For better or worse, black market brisk

When five Humvees from Eagle Troop of the US Army's 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment rolled into Souk Orfally, an open-air black market in eastern Baghdad, they beheld an amazing sight. There in the jaw of a front-end loader was Saddam Hussein, all 15 feet of him in Italian-crafted bronze. His right arm lay in the dust beside a dump truck.

A scruffy army of looters, smugglers, and profiteers watched with amusement as the former Iraqi president was sold for scrap. "This is the right place for this statue to be - in the garbage," says Hussain Ali As-Sayedi, who purchased the statue to melt down and sell.

The flourishing black market here stands in troubling contrast to the slow and tentative steps taken by US officials to restore control and move toward an interim government. Even as ordinary Iraqis long for a sense of order and business as usual, places like Souk Orfally are providing a financial incentive for the looting that continues to wrack Baghdad.

This market is more than ready for anything that can be carried, pried, ripped, or sawed out of a government facility. Such looting, in turn, is taking US forces away from tasks like restoring power and water service, and is instead putting them on patrol at any government facility containing anything of value.

The situation has so complicated efforts to stabilize and rebuild the country that Eagle Troop is investigating Souk Orfally to shut it down.

"This is tearing this country apart, little by little," says Capt. Stacey Corn of Cleveland, Tenn.

The effort to restore order to Baghdad, which has been taking longer than many had expected, is part of the backdrop for this week's appointment of a new US official, L. Paul Bremer, to supplant retired Gen. Jay Garner in directing Iraq's transition.

For now, though, it's business as usual at Souk Orfally. The market itself is two blocks long and is little more than a dusty open space. Merchants deal mostly in industrial materials taken from government offices or government-owned industries. It is piled haphazardly, and potential buyers and sellers stand casually nearby negotiating prices.

It is not unusual to see small pickup trucks overloaded with bags of cement, or pieces of aluminum door and window frames. There are even donkey carts weighed down with long strands of steel reinforcing bars dragging on the street behind.

First Sgt. Kenneth Smith of Sedalia, Mo., who is leading the black-market investigation, says he is surprised at how blatant Iraqi criminals are. "They sit out there and let you see them stealing in broad daylight," he says. "They might stop for a moment, but then they come right back."

Some of the material passing through Souk Orfally - like the Hussein statue, which was once located at the Baghdad International Fair - will be melted down in Baghdad industrial furnaces before being trucked north to Kurdish areas. The most active trade currently involves aluminum, lead, copper, steel, and brass, sources say.

The demand for copper, in fact, is in large part responsible for the thick black smoke that rises occasionally at various places throughout the city. After obtaining coils of wire, the looters burn the outer insulation, leaving the somewhat charred but valuable copper wire.

And in some cases, lead is being molded into bricks marked as having been manufactured in Lebanon.

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