Great article by Sean Penn in Iraq

[fizzana]

AS darkness descends, the sound of gunshots intensifies. On this night I'm determined to make my way across town to meet with Rob Collier of The San Francisco Chronicle. My taxi arrives at about 9 pm, and one of the staff of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting gives the Arabic-speaking cabdriver directions to the restaurant where I'm to meet with Collier (I’ll get a goddamn lamb chop yet). I grab my video camera, slip the button to “night shot”, and my driver and I hit the road. It’s about a 20-minute drive along a main artery through Baghdad. We’re about 10 minutes in when, on the opposite side of the road, I see a US military unit conducting a raid on an apartment building. I tape it from the car as we pass. I zoom in through the back windshield as doors are kicked in, and I stay fixed on the scene until we drift a block and a half away, when the image appears too small to be useful.

As I am about to shut off the camera, I sense a bright light over my right shoulder. Keeping the camera to my eye, I pan past the windshield to where six armed Iraqis mill about beside a sandbag-fortified position, housing a long- gunner in front of a nondescript building. We are moving into some traffic as I pan the camera through the passenger-side window. One of the armed men screams something in Arabic at me and raises his rifle toward my camera. We are suddenly stuck in traffic.

I switch off the camera and drop it at my feet as more rifles and voices rise and move toward us. I suddenly fear that my driver might attempt to accelerate and somehow escape. Every instinct tells me that the soldiers would fire on us if he did. I know he doesn’t speak English, so I use the universal, “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!”

He whoas and we are surrounded at gunpoint by six guards as they pull us from the taxi. There is a lot of shouting, and my driver looks frightened. We are ushered out of the illuminated area of the street and now, standing in a darkened Baghdad alley, my legs spread, arms extended, I am circled by six leather-jacketed Iraqis, their Kalashnikov rifles trained on me.

http://www.sundayherald.com/39651

On reading this article it becomes glaringly obvious that nothing in Iraq is normal, nothing is secure, death lurks just about anywhere and that life can only go on under extreme security measures.