Kathy Kelly
Voices in The Wilderness
Baghdad

Oral traditions eventually recorded in the Book of Exodus narrate the tales of the ancient Israelites’ escape from bondage in Egypt. A cruel Pharaoh was ruthless in his murderous demands. Already crushed by the work of building monuments to their oppressor, they were then ordered to also gather the straw to make the bricks that would be used for building. It was the last straw. The Israelites began to heed revolutionary calls for escape.

Today I visited the former Iraqi Air Defense Camp in Baghdad. Under Saddam Hussein’s regime, now legendary for ruthless repression, military officers and their families were given decent housing. In this camp, they even had two swimming pools. Heavily bombed during Operation Shock and Awe, the compound’s main buildings are now massive heaps of rubble, with a few long, grey tubular US missiles scattered on the debris.

Ehab Lotayef
Cairo

The fastest growing business in Egypt is - without doubt - mobile (cellular) telecommunications. It seems the case will be the same in the “new” Iraq. Two giant companies share the market in Egypt. Orascom, the holding company of one of the two, with operations in Egypt, Pakistan, Algeria, and Tunisia, has won the tender for the first license to provide mobile telephony services in Iraq’s Central Region (the Iraqi Telecommunications Minister, Haidar El Ebadi announced in October). While I was in Iraq, shops were selling the mobile lines and the phones. Service is scheduled to start during this January for the public. The test phase had already become functional in Baghdad sometime during December, while I was there.