Chapter 30 26 Our Home

Premature flowering to fruiting is a bitter fruit. — Carl von Guderian When you arrive in Baghdad, the first thing you do is clean up.The beautiful Baghdad in the Arabian Nights in the past is now just a pile of dirty concrete buildings covered in mud.Whenever the Americans are happy to bomb, they will send planes to bomb them.Because the electricity was cut off for more than two months due to the war, all four refrigerators of our Baghdad branch of the Xinhua News Agency stink, and delicacies from mountains and seas have become animal carcasses.The flesh of the fish turned into thick blood and bleed all over the place. When I touched the rotten flesh, it turned into a pool of mud. Flies slammed into my face in groups, and one of them flew into my mouth.It took a full day to clean up.

We also had a "bomb" dropped in our yard.A pit with a diameter of more than three meters has already been filled.But the landlord said it was done by an unmanned reconnaissance plane, and the military police found a high-end camera on it. There was no electricity at night, and the landlord sent two packs of candles, which were produced in Iraq itself. They looked like my thumb, thick and thin, pale and feeble.The landlady smiled and said that she still had Chinese candles at home, but she was reluctant to use them.She thanked me repeatedly for the chemical protective suit and gas mask I gave her before the evacuation in the early morning of January 14.

After cleaning up our branch, Chief Zhu Shaohua and I drove out to see other Chinese units.The Liberation Square in the city center is quiet, and some shops are open as usual.People were doing all kinds of deals in front of the crater, and a Canon "Little Thunderbolt" camera with an LCD back sold for $30. From the outside, China Complete Equipment Export Corporation is intact.However, a piece of glass in the Civil Aviation Office of China was shattered, and a wooden plank was used to support it.The dozen or so barrels of gasoline stored in the pool behind the house were gone.I found a wooden stick and fished for a long time, but I didn't even catch the empty bucket.It was even worse for China Construction Company. Lao Zhu and I jumped over the wall and jumped into the courtyard. A black dog in the fish pond called for help, but it was too hungry to bark.This guy was probably very hungry and jumped into the dry pool to catch fish to eat, but his physical exertion was too great and he couldn't climb up again.Lao Zhu helped me carry this black guy ashore, and made me stinky all over.This black dog looks very much like my hunting dog "Qui En" when I photographed pandas in the Qinling Mountains. At that time, "Qui En" slept with me in the same bed every night.But this guy in front of me is a very poor creature. It sticks its mouth to my shoe, stretches its two front paws, and licks the mud on my shoe non-stop.I found a basin of clear water for it to drink. This guy has a pair of watery, sparkling, crystal clear big eyes that are pure and innocent, really like my old Beijing cat "Big Mi".

The fuel tanks of the cars in the backyard garage of China State Construction Corporation were pried open like the cars in the Chinese embassy, ​​and the gasoline was completely drained. The 2908 Toyota Crown car has only one wheel left, and the Mercedes-Benz-300 next to it has even the Mercedes-Benz logo on the hood. The "July 16" cable bridge facing the Presidential Palace was completely destroyed, but the Liberty Bridge was intact, but the Republic Bridge less than 800 meters away from it was blown into four sections and fell into the river.I heard from a friend afterwards that there were 10 bridges across the Tigris River in Baghdad, three of which were destroyed.

A bomb hit the open space outside the Afghan embassy adjacent to the Chinese embassy. The barbed wire fence was torn open with a gap of seven or eight meters. The trees were scorched and twisted shrapnel embedded in the trunk.Military Attache Cao and I stripped many shrapnel off the tree trunk. The streets are quiet, there are very few cars, most of them are parked quietly on the side of the road, and almost all of them are military vehicles.Since the war broke out on January 17, the Iraqi authorities have ordered the suspension of fuel supply to citizens. Each car can purchase 30 liters of gasoline every 20 days with a card, which is only half of the fuel tank of our Mercedes-Benz.Black market gasoline is 7 to 10 dinars per liter, which is 90 times more expensive than public price gasoline.

Cars are pulled aside, and people are using bicycles instead of walking.Even the children of the wealthy in Mansour, a rich area in the center of Baghdad, have begun to learn to ride bicycles.I went to make friends with them for the sake of taking pictures, and I went for a ride with them, and found that besides the Iraqi-made "Baghdad" brand, there were also many Chinese "Flying Pigeons" and "Golden Deer". The price of an ordinary Chinese-made 26 Flying Pigeon men's bicycle in a bicycle shop on the "16th Ramadan" street is as high as 400-500 dinars, which is more than 1,500 U.S. dollars. The slightly better Taiwan-made shift shaft The price of bicycles is more than 2,000 US dollars (the official price is 1 dinar: "3.228 US dollars).

Due to the shortage of food, rationing had to be implemented, and the black market bargaining price of food was dozens of times higher than that before the invasion of Kuwait.The black market price of white flour (refined flour) on Rashid Street is 7 dinars per kilogram, which is 129 times higher than the 0.054 dinars per kilogram when Kuwait was invaded on August 2.Under the statue of Saddam Hussein on Rashid Avenue, the busiest street in Baghdad, black market transactions are carried out in broad daylight. The original price of 400 grams of Nido milk powder is 0.6 dinars, and the black market price is 9 dinars. The original price of 2.5 kilograms of milk powder is 3.6 dinars, and the black market price is 50 dinars.

Tap water is scarce, and Xinhua News Agency only has tap water in the garden that can last a long time, and the film developed with it is covered with an inexplicable layer of hoarfrost.All the restrooms in the lobby on the first floor of the Rashid Hotel where foreign journalists once lived were locked, except for the restroom near the restaurant.I went in and took a pee, but there was no water.In the Mansour district where the wealthy live, the water is cut off above the second floor, and only the water pipes on the first floor have a trickle.On Rashid Street in the city center, people hold plastic basins and buckets and line up around the thin water pipes in the middle of the street to get water.The scorching sun of the Middle East hangs high.According to Dr. Halmi, a highly respected local doctor, due to the lack of disinfectants and bactericides, the tap water in Baghdad does not meet the hygienic standards and cannot be drunk.With the advent of summer, the daytime temperature in Baghdad can reach 40°C-50°C, and the highest temperature in some parts of southern Iraq can reach 70°C in midsummer, and the water shortage will become more serious at that time.The fountain at the Al Rashid Hotel is now completely dry, and the slim fountain sculpture of an Arab girl is covered with rust.

At night, we drove across Baghdad, but saw very few lights, and even these lights were mostly powered by small private generators.Baghdad became the City of Darkness due to the complete destruction of the Dula Oil Refinery and Dula Power Plant on the southern outskirts of Al-Ghadda.According to a person in charge of the Mansour District wearing a military uniform and carrying a pistol, the government is trying to concentrate small and medium power plants near Baghdad to supply power to Baghdad, but the situation is still tense due to insufficient energy.As a result, the generator market on Rashid Street has boomed, and a 4,000-watt second-hand Honda diesel generator sells for 8,000 dinars (about 25,000 U.S. dollars).

The Chinese call Abu Zhan Wahab Square "Liu Wenxue Square" because a statue resembling Liu Wenxue stands here. In fact, this is the monument where Saddam and others assassinated Qassem.The black market dollar here changes by the day.The Danish w of the United Nations peacekeeping force before the war once sold the dollar at 5.56, and now it has risen to 6.68.The official rule is that 1 dinar is 3.228 US dollars, and the upside down is 18 times. (When I went to Baghdad for the fourth time in July 1993, 1 U.S. dollar was exchanged for 100 dinars.) All kinds of poor men exchanged all kinds of strange and unknown items on the black market for U.S. dollars.

On January 13th, the Jawula Cinema I visited was closed, and the popular European and American films and TV series have disappeared. Baghdad TV only broadcasts one program. The signal is extremely weak, and the color is on and off. Except for the sound, it is all Arabic historical dramas. The original 16 pages of the official La Repubblica have been reduced to 8 pages, with poor quality paper, dull ink and blurred photographs.The English-language official newspaper, the Baghdad Observer, has ceased publication. There is no telephone in the whole city, because all communication centers and telephone offices were destroyed by the US military.The communication with the outside world depends on the three satellite phones set up in the Rashid Hotel, which belong to WTN, AP and VIS NEWS (Reuters.NBC, BBC).The asking price ranges from $150 to $200 per minute. At the intersection of Sadong Avenue, two young men with mysterious looks stopped me and asked me whether I supported the United States or Iraq.I said I didn't understand much, I'm a photographer and I don't understand politics.But my mother said I was born a loyal friend of the Iraqi people.The two men asked viciously, "What do you mean? You should know that we Kurds are starving to death." All intersections in the city are guarded by security police, soldiers, Republican Guards and militiamen to check passing vehicles.Because we are Chinese, we are treated with courtesy and exempted from inspection.The guards and soldiers of the Rafidan National Bank on Rashid Avenue were very kind to see us back and hugged us endlessly.And busy asking for the pictures I took of them last time. At night, American planes roared in, making people unable to sleep because of the noise, and there were no ground weapons to fight back.After the war, German Chancellor Adenauer said: "Patience is the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the defeated."