Countdown to Handover

June 21 - 27

It would just take too much time to describe the carnage of the past few days. The coordinated bomb attacks last Thursday were unexpected in spite of everyone talking of an increase in violence leading up to the handover of power on June 30. The focus of the attacks has been on local Iraqi people, especially the ones trying to bring law to this lawless land. 

Cloistered in the relative safety of Sulaymaniya, I often worry about our field staff in hellholes like Mosel. Our CTO was trapped there on Thursday as the US Striker battalion closed down the city. With the large airport in Mosul, US forces have been there since the occupation. Since Saddam also had a large force there, Mosul’s population consists of Sunnis, Turkmen and Kurds. There is little love for each other and general hatred of the US forces, especially amongst the Sunnis. Yet the city of several million is instrumental in AsiaCell’s plans for the future so we must build there.

 Security Report from one of our Contractors - June 25, 2004

Steve

In the weeks leading up to the handover, the security situation in the North has deteriorated significantly.  Only last week one of our drivers was approached and was offered a significant amount of money to hand over foreign contractors.  Until such time as the impact of the handover is known we have no choice but to place a severe travel restriction on our expatriate employees.

We will endeavor to continue with site work to the extent that we can safely manage it.  As you know we currently have one local engineer carrying out supervision works for us in the Tikrit region. We are currently reviewing our security strategy and this may well have a direct effect on the level of local recruitment. Please be assured that we will do all that we can to mitigate delays but this will not be at an unreasonable risk to our employees.

We would appreciate it if all incident notifications and security notices that are issued by AsiaCell to its employees be copied to our offices. We will ensure that all incidents reported by our staff are notified to AsiaCell.

1. The information contained here should be issued and discussed with all of your staff. In particular, ALL personnel should be briefed on the hostage procedures described. Most should have seen this before but it won't hurt to go through it again.

2. In the coming weeks to the handover there is to be NO travel by expat staff into Mosul or Tikrit. If this means that site work is delayed then so be it.

3. Please advise all staff to be careful about how they dress.  Baseball caps and expensive looking sunglasses have "rich foreigner" written all over them. The locals do not dress this way so we should not either.

4. If you have not done so already, please review the security of your villas and place guards, improve locks and restrict access. Entry to our buildings by anyone other than our staff is to be controlled. That includes the residences for the site staff.

And the supporting Field Report from June 14 that shows how serious the situation is all across Iraq.

The Coalition Provisional Authority is rapidly pulling out. Things are very quiet at the Palace Hotel these days. They are renovating the entire fifth and sixth floors where the CPA has been staying for more than a year. I’m told that the Palace Hotel was a real jewel a few years ago but in the Saddam days, it was looted over and over, which is why it is now the armpit of hotels. I hope they made enough money during the occupation to restore it to some of its former glory. OK, I’ll settle for cleaning the carpet and maybe the bathtub.

We have a license issue whereby Erbil, a town with a pirate mobile phone system, will not allow us to build into the town. The CPA will not support us there. We pulled off a fast one on the town authorities a few days ago. We prepared our equipment beforehand and in one day, we went live with one station in the center of town. They were most upset and the municipal government threatened arrests. The head of the local government has a nephew who runs the pirate phone system there! Our Chief Technical Officer went down to Erbil, actually hoping to be arrested. This would definitely have been front-page news in the UK. Imagine. British citizen, in Iraq helping rebuild country infrastructure, arrested for putting up a legally licensed base station. Ahh, the press would have a field day. Sadly for him, it didn't happen. I counseled against it. Police station in Iraq? Not the safest hideaway one could thing of. Anyway, so far, we are fighting the Erbil authorities at every turn, and since we are building four more sites there right now, we seem to be winning.

More days pass and my time here is growing ever shorter. I am fielding a lot of different possibilities for other jobs once this is over. Heather is hoping for paradise but my only requirement is that we can all be together as a family again. The memories of Paris and Finland and Sweden and Warsaw don’t seem too bad at all. If we could just get something in Penticton or Florida or the Riviera or the Caribbean, all would be well.

Is it too early to say "see you soon"?

Steve

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