Incident on Khairallah Tulfa Street

When gunfire erupts on a street in Baghdad, drivers find the quickest way to turn around and head away from the shooting. People drive over medians, up on the curbs, anything that will put some distance between them and the firefight. And this is exactly what the Bedouins driving the vegetable truck were doing in the opposite lanes after the men in the dark sedan opened fire on us. The driver of the truck crossed the median in front of us, heading into our lanes, completely blocking them as he executed his turn. In his fear and desperation to get away from the attackers, Haidar never touched the brakes. We hit the truck going 40.

There was the instant of the crash -- the looming truck and then the feeling of striking the dashboard, the sound of a skull hitting the dashboard and a flash of pain. Haidar's head hit the steering wheel. The front end of the car absorbed most of the energy of the collision. It was destroyed, but neither of us were seriously injured, a miracle.

A second after we hit the truck, Haidar opened his car door and sprinted into the street over broken glass and car parts. I did the same, looking back to see if we were being pursued. I saw no dark car, no sign of the attackers. After the commotion of the accident, there was no way the men in the sedan could have made a second attempt. We watched from a side street as the Iraqi police from the nearest station arrived with five patrols and blocked off the street, and immediately got into a fight over who had jurisdiction over the crash. The cops put us in an SUV and drove us out of the neighborhood, stunned and beat up from the crash.

After three hours at a local police station where Haidar was interrogated, the police took us back to the Hamra with their sirens on, firing warning shots out the windows, which is their usual way of driving around Baghdad.

Later, I was visiting Umm Hassan, a kind Shiite woman, at her modest house, and after I told her the story she said without surprise, "You should sacrifice a sheep in thanks."

We never found out who the attackers were, which group they belonged to or what they wanted with us. In retrospect, after going through a long, paranoid chain of best guesses, I decided that it was probably Sgt. Ahmad who set up the kidnapping attempt. The cop finally had to put in an appearance to make sure it went off properly. Ahmad knew where we were and what time we would be there. The guys in the restaurant were probably tipped off that something was going down, which is why they hustled us out. And the ordinary-looking 40-year-old man who told the friendly cops about the suspicious characters was in on the plan, too: He was trying to lure the friendly patrols away and leave us unguarded.

Iraqis fear kidnapping as much as they fear anything else, and with good reason. While the few Western hostages (fortunately) get a great deal of press in their home countries, large numbers of Iraqis are kidnapped every day. Lately, there has been a trend away from taking single hostages, toward taking them by the dozen. Entire buses and offices have been cleared out by armed men with unknown affiliation. Workers on the way to work, people leaving for the Syrian border by road on buses, store owners, embassy workers, Iraqis doing business with Western companies, anyone. Mass kidnappers near Taji have demanded identification from the victims and sorted them according to whether they are Sunni or Shiite, killing those who are in the opposing group. No one is immune.

Last year during a patrol in Dora with the California National Guard, we were driving down the southern highway at midnight and found the body of a man lying in the road with a single gunshot wound to his chest, the blood pouring out onto the tarmac. He'd been dumped there, possibly killed for his car, or the victim of a sectarian attack. The man's body looked broken and ruined on the road.

I remember another incident, a few weeks later on another patrol, in the Western neighborhood of Amariyah. I was with a group of soldiers when we found an abandoned white sedan, still running. A translator for a Western embassy had been driving it. The man had been captured only moments before our humvee had turned the corner but now he was definitely gone, no longer present, another one of Baghdad's ghosts.

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