Arab Truckers Take On Highway of Death : Jordan: They dodge bombs to get Iraqi crude oil to their homeland. They curse President Bush and laud Saddam Hussein.

Ahmed Mahmood rolled his 37 tons of crude across the Iraqi border crossing here Wednesday morning, a living portrait of Jordan’s modern-day road warriors.

His 24-wheel tanker truck was shot through with shrapnel, his eyes were wide with exhaustion and fear and his heart heavy with determination and anger.

As he has done so many times since the Persian Gulf War began on Jordan’s doorstep three long weeks ago, the Palestinian driver had just dodged allied missiles and bombs, watched colleagues get hit and burn or bury themselves in bomb craters. Through it all, he had simply pushed on at 60 m.p.h. along one of most dangerous stretches of road on Earth, across Iraq’s western frontier, to keep Jordan’s lifeline to oil unbroken.

The pay: $230 a month; the hours: endless; the risk: his life.

But for Jordanian and Palestinian daredevils like Mahmood, who describe themselves as “soldiers of the highway,” the hell of Iraq’s bombshell alley, the 375-mile Baghdad-to-Ruweished highway, hardly matters. For them, it is not about money--Mahmood donated his pay this month to the Iraqi army--nor even death.

“I could die, sure,” said the barrel-chested Mahmood, 35, masking his fear with bravado. “Only God knows when I will die. But, God willing, tomorrow, I will make this run again.”

The mission for men like Mahmood: to deliver as much as 60,000 barrels of Iraqi oil a day to fuel-starved Jordan, which lost its traditional supply line in September, when Saudi Arabia cut off oil supplies to the kingdom, punishing King Hussein for his neutral stand in the Gulf crisis.

U.S. officials say the route that Mahmood and his colleagues take is a resupply line to Scud missile sites in western Iraq. As a result, it is under almost constant air attack.

At least eight of Mahmood’s colleagues have come home in coffins, and more than a dozen others are now lying in Amman hospitals with serious injuries. As he spoke with American reporters in the Jordanian border-police control room, he was filling out a report on the allied air strike that demolished at least one tanker in his convoy early Wednesday.

The missions have touched off a controversy that has left relations between the United States and Jordan at their lowest ever.

Jordan has asserted that the allies are deliberately aiming at convoys such as Mahmood’s. Although U.S. officials have offered apologies for the Jordanians killed and hurt, they have also suggested publicly that pro-Iraqi drivers like Mahmood are not only violating U.N. sanctions against Iraq but sheltering Iraqi missile-resupply trucks among their convoys. Allied commanders also have argued that the drivers know that there are risks in passing through a declared war zone.

In an effort to repair some of the diplomatic damage, U.S. officials promised Wednesday that no civilian traffic will be deliberately targeted. They also asked Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd to resume oil shipments to Jordan at concessional rates. (Jordan pays Iraq nothing for its oil-tanker shipments, which represent payment on a $900-million Iraqi debt.)

But analysts said the two kingdoms have grown so far apart over the past six months that the Saudis almost certainly will reject the American appeal.

Already, King Hussein has been forced to order gasoline rationing and other strict measures to cut fuel consumption. The kingdom’s economy, strangled by the 6-month-old allied embargo of its southern port of Aqaba and the loss of export earnings to embargoed Iraq and occupied Kuwait, is a disaster.

So, without exception, those who brave the Baghdad-to-Ruweished highway each day maintain that they will continue their work in the same spirit a soldier fights for his country.

“If I don’t sacrifice and do this, the country will come to a halt,” said Rakan Nael, 33, as he gave his giant tanker a final check before joining a convoy going back into Iraq on Wednesday. “I’ve been driving a truck since 1983. The money’s OK--150 dinars a month (about $230). . . . But the situation is different now. It’s a matter of service to the homeland. It’s not a matter of money.”

Faouzi Jamil agreed.

“What do we do?” he asked, shrugging. “Shall we leave our country to die without fuel? Our duty is to go on bringing this.”

“If I could only get my hands on Bush,” Jamil continued, reflecting the fury shared by all the tanker drivers who were interviewed. “I would ask him, ‘Why is this happening to us?’ What is our fight with him? Let him go fight at the war front.”

Jamil was surrounded by nearly a dozen other drivers in a large desert parking lot where they assemble each day and wait, sometimes for hours, to check with drivers coming out of Iraq. They weigh each account and try to calculate when the bombing has subsided sufficiently to make a run.

Mahmood, who had arrived to a hero’s welcome just after sunrise, his graying hair rumpled and his leathery hands caked with crude oil, showed off the latest damage to his tanker. He unlocked a tool box and pulled out two rusty, 12-inch butcher knives.

“When I drive on that road,” he said, “I wish that one day an American pilot will fall so I can cut out his kidneys with these knives and give them to stray dogs while he watches.”

Mahmood’s anger and bitterness reflected just how deeply and emotionally the once pro-American Jordanians feel they have been hurt by the United States continuing to hit their countrymen and their lifeline to oil. Fueled by almost daily television pictures of bombed and gutted Jordanian tankers and wounded drivers, the spreading grass-roots anger contributed to Tuesday’s U.S. State Department warning for all Americans to leave Jordan as soon as possible.