Road Rules for Surviving on the Streets of Baghdad

BAGHDAD —  The mortar attack that skimmed a barracks roof late Wednesday gives Capt. Kevin Hanrahan an unwelcome feeling. After a cranky night’s sleep, Thursday doesn’t look much better.

Hanrahan wants to introduce a visiting reporter to Lt. Col. Fares Jaber Malek, a Baghdad police station chief.

Malek, whose predecessor was slain, has become an Iraqi icon for steeling his new recruits to take on insurgents. But Malek is nowhere to be found so Hanrahan takes the reporter and heads to another police station.

Five minutes later, the American’s eyes suddenly grow wide and he presses the radio close to his ear.

“Driver, turn around,” the 30-year-old company commander barks in a New England twang. “We just got hit. At the station we just left.”

The scene at the Al Yarmouk police station is grim. Another Humvee, stopped just where Hanrahan’s had been, is splattered with flesh and shrapnel. A flaming green sedan, its twisted hull snaked around a tilting telephone pole, looks like a surrealist painting. An Iraqi bystander lies dead in a blood-spattered dishdasha robe, his shoes 10 feet away. The engine lies 500 feet away. Across the median, expressionless police inspect the bomber’s head, recognizable only by a string of broken teeth.

Six people are injured in the attack.

“He had a beard. A Wahhabi,” says Malek, now at the station. He is a lifelong policeman with green eyes, salt-and-pepper hair and a clean-shaven chin, like all his officers. For the fundamentalist Wahhabis, however, beards are the rule.

“One of our friends,” Malek says with a wry smile.

In the 200 days he has spent during his second tour of duty here, Hanrahan has watched Iraq change. His base has been hammered with 105 rocket and mortar attacks. Two of the 18 west Baghdad police stations he oversees are attacked by insurgents each month. All of his 200 or so soldiers have come under insurgent fire. In one Humvee securing the scene of the Al Yarmouk attack, all four squad members have Purple Hearts.

“The streets are a lot more dangerous,” says Hanrahan, a soft-spoken Red Sox fan from Whitman, Mass., with a V-shaped torso and an easy wit. After the invasion, “the insurgents were on their heels. But now they’ve had time to regroup.”

The lawlessness immediately after the 2003 invasion of Baghdad now somehow seems minor. As recently as a year ago, Western journalists roamed the streets freely, buying Manhattan-priced cigars at a tobacconist called Zanobia and dining at Nabil’s, a bistro that has lain dormant since a suicide bomber set off his charge on New Year’s Eve, killing eight Iraqis and injuring several Times staffers.

The reporter in Hanrahan’s back seat now eyes the capital through the bulletproof glass of an armored Humvee, a reinforced steel box in which he tries to stifle a serious case of claustrophobia.

The skittish scribe arrived at the unit’s home, Forward Operating Base Falcon, relieved to have left the whoosh of the insurgent rocket attacks that struck Camp Victory. There, he had slept in a room that reeked of smoke from a recent rocket attack that had sent a soldier to a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.

“Is it always like this these days,” he asks.

“Nah,” quips a uniformed wag. “Sometimes it’s real bad.”

A mere drive now is an adventure. The road to FOB Falcon from the 89th Military Police Brigade headquarters at Camp Victory, near Baghdad International Airport, wends along Highway 8. The road is more fraught with gunmen, rocket-propelled-grenade launchers and roadside bombs than any other in Iraq. Soldiers call it the “Highway of Death.”

The rules of the road are simple: Never travel alone -- in tunnels, two Humvees ride “shotgun,” side-by-side, giving RPG shooters nowhere to stand. Keep a distance from other cars -- an ideal, if not always a possibility, in the choking crush of Baghdad traffic. And never stop.

Another rule: Suicide bombers don’t take passengers.

“You can drive past that vehicle,” Hanrahan instructs his driver. “It’s got two people in it.”

And, says Hanrahan, never, ever, let a car get between two Humvees.

Two hours after the 10 a.m. blast at Al Yarmouk, a Mercedes tried to squeeze in. Pvt. 1st Class Aaron McClure, manning the turret atop the second Humvee, waves him off. No response. He yells. Nothing. He points to the roadside. No dice.

So the 20-year-old Reno native does what the U.S. Army tells him to do. He pumps a round into the radiator. The sedan screeches to the curb.

No one is taking any chances.

“Look around,” says Hanrahan. “It’s amazing how many cars have bullet holes.”

Still, amid the rising violence, there is a disjointed progress. Security measures, for example, have improved notably.

On Nov. 22, 2003, a car bomb slammed into the unprotected three-story structure of the Baqubah police station, killing at least six people. But today, a series of “stand-off” walls -- from a maze of knee-high Jersey barriers to man-sized Texas fences to 10-foot Alaska barriers -- held the bomber 200 yards from the entrance of Al Yarmouk.

On the street, city workers are -- surprise -- working. And with an efficiency unimaginable a year ago. A crew of orange-clad men swept the street two hours after the explosion, as an electrical worker grappled with crackling power lines whose occasional explosions drove bystanders to the ground.

Although public works and protective measures have moved forward, security hasn’t.

On his way along Route 8, an RPG whizzes past the convoy carrying Col. David Phillips, commander of the Ft. Hood, Texas-based 89th Military Police Brigade, and his newly arrived replacement, Col. Rick Swengros, commander of the 42nd Military Police Brigade, based at Fort Lewis, Wash.

After picking up one slightly dazed reporter, they wheel the Humvees around and head back home on the same road.

“I guess if it’s your time, it’s your time, you know?” Hanrahan says. “You never know in Iraq.”