Turkish truck drivers limit operations over insecurity

A month ago, few Turkish truck drivers moving into central and southern Iraq would have spared a glance at Ismailiye, one of the scores of roadside cafes that have sprung up on the dual carriageway connecting the Turkish border to the northern city of Mosul. Those who stopped there only did so long enough for a glass of tea, or to say their prayers before venturing out of the security of Kurdish-controlled areas. But since the beginning of October, the café's dusty forecourt has been transformed into a lorry park. This is no longer a break for most of the drivers here; it is an end point. "You won't meet many truckers willing to go further than this," Sabahattin Aynaci, from Tarsus, a town on Turkey's southern coast, told IRIN in Dahuk. "We're fed up with being paid a pittance to get shot at." "In central Iraq, our lives aren't worth an onion, or a single one of the frozen chickens we're transporting," added his colleague Aydin Bas, from Cizre in southeastern Turkey. Along with half a dozen colleagues from the same Turkish transport company, the men are waiting for Iraqi drivers to come and collect the goods they have imported. They've been at Ismailiye for 24 hours and think they could have three or four days' wait ahead of them. "There's only a limited number of Iraqi lorries and apparently the last convoy set out from here just before we arrived," explained Aynaci. It is the same story at Geli café, a haunt of oil tanker drivers 10 miles up the road towards Zakho. Crouched round an improvised picnic table set up between two parked tankers, the drivers explained how they used to take their loads of refined oil to a depot south of Mosul. That all stopped around five weeks ago, when, at a meeting in the northern town of Zakho, Turkish truckers told transport company directors and locally based US military staff that they would no longer go any further than the Kurdish city of Dahuk. "The US officers made promises to improve security for convoys, told us not to worry," Nureddin Hassan, a truck driver from Diyarbakir who was present at the meeting, told IRIN. "But we just said no. There's nothing anybody can do in Mosul to protect a convoy." The main problem for drivers, he added, was not the kidnappings and executions that have captured the attention of the Turkish public, but random drive-by shootings. "Three times when I was waiting outside the depot to the south of Mosul, I saw a car drive up, the passenger pull out a gun and start shooting," he said. "Everyday it gets worse." For two weeks after the Zakho meeting, the sudden halt in tanker traffic brought serious shortages to those areas of Iraq dependent on Mosul for refined oil, a good enough reason for the authorities to react by transferring the main Turkish oil depot to Filfil, on the safer, northern side of the city. Responsibility for security at Filfil was transferred to Kurdish figters 10 days ago, a fact that gladdens the hearts of many Turkish truck drivers. "You feel 10 times safer wherever the peshmerga [Kurdish fighters] are," said Nureddin Hassan's friend Ahmet Ferman. But, like most of his colleagues, Ferman added that he preferred to wait a while to judge the security situation before risking a trip down the Mosul highway to Filfil. "The depot itself may be safe now, but it is the whole road that needs to be protected," he said. Other drivers do not have his patience. Mehmet Katbas, a farmer from Urfa, a province in the south of Turkey's mainly Kurdish area, has made 23 trips to Iraq since the fall of the former regime last spring. With just the long wait at the Iraqi-Turkish border ahead of him, he vows never to come back again. "I was earning US $500 a trip, which is a lot of money," he said. "But the risk is just too great. I'd say about 80 percent of the Turkish truck drivers working in Iraq have stopped coming here." Figures that Abdullah Abdulrahman Duski, manager of the Ismailiye café, ruefully admitted were probably correct. "We used to have hundreds of lorries parked out the front here," he said. "How many are there now? Maybe 40. A tiny percentage."