| Restoring Order: For Iraqi Car Buff, That Means Pistons Mr. Saffar Struggled to Bring 1946 Ford Back to Life; Dreams of Hitting Road By YOCHI J. DREAZEN Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL MOSUL, Iraq -- When Basman al Saffar finally bought the 1946 Ford he had lusted after since childhood, it had a rusty frame, a cracked windshield, and so many broken windows that leaves and garbage blew in. The engine looked as if it hadn't seen fuel or oil in decades. He wasn't deterred. Like many Iraqis, Mr. Saffar had learned how to scavenge for old car parts during the long years when United Nations sanctions on Iraq made it nearly impossible to find new ones. He found an original Ford battery in a junkyard in the Kurdish city of Kirkuk and door handles in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. An elderly man in Mosul who had once worked for a Ford dealership in Turkey sold him several boxes of pistons, crankshafts, gaskets and oil seals. After two years of scrounging, he managed to completely restore the car himself. Settling in behind the steering wheel recently, Mr. Saffar turned the key and listened to the old Ford's engine rumble to life. "Welcome to the past," he said. Mr. Saffar and his car have rolled their way through recent Iraqi history. He tried to enter the Ford in international antique-car competitions, but the Hussein government wouldn't let him. When the regime fell, he used the car to ferry books from a university library where they were in danger of being burned. As a young boy here, Mr. Saffar, who is now 36 years old and works in his brother's general contracting business, was told the old car at the end of a neighbor's driveway had been purchased in 1948 by the elder brother of Iraq's then-prime minister, Arshad al-Umari. But the car was in such bad shape, that was hard for him to imagine. |
| Still, he wondered whether the car could be saved. Scouring old magazines in his school library, Mr. Saffar found a picture of a similar car and was struck by the gracefulness of its design. He spent nearly 15 years begging the owners to sell it to him so he could try his hand at restoring it, but they always refused. Mr. Saffar's neighbor said that his father had bought the car in the early 1950s, shortly before he died, and the family wanted to keep it as a remembrance. Finally, in September 2000, the family relented. The head of the household was a state-employed physician unable to support his family amid the continued drop in the value of the Iraqi dinar caused by the U.N. sanctions. Mr. Saffar's neighbors sold him the old car for $2,000. Mr. Saffar had the car towed to a warehouse in a seedy part of town and went to work crisscrossing the country looking for vintage Ford parts. Gradually, he began to find them. In Baghdad, his search for old valves brought him to Dosh Abbas, 56, who runs a large auto-parts store. In his youth, Mr. Abbas had apprenticed with an older brother who ran a Ford repair shop near a dealership that specialized in American cars. The car dealer did a lively business until it was shut down by force in 1963 when Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party took power and tried to rid the country of foreign influences. |
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