IRAQ: Michael Jansen travels to Najaf in the footsteps of the ProphetMohammed and Alexander the Great.
There is little traffic on the road from Baghdad to Najaf. Petrol is too scarce and too dear for even modest journeys of two hours. Every few kilometres we meet 2-3 km queues for petrol.
At Mahmudiya, a centre of anti-occupation resistance, there is a rank of roadside stands selling apples, oranges, Brazilian bananas and soft drinks. This is, after all, the route which bus loads of pilgrims take for both Najaf and Kerbala, the holy cities of the Shia branch of Islam.
Iraqi entrepreneurs need no advice from foreign experts on how to conduct their businesses. We pass three rusting burnt-out tanks, swampy fields of papyrus with fronds like silvery feathers, a flock of sheep, each marked with a fat purple dot. The town named Iskandariya is a reminder that Alexander the Great travelled this way more than 2,300 years ago. There are cities and towns named for him all over the region.
The longest petrol lines so far are at Hilla, Iraq's main industrial town where manufacturing ground to a halt during the war. Two brand-new fire engines go by, the only clean vehicles in sight. After sanctions were imposed in 1990, Iraq was unable to import new firefighting equipment. Old engines were looted after the war.
We drive by a US army camp, a minefield marked off by stakes and yellow tape, Babylon University. The road to Babylon, the capital of Iraq's ancient kingdoms where Alexander died, is blocked. The US army is encamped round the site, where Saddam Hussein reconstructed the palaces of Nebudchadnezar and Hammurabi.
At an Iraqi police barricade, a policeman, wearing an armband bearing the letters "IP" in English, advises us not to take the Kerbala road. "There are too many checkpoints," he says. A bus-load of Iranian pilgrims also takes his advice. In spite of insecurity and uncertainty, Iranians are pouring into Iraq to pray at Najaf and Kerbala. In these two cities are the shrines of Ali, the adopted son and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, and Ali's sons, Hassan and Hussein.
Huge kilns turning out Iraq's traditional yellow bricks stand alongside the road, their tall chimneys pouring out thick black smoke. Loading lorries are backed into the entrances of cooled ovens, long arched tunnels.
Dia, my driver, twists and turns the wheel of the car to avoid the starred holes left in the roadbed by exploding mortars. US forces advancing on Baghdad along this route met strong resistance from Iraqi defenders belonging to the black-clad militia called Saddam's Fedayeen.
Kufa is a city of golden domes, poster paintings of bearded and turbaned Shia saints and traffic jams. The angular Kufic script is one of the most elegant in Arabic.
Ali, the fourth ruler (caliph) of the expanding Muslim empire, was assassinated in the mosque here by a member of an extremist sect. His murder sparked Islam's fundamental sectarian split between orthodox Sunnis, who believe the caliph should be elected, and the heterodox Shias, who hold that Mohammed's heirs, possessed of mystical powers, should rule.
This rift was solidified in the eighth century in engagements fought here and at Kerbala. Ali's elder son, Hassan, was deposed after six months by the Sunnis and died of poison in exile in Egypt and Hussein, the younger son, was slain in battle near Kerbala, 65 km to the north.
Dia remarks: "Kufans are still blamed by Shias for failing to honour their pledge to fight for Hussein. For centuries they weren't allowed into Najaf."
The road to Najaf is spiked with betrayals, battles and blood-letting. Today the two cities are joined at the outskirts, in spite of bad blood.
Just beyond the entrance to Najaf lies a sprawling outdoor market for second-hand clothing, fruit and vegetables. Bus-loads of Iranian pilgrims cut through a sea of men in dark brown cloaks and headcloths and women shrouded in flowing black abayyas.
Water from broken pipes stands in pools in the streets, the Najaf Hotel is a bombed-out shell. A policeman trying to make sense of the swirling vehicles at the centre of the market-place directs us to the mosque where Ali is buried and the nearby office of the Hawza, the Shia religious establishment.
We take a roundabout route, lined with parked buses, dodging donkey carts loaded with vegetables and youths pushing low three-wheeled barrows carrying elderly pilgrims. We plunge down a narrow street which suddenly opens into a wide plaza where we are told were to park by policeman.
When I step out of the car, trying to manage headcovering and shawl over ankle-length Punjabi shirt and leggings, the policeman tells me I will need an abayya to get into the mosque. A graceful gold dome gleams over the squat shrine of Ali standing at the end of a pedestrian way where grubby shops display green and red flags, a famous local sweetmeat, kebab, cheap plastic goods and richly coloured portraits of Ali and Hussein.
We pause at the entrance to a muddy alleyway blocked by a guard carrying a Kalashnikov.
"I am a journalist and would like to meet a spokesman of Ayatollah Ali Sistani," I tell the guard.
The ayatollah is the senior cleric of the Hawza, a marja, a man to be emulated. As head of the majority Shia community, he is the most powerful figure in Iraq these days. His fatwas calling for elections to Iraq's governing bodies have complicated and stalled the US-led process of handing over sovereignty to an Iraqi provisional government by July. The guard responds: "The ayatollah is not speaking to the press. You can put your question in an e-mail. He'll respond the next day."
The shrine where Ali is entombed is modest, far less imposing than the mosques at Kerbala where his sons are buried. There is an empty triangle in the blue and white tiles decorating the main gate of the mosque, other tiles are cracked and chipped. Here in August, car-bombs slew Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, head of the Iran-backed Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and more than 80 people attending a service in the mosque.
He was targeted because the Supreme Council is a member of the US-appointed Iraqis Governing Council. The ayatollah's photo is plastered on the wall alongside black banners carrying quotations from his sermons.
He now belongs to the long line of martyrs revered by Shias.
A queue of men waits to enter at this gate; women, mostly Iranians, clad in black from head to toe, push and shove in the line at the side entrance. Progress is slow because each woman is being searched at a booth just inside the gate. A hawker proffers abayyas trimmed with lace or embroidered in gold thread but I quail at the crush at the gate and the dense crowd in the courtyard.
I have been to Kerbala. Dia and I have a look at the gold souq where pilgrims buy and sell at $12 an ounce and drink a glass of sweet tea before making for the vast cemeteries where Shia faithful from the world over come to be buried. The dun-coloured cemeteries, filled with sculpted tombs stretching for as far as the eye can see, are located on the northern outskirts of Najaf. No one knows how many people are buried here.
"Fourteen million, perhaps," says a custodian, surveying the petrol line which runs along the walls of the sections reserved for burials in the Eighties and Nineties. "It takes 36 to 48 hours to get to the pump," he remarks.
These days even the dead cannot rest in peace in Iraq.