Five hours after he lined up to buy gasoline for his ageing Chevrolet sedan Benjamin Poul finally reached the pumps in this country awash with oil.
More than one kilometer behind him in a queue that stretched all the way over a bridge, Mukled Rashid was just beginning a wait which motorists say has become increasingly common over the past two weeks.
Long queues at gas stations, and roadside black marketers with jerry cans, are one of the most obvious signs that life is a long way from normal in this country eight months after the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime.
"I usually come here but this is the longest the queue has been," said Rashid, 24, a student.
"Since Eid it's been getting worse," said Amar Hamoudy, 31, a taxi driver waiting in the middle of the bridge with an oil refinery in the distance behind him.
The Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan fell at the end of November.
Motorists blamed smugglers and black marketers for the problem in a country which is importing oil products despite having the world's second-largest oil reserves.
"I think there is smuggling of oil to other provinces and outside Iraq," Rashid said.
He said he met a smuggler who claimed to earn US$170 for each trip -- a little more than the monthly wage of some teachers here.
Hamoudy blamed gas station owners.
"They sell to the black market," he alleged.
During a 10-hour drive from Jordan to Baghdad this week, reporters saw major queues at gas stations along the highway.
Hadi Naseef, 50, a worker at the Baghdad station, said he had no shortage of fuel and blamed the customers.
"They have a crisis in their minds, that they want to fill everything," Naseef said, referring to people who want to gas up not just their cars but also large containers supposedly for generators.
Poul, 63, a member of Iraq's Christian minority, blamed the queues on roadside black marketers and said there is smuggling "from the source" at the nearby refinery.
"My neighbor has 10 tanks in his house," said the retired lawyer. "There should be monitoring to ask where they get this fuel."
He spoke over honking car horns and the occasional shout from drivers while rifle-toting guards directed motorists toward the pumps.
Across the street American soldiers of the First Armoured Division detained a young man. Minutes later they arrested a second youth beside the station, saying they were trying to get rid of the black market.
"We've informed them since May that they can't be doing this," said Staff Sergeant Alfonso Delagarza.
The roadside vendors, using discarded soft drink bottles as funnels, eliminate the wait for frustrated drivers, but at a huge premium.
Naseef's station sells gasoline for 20 dinars (US$0.01) a liter compared with a wildly fluctuating street price which on Friday was 400 dinars a liter.
Delagarza blamed the queues on "supply and demand" as people have been travelling around the city more frequently since the end of Ramadan.
Another soldier, Lieutenant Dominique Shaw, said blackmarket fuel has added to the problem.
The coalition's senior civilian spokesman Dan Senor acknowledged the fuel shortage was a problem.
He said the main cause was the sharp rise in demand after an additional 250,000 new and second-hand vehicles entered the roads over the past few months.
RSS