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July 28, 2007
Strife and Ice, Staples of Life, Overlap in Iraq
By STEPHEN FARRELL
BAGHDAD, July 27 - Each day before the midsummer sun rises high enough to
bake blood on concrete, Baghdad's underclass lines up outside Dickensian ice
factories.
With electricity reaching most homes for just a couple of hours each day,
the poor hand over soiled brown dinars for what has become a symbol of Iraq's
steady descent into a more primitive era and its broken covenant with
leaders, domestic and foreign.
In a capital that was once the seat of the Islamic Caliphate and a center of
Arab worldliness, ice is now a currency of last resort for the poor, subject
to sectarian horrors and gangland rules.
In Shiite-majority Topchi, ice makers say that Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army
issued a diktat on the first day of summer ordering vendors to set a price
ceiling of 4,000 dinars ($3) per 55-pound block of ice, 30 percent less than
they charge in areas outside Mahdi Army control.
Everyone complied, delivering an instant subsidy to the veiled women and
poor laborers who are the radical Shiite cleric's natural constituency. The
same price is enforced in his other power bases, like Sadr City.
Some suppliers are horrified. "They are trying to improve their image, and
gain favor," a merchant grumbled, as a sickle-wielding colleague chopped the
hollow crystalline blocks in half for black-robed women to cram into
shopping bags. "But it won't do much good, we all know what the Mahdi Army
are."
Wearied by four years of chaos, others support the move to reimpose order,
any order.
"There is nothing better than law and order," said Omar Suleiman, another
factory manager. "In the days of Saddam Hussein, the government used to
control the price of ice. Now there is no control, except where the militias
are doing it."
Shiites are not alone in manipulating supply to suit their own sectarian
agendas.
At one plant, situated under a highway overpass in Topchi, all four delivery
drivers quit last year after warnings that sectarian gangs would kill them
if they continued to drive across the invisible but all-too-real lines
dividing Baghdad's Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods.
Customers in one suburb cautioned them that takfiris - fanatical Sunni
extremists - had decreed their frozen product un-Islamic.
"In Ghazaliya, it is forbidden to sell ice because the takfiris said, 'The
Prophet Muhammad had no ice in his time,' " said Khatan Kareem, a manager at
the factory where the drivers worked, shaking his head at the absurdity.
Many of Baghdad's ice plants are museum pieces. In one, the industrial
compressor was manufactured in India in 1960. Another's was built by L.
Sterne & Co. in Glasgow more than half a century ago.
Hussam Muhammad, whose family owns the equipment in the business where Mr.
Kareem works, never imagined that the dilapidated factory, built in 1952
when Iraq was still a monarchy, would survive into the post-Saddam Hussein
era.
"In 2003, I thought the ice business would be finished because everyone
would have electricity and refrigerators once the Americans arrived," Mr.
Muhammad said as he scuttled from fan belt to ice-blistered piping trying to
keep the plant limping along. "The fish sellers and meat stores who used to
buy from us are gone, closed because of the security situation. Now it is
the poor people who come because they don't have money to pay for generators
to keep their food and drinks cold."
Baghdad's sectarian compartmentalization of ice is as rigid for customers as
for deliverymen.
Such is the fear of the gunmen that at the factory under the overpass, only
the immediate neighbors can safely reach its grimy doors.
"People used to come here from Sunni areas, Taji, Amiriya and Jamiya to buy
ice because they had no ice factories in their areas," Mr. Kareem said. "But
the Sunnis cannot reach this area now, and I am the same. I am Shia, and I
cannot go to Yarmouk."
The thought is particularly rankling to Mr. Kareem because until three
months ago he lived in Yarmouk, a Sunni neighborhood, and enjoyed a secure
government job, until an Iraqi Army raid uncovered a Shiite icon on his
wall.
"They beat me up, burnt my house and forced me out of the area," he said,
squatting amid the nauseating smell of ammonium that permeates all ice
factories. "I now live in my relatives' kitchen. And I work here."
His depression reflects the frustration of the Iraqi middle class, which
prided itself on being one of the most educated in the Arab world, but now
sees itself falling further behind its regional rivals and back onto the
technology of its grandfathers.
In wealthier districts consumer goods are stacked high on shelves, for the
"haves" who can afford to buy black-market electricity from private
generator owners.
But millions of "have-nots" cannot afford this luxury, and many of those
generator owners have now been killed or driven away by militias intent on
securing their lucrative assets.
Ice, ostensibly the least political of commodities, requires only water,
electricity and a few chemicals.
But in Baghdad's current state of polarized violence, no business is an
island. Raw materials must pass the checkpoints and gunmen, with their
arbitrary rules and instant punishments, as must customers, suppliers, staff
and the finished product.
The ice factories - cash cows in the peak summer season - have not escaped
the gunmen's notice.
In the Sunni enclave of Adhamiya, newly walled off from its Shiite neighbors
to halt cross-community slaughter, Taha Khaleel complained that his drivers
and mechanics were at the mercy of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Army
checkpoint that controls the gate.
"It depends on their mood," he said. "This causes problems for us in the
continuity of fuel supplies. The drivers are more reluctant to come to us
now because of that, and because of the insults they face."
A kidnapped factory owner in Taji was released only after he surrendered his
car. At the Qutub Ice Factory in Baghdad, the owner has already fled Iraq
after receiving a death threat, and employees say most of its middle-class
customers have also gone.
Not so fortunate are the poor buyers in a street market the Salaam
neighborhood, where wooden ice shacks have sprung up in recent months,
despite the adjacent sewage and piles of rotting garbage.
Alarmed by tales of disease, many buyers now drop sterilization pills into
the frozen blocks. If they are lucky, the stores will have ice from
Sulaimaniya or Erbil, Kurdish cities where it is made from clean mountain
water. If unlucky, the impure Baghdad product, with its distinctive yellow
sheen.
"I never used to buy ice in Saddam's regime, because I could use my
refrigerator. But nowadays I have to because there is no electricity, and we
need cold water," said Muhammad Abbadi, 52, the owner of a clothing store.
"Ice is the only source, even if it is dirty. Both my girls fell sick with
typhoid two weeks ago."
Strife and Ice, Staples of Life, Overlap in Iraq
By STEPHEN FARRELL
BAGHDAD, July 27 - Each day before the midsummer sun rises high enough to
bake blood on concrete, Baghdad's underclass lines up outside Dickensian ice
factories.
With electricity reaching most homes for just a couple of hours each day,
the poor hand over soiled brown dinars for what has become a symbol of Iraq's
steady descent into a more primitive era and its broken covenant with
leaders, domestic and foreign.
In a capital that was once the seat of the Islamic Caliphate and a center of
Arab worldliness, ice is now a currency of last resort for the poor, subject
to sectarian horrors and gangland rules.
In Shiite-majority Topchi, ice makers say that Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army
issued a diktat on the first day of summer ordering vendors to set a price
ceiling of 4,000 dinars ($3) per 55-pound block of ice, 30 percent less than
they charge in areas outside Mahdi Army control.
Everyone complied, delivering an instant subsidy to the veiled women and
poor laborers who are the radical Shiite cleric's natural constituency. The
same price is enforced in his other power bases, like Sadr City.
Some suppliers are horrified. "They are trying to improve their image, and
gain favor," a merchant grumbled, as a sickle-wielding colleague chopped the
hollow crystalline blocks in half for black-robed women to cram into
shopping bags. "But it won't do much good, we all know what the Mahdi Army
are."
Wearied by four years of chaos, others support the move to reimpose order,
any order.
"There is nothing better than law and order," said Omar Suleiman, another
factory manager. "In the days of Saddam Hussein, the government used to
control the price of ice. Now there is no control, except where the militias
are doing it."
Shiites are not alone in manipulating supply to suit their own sectarian
agendas.
At one plant, situated under a highway overpass in Topchi, all four delivery
drivers quit last year after warnings that sectarian gangs would kill them
if they continued to drive across the invisible but all-too-real lines
dividing Baghdad's Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods.
Customers in one suburb cautioned them that takfiris - fanatical Sunni
extremists - had decreed their frozen product un-Islamic.
"In Ghazaliya, it is forbidden to sell ice because the takfiris said, 'The
Prophet Muhammad had no ice in his time,' " said Khatan Kareem, a manager at
the factory where the drivers worked, shaking his head at the absurdity.
Many of Baghdad's ice plants are museum pieces. In one, the industrial
compressor was manufactured in India in 1960. Another's was built by L.
Sterne & Co. in Glasgow more than half a century ago.
Hussam Muhammad, whose family owns the equipment in the business where Mr.
Kareem works, never imagined that the dilapidated factory, built in 1952
when Iraq was still a monarchy, would survive into the post-Saddam Hussein
era.
"In 2003, I thought the ice business would be finished because everyone
would have electricity and refrigerators once the Americans arrived," Mr.
Muhammad said as he scuttled from fan belt to ice-blistered piping trying to
keep the plant limping along. "The fish sellers and meat stores who used to
buy from us are gone, closed because of the security situation. Now it is
the poor people who come because they don't have money to pay for generators
to keep their food and drinks cold."
Baghdad's sectarian compartmentalization of ice is as rigid for customers as
for deliverymen.
Such is the fear of the gunmen that at the factory under the overpass, only
the immediate neighbors can safely reach its grimy doors.
"People used to come here from Sunni areas, Taji, Amiriya and Jamiya to buy
ice because they had no ice factories in their areas," Mr. Kareem said. "But
the Sunnis cannot reach this area now, and I am the same. I am Shia, and I
cannot go to Yarmouk."
The thought is particularly rankling to Mr. Kareem because until three
months ago he lived in Yarmouk, a Sunni neighborhood, and enjoyed a secure
government job, until an Iraqi Army raid uncovered a Shiite icon on his
wall.
"They beat me up, burnt my house and forced me out of the area," he said,
squatting amid the nauseating smell of ammonium that permeates all ice
factories. "I now live in my relatives' kitchen. And I work here."
His depression reflects the frustration of the Iraqi middle class, which
prided itself on being one of the most educated in the Arab world, but now
sees itself falling further behind its regional rivals and back onto the
technology of its grandfathers.
In wealthier districts consumer goods are stacked high on shelves, for the
"haves" who can afford to buy black-market electricity from private
generator owners.
But millions of "have-nots" cannot afford this luxury, and many of those
generator owners have now been killed or driven away by militias intent on
securing their lucrative assets.
Ice, ostensibly the least political of commodities, requires only water,
electricity and a few chemicals.
But in Baghdad's current state of polarized violence, no business is an
island. Raw materials must pass the checkpoints and gunmen, with their
arbitrary rules and instant punishments, as must customers, suppliers, staff
and the finished product.
The ice factories - cash cows in the peak summer season - have not escaped
the gunmen's notice.
In the Sunni enclave of Adhamiya, newly walled off from its Shiite neighbors
to halt cross-community slaughter, Taha Khaleel complained that his drivers
and mechanics were at the mercy of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Army
checkpoint that controls the gate.
"It depends on their mood," he said. "This causes problems for us in the
continuity of fuel supplies. The drivers are more reluctant to come to us
now because of that, and because of the insults they face."
A kidnapped factory owner in Taji was released only after he surrendered his
car. At the Qutub Ice Factory in Baghdad, the owner has already fled Iraq
after receiving a death threat, and employees say most of its middle-class
customers have also gone.
Not so fortunate are the poor buyers in a street market the Salaam
neighborhood, where wooden ice shacks have sprung up in recent months,
despite the adjacent sewage and piles of rotting garbage.
Alarmed by tales of disease, many buyers now drop sterilization pills into
the frozen blocks. If they are lucky, the stores will have ice from
Sulaimaniya or Erbil, Kurdish cities where it is made from clean mountain
water. If unlucky, the impure Baghdad product, with its distinctive yellow
sheen.
"I never used to buy ice in Saddam's regime, because I could use my
refrigerator. But nowadays I have to because there is no electricity, and we
need cold water," said Muhammad Abbadi, 52, the owner of a clothing store.
"Ice is the only source, even if it is dirty. Both my girls fell sick with
typhoid two weeks ago."
