The buses have all gone. We are left alone with the oil stained pavement and the taste of cardamom.
Amman - when will you deserve your pale white stone, your thin air and your two million refugees?
Mercenaries grow old here, skin hangs to muscle and bone. Oily stares that hope for nothing.
Our black wing passes over the crescent moon. We dive into the darkness of Baghdad.
On July 28, 2008, Iran's Press TV conducted a live interview with David Enders about his perspectives on the war in Iraq.
Enders is currently reporting from Baghdad on Iraq's upcoming elections, the issue of U.S. detention of Iraqis and continued U.S. pacification efforts in Sadr City and Falluja.
Enders also plans to travel to Syria to examine the continuing struggle for Iraqi refugees there.
There are approximately 5 million refugees inside and outside Iraq. Yesterday Rick and I went back to Chikook, a refugee neighborhood on the north side of town that is home to, by local estimates, some 4,000 families. Even though the sectarian violence around Baghdad has largely ended for the moment, the neighborhood is still growing as families who had been renting houses in other neighborhoods run out of money and are forced to move there.
Baghdad is certainly safer now, but the scars of war are still raw. This afternoon I ran into a man I had not seen for more than three years, a clerk at a hotel I used to stay in. As we reminisced about crazy days in 2005, he suddenly mentioned that he had lost his son in crossfire in 2006.
He put his eyes down and began to fidget nervously.
"I have two daughters, but he was only son," he said. "What should I do? I am too old to get married again."
Rick and I spent Saturday and Sunday in Falluja as the guests of one of the local sheiks and a leader of the Sahwa Movement. Things are much better than they have been at any time since 2004, though a conflict between the Iraqi Islamic Party and the Sahwa threatens to turn violent as provincial elections approach.
We knew from the moment we arrived that something had changed. Our flight didn't get in until midnight because of a sandstorm, and Rick and I were resigned to spending the night on the floor of the airport. Curfew in Baghdad has been lifted, but we still didn't think it would be possible to get a taxi so late, and the Iraqi journalist working with us wasn't willing to come pick us up until daylight.
David Enders, an independent journalist and Pulitzer Center grantee, presented his reports on Iraq to multiple classrooms in the U.S. His work stirred much-heated debates on the country’s Iraq policy.
"With over 80 percent of the country's known oil reserves, Basra holds the key to Iraq's economy. Without its revenues the central government in Baghdad would collapse. The struggle for power in Basra is central to the larger battle for control in the new Shiite dominated Iraq. This is a report from Basra by independent filmmaker Rick Rowley of Big Noise films." (Democracy Now!)
Listen to or watch the video here.
TRANSCRIPT:
Basra is Iraq's economy – its Rumeila oil fields tap one of the largest pools of petroleum in the world, and without its revenues the central government in Baghdad would collapse. This wealth makes Basra the site of a battle for political control between the three largest Shiite parties in Iraq – al-Hakim's SIIC, Moqtada al-Sadr's 'Sadrist Current', and the Islamic Virtue Party, which controls the Basra governorate and is linked to the Oil Workers' Union.
Basra is Iraq's economy – its Rumeila oil fields tap one of the largest pools of petroleum in the world, and without its revenues the central government in Baghdad would collapse. This wealth makes Basra the site of a battle for political control between the three largest Shiite parties in Iraq – al-Hakim's SIIC, Moqtada al-Sadr's 'Sadrist Current', and the Islamic Virtue Party, which controls the Basra governorate and is linked to the Oil Workers' Union.
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