Traveling on a Highway of Dread

It hardly seems the place where people could hide and detonate bombs or jump out and ambush vehicles. But this is Baghdad's airport road, seven miles of dread.

It was on this road that U.S. soldiers opened fire Friday night on the car carrying Italian journalist Guiliana Sgrena, wounding her and killing the Italian intelligence agent who had negotiated her release from Sunni Muslim insurgents.

Having reported from Iraq for much of the last two years, I was dismayed to hear that a fellow journalist who had survived the unimaginable stress and fear of being a hostage was then the victim of an American military shooting. But when I learned the incident occurred on the airport road, it became, at one level, understandable.

Bad things happen on the airport road -- all the time. Many people who travel it on a regular basis have a personal horror story, a moment when they thought, "This might be it." Everyone else has a friend who has had one.

Since the war, the airport road has not been any ordinary highway. It is a battleground; a place without rules or certainties, a place where there are no guarantees of safety for civilians or soldiers of any nationality.

For the ordinary traveler, there are two hazards: the wary, short-fused American troops who have lost dozens of their comrades to roadside bombs and ambushes, and the insurgents who target the U.S. military convoys that ply the route.

It is a road to be approached with caution, with a plan, with wariness of every other car and every American convoy.

About five hours before Sgrena was shot, I was on the same road, traveling in the opposite direction from the airport into Baghdad with what has become routine unease. Rather than looking at the scenery, I stared straight ahead and felt a faint nausea.

Many who have traveled the six-lane route have wondered how U.S. and Iraqi forces can ever expect to defeat Iraq's insurgency if they cannot even make this short stretch of pavement safe. As we drove along, I remembered a conversation I had before the Jan. 30 election with a Western diplomat who had lived in Iraq off and on for a year.