It’s always been a good idea to wear seatbelts in the capital’s chaotic and obstacle-strewn streets. But whenever I’ve started to buckle in my Iraqi colleagues would warn me off it. Baghdadis don’t wear seatbelts, so the danger of showing myself as a safety-obsessed Westerner would be greater than the risks of a fender bender. But on a trip downtown this week, my Iraqi driver buckled himself into his shoulder strap and explained that while I had been out on a break the police had started requiring drivers to wear their belts or face a fine of about $25.
The streets are tricky. Hundreds are blocked by blast walls protecting public and private compounds or makeshift barricades meant to keep strangers from passing through residential neighborhoods. The asphalt is in crumbling disrepair, and parked cars choke off roads. So traffic police, who have kept working throughout the war, are forgiving about drivers choosing the dangerous “wrong side” option (the English phrase was adopted into the local Arabic long before the war) on busy streets. It seems like a good sign that now they finally not only have a seatbelt law, they actually enforce it.
I got another taste of Baghdad security later as I interviewed a storeowner. Plainclothes police pulled up to question my Iraqi staff waiting in the street. Perhaps someone had called them, worried that my driver and guards were suspicious strangers. (I’ll keep the exact number of guards and other details vague in case any of those who like to kidnap foreigners read this.) I explained to an English-speaking officer, a tall man in a T-shirt and jeans, that I was an American reporter and showed him various IDs. But he insisted that we all go to his nearby station house to explain our presence to his boss. In five years of working in Iraq I’ve never had to do this before.
I ran through some troubling thoughts regarding the spotty record of Iraqi police and the many instances of criminals posing as police. The storeowner was clearly scared about whether he would somehow be held responsible for something. Though the men showed us badges, those could be faked. They were in plain clothes and unmarked cars. But they were consistently polite, almost apologetic, and it was in a part of town where illegal militia activity had been rare of late. Anyway, we had little choice but to follow them to their station, and they placed one of the officers in my car to assure our cooperation.
It was a good sign when we pulled up to the small police post and saw four U.S. Humvees pulling out through the blast wall channel. At least it was a true Iraqi police office. I thought of flagging down the Humvees, but the officer in our car told me there were still more Americans inside, which turned out to be untrue. They gathered us in the commander’s well-appointed office. He had a satellite channel from France on his television, and a little boy, likely his son from his air of entitlement, sat on one of the couches. As in most police offices, there was a metal-frame bed in the corner, neatly made, where the leader must spend a lot of nights.
Things were relaxed as he signed unrelated paperwork and listened to his underlings explain what they had found: a reporter, men with weapons. They took a long at our IDs and paperwork, questioning unclear details about the guards’ government certificate. I explained, truthfully, that NEWSWEEK works with a private security company and that, unlike the massive U.S. and Iraqi government-backed firms traveling the city, our small company has meticulously worked according to Iraqi law. He let me use my mobile phone to start the calls to the Ministry of the Interior that could vouch for us. Our security company sent an Iraqi lawyer to the station. With that in motion, I called a well-known Iraqi official who instructed the officer to release us; I had recently been with this official when he received a similar call for help from Iraqi reporters. That did the trick.
We were let go with handshakes and apologies, and you could say the authorities were just doing their jobs. But there was a catch I didn’t know about until later. Just before we got outside, while I was briefly separated from my colleagues, one of the officers told one of my Iraqi staffers that they frequently provide protection for journalists who show their gratitude in cash. One of my staff, without my knowledge, handed them some money, which they said would only cover part of their costs. So he handed over more and a little more, getting into the neighborhood of about $100 worth of Iraqi currency. They never demanded it outright—and were polite throughout—but to my staff a substantial tip seemed like the prudent move.
We headed home slightly cowed. We had been sidetracked against our will for about an hour. That storeowner was probably still shaken, and my staffers were worried that they had now been identified as Iraqis working with a Westerner. We wondered if our paperwork had ever been the issue or it was just a pretense for supplementing modest police incomes. But we complimented each other on our calm—we’d all avoided the kind of shouting matches that can occur. The police never threatened or insulted anyone. And they sure were plugged into what was going on in the streets. My driver buckled up and took us home.
