Word: tikrit
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...Tikrit it would be better if we said you were Russian," said my interpreter Marwan as we drove north. Saddam's home town is still a hostile place for a lone Brit or American, he felt. I wasn't really listening. My attention was drawn to the surface-to-air missiles, apparently intact, still lying by the aside of the road six weeks after the war - a disquieting symbol of U.S. inactivity and the continuing lack of stability...
...Tikrit is the northern point of a triangle of hostility to the U.S. presence that extends south to the cities of Falluja and Ramadi to the west of Baghdad and then into the outer fringes of the capital itself. Somewhere within this triangle, many suspect, Saddam and his sons are hiding - probably split up, protected by a small group of bodyguards and a lot of money...
...Tikrit we dropped by the office of the region's new governor. We were ushered into a smoke filled antechamber where petitioners wait for hours, sometimes days, for an audience. Several tribal dignitaries in long robes were ahead of us in the line. One asked Marwan where I was from. "Russia," Marwan said. After a short silence a wiry, sunburned man who looked in his fifties asked, in very good Russian, "So what's the weather like in Moscow?" We discussed this and that - the allergy season in Moscow, apartment prices, other very Russian things. I asked him where...
...Kurdish attacks on their people in Kirkuk, an hour and a half to the northwest, he said, adding he might have to send fighters if the raids continue. "Our tribes are well armed", the governor remarked. "Very well armed," I countered, remembering the group of Ajil tribesmen just outside Tikrit who had briefly detained me in mid April, when the city fell during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Marwan, who had heard the story, filled in the details. "That's my tribe," the governor said, high-fiving me. "Did they treat you well?" he asked. "They released me," I answered...
...Tikrit's main streets fresh graffiti praised Saddam and denounced the U.S. Marwan got out at the post office, where a local told him a slogan that proclaimed "Saddam is lord of Iraq" had been on the wall since Saddam's birthday in late April. Another, near the new police station, jointly staffed by U.S. and Iraqis probably had the most resonance for this hostile, conservative and deeply suspicious population: "The Americans are on the ground, now, but soon they will be in your beds...