The road to Baghdad (Part I in a series)An agonizing adventurous trip [Archives:2005/866/Reportage]

By Mohammed Khidr
[email protected]
Yemen Times Staff
I have recently traveled from Damascus to Baghdad to visit my family there after more than five years, using the highway linking the two capitals. It was my first time after the occupation of Iraq to use this way back home. I hired a modern car from Damascus to carry me as I preferred it to big passenger busses that usually carry tens of passengers and waned to feel more comfortable on this long and tiresome way especially during the summer time when the desert between Damascus and Baghdad burns you with its scorching heat that reaches sometimes to fifty degrees centigrade in the shade. I asked the driver if we could begin our travel early in the evening to avoid the scorching heat, he told me he would have preferred that but it was more risky because of various unpredictable dangers of the road. He told me the border point between Syria and Iraq would not open by American and Iraqi soldiers before 8 o'clock in the morning because of a curfew they impose to prevent \”terrorists infiltration”” across the borders into Iraq. We have agreed to launch our trip at four o'clock after midnight so that so that to arrive at the border point at seven am