Iraqi Gold Scavengers See Dreams Melt Away

Follow the mute boy through ruins where princesses once bathed and you will see Edan Chlayeb mining poor man’s gold in the half-light, his fingers sifting dust amid caldrons of fire.

Chlayeb is known as “the purifier.” His flame melts all that is worthless from scraps collected from the shops of goldsmiths. He separates dust from gold and then gold from silver. If he is lucky, and often he is not, he will see flakes glinting like faraway stars in his pan. He weighs and sells them, but these days, since the war, there is sparse fortune in the fires and grit of Chlayeb’s hidden world on the Tigris.

“I will earn $3 today, but I need $6 to feed my family,” says Chlayeb, wearing cracked shoes and a ripped shirt as he stands in the glow of his caldron. “We’re exhausted. Kerosene prices are up. Petrol is up. Rent is up. I have three boys and three girls. I used to earn much more, but now how can I support them?”

Other men leave their fires to listen. They shake their heads.

The purifier speaks the truth.

“The demand for gold has declined,” says Raad Aoda, a heavyset man standing over a bin of dust and white cleansing powder. “When the war came, the goldsmiths hid their gold. But now the value of the dinar is going up and down and people aren’t thinking of gold. We’re extracting 40% less from the dust. Nothing is clear in our country anymore.”

The gold miners are gruff, but they are fragile. Theirs is among thousands of seldom-seen rhythms disrupted by the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March. The war touched the obvious and the obscure, and its aftermath is taking stiff tolls on poor and working-class Iraqis. A burden in one place ripples to another. With Iraqis buying fewer rings, bracelets and earrings, the goldsmiths are filing and engraving less gold, which means fewer flecks are tumbling to the floor for “urban miners” such as Chlayeb to collect.

“I learned this trade from my father,” Ameen Isa Shijar says, “and I can tell you the old days were better.”

The signs of hard times are easy to spot if one knows the gold craft. The miners cannot afford the graphite pots in which to bake their dust and separate their metals, so they use artillery shells instead. With less dirt from goldsmiths’ shops, the miners scavenge for gold- and silver-plated computer circuit boards. Some cull silver from film discarded by photo shops.

The yield is never big, and sometimes the miners joke that they need plane tickets to America, where they’ve heard there are mountains of old computer parts.

“Take us with you,” one says. “We could do well there.”

Most of Baghdad’s gold miners are Sabaeans, members of a religious sect that follows the teachings of John the Baptist and is a curiosity in this predominantly Muslim culture because its wedding ceremonies are performed in the Tigris’ shallow waters. The Sabaeans and the Jews shared Iraq’s gold trade for generations, but in the early 1950s, thousands of Jews fled Iraq and the Sabaeans, with a population of between 70,000 to 100,000, inherited much of the precious-metal business.

To find the miners, walk past the goldsmiths on Al Nahar Street, past a man selling ducks and the cart boys running from shop to shop with deliveries, past stalls of smoked onions and kebabs. Then you hit the alley that slides downhill and cuts right, opening onto a labyrinth of mud-brick walls and sunlight shafting through broken ceilings.

There is the clatter of stokers, the roar of propane fires, the hiss of nitric acid, the smell of ash and rust, and the ephemeral magic of boiling orange liquid.

Theirs is a strange alchemy, and it is here that reality intrudes upon dreams of riches, where the secrets of the trade are hard-earned.

Haider Abdul Ridha dips his hands into a plastic pail.

“Some goldsmiths are very clever,” he says. “They know how much gold is in their dust, and we bargain hard. Sometimes, we sell the gold we extract back to them. But most of us are hurting from this war situation. Before the war I’d make maybe $100 every few days. Now I can’t even make $100 in a month. I depend on God. My four brothers and I collect dust and try to survive together.”

The men here say “taban, taban” a lot. It means “suffering, suffering.”

Ridha, with his strong back and rotting teeth, is one of the angriest, and when he sifts through his pail, he has time to reflect.

“I am 24 years old,” he says. “When I was 18, Saddam Hussein took me into his army and I have seen nothing of my life since. I am tired now. What good is there? I think whoever comes to rule Iraq brings us no good.”

Muhsin Saad is as thin as a slat in a shutter. With combed-back hair and a denim shirt, he adds a princely air to the kilns and black molten remnants scattered about. He guards the miners when they work and he likes to talk politics.

“The Iraqi Governing Council was installed by the coalition forces and they don’t represent us,” he says. “The Governing Council is a bunch of gang leaders. We were expecting America to improve our country. The unemployment and the poverty here are causing the terrorism. If people had jobs, they wouldn’t become the mercenaries and terrorists attacking us.”

Alaa Nasir Sayah is a goldsmith. His shop is in front of the gold miners’ ruins, and by either necessity or nature, he is an optimist.

“Right after the war, the gold economy was terrible,” he says. “But we have 130,000 U.S. soldiers wanting to buy souvenirs for their families. Middle-class salaries are beginning to rise. The new Iraqi currency is stabilizing, and I think soon things will get better.”

The miners around the caldrons have not yet seen such things in the dust.

“We are one of the richest oil countries,” says Shijar, the one whose father taught him the gold dust trade 40 years ago. “This is unacceptable. Americans tell us they bring freedom, but what good is freedom if you’re hungry? ... Propane gas used to cost 250 dinars a cylinder -- now they charge 4,000 dinars.”

Lunch is rice and beans. The fires stay lighted. Sami Salim looks at a pan of grit. He’d need a ton of it to change his life. He has six children, including a paralyzed daughter and a son with a brain tumor who follows him to work and takes off his cap to show thinning patches of hair.

“I’ve been in this business since the 1960s,” Salim says. “I was a goldsmith in the 1980s. But during the first Gulf War, 4 kilograms of gold was stolen from me. I had to sell my house, and now I can’t afford to send my son abroad for treatment.”

Upstairs, flames whir in another kiln near a window that opens to the Tigris. Some of the miners will work the riverbank in the warmer months, searching for metals in sewer pipes that lead from the goldsmiths’ shops and drip near the reeds. Most know their pans will never hold a treasure, but they cling to the mystery of what may sparkle when the fires cool.

Suheil Ahmed of The Times’ Baghdad Bureau contributed to this report.