Rubar Sandi climbed into an armored car, propped an automatic rifle between his knees, slapped another next to his right thigh and adjusted a pair of aviator sunglasses across his broad face.
He gave a quick nod to his driver and two bodyguards perched with guns on the front and back seats. Sandi, an Iraqi-American financier working with the U.S.-led coalition, was ready for another workday in this unsettled capital.
“You just try to suit yourself for the environment,” said Sandi, cocooned inside a thick-walled Trasco four-wheel-drive vehicle that can “handle everything but a missile.”
“Hopefully, it deters the bad guys,” he said.
Sandi’s precautions for a trip to a construction site in Baghdad reflect a new level of peril in doing business in Iraq and another threat to the coalition’s multibillion-dollar reconstruction effort. Recently insurgents and kidnappers have preyed on foreigners–notably contractors, businessmen and journalists–and have seriously disrupted the economic recovery.
About 40 foreigners from a dozen nations have been abducted in the past few weeks, according to the U.S. military. At least seven U.S. civilian contractors and a U.S. soldier have died after being caught in ambushes. A Danish businessman and an Italian hostage also were found dead in the past two weeks.
Reconstruction in Iraq’s hot spots from Baghdad to the south stalled this month as attacks surged. Work in relatively calmer cities, such as Mosul in the north and Basra in the south, stuttered but largely recovered.
U.S. government officials estimate that work has been derailed at 10 percent of Iraq’s work sites because of fears, threats of attack and a slowdown of supplies from Kuwait, Jordan and the port of Umm Qasr. Other coalition officials said privately that productivity has been hit much harder.
U.S.-financed contractors are spending a quarter of their money to protect workers and insure their projects, according to U.S. officials monitoring the work.
“The security issue has caused problems getting subcontractors to projects when they were supposed to be there and supplies when they were supposed to be there,” said James Hicks, a coalition senior adviser for electricity. “In this kind of environment, it is hard to move things around.”
Some major projects were completed before the latest wave of assaults. The dredging of the Umm Qasr port, an important transport link, was finished months ago. Bridges leading to Mosul have been rebuilt. A prominent dam in Haditha, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad, was finished in early April.
Progress on electricity
Iraqi Electricity Minister Ayham al-Samaraie said last week that the increase in attacks has not hurt the country’s most crucial goal: to repair enough transmission lines and generators for Iraqis to have adequate summer cooling.
Iraq “is on track” to provide 6,000 megawatts of electricity, a third more power than under the regime of Saddam Hussein, al-Samaraie said. “Air conditioners will be on,” he said. “Most of our parts–and all the essential parts–were in when the trouble started.”
Still, the troubles have hit close to home for al-Samaraie. A week ago armed gunmen open fire on his Baghdad home. His bodyguards fought them off, and three men were captured, he said.
“There’s such a long list of people who’d want to disrupt progress here,” al-Samaraie said. “I don’t even like to think who it was.”
Attacks are expected to increase as the planned June 30 turnover of sovereignty nears. And for now, government officials said, the effect of the attacks on scheduled reconstruction cannot be fully assessed.
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Officials from Mosul, Basra and Baghdad agree that the worst days of mayhem on the roads — April 9 through 12 — prompted a work shutdown in all major cities.
That period “was very difficult for people who have never been in an environment like that before,” said Maj. Gen. Ron Johnson, commander of the Gulf Region Division of the Army Corps of Engineers. Since then, he said, the workforce has been unreliable.
“We may not be going as fast as if it was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers working in Honolulu,” Johnson said. “But this is not Honolulu.”
Some workers returned last week, according to government officials and some contractors, but tension remained high for workers traveling north and south of Baghdad. General Electric suspended some operations. The German engineering business Siemens AG pulled all employees from Iraq.
Officials with Washington Group International, contracted to repair electrical lines and generators in the Sunni Triangle, an area where Hussein enjoyed strong support, said its American employees chose to live in metal containers at their work sites rather than travel through dangerous territory.
But Iraqi employees did not have that option. A week ago, 150 of the 200 Iraqis employed by Washington Group didn’t show up for work.
Work has progressed but at a slower pace, said Jack Herrmann, spokesman for the Idaho-based company.
`Extraordinary circumstances’
Even Bechtel Inc., the San Francisco-based contractor that has a $2.8 billion contract to oversee reconstruction and rarely admits problems, conceded through a spokesman that Iraq now poses some “extraordinary circumstances.”
Bechtel and its subcontractors employ about 41,000 Iraqis, and many have not shown up for work. The violence “has had an impact,” said Francis Canavan, a Bechtel official in Iraq. He would not elaborate.
This new battle for Iraq is not a complete surprise to Sandi, an Iraqi Kurd who advised the Bush administration before the war.
Sandi fled Hussein’s regime in the 1970s, living in Iran and then in the United States. Eventually he settled in Washington, where he was one of the Iraqi exiles clamoring for the fall of Hussein.
A year ago he drove around Baghdad in a sedan, looking for hotels to renovate, but now he uses his armored car and guards every time he leaves his office.
“All of Iraq is not Fallujah and Najaf,” he said, referring to two particularly restive cities. “[But] in the last month, I was convinced to upgrade.”
Sandi has developed five hotels in Baghdad, all now leased to the coalition. He has his own security operation and is in partnership with DynCorp International, a security business.
Sandi said his payroll includes 7,000 Iraqi workers. Eighteen employees have died in attacks in the past year.
“In a whole year, that isn’t too bad,” he said.
Requests for danger pay
Iraqis who show up for work have doubts about toiling for the U.S. effort, said Marwan Rahman, the manager of a Sandi project that involves renovating a villa. Last week some of the men asked Rahman for raises, to $10 a day from $7, to help compensate for the danger.
One worker, who would not give his name, joked about the name that the Americans have given the coalition headquarters, the Green Zone, a safe area. The Iraqi workers have another name for it.
“We call it the Red Zone, the hot zone,” he said. “We Iraqis would prefer to work outside of where the Americans are.”
Rahman said he is concerned about other workers.
“These are day laborers who come here every day, from everywhere in Iraq,” he said. “They are watching everything. . . . Any one of them could be a problem. . . . I fired 20 of them because, the way they acted, I feared they could be a problem.
“Sometimes,” Rahman said, “even I get scared.”