One of the more annoying aspects of life here is how one’s convenience has to take a back seat to the whims of whatever disorganised individual with whom one is currently interacting. Is the restaurant out of your favorite sandwich? No problem. You can have whatever else they think you should eat. Need a ride back to your hotel? No problem. As soon as the driver finishes his shopping, washing the car, chatting with his friends… whatever...
My latest beef is with the Palace Hotel. Again! If you remember the last page, you will remember that I was forced to pack up all my stuff and relocate to the first floor, due to renovations. I am a cooperative type, so I did it. But it seems they are renovating the entire hotel. And guests are simply an inconvenience that must be dealt with. So last night, after a full day and a long meeting, hungry and tired, I returned to the hotel only to be told I “must” move, AGAIN! No warning, no notice. That would lower the inconvenience level and we certainly can’t have that. So I wearily began hauling my stuff up the two flights of stairs for a second time in a week. It seems that the policy is to move you down until you cannot be moved down any longer, and then move you back up.
I realised early in the process that the fridge did not work in the room, so I suggested someone come and have a look. “Tomorrow” they told me. “OK, ‘tomorrow’ I will move then”, was the response. Not good enough. I had to move immediately, so they sent some guy up to look at it. He fiddled with the plug and switch and left without a word, clearly stymied. I continued the move, but I noticed that the stairwells were filling up with beds and dressers from the floors about to be renovated. Soon a mouse could not make it between floors so I attempted to use the elevator. One elevator was out of service, running people up and down to the restaurant on the 7th floor and not stopping in between. The other was in use by the staff, who were moving furniture between floors. When I had the temerity to ask about this, they looked at me as if I were daft. Because the stairwells were BLOCKED WITH FURNITURE, of course.
I completed the move and went down to the front desk to ask about the fridge. As I stood there, other AsiaCell staff arrived after a late meeting. They too were told they must move. Following my suggestion, they asked if everything in their rooms worked. “In sh’allah”, was the response. Translated it means “if Allah wills it”. We hear that phrase a lot here. It seems that most everything relies on divine intervention. Uncharacteristically, I told the clerk that I wanted the entire fridge, and contents, moved from my old room to my new room “NOW!” setting détente between Canada and Kurdistan back a week or two. It was done in minutes, one poor guy lifting the whole fridge by himself. I would not help.
The next morning I was caught at the elevator by one of the frequent power failures. Not a problem, you might think. The lazy son-of-a-gun can walk down a few flights of stairs. Remember the stairwells? If ever there were a fire…
That is how it is here. On any given day enough inconveniences occur that one could spend the entire day complaining. They are used to it here. Customer service is just non-existent. Business runs the same way. We are hoping to be a world-class company. My request to buy five air conditioning units for the building we are converting to office space, was declined. Procurement had run out of money. It seems they receive $7000 each week to purchase items. This week there were a lot of purchases the first day and the cash was all spent. So all departments were expected to wait for another week to buy whatever might be needed to ensure we stay in business. That’s just the way it goes. Our new CFO wants to change things but he is having a tough time. He’s a young guy and I think he will be very old in a few more months.
Monday, I left work after only 11 hours. After a long night of moving, the night before, I was looking forward to buying some milk and water and a few Diet Cokes at the Zagros department store next to the Palace Hotel. Then a quick movie and off to bed. It was not to be so easy.
As I exited the elevator on my latest floor, the cleaner had dumped a portion of the dirt from the vacuum cleaner on the carpet. Several of the giant cockroaches were amongst the debris. I asked him what they were called and he told me. The Arabic word is “sirsir” (“calancha” in Kurdish). He said there were hundreds of them crawling everywhere throughout the hotel, since the renovations had disturbed them. I was feeling the creepy-crawlies starting already. I suggested he vacuum them up again, although no doubt he was thinking they'd hide themselves if they were left alone. Grudgingly, he plugged in the vacuum and sucked them up again.
I changed, ran over to Zagros, bought my groceries and headed back to the Palace for supper. While I sat on my bed and made my pitiful nightly ham and cheese sandwich buns, I knocked over a half liter of strawberry milk onto my bed. I managed to thoroughly soak myself as well. What a mess. Since there was no way they’d come and change the bed at 8 PM, I sopped up as much of the mess as possible and laid a bath towel over the wet spot. Then I tore the sheets off the other bed and created a small nest of rags on which to spend the night. Finally, in that sorry state, I called Heather for some much needed sympathy. After a chat, and feeling better about life (she has that effect on me), I lay down to watch Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (with Clint Eastwood), on my laptop.
The renovations to the Palace carry on until late into the night. Banging and clunking are part of the norm until well after 10 PM. Just before 9 though, there was a particularly loud clunk that made me wonder what the heck was going on. At this point, I was watching a part of the movie where some bad guys shoot up Clint’s car. As that was happening on my laptop, I realised I was hearing additional gunshots outside my window. Soon it was clear that a full-blown operation of some sort was in progress in the parking lot. I stopped the movie, grabbed the phone and called Heather back.
I had already heard 40 to 100 shots over a few second span. These were AK-47 shots coming fast, but not as fast as the br-rr-rr-rr type of sound that an M1 would make. So I knew it was the Kurdish guys shooting, as opposed to the Americans. The shooting stopped and I described the scene to Heather as I cautiously peered through the heavy curtains of my third floor room.
The Palace Hotel parking lot is next to the Zagros Department Store parking lot. There is a small gate between them, but nothing that would stop a car. Instead, on the far side of the Zagros lot, there is a guarded entrance. This is similar to the Palace entrance, but without the nasty spike gate designed to blow the tires of any intruder. Guards at the Zagros entrance stop and inspect cars of the people who come to shop. Right beside the entrance, they are building an extension to the Zagros. A black BMW had slammed into the corner of the new construction. The parking lot was full of smoke from the gunshots so it was difficult to see what was happening at that point. Kurdish military guys were buzzing around and staying well clear of the car. Americans were guarding the wall between the Palace and the Zagros. These were not American soldiers. Most likely they were CIA or the special security forces that often guard international VIPs. As I looked down on the scene, I noticed a fiery whoosh in the Zagros lot and jumped away from the window. “It’s some sort of a rocket”, I told Heather. Either an RPG or a mortar, I could not tell. A few more shots rang out. Then it was quiet again.
By this time the smoke had cleared and as I ventured another look out the window, I could see that someone was in the car. The person appeared to be dead. Guards were cautiously approaching the car and soon after, a crowd of military personnel surrounded the vehicle. There was a lot of activity in the parking lot for the next few hours and I slept restlessly all night. The next day, I found out that it was indeed a car bomb and that the 19-year-old driver had been shot dead. The bomb was more than 500 kilos of explosives, enough to make quite a mess of my room (and the whole hotel), should the suicide bomber have been more fortunate. I was told that the driver was killed with his hand on the detonation trigger. A note was found in his pocket that read "from Earth to Heaven".
In the photo above, the blue arrow shows how the bomber entered the parking lot from the street. This is where his car would have been searched. The red area is where his car ended up, nose against the new construction, following the shooting. The yellow arrows show two possible ways to get into the Palace Hotel parking lot. straight ahead through a metal gate, or by going around the Zagros parking lot. The second way is blocked by cement barricades.
These photos (left to right) show the entrance to the Palace Hotel looking left from my balcony. The close-up shows the nasty spike barricade that was put in a month ago. The third picture indicates the difficulty a bomber would have getting around the Zagros parking lot into the Palace Hotel lot due to the concrete barricades. Finally, the last shot shows the Zagros lot again, but this time you can see the small metal gate the driver would likely have tried to crash through if he were not killed. Once through that gate, he'd be under my window.
Here is what the USA Today wrote about it:
Also Monday, authorities in the town of Sulaiminyah in
the Kurdish north of Iraq fired at a car rigged with explosives outside a hotel
that housed diplomats, killing the driver, Kurdish official Dana Abdul Majid
said.
Dana is the head of Sulaymaniya security. It’s really not much of a write-up compared with the massive bombings that have occurred over the past few weeks. Not very newsworthy, since only the bad guy was killed, but it was close to "home", and it was still not my turn to die.
The Kurdish News
Here is how it was reported in the Kurdish newspaper the next day. I have blotted out the picture of the dead kid. In typical gory fashion, he was shown lying dead and naked on a slab, riddled with bullet holes with blood pooling beneath him. I don't think there's much to be gained in showing that picture. You can, however, from this angle, see my hotel room window above the black BMW. I circled it in red. It was that close.
The next day, I found out that security in Sulaymaniya had known that someone was likely going to try to detonate a bomb somewhere in town. They had infiltrated the organization and they have intelligence that another car might be on its way to Sulaymaniya to try again. The target is not likely to be the Palace Hotel this time, they say. I hope security is right, and I hope the terrorists do not know where we work.
I also found out that the British ambassador to Iraq was staying in the Palace Hotel that night. Hence the international security. It may have been that the bomber knew that, but it is more likely that he was just targeting the Palace since it is the biggest hotel in Sulaymaniya. Nothing has happened here of note, and it would be a great coup for the terrorists to explode a bomb in the heart of Kurdistan.
One last picture. Here is the boy. He could have been the kid living across the street or the one who brings me my lunch sometimes. He could have been the son of the widow lady who I gave a buck to yesterday as she begged on the street. He could have been one of our own kids, except he lived in Iraq.
In less than two weeks, I will be out of this country, as they say, “In sh’allah”. It just can’t be soon enough for me.
Steve