Excerpts From Nicholas Berg's E-Mails
Excerpts from e-mails sent by communications tower specialist Nicholas E. Berg to friends and colleagues back home during a January trip to Iraq. The e-mails were shared with The Associated Press by David Skalish, a friend and colleague of Berg's.
SUNDAY, Jan. 4, 12:44 p.m.
I am well here in Iraq - for the last two days I have been in and around Mosul (Northern Iraq, on the outskirts of Kurdistan) which is a welcome break from the smog and crowds of Baghdad. Of course Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, is crowded and smoggy too, but at least we're only 20 kilometers from some bona fide hills and open space. ...
Tomorrow (Monday) I'll inspect a site in Sinjar (west of Mosul, towards the Syrian frontier and as close as I'll ever come to Syria). Then I'm back to Baghdad to hire our local business manager and hopefully get on two 1000' towers outside of Baghdad at Abu Ghreb (the site of a notorious prison for Army and political prisoners). So I am reasonably confident we can score some work out of this. It's treacherous, though - there are so many parties involved in this work and they all subcontract to people and none of them are specialists like us. ...
Mosul is very calm - except for the Army convoys and checkpoints, you can't really tell there is an occupation. Baghdad every night you here IEDs and such, but here I've yet to here or see anything except a few aged craters. Still, there is obviously quite a difference to someone who lives here and will face the same people and situations day in and day out. ...
Another thing that's tough for me is the language - in Bantu languages the accents are easier to pick up and there are more vowels. Arab is a very intricate language with very fine accents and tons of consonants. So as much as I know the right words and can understand some of them being spoken, I can't say them worth a damn to the fellow who doesn't understand English (about 95% of the people I meet).
SUNDAY, Jan. 18, 11:36 a.m.
So between the 11th January and the time of writing, I have been on six major sites, inspecting towers and cataloging the extent of looting/sabotage damage. Most of the destruction was intentional looting or even sabotage on the numerous (at one time twenty-six) tall towers in Iraq. There are twenty-two left, and at least ten have some major problems. The worst site I have been on was the Abu Gharib I tower, a 320 meter (1040') guyed tower in the main broadcast complex for Baghdad, near the Abu Gharib political prisons. ...
So anyhow, Thursday about 1200 I left Baghdad and enjoyed a beautiful sunny afternoon and a peaceful bus-ride to Diwaniya (about two and a half hours). I get off the bus in this little town and set out to find this site, on the outskirts of town. ....
So I finally find the site at around 1900, it's dark and I can barely make out the tower. But I found it and learned what I needed to know. I make my way back to the Garage Baghdad (which is where the service-taxis leave periodically throughout the day). By this time I had missed the last public service-taxi to Baghdad, so I started to negotiate with a throng of taxi drivers (none of whom had a car - that's kind of an afterthought to actually winning the negotiations). I've got one down to 30,000 ID (about $20 at the time) when the IP (Iraqi National Police) swings by on patrol. It seems they had reports about unknown Iranian people infiltrating their town, and at night they can't see much of my face. Anyhow, the story ends in a rather anti-climatic fashion - the police collect me and take me off to the Lieutenant who is more worried for my safety than about me being an Iranian spy.
By the time the story get's told and retranslated a few times, they've got me being picked up at the sheep market amidst a bunch of Turkish truck drivers. So I am invited to spend the night in Diwaniya (which I do) and the next morning after hours of waiting and retelling the sheep story I get on my way back to Baghdad. ...
I think our interests will be well taken care of while I'm gone. I've found a very competent and fairly reliable commercial manager here. He's actually been living in Philadelphia the last twenty years and just came back - so he's similarly a bit out of his element. Imagine coming home to a country so different form where you grew up. We're right now at an office near the sporting club where he played European Football as a kid.
Since then it's been destroyed, rebuilt, run by Oday, son of Hussein, and finally privatized. The fact alone that he and I are just now sitting in a free and open internet shop is unbelievable to most Iraqis. Even a year ago he would have been arrested upon his return.
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