Voyage to the Country of Hate
By Sara Daniels
Le Nouvel Observateur Hebdomadaire
Week of Thursday 08 April 8 2004
From the Kuwait border to the "Sunni Triangle"
Oum Qasr, Fao, Basra, Al-Qurnah, Nasiriya, Nadjaf... From the entry of coalition troops into Iraq on
March 20, 2003, to the fall of Baghdad on April 9, these cities punctuated the advance of American
and British assault troops toward the north. One year after Operation Iraqi Freedom, our special
envoys, Sara Daniel and the photographer Stanley Greene, have retraced the route taken by these
soldiers that many Iraqis consider more as invaders than liberators. If the dictatorship has fallen and
the tyrant is imprisoned, democracy has still not taken root in a country in full chaos, where religious
extremists and their militias - as we see now in Nadjaf and in Sadr City - hold the real power, and where
the "occupiers" fall almost every day to guerilla bullets. Sara and Stanley's voyage ended where the
horror had achieved its most insufferable peak: Falluja on March 31.
Falluja
Two Americans tried to exit their vehicle, but the city's residents pushed them back into the flames
with spades and pitchforks.
Mob at the end of a little iron bridge. Young people sing gaily. They're bent over two charred bodies
that they roll along with kicks and from which they take slices with their knives. A kilometer further on,
in the direction of the mosque, the carcasses of two cars burn. Above them, tied with an electric cord,
a leg cut at the femur dangles. The crowd brandishes portraits of Sheikh Yassine, chanting slogans:
"Falluja is the Americans' cemetery." Or "We'll cut the hands off all foreigners". In the crowd,
Abdulkader Mohamed, 20 years old, had witnessed the scene. Two Jeeps driven by American civilians
in bullet-proof vests had been attacked by the "resistance" with RPG-7 grenade launchers. Two
passengers who had survived the grenade impact tried to leave the vehicle, but were pushed back into
the flames by residents wielding spades and pitchforks. "They cried, 'Please, please, help!'" the young
man remembers. Had he tried to help them? Abdulkader stares wide-eyed, as though the question
were totally wacky.
Then, residents dragged the bodies into the town behind their cars and hung them up on the small
iron bridge-only to take them down again, the young unemployed man recalls with a gentle smile.
"Why weren't you here two days ago?" he asks. "It's too bad. There were several attacks against
Americans, but there was no one to take pictures because all the reporters are afraid to come here."
For several hours after the attack, not a single tank, not a single helicopter was seen in Falluja.
Oum Qasr
The first stage of the ascent toward Baghdad from Kuwait. A year after the war, people still live less
well than during the time of the despised dictator.
A multi-colored ribbon of cars snakes along for more than a kilometer. Once past the Kuwait border,
every gas pump that punctuates the route to Basra offers the tableau of irritated resignation from drivers
who wait sometimes five hours to fill up. It's the first grievance against occupation forces that we hear
on this road that the coalition has borrowed to connect to Baghdad. A year after the war, in an oil
country, the gas shortage still rages as it did on the first day of the Anglo-American troop incursion. In
Oum Qasr, an underprivileged township of 150,000, whose every block of houses counted a prisoner, a
death row inmate, or a martyr during Saddam's time, the residents, like so many betrayed lovers, keep
trotting out their disappointment with and their resentment against the liberators. One year after the
war, people still live less well than under the despised dictator. "Last month, milk rations were missing.
This month, there's no rice, and there's still no running water!" Furious, this souk merchant demands
that unkept promises be noted. Like everyone here, he loathes the little neighbor that taunts his
country with its standard of living and its petrodollars. This cursed Kuwait responsible for all the looting
and shortages...
Basra
Here on the banks of the Shatt al-Arab, 45 ports live exclusively off contraband: a ton of gas sells for
over 200 dollars.
Gas contraband is General Qaduum's personal battle. The Basra Police Chief is forty years old and
has beautiful blue eyes. He's a new generation cop. Every day, he boards and searches these tanker
trucks that instead of distributing gas to the pumps are going to sell it to the tankers that lie at anchor
in the Shatt al-Arab, equidistant from Iraq and Iran. Usually, however, the General is powerless. The
papers are in order, approved by the political parties sitting in the Iraqi Government Council. "Chalabi's
Rifah Party is at the heart of trafficking in the region," Qaduum accuses. "Saddam, at least, was alone.
Today we have to deal with a hundred Saddams, who push their pawns, and then when we ask for help
from the British, they tell us that trade is free!"
At least once a week, Qaduum patrols the 45 ports that, all along the Shatt al-Arab from Fao to
Basra, export contraband oil and gas and bear evocative names such as “al-Flous,” "Money". The
stowaways from Iran, who are suspected of being the source of several of the attacks that have
bloodied Iraq, come through the same ports. To show his men that he is not afraid, Qaduum drives his
own car at the head of a cortege of fifteen armed police. He wants us to understand the scope of the
traffic that diseases his country. He assures us that without his escort, it is impossible to get into
these filthy ports where a ton of oil sells for over two hundred dollars. All the traffickers are armed and
ready to defend their business dearly.
And yet, all along this sensitive border, we didn't encounter a single checkpoint, not a single patrol by
coalition soldiers. At one intersection, a fine paved road leads to the Al-Barak port. Trucks, loaded with
new cars without plates coming from the Emirates, leave the immense port, guarded like a fortress.
But we won't go any further. Al-Barak is the port of Kaled al-Amar, Bin Laden's uncle, Basra's first cop
explains to us with a sigh, "It's a private port; I don't have the power to go there. They'd think I was
trying to attack them and open fire."
Basra Hospital
Before, I used to pop over to the hospital at 2 AM. Now my colleagues are getting murdered one after
the other...How much longer can we hold on?"
On the road to Basra, the calcified carcasses of Iraqi army Soviet tanks lie along the shoulders like
abandoned toys. Researchers have measured the radioactivity of these hulks that continue to emit
depleted uranium from the shells that hit them last year. The figures are alarming. The Head of
Pediatric Leukemia, Dr. Jenan Hassan, expects a fresh outbreak of young patients in 2005, given the
incubation period. Before Operation Desert Storm, there were only 19 children a year with leukemia. In
recent years, however, the doctor attends more than 200 patients a year, not counting all those whose
parents are wealthy enough to have them sent to Baghdad for medical care.
Draped in a turquoise hijab, the energetic 47 year old doctor makes her rounds. In her department,
thanks to an Austrian NGO which has taken charge of the wing with children suffering from leukemia,
the rate of cure has gone from 20 to 50% since the regime's fall. When she evokes the atmosphere in
the town, however, the pediatrician loses her fine optimism. "Before, I could pop over to the hospital at
2 in the morning. Today my colleagues have taken turns getting murdered... We have 160 political
parties in Basra. New portraits replace the old ones. Personally, I can't tell the difference."
Dr. Jenan's children go to school with bodyguards, and her daughter, who had been harassed by
Islamists trying to indoctrinate her, has quit her university studies. A few weeks ago, one of the
Islamist parties tried to take over the hospital, but the energetic doctor chased their militia away. "Ever
since, we make the rounds to defend the hospital. But how much longer can we hold out?"
Basra Prison
Asil Jasem, 18 years old, was kidnapped and raped. The judge has put her in jail to protect her from
her family, which wants to kill her to restore her honor...
The day before we arrived in Basra, two young women who worked for the American firm KBR, a
Halliburton subsidiary, were murdered in the taxi that was supposed to take them home. Small Islamic
groups claim credit for the crime. "There are parties that have decreed women should not work for
foreigners, indeed, not for anyone," explains the Chief of Police. You only have to take a tour of the
Basra prison to understand the hard reality of life for a woman in today's Iraq. In this filthy prison which
stinks of urine, 350 prisoners are piled into six cells. In the women's section, there are only eleven
prisoners. However, according to the opinion of the jailer himself, only one of them really deserves
detention. Iman Abdallah, 33 years old, threw a grenade at an official building in exchange for a few
dollars. Orphaned, she justifies her act by her impoverishment. She knows she will probably spend the
rest of her life in jail. As for the others...
Asil Jasem, a very pretty eighteen-year-old brunette, was kidnapped by a man who raped her. The
police picked her up and took her in and the judge placed her in detention so her family wouldn't be
tempted to kill her to restore her honor. She's been hiding in prison from her family for three months.
The jailer harbors no illusions about her fate. As soon as she leaves, they'll kill her. Dounia Abdul
Wahad, 24 years old, is accused of murder. In fact, her brother killed a man who was harassing her.
But since she was "the source" of the crime, she's the one who will pay. She's been in prison five
months and ten days. Her neighbor is a simple-minded person, protected here from the street. The
next woman is a young girl of fifteen, who is the sister-in-law of a kidnapper no one has been able to
arrest. She is serving his sentence in his place...
Suq ash Shuyukh
"Do you know you almost died?" the militiaman in the service of the young Shi'ite, Moqtada al-Sadr,
asks us... They took us for terrorists.
The township of Suq ash Shuyukh, a source of obsessive worry for Italian Colonel Luigi Scollo, who
heads task force number 11 responsible for controlling the region, is to be found on the Nasiriya road.
Something is always happening in this little town where Shi'ite extremists make the law. Suq ash
Shuyukh's specialty, however, is train attacks. It is said that the bandits have an understanding with
the conductor such that he slows down in the vicinity of this little town. Candidates brave or unaware
enough to board the phantom carriage with the broken windows have become rare. That's not Suq ash
Shuyukh's only curse, however. Only at some remove from the train tracks can one make out the
ecological disaster of the city's sewers. Torrents of whitish foam flow directly into the stream from
which some draw their "potable" water.
When we try to leave the city, a pick-up truck full of Iraqi police blocks our way. A dozen
Kalashnikovs are trained on us. In this city where people firmly believe Americans who want to justify
their presence in Iraq are responsible for the attacks, we have been taken for terrorists. Once the
"misunderstanding" was cleared away, the policemen asked that we follow them. Soon, however, a car
intervenes: militiamen from the young Shi'ite extremist Moqtada al-Sadr's party have their finger on the
trigger. The Iraqi police respectfully efface themselves. "Do you know you just missed being killed?'
scolds Adnan Daoui, Representative from Al-Sadr's office, who was warned of our presence by a
neighborhood militiaman. "Have you forgotten that in every city you must present yourselves to the
local authorities?" Seeing the local residents' deference towards Daoui, we quickly understood who
represents the authorities in question here...
Nasiriya
Dr. Harith, one of those who cared for- and saved- the American "heroine" Jessica Lynch, has not
received a word of thanks...
In Nasriya, poor sheep graze on garbage in the ruins of buildings bombarded during the last war.
People fought in this city that contemptuous Iraqis call "the Weed" to mock the obtuse character of the
city's residents. The American "heroine" Jessica Lynch fell into an ambush here. People remember the
Hollywood epic in which she was presented as the first imprisoned woman soldier since World War II
to be "liberated". A raid worthy of the best studios was organized against the Nasiriya Hospital, where,
according to American General Headquarters, the young woman was being held. Only later did we
learn that, in fact, the soldier had been cared for there by Iraqi doctors who had done everything to save
her life.
Dr. Harith, 26 years old, a young emergency internist with round eyeglasses and a lanky bearing,
was one of those doctors. He took care of Jessica Lynch when she regained consciousness,
twenty-four hours after her arrival. "I even arranged the pillows so she could see the city from her bed,"
he recalls. "She kept repeating she was afraid of Saddam. She was a baby." When he considered she
was in fit condition to travel, he was the one to try and organize her transfer to an American checkpoint
in an ambulance. In vain. Welcomed by shots, the vehicle had to turn back. We all know what followed:
the nighttime raid that shook the hospital and the soldier's removal.
Since then, Dr. Harith has not received a word of thanks for having taken such good care of the
American heroine. The only one to receive the prize of American citizenship was the lawyer who
showed the marines where the girl was located: "Amusing, when you consider that that man, a former
member of Saddam's secret services, is being sought by Nasiriya residents for the harassments to
which he subjected them." Today, however, the "Lynch affair" is the doctor's last concern. The
hospital's lamentable state of disrepair gives him a chill down the spine. Garbage burns on the front
steps. The emergency room is filthy and overcrowded. The repugnant acrid smell of mixed urine and
blood forces visitors to keep a handkerchief over their face. There is a shortage of everything. The
young intern states bluntly that the hospital's situation has deteriorated terribly since Saddam's fall:
"The Italians brought us a little package of medicine, but in this hospital we receive up to 2,000
patients a day. It's like trying to feed a family of fifty people with a sandwich!"
The archeological sites of Oumma and GudaÔa
The Sheikhs have given their approval for the looting of Sumerian and Mesopotamian archeological
sites in exchange for the donation of 20% of the proceeds to the mosque...
Traumatized by the attack which cost sixteen of their soldiers' lives in November 2003, the Italians
have taken refuge in the airport. Today they are leaving one of their last posts in the city, Nasiriya's
museum. The director, Mr. Hamdani, swallows his shame and ends up agreeing to take us on a tour of
his establishment. Bottles of wine on the pedestal of statues of Sumerian gods, plastic strewn on the
ground, and remains of meals...The archeologist cannot keep back his tears before this spectacle. In
the small room where he had put away the treasures from Sumerian sites, he let us touch cuneiform
tablets, necklaces, and 5000 year old children's toys.
With an escort of fifteen customs agents, we accompany him about a hundred kilometers from
Nasiriya to the site of the first Mesopotamian temple of which we have traces, the Gudaia Palace.
About 40 statues exhibited in the Louvre come from this site. Today, however, you'd say that an army
had turned the ground over. Looters directed by antiquities dealers have systematically dug, ravaged,
and reduced this fabulous depositary of ancient history to powder. Ever since the Sheikhs gave their
approval to looters if they agreed to turn 20% of their proceeds over to the mosque, the antiquities
hunting season has been open: for a few dollars, Baghdad merchants can procure themselves the
ancient pottery and cuneiforms that Western collectors fight over. Hardly any need to put oneself out:
all you have to do is walk on this sea of Mesopotamian shards to pick up cuneiform tablets, royal
seals, and little bas-reliefs, without even having to dig.
In Oumma, where just walking around you bump into intact Sumerian vases dating to 2,500 BCE, the
thieves have, nonetheless, destroyed a large part of the ancient city's walls. For the market is
saturated with pieces from this period, and western dealers now seek objects older than 5,000 years:
so the thieves destroy everything above the most ancient layers..."For collectors, these pieces are
nothing but a pretty piece of pottery in their showcases," despairs Hamdani. "For us, they're the
missing link to decipher the world's first civilization." And to defend this cradle of humanity against
looters, there's just an old, almost blind man who uses his Kalashnikov as a cane. No trace of the
sharp shooters dressed in black and armed like science fiction robots that patrol Nasiriya's streets in
their armored vehicles. All the same, they are the ones who are charged with protecting these sites...
Nadjaf
If an accused is declared guilty by the "judge" of an Islamic tribunal, it's the injured party who
performs the punishment, cuts the hand off thieves, executes murderers.
At the Nadjaf municipal civil court, there are about twenty judges sitting in the president's office
sipping tea. Idling, they count their murdered colleagues. Of course there was the ex-president of the
Nadjaf court, then the Mosul judge, the Kirkuk judge, and, most recently, the Hilla judge. Today, there
are no hearings. Not the least little divorce, nothing. For in Nadjaf since the fall of the despised regime,
one can finally leave it up to the religious authorities or the tribal sheikhs to settle differences. Of these
new "judicial centers", the most popular is that of Moqtada al-Sadr, the young extremist leader with the
sinister expression who preaches hatred for the Americans. In a narrow alley, a compact crowd hurries
in front of the dispensary for the champion of Nadjaf's disinherited. Under the black turbans, the glares
launched at foreigners are filled with hatred. Everyone here is waiting only for a signal from the guide to
take up arms against the invader.
Inside Moqtada's court, in the little hearing rooms, judges, like the plaintiffs, squat right on the floor. In
this place called "a court of law,' sharia is applied to every infraction. The "court", which only sits in the
morning, hears over 50 matters a day. To be a judge, there is no need for a diploma; it's enough to
have studied the Koran. The house even includes a little prison. Here, everything is done to reconcile
the parties present. If a plaintiff refuses all forms of compensation and the "judge" declares the
accused guilty, it is the injured parties who themselves carry out the sentences, cut the hands off
thieves, execute murderers. Seated in a suit in a little room, the Sheikh Ahmed al-Hussein arbitrates a
conflict between two brothers who are fighting over their inheritance, listens to plaintiffs who sob. In
twenty minutes, the verdict is given. And social and religious pressure is strong enough that the verdict
is applied without argument. When necessary, the police collaborate with the "court of law.” "They even
help us arrest alcohol vendors who refuse to come before us," acknowledges Sheikh Ahmed, satisfied.
Baghdad
While foreigners hole up in hotels, domino players have returned to the terrace of the old cafe
Al-Beyrouti.
When you arrive in Baghdad, the first thing you notice, the most spectacular change, is the
consumption frenzy. The fury to buy. On the sidewalks in smart districts, in Arasat or in Al-Mansour,
there's a pile of overflowing boxes. You can find television sets for under 100 dollars, satellite antennas
for 75 dollars and washing machines for 150, or about one month's salary for a bureaucrat. In front of
the city's hotels, on the other hand, there's an altogether different ritual that gets played out: one of fear
and obsession with security. One runs into former British, South African, Chilean soldiers, who walk
with their legs apart, their hand on their weapon's grip, to - as they say in their jargon - "securitize the
perimeter."
While foreigners hole up in the hotels under the protection of these armies of mercenaries, in
Baghdad, Iraqis - the men, at least - breathe. Finally. At night, people line up in front of Chez
Al-Faqma, the best ice-cream merchant in the city, and, on the banks of the Tigris for the first time
since the war, the dominoes players have returned to Al-Beyrouti. On the terrace of this old Baghdad
cafe where the waiters sport red vests, the wind carries the good scent of the river. A boat glides on the
water. The illusion of peace, however, never lasts very long. According to the Iraqi police, there are
about 25 attacks a day in the capital. Only a third are foiled.
A mosque in the Al-Khazalia neighborhood
"We're all going to die," says the Sheikh. "So, let's die bravely. Let's imitate Sheikh Yassine and the
martyrs who blow themselves up in booby trapped cars in Israel!"
Friday is the day of prayer and in Baghdad tanks and armed militias take position in front of
"sensitive" mosques. Ibrahim, 14 years old, is on duty at his neighborhood mosque. He can act as
detached as he likes, one nonetheless feels his pride at playing one of the tough guys with his
Kalashnikov among his pals whose eyes dart lightning. A few days ago in this neighborhood, the just
completed Shi'ite mosque was demolished by a bomb. Concatenation of reprisals: one of the Wahabite
notables of the neighborhood was murdered and the Sunni mosque attacked in turn. The tension is so
keen that armed bodyguards accompany the sheikh into the mosque's interior, a sacrilege for
Muslims. Nonetheless, it's not the conflict between Shi'ites and Sunni that will be the subject of the
Sheikh's sermon today. Draped in his ample white tunic over which his long black beard flows, the
Sheikh flies into a rage against "the invader.” He compares the good smell of martyrs to the pestilential
odor that emanates from Americans' corpses. "We're all going to die, it's our fate as men," the Sheikh,
in tears, prophesizes. "So let's die bravely. Let's imitate the example of Sheikh Yassine (the
Palestinian Hamas guide who was murdered March 22 by the Israeli army) and of the martyrs who
blow themselves up in booby-trapped cars in Israel!"
Translation: t r u t h o u t French language correspondent Leslie Thatcher.
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