The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  When one party to a relationship has the power of death over the other and, at great financial sacrifice, steadily chooses not to exercise it while at the same time risking his own neck just by the fact of working together, the personal bond grows strong. I never left Iraq without feeling a little emotional about the young men who had kept me safe.

  The best translators in Baghdad weren’t professionals (these were mostly the corrupt middle-aged minders from the previous regime) or graduates of the College of Arts with textbook English. The best had been doing some other kind of work and fell into the job by accident after the arrival of the Americans, sometimes by a chance conversation with a journalist on the street. They were quick-witted, resourceful, more than a little brave, and had to thrive on the pressure of moving between our world and their own. They harbored a sort of double consciousness, interpreting Iraq for us while belonging to it, accepting that nothing in their country of holies was going to be sacred, sharing our nonstop patter of profanity and sex talk, our mockery of sheikhs and imams and zawaj mutea, then going home to shrouded mothers who hardly ever left the house. The translators were ambitious, they knew that the opportunity wouldn’t last forever, and the best learned fast enough to grow restless in the job, perhaps even a little resentful that we needed them so much and that they got so little glory. As the insurgency became more brutal, news organizations began to rely on local staff to go out and do the reporting for them, first in no-go cities like Falluja, and then, once the kidnappings started, almost everywhere. After a few cases that amounted to literary theft in the pages of America’s leading dailies, followed by bitter complaints, the Iraqis began to receive professional credit. What they lacked in training they more than made up in street knowledge and willingness to risk their lives.

  One of my best translators was a young doctor named Ali. He was half Sunni, half Shiite (he called himself a Sushi), and a year before the war he had fled to Yemen when the security police got wind of the fact that he was running a side business making copies with a banned color printer (Saddam had declared Hewlett-Packard office equipment to be “Jewish”). Ali came back after the invasion, dug up the printer where he had buried it in his yard in a watertight wooden box, and soon abandoned medicine, which bored him, for a desultory career working with and then abruptly leaving some of the best journalists in Baghdad. He was that rare thing in Iraq, a free spirit as well as a daredevil, willing to smuggle Westerners into Falluja at the height of the fighting there. He had good contacts among the insurgents and sympathized with their resentment of the occupation, as well as with the civilians suffering in the war zones. We once stayed up half the night arguing whether the young judge in the case against Saddam should be considered a national hero. I thought so—he represented the new value of law against the old object of power worship. For Ali it was too soon. Such a man was too close to being a collaborator, the sting of humiliation was still more compelling than the principle of democracy. But Ali’s own life had opened up under the Americans. He liked the soldiers individually, and he was restless enough to apply for one of the newly available Fulbright scholarships so he could study journalism in the United States.

  Ali bought a suit and wore it to the Green Zone for the finalists’ interview with State Department officials. Afterward, he called me in New York on his cell phone from the checkpoint outside the convention center. He was in despair. One of the questions had been, “Do you consider America to be a liberator or an occupier here?” Every other young Iraqi candidate had answered the former, but when it was Ali’s turn he had said “occupier” and felt a chill come over the interview. He was sure that his honesty had cost him the scholarship. Ali was impressed when the U.S. government gave him a Fulbright anyway. He arrived in Philadelphia determined to learn how Americans managed to do what Iraqis were increasingly incapable of doing: to break down their group identities, to become individuals, to live together. Ali had become a harsh critic of the Sunni insurgents, the Shiite militias, and their uses of Islam.

  My first translator in Iraq, and the one I got to know the best, was a Kurd whom I will call Serwan. He was thirty-three years old when I met him that first summer, with a skinny, angular frame, a right shoulder that had an agonizing habit of dislocating (it happened one day when Serwan, Qais, and I were swimming in a lake above Suleimaniya), and a scar on his forehead just above one of his black brooding eyes. He liked to drink beer, and he liked the feel of his 9-mm. pistol in his hand and the businesslike metallic sound when he shoved in the clip (I wouldn’t let him carry his gun on the job). He had the coiled, intense air of a former intelligence officer, which he was, and which women found attractive. He felt that he had been born in the wrong country, that his hard life as an Iraqi had been a mistake.

  Serwan was the older son of a powerful tribal leader in Suleimaniya, in the foothills of northeastern Iraq. He was adored by his mother and bullied by his father, who considered pleasures like bicycles and musical instruments unworthy of a boy of Serwan’s station. He grew up with a sense of grievance, and when he was eighteen it found a focus larger than his father. A friend recruited Serwan into a small underground political party. “What do they want?” Serwan asked. Kurdish independence, the friend said. Suleimaniya was a Kurdish town under the control of Arab Baathist security police who had a license to arrest, torture, kidnap, rape. Throughout the eighties, with the intensification of the guerrilla war in the mountains and the Baathist campaign of destroying villages, the repression in Suleimaniya grew worse. Serwan joined the party, and at secret meetings its politics quickly got into his blood. “I was crazy,” he said. He began to carry around a concealed bomb, keeping others in his room. “I was ready to do anything. I was ready to kill. It was very easy for me to do it if they asked me, but they didn’t.”

  One day in 1989, when Serwan was nineteen, security officials dressed in policemen’s uniforms approached him on the street. They were very nice, very polite; no need to call his family, they only wanted to talk to him for ten minutes; would he come with them? They brought Serwan to the security headquarters, an ugly concrete structure the color of dried blood, called the Red Building. Everyone in Suleimaniya knew it—the name alone terrified people. Kurds disappeared inside the Red Building for weeks, and if they came out, they came out destroyed. The security officials told Serwan, “We have a report you were in an organization against the government. Maybe they fooled you, you’re a good guy, we know for sure you’re an honest Iraqi person. But the truth is you’re helping some guys against Iraq.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Serwan said.

  “Yes, you do. Here’s paper, pen—if you need tea or cigarettes just tell us. Write down who you know.”

  “I don’t have anything to write.”

  “Take your time.”

  Serwan had been told by his friends that to make any confession would mean the end for him, and so he didn’t. What happened next I didn’t learn until I had known him for a year; Serwan had told me his life story during one long night that first summer without mentioning it. The normal experience of Kurdish youth was to join nationalist politics, to be arrested, to face torture, and someone like Serwan had had occasion to ask himself how he would hold up under it. He knew that no one could stand the pain for very long, but an older friend had told him to make sure he was always hungry in prison so that he would faint soon after it began.

  The Red Building, which the Kurdish government has turned into a museum, was a warren of dim interrogation rooms and narrow cells, the walls chalked with despairing graffiti, extending too far back from the street for passersby to hear what was happening inside. The interrogation rooms were bare except for a metal desk in the corner and a chair. An exposed cast-iron pipe ran beneath the ceiling, with a piece of steel rebar welded around it in the shape of a hook. Serwan was taken into one of these rooms. He was made to stand on the chair with his arms tied behind his back, suspended over his head from the hook. An interrogator kicked the
chair away, then grabbed him by the waist and pulled him down hard, and the violence of the jolt jerked his right arm out of the socket, and he fainted.

  The torture continued for seven days. The torturers were professionals: After each dislocation, as Serwan lay unconscious on the floor, one of them would shove his arm back into place. “All their life this is their job, this is what they know.” Serwan tried to get through it, telling himself: It’s temporary, you will get hurt, they will make you scared, just try to handle it, be brave, handle the pain, it’s temporary, everything will be okay, after that you will forget. What also helped the pain, he found, was the thought that these men were foreigners, occupiers, in his home, taking Kurdish land, killing Kurdish villagers. “You know, I just—I was hating them. Till now I am hating them. I hate them. Sometimes when you are in front of your enemy, you decide not to be weak.”

  After two weeks, Serwan was released. The security officials told him, “Okay, you’re a good guy. We’re sorry, we didn’t know, there’s a confusion with another name.”

  In 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, when the Kurds and Shia rose up against the regime, Serwan was among the fighters who stormed the Red Building and killed dozens of Baathists inside. It was the happiest day of his life. But he was not cut out for lasting happiness, even during the years that followed, when Suleimaniya flourished under the protection of the no-fly zone into a prosperous, modern-looking town. First, he married the wrong person—a very nice, high-strung girl, the daughter of a politically powerful family. Serwan was still involved with his small party, doing intelligence work, and when his in-laws offered him jobs and foreign visas if he joined the ruling elite, he refused. Kurdish security officials tortured him once, too: A blow just above his eyebrow popped one of his eyes out of the socket, dangling from a nerve. Tensions increased with his wife, and after eight months they agreed to divorce.

  Then there was his father. After the divorce their quarrels grew worse, and life at home became intolerable when his mother, whom he loved more than anyone, died of cancer in 1997. One night, Serwan left his father’s house with the equivalent of four dollars in his pocket. “If you go out of this house, you will die of hunger,” his father said. “You are not used to a hard life.”

  “We will see.”

  Serwan went to Erbil, the capital of the other Kurdish region, under a different party’s control. He was completely alone now, determined to defy his father’s prediction, to make his own way, a strange thing for a man of his lineage and a very difficult thing in a country like Iraq where everyone relied on family and tribe and connections. There were days and nights of hunger, when he lived on three daily pieces of bread and jam. He smoked by his watch, one cheap cigarette every two hours. “I was not ready to lose. And I didn’t lose, but I paid so much, I killed all the nice things in myself. No girls, no love, no music, no picnics. No happiness. Every moment in my life was challenge.”

  After two months he found a job in an Internet center, and he was still working there in the winter of 2003 when foreign journalists began arriving in Kurdistan in advance of the American invasion. Two Australians hired Serwan as a translator in spite of his rough English, sensing that he was trustworthy and tough, the kind of man you would want by your side during a war.

  Serwan went on to Baghdad to pursue this new work. But liberated Iraq was still Iraq, a closed, narrow place, afflicted—as he saw it—with political Islam, with corrupt mullahs and parties, with constricted relations between men and women. Iraq had a hundred free political parties, but the problem was inside people’s heads. You could change teachers in a classroom, but if the students were crazy they still wouldn’t learn anything. So it would be for another fifty years, and he didn’t want to lose another half a life. What he wanted was to fall in love, but he made another mistake: He fell for an American correspondent, who soon left him and Iraq. Aseel, whom Serwan met through me, seemed like a kindred spirit, another oddball with a strong will, but to Serwan she was an Iraqi woman living with her parents, which meant that true understanding, true freedom, would be impossible together.

  Serwan had a dangerous secret: Jewish ancestry. It was on his mother’s side, generations ago. His mother had mentioned it when he was young and the subject interested him intensely. As a Kurd in the Arab world, he identified with Jews and admired Israel, which had supported the Kurdish cause; he wanted to live there, to marry an Israeli and raise Jewish children. Nothing could have set him more apart from other Iraqis. Once, in Suleimaniya, we visited his mother’s brother to find out whether there were any records. The uncle, a writer who had come within a few days of being executed when the 1991 uprising saved him, was a depressed man in pajamas, and he had bad news: The regime had burned all the relevant documents after 1948, when Jews left Iraq en masse. Most of the uncle’s childhood friends were in Israel now. The Suleimaniya synagogue was turned into a mosque.

  I introduced Serwan to some American neoconservatives in Baghdad, knowing that this Jewish Kurd who wanted to go to Israel would be of interest to them. But the story was always the same: Without documentary proof, it would be difficult, if not impossible. So Serwan continued to live as a foreigner in Baghdad. He still had no contact with his father. He channeled his anger into his work, going into the most dangerous cities, driving the tense roads at night. He would calmly translate while an Arab claimed that no chemical weapons had ever been used on Kurds, and on our way out he would turn to me, his black eyes like glowing coals: “Did you hear that son of a bitch?” We attended a funeral once with Sheikh Emad al-Din al-Awadi, where Serwan and I shook the hands of dozens of men with different varieties of facial hair. At one point Serwan smiled mischievously and whispered, “These guys don’t think we’re real men because we don’t have mustaches. [pause] And they can only have sex once a month. [pause] And what would they do with me if they knew I was a Kurdish Jew?” I once asked him if oral sex was haram in Iraq. He replied, “Everything nice is haram.” At times he seemed to be at war with the whole world and only I was on his side. He openly wished that an insurgent would take a shot at him so that he could have an excuse to carry on his own private struggle. When I suggested that some of the insurgents might see the Americans the way he had seen the Arabs in Suleimaniya—as foreigners occupying their homes—he wouldn’t hear of it. “Always they saw their self powerful. They lost it. What do those guys have to believe in to fight for? Saddam? Baathists? Islam? Why they didn’t fight for Islam during Saddam?”

  In a sense Serwan was yet another child of Saddam, on yet another side of the fault line. The regime was gone, and with the Americans his life had undergone great change. But the essentials were still the same. “Suleimaniya was a jail for me,” Serwan said. “Now it’s all of Iraq. I can move around, and it’s a big jail.”

  * * *

  BAGHDAD WAS HAUNTED by its Jews. According to some accounts, until the pogroms of the 1940s and the exodus that followed the creation of Israel, Iraq’s capital was one-third Jewish. By the end of Baathist rule, the Jewish population of Iraq, the oldest continuous settlement in the world, had dwindled to about two dozen. In all the major cities, the former Jewish districts were the old neighborhoods, with their narrow streets, tradesmen’s shops, and Ottoman balconies of wooden latticework. You could still find abandoned synagogues, and the mayor of a small town south of Hilla was keeping watch over the twenty-five-hundred-year-old shrine of Ezekiel until the Jews returned. There was a sharp generational divide between those Iraqis who had breathed in the air and light of pre-Baathist Iraq and those, like Emad, Bashir and his brothers, and Ali Talib, who had not. Older Iraqis were likelier to speak English, to have traveled, to be secular. And nothing dramatized this divide more than the attitude toward Jews. With a few exceptions, younger Iraqis, raised on virulent propaganda in a country that had no more Jews, talked about them as if they were devils incarnate. The insurgents called American soldiers, civilian contractors, and eventually just about anyone working with the occupation “
Jews.” Once, when a Sunni tribal sheikh was demonstrating his open-mindedness by telling me that he didn’t care if the next Iraqi president was Kurdish or even Christian, I asked provocatively, “What about Jewish?” A man in the gathering exclaimed, “Gawad!”—You pimp! Even as gentle and questioning a soul as Ali Talib believed that the Jews sought world domination. But urban Iraqis who were roughly fifty or older had memories of Jewish friends and neighbors, and those memories were bathed in affection. The Jews seemed to represent the time when Iraq was cosmopolitan and no one cared who was Muslim or Christian or Jew, let alone Sunni or Shiite. One night, when my driver’s family threw me a birthday party, his father, a retired artillery colonel, sat in the living room with his fist against his forehead in deep thought. Suddenly he looked up: “Doris Day—Jewish?” Disappointed, he went back to thinking. Then: “Gene Kelly—Jewish?” Finally I confirmed that Danny Kaye had indeed been Jewish, and the colonel was satisfied.

  Thousands of Iraqis had Jewish ancestors, but if they knew it they kept it a closely guarded secret. The whole subject of the population that had mysteriously disappeared from Iraq was hidden in mystery and fear. Among the millions of documents that Kanan Makiya had obtained, the most sensitive were the Mukhabarat’s files on Jews. When I visited his father’s house on the Tigris, Makiya took me on a tour of the archive. Baath Party binders filled shelves as dense as the stacks of a research library. While we were walking through the basement, my cell phone rang: it was Aseel. As soon as I hung up, Makiya said, “Who was that?” He wanted to meet her: He needed to hire more staff for the vast work of scanning the documents.