Stress

I officially committed to staying in Baghdad until Sept. 23 last night, which will bring my total time in country to 11 weeks (instead of the eight I initially committed to). If this decision had come just two hours earlier, I might have been mostly excited about it. As it was, this came an hour after gunmen had attacked the guards that man the entrance to our compound, so I wasn't feeling too thrilled about the whole Iraq concept.

Tensions have been running high around here since the incident last night. For a few of us, the stress was compounded by another scary incident this morning. On our way to a meeting at the Green Zone, we attempted to drive down the road that hundreds of Shiite pilgrims were using to return for an aborted religious festival in the southern city of Karbala. People were packed into buses and trucks, with many riding on the roofs of each vehicle because there was not enough room inside. There were lots of guns as well. At one point, somebody shot twice directly at our car. It would have been tough for them to figure out I was an American, since I was dressed like an Iraqi, so it was probably because they assumed our armored car was carrying a VIP. An AK-47 bullet won't go through armor, so we were never in any real danger, but combined with last night's violence it was too close for comfort.

By the time we made it past all the pilgrims, we heard that the road we needed to take was closed, so we turned around to head back. By then, they had also closed the road leading back to the office, so we were stuck in the middle of a scene that seems to have all the necessary characteristics to prompt a riot. We were contemplating leaving the cars and walking back to the office, but one of our drivers managed to bribe a soldier to let us through a barricade. Traffic jams are so, so scary in Baghdad because they are the perfect setting in which to set off a car bomb. We made it back to the office just fine, but the sequence of events has made me a bit uneasy.