Naked in Baghdad

by Anne Garrels

  Iraqi television has been hit, and programming was halted for a while, but the main channel is now back on, with endless paeans of praise to Saddam. The Iraqi government clearly anticipated the hit and had mobile broadcast vans ready as a substitute, though it’s unclear if broadcasts reach beyond Baghdad. The attack on Iraq’s TV stations will resuscitate the debate over the legality of hitting broadcast installations, which started when the United States targeted Serbian TV in Belgrade.

  By early afternoon it’s started to drizzle. The dust has turned into a mud paste that sticks to everything. The sat phone, out on the balcony, is now covered in a gluey film, but that doesn’t appear to have hampered its operation. Suddenly we’re told there’s been an American attack on a working-class neighborhood called al Sha’ab. Officials are so eager for us to cover this that we are told we don’t have to wait for the buses but can go off on our own. Amer and I head out. We stop for directions and are waved away by a policeman, who warns Amer that there are antiaircraft guns in the area and the Americans are going to come back for them. This certainly doesn’t jibe with the official version that says there are no military installations in the neighborhood. The policeman doesn’t see me because, like everything, the windows of the car are covered in mud. Incidentally, it’s illegal to have tinted glass in Saddam’s Iraq.

  Commercial strips on both sides of a major thoroughfare have been hit by two simultaneous blasts. There are two craters, much smaller than the holes drilled by other American bombs that have fallen in the past week, but the damage is extensive. After a week the war between the United States and Iraq has finally produced an incident with enough civilian victims to create a shock wave of popular protests.

  Thirty-one-year-old Abbas bin Ayan was working in his auto-repair shop, one of several small storefronts, when the blasts literally blew him out the door. That he survived is a miracle. There is nothing left of his shop now but a scorched hole. All the bodies have been removed, making it difficult to establish details. Covered in soot, Abbas bin Ayan provides a list of those he knows are dead; three in nearby garages, a twenty-one-year-old in a water-heater shop, a family in one of the charred apartments upstairs. He points to some shards of metal and a pool of blood. He says it’s all that’s left of a tea trolley and the man who not long before had been catering to local customers. At least ten cars that had been lined up to be fixed have exploded. Faras Rashid had reportedly been working under one. All that remains is a carbonized hulk. A couple who were driving by were also reportedly caught in the conflagration and burned to death.

  Residents say they heard fighter planes overhead and several thuds during the morning but didn’t pay attention because they had grown accustomed to the bombing and, they imply, to the accuracy of the bombs. The Iraqi information minister has repeatedly accused the United States of deliberately targeting civilians, but people here don’t say that. More than anything they seemed disappointed in their misplaced trust in American technology and precision. Surrounded by Baath Party officials who have taken control of the neighborhood, they insist this is a purely civilian area, though one resident quietly points to a nearby stadium where he says soldiers recently deployed antiaircraft guns. This seems to confirm what the policeman told us.

  Ambulance workers struggle with fire, hot tangled metal, and the untimely darkness. The rain has converted the veneer of dust to a cloying yellowish mud that now covers Amer, his favorite suit, me, and my microphone and recorder. Amer suddenly looks like an old man. His black hair, mustache, and eyelashes have turned a ghoulish gray from the dust.

  A teenager thrusts a can at me. He says it contains the brains of one of the victims. Another shows off a severed hand. “Is this what you call human rights?” scoffs one young man. “Is this what you call liberation?” demands another. “Why must you kill children?” cry others. Like a Greek chorus, conducted by the party faithful, members of the crowd erupt into chants: “Bush, Bush listen well, we all love Saddam Hussein.”

  Asked how he would respond if American soldiers entered Baghdad, forty-two-year-old Abdel Razek says it’s impossible they will reach the city, but he warns that, if they do, the Iraqis will kill everyone they can. A student from the Technological University, who has a rifle slung over his shoulder, says sadly that this war has changed his mind about Americans.

  BRENDA BULLETIN: MARCH 26

  Annie reports that for the second day running Baghdad has been blasted with a withering sandstorm that has driven inside virtually everyone who remains in the city. In this ugly pea soup, visibility is zero. The building across the street has disappeared. “God,” so an Iraqi told her, “has come to the aid of our country.” Yesterday there was a brief break, enough of one for her to see that with the exception of clusters of raggy militiamen digging desultory trenches, the city has emptied out. A few shops opened and then quickly closed. The brief moment of emboldened jubilation following the capture of the first Americans and the “Defend-the-Homeland” enthusiasm has given way to a grimmer anticipation of what is to come. Last night there were renewed strikes close by.

  The reporters sequestered in the Palestine Hotel are in a virtual lockdown status. There is a sense that the Ministry of Information, people with whom Annie normally has contact, now have more ominous superiors. Her ability to get out on her own and revisit the families she knows has been strictly curtailed, either by edict or by her own gut judgment. There was a nasty winnowing of the press corps the night before last when several of her colleagues were taken from their rooms, we know not where.

  I get the sense that Annie and the Dirty Dozen have seized on this imposed hiatus to catch up and prepare for what is to come. She tucked up on the floor, eschewing the voracious flea-ridden bed, and got some sleep. She and friends have long exhausted her paltry stock of bad wine, but her supply of Cheer-Up and Kit Kats is holding. Her driver, Amer, even managed to find some fresh bananas. This man is now vitally and crucially important to her. All the smart old hands have or would like to have someone like Amer. Her ability to go under and out, if the need should come, will depend on him. We don’t talk openly about this, but the inference of mutual support is clear. “How’s Amer?” “Oh, things are good, we’re working well together.” Stuff like that; we don’t dare get more specific. It is all in the inflection.

  Amer came into her room the other day bringing something. He spotted a photograph of Annie and me taken in the garden here on an opulent summer morning. He went over to the picture, studied every bit of it, and said, “It looks like you have a nice life there, Annie. What are you doing here?”

  That pretty well says it all,

  V

  MARCH 27, 2003

  A group of us get together to brainstorm about what we can do to help track down the missing journalists. Larry Kaplow has taken the lead. So far all our efforts to get information from the Information Ministry have been met with a wall of silence. Newsday and the Committee to Protect Journalists back in New York are asking everyone from Ramsey Clark to Yasir Arafat to weigh in. A letter to the Information Minister, signed by the Baghdad press corps, is voted down as too provocative at this point. We decide to privately approach another more sympathetic senior official with whom some reporters have good relations.

  Phone service has been cut in several neighborhoods as the United States begins to target telecommunications centers. But as Baghdad shudders under the barrage of bombs, Iraqi officials call us to a press conference where the Iraqi defense minister, General Sultan Hashim Ahmed, warned that even if American forces surround Baghdad the ensuing street fighting could last months. General Hashim warned that the invaders would rue the day they entered the city.

  There’s a run on the remaining drugstores for anti-diarrheals in anticipation that this could be a long siege and that water supplies could be hit next. Though my ironclad stomach is holding out, many journalists in the Palestine are suffering from food poisoning. Iraqis waiting outside shops say there’s no Valium available. Pharmacists say i
t was snapped up long ago by parents who are giving it to their kids, if not taking it themselves.

  The hotel is filthy. Trash mounts in the hallways. I have to keep the balcony door open so that the blasts don’t shatter the glass. The room is consequently covered with a layer of oily dust. The hotel staff has all but disappeared, and the restaurant has long since dispensed with menus. Instead, it offers up a buffet of gristly mystery meat and glutinous macaroni that never vary. The water, served in commercial bottles, is in fact drawn from the taps. (Another lesson from Afghanistan is to make sure the seal on the bottle-top is unbroken.) When there’s time, Amer gets us take-out of chicken tikka and kebabs from one of the few restaurants that are still open. It’s a good thing I’m not a vegetarian. The weather is improving, but this only increases fears that the U.S. bombing raids will become more intense.

  MARCH 28, 2003

  By now I have lost track of what day of the week it is or even what day of the month. I just know it is Day Nine since the bombing started. The muezzins have now taken the place of air-raid sirens, their plaintive cries from the minarets echoing through the night.

  Another explosion has rocked a crowded street, killing dozens and wounding even more. This is the second deadly blast in a Baghdad marketplace in less than a week; the U.S. military has attributed the first incident to an errant Iraqi missile or deliberate sabotage. Amer and I once again race out. In the dark, a crowd of men move toward the nearby mosque. They carry aloft coffin after rough-hewn coffin, their voices raised in prayer, not pro-Saddam propaganda. The blast hit at 6 p.m., when the local open-air market in the al-Shula neighborhood of Baghdad was packed with shoppers. It’s now a mass of corrugated iron, broken glass, and tangled frames of what were once vegetable stalls. A burst pipe does little to wash away the blood, visible in the glow of a flashlight. In the heart of the marketplace people point to a crater about five feet in diameter and a couple of feet deep. They are convinced an American bomb was responsible. It’s impossible to know right away, but the extent of the damage suggests something smaller. Amer Dagestani, a businessman who’s come to see if friends have been hurt, asks, “Is this the way America brings democracy?”

  Shards of metal struck two teenage boys who were standing outside their house at the edge of the market, killing them instantly. Shrapnel peppered the gate behind them, piercing the metal. A third brother standing in the courtyard was hit in the head and also killed. Their bodies are lined up inside, wrapped in white cloth, illuminated by a kerosene lamp. Their father stands frozen, unbelieving, as a friend prays over the dead children. Two surviving sons clutch each other. Their wrenching sobs allow no relief.

  In the next room, women draped in black sit on the floor, keening, calling out to God in their grief. Behind them hangs a portrait of Hussein, the prophet Mohammed’s grandson, whose martydom in the 7th century is a symbol of the Shiites’ suffering. The United States hopes that these Shiites, repressed by Saddam Hussein, will rise up in anger against him, but here in al-Shula the overwhelming emotion seems to be despair.

  Families flood into the al-Noor Hospital. The halls echo with desperate wailing as the people call out names, hoping to find their relatives alive. Amer negotiates our way through the crowds. In a simple ward of rusted metal beds, covered with nothing but ratty blankets, fifty-two-year-old Saman Zaki Khadim winces from the bloody wound in his back. Over the hubbub, Amer calmly translates. Saman had been in the market with his son-in-law and grandson trying to buy a TV antenna. He does not lash out at me when he learns I am an American reporter. He just states the facts as he knows them.

  The wards are packed. Many of the injured have had to be moved elsewhere. It’s impossible to get an accurate count of the dead and wounded. Though a professional, Dr. Ahmed Sufian confesses he’s overwhelmed. “All the floor is covered by blood,” he says. “Why, why this blood? Even as a doctor I can’t understand such things. This is freedom? I don’t know.”

  Amer is silent on the drive back to the hotel. He too is consumed by confusion and despair. It occurs to me that I have never asked him why, exactly, he is helping me. Perhaps he, like me, is struggling to find some truths.

  BRENDA BULLETIN: MARCH 28, 2003

  I spoke with our girl this morning. She is as fine as can be expected, given what she has gone through of late. She’s off on a story, which is why some of you worried when you heard the Los Angeles Times correspondent do much of the Baghdad wrap-up this a.m. The mood at the Palestine Hotel is pretty grim as the reality permeates that the 150 or so journalists sequestered there are not getting out any time soon. Many of these journalists are Arabs representing Middle Eastern papers and television stations. Quite a number of them are Europeans, and there are a surprising number from places you would not expect, Greece and Chile among them. The Chileans, in fact, have done a profile/interview with Annie because “Women in Chile don’t do this sort of thing.”

  The last few days have been particularly grueling. An enormous blast occurred in a market the day before yesterday (and another one happened tonight). When Annie arrived with Amer, the light was failing, the sand and smoke swirling relentlessly. In a scene that must have been macabre and horrible in the extreme, she was accosted by screaming, wailing Iraqis brandishing body parts of those killed. I spoke with her later that night after she had had a long soaking hot bath. I am certain she did not notice its color. She was still pretty shaken. She could not talk for long.

  The next morning she returned to the scene, where she elicited more facts. Whether the explosion was caused by an errant U.S. bomb or a failed Iraqi rocket is still unclear, but America’s image suffers every time something like this happens.

  Annie keeps patching together what few creature comforts remain, but the stock is getting thin. She is running flat-out, with repeated filings to NPR each day. She brought with her a copy of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. We naively thought it might help pass the time if we read them together and had long e-mail exchanges on nuance and meaning. Hah! That wasn’t such a great idea. Neither of us has finished even a single one.

  The journalist community at the Palestine Hotel is very much a guy’s world divided between print journalists and TV types. Somewhere suspended in her own space is our Annie—neither print nor television; too old to be a babe, too serious to be dismissed—but not really one of the gang, either. And her brutal schedule of constant updates doesn’t allow her to socialize much. It doesn’t bother her; she works better that way. Moreover, it amuses her to see how the little fissures in the journalistic hierarchy get established. Her main chum of the moment is Tim Judah, who writes for The Economist and The New York Review of Books. Her attraction for him, however, has more to do with the fact that she is, marginally, more technologically adept and has been able to help him access e-mail.

  Every once in a while, despite her efforts to keep a low profile, she gets noticed. She was talking with a senior official of the Ministry of Information. He asked her who she worked for. When she told him, he smiled broadly and said that when he was in America he listened only to NPR.

  V

  MARCH 29, 2003

  The Information Ministry has, at last, been hit. Amazingly, no one was hurt. Our keepers move their operations to the Palestine, and the various TV companies are finally able to move what’s left of their gear to the hotel too. Satellite trucks cram the parking lot and camera positions sprout like wildflowers in the surrounding grounds. And the American bombs seem to have resolved the sat-phone dilemma. As long as they are not the dreaded Thurias, they are now openly tolerated at the hotel. I can now broadcast at night with my clothes on.

  Deputy Prime Minister Taha Yassin Ramadan praises the first known suicide bomber in this war, who killed himself and four American soldiers in central Iraq. Ramadan identifies the bomber as a junior officer, a father of several children, who blew up a taxi he was driving at an American checkpoint. Ramadan says from now on this will be routine military practice. When I ask if by posing as civilian
s, these bombers don’t put all Iraqi civilians at risk of retaliation by American troops, the answer is a blunt “Not at all.” But the incident has unquestionably unnerved American troops and will lead to tighter security in the field.

  For all the bombing, a large part of Baghdad, in particular Saddam City, has not been touched. There are no government buildings of note there, and the United States wisely does not wish to antagonize the Shiites who live there, since American officials are hoping they will rise up against Saddam.

  Iraqis officials are holding more of their briefings in Arabic, clearly directing their comments to an Arab world that has disappointed them. They are demanding a pan-Arab battle against what they call the lackeys and stooges, a reference to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Qatar, which have facilitated the U.S. assault. Some Iraqis, on the other hand, are privately furious that Arabs “on the street” in other countries are supporting Saddam. “Just imagine what they would feel like living under this monster,” says one Iraqi.

  Opinion here is not black or white. Even those who don’t like Saddam resent American interference. And as the war drags on longer than many anticipated, some are feeling a kind of national pride that America has not been able to walk in unopposed. Even those who would like nothing better than to see Saddam overthrown are nonetheless proud that the Iraqi military has put up a better show than expected.

  Two Belgian doctors, who’ve come here as peace activists, post a notice by the hotel elevators offering to help us deal with too much smoking, too much drinking, and too little sex. The turnout at the appointed hour by this usually jaded group is remarkable. The only problem is the doctors don’t turn up.