 | | | | Bus to Baghdad - 25/03/03 | | | |
 Dominic Arkwright in Jordan
Dominic Arkwright's frosty bus trip with Iraqis returning to fight for Saddam
Amman skyline
Camp in Jordan
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It's cosy in the car. But then it's not really designed to carry ten people. In this case Today Producer Alexis Condon, my translator Foad, and myself - plus seven Iraqis. I'm wedged in next to a man who seems to think it important to carry a large, old electric fan, partly on his lap and partly on mine.
If you're taking two bags back to Iraq by bus why would one of them be a battered desktop fan?
Oh ... that's where we're heading - Baghdad. This is the car taking us to the bus stop. And everything's going just fine until the driver turns on the radio. And this is what we hear.
"The mass media are hostile….they are lying…the mass media are conducting psychological warfare". An Iraqi military spokesman's latest press conference.
Now this is not what you want to be hearing when you're trapped in a car with seven Iraqis who are going home to fight. But it seems worth recording. My translator whispers "I suggest you don't do any recording. It's a little bit hostile". And the guy behind me taps me on the shoulder and starts talking loudly about something which I suspect is not completely friendly and probably contains some reference to killing Americans.
We reach the bus stop, just an unmarked stretch of pavement in front of a patch of wasteland in downtown Amman. A herd of goats is grazing on a steep hill beyond.
The bus is already half full. The luggage is being loaded. This is what is going into the hold. One television, used. One electric fan, previously mentioned. One old UN Food Aid bag, stuffed with clothes. One parcel wrapped in a carpet, tied with baler twine.
I'm recording this event with a microphone that is black and almost a foot long. It has not been confused with anything else in its life. It's a microphone, and it knows it, and it's comfortable with that fact. But, today something unusual happens to my microphone, for the first time ever. It's a big day for my mike. One it will remember.
Foad, our translator, comes up to me. Several Iraqis are with him and they are talking angrily to each other and to him.
"You must stop recording", says Foad.
I Shhh him. He's spoiling my sound effects.
"No, you MUST stop recording. They think you are checking their luggage. They think your microphone is a scanner."
Blimey.
It is definitely not a good idea for a British hack to be caught scanning the luggage of a bunch of Iraqis who are going home to fight. Not a good idea at all to be provoking a group of people you are just about to accompany on a bus heading for Baghdad.
We find some seats near the back, quite a long way, I can't help thinking, from the exit. We have spoken to enough Iraqis to know what they think about the coalition, the war, the British, the media.
As the bus pulls out and heads for the East Jordan desert, we find a man who will talk to the BBC.
"We will not allow Bush to take one footstep in Iraq. Iraq will be a cemetery for Americans. I will sacrifice my five sons to defend my country. Guns are available. We will find them".
We're getting the message. The views of this 38-year-old man, once a teacher in Baghdad, now a lorry driver in Jordan, soon, if you believe him, to become a fighter back in Iraq. Some five thousand Iraqis have left Jordan for Iraq in the last week. Not one has come the other way.
Will anyone else talk to the BBC?
"No", says Foad. "They will not. I have asked them. I think we should leave the bus. I'm getting a little bit worried".
And that's what we do. We ask the driver to drop us off in Zarqa, about 25 kilometres outside Amman. The journey, for us, was over. For the rest of them it had barely begun.
They will have to leave this bus at Ruweished, near the Iraqi border and board another. All things being equal, which in these times they are not, they would be in Baghdad in about fifteen hours.
As the bus pulls off and Alexis, Foad and I stand by the roadside, the hand gestures through the windows include the reverse of the "V" for victory and a finger being drawn across a throat. Nobody is smiling on the bus. And neither are we.
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