The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  All the while we talked, the women of the household—Ali’s mother, sister, cousin, and neighbor—were cooking holiday dishes just a few feet away in the kitchen. The younger women kept coming to the door, dressed all in black for Muharram but unveiled and extremely curious, and made eye contact with me before retreating to whisper among themselves and giggle. I told them that they were making me feel like an animal at the zoo. On any other occasion, Ali said, they would not have shown me their faces at home, but this was a feast day and I was an honored guest.

  His sister Ibtisam, a volleyball instructor at a local college, finally stood in the doorway, her face half hidden by the jamb, and engaged me in something like a conversation. She asked why the American soldiers no longer smiled and waved as they used to after the liberation. She wanted me to know that after a year they had seen nothing from the occupation. And women, she said, wanted their rights. “We want to take part in the elections.”

  “Nobody said you can’t vote,” Ali told her.

  “We want higher education,” she said. “We want better jobs. And respect in society.” With that, Ibtisam retreated to the safety of the boiling pots.

  Around three in the morning, I followed Ali up the exterior staircase that ran from the court to the second-story roof. A cool breeze was blowing. Down below, the penitents on the boom box were still chanting and beating themselves. Under the stars and a half-moon, palm trees and lights stretched out across the city. All of Baghdad seemed to be awake, waiting for Imam Hussein, and at this distance, on this night, it was a magical place. Ali and I said goodbye just before dawn.

  * * *

  AS THE MONTH WORE ON, Iraq became noticeably more dangerous for someone like me. On March 9, a young CPA official who had been working with women’s groups, a colleague of hers, and an Iraqi translator were chased down and shot to death on the road between Karbala and Hilla by five men wearing Iraqi police uniforms. An hour earlier, I had been driving back to Baghdad on another road a few miles away. On March 15, four Baptist missionaries were killed by automatic weapons fire in Mosul. The next day, two foreign water engineers were gunned down in a roadside shooting near Hilla. Their corpses became part of the nightly work at Dr. Shaker’s morgue. Perhaps as a warning, he gave me the clinical details of the Dutchman’s case: A Kalashnikov bullet fired at a distance greater than six feet shattered the right ankle; a second entered the back of the right thigh, tore off the scrotum, and exited through the left thigh; a third penetrated the right kidney with shrapnel; a fourth entered the left side of the neck and exited with part of the lower jaw, causing death.

  I was staying at a small family-owned hotel on a side street in the commercial district of Karada. Its clients were mostly Turkish, Arab, and Iranian businessmen. The low visibility of the place seemed safer as well as more congenial than the big downtown hotels surrounded by blast walls, which were widely known to house Western journalists and contractors. My room was off the street, and I had scoped out an emergency exit through the bathroom window. Nonetheless, the explosions that went off two or three times a night were making it harder to sleep. One night in the middle of the month, around midnight, a bomb somewhere in the city rattled the windows and walls of my room just after I’d slipped into unconsciousness. You could never tell where it came from or how far away—the blasts always sounded much closer than they were. I tried to fall asleep again, but it was no use. I pulled on my clothes and went out to the street.

  The security guard, Saad, who had one AK-47, was standing outside his booth with the night manager, Dafir. Dafir reassured me that the explosion had come from the direction of Liberation Square, a mile or so north. Both men were in their forties but looked the usual decade older, underpaid and underdressed on a chilly night. They invited me to join them. I knew that I wasn’t going back to sleep, so I stood with Saad and Dafir while a movie about the martyrdom of Imam Hussein played on the DVD. They began to reminisce about their experiences in the eight-year war with Iran.

  “Saddam destroyed me.” Saad lifted his shirt to reveal a nasty eight-inch vertical scar on the right side of his stomach. He had been wounded in the battle of Majnoon. The Iraqi soldiers used to find the hands of the dead Iranians still clutching keys, to get into paradise. Dafir had also seen action in Majnoon, as well as other battlefields along the border. His job had been to test the air for safety after the chemical weapons attacks by the Iraqi army that turned the tide of the war.

  I asked Dafir what they had been fighting for. “No, the government just told us to fight.” He quoted the words of a Moor who had led the conquest of Spain in the eighth century: “The enemy is in front of you, the sea is behind you. Nothing to do—you must fight.” He added, “We fought against Iran and now here we are, making fifty dollars a month.” They laughed heartily. Dafir, a man of painstaking dignity, wrote out daily news summaries of Iraq’s calamities for me in his self-taught English. Tonight he was wearing a sheepskin coat given to him by a Kuwaiti guest; Saad had no coat.

  The movie about Imam Hussein ended in martyrdom and lamentation. Saad took it out and replaced it with vintage Iraqi porn. A man was undressing a woman in a seedy-looking bedroom. The production values were quite low, but Saad was more attentive now than he had been during the Karbala movie. I ribbed him that Moqtada al-Sadr would have him punished. He waved off Moqtada and pointed upward. “Allah,” he said. It was between him and his God.

  After an hour with Saad and Dafir I felt much better.

  A few nights later, a huge car bomb destroyed a hotel a dozen blocks away. The Mt. Lebanon matched the profile of mine perfectly. Iraqis speculated that the bomb had detonated prematurely, that the intended target had been one of the Western hotels. Nonetheless, I didn’t think it was wise for me to stay at a hotel whose only protection was Saad and his AK. The next morning, Dafir asked for no explanation as he wrote up my bill, but it was hard to look him in the eye. I had the feeling that I was abandoning them.

  Foreign journalists were beginning to realize that they might be specifically targeted as Westerners, which elevated the risk far above the bad luck of being blown to pieces by a stray mortar round that happened to land next to you. And since journalists spent a good deal more time wandering around Iraq’s streets and highways looking for Iraqis to talk to than either CPA officials or private contractors, many decided that they needed more protection than simply keeping a low profile afforded. Those with bureaus in Baghdad had the means to hire security consultants and buy armored cars and even build blast walls and watchtowers around private compounds. I had no bureau, no staff—whenever I went to Iraq I had to cobble together a team of driver and translator almost from scratch.

  I decided to hire a bodyguard. The man I found for the job had relevant work experience and was currently underemployed, having formerly served as one of Saddam’s, and later Uday’s, bodyguards. Emad Hamadi was a short, broad-chested thirty-four-year-old with a Fuller brush mustache and mirthful eyes. He was spending his days sitting at home in Qadisiya, one of the newer Baathist neighborhoods on the western side of the river (Saddam liked to bestow them with Arab nationalist names: Qadisiya for the seventh-century Arab victory over the Persians, reprised for the Iran-Iraq War; Andalus for the Arab conquest of Spain; Jihad for jihad). One or two days a week, Emad ran intergovernmental mail from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where, owing to family connections, he had worked before the fall of the regime. For this sinecure he was still earning a hundred dollars a month, as much payoff as salary. As far as I knew—and I had only his and a few other people’s word for it—Emad was staying out of the insurgency.

  His family was Sunni Arab, from Falluja and the small towns of Anbar province. All his relatives had battened off the old regime. A brother had worked in the now-defunct Ministry of Military Production and also owned a trading company that had once done brisk business through government cronies, but with no contracts coming from the CPA, he had closed his shop in Mansour. A cousin had been a decorator of the hid
eous guest rooms in one of Saddam’s palaces, now accommodating American soldiers; another had been laid off by the Ministry of Health. Emad’s nephew, the son of a diplomat at the Iraq UN mission in New York, had been working at a Brooklyn deli when federal agents arrested him, just after the invasion, on a visa violation in a sweep of suspect Iraqis, jailed him for four months, and then deported him to Iraq. Emad’s family was just one small block of Saddam’s vast edifice of patronage and control that the war had sent crashing to earth.

  In the past few months, half a dozen of Emad’s friends from the old regime had been bumped off in mysterious circumstances. One of them, a notorious womanizer from Tikrit, had said to Emad shortly before being killed, “What’s happening? The world has turned upside down.” But Emad was too good-natured to express any bitterness. When American soldiers came through his neighborhood searching houses, he burned his snapshots taken with Uday, Qusay, Arafat, and Qaddafi; they were of strictly sentimental value. Emad was one of the thousands of younger Iraqis who came after Saddam’s generation and who had no ideological attachments, simply using a regime that had turned into a criminal operation for personal gain and pleasure. Emad was about the same age as Ali Talib and Bashir Shaker and his brothers: Though they had lived on different sides of its fault line, they all knew nothing but the rule of Saddam. Now Saddam was in American custody, having been caught in a hole in the ground looking like a homeless man.

  Since the present had grown so bleak, Emad lived happily in the past, the good old days when he could fuck a woman behind a tree in Zawra Park, get into a fight with a group of men who tried to take their turn with her, shoot one of them in the leg, and then be sprung from jail by Uday himself. Women and booze were easy to find, the problems they led to could be solved by pulling the right strings, and justice was done within the extended family. After deserting from military college during the war with Iran—he couldn’t take the drills, and he wasn’t used to washing his own clothes—a chance family connection to Saddam’s private secretary landed Emad a place as one of the thousands of men on the president’s personal security detail. The first line of guards consisted entirely of Saddam’s cousins, favored with a piece of land and a yearly car, empowered to remove even a minister; the second line was distant relatives, who could place a phone call and move an entire division. There were five lines in all, and Emad was in the third.

  Saddam loomed over Emad’s life as an awesome but just god. “From what I saw and heard, Saddam was a man of mercy,” Emad told me. “He didn’t punish—he forgave, he gave gifts. Let me tell you this as an example. One of the guards at the gate, who controlled the spikes in the road—he saw Saddam coming out of the palace, and when he saluted he stepped on one of the spikes. Saddam stopped and asked him, ‘Why did you do this?’ ‘I don’t know,’ the guard said. ‘It’s the first time I saw you.’ He was crying the whole time.” Saddam ordered medical treatment and gave the injured man money and a Toyota Corolla. Emad’s direct encounters with Saddam were few but memorable. There was the slow Friday afternoon when he and his mates were lounging around outside the palace in their underwear, when two cars pulled up. Saddam was in the backseat of one. “We didn’t expect him, we didn’t know what to do. We stood and saluted.” Saddam’s much-feared first secretary promised the guards extreme punishment. But Saddam let them off. “It’s Friday,” he said. “They didn’t know.” Most unforgettably, during the American bombing of Baghdad in 1991, Emad and a few other guards stayed in the presidential palace while others fled the explosions. Saddam handed out gold watches and Browning revolvers to the loyalists. Emad was trembling in fear—less of the bombing than of the president. Saddam laid his hand on Emad’s head. “His presence was something abnormal,” Emad remembered, “like a magician’s.”

  Emad was well aware that the regime he served massacred thousands. He once spat out the worst epithet imaginable in Iraq for the whole Baathist elite: “They were criminals, sons of dogs.” But it was the life he knew, and leaving aside the occasional whipping or incarceration for one infraction or another, he had done well by it. Emad made a point of insisting that he had never committed murder. He swore up and down that, during the intifada that followed the Gulf War, he had refused an order to shoot a rocket-propelled grenade into a house in Karbala with women and children inside, for which he was flayed with a cable and hose. I had no way of judging the truth of this. In my dozens of conversations with servants of the old regime in Iraq, none of them ever admitted to having harmed a soul.

  The rough experience in Karbala led Emad to request a transfer, and he ended up on Uday’s detail. Uday was a source of constant, dangerous fun. Emad freely acknowledged that he was insane, his mood swinging wildly from hour to hour, especially when he drank. His generosity was as overwhelming as his cruelty. When things turned dark inside the head of the first son, Uday would pull out his pistol and no one knew whether he was going to shoot out a ceiling light or the brains of someone who had displeased him. Emad spent two years in Uday’s pleasure palaces and nightclubs. It was the swimming pool incident that prompted him to try to leave the service. This was nearly impossible to do, but after several attempts and interventions by high-placed connections, Emad was allowed to retire on his memories.

  By the time he entered my employ, Emad was past his prime. With a 9-mm. pistol tucked under his Hawaiian shirt, he needed constant reminding to walk behind me and to keep an eye on more than just girls. Still, I enjoyed his company. Amid the humorless righteousness of Muharram, it was a relief to travel around with a steady source of jokes. Emad felt a fond nostalgia toward Baathist corruption and decay, and he looked with disapproval on a city—his city—so thoroughly transformed, its walls draped in black banners of Shiite faith, its streets taken over by youth militias in green headbands, the familiar names of its bridges and neighborhoods changed to religious ones. Emad was outraged that a friend of his had been stopped on his way to Basra at a Shiite checkpoint outside Najaf and, when militiamen found a case of whiskey in his trunk, had been beaten forty times with a length of rubber hose. Zawaj mutea, Shiite pleasure marriage, was a source of particular amusement to Emad. “Ask a Shiite if you can have his sister for a month,” he said. “He’ll go crazy.” It was better to be a bad Muslim and admit it than to pretend to be good. “All Iraqis are going to hell,” Emad told me on our last day together. “I know I am. So why not sin?”

  * * *

  THE MORE DANGEROUS Iraq became, the more I depended on the Iraqis I worked with: to overhear hostile comments in a restaurant and decide that it was time to pay the bill and leave, to talk us past police checkpoints and divine the real from the fake, to scope out the mood of a crowd before bringing me onto the scene, to lend me a jacket that allowed me to blend in. Eventually, I couldn’t cross the street by myself.

  I hired several different translators. Because each visit seldom lasted more than a month, after my departure they always got snatched up by other journalists with permanent bureaus in Baghdad, and on the next visit I had to find someone new. The skills required for the position went far beyond fluency in English and Arabic. The wave of kidnappings placed a high price on every Westerner’s head, and simply working for a foreign journalist endangered an Iraqi (many local employees of Western news organizations were threatened, and a few killed). So the relationship between journalist and translator was forced onto ground where mutual trust became essential, and the balance of power equaled out. I was the boss and paid the salary, but it was his country, his language, and my scalp was more valuable than his. There was a running joke between me and my driver, Qais, who worked with me on each trip and displayed fanatical loyalty: If I didn’t come to his house and have dinner with his family, he’d turn me over to the jihadis.

  I was well aware that by employing these young men I was forcing them to choose every single day whether or not to say a few words to a cousin who had a friend who had a friend in a criminal gang and, just like that, collect ten or fifteen thousand dollars
. One translator who worked for me seemed a little unstable. He sometimes swore to himself when there was nothing obviously wrong, and he had a tic of snapping his head back on his neck with a groan as if he were in mental pain. He also lied to me about work more than once (I would never have known if Qais hadn’t told me—such was the state of ignorance in which we Westerners spent most of our time in Iraq). One day I suddenly stopped trusting him, and from that moment until my departure I was aware of every chance the guy had to turn me over—all he really had to do was speak English in public in a loud voice. Fortunately, I left a few days later and never saw him again. But some of the news bureaus were virtually hostage to gangs of drivers and security guards, most of them blood relatives, who couldn’t be fired because the risks were too great.