'I let go of life'

A purple-coloured Korean saloon was gaining on us fast as we zigzagged the wrong way up the motorway. My toes ached as I forced the accelerator into the floor. The jeep gamely shuddered and rattled as the exhaust dropped off, the whine of the engine turning into a desperate roar.

When I was growing up, my mother had always insisted that passengers in her car clench their buttocks to squeeze a few extra miles out of the tank. It often seemed to work. Now I was cramping my backside for dear life – literally. Groaning with fear, I couldn’t get more than 90mph out of the coughing jeep. The purple car swept past, swerved in front, then three guns popped out of its windows.

After two months in Iraq, we were just a few hours’ drive from sanity at the Jordanian border. Giddy with a sense of freedom from the war against Saddam, we were breaking for the border on the busy road from Baghdad to Amman, Iraq’s western artery. After two months of war we had hoped to be leaving the violent anarchy unleashed by the American and British invasion behind us. Instead we found ourselves standing in the fast lane of a freeway outside Ramadi, with our hands in the air, smiling emptily at a pair of Iraqis. Dressed in black dish-dash, they were shoving their AK47s in our guts and screaming.

Hundreds of Iraqi civilians were killed in Baghdad when the Americans took Saddam’s capital. Looters tore the city apart, and what was left of the Iraqi middle class rushed into the markets to buy guns to protect themselves. A coalition victory was easy to come by, but the Americans are rapidly losing the peace.