We approached from the south. The place is crawling with snipers from all sides — Americans, Mahdi and Iraqi Security Forces. We hugged the walls of the close-to-collapsing buildings and raised our hands to show we were unarmed as we crossed every intersection. H, and I had hooked up with some Iraqi and Algerian photographers from AP, AFP and Reuters, and they seemed to know what they were doing — until the Reuters guy almost started crying in one intersection. It’s understandable. It’s an incredibly stressful thing to do, to walk out into the middle of a free-fire zone with a bullet-proof vest, “TV” or “Press” taped to it, and hands raised in the air.
Throughout this 2 hour long ordeal, we were constantly surrounded by the sharp bang-bang of small arms fire and the colossal booms of Bradleys and M1-A1 tanks firing. Oh, and mortars being launched and landing about two blocks over. That was fun. At one point, a huge plume of black smoke rose up and a Bradley or an M1-A1 — I couldn’t tell from the distance — was returning fire. It was about 500m away from us, but the smoke was too thick for me to shoot through.
As we rounded a corner approaching Medina Street, which is the Red Line on the front, the sound of gunfire opened up around us. We scrambled to the lee of a building and squatted. As the exchange died down, incredibly, some guy came up and sold us all ice cream. I asked him what he was doing.
“I’m supporting the Mahdi Army,” he grinned. “They like ice cream and I have a lot of customers.”
It was good ice cream, I’ll admit.http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000809.phpThis is from a long interesting blog entry about Allbritton's trip to the shrine.
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