Homecoming

Along a gritty highway on the outskirts of Baghdad, in an area of onion sellers and car-parts vendors, the families kept coming Tuesday. Hom...

Along a gritty highway on the outskirts of Baghdad, in an area of onion sellers and car-parts vendors, the families kept coming Tuesday. Homeward bound, on the back of trucks packed with tires, diesel cans, blankets, pillows and plastic toys, tens of thousands of people who had run away from Baghdad when the fighting started were coming back.

They were seeing their city for the first time since the war: the burned-out shells of tanks and overturned buses lining the roads, the destroyed telephone exchanges, the portraits of Saddam painted over or raked with gunfire, the unbelievable sight of US tanks rumbling through their streets, topped by grinning soldiers offering friendly waves. For many, it had been a long, exhausting sojourn away from home.

Some had been gone nearly a month, sleeping in half-completed houses in the desert, on sand or concrete, covered with blankets that could not keep out the night cold.

They drank water from rivers or wells that were not very clean. They lived on rice, bread and sugared tea, dreaming of a bit of meat. While they were coming to terms on Tuesday with the new reality, many were seething 8212; quick to blame the Americans for everything that had befallen them and all that awaited them when they reached their homes.

When a pair of American journalists stopped to talk with the returnees along the Abu Ghraib highway that connects the capital with western Iraq, they were soon enveloped in a swarm of people, shouting complaints and invective. 8216;8216;No good Bush!8217;8217; shouted Assad Saleh, a 37-year-old electrical company worker. 8216;8216;He doesn8217;t stop the looting, he only protects the oil. There are no salaries. No companies left. We can do nothing. There is no gasoline. There is no security. They said they wanted to give us freedom, but we are free only to have this situation.8217;8217;

Mohammed Sayel, 36, a former Foreign Ministry worker who now sells cars, recalled how he fled with his wife and six children on the first day Americans came into Baghdad. His brothers and their families made their total group 16.

8216;8216;Yes, we were under the oppression of Saddam all these years, and we wanted to be free,8217;8217; said Sayel. 8216;8216;But another miserable situation has set in.8217;8217; Hassan Saadi, a 55-year-old trader, decided on Monday to return to Baghdad from Haditha, also near the Syrian border. 8216;8216;I heard that Baghdad is getting better, and I was afraid for my house,8217;8217; he said. 8216;8216;Besides, our food was running out.8217;8217;

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About 1,000 refugees from the capital stayed in that one small town, in an area where farmers grow dates and oranges and supplement their income with fishing. Saadi had set out from his home in Baghdad on March 18, just before the war began, taking 27 family members with him, including his wife and four children plus the children8217;s spouses and children.

Indeed, along the way, men could be seen sweeping the sidewalks of debris. Piles of uncollected garbage were being burned on the curbs. At last, the family reached their street in Jamila, and climbed out of the cars, smiling.

The house, a low brown building with a tiled driveway and a small yard lined with roses, had emerged unscathed. There was no water or power, and Saadi had trouble using his crowbar to get down the bars he himself had welded in place to keep out thieves.

But it was home. Neighbours came out to embrace them and Saadi gave a sigh of relief. 8216;Stay with us tonight,8217;8217; he invited the two journalists who had ridden with him. 8216;8216;Have you ever tasted real Iraqi food?8217;8217; LAT-WP