Taking the Bus Home, Toward War

The men came scrambling through the streets, clutching kerosene lanterns, bedrolls, a few days’ food. They reached the bus, heaved their baggage into the underbelly and clambered aboard as if it were the last ride out of town.

There was a tailor who had worked all night at a pants factory, a lone woman who stared out the window from the depths of her black veil, a cook who after days of argument managed to wrangle his passport from his boss’ grip.

The Iraqis were bound for home, some to fight for their country.

“I’ve been waiting for this moment,” said Usam Zead, a skinny 21-year-old who had come to Jordan from Samawah, Iraq, to work at a string of day jobs.

This isn’t what the world had anticipated.

Before the war began, governments and human rights groups erected refugee camps along Iraq’s borders for those fleeing the war, but so far the tents have been deserted. Instead, the human tides have been running the other way, particularly from Jordan into Iraq. Jordanian border authorities estimate that well over 5,000 people have crossed, and buses have been rolling east out of Amman every day, heavy with men making the long trek to a battle zone.

The bus that left the Jordanian capital Sunday would run the five hours to the Iraqi border; then the passengers would be on their own. They had no notion of what awaited them on the other side -- whether they might be bombed or stopped by foreign soldiers, or whether they could hitch a ride into Baghdad, about 300 miles beyond.

An American journalist who traveled from Baghdad on Sunday said at least 100 bombed-out vehicles littered the main road from the Iraqi capital, U.S. helicopters hovered overhead and Australian special forces had stopped his car.

On Monday, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said special forces were “denying freedom of movement throughout the western desert” and have turned back some of the people streaming into Iraq.

Still, these passengers were determined to try. Their road to Baghdad started here, in the ramshackle corners of Amman, where thousands of Iraqi migrants take beds in group houses and work for money to send home.

“When you’re at war and you’re ready to fight, it means death,” Zead said. His two brothers are soldiers; he himself once served in the army. “You have to accept the word, death, and say, ‘I’m dying.’ ”

As the bus idled on the street, soft music poured from a television dangling from the ceiling. Somber Palestinian children stared down from the screen like small ghosts. “Welcome back,” they sang, “welcome back to the land.” Well-wishers crammed the bus’ aisle, clinging to hands for final goodbyes.

The horn squalled, the engine roared and a shiver of excitement passed through the bus. “Peace upon the prophet Muhammad!” the men cried. They stomped their feet, waved frantically through the windows. The people on the sidewalk below raised their hands in salute and split their fingers into Vs. The bus creaked off the curb and jolted its way into traffic.

“My heart is booming,” Zead said.

His eye caught the face of a man in the crowd outside, and he banged his fist on the pane. The friend’s face split into a grin and his arms pumped a wild goodbye, but there were tears on his face. Zead kissed his palm and pressed it to the glass. The bus pushed forward; his friend slipped out of sight. Zead sighed, shifted in his seat and lighted a cigarette.

“I am not frightened,” he said, but his hands trembled. “I’m not a man if I don’t defend my country.”

The bus lurched past the ruins left by Roman conquerors, past the marketplace and the tenements that climb the old hills like stained boxes. The outskirts of Amman faded away -- the wilting cypress trees, the tangled vacant lots where old women stooped to pick herbs, the cool stone shadows of the mosques. The remains of the winter rains coursed over a rocky riverbed.

Asked whether they will see Jordan again, the men uttered a word they repeated like a mantra on their eastward plunge into uncertainty: Inshallah. God willing.

“Brothers,” urged the Palestinians on the screen, “rescue the Muslims.”

Some of the passengers were confident that Iraqi military representatives would pick them up on the other side of the border and take them into the army. But they were circumspect when pressed for details.

“Life is open, it’s happening before me,” said Abbas Majdi, 30. “People die. It’s better that I should die this way.”

It sounds like fatalism, but their motives are not so simple. Each of the men said, “I want to fight for Iraq.” When asked for specifics, however, some admitted they were headed not to battle but for home, frantic to see their families. Some drew no distinction between those two impulses.

They were driven by religious duty or, at least in part, by a feverish peer pressure: They said they were ashamed to stay in Jordan while their homeland came under attack.

“If chance brings death to my family and I am not there,” said 29-year-old Ehssan abu Ihkame, “I couldn’t live.”

When Abu Ihkame finished his university studies in Russian and English, he moved to Amman and found a job at a clothing factory, sewing on the graveyard shift. He would send the money home to his aging parents and siblings.

Then the war began, and the taxis stopped running between Jordan and Iraq. It was a small change, but for families like Abu Ihkame’s, it was devastating. The makeshift network of cabs had long been a lifeline, ferrying letters and packages between Amman and Baghdad. Now the drivers are afraid to make the trip, and the men are faced with unbearable silence from home.

A day before the war began, Abu Ihkame phoned his family. His 23-year-old sister answered and burst into tears. “Thank God you called,” she told him. “We tried to call you, but we couldn’t find you.”

“This broke my heart, and I couldn’t go on,” he said. “If you were in my place, what would you do?”

Quiet had fallen on the bus. A white-haired man fell asleep; his head bobbed in time with the bumpy road. The landscape opened, the sky loomed wider, the hills fell away. Green farmland faded to brown desert and black rock. Zead pinched the bridge of his nose and stared at the floor.

The bus driver, a Palestinian named Khalid Ali Khalil, watched in the rearview mirror. “I wish that I could join them,” he said. “It’s a natural feeling.”

He slipped a disc into a dashboard DVD player, and Arab dance videos filled the television screen. The men clapped their hands over their heads and nodded with the music.

On the set, smiling women in baseball caps and shorts belly-danced in a seaside grove of palm trees. Fat men in suits shuffled on a nightclub floor. The singer spun a lithe brunet before twinkling lights, and her hair swirled in a gleaming arc.

Outside, Bedouin shepherds prodded their flocks over the rocky landscape. A dog lay dead in the sun. The dirt had taken on a ruddy tinge.

“Goodbye, my friends, I am tired,” the singer crooned in Arabic. “I need my beloved to hold me -- I am very tired.”

The bus rolled on, following this ribbon of road through nothingness to Iraq.

It was impossible to say if or when the passengers would reach Baghdad. Inshallah, they said, they would make it by next light.