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| A Train Ride Through Time: From Iraq’s Checkered Past Into an Uncertain Future (1319401) | |||
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A Train Ride Through Time: From Iraq’s Checkered Past Into an Uncertain Future |
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Posted by italianstallion on Sat Oct 18 23:18:51 2014 TimesBAGHDAD — Saad al-Tammimi is in his fourth decade working for Iraq’s railroads, a career that has taken him all around his country, and around the Middle East. Nowadays, though, he can go only from Baghdad to Basra, across the relatively calm Shiite-dominated south of this war-torn country. “If we have a problem and have to stop, it’s safe,” he said on a recent evening as he drove his regular route. “Even the Sunnis feel comfortable going to Basra.” With so much violence, neglect and political dysfunction here, it has been years since passenger trains leaving Baghdad went anywhere other than Basra. In recent years, however, grand ambitions to link the country by railroad had begun taking shape. Freight trains shuttled goods around Iraq, and a few years ago there were test runs of a new train service between Mosul and Turkey. But as the militants of the Islamic State have advanced around the country, those efforts have halted. At least Mr. Tammimi has a new train to drive, a sleek and shiny one built in China that glides out of the station at dusk and through the closed-in thicket of this city. It almost kisses the storefront awnings and low-slung homes that line the track as it moves past waving families, boys playing soccer and trash being burned, before reaching the rural south, past endless rows of date palms, on an overnight journey to Basra. Inside are the luxuries of first-class rail travel, including flat-screen televisions and refrigerators in the sleeper cabins. Rowdy young army recruits, answering the call to arms from their Shiite religious leaders and on their way to basic training, crowd the brightly lit cafe car. The food is second-rate — cold fried chicken and soggy French fries — but there is a good falafel joint in Hilla, a town on the way; if you call in advance, sandwiches will be waiting at the station. The new train is a small but noticeable sign of progress — of oil money spent in the interests of the public — in a country consumed by violence and corruption that is quickly coming apart in the face of an onslaught by the Sunni militants of the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL. It is also a reminder of what has been lost in Iraq and in the broader Middle East. Once, the region was connected by trains; building rail lines was central to the imperial ambitions of European powers — the Germans, the British and the French — to exert influence in the Middle East in the years before World War I, when the region was part of the Ottoman Empire. In more recent times, sectarian violence has torn apart diverse societies, especially in Iraq and Syria, that, for better or worse, were once held together by dictators. The areas reachable by trains have steadily shrunk, the diversity of the passengers who rode them a long-lost memory. . . . .etc. Lots of good pictures in a slide show on the website. |
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