| Long article from the Guardian about neighborhood patrols in Baghdad. When the Guardian can see the big news, it's big news. |
Under the embers of the wintry evening sun the Tigris river, usually as brown as old boots, had turned almost blood red. Its waters were calm but its oily sheen was disturbed by the oars of a rower as he sculled his way through the city's fractured heart. Alone and apparently indifferent to the threat of a sniper's bullet, Muhammad Rafiq eased up on his stroke rate and tacked over to the shore. He hauled his craft up the bank to a mosque - the temporary headquarters for his rowing club since US soldiers had commandeered its real boathouse in 2003. Inside the courtyard, his forehead beaded with sweat, Muhammad laid a few old blankets over his upturned boat and padlocked the oars to a railing."My friends said I was mad when I started rowing," said the 22-year-old former science student. "They said I would be sharing the river with dead bodies and that people would shoot at me. But it keeps me fit and it keeps me focused for my night work." As dusk fell, he checked the contents of his kit bag, slung it over his shoulder and jumped into a waiting taxi.
Fifteen minutes later, he had made it through checkpoints and concrete blast barriers en route to his home in al-Amil district of west Baghdad. At a makeshift barricade close to the street where he was born he greeted the sentries as friends. Then he unzipped his kit bag and pulled out a Kalashnikov. And for the next six uneventful hours he stood guard with his peers behind the straggles of barbed wire.
"I help to keep the peace so that I can row in peace, and that is my passion," said Muhammad, who asked that neither his real name nor that of his rowing club be used. "Now when I go out on the river, you can hear the birds and the hum of the generators. When I began it was only gunfire and bombs."