Building homes amid the looting

Jasem Mohammed was an honest man, he says, who had never stolen anything in his life. So he feels a little ashamed of whatever it was that clicked in his head these last few days 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'll 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 colour orange," Mohammed said. Grinning happily, the 45-year-old sailor waved a plan of his house, which he had drawn up by an engineer 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; people chalk out plans for foundations on the dirt and throw up walls for houses as fast as they can – before a new authority materialises to tell them to stop.

Basra's building boom has a crazy, surrealistic air. Virtually everything is stolen: the bricks, the mortar, the tiles, even the land. Some houses are striped, with a lower stripe of honestly purchased pre-war bricks topped by stolen post-Saddam bricks of another colour. 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 you hear the cry echoing hilariously around the streets. "Ali Baba! Ali Baba!"

To people such as Jasem 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, explaining 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 earlier 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 Rasheed Bank, people drilled narrow holes into floor vaults and lowered children in to hand out the money. Two children suffocated because looters set the bank on fire when the children were still below.

The Central Bank manager here declined British military offers to remove the money in the vault – about 87 million dinars – for safety, insisting his vaults were impregnable. A huge explosion proved him wrong after a few days.

The First 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," said Lieutenant William Hawley.

He said there was a shootout in the bank between two rival families who were both trying to break into the vault. By the time the military 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. Some looters are pitiably poor, like Vajem Abas, toiling 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 Abdulla, a former 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 Hussain Ali Hussain, 32. A former policeman when Saddam 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, Abdullah, the former police c#olonel, 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 storey. But people building not far from him on a strip of land adjacent to a foul-smelling, green canal were disappointed to find the area cordoned off by the British military. Anti-tank 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 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 organised a team of men to return the bricks. The landowner, Kadem Sabeeh, 42, an engineer with South Oil Company, said "for many Iraqis, freedom means stealing."

"The former regime erased the sense of national pride from our hearts. They spread hatred" 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.

© Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service