No end to Baghdad dangers

By Hywel Jones
BBC, Baghdad

When dusk falls in Baghdad, not even the inner circle of Iraq's new elite can guarantee to keep the lights on.

At a safe-house in one of Baghdad's suburbs, I waited for Mouwafak al-Rabii, a member of Iraq's Governing Council. His bodyguards padded around the house as the electric power came on, then went off. On and off again.

The UN headquarters in Baghdad has suffered from two attacks

Then Dr al-Rabii burst into the room, beaming a welcoming smile in the gloom. The conversation quickly turned to the assassination of one of his colleagues on the governing council, Akila al-Hashimi.

Akila al-Hashimi had been one of the brightest stars of the new political generation in Iraq before gunmen ambushed her outside her home.

"What this act of terrorism wanted to do to the council members is to isolate them from the masses, the Iraqi people. This isn't going to happen," Dr al-Rabii told me.

"They wanted to frighten us because of our vision for Iraq. This isn't going to happen. We are going to stay with our people."

The people were off the streets by the time I made my way back to the centre of Baghdad in an armoured car.

Those streets have seen a lot of violent death in the last week or so.

In Baghdad, we have had the shooting of Akila al-Hashimi; a suicide bomber at the United Nations compound; and a roadside bomb which missed its target (a US military patrol) and blasted shrapnel through a bus in the rush hour.

Security is the issue here - whether you are a member of the governing council or just commuting to the day job.

Scaling back

The UN has decided that enough is enough, for now.

One UN worker put it succinctly on the day that the UN compound was targeted by a suicide bomber for the second time in barely a month: "We can't work if we're not safe."

Aqila al-Hashimi was one of three women on the 25-member Council

On the day of the bombing, my colleagues and I spent a long hot afternoon at the razor-wire cordon erected around the UN.

We watched American patrols speed past, the troops shouting greetings that were drowned out by the roar of their Humvees' six-litre diesel engines.

We reporters, in turn, talked to the world down satellite links about the dreadful details that always define events like these. What happened. Who died. When we might know more.

Then, through the cordon, an elegant and composed young woman sauntered towards us, dressed as if for a stroll on a late-summer evening (apart from her pale blue baseball cap).

She was a UN press person, who took us aside and told us that the organisation was "reconsidering" its presence in Iraq. And from that moment, it seemed almost inevitable that the UN would scale down its presence here.

With the UN pulling most of its people out of Iraq, other aid agencies are bound to take a long hard look at whether they should stay here. Aid workers often rely on the UN for security and co-ordination.

This is a country where nearly half of the population is thought to need assistance, according to a joint report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Food Programme.

Few are starving. But the report says chronic malnutrition persists among several million people, including an estimated 300,000 people who are refugees or driven from their homes by war.

Life in Iraq without the men and women in the pale blue baseball caps will be all the more difficult and dangerous.