TIKRIT, Iraq — We made it inside the city lim­its, about 5 km from the city cen­ter, before we got shot at.
We had decided to get an early start and headed out to Kirkuk and then to Tikrit. Along the way, we agreed to meet in Kirkuk to form a con­voy of other jour­nal­ists. While we were wait­ing for the other guys — mostly Ital­ians and Ger­mans — to show up, we talked with some of the Kirkukis.
The appear­ance of calm is decep­tive, they said. Dur­ing the day, the police keep a sem­blance of order, but at night, rov­ing gangs with guns have been ter­ror­iz­ing peo­ple in their homes. The peo­ple we talked to also said they had had no water for four days.
“Why doesn’t Amer­ica do some­thing?” asked Sal­ima Abdul-Kadir Abdula, a nurse at the hos­pi­tal in town. She can’t drive to work because she’s afraid of car­jack­ings.
More omi­nously for the future, per­haps, was Sham Sideem Has­san, 45, a charis­matic teacher who was work­ing the crowd that had gath­ered.
“These Arabs here, they are Sad­damists!” he yelled. “They have to go! They can­not stay! Kirkuk is Kur­dish and Turkomen. Get those Arabs out!“
The last line was the money line, caus­ing the crowd to burst into applause. Another man tugged my sleeve, pointed to Has­san and said, “This is good, this is good!“
Fig­ures vary, but there may be as many as 100,000 Arab fam­i­lies who were trucked up to Kirkuk under the Ba’athist regime’s pol­icy of Ara­biza­tion since 1977. It’s unclear how wide­spread Hassan’s ideas are, but they don’t bode well for the future.
After we finally hooked up with our con­voy, we set out. They all had com­bat vests and four-wheel drive vehi­cles. But we sol­diered on, even when they stu­pidly stopped at a cross­roads about 10 km from the city lim­its.
“We heard some­thing about this cross­road,” said their trans­la­tor as he stepped out of the car. There was no cover any­where and we were easy tar­gets.
“Why the hell are we stop­ping?” J. asked and Frey­doon gunned the engine.
The route to Tikrit is ugly and tire­some. Not quite desert and not quite fer­tile, dust rises at the slight­est breeze and gets every­where. The hills are jagged and dim­pled with craters, some out­lined in scorch marks. The land is blasted away in many places. Even in April, stand­ing in the sun­light for a few moments was uncom­fort­ably warm.
The road was thank­fully spot­ted with pesh­mer­gas, but their pres­ence was light, so we were wary. Along the way, we passed an over­turned mobile mis­sile launcher with the mis­sile still attached. To my and J.‘s untrained eyes, it looked like a surface-to-surface mis­sile.
Enter­ing the city was tense. We had no idea who was friendly and who wasn’t. The pesh­mer­gas told us that Arabs were shoot­ing at any Kurds they saw. The streets on the out­skirts were mostly deserted. The few men who were on the street car­ried Kalish­nikovs.
Our con­voy stopped on the out­skirts so some PUK pesh­mer­gas could stage a lit­tle media event. A large bill­board of Sad­dam in Bedouin dress greeted vis­i­tors. They doused it with gaso­line and set it on fire, pos­ing in front of the burn­ing por­trait for our troupe’s cam­eras.
While we were stand­ing around admir­ing the flames, a man in a dark car, com­ing from the direc­tion of –Haweja– Uja, Saddam’s birth­place, pulled up. He watched the bill­board burn silently and then waved at me. I was about 20 meters away. I waved back war­ily. Then he beck­oned me closer.
No way. I shook my head at him and called out to J., Frey­doon and Sabah, our trans­la­tor. “Let’s go.“
Smoke from the direc­tion of Haweja was a black smudge in the sky. We could see, off in the dis­tance over Tikrit, an Amer­i­can heli­copter gun­ship buzzing low over the rooftops. Every few sec­onds a muted BOOM rolled over us. Reports from our short-wave BBC pickup said U.S. troops were meet­ing lit­tle resis­tance.
We moved fur­ther into the city along a four-lane high­way with a median. Two of the other SUVs were in front of us. Sud­denly another SUV pulled in front of our train and stopped. The man in the pas­sen­ger side draped a white flag out the win­dow at arm’s length. Another dark car pulled up on his side block­ing the way. Some­thing smelled really bad about this sit­u­a­tion.
“Back up, back up!” we demanded of Frey­doon, and he pulled back far enough to spin the wheel and force us through a gap in the median. We heard shout­ing behind us and then the sharp crack of gun­fire. We all ducked and Frey­doon floored it north out of town. I don’t know what hap­pened to the Ger­mans and Ital­ians and I’m wor­ried.
We drove back to the ruined mis­sile launcher before I made the call to try again. But on the way back in, we saw many, many cars stream­ing from the direc­tion of Tikrit, includ­ing a num­ber of media cars. Sev­eral dri­vers motioned for us to turn around and by the third time, I was suf­fi­ciently freaked out to pay them some heed. We turned around and caught up with a truck full of men. As we sped along the high­way, they told us the Arabs had started shoot­ing at every­one in sight, and that Tikrit was not safe.
I decided we should head back to Kirkuk to work out our next move.

IRAQI HIGHWAY 2 TO KIRKUK, Iraq — While en route to take another stab at Tikrit, I thought I’d answer a cou­ple of ques­tions.
Syria may or may not be the next tar­get, I don’t know. No one here knows any­thing as that deci­sion will be made in Wash­ing­ton. I’ll ask around, how­ever, but I doubt any­one will be able to tell me about it.
Some­one in the com­ments asked about an action photo. I’m not fond of hav­ing my pic­ture taken, but I’ll see if J. can whip some­thing up.
Opie asked when I was com­ing back. My return ticket was for April 24, but that’s scotched at the moment for two rea­son. One, Swiss Air has gone out of busi­ness. Two, I can’t go back through Turkey, since I’ve heard from a buddy in the Newsweek bureau in Istan­bul that B2I has come to the atten­tion of the author­i­ties. And since I smug­gled myself across the bor­der and I have no exit stamp on my Turk­ish visa, I would be arrested when I come back. Prob­a­bly I’d be fined and released after a few hours. Maybe not, how­ever. I don’t feel like chanc­ing it, so I’m look­ing for an alter­na­tive exit strat­egy. Jor­dan or Kuwait, per­haps. Besides, I’ve never been to either coun­try. And in my more opti­mistic moments, I think, “There’s always Bagh­dad Inter­na­tional.“
Also, I just had another $3000 wired. A guy here in Arbil has a dol­lar account in Turkey. It’s a bank-to-bank trans­fer, and he keeps 5% of the money and release the rest to me in cash. He’s a human ATM machine. Deals like this is how cash gets into Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. The upside is that since my return plans are now a bit up in the air, the money will allow me to stay a lit­tle longer, per­haps if I choose.
Lastly, there needs to be an exit strat­egy for B2I itself. I’m unde­cided on what to do, other than take a break after this war — I’ve been doing the site solo for about 10 months now on an almost daily basis. I need a vaca­tion. But after that? Per­son­ally, I’m going to have to go back to work and/or find another job. I’ll def­i­nitely spin some of the sto­ries on B2I into free­lance arti­cles or syn­di­cate some of them. I’ve had some nib­bles on book deals and I’ll look into that, too.
But what hap­pens to the site? I think we can declare this exper­i­ment in inde­pen­dent, reader-funded jour­nal­ism a suc­cess. But where do we go from here? I’m open to sug­ges­tions, so please leave them in the com­ments sec­tion on this entry.
On to Tikrit.

KIRKUK, Iraq — I’m stand­ing about 50 km from Tikrit and ner­vous enough to feel like I’ve just swal­lowed molten lead. The road is as straight as an sniper shot. Behind me, about 10 km, stands the last PUK check­point after Kirkuk. The land is flat, and per­haps it’s my imag­i­na­tion, but it appears stunted and less fer­tile than the hills and moun­tains to the north east. There is a light wind that smells faintly of burn­ing oil. Every now and then a car passes our small encamp­ment on the side of the road and its pas­sen­gers peer at us intently. The ones com­ing from the direc­tion of Tikrit don’t smile. Before us lies the strong­hold of Sad­dam Hus­sein, and I have to make a deci­sion to press on or not.
J. and I left ear­lier this morn­ing from Arbil think­ing the war was done, more or less, after see­ing the footage from CNN that things looked quiet. We left before we knew the truth. Cor­re­spon­dent Brent Sadler would come under fire from auto­matic weapons and flee the city under a hail of bul­lets.
When­ever we ask, pesh­mer­gas and other offi­cials tell it is “very dan­ger­ous” to go to Tikrit, that despite the claims of CENTCOM, U.S. forces are nowhere to be seen. Fara’doon Abdul-Kadir, the newly appointed interim gov­er­nor of Kirkuk, warns me that there are no pesh­mer­gas past the check­point — we’ll be on our own. We’re in a taxi with blue “TV” taped to the side pan­els and win­dows. Frey­doon, our loyal dri­ver and now body­guard, is pack­ing a 9mm Brown­ing Hi-Power that J. picked up at the weapons bazaar when I wasn’t look­ing. It won’t do much good, how­ever, against the Kalish­nikovs of the Feday­een Sad­dam.
The fact of the mat­ter is that Tikrit is “hot” as the journos here say. It is not “fine” as I thought it might be from CNN’s early footage. A Kur­dish jour­nal­ist and his crew that I’ve become friendly with were chased by men in black in black sedans later in the after­noon when they got within a few kilo­me­ters of the entrance of the city. Feday­een. From Mustafa’s descrip­tion of his pur­suers, they sound like James Bond vil­lains.
There is a rumor that Jalal Tal­a­bani, head of the PUK, sent in Said Jabadi, a for­mer Ba’athist, to nego­ti­ate a sur­ren­der of the city. Twenty-five of the 28 clans have agreed to sur­ren­der their weapons, but only to allied forces. No pesh­mer­gas. The other three, includ­ing Saddam’s clan, have said they will fight to the end. It seems, then, the Amer­i­can bom­bard­ment will con­tinue.
The lead­er­ship is holed up there, some believe, and the U.S. doesn’t want to take any chances on los­ing them. What hap­pens in the next few days will be a sharp, short shock. Tikrit, I’m guess­ing, will be cut off from the out­side world — no one in, no one out. The ques­tion is whether to be inside or out­side when that hap­pens.
Ulti­mately, I decide to turn back. It’s not worth it. We don’t have eight cylin­ders under our hood, we don’t have the pro­tec­tion, we don’t have the backup and so far, we don’t have a story. Yeah, it’d be cool to say I was in Tikrit before it was sacked, but I need to have a bet­ter story than what Tikri­tis think about the U.S. Marines and the demise of Saddam’s regime.
Tomor­row, we’ll try another probe, to see what we can see, but I’ve reserved the right to turn back at any time. See? I am a phys­i­cal cow­ard.
*In other news*
Kirkuk has been mostly brought under con­trol, and Mosul is on its way. The road to Kirkuk is patrolled and man­aged by U.S. troops. No weapons go in, except for a few AK-47s car­ried by autho­rized pesh­mer­gas. Inside the city, which saw much less loot­ing than Mosul, the process of cleanup has begun. Jar­ringly, police trucked in from Cham­chamal and Suleimaniya are wear­ing Iraqi police uni­forms, which look exactly like Iraqi Army uni­forms. The whole time I was in Kirkuk, I thought we were sur­rounded by Iraqi troops that had decided to make them­selves use­ful after sur­ren­der­ing.
Not the case, as it turns out. The Kurds are using the old uni­forms of the Iraqis so as not to antag­o­nize the Turks (or any­one else) into think­ing that “Kur­dish uni­forms” were the mark of an inde­pen­dence bid. So the Kurds, who have suf­fered griev­ously under the regime, have donned the sil­ver eagle, black beret and green fatigues of their enemy to keep Turkey and Iran happy. The new police force num­bers 1,500 men, said Abdul-Kadir.
The interim gov­ern­ment — which as yet has no expi­ra­tion date — will be made up of a 21-member com­mit­tee, with four mem­bers of each eth­nic group: Kurds, Arabs, Turkomen and Assyr­i­ans, said Sadi Ahmed Pire, who is with the PUK inter­na­tional rela­tions office and the chief PUK rep­re­sen­ta­tive in Arbil. The last mem­ber will be Brig. Gen­eral James Parker, com­man­der of the north­ern forces. (*CORRECTION:* I incor­rectly reported his name ear­lier. I apol­o­gize for the late cor­rec­tion.) The com­mit­tee will advise Adbul-Kadir as he nav­i­gates the eth­nic mine­fields of the region and attempts to answer ques­tions such as what will hap­pen to the Arab fam­i­lies who were moved, often against their will, into the homes of expelled Kurds? What hap­pens if the Turks move in? Where will the Kur­dish refugees, which some esti­mates put near 300,000, go?
These ques­tions are as yet unanswered.