Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  In April 2003, after what felt like an eternity, I was at last assigned to Basra. I flew to Kuwait, picked up my press accreditation from some Coalition press office in a luxury hotel on the shores of the Gulf, and drove over the border with Bob, a designated BBC security escort, late of the 22nd Regiment SAS. The short war to depose Saddam was in its final days and there was a large BBC team up in Baghdad, but Basra was where the British troops were centred and I found our team based in the same palace complex as Britain’s 12th Armoured Brigade. The palace was a collection of expensive, almost brand-new buildings built out of marble and white stone on the banks of the Shatt Al-Arab river and surrounded by a high wall. Cornering off some of the best land in the city, it had been intended for use by Saddam’s delinquent sons, but had apparently rarely been used. Local Iraqis told me that any fishermen caught straying too close to its perimeter were automatically shot.

  Saddam’s regime may just have fallen but there were still plenty of stories to cover. The US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, flew into Basra for a one-day visit filled with theatre. When his plane landed on the runway black-clad US security men tumbled out of it ‘to secure the area’, watched by bemused British squaddies who had already secured the airport long ago. At the ensuing press conference Rumsfeld only took questions from his own travelling press pack from Washington, ignoring an awkward question I put to him. Journalists tend to remember these things.

  I went up to the Iranian border at Shalamcheh to cover the tumultuous return to Iraq of the exiled Shi’ite cleric Muhammad Baqr Al-Hakim. It was a story made for television. At this bleak border crossing in the far south of Iraq, Iranian border guards in white gloves and helmets faced off with British soldiers in berets. There was a brief argument about exactly where the border lay, but no shots were fired and an international incident was averted. The Shi’ite crowds went wild with joy as Al-Hakim’s convoy made its way slowly into Iraq, culminating in a massive rally at a stadium in Basra. But Baqr Al-Hakim had only three months to live; he was assassinated in August 2003 by a suicide bomber in the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf.

  Basra was a lot safer then than it has since become, and several times I went out on patrol with the British troops to see how they were operating and interacting with local Iraqis. Sometimes this would be on foot and sometimes in convoys of Warrior armoured fighting vehicles – more for show than security, since almost no one was shooting at the Brits back then. When the patrol did hear the occasional burst of gunfire it would almost invariably be what the soldiers called ‘happy shooting’, someone blazing off into the air with an AK-47 to celebrate something like a wedding, a common practice in some of the remoter villages of the Arabian Peninsula.

  I really enjoyed the foot patrols, padding silently alongside the canals and riverbanks of southern Iraq, listening to the sounds of village life: the hoarse bark of a distant dog, the muffled revving of a pickup truck, a cacophony of frogs from close by, the soft call of an owl from the foliage of a date grove. The patrol commander would divide up the area into squares on the map, sending part of his force one way then joining up with them at an agreed point. Almost the only threat came from common banditry, which had long been rife here. When we came to a village, the British soldiers seemed to have established a rapport with the local Iraqis.

  ‘Sullum alikkum,’ a sergeant would call out in a Brummy accent.

  ‘Wa aleikum assalaam!’ would come a cry from a darkened doorway, in rather more authentic Arabic.

  ‘Oh, ’ullo, Aly, how you doin’, mate?’ called the sergeant.

  ‘Itfaddal! Please, come have tea with us.’

  It was hearts-and-minds soldiering at its best and I believe it was genuine, rather than put on for my benefit as a journalist. Earlier in the day our crew had watched Royal Engineers throwing up a metal bridge for villagers to use over a canal; they were working hard to sort out the shortage of fresh drinking water, and back at headquarters the officers were convening regular councils with tribal sheikhs and religious leaders to hear their complaints.

  Basra and the surrounding area had sustained relatively little physical damage from the invasion and most Iraqis I spoke to then seemed well disposed towards the British, but always with the caveat that they expected them to leave as soon as some sort of order and infrastructure had been restored. Not everyone was thrilled to have been invaded: I attended a gathering of newly unemployed judges and lawyers who had prospered under Saddam. For them no curse was strong enough to condemn the British Army, but I learned later that they eventually got their jobs back.

  But the vast majority of Iraqis I spoke to in Basra and the surrounding villages told me how relieved they were to be rid of Saddam Hussein at last. One man even berated me quite angrily for coming from a country that had held anti-war demonstrations. ‘How dare you?’ he rasped. ‘You people did not have to live under that murderous bastard all your lives like we did. If you had, you would have welcomed this invasion, not opposed it.’ It was only one man’s opinion and there were plenty of others who took a very different view, but one afternoon I had an encounter that went a long way towards convincing me at the time that the overthrow of Saddam had been the right thing. A small group of pensive, quietly spoken Iraqis showed me round the torture cells at the Secret Police headquarters, now ransacked and empty. When you have been led by the hand round a cell by a man who shows you what was done to him by the state security apparatus it is hard to remain unmoved. These men were tortured for months on end, beaten with metal bars, electrocuted on their genitals, hung up by their wrists with their arms behind their backs. The pain was excruciating, they said, the agony endless, and for what? They knew nothing worth telling their interrogators. Their jailers were just having fun. But of course part of the tragedy of the mismanaged post-war administration of Iraq is that such abuses have again become commonplace. By late 2006 the UN announced that torture in Iraq was probably worse now than under Saddam.

  But for me, a rewarding part of reporting from southern Iraq was meeting Iraqis, newly empowered to speak freely without Baath Party minders noting down their every word. In the evenings I would go with our Iraqi fixers to an open-air café, where we would sit in the stiflingly hot air playing noisy games of backgammon, drinking sweet tea and puffing away on a narghila water-pipe. This was the Middle East I have always loved: good company, quick, witty conversation and great atmosphere. It saddens me to think that if I had returned to Basra two years later I would have been risking kidnap or worse to go out at night in such a place.

  But behind the scenes there were already dark forces afoot in May 2003; with Saddam and the henchmen of his ruling Baath Party no longer in power, old scores were starting to be settled. In the leafy date-palm-oasis village of Abu’l Khasab, south of Basra, I interviewed a ten-year-old boy who was plotting to murder his neighbour. As we squatted on rush mats in his family’s spartan reception room, he told me he knew exactly which Baath Party official had ordered his father’s execution some years ago. Now he said there was nothing to stop him from avenging the family honour – ‘With this,’ he said, cradling a rusty AK-47 that was almost as tall as he was.

  A few miles away we found a man on a farm who was missing half his ears. As a deserter from Saddam’s army in the mid-1990s he had been caught in a round-up, loaded on to a truck and taken under armed guard to Basra Hospital. ‘When they strapped me down on to a trolley I did not know what to expect,’ he told me, ‘but I knew it was going to be bad. They found out my first name was Saddam so the doctor was allowed to be lenient. He said, “Because you have the same name as our President I will only slice off half your ears.” Then I felt this burning pain and I could feel something wet splashing down my neck. Now I am disfigured for ever.’ Saddam the mutilated farmer seemed to have accepted what had happened to him; he was not plotting revenge.

  When the US-led Coalition went to war in Iraq, I expected, as many did, that in the short term the threat of international terrorism would probably in
crease. But few could have predicted in March 2003 the depth, extent and sheer savagery of the insurgency that was to follow. When the first of Al-Qaeda’s beheading tapes came into the BBC via the internet, I had the misfortune to have to ‘package’ it into a report for the lunchtime TV news. The victim was Nick Berg, an American telecoms engineer who had come to Iraq looking for work and who had ended up getting kidnapped and handed over to the most violent insurgency group in Iraq led by the Jordanian Islamist Ahmed Al-Khalayleh, who had adopted the nom de guerre Abu Mus’ab Al-Zarqawi.

  ‘The tape is pretty horrific,’ one of our videotape editors warned me. ‘We’ve had a look at it and some of us just couldn’t watch it.’ I took a deep breath and slotted the tape into the machine then pressed ‘play’. There was Nick Berg, seated cross-legged on the floor in a bare room and wearing an orange jumpsuit of the sort worn by the alleged terrorists incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay; he looked frail and frightened but unaware of what was about to happen to him. Standing behind him were four well-built men with their faces concealed by black ski masks, carrying machine guns and belts of ammunition. The man in the middle was Al-Zarqawi and he was reading out a statement in Arabic to the effect that Berg had been tried by an Islamic court and found guilty of being an enemy of Iraq and that his captors would now carry out ‘God’s will’. With that he withdrew an enormous knife, almost a sword, that he had been concealing inside his jacket. This was the signal for Al-Zarqawi’s henchmen to put down their weapons and set about helping their leader to decapitate Nick Berg. Al-Qaeda’s video technicians had not quite got the sound in sync with the pictures, as the tape had the hapless Berg screaming in terror while he was apparently still sitting immobile and saying nothing. But the video soon caught up with the audio as the men in ski masks pushed him over on to his side and held him down, crying, ‘Allahu akbar!’ (‘God is the greatest!’) as Al-Zarqawi beheaded him and the camera zoomed in on this gratuitous, ghoulish bloodbath.

  From their reactions on the internet I know that many Muslims found this utterly abhorrent and barbaric, especially the uttering of the sacred phrase ‘Allahu akbar’ in conjunction with the cold-blooded murder of a noncombatant captive. ‘This has brought shame on us,’ wrote one Arab contributor. ‘Slaughtering this man like a sheep is degrading.’ Others, though, said he deserved it, claiming that as an American Jew (and therefore ‘obviously a spy’), Nick Berg had no business to be in Iraq. Berg’s executioners seemed to care little for what people said in the wider world, though. They had achieved their aim of horrifying the West and scaring many foreign contractors into leaving Iraq, thereby undermining the chances of the Coalition’s nation-building succeeding. Their message was clear: anyone who cooperated with the ‘puppet government’ in Baghdad risked the same fate. Months later, lying in my hospital bed in Whitechapel, I watched the sad tragedy of the Liverpudlian Ken Bigley’s capture and execution unfold. Al-Zarqawi’s bloodthirsty and sadistic tactics were typical of Al-Qaeda’s approach to asymmetric warfare. The Islamist extremists inspired by Osama Bin Laden and others were never going to be able to confront and defeat a Western army on a conventional battlefield, but they did know how to hit the West where it hurt. The fear engendered by these beheadings was exponential: for every foreign contractor kidnapped and beheaded on camera, perhaps dozens of others would be put off coming to Iraq, or, if already working there, intimidated into leaving early.

  By late 2005 Iraq had become well established as the new jihadi battleground, the chosen destination for angry young Muslims to go and confront the USA and its allies. Saudis, Yemenis, Algerians and others, including Europe-based North Africans, formed a steady trickle of recruits that was funnelled into Iraq across the Syrian and other borders by an efficient network of sympathizers. Iraqis still made up the bulk of the insurgency, but a relatively high proportion of these non-Iraqi Arabs volunteered for suicide-bombing missions. Their preferred targets were US and Coalition troops, sometimes detonating a car full of explosives into a convoy of Humvee jeeps, sometimes remotely detonating a roadside IED (Improvised Explosive Device). But far more accessible and just as damaging to US-led efforts at nation-building have been the ‘soft’ targets: the suicide bombings of unprotected marketplaces or milling crowds of police recruits.

  Iraq in the 2000s differs from Afghanistan in the 1990s as the magnet for jihadis in one vital respect. Iraq is a real battlefield, whereas the thousands of young men who made their way to Al-Qaeda’s Afghan training camps in the latter half of the 1990s were at little personal risk and so survived. After learning to fire a Kalashnikov and rocket-propelled grenade, listening to rousing and vitriolic anti-Western sermons and making some international personal contacts, they were free to move on, choosing either to put their skills into practice in their own countries’ insurgencies or simply to lie low and blend back into the societies to which they had returned. In Iraq, many of the volunteer jihadis have made a one-way journey, convinced they are guaranteed a place in Heaven for blowing themselves up and taking a handful of Iraqi ‘collaborators’ with them. But those who do return from the insurgency intact are often changed men, deeply imbued with violence, having witnessed bloodshed of the most gruesome kind at first hand. The return of these combat veterans to neighbouring countries like Saudi Arabia deeply worries the authorities there. The longer the Iraq insurgency drags on, the bigger the pool of battle-hardened jihadis who will one day turn their attention to new arenas in which to confront the hated West and its allies. Ironically, one of the few things President Bush and Al-Qaeda could agree on is that Iraq has become the front line in the so-called War on Terror (which it never was before the invasion of March 2003). Washington has considered it vital to defeat terrorism there or risk a new failed state like Afghanistan in the 1990s. Al-Qaeda has considered it a sacred duty to confront the ‘crusading infidels’ and drive Coalition forces out of Iraq. For both sides the stakes are impossibly high; this is a war that neither side can afford to lose.

  Inevitably, the conflict in Iraq distracted attention from Afghanistan for the first three years. Until the major deployment of British troops to Helmand in 2006 Afghanistan was nicknamed ‘Op Forgotten’ by the few Brits who served there. But the Americans never stopped pursuing Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and two years after the latter had been dislodged from power I went with a BBC team to see at first hand how the US military was fighting the ongoing insurgency up in the wild mountains of the southeast.

  It was cold in Gardez in mid-November 2003. Crisp and clear by day, this desert market town lay nearly eight thousand feet up in the mountains and by nightfall it had us stamping our feet and blowing into our hands. We were staying in a mud-brick fort, one of thousands scattered across Afghanistan’s bleak landscape. At each corner stood a raised watchtower, with a rickety wooden ladder leading up to a narrow parapet. This particular fort had been taken over by a company of soldiers from the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division, men from upstate New York more used to freezing winters than we were. They were mostly reservists, civilians pulled out of their day jobs to be mobilized for months at a time in the name of fighting the Global War on Terror.