Thousands of ships, including former dictator Saddam Hussein’s yacht, have passed through the Iraqi shipyard’s three docks, where a giant steam engine hauls them out of the water and up the century-old wooden tracks. Mohammed Adnan, who has been operating the huge steam engine for six years now, says it is not easy. “They say they [the British] brought in the wood from Burma… we tried to drill a 1.5 inch nail into it once, we couldn’t,” said Jassim Hussain Sabour, the shipyard’s longest-serving worker.
