Back to Baghdad

It's never easy flying Iraqi Airways. I had problems with them when I left Baghdad to go on leave and was flying back in from Kurdistan the other day. We boarded the flight 2 hours after it was scheduled to depart, which was fine. We expected that and 2 hours isn't too bad for this airline. So then we sat there for a while and nothing happened until they asked everyone to get back off the plane again to check the luggage. They'd lined all the bags up on the tarmac and we had to go and identify them to get them put back in the hold. Nothing to do with security measures - just plain incompetence. It puts you in the mindset that you are back in Iraq though, so it's not all bad.



Being back isn't that bad, though it's much tougher to come back after leave than it is to come here in the first place. You get used to normal life and seeing friends and family again and then it's back to this madness. One of our guys' brother was shot and killed 3 days ago, the cleaner whose husband was kidnapped (and has now disappeared altogether) had a brother murdered 2 weeks ago, and another guy saw someone dragged out of his car and shot in the head yesterday outside his front door. This place is much worse than it was when I left and the sense of fear is palpable. The main obstacle for security is the government. They are a total disaster for the people of Iraq. Many Iraqis think even talking to Syria and Iran won't make any difference now. Maliki and his corrupt, partisan government should be overthrown as soon as possible. I wouldn't lose too much sleep if they were kidnapped tomorrow.

As for today's suicide bombing that killed over 50 people looking for work and injured 3 times as many, it will be blamed on Sunnis. I'm not so sure though because Iraqis aren't usually suicide bombers - Arabs are. So my guess is the suicide bomber this morning was Syrian or in any case a foreign terrorist. Not that that will stop the Shiites going on a sectarian death squad jolly though.

In other news gunmen stole USD 1 million from a bank truck in Baghdad. That probably translates into a lot of rockets, so soon, in a sense, it will be raining money.