Naked in Baghdad

by Anne Garrels

  There’s a Web site providing instructions on how a potential human shield can get a visa and how to make the trip to Baghdad, but human shields are not an organized group and they are looked on as a bunch of crazies by most Iraqis. Ubanks is frustrated because, with no common voice or leadership, they have been largely ineffective. There are animosities between longtime radicals and newly politicized shields, who, like Ubanks, simply oppose this war. There are shields who are pro-regime and others who are struggling to reconcile their opposition to the war with their distaste for Saddam. These arguments, and the fear of eventual street-to-street fighting, have whittled the numbers down to about forty. The war has gone on a lot longer than Ubanks anticipated, but he has his cutoff point: when U.S. helicopters sweep over Baghdad or on April 15, whichever comes first.

  Phil Sands, a twenty-five-year-old from Britain, has been here for more than five weeks, but he’s suddenly been ordered out by the Iraqi authorities. They told him, with no explanation, that he was a security risk. In other words, he explains, “They suspect I am a spy.” I would give Ubanks that honor. As Sands says good-bye, his backpack and worldly belongings at his feet, he admits he isn’t sure he achieved anything: “The war happened. It’s still happening. I think a lot of people will get killed, so did I achieve anything? I don’t think so.”

  Seventy-nine-year-old Larita Smith from Jackson, Mississippi, is undoubtedly the oldest shield. She says her family thinks she’s crazy, but as an artist, former local reporter, and divorced mother, she’s one of those people who has probably never paid much attention to what others think. She marches around in a smock and baggy pants with her camera strung around her neck, hoping to get her stories back to a public-access TV station in Jackson. Asked why she is so opposed to this war, she answers, “Bush’s economic program.” She figures she might succeed here in getting the attention she failed to muster at home. In her gentle drawl, she says, “Down in Mississippi, people need their tax money to live a decent life. Our nursing homes are so crowded and so poor and I’m facing that. You’re locked in with a combination lock. You won’t get your diaper changed sometimes for twenty-four hours.”

  She’s coughing pretty badly from the sandstorms and the smoke from the oil fires. Given her age and poor health, the Iraqi authorities have let her stay in a hotel and have not forced her to spend the night at one of the human-shield sites. I suspect they’ve never seen anyone quite like Larita Smith in their lives.

  BRENDA BULLETIN: APRIL 2, 2003

  Despite what you may have heard, Annie is quite alive and feisty as of this evening. The bomb or missile strike initially reported to have hit the Palestine Hotel actually hit about a football-field length away and was aimed at a building reputedly used by Baath Party functionaries. True, the concussion of the blast was sufficiently unsettling to dump her “unceremoniously” on the floor, but she was otherwise unharmed. She had some uncharacteristically sharp remarks for the wire-service reporter who aired some wildly unfounded reports that were picked up and passed on by CNN, who apparently could not resist adding a few breathless twists of their own. It wasn’t until late last evening that everything got put into proper perspective.

  It is true that the ground war seems to be moving closer to Baghdad, but if not exactly inured to the cacophony, Annie seems at least to be taking it in stride. There was an amusing interchange this morning when the Washington interviewer, upon hearing a particularly loud explosion in the background, said “Jeeezus, Annie, what was that?” To which she replied, “Oh, THAT really wasn’t anything.”

  I would tell you more about the arrival of the network bimbette in the very tight T-shirt, but perhaps it’s better that you have something to look forward to.

  V

  APRIL 3, 2003

  I wake up at 6 a.m. to utter silence. This is the first time in a while that I’m not roused by thuds. The smoke has settled on the horizon, and at last I catch a glimpse of blue sky. Amer calls it the calm before the storm. But it doesn’t take long for the Iraqis to stoke the oil fires around the city and get them going again. I had once mistaken the black plumes for the aftermath of bombing, but Amer corrected me, saying bombs produce white smoke. These are like funeral pyres.

  The new twist of the day is that under current rules Amer can’t be both my translator (with him I can’t use the word minder) and my driver, so we have had to hire a driver. Who knows why? Perhaps this is a way of adding another layer of costly snitches. Amer, however, has once again found just the right guy. Mohammed is twenty-eight. He is as short and stocky as Amer is long and lean. And while Amer goes for suits, Mohammed remains an overgrown teenager, preferring T-shirts with English phrases on them and baggy pants. At first I thought he actually might be retarded, but it turns out he’s just a flake. However, he speaks fluent English, has the right credentials, and isn’t going to get in the way. He is the son of the Iraqi ambassador to Austria, a lost soul who clearly did too many drugs at some point in his life. A child of privilege, he went to high school in the United States while his father was posted there. He came back to Iraq, but he doesn’t fit in. He isn’t a dissident. He’s not an intelligence agent, or at least not a serious one. He is just lost. He never did military service, has no college education, and seriously asks me what happened to Jason on Days of Our Lives. He is disappointed that I can’t fill him in on ten years of soaps. His favorite TV program was The Cosby Show. “I guess it’s not on anymore,” he says wistfully. Then he asks me about the clubs in Washington, D.C., which he clearly frequented all too often.

  It’s another bus “tour du jour,” and like good schoolchildren, we take our seats. As usual we are not told in advance where we’re going. As the bus wends its way, seemingly endlessly, through the city, I start to lose it, calling out to officials up front, “Where are we going?” Of course there’s no answer. I hate being out of control.

  For several blocks near the Republican Palace, shop windows have been shattered by repeated explosions, though the shops themselves remain untouched. Our destination is the Baghdad Trade Fair, which Amer and I visited on our own yesterday. This is not going to add much to what I already know. The place is crawling with Baath Party members, hardly an inducement for people to pour out their innermost feelings. However, I happen on an endearing twelve-year-old boy who is selling candy to support his widowed mother. I ask what he thinks about Americans coming to Baghdad, and without missing a beat he says, “Great.” A man listening in quickly intervenes and moves him off.

  Amer says this particular neighborhood was once a favorite haunt for Uday, Saddam’s elder son. There are stories about him parading the streets with his tiger before he was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in the mid-’90s. Unable to hide his disgust, Amer says Uday would also prey on local girls. Word has it that to refuse Uday could mean an ugly death.

  Back at the Palestine, we have another briefing with Information Minister Mohammed al-Sahaf, whose grip on reality is slipping even more. Dressed in his dapper battle-dress and beret, he sticks to his rosy version. To reporters who gently suggest his accounts are at odds with known American successes, he answers, in effect, that we are hallucinating. Asked about reports that American troops have seized part of Baghdad’s main airport and are within sight of the city, he replies with no evident shame that the Americans are not even within 100 miles of Baghdad. This is the world we have to live in. Contradicting him, challenging him head-on, would get us nowhere, except expelled.

  A colleague seated next to me hands me a note: “I want what he’s smoking.” What does he really think he’s doing? The more dire the situation, the more he defies reality. He certainly has a captive audience.

  It is curious that officials don’t mention the Iraqi army as such. They speak of Iraqi defenses being led by the militias of the Baath Party, tribal units, or the Fedayeen Saddam, the black-uniformed thugs who are amongst the most feared of Saddam’s forces. Foreign volunteers also come in for a lot of praise. Vice President Ramad
an claims that 6,000 Arab volunteers have arrived, with more than half of them ready to act as suicide bombers. He promises we will see the results of this campaign before long.

  There are still few signs in the city of preparations for street-to-street fighting, apart from the groups of armed Baath Party members and local militias, most of whom sit in white plastic chairs doing nothing. There are some trucks, covered in mud, hidden among civilian houses under date trees. The Iraqi press, such as it is, and television have not mentioned that anything unusual has happened at the airport, but Iraqis know that American and British troops are approaching. I went to the open-air market today, and as I entered, one of the many merchants selling canned tomatoes had his ear glued to the BBC on a shortwave radio. I asked him what he thought about the news that U.S. and British troops might be as close as twenty miles. He looked up, startled that I’d caught him listening to the Beeb, and said, “Lies, lies, all lies,” and then promptly went back to listening.

  People continue to be incredibly friendly, which says more than the words they utter. At one stall I am offered a soft drink. Most here are Shiites, and I ask them why the Shiites have not risen up against Saddam as they did in 1991 and as the United States anticipated they would again. They all answer that this war is totally different. Then, they say, the United States was justified in pushing Iraq out of Kuwait. Then, some say, there was hope, a reference to what many think was the betrayal by the United States when it sat back and did nothing to help the insurrectionists.

  Sixteen days is a long time in a bombing campaign, and people are exhausted. You can see the strain. A woman comes up to me asking why President Bush is waging war against innocent people. The more she talks, the more she is racked by sobs. A friend gently ushers her away.

  When we get back in the car, Amer, a Sunni Muslim, says the Shiites loathe Saddam, whatever they may say to me. He says Shiites have never forgotten one particular incident. When they rose up against the regime in the wake of the ’91 Gulf War, Saddam’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel and his forces damaged the domed tomb of Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Mohammed, in Karbala—a holy site second only to Mecca in terms of the number of Shiite pilgrims who visit it. That was bad enough, but Hussein Kamel dismissed the subsequent outrage, daring to compare himself to the revered Shiite hero, saying “I am also Hussein.” This man did not know the meaning of humility. After he defected to Jordan and spilled his guts to the United States about banned weapons programs, he was disappointed with his reception and decided he would be better off back in Baghdad. On his return, Saddam had him assassinated.

  At 8 p.m. the lights suddenly go out. No large explosion preceded the blackout, so it is unclear who or what caused it. The entire city is plunged into darkness. I have my trusty headlamp, courtesy of a wilderness outfitter. This is one good result of love-enforced camping with Vint in Montana as well as my time in Afghanistan. If not for those times, I would never know about this incredibly useful item. My hands are free, and I can see and type at the same time. I wander out into the hallway for a reality check just as Amer arrives to make sure I am managing all right. I give him a spare headlamp. He’s balked in the past every time I have asked him if he is all right, as if it were unseemly to ask that. At last I can do something useful for this man who has done so much for me.

  It takes forever to get through on the satellite phone. I finish the piece for ATC and broadcast with the roar of the hotel generator in the background. It only provides a dim light in the hallway, but for now the elevators are still working. I collapse at I a.m. from dialing fatigue.

  BRENDA BULLETIN: APRIL 3, 2003

  Getting on toward crunch time. Lights now out in the city. Her satellite-phone batteries will only last a couple of hours without recharge. In the information vacuum, her editor promises to relay anything he hears. Long talk with her, which may be the last time we will talk like that for a bit.

  Ironic that as big things crumble, small bureaucratic machines grind on. Yesterday, what is left of the press corps lined up like miscreant school children to get their new press ID cards, turning in the old pink ones for new yellow ones. Annie wondered if the star comes next. There was a scurrying around for photos. Annie finally found one taken of her in Kosovo. Amer said it made her look like a “monster.” The fellow has such a way with words sometimes. But she has learned there is a strict photographic protocol among Iraqis to always look one’s best before the camera, no matter what the occasion.

  The press corps yet again had to settle past accounts with the Ministry of Information just for the pleasure of being there. Newsweek got socked for $15,000, little NPR for $1,500. Tempers flared in the long queue. An arrogant French journalist, feeling entitled, tried to barge in ahead of Annie, saying, “I am French, you are nothing!” Annie briefly became Brenda and stomped on the delicate Froggy femme’s foot and sent her reeling. So much for politesse and camaraderie.

  The Palestine is rife with rumor and intrigue. The grizzled reporter for The New York Times, John Burns, may be kicked out at last. On hearing this, Annie’s editor asked her if she wanted to grab a seat in the Burns Exit Convoy. She contemplated twelve hours of being cooped up with Burns’s vitriolic fury and opted to stay put. There is some question if they can even get out at this point, and anyway she wants to stay. At last read some sort of face-saving accommodation had been reached. Burns, perhaps marginally muzzled, is to stay. There are at least two TV crews—one French, one Italian—who have been detained in the hotel since the beginning. Prohibited from reporting, they have no permission to leave. That sounds like the worst of fates.

  Annie remains well stocked with fresh fruit, thanks to Amer. Produce is trickling in if you know where to find it, and he does. The alcoholic stocks are also holding up, and should they run low, there is again available a particularly virulent brand of local firewater called Iraq Arak for a buck a bottle. Perhaps if she mixed this with Cheer-Up she could come up with something approximating what my delightful bartending first-cousin-once-removed calls a “Slow Screw Against the Wall.”

  Her biggest problem in the early a.m. today was that she desperately needed some toenail clippers. My guess is that she has bigger troubles on her plate now.

  Wish her well.

  V

  APRIL 4, 2003

  Cold water, but at least there is still water, albeit sporadic, and I top up my garbage pails so I have reserves in case the taps shut down altogether. There is no light in the bathroom—and no window—so ablutions are performed in the dark. Probably just as well. Thank god I got some laundry done yesterday, because who knows when the opportunity will arise again.

  The room is now even more like a cave, but the narrow glass doors onto the balcony are a comfort because there is not much of them to shatter. Unfortunately this also means there is almost no daylight. I keep thinking I should move the beds around to make the room more secure. Jon Lee Anderson and Paul McGeough have transformed their room into a snug bunker by turning the bed frames on their sides as a barrier against incoming fire. They sleep on mattresses on the floor surrounded by their protective wall.

  The lack of electricity has plunged Iraqis into new despair. Everyone is in the dark now, literally and figuratively. Though Iraqis lived for months in ’91 without electricity, they thought this time would be different. They believed that the United States would not target the infrastructure and convinced themselves this war would be easier. Indeed they have high, perhaps overly high, expectations of how precise the bombing will be. Now they don’t know what to expect and, more poignantly, they don’t know what to expect from one another. They have lived in fear for so long that there is no trust even among family members.

  Virtually no one is venturing out into the streets at night, and not many do so during the day. Aid officials say that, unlike in ’91, a crucial water-pumping station about twenty miles north of the city is equipped with generators, some of them provided by the Red Cross for just such a crisis. But water and sewage plant
s are on the outskirts, so it may be impossible for employees to reach and service them if fighting on the ground gets really bad. After so many years of sanctions, these installations are working way below capacity, repaired with little more than Scotch tape when they should have long ago been replaced.

  My computer and sat-phone batteries run out quickly, so I have to hole up in Amer’s car to recharge them from the lighter socket. But I have a car battery in reserve just in case. We lug it up the stairs (the elevator goes out for a while). Those things are heavy! I hook up some jumper cables to a portable AC/DC converter, plug in my equipment, and bingo, everything is working. Experience from Afghanistan yet again comes into play. Some other reporters, who are more organized and flush than I, have small generators in their rooms. (Given how much I am smoking I think it just as well I don’t have one, with all the attendant cans of diesel.) They promise I can use their generators if my battery contraption fails.

  What staff there is left in the hotel is really stressed. I haven’t seen anyone on the floor today and guess there won’t be clean sheets for a long time to come. I can’t make coffee in the room anymore—the car battery can’t handle the kettle—so I have to go downstairs, where the coffee shop is brewing something on propane burners. The restaurant, which was never good, has reached an all-time low. Despite dinner hours slated to start at 8:30, the doors now don’t open until well after 9 and the cook is extremely grouchy because he has no help. And surprise, surprise it’s the same awful meal we have had for ten days. I haven’t eaten in a couple of days again and am getting jittery. Amer goes out in search of some edible takeout.

  While he is out, Amer checks in on friends in the southwest suburbs. He sees people fleeing into the city from the airport area while others try to leave the city altogether. Residents have been told to abandon three neighborhoods because the Republican Guard and Fedayeen Saddam are to take up positions there. At least, in this instance, they are getting a warning, since most of the time Iraqi troops just move in unannounced and use civilians for cover.