As the quest for greater private security increases, a new and unexpected kind of public insecurity has grown alongside it. With vehicles rerouted through an ever-diminishing number of open streets, traffic jams have become more frequent, exposing foreigners, rich Baghdadis, and anyone else out of favor with one or another group of insurgents to a greater danger of being kidnapped, shot, or blown up. It is unnerving (to say the least) to be stuck in such traffic, wedged into a welter of dilapidated sedans, vans, and pickup trucks with heavily armed Iraqis staring sullenly through the window of your expensively reinforced car, as security guards sitting next to you cradle their automatic weapons. With no possibility of escape, you can't help wondering when your unlucky moment will come. And when traffic completely stops and frustrated drivers begin to break out of line, gun their vehicles up sidewalks, veer across center dividers, or just charge up the opposite lane against the flow of oncoming traffic, it is difficult to remain calm.
The worst offenders are private security guards who are committed to protecting their charges any way they can, and the Iraqi police, who now have brand-new fleets of green and white cruisers with whooping sirens, allowing them to plow their way through traffic-clogged streets as if they were kids on joy rides.
Adding to the overall racket and general sense of anxiety is the fact that it is hard to tell if the incessant sounds of sirens, the periodic bursts of automatic weapons fire, or the occasional explosions that are heard throughout the day mean anything or not. There are police firing ranges within the city, and sometimes a bored guard will just harmlessly fire off a few shots by way of a warning. As Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times explained, "Squeezing off a few rounds of automatic weapons fire here in Baghdad is the equivalent of honking your horn in America."
So unless an explosion is quite close, people hardly break step. At most, if there is a particularly loud report, a journalist might go up onto his bureau's rooftop to see where the smoke is coming from.
There is undeniably a "Blade Runner"-like feel to this city. The violence is so pervasive and unfathomable that you wonder what people think they are dying for. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the everyday violence is horrendous, it does not take too many days before the deadly noises and the devastation everywhere seem to become just part of the ordinary landscape. Soon, quite to your surprise, you find yourself paying hardly more attention to the sounds of gunshots than a New Yorker does to the car alarms that go off every night ... until, that is, someone you know, a neighbor, or just someone you have heard about, gets blown up, shot on patrol, or kidnapped by insurgents.
Just a few days after I left Baghdad, Iraqi newspapers carried a short notice that a well-to-do Iraqi banker, Ghalib Abdul Hussein, had been kidnapped from his fortified house by gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms. Five of his personal guards were shot execution-style in his yard. This is just one of thousands of such occurrences. But except for obeying the security guards responsible for you (if you have them), there isn't much else you can do.
Driving through the streets of Baghdad, one now sees members of the newly created, blue-uniformed Iraqi Police Service, extolled by the Bush administration as another hopeful sign of "Iraqization." But because police recruitment stations, training schools, and district precincts are favorite targets of the insurgents, many of these new police are afraid of being identified as collaborators with the Americans or the new Iraqi government. Their remedy is to wear black stocking caps with eye, nose, and mouth holes pulled down over their faces so they look like so many bank robbers. One sees these sinister-looking protectors of the peace at traffic circles and intersections, or brandishing automatic weapons in the back of American-bought pickup trucks, which makes them seem far more menacing than reassuring.
Visiting any of the news bureaus gives an immediate sense of how embattled foreign journalists now are and how difficult it has become for them to do their jobs. Everyone I spoke to complained that the deteriorating security situation has increasingly made them prisoners of their bureaus.
"We could go almost anywhere in Iraq in a regular car, unprotected," wrote the Wall Street Journal correspondent Farnaz Fassihi this February, in a wistful front-page story for her paper about the situation she found when she first arrived in 2003. "I wore Western clothes -- pants and T-shirts, skirts, sandals -- walked freely around Baghdad chatting with shopkeepers and having lunch or dinner with people I met." By the spring of 2004, she writes, "the insurgency had been spreading and gaining strength faster than we had imagined possible. For the first time, I hired armed guards and began traveling in a fully armored car. Outings were measured and limited and road trips were few and far between ... As security deteriorated around the country, the areas in which we could safely operate shrank."
Foreign news bureaus are either in or near the few operating hotels such as the Al Hamra, the Rashid, or the Palestine. Like battleships that have been badly damaged but are still at sea, these hotels have survived repeated bomb attacks and yet have managed to stay open. A few hotels like the Rashid, where once there was a mosaic depicting George Bush Sr. on the floor of the lobby, are sheltered within the Green Zone. A few other bureaus have their own houses, usually somewhat shabby villas that have the advantage of being included inside some collective defense perimeter that makes the resulting neighborhood feel like a walled medieval town.
Wherever in the city the news bureaus are, they have become fortified installations with their own mini-armies of private guards on duty 24 hours a day at the gates, in watch towers, and around perimeters. To reach these bureaus, one has to run through a maze of checkpoints, armed guards, blast-wall fortifications, and concertina-wired no man's lands where all visitors and their cars are repeatedly searched.
The bitter truth is that doing any kind of work outside these American fortified zones has become so dangerous for foreigners as to be virtually suicidal. More and more journalists find themselves hunkered down inside whatever bubbles of refuge they have managed to create in order to insulate themselves from the lawlessness outside. (A January USAID "annex" to bid applications for government contracts warns how "the absence of state control and an effective police force" has allowed "criminal elements within Iraqi society [to] have almost free rein.")
Nearly every foreign group working in Iraq has felt it necessary to hire a PSD, or "personal security detail," from more than 60 "private military firms" (PMFs) -- Triple Canopy, Erinys International Ltd., and Blackwater USA -- now doing a brisk business in Iraq. In fact, there are now reported to be at least 25,000 armed men from such private firms on duty in the country today. Led mostly by Brits, South Africans, and Americans, these subterranean paramilitary PSDs form a parallel universe to America's occupation force. Indeed, they even have their own organization, the Private Security Company Association of Iraq.
It has not escaped the attention of U.S. National Guardsmen, reservists, regular Army soldiers, and Marines that their mercenary counterparts get paid four or five times more than they do, sometimes as much as $1,000 a day. Understandably, there is a good deal of resentment about this inequity, and not a few American soldiers now aspire to nothing more than getting out of their low-paying jobs working for the military so that they can sign on with one of these companies.
"I look at it this way," one young former Marine told me. "The Corps was an all-expenses-paid training ground to graduate me into the private sector."
Next page: Every reporter who ventures out is under the control of a full-time security chief