Towering above these industrial carcasses, the four smokestacks of the Al Dora power plant memorialized Iraqi self-sufficiency. Defiantly billowing smoke, the stacks were spared during the recent air campaign but had been destroyed ten years earlier in the first Gulf War. In that time, Saddam rebuilt the stacks using only Iraqi parts and Iraqi labor. Within weeks of the end of that war, the power plant had been activated and pumped electricity to the homes of the chosen ones, exalting the efficiency of the Saddam regime.
Concrete barriers now filled the road beside the power plant, behind which heavy trucks offloaded wooden crates with a Bechtel stamp. The era of the Iraqi-only power plant had ended; the era of the Iraqi reconstruction contract had begun. As we drove by, my counterpart explained that the power plant would be rebuilt in a more efficient manner that would provide more power to more people. It would require shutting down the stacks in sequence and rebuilding them. So, when Saddam was in charge, all four stacks worked, but with the Americans in charge, only two stacks were operational. Explaining the difference, which the people interpreted as a divine sign, fell to my counterpart and me. The council served as the mechanism for distributing this information to the people and ensuring that they understood “progress.”
As we continued past the oncoming traffic, the concrete overpass was narrowed from four lanes to two by a row of concrete barriers. The lane closest to the power plant was now a garden of barbed wire, orange cones, and miscellaneous plastic bags from the nearby shops. Orange-and-white taxis impatiently honked behind bustling minivans packed with families traveling home.
On the left-hand side of the road, a forlorn building surrounded by sandbags and dirt-filled wire-mesh cages stood alone in a barren field. This was the Dora Police Station, a decrepit building masquerading as a new symbol of order in Baghdad. Its impotence, both structurally and functionally, showed clearly even as we drove by. Blue-and-white trucks lay scattered around the building. The disorder was in strong contrast to the U.S. Army Humvees strategically guarding the approaches to the building. Similarly, the helmets of disciplined American soldiers barely showed above the well-constructed sandbagged machine-gun nest on the roof of the building. Meanwhile, groups of Iraqis in ill-fitting blue uniforms smoked languidly, while their AK-47s were haphazardly slung over their shoulders.
On the right side, cars were crammed into the impossibly full parking lot of a mosque. Here, too, Iraqi men with AK-47s patrolled the roof. The mosque was another institution undergoing a revival in Iraq. Since the invasion, mosques’ minarets had been sprouting among the demolished neighborhoods and the destitute people. The call to prayer sounded stridently into the evening, and the people, as was the ritual required before entering the mosque, stood in line to wash their hands and feet. Gleaming with new tiles and humming with the power of a new generator, the mosque shone its lights and directed its defiance toward the police station. The sermons, which were weekly protestations against the American presence and “American imperialism,” traveled beyond the thin police station walls and echoed in the minds of those who had chosen to cooperate with the Americans. The battle between these two heavyweights—the religious institutions and the civil institutions—was only just beginning, but the mosques certainly seemed to have a more attentive and dedicated following.
As we continued our tour, the road opened back up after the power plant, revealing a bustling market on the right and a series of huge palm groves on the left. The market represented one of the largest open-air bazaars in the city. It was possible to find everything here, from fish to firearms. The narrow mazes of stalls obscured a deeper view into the market from the road, but the smell of diesel and rotting produce swirled through the Humvee’s windows, along with the honking of horns and the general din of a population hustling to buy dinner on the way home.
Just past the market, the houses adjacent to the road became enormous. Gone were the one-story homes that defined the middle-class subdivisions. Soaring entryways, towering walls, and huge vacant windows indicated our proximity to the power plant. These homes belonged to people of status, who were often schooled in the United States in the 1960s. These were the elite Ba’ath Party loyalists who had long since left for Jordan or Syria or gone into hiding. They had received these behemoth homes in exchange for their loyalty to Saddam. Ostentatious even by American standards, they included all of the amenities of Western mansions with highly stylized architectural details. Above the entryway of one grand home, a scale-model airplane perpetually took off from an outstretched hand—it was the home of a former air force general. Other houses had similar markers of identity and stature. The fine homes and their one-acre gardens testified to the payoff that came with party prestige. Even after the invasion and in the absence of guards, looters had not violated the sanctity of these homes. Their windows remained intact and doors unopened. The lingering legacy of party power and retribution hung like an invisible cloak, warding off criminals and miscreants, holding the places intact for the eventual return of their masters.
Suddenly, the grandest of all of these homes came into view—the palace of Sajda Hussein, Saddam’s wife. Between Al Dora Road and the river, surrounded by orchards and open fields, the palace commanded a view of the two-level Saddam Bridge. The occupants had an unobstructed view of downtown Baghdad and could also survey the activity at the oil refinery. The strategic location made the palace an easy choice for a transient American base during the invasion. The several palace buildings provided a perfect place for an operational headquarters. There was also an indoor swimming pool and a basketball court sheltered inside its castle walls.
Presently, the palace was being reconstructed into a community center that could be used by community groups. Any number of nonprofits championed this transition, although the Iraqis had expressed a very high skepticism. If the houses across the street had been protected by a lingering air of fear and vengeance, then the palace of Saddam’s wife deserved the utmost deference.
We turned right and began our circle back toward the base. Tanker trucks poured forth from the refinery gates. The refinery, the third largest in Iraq, had continued to operate during the war and even now ran at near capacity. The concrete highway hummed beneath our tires. The larger houses receded into the distance. We made a hard right onto Highway 5, a four-lane divided highway that ran parallel to Al Dora Road but divided the Sunni and Shi’a neighborhoods. Looking left and right, I noticed the stark contrast between Iraqi rich and poor. To the north, houses rose two or three stories, while to the south, dirt roads wound through collections of hovels that were surrounded by pale-green pools of raw sewage. For the moment, that portion of our sector would remain at a distance.
Whatever feelings of relief one might expect from making it safely back to the base were overwhelmed by feelings of excitement and uncertainty. Even if my counterpart didn’t really accomplish much during the council meeting, he had effortlessly managed his way through its personalities and complicated dealings. The places, the names, and the ongoing projects dotted his conversations as if he had lived in Iraq all of his life. The council members knew him by name and face and, more important, really seemed to respect him. Personal recognition and respect are central in Iraqi culture. Army handouts on the subject emphasized over and over that oral promises were sacred. Apparently, my counterpart had delivered enough results to meet this threshold. How was I supposed to step into that same room, minus any real authority, and make a seamless transition? I was off the map here, with no army instruction book or training to refer to, and it occupied my mind constantly.
Five
BANNERS AND UPRISINGS
IN ABU DISHER, A POOR Shi’a slum in Al Dora, a sparse collection of houses and the sewage-strewn streets stood in stark contrast to the well-lit American base across the street. Inside the wall, Americans had running water and a working sewage system. Within a few months, KBR had delivered all of the amenities of home to the Americans, while the Iraqis were told to be patient. Conv
oys loaded with food and appliances such as hot water heaters and generators streamed into the FOB nightly, barrelling their way through the small market stands selling rotten fruit just beyond the FOB wall where the inhabitants of Abu Disher scraped out a living.
Our predecessors assured us that, despite this disparity in quality of life, the neighborhood remained one of the most pro-American in Baghdad and that they never had any trouble there. The old women carrying plastic sacks to the market and the laundry draped from the windows of each building did not seem ominous. In fact, I regarded the people as genuinely industrious. The roadside market always heaved and bustled. Hustlers and blackmarketeers sold a variety of strangely out-of-place goods from beneath the sun shades. Computers, for example, taken from ministry buildings, were readily available, although most of them were probably unusable, and few people in the market, if any, knew how to operate them. The pricing, as I later learned, reflected this reality, with keyboards selling for almost ten times the amount for a monitor. The reason? The keyboard had keys.
The practical challenges were considerable. Aside from the bewildering collection of odds and ends in the market, two desperate community needs struck me, both almost literally, each time I passed through. The stench of burning trash and the untreated sewage created a noxious, almost tangible cloud that hung in the streets. Just behind the market, an area of no fewer than ten acres smoldered as mound upon mound of trash sat rotting and burning in the open air. For years, this dumping ground had provided a shortcut for Baghdad trash haulers who were not going all the way to the city dump. The richer neighborhoods simply dumped their trash in the poorer neighborhoods, and this was the poorest.
Similarly, the sewage treatment plant and the associated city sewer routed Baghdad’s entire flow of human waste through these poorer neighborhoods. When the plant had been converted to a clandestine oil storage facility at the beginning of the invasion, the sewage simply ran to this neighborhood and stopped. This problem was exacerbated by the chronic electricity shortage in Shi’a neighborhoods that had been deliberately un-derwired. The pumps seldom worked, even when they were present, and in this case they had been removed by looters months ago. The resulting large and growing pools of sewage reduced parts of Abu Disher to islands of dry land. In between these dry spots, makeshift bridges of cardboard boxes and closely stacked trash bags futilely tried to ward off the rising tide and provide necessary, but precarious, passage for the locals.
It would be a challenge to convince the Iraqis that a change toward democratic governance was a better option for them than a transition to a theocratic regime. Each day of bureaucratic process pushed these families further away from the American Dream. Nightly, the men of Abu Disher sat in their homes without electricity surrounded by hungry family members. They did not have much left, save their pride. Watching the Americans bask in the glow of electricity and satellite television placed a high toll on what remained of that pride. For this reason, Muqtada Al-Sadr’s populist messages resonated well here. The sermons at the mosque across from the FOB, led by one of Sadr’s lieutenants, were well attended. With the transition of American forces, the men of Abu Disher had an opportunity to assert themselves, make their situation known, and demand respect. The time to lash out was now.
Blissfully secure in our base, however, we had no idea that Abu Disher had stepped to the edge of open hostility. Our counterparts had left, save a few stragglers. We conducted our own meeting and planned out our first night on our own. The meeting went well, with our commander reinforcing the values that we intended to abide by, cautioning us against the rough tactics used by our predecessors, and stressing our own sets of objectives along the lines of reconstruction. As committed as we were to these principles, our faith in a cooperative reception from the Iraqis evaporated as quickly as a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) can launch.
Ssssssssss—BANG!
The explosion that rattled our headquarters sounded impossibly close. Within seconds, the radios inside the tactical command center came alive. Routine chatter was displaced by urgent calls from one of our units. Everyone from the headquarters immediately glued himself to the radio, frantically looking at the map. Grid coordinates and street names came flowing through the speakers as radio operators scrambled to record the unfamiliar phrases. After a few minutes, our commander finally said what we all wanted to hear: “Let’s just get over there.”
There was a mad rush to the door, with guys grabbing weapons and vests. We ran toward the Humvees; we were the cavalry coming to the aid of our fellow soldiers. Had we really known what to expect, we would have been scared, but there was no time for those thoughts. The air was thick now with the sound of machine-gun fire, punctuated occasionally by the authoritative bang of an RPG. At reckless speeds, we tore from the FOB, driving straight into the teeth of the firefight.
It was a short drive to the scene of the firefight, barely a half mile. The streets were dark. Even the usually well-lit mosque had gone ominously black. We parked at the first intersection and dismounted, waiting for a report from the soldiers involved. They and the insurgents were in the narrow streets beyond the remaining streetlights, their presence marked by an occasional burst of small-arms fire.
We fanned out and looked helplessly into the dark. We had still not remedied the night-vision shortage. Nor had we really done much to augment the ammunition scarcity. Once again, I found myself thinking this was not the army commercial that had enticed me to join. I missed my tank.
“Whizz, whizz, whizz”—a sound like hornets flying by.
“Hmm, those sound like bullets,” I casually thought, still not quite ready to accept the fact that people were shooting at us.
“Whizz, whizz, plunk.” One hit the wall nearby.
“GET DOWN!” someone yelled, just as the hail of bullets intensified.
I found myself standing behind a metal trailer, listening intently to the bullets. They buzzed nearby in thick swarms. The noises came from everywhere, but there were no muzzle flashes to guide us to the source of this attack. It was if the night itself was spitting daggers. And quite accurately, too.
Holes began to appear near my head in the rusted steel trailer. Unlike in childhood games, it mattered what material you were standing behind, and my current hiding spot was not stopping any bullets. I looked around for new cover. I saw a sand pile and a group of cinder blocks. Either one seemed like a better option than my increasingly perforated container. I made a quick dive for the cinder blocks. The bullets followed closely. Whoever was doing the shooting had seen me run. A flurry of smacks hit the cinder blocks as I slid into place.
Crouching there, I realized I had not yet fired a round. Few of us had. What were we supposed to shoot at? In training, it was always really clear. The little human-shaped target “presented” itself in a predictable fashion. These live “targets” had no such intention. While we remained pinned down, another portion of our unit swept through the streets looking for insurgents to engage. They had as much luck as I did. Within an hour or so, the gunfire began to dissipate.
The radio reports trickled in. There were no casualties and no confirmed or even suspected kills. The whole engagement consisted of shots into, and back from, the darkness. The relief at being in one piece overwhelmed any feelings of frustration or disappointment. For the most part, everyone just felt glad to have experienced life at the end of a real attack. It had been terrifying. I felt woefully unprepared. As we turned back into the base, the mosques lit back up.
Living through my first ambush forced me to reconsider the probability of success against an enemy so determined. These Iraqis were destitute, which meant that they had nothing to lose. We had little to offer them in the way of immediate material change. At present, there was a lot of talk about ideology and political systems, but this was going to be a war to provide opportunity today. Whoever could inject tangible hope into the daily lives of these people could use the resulting leverage to co-opt them. It was a fact that the r
eligious leaders knew well.
The next morning there was a council meeting with the leaders of the neighborhood in which the attack had occurred. I am not sure whether the attack itself was a staged precursor to the meeting or if it was simply a scheduling coincidence. Coincidences of this nature happened more often than one might expect in Iraq. The battalion command sergeant major had assembled my personal security team from a miscellaneous group of soldiers and equipment taken from the battalion headquarters. Our trucks, from the recently retrofitted fleet, lacked the the enhanced firepower of our predecessors vehicles. Because of the ad hoc nature of our little group and its piecemeal composition, the soldiers had decided to call themselves the “Misfits.” The soldiers had even spray-painted a small insignia bearing the new name onto the tan roofs and the rusted doors of each Humvee. Neither man nor machine appeared altogether prepared for the task ahead.
We arrived at the DAC building in the same way that the unit before us had. Our Humvees parked in the same spots. The soldiers executed the search of the building and commanded the roof as if they had done it for years. The only person who seemed unsure of his role was me. I held my outward demeanor as confidently as I could, but my commander had issued me the strict order to confront the council members about the aggression and to try to gain as much information as possible. I did not know how to do that.
As I entered the DAC hall, Ali, Ammar, and Sa’ad were already seated, as were five men who looked distinctly different from those who had attended the previous meeting with my counterpart and me. In the earlier meeting, the council members had been dressed in Western-style suits. Poorly made and ill-fitting, but suits nonetheless. Here, for the first time, I was confronted by a group of men in typical conservative Arab dress. Each of them wore the white dishdasha robe, sharply contrasting with his dark skin. Their heads were shrouded in the black-and-white kiffeyeh headdress and crowned with a ropelike ring.
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