The Dream Houses of Iraq’s Ali Babas

Jasem Mohammed says he was an honest man who had never stolen anything in his life. So he feels a little ashamed of whatever it was that clicked in his head since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime and made him a thief, like so many others in this southern Iraqi city.

But he can’t stop now. These are golden days, with no government and no rules. He sees it as the one chance he will have to drag his family of eight out of miserable poverty, leave behind their one-room hovel and build a dream house with two stories, four bedrooms, two bathrooms and orange walls.

“Who doesn’t like orange walls? Everyone likes the color orange,” said Mohammed, whose house will be built using stolen materials, on land that does not belong to him. Grinning happily, the 45-year-old sailor waved a plan of his house, which he had an engineer draw up for about $8.

In Basra, there is an atmosphere of teeming industry and frantic activity. Trucks piled high with bricks race around; donkeys drag carts laden with huge metal pylons and rods; and people are chalking out plans for foundations on the dirt and putting up walls for houses as fast as they can -- before a new authority materializes to tell them to stop.

Basra’s building boom has a crazy air. Virtually everything is stolen: the bricks, the mortar, the tiles -- even the land.

At some homes under construction, honestly purchased prewar bricks are topped by stolen bricks of another color, giving the houses a striped appearance. Once these illegal dwellings are built, the squatters plan to hook their own wires into the electricity lines, tap into phone lines and connect pipes to the water system.

In the meantime, they can use firewood to cook: the trees in the parks and along traffic islands are being chopped back to ugly stumps by locals looking for fuel.

There’s a name for this wave of collective kleptomania. Locals call the looters “Ali Babas,” and one hears the cry echoing around the streets. “Ali Baba! Ali Baba!”

To people like Mohammed, this new kind of freedom is dizzying.

“It’s the best opportunity I ever had in my life. This is a good chance to do anything, because everything is cheap and you can do it without permission,” he said, explaining that he had taken a piece of land in the south of the city.

“I knew no one would come and stop me because there’s no government. I’m hurrying to finish it before a new government comes.”

Some looters who took to the streets after British troops captured the city this month were so ashamed that they returned stolen items to the mosques. Some mosques resemble big parking lots, full of buses, ambulances, tractors, forklifts, digging equipment and other government vehicles, all returned in the last few days after being stolen.

But the looting goes on day and night. After the wild early days, when every last fitting was stripped from public buildings, people have become a little more creative and are systematically plundering the factories on the outskirts of the city.

In the Rashid Bank, people drilled narrow holes into floor vaults and lowered children in to hand out the money. Two children who were still in the vaults suffocated when looters set the bank on fire.

The Central Bank manager here declined the British military’s offer to remove the money in the vaults -- about 87 million dinars -- for safekeeping, insisting that his vaults were impregnable. A huge explosion early Saturday proved him wrong.

The 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards raced to the scene. “We found about 500 locals just running rampage. It was like ants. There was money everywhere. Some had it packed into [garbage] bags. Some had it in their trousers. We apprehended 57 suspects inside the bank,” British Lt. William Hawley said.

He said there was a shootout in the bank between two rival families who were both trying to break into the vaults. By the time the troops arrived, all they found were pools of blood.

“Many people are so poor and having their first sense of freedom, they think, ‘I need to get as much as I can as quickly as I can,’ ” Hawley said. It’s not clear how much was stolen.

Some looters are very poor, like Vajem Abas, trudging along the road with a trolley of shabby metal furniture, his shoes so old that one sole flapped open like a book, revealing grubby toes.

Everyone in Basra seems to be in a hurry: They have to deliver their load quickly and get back to take more. The people building houses stake out their plots on government land with white chalk, build shallow foundations and pile up the brick walls, with alarmingly little mortar, as fast as they can.

The cheekiest were building not far from the home of Abdul Razak Abdula, a police colonel under the old regime who once inspired terror around here.

“They would never have dared do this in the past,” said auxiliary policeman Hussein Ali Hussein, 32. A policeman when President Saddam Hussein was in power, he was now working unarmed under the British military.

He said the only job he’d been given by the British was checking identification papers. But without guns, he added, it was impossible for local police to stop armed looters.

His ex-boss, Abdula, the former police colonel, is also part of Basra’s building boom, with a big pile of bricks in front of his house and a crew of men on his roof adding a second story.

But people building not far from him on a strip of land next to a foul-smelling, green canal were disappointed Wednesday to find the area cordoned off by the British military. Antitank mines had been found near where the locals had wanted to build.

For the poor, the power vacuum presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but professionals and property owners are disgusted by what is happening to their city.

On a block of private land, two men nearly came to blows Wednesday morning after each accused the other of being a thief. The landowner was furious that someone had drawn white lines for foundations on his property while the other was enraged to see a pile of bricks stolen from his factory on the site. The real thief was nowhere to be found.

A few hours later, they were laughing about it, and the factory owner, Reshe Abdul Nabay, 45, had organized a team of men to return the bricks.

The landowner, Kadem Sabeeh, 42, an engineer with the Southern Oil Co., said that for many Iraqis, freedom means stealing. “The former regime erased any sense of national pride from our hearts. They made everybody hate everybody else,” he said.

“We are people who don’t respect ourselves. We respect power, and we respect fear. Now everyone in Iraq has a gun, and mindless people use them without a second thought. That’s what the regime instilled in us.”

Esmael Sayed, 53, a teacher, and his brother, Jawad Shahan, chose a corner plot of government land overlooking a river for their new place.

“It’s not just us. It’s everyone,” said Sayed, a pious man who reconciled the theft of land by arguing that it belonged not to the Iraqi people but to God.

“In my opinion, I can take it. Nobody needs this land,” he said, convinced that no new government would evict them.

“We will die here. I believe that. I’ll run a water pipe from the pipe over there to my house. And, of course, I can run a cable from the electricity wires to my house. It’s not a problem.”

Two donkeys named Saddam and Azat have been working hard for their masters these days, hauling load after load of tiles from a factory on Basra’s southern outskirts.

“Our business is only tiles,” said Ali Kadem, 33, saying he and his cousin had not tried stealing anything else.

He was furious that the British military had blocked an area Tuesday, preventing them from carrying away tiles. Others have strongly criticized the British military for being slow to act against the looters.

For Basra’s poor, the site where a large mosque was to be built is a kind of heaven. A mountain of bricks for the taking. One old woman plodded home from there with a single brick on her head. A dozen trucks lined up with laborers quickly tossing bricks into the backs of the trucks, careless about breakage. It was a hectic, joyful scene.

Jasem Mohammed, dreaming of his new house and orange walls, had to pay only about $5 for some boys to load his truck. One driver played a musical tune on his truck’s horn by using a keyboard that was connected to the vehicle’s horn -- a tradition among truck drivers in Iraq.

The laborers paused in their work for a few seconds, gyrating rhythmically to the sounds, clapping and singing. Then they went back to tossing bricks. Everyone here was happy.