Bandits, insurgents drive Iraqi truckers off the road

BAGHDAD — The last time trucker Walid Mohammad Waij faced death on the highway, he screamed in its face.

He was driving his Volvo tractor-trailer toward the Syrian border when armed men pulled up alongside and ordered him to stop. It was the third time in as many months that bandits had attempted to rob him, and he decided he’d had enough.

Mr. Waij kept driving. A bandit stuck an assault rifle out the window of his car and opened fire into the sky. Still, Mr. Waij kept driving.

“I yelled out the window at them,” he recalls. “I told them, ‘Even if you fire at my head, I am not going to stop.’ ”

Luckily, the bandits fell back in search of easier prey. But for Mr. Waij, that was it. “I’m getting out of the business,” said the 47-year-old trucker. “The roads are too dangerous. Anything is better than getting killed.”

The truckers who traverse Iraq’s long, desolate stretches of highway say that outside the three northern provinces under Kurdish control, much of the countryside has become a no man’s land where criminals collude with police to rob and occasionally kill truckers.

“Once, I gave them all the money I had,” said Karim Amin, a grizzled 60-year-old trucker who has been robbed three times driving between Baghdad and Kut in southern Iraq.

“They said, ‘That’s not all you have. You’ve got money inside the car.’ So they searched the car and found nothing. And they were so angry they nearly beat me to death.”

Under Saddam Hussein, the biggest headaches truckers faced were corrupt police officers who collected bribes at checkpoints. Now, truckers say they toss and turn at night for fear that bandits will steal their vehicles or leave them dead on the side of the road the next day.

Each of Iraq’s roads poses its own special peril. Each band of criminals has its unique appetite for loot.

On the road between Baghdad and Basra, for example, robbers seek truckers carrying electronic equipment that can be resold on the black market.

On the road across Iraq’s vast western desert, Islamic rebels fighting the U.S. military in Fallujah and Ramadi steal foodstuffs to feed their troops. “God help you if they suspect you’re working for the foreigners,” said Ra’ad al-Tamimi, a Baghdad driver.

The road to Syria is where many trucks — and sometimes drivers — are seized for ransom.

“They took my friend and demanded $15,000 for the truck and driver,” said Haydar Yassin Ahmad Turkowi, who hauls goods from Syria. “The company didn’t have enough, so we took up a collection to free our friend.”

The U.S. and Iraqi governments have made a point of their plans to recapture insurgent-held cities such as Fallujah and Ramadi before elections in January. But the problems on Iraq’s roads are only getting worse, according to truckers.

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