In March 2009, I was on a local bus in Esfahan, Iran, when I started talking to a random guy sitting next to me. I will not publish his name here. Turns out he was an engineer, working on Iran’s unmanned aerial vehicle program at a nearby aerospace firm. He seemed like a smart guy, he spoke English reasonably well and his knowledge of world affairs was pretty good. One of the things we talked about was Islam. Turns out he was a devout Shiite. It always surprises me when I meet religious scientists. It also surprised me that he was willing to admit what he worked on to me.

He told me about a recent pilgrimage he made, to Najaf and Karbala, in Iraq. Iranis weren’t allowed to make pilgrimages to Iraq for almost a generation, first because of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and then because Saddam Hussein sealed the Iran border post-war. The Iraq - American war in 1991 and the post-war sanctions were also a factor. The border opened up only after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The land border is now open, and apparently buses full of pilgrims make the journey, in stifling heat. My bus-mate flew to Baghdad, on a chartered flight full of pilgrims. He mentioned the corkscrew landing they had to make at Baghdad to avoid potential grenade and missile attacks, it scared him. Once they landed, he noticed security everywhere. Except they weren’t American. And they weren’t Iraqi. They were dressed in military fatigues. He believes they were Ugandan army or mercenaries. The word on the street is that the United States is paying the Ugandans to handle security at Baghdad airport. The Iraqis can’t be trusted and American lives are too valuable. So Ugandan mercenaries handle it.

Wikipedia says: “Currently Sabre International Security provides the ground and aviation security at the BIAP. The personnel consists of ex-pat nationals in key and supervisor roles and local nationals and a mixed Gurkha and Ugandan guard force.” (BIAP = Baghdad International Airport)

The immigration counters are all staffed by Thais. The Iraqis can’t be trusted to handle their own immigration processes. Most of the manual labour at the airport was being done by Filipinos. In fact, the only Iraqis he saw working at the airport were the people cleaning the toilets.

From Baghdad airport, his group of pilgrims took chartered buses, part of their package, to their pilgrimage sites, to the south. On the way, they had to pull over a couple of times to let convoys of oil tanker trucks pass. The convoys were protected by US forces. At least one US military vehicle every few trucks. There were about 80 trucks to each convoy. He counted. I wonder where the oil was going. My guess is probably to Kuwait, for export through its ports. I hope Iraq is being paid adequately for the oil being removed from it.

I have to wonder: If the Americans can’t trust the Iraqis to handle their own airport security, how much power are they really giving them? There have been many recent reports of the Iraqi army taking over security for large parts of Iraq. However, I believe theres more to it than that, this man’s story doesn’t necessarily support some of the good news out of Iraq. I guess time will tell. I hope the Iraqis don’t get screwed over any more than they already have. They’ve suffered a lot, the loss of life has been of almost genocidal proportions.

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Note that this story is based on one man’s retelling of his visit to Iraq. I don’t know if he had an agenda of his own. He didn’t seem to. He might have embellished the story. I don’t think its a complete fabrication. I would take the whole thing with a pinch of salt. My goal here is to reproduce the story as faithfully as I could, and provide my readers with the same level of information and detail as they would’ve gotten from talking to the man himself. I have done only cursory fact checking.