One soldier shouted "put your hands on the hood" and another yelled "down on your knees". After some confusion they decided that we should get down on our knees and one snatched away the satellite phone. I said I was a journalist from a British newspaper. When our driver said something in Arabic a soldier screamed: "Shut the f*** up!"
After a few minutes the soldiers decided that we were harmless and the incident was over. But if we had been Iraqis who spoke no English it is difficult to understand how we would have known what was going on or what the edgy group of soldiers were telling us to do.
The road leading from Baghdad to towns on the Euphrates river to the west increasingly has the tense atmosphere of a war zone.
High chicken-wire fences are being built along the sides of bridges passing over the road to stop bombs being dropped on US soldiers passing underneath. There are frequent checkpoints. When we reached Fallujah, perhaps the most militantly anti-American town in Iraq, American troops had closed the main road to the city.