Escape from Baghdad

by James Ashcroft

  Even according to conservative estimates, between 2004 and 2005 the average number of civilians killed per day had risen from twenty-three to thirty-six. Ask any liberal anti-war Westerner and they will assume these deaths are attributable to Coalition Forces. Ask anyone who has actually been to Iraq and they know that the vast majority are due to Iraqis fighting or murdering other Iraqis.

  In 2006 this figure would double to an incredible average of seventy-two civilian deaths every day of the year with nearly 80 per cent due to executions and with over half these deaths in Baghdad itself.

  Where my friend Sammy and his family were in hiding.

  Mad Dog came to his feet. The briefing was over.

  ‘Thanks for the ride in from the airport, by the way,’ I said. ‘I enjoyed the VIP treatment.’ I knew that it was extremely unusual for the very busy CF to spare a patrol to pick up some random civilian contractor and I wondered what strings Mad Dog had pulled.

  Colonel McQueen and Cobus exchanged looks, then the Colonel threw up his big shoulders in a shrug. ‘I don’t want to let the air out of your ego, Ash, but Cobus was dropping someone off.’

  ‘You have good timing,’ added Cobus with a rare smile.

  ‘Speaking of which, it’s a good time to get some food,’ said McQueen. ‘Anyone hungry?’

  We trooped off in file. I followed Tanya Carillo along the corridor. The walls were temporary and swayed as we marched along.

  I kept chatting, laying on the charm, and managed to draw out of her that she had three older brothers who were all anti-army. Tanya had enlisted to pay her way through college and couldn’t get out until she’d cleared the debt; thousands of soldiers were in the same position.

  She leaned back and whispered to me huskily. ‘Back out there in the ditch? That was the closest I’ve been to a man for a long time,’ she said.

  I found that very hard to believe. I remembered Dai Jones’s famous calculation that there were 100m of cock for every available woman in the Green Zone – and in Iraq 10,000 guys for every pretty girl. Being close to death gets the libido going, and it was astonishing on my first day back in Iraq that one of the most attractive women I’d ever seen in my life was coming on to me at that moment.

  CHAPTER 8

  IT WAS MIDNIGHT, the dull thud of mortars distant, hammering a different part of the city. I was in bed, in my section of the container, unable to sleep. I was thinking about the tasks and days that lay ahead, and also pondering the intriguing conundrum that was Tanya Carillo. Bearing in mind that I had only just left Krista, I felt guilty fancying the hell out of another woman, vaguely cross that that I’d let her slip through my fingers, and comforted that I hadn’t been unfaithful, except in my head.

  Before Cobus had organized the accommodation, Tanya had planned to book me into the Al-Hamra, a hotel that had the kudos of being outside the safety zone. The hotel was a featureless, shell-peppered, ten-storey block of cement 200m from a fortified watchtower in a street guarded by a fleet of Humvees, but it appealed to aid-agency workers who wanted to remain independent of the Coalition, and journalists digging out the real story of Iraq. It was at the Al-Hamra, or the Palestine, another flophouse near by, where I had thought I might find a PSD who could spare two days to go along for the ride if Les was out of reach.

  My first tasking with the Spartan team had been to bring Associated Press reporter Lori Wyatt from BIAP to the Green Zone. We’d come under contact from a ragged band of insurgents as we were entering the CPA gate and Lori had spent the entire gunfight spreadeagled below Les Trevellick, her dedicated bodyguard. They exchanged numbers, and Les for the following four weeks spent free afternoons in her room, exploring the deeper aspects of the British-American special relationship.

  Although I had met Tanya in the same way, shortly before a contact, I had played a less heroic role than Les, who had protected his glamorous journalist with his own body whilst coolly returning fire and killing hordes of insurgents. I, on the other hand, had only lain at the bottom of a ditch for Tanya, and that fat bastard Cobus, to use as a crash mat.

  Tanya Carillo must have assumed that the Al-Hamra was the kind of place where gun-slinging contractors preferred to hang out. My own memories of the Al-Hamra were more mundane, swimming in the pool at the regular Thursday-night parties and the much-photographed sign at reception: ‘Please check your weapons at the desk.’

  It made me wonder just what horror stories Cobus and Mad Dog had been telling her about me. They were both straight guys, I reasoned, and had probably done their best to contain their evil sense of humour. It occurred to me that I would only have a day or two with Tanya to stitch up Seamus and Les before they arrived and their charm offensive began.

  It was disorientating to be back in Baghdad, and I lay on my thin mattress, thinking back over the events of the day. We’d survived unscathed from the bombardment outside the US Embassy car park. From the reactions of the others, I could tell it had been a daily event, a reminder that insurgents were out there, and could reach in at will. They didn’t have to defeat the Americans, they just had to make them pay an unacceptable price for their presence, continue the dripping-tap torture of killings, maiming, suicide bombs, IEDs, sapping the morale of the occupiers and their collaborators and undermining their will to continue.

  We had piled into the chow hall on the ground floor after dropping our weapons and my bag off at Cobus’s container. It’s a funny thing, but when you’re still covered in debris from nearly being blown up, your food tastes amazing. I ate a chilli burger with ‘Freedom fries’, same as Mad Dog. Tanya, sexy as hell with dust stripes on her cheeks, had cod fillets flown in from the Eastern Seaboard and Cobus – I could scarcely believe this – had taken a plate of roast lamb.

  Before eating, Cobus closed his eyes briefly and mumbled a prayer. Mad Dog lowered his head, and Tanya gazed at me across the table, eyebrows raised in two precise arcs. There was a look of wildness about her, a look that told me this girl didn’t want to sleep on her own, not tonight, not after our close encounter in the ditch. In my easily adaptable memory I was already editing my role in the matter to a far more macho one.

  McQueen and Cobus were chomping away.

  ‘Do you like fish, Ash?’ she asked. ‘You must try it.’

  She put a small piece of cod on my plate. I rolled my eyes and made sounds of sheer delight.

  ‘Mmm, tasty,’ I said.

  We smiled. There was a frisson, a definite chemistry. Without her helmet and body armour on she was more feminine – stunning, in fact – and the guys at the tables around us could barely keep their eyes off her.

  We talked openly around the table. Colonel McQueen was one of those American officers who discussed politics without calling you a commie bastard if you disagreed with US foreign policy. He knew a lot of things had gone wrong in post-war Iraq, an obscene amount of taxpayers’ money had vanished into corrupt hands – American as well as Iraqi. But he genuinely believed in the underlying value of change in the Middle East and wanted to do his part in trying to make things better.

  My arrival inspired him to recount several anecdotes from the old days when he and a couple of guys in his team would dress in civilian clothes, get tooled up with AKs and spend their time with us around Baghdad, and Aradisa Idah in particular, our old neighbourhood in the south-east corner of the city. He had a selective memory regarding certain incidents – I certainly didn’t remember them being as humorous as he did. Still, we didn’t call him Mad Dog for nothing. I also didn’t remember myself playing such a courageous role in some of the adventures. Even Cobus choked on his lamb at a couple of the more outrageous ones. Tanya lapped up the stories and my embarrassment with obvious relish.

  ‘Really, Ash,’ she breathed huskily and fluttered her eyelashes in a parody of admiration, ‘you carried two hundred nuns to safety single-handed? That’s amaaaazing.’

  ‘Well, Mad Dog carried a couple, and ah, it was probably nearer just the hundred, um, possibly even down in
the double digits . . .’

  ‘That’s so interesting.’ Tanya paused thoughtfully. ‘And I never even knew there were any nuns in Baghdad,’ she said innocently. ‘And I hear you even rescued the puppies as well?’

  ‘Well, maybe they were orphans, not nuns, I can’t remember clearly now, stress of combat you see. Of course we rescued the puppies. In a situation like that, one doesn’t think of one’s own safety. The training simply takes over, you know.’

  ‘Yes, and then back home in time for tea and medals. I know the rest of the story. God, you guys are such bullshitters.’ She laughed delightedly. ‘You must think I was born yesterday.’

  Actually much of that story had been true. I looked forward to showing her the photos of the puppies on my laptop and watching her eat her words.

  One thing Tanya did take note of was the fact that, despite being a full colonel, Mad Dog had been taking unusual risks, spending time nearly every day for two years ‘outside the wire’, often driving around with only a couple of sergeants for self-defence. Although charmed at the thought of sharing such experiences, Tanya had too much common sense to want to risk her life for the sake of adventure.

  When she remarked on it, Mad Dog leaned across the table to her. ‘We haven’t lost a colonel in this war yet, and I ain’t gonna be the first,’ he said, and I remember a chill running down my spine. Every soldier is superstitious and knows that it’s never wise to tempt fate.

  We continued talking for the best part of an hour and Tanya seemed as if she couldn’t tear her eyes off me. Maybe there was something stuck in my teeth? We swigged from cans of ice-cold Coke, and I could hardly believe it when suddenly she placed her cutlery American-style slantwise across the plate and got to her feet.

  ‘It’s been a pleasure. Good night, guys,’ she said, and was gone.

  We stood briefly, and if Mad Dog and Cobus knew I’d been harbouring great expectations, they didn’t show it. We finished our meal and I sat there wondering if it had been a come-on set up by Cobus and McQueen.

  Cobus got a plate of Twinkies, which he ate distractedly one after the other as the conversation switched to the surge. McQueen believed it would have the desired effect in the long run, even if right then the streets were more precarious than ever.

  In January President Bush had ordered the deployment of twenty thousand additional soldiers in five brigades to Baghdad, and the tour of four thousand marines in Anbar province had been extended. The role of these troops was to assist the newly trained Iraqi forces in securing hostile neighbourhoods, to protect the local population and leave Iraqi forces behind to maintain peace.

  The plan had been opposed by both houses of Congress. Opponents argued that Iraq had become an unwinnable sectarian civil war, and that the cost and duration of the deployment was unclear and diverted resources from the battle against a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. Like the insurgents in Iraq, the Taliban had learned that they did not actually have to win the war, they just had to fight on and survive in their holes until the enemy was exhausted and went home.

  As commander-in-chief, Bush held sway and the surge reinforcements sailed in February. Donald Rumsfeld had been axed in December 2006 and Robert Gates was now Secretary of Defense. Bush had also appointed a new commander of Coalition Forces, General David Petraeus, a straight-talking PhD graduate in international relations from Princeton whom McQueen had marked down as a potential future president.

  The number of troops serving repeat tours was rising, and extending tours of troops already in country had serious if predictable effects on morale. By the time an American infantryman had been in Afghanistan and was on his third tour of Iraq, he knew the statistics were weighing against him and was focused on staying alive. These troops were serving out their time, keeping their heads down, and they weren’t signing on again once their time was up. But with a new general and the will to bring in surge troops to destroy the insurgents decisively, everyone was feeling the new sense of commitment in the air.

  That isn’t to say that the situation had not improved by spring 2007. It had. In Anbar, the most volatile province a year earlier, the marines were holding the ring and a fragile peace had settled on Ramadi, the capital, after Sunni sheikhs finally decided to reject the al-Qaeda-led insurgency in what had become known as the Awakening – Sahwa in Arabic.

  As the former masters under Saddam Hussein, the Sunni had put up the fiercest opposition to the invasion. While they continued to live in biblical poverty, they were aware that in those other parts of the country where the Iraqi people had reached an understanding with the Americans, Shias and Kurds were now enjoying the benefits of reconstruction.

  The followers of Sahwa, later dubbed the Sons of Iraq by Coalition Forces, would in time be counted as allies in the struggle against al-Qaeda and Shia militants, and be paid and armed by the Americans. The Americans had followed the same strategy during the resistance war against the Russians in Afghanistan and armed the mujahideen, those swashbuckling freedom fighters reborn as the Taliban once they were in power.

  The Sunni had boycotted regional elections and referenda in 2005. After Sahwa, they began to engage in the political process and largely accepted the results of the 2006 general election that saw the Shia political leader Nouri al-Maliki sworn in as prime minister. Hundreds of small parties had competed in the election, which turned out to be as democratic as one could hope for in a country with no tradition of democracy and where women do as they’re told or get a backhander.

  Al-Maliki was a modest, quietly spoken man who seemed reasonable and governed as a lion tamer governs a ring of lions in the circus – cautiously and knowing that he may get eaten at any moment.

  Mad Dog believed the real power behind the Shia wasn’t al-Maliki, and it wasn’t the Iranian-born cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. It was Muqtada al-Sadr.

  ‘The Iraqi Scarlet Pimpernel,’ he said. ‘They seek him here, they seek him there . . .’

  Al-Sadr had gone to ground as the surge got under way in mid-February. Coalition chiefs wanted to believe he had fled to Iran, or Najaf, his clan base 16km south of Baghdad. Mad Dog believed he had remained in Sadr City all the time and was proved right on 25 February when a suicide bomb killed forty people in a student college and al-Sadr went public to announce that he was ‘withdrawing his support’ from the security crackdown.

  Al-Sadr wasn’t just some charismatic young punk with a scruffy beard and a black turban. He was believed by his Shia followers to be a direct descendant of the Twelfth Imam of Shia tradition, a living saint to the one-and-a-half million people crushed into Sadr City, the Shia slum in the north-east of Baghdad once called Saddam City and renamed in honour of Muqtada’s uncle, the martyred anti-Saddam cleric Muhammad Bakir al-Sadr.

  Apart from being a saint with a bloodline going back to the Prophet, al-Sadr was the head of the Mahdi Army, a force of ten thousand well-armed followers that had grown from the body of students who had been with al-Sadr at seminary college before the invasion. After the fall of Baghdad, the Mahdi Army, uniformed in black with green headbands, filled the security vacuum in a string of southern Iraqi cities; they prevented looting in Sadr City and provided assistance to Shias who had suffered in the bombardment. By 2007, in Shia areas throughout the country the Mahdi Army was operating what was in effect a shadow government.

  It was – by design or coincidence – in Sadr City that General Petraeus launched the surge, as I’d read in The Times online in Africa. Al-Sadr had not disappeared, ‘fled to Iran’, but was quietly watching and had tacitly supported the surge in order to prevent all-out civil war.

  As far as I could see, he was continuing to play the long game. Once there is a pacified Iraq, once every cent of aid and reconstruction money has been sucked out of the US Treasury, in five years, or ten years, Iraq will drop all pretences of democracy – it does not exist except as a façade in any Arab country, with the possible exception of Lebanon – and become an Islamic republic like Iran, with Muqtada al
-Sadr as president. The war, the deaths, the oil, the largest US Embassy in the world, all will have been in vain.

  In the Pentagon, in the State Department, in Whitehall, no one before the invasion in April 2003 could see the big picture – myself and everyone on the ground in Iraq included. Iraq is too complex, too labyrinthine, too Byzantine. Its divisions are tribal, multi-faith, multi-ethnic; they go back to Mohammed and beyond to Mesopotamia and the beginning of human history.

  I had already forgotten the myriad tribal details of Iraq and most of my Arabic during my last year in a semi-deliberate effort to fill up my memory with new details of African tribes and African wars.

  But what that all meant to me was that lifting Sammy and his family from a safe house and joining the convoy going up to Mosul was going to be that much harder with the spike of violence between the US surge and the insurgents, and with the Sunni militias fighting al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, each jockeying for position in the aftermath of the surge.

  Secretly, and I would want to check with Sammy first, I worried that with Anbar province turning hostile to the al-Qaeda foreign fighters, would they retreat to the north, and would Mosul be a worse place for Sammy to move to?

  If that were not enough, the suicide bomb on 25 February revealed that the city was a powder keg and, more disturbing, it was a young woman who had strapped on a vest packed with explosives and detonated herself in the corridor at the Baghdad Economy and Administration College. Most of the forty dead and sixty injured were students studying economy and administration in a land desperate for economists and administrators.

  There was nothing new about female suicide bombers in Iraq. The first came in April 2003 when two women, one of them pregnant, blew up their car at a Coalition checkpoint, killing themselves and three US soldiers. What was more alarming was that, since then, attacks by women had increased to about twenty a year, and the number was still growing.