Death shadows life in Baghdad By Rick Jervis, USA TODAY
Mon May 22, 7:12 AM ET
At 7 p.m. each evening, Ahmed al-Qaisy, 40, shutters his optical store and heads home to have a light dinner with his wife and four children. Then he pulls his assault rifle from the hall closet and goes out on the streets for a night watch shift with the Adhamiyah neighborhood's armed militia.
Across town, Huda al-Salehy, 54, rarely leaves her home. But when she does, to visit the grocer or the doctor's office, she constantly scans her rearview mirror and makes sure to pull her car well into the shoulder of the road each time a U.S. convoy passes near.
It's a tactic she learned last year after her hired driver was crushed to death under the treads of an American tank, she says.
Each morning after breakfast, Ahmad al-Hamdani, 26, chief correspondent for Al-Hurriyah, a popular television station run by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, scans the morning headlines for potential stories, then searches his 1986 Chevrolet for bombs. He loads the magazines of his CZ 9mm pistol and AK-47 assault rifle, and then carries them to work.
Every day, ordinary citizens here carefully plot how to get through the day, how to navigate a minefield of dangers that include car bombs, street gunfights, kidnappings and, increasingly, sectarian killings.
Life for average Iraqis has been risky since before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. But the streets became even more dangerous after the bombing Feb. 22 of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, which touched off a wave of reprisal killings between Shiites and Sunnis. The number of Iraqi casualties, both civilian and Iraqi security forces, jumped from about 55 per day earlier this year to nearly 80 per day last month, according to U.S. military figures.
There is nothing normal about the conditions under which Iraqis now live or the precautions they must take. And yet, somehow, despite the growing violence, shops still fill with customers, workers drive to their jobs each morning, and students go to class.
Translator keeps job secret
As a translator for the U.S. military, Haider Kareem has one of the most dangerous jobs in Iraq. Insurgents frequently target Iraqis cooperating with the United States or the Iraqi government.
Each morning, Kareem, 33, rides two buses from his home in northwest Baghdad to the fortified Green Zone, which houses the American Embassy and other U.S. and Iraqi government offices. He keeps his wraparound sunglasses on for the entire two-hour trip, even in cloudy weather, to avoid being recognized if he encounters friends or relatives, he says.
Even inside the Green Zone, he tries not to be seen. Cardboard boxes are stacked next to the only window of his office trailer to shield him from prying eyes. When he goes on a cigarette break, he keeps a handkerchief wrapped around half his face. On the trip back home, he changes into a crumpled, older shirt so that neighbors don't suspect he has a high-paying job. At $750 a month, he makes well above the national average of $88.
And at home, no one in his family - not his wife, father, mother or two sisters - knows he works for the U.S. military. Everyone thinks he goes to work each day as a clerk for a printing company. Only his brother knows, Kareem says. "Only reason I told him is because at least one member needs to know, in case of an emergency," he says. "It's dangerous. My job is risky for everyone. But I have to work."
Newsman saves one bullet
The face of Ahmad al-Hamdani is beamed into living rooms across Iraq each evening, making him a known personality - and a high-value target for criminals and insurgents. Iraqi journalists have routinely been targeted by insurgents, killed for the content of their broadcasts or kidnapped for ransom.
Since the start of the war, 93 journalists and media assistants have been killed in Iraq, making this among the most dangerous assignments ever, according to Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organization that monitors press rights. Forty-two journalists have been kidnapped during that same period.
Those facts are not lost on al-Hamdani as he prepares for work. He carries a fully loaded assault rifle and pistol and keeps an extra bullet in the car's center console, in case he runs out of ammunition and faces capture.
"That one's for me," he says of the extra bullet. "I won't get kidnapped."
He alters his route each day from his home north of the capital to his TV station in central Baghdad. He prefers the longer, meandering farm roads to the main highway. He's often recognized at military checkpoints, but so far that has worked in his favor, he says: Iraqi soldiers use their camera phones to take pictures with him and whisk him through the line more quickly.
As he drives, he's always checking his rearview mirror to see if anyone's tailing him. And so it goes for the 12-mile journey until he reaches Al-Hurriyah's walled, fortified compound on the banks of the Tigris River in central Baghdad. It's guarded by armed members of the peshmerga, the Kurdish militia.
Inside, he directs eight correspondents on assignments around Baghdad while smoking a pack of Marlboro cigarettes a day. But he has to assign many of the stories to himself; none of the other correspondents are willing to show their faces on camera.
Each time he leaves the compound, al-Hamdani repeats the process of making sure his magazines are loaded, and he stays in constant touch with his bosses.
He also keeps the direct telephone numbers of high-ranking Iraqi military officials, including the commander of the 6th Division's Special Forces unit, on speed-dial on his mobile phone. At the first sign of trouble, he says, his plan is to reach for his phone first, his assault rifle a quick second.
"Every time I leave my home, my wife kisses and hugs me as if she's never going to see me again," he says. "But I love this work. It's more beautiful than any other job."
Widow fears for nation's psyche
Al-Salehy started keeping her 15-year-old granddaughter, Lujain, home from school in March, when the violence escalated in Baghdad. Al-Salehy is a widow and the matriarch of her family. Three daughters and one granddaughter live with her in Mansour, a leafy, upper-class neighborhood of Sunnis and Shiites. Criminals regularly prey on residents of the neighborhood.
Last year, as car bombs and kidnappings climbed, she hired a driver to keep her family off the street as much as possible. In August, the driver was parked in his Daewoo sedan outside a store in western Baghdad when an American tank drove over the vehicle, crushing him and the car, she says.
She says she filed a claim with the U.S. military and hopes to get compensated.
Since then, she has been doing most of the family's driving - keeping her eyes on the rearview mirror for U.S. or Iraqi convoys as much as on the road in front of her, she says.
Al-Salehy says she has been able to maintain her sanity but worries about her countrymen.
"Iraqis are very nice people," she says. "But their country is completely damaged right now. It's making them crazy."
An estimated one-fourth of Baghdad's adults are suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, though only one-fifth of those seek treatment, says Aamir Hussein, a physician and deputy manager of Baghdad's Ibn Rushd Psychiatric Hospital. After the Samarra bombing, the number of psychiatric cases the hospital increased, Hussein says.
At the Al-Jannan - "The Paradise" - clinic in central Baghdad, Baher Butti and a team of five therapists offer free counseling to poor patients and organize workshops and seminars.
Iraqis tend to be "psychologically withdrawn," retreating further into their families or leaving the country altogether when feeling pressure, Butti says.
Butti himself plans to leave Iraq at the end of the month because he learned that his name appeared on a target list held by militias, he says.
"The last few months have been increasingly traumatizing for Iraqis," he says. "It's out of the realm of human capability sometimes to adapt to this."
Optician fights death squads
Al-Qaisy, the optical store owner, joined the Adhamiyah militia last fall, just as uniformed death squads began targeting his neighborhood, he says. A predominantly Sunni area, Adhamiyah has been a repeated target of nighttime raids by troops that many Sunnis believe are linked to the Interior Ministry.
The bodies of some people captured in the raids have been found handcuffed and executed, at times with holes drilled in their heads, al-Qaisy says. Often, the captives are never seen again.
Many Sunnis don't trust the predominantly Shiite Interior Ministry paramilitary forces, which they suspect have ties to Iran and use their authority to abuse and kill Sunni rivals. President Jalal Talabani addressed these fears last week. "What is asked of the political parties is that they strenuously and clearly condemn these crimes, regardless of who the perpetrators are," he said in a statement.
Increasingly, Adhamiyah residents have taken matters into their own hands. On a wall at an entrance to the neighborhood, a sign scrawled in bright red and black paint reads: "Iranians and Persian police are not allowed to enter the lands of ADHAMIYAH - the people of ADHAMIYAH."
Last month, Adhamiyah militias confronted uniformed Interior Ministry police units on a nighttime raid in the neighborhood, al-Qaisy says. What ensued was a murky, two-day firefight that embroiled local residents, Interior Ministry troops, U.S. forces and Iraqi army units. Two of al-Qaisy's cousins were killed in the fighting; one of them was cut nearly in half by rounds from a .50-caliber machine gun, he says.
Al-Qaisy pulls the night watch at one of three militia checkpoints for six hours, 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., six days a week. After dinner at home - he likes his meal small to keep his ulcers from troubling him - he shoulders his AK-47 and meets up with three other neighbors at a checkpoint.
Much of the night is spent sitting on plastic lawn chairs, sipping sweet tea carried out on trays by residents and chatting among themselves - usually about the latest neighbor or relative to be arrested and go missing.
Earlier this month, the four neighbors exchanged fire with six men who approached them with guns drawn, al-Qaisy says. After a brief firefight, the gunmen fled on foot, he says. "Scouts," al-Qaisy says. "They were just checking if we were here."
He says he joined the militia not for political reasons or even to defend his neighborhood, but mostly for his four children, ages 8 to 18.
The stress is gnawing at his health. To combat the anxiety, he takes Valium three times a day and ulcer medicine twice a day. "You always feel angry, always feel scared. It's not comfortable, it's not me," he says inside his optical shop, which sells prescription reading glasses and Chinese-made imitation Ray-Ban sunglasses. "I feel dead every day. I hate this life."
He checks his watch and sighs. Two hours to go before his normal workday ends and the overnight routine begins. |
