Naked in Baghdad

by Anne Garrels

  On that note, Amer and I retire to my room to imbibe “some medicine” after I have filed for the evening programs. He’s had a crush on a young, beautiful Greek television reporter, for whom he’s helped negotiate visas and the like along the way, but he is disturbed that she is now letting herself be used by Iraqi intelligence. It’s by no means clear that she really has anything interesting to tell them, but he gets the sense that she tells them whatever she knows in order to ensure her continued stay here, and access. Amer says he’s warned her that life in Iraq isn’t simple, that she is getting in way over her head, but he says she dismissed his warnings, asserting, “I’ll do what I have to, to be a star back in Greece.” Whatever romance might have been brewing is over. He asks me if everyone behaves like this. I tell him no.

  MARCH 30, 2003

  The bombing has been pretty relentless, though no ground attack on the city itself appears imminent. American forces are less than fifty miles from Baghdad now, but they are reportedly strengthening their supply lines while air and artillery strikes grind down the city’s defenses. There is talk that the U.S. military underestimated Iraqi resistance. Security is such that I can no longer go out on my own to see families, even with Amer. It is just too much of a risk, if not for me, then for any family I might visit, so Amer and I agree he will do interviews when I cannot. I describe the community I would like to hear from today—Shiite professionals—and I write out the questions.

  After he comes back, I grill him on everything he has seen and heard. He reads out his notes, we go back over the details, and the story that emerges is as follows:

  Sitting over a cup of dark, sweet tea, thirty-eight-year-old Zanab (this is not her real name) shakes her head in amazement at the events of the past week. She didn’t anticipate that Iraqis would take on the Americans with such fervor. She’d planned to sit out this war, watching from the sidelines, expecting it to be over quickly. But now that Iraqis have shown they are willing to fight, this delicate woman in a long blue robe says she too will fight in the streets of Baghdad if American troops try to enter the capital. Pride has overtaken paralyzing fatalism. Zanab is a Shiite Muslim, one of the majority who has endured relentless repression at the hands of Saddam’s Sunni-dominated government, but she says the divide, so apparent up until the war, has disappeared under a new unity forged against the Americans. She calls them aggressors who have come only for oil.

  She compares the current situation to that of the ’91 Gulf War. Then she understood why the U.S.-led coalition pushed Iraqis out of Kuwait. But this time, she says, “We’re innocent. We did not attack anyone.” Asked why Shiites are not rising up against Saddam Hussein, as they dared to after the Gulf War, she admits she was initially surprised. But now she concludes the anger against the United States is greater than against Saddam. She says Iraqis are fighting for their country and their faith. People are also very angry about the other Arab countries, she quickly adds. She spits out the names of countries that have done nothing to support the Iraqis or, worse still, who have sided with the United States. Jordan comes in for the harshest criticism. “Just wait,” she warns, “we will get out revenge even if it takes thirty years.”

  Bombs have rained down around her neighborhood. Though it has not been damaged, her typical two-story cement house has shaken so hard that those pictures still on the wall are askew. Last night’s attacks were particularly ferocious. Just 500 meters away, the Baghad headquarters of the infamous Ali Hassan Al Majid, Saddam’s cousin, was destroyed. Known as “Chemical Ali” for launching attacks against the Kurds, he remains one of Saddam’s top lieutenants.

  Like many, Zanab expected that the initial wave of bombing would be much worse. As Baghdadis saw the precision of the bombing, they began to believe that the United States would not touch the infrastructure. But by this morning three telecommunication hubs had been eviscerated. Zanab can no longer call out. She can’t reach friends and relatives. She feels isolated and sees this as a portent of worse to come.

  She lives with her younger brother, his wife, and their small children. It’s a modest life, helping with family chores. She has never married, like many women of her generation. Eligible young men her age were decimated by Saddam’s eight-year war with Iran. The absence of the usual rote praise of Saddam Hussein suggests no love for him. Her brother, a university student who also runs the family business, is a member of the Baath Party. He apparently joined more to advance his career than out of any deep-seated loyalty. But now, she says, he’s out on the streets carrying a gun and ready to fight. His attitude toward the United States has hardened with the reality of war, the unexpected camaraderie among Iraqis, and reports of bravery from the south.

  Yet for all the talk of fighting, she doesn’t know how long the family can cope. She fears a siege of the capital. In just one week, the price of food has soared. Potatoes, a wartime staple, have gone up three times, tomatoes and cucumbers five times.

  MARCH 31, 2003

  The TV station is hit again, but the Iraqis doggedly get what passes for programming back on the air. Another telecommunications building was ripped apart early this morning, the seventh in three days, so phone service across the city, if not the country, is now thoroughly disrupted. This is what really upsets Iraqis.

  The deteriorating situation has affected neither official greed nor the government’s determination to control us. A notice goes up announcing that we have to get new accreditation cards. The key here is that to get a new ID we have to pay thousands upon thousands of dollars in outstanding fees. And it looks like not every journalist in Baghdad is to be reaccredited. A long list goes up of those who have been “disinvited” to the party. I have survived yet another cut.

  APRIL 1, 2003

  Amer calls on the hotel phone asking if he can come up, a clear sign he needs to talk about something sensitive that cannot safely be imparted from the lobby. He gives the now-familiar knock. He has heard that the Information Ministry is going to expel John Burns. He says that a vicious minder, out to curry favor with the wickedest of the wicked, wrote a “bad report” about John, saying he had deliberately slipped away on occasions. Amer says John’s driver has tried and failed to correct the record.

  I track down New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks, who says that although John is all right, things are not good. He summarizes a terrifying late-night visit by intelligence agents (which John later described in the paper).

  Men in suits and ties, at least one with a holstered pistol under his jacket, said they had known “for a long time” that John was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency and that he was from that moment under arrest, and that a failure to “cooperate” would lead to more serious consequences. They then proceeded to steal laptop computers, a satellite telephone, cameras, and a printer, plus $6,000 in cash. They left, ordering John to remain in his room until “more senior” intelligence men arrived.

  I knock on John’s door. I can hear him inside but he doesn’t answer. He doesn’t appear at the noon follies with the Information Minister. Mutual friends say he will shortly be leaving the country.

  Meanwhile, there is good news from Jordan. The missing journalists have surfaced. After eight days in solitary confinement in Baghdad’s Abu Ghreib prison, they have been released unharmed, if not altogether unscathed. They lived in uncertainty the whole time, were questioned about their alleged spying activities, and reportedly heard the screams as others around them were tortured. It’s unclear who or what was able to secure their release.

  It looks like some of Saddam’s relatives may have also crossed the border. Amer tells me he has it on good authority, and when he says this I know by now he means it, that one of Saddam’s wives and two daughters have left in a convoy for Syria. Officials take the extraordinary step of denying the rumor, which gives it more credence. Amer then goes off to hang out “with the bad guys,” to find out what else he can learn.

  It’s a glorious spring day, and though American troops are closing i
n on the capital for the Battle of Baghdad, Saddam’s propaganda machine is in full gear downstairs, taping one of the pro-Saddam sing-alongs, which air endlessly on television and which are probably now seen by only a tiny fraction of the population. There is a mad dynamic to the cult. Leading musicians have been ordered to the hotel gardens to take part in the production of a newly composed hymn. An enthusiastic man wearing a Saddam button holds a vast placard pointing out the words so everyone can join in. As I record the proceedings, a distinguished-looking gentleman asks if he can help me. He introduces himself as Feodor Embazi, a lute player, age sixty-five. I ask him to help translate the song. He says, “All our songs are love songs for Saddam,” adding, “Saddam is with us day and night even in our dreams.” I can’t tell if he is making fun of the proceedings.

  When he finds out I am American, he proudly says his son lives in Chicago, has a green card, and is looking forward to receiving American citizenship. Isn’t it strange, I ask, that your son is in America, and you are standing here defending Saddam? “Not at all,” he replies, adding simply, “I love my country.” I ask if he thinks his son made the right decision by moving to the United States. “Absolutely,” he answers.

  This seeming contradiction is one that I have heard again and again across the Arab world. The very same people who line up for visas, ready to be the best Americans, could just as well be in the crowds the next day pelting the American embassy with rocks and resentment.

  Despite today’s unctuous performance, officials have started to mention Saddam less and less by name of late. At most they talk about “the Iraqi leadership.” Even when we lob them a softball question about Saddam, which they would have grabbed at in the past, they sort of skip over the subject. Their rhetoric now emphasizes the fight for Iraq, for Iraqi dignity, and for the destiny of the Arab world. Just what this implies about the fate of Saddam is a question no one is able or willing to answer.

  Saddam’s vast presidential compound, which stretches almost two miles along the Tigris, came in for more big hits overnight. It’s like a huge outdoor movie, and I watch it all from my window. This maze of palaces, barracks, gardens, and outbuildings covers a bunker that was designed by the Germans in the ’80s to withstand a nuclear attack. As anxious as Iraqi officials are to show us civilian casualties, they have not permitted us to survey the damage at the palaces.

  BRENDA BULLETIN: APRIL 1, 2003

  Judged against the grisly end of last week—billowing smoke, driving sand, sheets of rain, mud, screaming Iraqis brandishing body parts—the last few days seem almost benign. For the most part, the people of the city remain remarkably open and kind to Annie personally, spouting anti-American rhetoric only when a Baath Party member approaches. They are fatalistic, but many with whom she has spoken seem to believe that they are not the target, despite what happened last week. What will happen as the noose tightens absorbs all.

  Annie took most of a day off over the weekend, slept through most of it, felt better and sounded stronger the next morning. Her spirits as well as her popularity were greatly enhanced when the ever-resourceful Amer got his hands on yet another case of French Bordeaux to go with her remaining bottle of gin and five fresh lemons. How one effectively mixes those ingredients is open to question, but I hope that both the question and Annie were in short order blissfully moot or, if you prefer, mute.

  The Palestine, in her words, is like a reform school. The 150 or so inmates (sixteen Americans among them) are let out only under supervision, punished for bad behavior, and watched closely by a growing number of regime officials and security thugs. With the bombing of the Ministry of Information, many of those officials now work in the hotel, using the journalists in effect as unwilling human shields. A quasi-hostage situation? Perhaps not, but there must be disturbing similarities.

  Years ago in Moscow in the ’70s and early ’80s Annie was in a similar situation when the tiny human rights movement was under attack. Andrei Sakharov, one of its founders and a friend of Annie’s, was under house arrest in the closed city of Gorky. Annie was being watched and her movements monitored. She could not get to Gorky but she knew Russians who could. So she asked ABC to send her a dozen Super-8 movie cameras (TV then was still collected on film), which she passed out to Russians who went and made some home movies that she found most useful. Now she is working with Amer in a similar fashion. He goes and collects the sound, asks her questions, and is her eyes and ears. That his neck is very much on the line in so doing speaks volumes about the trust that has developed between them. Her piece on Sunday about the conditions faced by an ordinary family was carefully crafted to conceal how it was assembled.

  Friends who have watched her over the years have suggested that sometime, somewhere, Annie should have a reunion of all those extraordinary people who, whatever their job descriptions were initially, became over time enduring friends and adopted family. They are unsung heroes, a diverse, brave, and unique group, connected only by their affection for and belief in her.

  We spoke yesterday of Peter Arnett, his dreadful lapse in judgment in going on the Iraqi State TV Channel to blast the coalition campaign and his subsequent firing by NBC. What saddened Annie was not so much what he said, but what had happened to the man in the intervening years since his Baghdad heroics of a decade ago. In the time leading up to his ill-advised performance, she saw him as an increasingly desperate, sad old man, angry at being marginalized and given to self-aggrandizement that vitiated what he had been. A cautionary tale for all us old horses. She was much less charitable—in fact, she hooted with laughter—at the report that the Poobah of Kabul, the Wazir of War Correspondents, Geraldo Rivera, was unceremoniously dis-embedded and dumped at the Kuwaiti border for giving away his unit’s position by drawing maps in the sand on Fox TV. Annie had seen Geraldo in action in Afghanistan and the picture wasn’t pretty. He reported from hostile places where he wasn’t, he claimed to be in firefights that were staged, or less than they were cracked up to be, and he recklessly endangered the lives of other journalists by announcing he was carrying a weapon. If his actions were not so intrinsically dangerous, and his employers so supportive, his role of joker would be funny.

  V

  APRIL 2, 2003

  I bump into John Burns in the hallway. He is, as he puts it, “living a clandestine existence, using darkened hotel stairwells in place of elevators, sleeping and working in other reporters’ rooms.” It is unclear why he has been given even this amount of freedom, as the intelligence guys must know where he is.

  Jusef, one of the last remaining waiters, sidles up to me and asks if he can make a satellite phone call from my room. I tell him to come up later in the afternoon. He arrives on cue. He wants to call his brother in Norway to tell him the family is fine. By now, with phones and Internet out, there is no other way to contact the rest of the world. He looks around nervously, whispering, “Is the room bugged?” I can’t give him any assurance it isn’t. There’s not much I can do if it is. I am hoping that like the waiters, most lower-level intelligence operatives have disappeared, preferring to be with their families than to defend Saddam.

  There’s a wire report that the United States has hit a hospital. I go out to check. It’s not true. Some windows have been blown out from nearby blasts, and some people in the area have been injured, but further questioning reveals that the hospital itself had long since been evacuated.

  Outside the hospital there is a pool of blood. Baath Party activists spread the story that a pregnant woman was killed on the spot along with her unborn child. Rumor quickly turns to myth, repeated with ever-growing gore by people on the street, but when we track down an Egyptian watchman who was at the hospital when the bombing occurred, he insists there was no pregnant woman, and no patients at the hospital. A tour confirms that no one has been staying in the hospital for some time. Doctors had refused to work here when the bombing started, well aware that the hospital sits across the street from Saddam’s intelligence headquarters. Amer dares not p
oint to the complex, but tells me to look out to my right at a large compound with a gate. It’s been damaged. The Baghdad Trade Fair next door, in front of the hospital, has been leveled.

  International human shields have continued to stay in Baghdad, assigned to protect power stations and food stores, not working in the hospitals and orphanages as many had hoped. When they get time off, they hang around the Palestine, checking up on the latest news and begging to make calls on our sat phones.

  I’ve been keeping tabs on one shield, in particular: Mark Ubanks, a forty-one-year-old from Warrenton, Missouri. He’s personable, with a wry take on what’s going on, and we retire to the gloomy coffee shop to catch up. Mark insists he had never taken a political stand before. He says he’s never even voted, though he has a curious resume. He spent four years in the U.S. Air Force, something I don’t think he’s advertising to his Iraqi hosts. When he left the Air Force, he stayed on in Europe and says he was working as a Web designer when he ended up in Baghdad, as he puts it, “by mistake.”

  He’d read an article in a Greek newspaper that claimed there were 2,000 human shields waiting in Jordan, with more than a thousand already in Iraq, many, so it said, suffering from diarrhea. Egged on by his Greek girlfriend, he collected medicines. When he arrived in Baghdad, he found there were in fact only a handful of human shields, perhaps no more than 250 at any one time, from as far away as Australia and South Africa. Once in Iraq, Ubanks’s opposition to the war prompted him to stay, and the Iraqi Peace and Friendship Society was happy to assign him to protect the Dora power plant. He has to be in place by 8 p.m. every night, in time for the heaviest bombing. While it was initially scary, he says you get used to the bombing, and now after almost two weeks he sleeps through the blasts.