middle of it where Saddam used to sit.

We then went through one of the many bridges that connected Baghdad over Tigris. We went to the old city center as we passed by the burnt Ministry of Information the way through the Abou Nawwas street along the Tigris where we saw old buildings, the famous Palestine Hotel -- now home to many journalists -- the Sheraton Hotel and the Fardous Square were media covered the downfall of Saddam’s statue.

  Baghdad also showed traces of 12 years of siege with ill-maintained buildings and streets.

We slept at a hotel in downtown Baghdad without any AC due to electricity cuts. Temperature reached around 25C at night.

 We continued out trip north and reached Kirkuk’s streets were busy streets and we could see some police officers. We also saw Kurdish flags and headquarters of Kurdish parties.  This marked the beginning of Kurdistan.

Kurdistan was in a much better situation than the rest of Iraq since it had been outside Saddam’s control since 1991.

We traveled north to  Arbil. The landscape changed to hills and mountains, relatively new cars, buildings in good-shape and Kurdish paramilitary troops known as Peshmarga.

Naji Issa is a Lebanese working in a Kuwait-based NGO. He wrote this article for Alternative