GNN's man in Iraq writes his most poignant dispatch yet.
Editor’s note: Two weeks ago a Wall Street Journal reporter named Farnaz Fassihi wrote a heartfelt email to her friends describing what life is really like for her as a foreign reporter in Iraq. The email became a lightning rod of controversy because it appeared to describe a hellish reality few Americans were being exposed to on the nightly news. But anyone who gets their news from GNN wouldn’t have been surprised. Iraq has become one of the most dangerous places in the world for everyone there, soldiers, reporters and, most significantly, for the people America claims to have “liberated.” In his most powerful dispatch to date, GNN’s man in the Middle East Borzou Daragahi shares his latest thoughts about what’s happening on the ground:
Behnam Farho is a low-key, middle-aged, middle-class goldsmith, a member of Iraq’s Christian community and pillar of his community. Sitting in his living room one recent day he pinpoints for me the moment when fear overwhelmed him and he decided to quickly sell everything he and his extended family owned and flee Iraq forever.
It was late August, just after his beloved niece, Mayada, had been abducted by gun-toting men with Basra accents from the sidewalk in front of her home. Farho, in search of Mayada, began a weeklong odyssey into Baghdad’s new criminal underworld.
At one point he found himself sitting in an outdoor teahouse in Sadr City, the dilapidated Baghdad neighborhood of 2.5 million Iraqi Shias overrun by raw sewage and nightly gun battles between Shia militiamen and the U.S. Army. He was having an awkward chat with a whiskey-guzzling crime kingpin who might have been able to shed light on Mayada’s fate.
“What if the police come now?” Farho recalls asking the criminal overlord. “They’ll arrest me, too.”
The mobster, a graduate of Saddam Hussein’s prisons, laughed heartily. “Before the police even left the station,” he told Farho, “I would get a call on my cell phone.”
A few weeks later – after he had paid off a $10,000 ransom, collected his distraught niece, and begun selling off the family’s cars, houses and furniture – he was headed off to Syria, one of the many Iraqis now getting out of the country.
“There’s no place for us in Iraq,” Farho tells me. “Even if I wound up in a poor country in Africa, I’d be happy, as long as I could sleep at night without fear.”
It was Kanan Makiya, the Brandeis scholar and Iraqi exile, who wrote a book some years ago branding Saddam Hussein’s Iraq “The Republic of Fear,” a place where the deposed president’s security apparatus wrought havoc on the lives and psyches of ordinary Iraqis. Makiya was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the U.S. invasion, an associate of Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi, who now appears to have played a key role in fooling American intelligence officials that Saddam possessed Hussein possessed weapons
But in the “liberated” Iraq they pushed for, a new kind of fear ravages the land. It’s the constant, nagging fear that the growing insecurity will only get worse, that the violence, the hatred, the chaos will keep edging closer and closer to one’s own life, one’s immediate circle.
Fear is the common denominator, the only thing any of the disparate groups in Iraq have in common. For many Iraqis, fear has dashed hopes for a future democratic country and left them longing for the certainties of the past.
“I would prefer that the new leader will be Saddam Hussein because I would rather vote for Saddam Hussein than any else,” said Wafa Hamid, a 41-year-old engineer at the Ministry of Trade and a mother of two. “He was one of the most hated people in the history of Iraq. And I was against him more than anyone else. But if he runs for election I’m going to vote for him.”
For those who live here, violence, crime and mayhem have turned the capital upside down. A simple trip to the supermarket turns into a near-disaster when a gunfight erupts outside. A well-to-doctor drives around in a beat-up jalopy while keeping his two Mercedes on cinderblocks, for fear he’ll be car-jacked. An Iraqi teenager wearing AC Milan hat stands frowning oat an American soldier in a guard post. The soldier, a burly African-American with an M-16 in hand, stares back, stone-faced.
Once busy commercial streets crammed with cars and consumers are ghost towns. Once free-flowing highways turn into parking lots as roadblocks and checkpoints and military operations halt traffic and hamper life.
Car bomb explosions and mortar fire shake the day and night, so mundane now that some people don’t even halt their sentences when the explosions go off, much as a New Yorker might react to a car alarm.
Shop owners who used to welcome foreign reporters with tea, now politely but firmly order them out. “I’m sorry, it’s not you,” one cell phone shop owner explains. “I’m just scared someone will target my store because they see foreigners here.”
The fruits of liberation – unrestricted political expression, freedom of travel, uncensored access to media—have become poisoned by the harsh, bloody realities of post-war Iraq, where car bomb explosions now exceed more than one a day and terrorists, kidnappers, criminals, soldiers and spies scar the lives and psyches of ordinary Iraqis.
The trauma Iraqis are undergoing strikes me during a hasty visit to the Bab al Sharji “thieves market,” a sprawling bazaar in the old section of town filled with pickpockets, car thieves and prostitution. At one stall, 13-year-old Allawi Ali Haydar sells videos showing battle of footage of guerrillas fighting American forces and Iraqi National Guard. In the bloody videos, the Mahdi Army militiamen open fire on Americans from alleyways and fire rocket-propelled grenades across outdoor markets in Sadr City. They sell briskly.
“I don’t feel good when I see them,” says the boy, the sadness flickering in his brown eyes. “Because I live in Sadr City and most of the events shown are in Sadr City, and I don’t want such things to happen in my part of town.”
A crowd gathers as I interview him, and my driver and translator whisk me away. “We have to keep moving,” my driver says. “We’ll be safer if we keep moving.”
Another day, another quick getaway from an interview. This time I am bundled into the backseat of the car after an interview with soldiers at an Army base when the fear creeps up on me. The paranoia settles in, as it does at every turn in Iraq. What if someone is following us, or has turned us into the resistance? What if one of the translators or guards at the will sell me out for a few hundred or thousand bucks?
I think of poor Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, the two French reporters kidnapped on the road to Najaf. I last saw Christian at a café in Paris. He was pondering whether to come back to Iraq. George was at my wedding in July. He had been talking about hanging up his foreign correspondent spurs, settling down back home with his new girlfriend.
They’ve now been missing for 40 days.
My heart races. I order my driver to move, quickly. A series of car bombs has gone off nearby, and while I don’t rush to the scene of every explosion in the city, this one is newsworthy: the radio says dozens of kids were killed.
But the road is blocked, yet again. We try to find a way past, but are thwarted at every stop. We are in the south of Baghdad, an area I’m not familiar with. Piles of garbage rot on the streets. The Iraqi drivers lean on their horns and climb onto the median. “Yes, yes, Moqtada,” says the graffiti. “Iraq will be America’s graveyard.” A Kiowa armed surveillance helicopter flies low over ahead. And then another one.
Across the median, an American Humvee convoy is stopped dead in its tracks. Up ahead is a clogged intersection. Behind is a huge wave of traffic keeping its distance. The drivers are too terrified to get close to the American convoy, the Americans too scared to get close to the intersection. Some of the Iraqis try to back out. Some tries to push forward. No one gives anyone the right of away. Thus there is gridlock.
I have learned to fear the Arab word, “hadasseh,” which means literally accident or incident but in Baghdad’s current context usually involves explosives and rapidly moving projectiles. I realize we’re stuck very close to the American convoy. If there’s going to be a hadasseh, it will be right in our faces.
“Let’s get out of here,” I announce.
The side street is blocked. So is the next one. And the next one. Finally we find a way out, slowly winding our way through. a labyrinth of concrete pylons and razor wire. I breathe a sigh of relief.
We have to keep moving. We’ll be safer if we keep moving.
My driver entertains us with the story of his cousin: Stuck in traffic a week earlier he had been car-jacked at gun point. He calmly handed the criminals the keys to his Toyota, stepped out of the car, grabbed a taxi and went home, where he broke down in tears and vowed to kill himself. His relatives intervened, took up a collection and agreed to buy him the Kia Civia.
Two days later the cousin was stuck in traffic again when a roadside bomb directed at a passing American convoy exploded. The Americans opened fire, he said, and pandemonium ensued. Cars screeched away ramming into each other. He threw the car, a Korean-made Kia Civia, into reverse and tried to get away. He was terrified something bad would happen to him or his car. By the time he got home he was again mired in despair.
Down another Baghdad street on another day, and high school teacher Hanna Abdul Hakim walks hand in hand with her two kids aged six and eight. She explains that a few days ago a roadside bomb exploded on the highway a few hundred yards from her house, and her kids have been terrified ever since, refusing to stay in the house unless she was with them.
Her understanding employer allowed her to leave work every day at noon, pick up her kids from grammar school, and them bring them back to work with her, while she finished up afternoon classes. “We’re scared for our kids mostly,” she says. “But we cannot keep our children locked up. They have so much energy. We can no longer take them to the park or public places, because of the explosions, they’re afraid of the explosions.”
Many parents, she says, have considered pulling their kids out of school altogether until things achieve some level of normalcy.
“We’re pretty confident things will get back to normal,” says Shamil, my translator, as we get back into the car. “The question is what level of suffering we’ll have to endure before things go back to normal.”
The graffiti on the wall says: “Long live the resistance. Long live the holy warriors. The occupier will leave, by God. Traitors and spies beware.”
We turn on Radio Sawa, the popular US-backed radio station that has become the soundtrack to my life in Baghdad. My translator deciphers the headlines: Sunni clerics abducted and murdered in Sadr City, three Kurdish peshmerga beheaded, intense fighting on Haifa Street, new Abu Musab al Zarqawi communiqué promising more violence against collaborators. Then the music comes on.
“I’m like a bird, I’ll only fly away,” Nelly Furtado sings, “I don’t know where my soul is. I don’t know where my home is.”
***
This is my eighth trip to Iraq since 2002 on stays lasting from two weeks to four months. I first visited Iraq’s Kurdish north, which actively supported the war. Their view of the war as a liberation of Iraq was infectious, and when the northern front fell, I followed the Kurdish militiamen into cities where locals embraced us with flowers, hugs and sweets.
Back then everyone – journalists, Iraqis, Americans – at least half believed that Iraq was on its way to freedom and prosperity.
As the months wore on and the mismanagement, beheadings, kidnappings, car bombs, prisoner abuse scandals, gunfights and air strikes mounted the true believers became fewer and fewer.
Now, only a dwindling cadre of U.S. officials – ensconced behind the high walls and multiple security layers of the Green Zone—continue to publicly express unbridled optimism for the future of Iraq and America’s aims here. I suspect even most of them are just trying to keep themselves alive and contain the burgeoning chaos until they have a chance to get out.
The most honest officials of the interim government, acknowledge Iraq’s deep troubles, but call them growing pains, a stage countries undergo as they move from one government to another. They argue there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
“We believe this is natural a result of the collapse of the regime,” says Hamid al-Bayati, the deputy foreign minister, like Makiya and Chalabi, another exile I met before the war. He, however, was skeptical about a U.S. invasion.
“This has happened everywhere: the French revolution, the Russian revolution, Iranian revolution,” he says. “When a dictatorial regime with 13 security organizations, with a huge army of a half million or more collapses and the arms go into the hands of gangs, criminals and thieves this is the obvious result.”
One friend who lives and works in the Green Zone recently had me over to her house for lunch. An Iraqi-American, she arrived here in the summer of 2003 to get in touch with her roots and rebuild the country’s political infrastructure. Tears welling in her eyes, she says she’s leaving this weekend for good, convinced she can do neither. She says she’ll try doing good somewhere else. Maybe Indonesia.
As for me, I find myself compelled to keep coming back. Despite its dangers, it’s undoubtedly the most important story of our generation, what the U.S. invasion of Vietnam was to the 1960s. I find have built my life around the Iraq story: I’ve moved from New York City to Tehran, half a day’s drive away, and my lovely new wife is a French correspondent who is also based in the Middle East and covering Iraq.
We haven’t gone our honeymoon yet. Instead we came to Baghdad.
I have certain advantages that make it possible for me to work. I am of Iranian descent, which allows me to blend in with unless I open my mouth. And even when they find out I’m a foreigner, I tell them I’m Iranian. That makes them afraid. In Iraq these days, many people fear Iranian spies, and I guess in the current climate it’s better to be feared and avoided than to get kidnapped and star in a beheading video.
I grew up in Chicago, and my Midwestern vowels give me access to the U.S. troops and officials.
But most of the Americans here don’t have the choice to leave.
On another street, on another day, a joint U.S. Army-Iraqi Police checkpoint slows traffic to a halt. Pfc. Isaac Staley, 30, of Springfield, Oregon, tries to make the best of a tough situation.
“I like the Iraqi people,” he says as he stands guard over traffic that eases past the checkpoint. “But there’s so much separating them from us, from our Western Civilization, that it’s hard to get past. There’s prejudice, there’s prejudice on our side, and there’s prejudice on their side.”
The Iraqi police radio crackles out an all-points bulletin: “A guy with a beard named Mohammad,” says the dispatcher, a description which could fit hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. “If you see him, detain him.”
A Black Hawk helicopter roars by overhead . And then another one.
In general the U.S. soldiers are stunned by what they consider the ignorance, ingratitude and hostility of Iraqis.
A soldier here tells me the story of a group of 1st Cavalry Division soldiers targeted by a remote-controlled roadside bomb under fire in a desolate area just south of Baghdad. None of them were hurt, but they started scouring the area.
They came upon a father and son whose identification cards showed they came from Sadr City. The pair started spewing out a cockamamie story about how they’d come here from all the way up north to look for work.
“If it was any other unit,” the commanding officer told the father as they detained the pair. “You’d be lying on the ground bleeding now.”
In a nearby town, a hotbed of trouble where locals constantly take shots at the Americans, another soldier sums up his feelings as he felt the glares of those staring at him. “If I’ve got to prevent myself from getting shot,” he recalls thinking to himself. “I’ve got to kill everyone in this village.”
In moments of candor, beyond the watch of their commanders, many soldiers express grave doubts about their mission here. They’re under frequent fire, with mortar rounds and rockets narrowly missing their base. They’ve seriously curtailed patrols and rarely venture off their base in unarmored vehicles. They suspect the same people who smile at them during the day are the ones firing rocket-propelled grenades at them by night. They’ve grown to mistrust everybody, fear everybody.
“It’s more of an insurgency than a war,” says U.S Army Capt. Jeff Mersiowsky, of Tucson, Arizona. “Don’t trust anyone, not even the 10-year-old kid on the street. You’re not nervous when you’re out there on the street. You’re nervous when you’re at the base thinking about being out there.”
They wonder what it means to win this thing, what the endgame is. “We’re walking a very fine line here,” says one Sergeant. “The people are either actively supporting the resistance or tacitly supporting them by not diming them out.”
I remember a comment I heard last summer when I was embedded with the Army’s 4th Infantry Division in Baqouba. A grizzled sergeant whose name escapes told me something that, at the time I thought was far too cynical, but now strikes me as prophetic:
“The only question for us,” he says, “is how many of us got to die before we get to go home.”
****
A calamity has struck.
My laptop has died. I call around desperately. I can easily buy another laptop, but I need to recover the data, especially the interviews stored on the hard drive. Someone recommends a computer shop near my hotel. The owner – speaking perfect English – tells me my hard drive is dead. He says he can’t fix my computer, that I need to go to Sana’a Street, Baghdad’s Silicon Alley.
I dress local, a cruddy button-down shirt I bought at the bazaar last trip here, grey slacks, dirty shoes, Baghdadi frown. I go with my translator. “Don’t speak too loud in English,” I tell him.
“It’s hard to remember,” he says.
“Just picture me on al Jazeera with a knife to my neck,” I say.
“Don’t worry,” my translator, an Iraqi Christian, says. “They’ll kill me before they kill you.”
On Sana’a Street, the slinky melodies of Arab pop tunes tech savvy Iraqis have downloaded onto their cell-phones ring aloud. The computer shop is like something out of “Blade Runner,” with anachronistic technologies, radio tubes, microchips, screw drivers and hammers mixed together on shelves. The technician says he can repair my computer, but that will take a few hours. He says he can probably extract the data, too, but that I should stick around to make sure nothing gets lost.
I’m not really supposed to stay anywhere for longer than a few minutes, an hour tops. I’m stuck between safeguarding my person and my data.
I decide to play the odds and go with my data.
I sit around for a couple hours. On the television is a documentary on al-Arabiya, the ubiquitous satellite news channel, about the Spanish conquistadors of America. A missionary hands a Bible to a Native American, who drops it to the ground with contempt. A Spanish soldier raises a musket toward him and opens fire.
Bored, I take a walk along the street. The shops sell all manner of high-tech gear, flash cards, digital cameras, laptops, and I find myself lost in the window displays of cool, colorful gadgets and forget for a moment where I am and what the rules are.
I come to, and the fear creeps up again. Just a few days earlier I had to get an AIDS test in order to get my Iraqi residency stamp on my passport. The registrar at the clinic began jotting down my name, local address and nationality. The fear hits. I plead with him to take out at least one piece of information. Who knows who reads the book? He laughs at my paranoia, but agrees to change the name of my hotel, just in case kidnappers come hunting for me.
I quickly return to the computer shop. The laptop is ready. It’s time to get back on the road.
***
Iraq’s passport offices have become among the most popular places, as droves of the country’s young and talented try to get out of the country. Even those who originally signed on to America’s plan to reshape Iraq are leaving. Ahmad Ibrahim 21, worked as a translator for the U.S. Army, a job as dangerous as any in Iraq, where hundreds of employees doing even the most menial jobs for the American authorities in Iraq been gunned down, or kidnapped and murdered.
Ahmad had lost three of his fellow translators, his good friends. People on the street told him he was a traitor who deserved to be killed for working with the Americans. One day, he came upon the corpse of one his pal Mohammad, who had been abducted earlier, lying close to the river, a bullet in his head.
But that wasn’t what finally spurred him to leave. It was a particularly gruesome day as the unit he worked for patrolled Sadr City. The gunfire was intense. The battalion commander handed him a pistol and told him to watch his back.
“I didn’t sign up for this,” he says. “I just wanted to be an interpreter. I’ve been just like an American soldier. I’ve been jumping over fences, doing hard raids. I’ve been taking fire on patrol.”
The $800 a month he got couldn’t make up for the mental anguish he suffered over his conflicting loyalties to employer and countrymen. He found he had to hide his movements, his sudden wealth, and above all his job description. He led a double life. To the soldiers of 1st Cav, he was Bill the popular translator. To his friends he was Ahmad the shy student. It got to be too much, too intense for the young skinny man, and now he’s about to leave for America
“Actually I want to leave but it’s still my country,” he says. “I feel so bad about it. Everything is starting to get worse and worse.”
*** On another side of Baghdad, a giant poster of junior cleric Moqtada al-Sadr hovers above as the bright smiles of two laughing young women shine out from their all-black all-covering abayas. Sadr City is best known as the vast slum of 2.5 million Iraqi Shias who suffered immensely under Saddam.
But I’ve always thought of it as a pulsating, high-energy domain of young Iraqis. The kids dominate the sewage infested streets. The kids scrawl graffiti on its walls. With feckless disregard for their own lives, the kids pick up rocket-propelled grenades and engage in running battles with American soldiers and Iraqi National Guard.
“Iraq is for sale,” says one piece of graffiti. “Please see Iyad Allawi.”
Nearby on Dakhel Street in Sector 55, seven funeral tents have been raised for seven “martyrs” of Mahdi Army. All died three nights earlier in battles with the U.S., the locals tell me. The relatives of the deceased sit on plastic chairs and greet each other mournfully, sipping sweet, dark-brewed tea and wiping tears.
Suddenly, a truckload of young men pulls into the square. They wear black shirts, wave black and green flags and sing religious songs. They dance in circles, jump up and down. They hold portraits of Moqtada Sadr. More pick-up trucks of joyous young men pour in.
“God is great! Oh, Ali,” they sing.
Some of the older mourners turn away.
“It’s a goodbye party,” says a young man who gave only the nickname Abu Mahdi. “We are seeing our friend off as he goes to heaven.”
His friend was Ali Nasser Hadid Mussawi, 28. A few hours before he died, his best friend was killed by Americans during a gun battle. Others had urged him not to go out and fight that night.
“I told him,’ Your friend just died,’” Abu Mahdi said. “Now is not the proper time.’ But he said, ‘Indeed, now is the proper time.’”
A little down the pockmarked road past blue and white Mercedes bus riddled with bullet holes sits rests, I spot a smiling Mahdi Army fighter giving orders. He gives his name only as Ali “Abu Hossein,” and says he’s 24.
He’s got perfect teeth and an infectious laugh.
He leads a group of lively, pumped up young men out for a night of what passed for fun in Sadr City—resetting remote control bombs that failed to detonate during the previous night’s battles with American soldiers.
“Inshallah,” or God-willing, he says, “there will be more fighting tonight.”
I can’t help but feel sorry for them. They are little more than lost children, some of them as young as 12.
As the plant the remote-control bombs, I notice a group of Iraqi police stand not 20 feet away. They refuse to speak to me. “The police are with us,” says Ali.
“Or, they are afraid,” jumps in another young man, among several listening to our conversation.
Ali and his merry band of warriors ask me if I’d like to join them, to cover their heroic feats in tonight’s battles. Inshallah, I say, next time.
The crackle of mosque loudspeakers heralds evening prayers and the beginning of more fighting. It’s time to get out of Sadr City and return to the relative safety of my hotel compound.
But before I leave, I draw the eavesdropping young man off to the side. His name is Hamid Feras, a 30-year-old civil service worker, and his is the only speck of hope and moderation I’ve heard all day.
“In my opinion,” Feras says, “now is not the time for resistance. Up to this point, we should be grateful to the Americans, because they got rid of a nightmare we’d never thought we’d get rid of. We should give them two, three, four years to rebuild the country.”
His voice is drowned out by a passing convoy of U.S. tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, beginning to take up their positions for the nightly battle. A Kiowa flies overhead. Then another one. Dusk is settling into darkness, and gunfire erupts in the distance.
I’ve been casting about for a nickname for this place. I think I like “Brazil,” because of all the dilapidated Brazilian made Volkswagen Passats Saddam ordered in the early eighties. Iraqis call them “Brazili”
But “Brazil” is also Terry Gilliam’s 1985 sci-fi film about a dystopic city where terrorist bomb blasts don’t interrupt dinners, where the simplest bureaucratic problems can have life or death consequences. In both Baghdad and “Brazil” fear deadens the senses and sucks the joy out of life, and those who cannot get out – like the hapless hero of the movie, tortured while strapped into a chair—retreat into their imaginations.
As we leave Sadr City to head back toward the city center, we turn on Sawa. Lebanese pop singer Wael Kfouri is on. “Birds cry, flowers bloom, the sun sets, and it is dark,” he sings. “Talking was leading nowhere. He was able to forget, and his eyes could sleep.”
Borzou Daragahi is GNN’s man in the Middle East. During the invasion, he reported for GNN from northern Iraq. He has contributed to NPR, U.S. News & World Report, MSNBC.com, and the CS Monitor.
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