We Are The Only Service That Has Never Stopped Working

The bin-men of Baghdad:

Garbage collector Saad Kamal Farhud is always scared, dodging bombs and bullets to shift the filth of Baghdad for a pittance. Yet he says that things have improved since thousands of troops launched a crackdown.

"I'm frightened every day," says the 30-year-old driver who begins his daily round of the bins on the west bank of the Tigris River, picking his way through homemade but lethal booby traps and bursts of gunfire.

"No one taught me how to spot the roadside bombs but I've learned to pick out the trip wires that set them off," confides the married father-of-two, already lucky enough to have escaped one explosion...

"Homemade bombs are often hidden under the bins or rubbish. So the insurgents don't want us to clean up and they shoot at our workers," explains 43-year-old Mohammed Nuri, an employee of Baghdad Municipality, who heads the rubbish collection in the district.

Another explanation left unsaid, however, is that at least many of Baghdad's municipal dustmen, like Farhud, are Shiites and some of the districts that they steer their dumpster trucks through are predominantly Sunni...

"Five of our workers have died," says Talal Karim, who is responsible for trucks and equipment used by a team of around 400 people. "Recently one worker was killed by a mortar round while he was working."

"One of my colleagues was shot with four bullets six months ago," says Farhud.

"Despite everything, we are the only service that has never stopped working from the fall of Baghdad until today," says Nuri with pride.

Once the rubbish has been scooped up, the trucks head out to one of two main dumps outside Baghdad - Taji, 30 kilometers (almost 20 miles) to the north, and Husseniyah, 15 kilometers to the northeast.

"The road frightens us. When the situation is really too dangerous, there are temporary dumps where we dump the rubbish. But these days, with the security plan I have to say things have got a lot better," says Farhud. "We hope things will continue that way."

Iraqi and US military officials say that execution-style killings have fallen in Baghdad since the crackdown was launched February 14.

US military spokesman Major General William Caldwell said that such killings were down 60 percent between "the last week of March and first [week of] April", compared to a similar period of the month before.

Iraqi Brigadier General Qassim Atta Mussawi has said that an average of eight bodies are found on a daily basis compared to the dozens of handcuffed and blindfolded corpses of men riddled with bullets found everyday on Baghdad's streets before the crackdown.