The Orange Trees of Baghdad

by Nadir, Leilah

  “It’s not safe,” Karim writes. “US tanks pass in the street, and to them every Iraqi is a potential suicide bomber, so they have become trigger-happy and you have to stay away.”

  Now Maha goes to our house to clean it in Lina’s stead. She tells Amal that she weeps as she goes from room to room. The house is so empty now, and she remembers that it was once the busiest and liveliest house on the street. She was the youngest of that generation. She asks herself what will become of it now.

  FARAH’S FAMILY WATCH THE AFTERMATH OF AN EXPLOSION OUTSIDE THEIR HOUSE, MARCH 2006

  PHOTO CREDIT: FARAH NOSH

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Flower of the Pomegranate

  “Do you realize how history is repeating itself?” . . . He was referring to the British invasion of Iraq in 1917. . . . And within three years we were losing hundreds of men every year in the guerrilla war against the Iraqis who wanted real liberation not by us from the Ottomans but by them from us, and I think that’s what’s going to happen with the Americans in Iraq. I think a war of liberation will begin quite soon, which of course will be first referred to as a war by terrorists, by al-Qaeda, by remnants of Saddam’s regime, remnants (remember that word), but it will be waged particularly by Shiite Muslims against the Americans and British to get us out of Iraq and that will happen. And our dreams that we can liberate these people will not be fulfilled in this scenario. —Robert Fisk in an interview by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, posted April 23, 2003

  It is February 2006, three years since the invasion began, and it is now more dangerous than ever to go to Iraq. There is talk of civil war as large bombing campaigns that seem religiously motivated are occurring with more and more frequency. But Farah has suddenly been seized with the desire to return. Her last trip was a year and a half ago and she has tried to busy herself with other photography projects since, but the urge to document the lives of her family in Baghdad has overwhelmed her. She has had assignments on Hurricane Katrina, the Northwest coast Haida and Canadian troops getting ready to go to Afghanistan. But Iraq haunts her.

  Farah speaks to her family in Baghdad regularly, and they tell her it is very dangerous and that she shouldn’t come. One of her aunts even calls Farah’s mother begging her not to let Farah come. In the end, one of her male cousins relents and says that if she insists on coming, of course they would be so happy to see her. They are mostly trapped in the house and small courtyard, while the occupation rages around them. For months Farah thinks about going to Iraq, not sleeping as she imagines what she will find there, and then one day, impulsively, she buys a ticket to Dubai but doesn’t tell anyone at home because she knows what the reaction will be. All Iraqis are hearing from family in Iraq is “Don’t come, things are getting worse and worse, not better.” Iraq is disintegrating.

  Her plan is to find Iraqi victims of war and photograph them. The occupation has not only taken over a country, but has also occupied Iraqis’ bodies, leaving bullets lodged in their flesh or confiscating their arms and legs forever. It has consumed their lives. She knows that there are thousands of Iraqi victims, yet the West doesn’t see them depicted in newspapers because it is so dangerous for most journalists to get those photographs and also difficult to get newspapers to publish them. Now the US media is filled with wounded US soldiers. Farah feels that the US audience is only “seeing” part of the story. No editors will help to fund her trip as they don’t believe she will be able to get the story of wounded Iraqis.

  When she finally tells her family of her decision, they are distraught. Her sisters try to convince her not to go; they worry that she might be tempting fate. She has gone and returned safely so many times, how many times would she be this lucky? On her last trip, she experienced three close calls. The first occurred when she was embedded with the US military. She was flown from the Green Zone in a Blackhawk helicopter, and suddenly she saw the city from the perspective of American soldiers. She was flying so low that she could see Iraqis pulling groceries out of their cars, looking up at the noisy helicopter. She half expected someone to shoot an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) at it. That night she was on patrol with the soldiers and their convoy was ambushed. The vehicle in front of her caught fire, ironically giving her light to take photographs. Luckily, all the soldiers survived, as did she, but she witnessed fifteen minutes of petrifying heavy fighting.

  The next close call happened when she was on assignment for Maclean’s at the military base in Ramadi. Her driver dropped her off, but when she came out after the photo shoot, he was nowhere to be seen. Suddenly, a group of Iraqis in a car bristling with weapons gestured to her, saying they wanted to talk to her. Alarmed, she went back into the base, but the American soldiers did nothing to help her. Starting to panic, she looked around, and saw her driver coming down the road. He was escorted by Iraqi police, who he’d gone to for protection while she was inside. She leapt into the car, but meanwhile the Iraqis had put on masks and started chasing them in their car. Her driver was going over 200 kilometres an hour on the road between Ramadi and Fallujah, and for fifteen minutes they were pursued by the other car. When they got to Fallujah, they went through the city and tried to go straight out the other side to get to Baghdad.

  Suddenly, explosions were going off all around them; they had driven into a battle between American forces and Iraqis. Farah reached for her camera, but her driver said, “If you want to die today, take your camera out.” She didn’t lift up her camera. Their pursuers stopped chasing them when they got to Fallujah, probably because they were outside their territory. But now Farah and her driver were trapped in Fallujah in the middle of a firefight. By nightfall, the combat finally stopped and they escaped towards Baghdad.

  The final incident was the worst. Farah and her driver were going to the Green Zone. They went through the Iraqi army checkpoint, and then drove on, but without realizing it they drove through a second checkpoint without stopping. The soldier on duty wasn’t paying attention and hadn’t signalled the car to stop. In an instant, six soldiers were pointing their guns at Farah, and a nearby tank had swung its huge gun towards the car. The soldiers put zip cuffs on her driver, took their photographs for intelligence purposes and interviewed them. Finally, the guards realized the couple was harmless and let them go. As they were leaving, one of the soldiers said she was lucky to be a woman, because the same thing had happened the day before and a soldier had summarily shot the driver in the head, killing him instantly.

  Once home, Farah realized the next time she went to Iraq she would have to make a conscious choice to risk her life for some photographs. So the photos better be worth it. Eighteen months later, there are suicide bombs and car bombs every day; American soldiers, Iraqi soldiers and civilians are dying, and Westerners are being kidnapped. How will Farah be safe from all this now?

  On the flight from Dubai, Farah falls asleep. But when the plane descends over Baghdad, she is jolted awake. She sees the city spread out below her in monochrome; it looks black and white. She rubs her eyes and blinks, trying to see the colours she knows are there—brown, beige, green—but she can only see black and white, maybe sepia, the colours of an old photograph. To her, Baghdad is like a silvery gelatine print, and so she knows she has to shoot only black-and-white film, and not use a digital camera. It is as if she were seeing time turn back, seeing modern Iraq slowly descend into the isolated, provincial, poverty-stricken place it had been at the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1917, just before the first British occupation.

  Within fifteen minutes of leaving the airport, Farah is at her aunt’s house in Baghdad, hugging her family. She can’t believe how this monumentally difficult trip could suddenly feel easy. She hasn’t slept much in the weeks leading up to the trip, anticipating every danger, finding a flak jacket to take with her. Despite her friends’ and family’s protests, she is in Iraq. She’s made it. She has promised to stay inside with her family, promised not to be seen or noticed as a Westerner, promised not to bring out her camera in publ
ic. Her desire to be in Iraq had overcome all the fears of her loved ones and her own personal fears. She is in Iraq.

  A few days later, I come back from a walk on the beach, admiring the snowcapped mountains all around me, to find an e-mail from Farah awaiting me.

  “ ‘Welcome to Iraq, the worst country in the world,’ ” her uncle Ahmed had said to her when she arrived. “But I finally feel like I am at home,” she writes to me. Her uncle and his family have fled their Baghdadi neighbourhood to stay with their relatives in another area, just as they had done during the invasion in 2003, three years before. The fighting in their neighbourhood is too intense, and so they will try to rent out their house and find another place to live in a safer area. When her driver brought her to the house from the airport, detouring around roadblocks set up by Iraqi police, he told her, “This neighbourhood has become very bad.”

  Instead of living in the relative safety of the Green Zone or amongst the few brave journalists still reporting from the city, Farah has chosen to live with her family in Baghdad. She can’t tell me which neighbourhood because her family is paranoid that someone might find out where she is by hacking into her computer. When she arrived at the airport, she called ahead to tell her uncle to make sure to keep the children in the house, so that when she arrived, and they jumped all over her screaming in excitement, the neighbours wouldn’t see or hear anything. She doesn’t want anyone to know she’s staying there. She didn’t even take out her luggage when she got out of the car; her uncle came later and retrieved it. She is moving between a few of her relatives’ houses because she knows that if someone realizes that she is a Westerner, she will probably be abducted for ransom or revenge.

  Farah tells me that innocent Iraqi civilians are being inexplicably murdered. A grandfather sitting in a courtyard with his grandson is shot and no one knows why. The man selling falafel on the street is killed. Why? After three days, Farah has already stopped questioning these crimes.

  The headline in Western newspapers today is “New Abu Ghraib videos shown.” Yesterday’s lead story was about a video of British soldiers in Basra beating helpless Iraqi teenagers. Farah hangs laundry in the courtyard, looking over her shoulder at the gates for fear of kidnappers lurking on the street. She has already heard story upon story of masked men barging into homes to murder or kidnap civilians, not just Westerners but Iraqi civilians too.

  She is woken early the next morning by an explosion and a brief gunfight. Two hours later, her cousin’s wife is dragging her children away from the breakfast table as the battle moves down the street. For the first time since I’ve known her, Farah admits that she is afraid. She has visited Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s regime of terror, during the 2003 invasion and in the wake of the aftermath, but she has never experienced this kind of fear: adrenalin-pumping, paranoid, heart-racing, dry-mouth, animal fear.

  Farah is staying with her aunt Lamaan and uncle Ahmed and the families of their two sons: fourteen people living together, including their sons’ children. Sima, her cousin’s wife, shows Farah her scars from when she was shot in the street a few months ago. One bullet is still lodged in her abdomen while the other went right through her body, leaving a ragged hole that has now healed. The doctor fished inside her for the other bullet but couldn’t find it. She spent weeks with a psychiatrist and on medication to deal with her nerves after the shooting.

  Farah tells me that if I want to catch my cousin Karim at home, I should call him after 8:00 p.m. when everyone is home because of the curfew. He is still my porthole into occupied Iraq. I’ve had so much trouble getting him on the computer recently that we haven’t communicated in a few months. I get him right away on his mobile, but our conversation is brief. Karim is worried about the call being too expensive and says, “Things are very very bad. Nothing has changed, everything is worse. There is lots of violence in our neighbourhood. Electricity two hours a day, water two hours, it is just worse.”

  Karim’s voice sounds gruffer, angrier and deeper, and he doesn’t even try to hide his rage. He is worried about Farah being in Iraq.

  “She is too small to be here. It is very dangerous where she is staying,” he states.

  Suddenly, the line cuts off and I can’t get through again. I know that he doesn’t understand why I care so much. Later, I learn he sent an e-mail to my aunt Amal, saying, “Why is she so interested in Iraq? Everyone here just wants to leave and never look back. If Leilah came to Iraq, she wouldn’t last two hours here, and she would want to leave and never ever return.”

  In her next e-mail a few days later, Farah tells me that she was out with four of the children and her uncle. Even the upscale Mansour district, one of the most affluent areas in Iraq, is not safe for a family outing. They needed to get the kids out of the house because they were stir-crazy from being inside all the time. On the way back, Iraqi police started shooting and speeding through the streets while they were being shot at from somewhere else. Farah’s car was lodged in the traffic jam caused by the crossfire. She saw infrared tracer ammunition fire all around her, arcing up and over the car. The children wanted to look at what was happening, but Farah pushed their heads down, worried that they might be shot. They were finally able to zigzag through the neighbourhood to get away and ended up on a street lined with concrete-walled embassies. All of a sudden the car was surrounded by security forces out in position, Iraqi police and American soldiers. They flashed their AK-47s in the air, yelling, “Turn your inside light on! Turn it on so we can see your faces!” On the way home, the children sobbed, saying they wished they had just stayed at home and never gone out in the first place.

  Farah is nonetheless determined to photograph injured Iraqis, and her first subject is a traffic policeman who had his face blown up by the Americans. I picture her sitting in her car in Baghdad traffic being driven by Mohammed, her trusted driver. I wouldn’t recognize her if I was spirited there right now. She is wearing a full-length black abaya that covers her jeans and T-shirt. She has bought local shoes from the market in Baghdad so that even her feet won’t give her away to would-be kidnappers. Before Saddam’s regime fell, she didn’t need to cover up—such are the freedoms that the invasion has imposed. Some women remain uncovered, but the abaya is a good disguise, providing a feeling of security in a violent and unpredictable city.

  She has been visiting the hospital where limbless Iraqis are given prosthetics. Her driver speaks to casualties of the anarchy and violence that has gripped Iraq in the wake of the war. They are victims of car bombs, IEDS (improvised explosive devices), suicide bombers, missiles and shootings by American and Coalition troops. The driver packs a 10mm gun that he hoists into the waist of his jeans when they get out of the car. He’ll ask the victims (men, women and children) waiting for care in the decrepit hospital if Farah can take their photographs. These tragedies have gone largely unrecorded because of the distrust Iraqis have for Western journalists.

  Four days later, I receive a short e-mail from Farah. She tells me that “insurgents” planted an IED right in front of her house. The target was an Iraqi police checkpoint that had been set up a few days earlier. Her family and the neighbours were nervous about the checkpoint, knowing that it would probably attract violence, but they were helpless. The police go home at night, leaving the checkpoint unmanned, and the fighters come and set up their explosives, then wait until the police arrive again in the morning and detonate the bomb.

  Farah sends me her cell phone number, so I call her. To my amazement, I get her on the line immediately. It’s always a wonder to see what works in the new Iraq. She tells me she woke up to a huge blast and the sound of windows shattering, and ran into the children’s room to bring them to the back of the house. The scene became chaotic, with police shooting randomly, yelling things like, “Being here every day, we are asking for it!” and “Yes, but what can we do? This is our job, our life.” One policeman was killed, and Farah heard the others say afterward, “He had seven children.” Two other people were inju
red. The police reckoned that the perpetrator had to have been within a hundred metres and seen the policemen arrive, since that was exactly when the explosion occurred.

  The bomb was planted just behind a palm tree on the other side of the street, in front of a neighbour’s house. The woman who lives there had suspected something, and had actually gone out and looked around before her daughter went to school. She didn’t see the bomb though. It went off later, after she had gone back into her house. A crater was left in the road behind the mangled palm tree, and a concrete wall next to the house was damaged, surrounded by shards of broken glass.

  The Iraqi police went from house to house searching for suspects and took away all the young men. They put potato sacks on their heads as they led them out of each house and onto the street. An older man yelled that they should take the sacks off, but they didn’t. Farah’s uncle (who is in his seventies) led the police through their house, but as soon as a policeman saw Farah in her hijab and abaya he averted his eyes and politely turned away into the next room, not realizing she was an outsider. The children were in shock and kept retelling the story of where they had been when the bomb went off. Farah says it was their grace that the blast wasn’t bigger.

  She tells me the police set up the checkpoint in the neighbourhood as it is known for heavy insurgent activity. The police gave people in the area a phone number to call if they saw anything suspicious. But the people who live on the street are terrified. They know that if any insurgent suspects that someone has talked to the police, that person will be dead.

  Farah admits that the neighbourhood is very dangerous, that she hears explosions and gun battles all the time. I ask her if she will move to a safer area, but she answers, “And leave the rest of the family here?” Her family has been living in the house for forty years, where would they go?