Cabbies find Baghdad streets safer

BAGHDAD – Haider Abbas, a 36-year-old taxi driver, had only a few moments to answer what is often a life-or-death question in this city: Would he drive a passenger home?

The home, on that scorching afternoon last month, happened to be in Adhamiyah, a notoriously dangerous neighborhood where several cabbies had been gunned down. Abbas hadn’t been there in two years. But the fare pleaded that it had become safer, so the cabbie reluctantly agreed to go.

“To tell you the truth, I thought I had just traded my life for 5,000 dinars,” or $4, said Abbas, who was shocked when he arrived in the traffic-jammed streets of Adhamiyah to see shops open and people strolling in the road. “Then I suddenly realized that security really is returning to Baghdad.”

In a city where few residents believe official statements on declining violence, whether from the U.S. military or the Iraqi government, some of the most reliable figures on security improvements can be found on the odometers of Baghdad’s taxi drivers.

After years of sectarian warfare whittled down the list of neighborhoods where they could safely work, cabbies are once again crisscrossing nearly all of Baghdad. Every day they assess the constantly shifting boundaries between danger and security, hoping that life will return to normal, but mindful that this is still a city where anyone could be killed at any moment for no particular reason.

“There is a saying in Iraq that once you have seen death, you will not mind even if you have a life-threatening fever,” said cabbie Haider Salim, 38, a resident of the Kadhimiyah neighborhood who drives a light blue Brazilian-made Volkswagen. “Of course Baghdad is still very, very dangerous. But we can live with this fever, because we are so hopeful that the situation will improve even more.”

Not everyone is so optimistic. Many Iraqis still shun taxis, fearful that the drivers may kidnap them or that the vehicles may be particularly attractive targets for suicide bombers.

Zuhair al-Wazan, a 43-year-old day laborer from the Karrada district, said it would be foolish to ride in a cab. “I do not want death to find me in a taxi,” he said. When asked what he was afraid of, Wazan threw his arms up in the air, as if the answer was obvious, and shouted: “Boom!”

According to interviews with a dozen cabbies across the city, however, the mood now is far more hopeful than at any point since the February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, which pushed the country to the brink of civil war.

Abu Ahmed, 32, who lives just outside the fortress-like Green Zone, said that after the attack on the Shiite shrine, about 65 miles north of Baghdad, he could no longer drive on roads leading out of the capital. Even within the city, he said, it would have been suicide to travel to neighborhoods such as Ghazaliyah, Sholeh and Amiriyah.

“If you took a passenger to those areas,” he said, “there was a good chance you would never come back.”

Today, Ahmed says, he takes passengers to any neighborhood in the city, and any region of the country except for volatile Diyala province. “But I never go onto the side streets in the dangerous neighborhoods – just the main roads,” he said. “And sometimes I still have fear in my heart.”

The office of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says the number of attacks in Baghdad has plummeted from 1,442 in April to 323 last month. But instead of official pronouncements, the cabbies rely more on friends, family members, fellow drivers and what some consider a sort of innate intuition about the roads.

“We call the taxi driver in Iraq a roving reporter,” said Haider Abbas, the driver who was surprised by the bustle in Adhamiyah. “We know every single neighborhood, and we can read the minds and hearts of the people who hire us.”

Cabbies gripe that the improved security situation also makes it harder to eke out a living. A growing number of Baghdad residents now feel comfortable driving their own cars around the city, obviating the need for taxis. The skyrocketing cost of fuel has made it harder to make ends meet. And high unemployment has led many young men to plop a yellow “TAXI” sign atop their vehicles, adding to the competition for passengers.

For taxi drivers who used to take passengers from Baghdad to Syria, the increased sense of security – combined with strict new visa rules in Syria – has stopped the exodus to the border, ending their source of income.

Muntasir Rasheed, 24, who worked for two years driving Iraqis to Damascus, said he is now unemployed. Almost no one is going to Syria anymore. The demand is so high in the reverse direction that $500 taxi rides from Damascus to Baghdad now cost $1,000, he said.