How easily death comes to those who are in the wrong place at the wrong time

Already the conflicts of the future are brooding in the hearts of men. That is the most certain truth of our age, and the saddest

The al-Rahal brothers run taxis between Amman and Damascus and Baghdad. They are masters of the road. I'm told they know every customs man and immigration officer in the Arabian borderlands. There were three al-Rahal brothers: Ahmed, Rasheed and Amjad. They belong to the fraternity of desert drivers who have found employment with the army of foreign journalists who have descended on Jordan. The war economy is booming.

We were filming in a café in downtown Ruwayshid, on the border with Iraq, when Ahmed came in asking for work. But the reporters in Ruwayshid had already hired drivers and translators, so Ahmed set off for Baghdad to see if he could find work there. His friends tried to persuade him not to travel but Ahmed was not afraid. War had not yet started. There was time still to make it to the Iraqi capital.

The following morning, the day after bombing began, we trooped up to the border in a huge convoy. We were a conspicuously wretched gang. So many reporters and photographers and television cameramen in the wrong place, everybody wishing they were in Baghdad. There was much shouting and no end of complaining. A genial man called Ali from the Jordanian ministry of information struggled to keep order, but he had not reckoned with the frustration of those who know they are in the wrong place. I was as bad as the rest, snarling whenever some luckless writer or photographer wandered across our perfect shot.

The story was a long way away from us, in Baghdad and Kuwait and Basra. So we descended on every traveller from Iraq. Most were foreigners who had left before the bombing began. They were fearful but not terrified. A few Iraqi students came across and told us they hated America and Britain. Hatred did not, however, act as a spur to fight. They would wait out the war and go back when it was safe.

A car pulled up with a group of Jordanian schoolboys on their way home from a trip to Baghdad. I noticed Walid, the younger of our drivers, listening intently to the driver. He started shouting. "Ahmed Rahal, Ahmed Rahal." Our other driver Abdel ran to him. There was a short intense conversation in Arabic. Both men were shaking their heads. "What happened, what happened?" I shouted. "My friend is dead. Ahmed Rahal is dead," said Walid.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. He is killed by missile outside Baghdad." Abdel and Walid called out to the other drivers. They gathered into a huddle. There were cries of shock and sadness. The facts, in as much as we have been able to establish them, are as follows: Ahmed al-Rahal was driving near the city at around four in the morning. He went into a communications building used by the police. The other drivers said it was something he did frequently. He used to pay the cops to allow him to use the phone. This is because mobile phones are not allowed in Saddam's Iraq. Ahmed was in the building when it was hit by a missile. His was an accidental death. Like many civilians before, Ahmed was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The other drivers were sad and angry. Like everybody I've met in Jordan they don't want this war. They hate Saddam Hussein but would rather that somebody other than George Bush were acting as his nemesis. But while I've heard much angry denunciation of the war, not one person has abused me for being Western. Perhaps the most striking impression is of angry impotence. The protests in the Middle East have been small because people are afraid of their governments or because they feel demonstrating will change nothing. The young men of Jordan and countries across the region look on the might of the West and feel humiliated. It is a very dangerous sentiment.

For the drivers, the war has now been reduced to a question of personal loss. They think of their dead friend's family and of the life he might have lived. He was in his twenties and unmarried. I suspect also that his death has made them fearful. The Baghdad road has suddenly become a place of death.

Last night I sat in our house on the edge of the desert and listened to the voices of my colleagues describing the steady advance into Iraq. Across the airwaves came the noise of the sirens in Baghdad, like wolves howling across the night. Occasionally we have heard jets far above and once, in the very early hours, a helicopter clattering overhead. In the big scheme of things Ahmed al-Rahal will not figure at all. The war will go on and it will be won. There will be, there are already, other dead. They are not the only civilians.

There are also the young men who died when their helicopter crashed in Kuwait, the Iraqi soldiers vaporised by huge bombs, the young US marine shot outside Basra. In the wars of the past 20 years I have known a long list of such names. They fill my old notebooks, from Eritrea in the early 1980s to the vicious wars of esteem in the Balkans and central Africa at the end of the century; men and women forgotten by all except those who once called them father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter, husband, wife, lover. But humankind absorbs death and kills again. Already the conflicts of the future are brooding in the hearts of men. That is the most certain truth of our age. It is also the saddest. War will happen again and again.

A trickle of refugees has been arriving. By no stretch of the imagination could it be described as a big humanitarian crisis. Most of those being given shelter are Sudanese migrant workers who came to Iraq to escape the misery of their own land. In a tent on the flinty desert, I met men and women from the south of Sudan. Heaven help them. As the sun dipped and the temperature dropped I thought of Johnny Clegg's lines: "We are the scatterlings of Africa / each uprooted one / with hooded eyes and weary brow / beneath a copper sun."

They are people of that other world of meagre chances and small mercies. They understand in a very precise way how the world is ordered and what they may expect. And they know too that however this war is resolved, the zone of deprivation in which they exist will remain unchanged.

The night we arrived here in Ruwayshid a local cleric arrived. I thought he'd come to berate us over the war. But nothing of the sort. He wanted to pray. So we stood in a circle while he invoked Allah and wished us a peaceful life. It is one of the more hopeful images of this past week on the border. But I will conclude with another, rather different picture. On the way back from the border the other day we stopped to film some images of the desert. I saw a Bedouin shepherd sitting next to his flock a few yards away in the desert.

I went over and asked him what he thought of the war. Here was a man whose ancestors had seen countless armies pass this way. They had seen the empires of Babylon and Rome and Britain rise and fall. After a few moments' silence, I asked my question again. Did he understand me? I think so. But he did not want to answer. Instead, he looked at me with what I imagined to be millennial scorn, and turned away.

The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent