From The Independent/UK
Iraq is breaking up into competing centres of power and truck drivers are among those who can best describe the miseries of trying to travel from one fragment of the country to another. “Our life is horrible,” says Mohammed Oday, a driver sitting with seven or eight others in the shade of a road bridge beside a parking lot filled with trucks on the outskirts of the oil city of Kirkuk.
All the drivers bar one were Sunni Arabs from Ramadi in Anbar province, a city that was 80 per cent destroyed by US air strikes and Iraqi army artillery when they besieged it last year. “One room in my house is not as badly damaged as the others, so maybe my family could live in it,” said one of the drivers, but he added that there was not much chance of this happening because the road to Anbar is too dangerous.
The furthest west he and the other truckers dared go on the road to Anbar was a checkpoint called Bzeybiz beyond which the road is controlled by much-feared Shia paramilitaries like Ketaeb Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq. “They question us to see if we have Sunni names like Baqr, Othman, Omar or Muawiya,” says Mr Oday. “And, if they don’t arrest us, they charge between $800 (£555) and $1,000 per truck to let us through.”
“It is not we drivers who pay the bribes but whoever owns the goods we are carrying,” said one the drivers, only a few of whom own their own trucks. “Then the owner adds the cost of the pay-offs to the price of goods when they are sold in the shops or the markets in Baghdad.”
