NAJAF, Iraq — There’s a storm brewing over the Imam Ali Shrine in the old city here, and it’s going to get ugly.
We made it into the shrine today after an early morning dash to the city of Najaf from Baghdad. I had to hunker down in the back while traveling through Mahmoudiya and Latifiya, because those are the two hot spots where most journos seem to get themselves kidnapped. We made it through without incident, however, mainly because we were going about 180 km/hour and we were there before any of the kidnappers were awake. It was 6:30 a.m. when we blasted through the twin burgs.
We hit Najaf around 8:30 a.m. or so. After a quick check in at the Sea of Najaf hotel, which is about as crappy as it sounds, we surveyed the surroundings. The hotel was crawling with journos. Some old friend from Baghdad who had been on this story for a week longer. And tempers are short. If you’ve not been here for three weeks, the completely fried old hands just hiss at you.
We headed out. Najaf is divided into the old city and the new city. The old city is a roughly circular area surrounding the shrine while the new city sprawls out to the east and south. To the north is the Wadi al-Salaam, the Valley of Peace cemetery that some say is the largest in the world. It’s currently occupied by the U.S. Marines and other Army units. The Mahdi Army has been pretty roundly chased out of there.
Anyway, we had to cross Medina Street to get into the Old City. We approached from the south. The place is crawling with snipers from all sides — Americans, Mahdi and Iraqi Security Forces. We hugged the walls of the close-to-collapsing buildings and raised our hands to show we were unarmed as we crossed every intersection. H, and I had hooked up with some Iraqi and Algerian photographers from AP, AFP and Reuters, and they seemed to know what they were doing — until the Reuters guy almost started crying in one intersection. It’s understandable. It’s an incredibly stressful thing to do, to walk out into the middle of a free-fire zone with a bullet-proof vest, “TV” or “Press” taped to it, and hands raised in the air. Throughout this 2 hour long ordeal, we were constantly surrounded by the sharp bang-bang of small arms fire and the colossal booms of Bradleys and M1-A1 tanks firing. Oh, and mortars being launched and landing about two blocks over. That was fun. At one point, a huge plume of black smoke rose up and a Bradley or an M1-A1 — I couldn’t tell from the distance — was returning fire. It was about 500m away from us, but the smoke was too thick for me to shoot through.
As we rounded a corner approaching Medina Street, which is the Red Line on the front, the sound of gunfire opened up around us. We scrambled to the lee of a building and squatted. As the exchange died down, incredibly, some guy came up and sold us all ice cream. I asked him what he was doing.
“I’m supporting the Mahdi Army,” he grinned. “They like ice cream and I have a lot of customers.”
It was good ice cream, I’ll admit. So while bullets whizzed around and over us, we crouched by the side of a wall that radiated heat from the mid-morning sun and snacked on a rainbow swirl. Unreal.
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