Iraq’s Big Port Has Commerce, Crime — Even Camels
Umm Qasr is patrolled by Iraqi sailors in a few fast boats. Commanders say militias have penetrated the coast guard, adding to their problems.
UMM QASR, Iraq — In this Persian Gulf port, by far Iraq’s largest and most important, the misshapen realities of life and commerce in Iraq mix with the refreshingly ordinary ones that govern much of the rest of the world.
Commodore Thamir Nasser and the Iraqi naval forces he leads, for instance, carry out the routine law enforcement chores of intercepting smugglers who try to make away with boatloads of diesel fuel, crude oil, televisions, sheep and even troupes of Iraqi camels, which he believes are prized because they are not only especially patient but also remarkably cheap. He chases down small-time pirates and has killed them in shootouts.
But as Commodore Thamir, as he is known, bounced across the port in one of the little aluminum boats that make up most of this man’s navy, he said one of his toughest tasks was dealing with the Iraqi Coast Guard. Like the Iraqi police, the coast guard is controlled by the Interior Ministry and is widely considered to be infiltrated by local militias with little interest in halting smuggling.
“They are a separate operation,” Commodore Thamir said, gesturing helplessly toward the inland waters where his authority ends and the coast guard’s begins.
So separate, said Lt. Cmdr. Bryan White, an American officer who advises the Iraqi Navy, that he has found it easier to arrange joint operations with maritime forces from Kuwait, just south of here, than with the Iraqi Coast Guard. “It baffles me,” Commander White said.
So it goes in the port that was supposed to fall in the first hours of the 2003 invasion, but held its own through days of gun battles before it succumbed, becoming the country’s most important entry point for humanitarian supplies like rice and wheat. The port, located roughly 30 miles up a sinuous inlet from the gulf, remains crucial for supplying both Iraqi markets and the American-led reconstruction effort.
Umm Qasr’s ambiguous image was cemented early in the conflict when Britain’s defense secretary, Geoff Hoon, likened the city to the relatively upscale British port town of Southampton. To which an unidentified British soldier replied, “There’s no beer, no prostitutes and people are shooting at us. It’s more like Portsmouth.”
Now, after months of relative calm, sophisticated roadside bombs and assassinations of Iraqis who work with Westerners have increased across the entire south, while the port itself has become a place of danger, corruption, commercial bustle and intrigue.
In many ways Umm Qasr looks a lot like any deepwater port in the world. A long row of giant gantry cranes unloads cargo from freighters painted with unremarkable names like Tatyana, Marblue and Explorer I.
Uneven stretches of asphalt, tall grain elevators and long rows of warehouses flank the docks, which are dotted with piles of burlap sacks filled with imported cement, boxed refrigerators, microwave ovens, DVD players and television sets. Arab truck drivers doze or squat in the shade of flatbed trucks as they wait their turn to pick up the cargo and head north.
But in Umm Qasr, much of the cargo would not move an inch without bribes to crane operators and other dockworkers, said Najm Sager, a liaison between the Iraqi Port Authority and the United States Embassy who thinks that, for now, corruption is all but guaranteed at the port.
Because of the low wages paid to a typical dockworker, Mr. Sager said, “You are telling him, ‘Go steal.’ “
“That is why they ask for ‘tips,’ ” Mr. Sager said, a bit euphemistically. He added that typical salaries range from $150 to $250 a month, but that a crane operator can expect to collect a standard ‘tip’ of $50 per job.
Crime on the docks goes beyond graft. Iraqi police reports for 2006 show at least half a dozen murders of workers at Iraq’s southern ports.
Like Commodore Thamir, Mr. Sager was on the boat trip that was arranged by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to showcase $45 million in rebuilding projects, including a new cargo berth and work on two of the big cranes.
The bustle along the waterfront is no match for the ports in New York or San Francisco in their heydays, and in spite of the commercial activity it seems a little sleepy for the lifeline of a nation at war. The Marblue, carrying cement, looks so rusted it could be derelict. Railroad tracks crisscrossing the asphalt are empty because saboteurs to the north constantly cut the rail link to Baghdad, making the trains useless for cargo.
Still, for anyone looking for signs of normalcy in Iraq, the numbers are likely to impress. Between 16 and 18 freighters enter the port each week, unloading around 45,000 metric tons of wheat, 11,000 tons of rice, 55,000 tons of cement and 30,000 tons of general cargo.
It takes 4,000 to 5,000 trucks to move all of those goods out of the port each week and spread them around Iraq. As a consequence of all that traffic, port fees collected at Umm Qasr have shot up from around $600,000 a month in late 2004 to more than $2.5 million now.
But those fees are mostly absorbed in salaries, meager as they are. In a custom that may sound familiar to Americans, the Iraqi Port Authority carries thousands of unnecessary workers, Mr. Sager said, so dredging and rebuilding the port still depends on American cash. An official at the dock who asked to remain anonymous denied there were extra workers on the payroll.
And then there are the pirates and smugglers. Commodore Thamir, 44, whose official title is Iraqi operations commander, does not have a lot to work with, considering that his entire functioning navy consists of 10 of the fast aluminum boats, each 15 feet long; five Chinese-made patrol boats, each 40 feet long; and 10 dinghy-style boats.
But Commodore Thamir, a native of the southern city of Basra who graduated from the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, England, and served in Saddam Hussein’s navy, says that with the fast boats, he has everything he needs when a tip or a distress call comes in.
“Fifty knots,” he said of the speed of the fast boats, which were a present from the United Arab Emirates. “It is fast enough to catch anybody.”
Catch them he has. Three times his sailors and marines have chased down and killed the pirates who board ships here and often beat crew members until they reveal where their cash and valuables are stashed. His marines have grabbed suspected terrorists off the local ferry.
He has surprised small boats at sea as they transferred smuggled diesel onto larger vessels bound for points south along the Persian Gulf coast. In a series of e-mail communications, Commander White, who is the executive officer for a British-American mentoring and rebuilding program called the Naval Transition Team, confirmed the commodore’s recollections.
Commander White said that the naval security forces, which fall under the Ministry of Defense, face the same challenges of training and equipment as the Iraqi Army does. “But if we pulled out today, the Iraqi Navy could run itself,” he said.
Whether or not that prediction will ever be tested, Commodore Thamir and his friend Mr. Sager appeared most interested in bantering about the load of smuggled camels the navy had intercepted.
“The Arabs like camels,” the commodore said, trying to keep a straight face when asked why any smuggler would attempt such a thing.
“Iraqi camels and sheep are the most desirable,” Mr. Sager said, as they both began to laugh. “And cheap.”
Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Basra.
