In contrast to the forlorn British cemetery, the Ottoman memorial is proudly guarded by an Iraqi Arab paid by the Turkish Embassy. He is the fourth in an unbroken line since his great-grandfather dug the graves. He greeted me with his young son beside him, the next guard. Polished plaques on the gate say TURKISH MARTYRS, 1914–1917 in Turkish on one side and Arabic on the other. The white concrete markers inside bear no names, just the raised Turkish star and crescent, dabbed red with too much paint. These 50 Turkish soldiers and 7 commanders are all that can be found, representatives of 10,000 lost here. I asked where the rest are buried and the guard swept his arm around the horizon. Iraqis are not interred in Kut. They are carried to the city-sized cemeteries in Najaf and Karbala. Only invaders are buried here. The caretaker showed me the visitors’ log, and it was a list of foreigners, mostly Turks. I added my name. On our way back to the car Nassir bought diapers for his new baby. Today is better than tomorrow.
We checked in to one of the two hotels in Kut, and it was unfit for prisoners. They made a copy of my passport visa for the Iraqi police. The state now tracks all guests in hopes of catching foreign terrorists who have no family and nowhere to stay. Guests in hotels are all suspect. Despite the thousands of pilgrims passing through Kut, the hotel was almost completely empty. We tried to find a restaurant but failed to please Khalil after two cab rides. He was suspicious of all the kebabs, since meat is no longer inspected and regulated like it was under Saddam, and some places will secretly serve donkey. (If there is anything an Iraqi disrespects more than a donkey, I’d like to know. I remember a police officer wiping his hands and saying, “Saddam Donkey,” as the highest sign of his disgust.)
I lay awake most of the night, feeling insects real or imagined, seeds from the cemetery still in my hair, the bed uncomfortable and heat up too high. The ventilation fan didn’t work, pigeons nesting in it, septic gas seeping out of the bathroom and smearing the air in the room. Unlike Baghdad there was no security curfew in Kut, so the sound of horns and police whistles came through the coo of birds all night. A loose wire kept a long fluorescent light blinking, the mint-green paint on the walls appearing and disappearing in flashes. Everything was worn down and dirty like everything else in the city.
In the morning, after being locked in our room by a broken latch, we waited to meet Mahmoud Talal, the governor of Wasit, in a building notable only for a sign in the lobby that Khalil translated as “Don’t torture your children.” Men waited with papers, their needs requiring the brief review of government. Some strode through with an obvious sense of privilege, family of the governor or officials of note.
We were finally invited into the governor’s office, a large empty space with ornate chairs pushed up against the walls. He reviewed and signed documents, pausing to speak with us, his attention often drawn to men bringing messages whispered to him. He answered questions with the neutrality required of his position, the room listening carefully. I asked about the British cemetery, and he said it had been reported to the British Embassy but they had done nothing. I asked about the arrest warrant issued by Maliki against Sunni members of his Provincial Council, and he regarded his audience. “That is just political propaganda,” he said. I responded, “It is very effective political propaganda.” Everyone laughed.
The area around Kut had become dangerous for tribal sheiks. Notable men were said to be targeted by al-Qaeda now because it was big news and reflected poorly on national security. It was believed that Sunni extremists were attacking their own to frame Shias and encourage sectarian violence. But Kut was rarely the target of bombings. Most of Wasit’s own security forces had been sent to the mixed city of Suwayrah, near Baghdad, which had been especially unstable. Governor Talal was trying to preserve the support of his Sunni minority while Maliki was estranging them. I found out later that a sheik sitting in the room was from Asaib Ahl al-Haq, the violent Shia militia allied with Maliki. They had attacked Americans for years. He was a very dangerous man who smiled benignly while I questioned the governor and radiated consequence as he responded. I was the only one who didn’t notice that he was silently presiding over the conversation. It must happen all the time. The man who confided this to us said, “We can’t make him leave.”
After the interview Khalil and I were invited to stay in the governor’s guesthouse, a kind of overwrought hostel for officials visiting from out of town, and we were very grateful to leave our miserable hotel. Our new room could have been anywhere in the world. The bedsheets had Pour les Amoureux du Café printed on them, and the furnishings still wore plastic wrap as if their newness could be preserved, the desert dust kept off for one more day. An ad for a Saudi falconry contest played on the TV, the only clue that we weren’t somewhere in Mexico, and most channels showed American movies.
Back out in the city I traced the edge of the Tigris and came to the souk from a new direction as night fell. The air was damp and smelled of fresh bread.
One shop selling uniforms for security forces displayed the modern U.S. Marine desert digital camouflage, USMC in tiny letters embedded in the pattern. They can only be purchased with an official government ID, and the vendor showed me the logbook in which each purchase was recorded. A T-shirt had the misspelled slogan If Everything Is Exploding Around You. “Thrt’s Probably Us.” At a tailor’s shop, portions of shirts and pants were pinned to the wall. They looked like men blown apart, clothing for the bare dismembered mannequins piled on the streets of the Karada district.
The American memories of Iraq are largely urban. Drawn into population centers where people and religion rubbed against each other, our experience became associated most with the names of a few cities. The villages spun away in an expanding orbit, growing more distant from us, and from Baghdad.
The floodplain between Kut and Jassan was covered with winter rainwater, a gray sea reflecting the cloudless atmosphere. As we rode out the next day, the horizon was without distinction, above and below nothing but a singular color, the sky spilled onto the desert. The land here betrayed no proof of an underneath, no outcroppings of bedrock, no hills and no sedimentary layers distinguishable in the dust. It seemed to be of an almost infinite depth, the soil going down for miles, all the way to oil.
Stockpiled aerial bomb fins we once found on an abandoned air force base in Kut were now painted white and used as traffic cones at checkpoints everywhere. We saw buses full of Iranians on their way to Karbala, a sign of tremendous change here. Our cabdriver said that once, a few years after the Iran-Iraq war, “they found a candy wrapper made in Iran and the whole area was swept by the military looking for the Iranian who dropped it. All the way from Kut to the border. There was no border traffic before the U.S. invasion. Control by the Iraqi military was absolute.”
The road was lined with blown tires or the rusted steel rings of burned ones. We stopped to visit Bedouins camped along the route. A man from a nearby hut guided us across a ditch to a tent. His wife immediately called his cell phone, afraid that we had taken him. He smiled as he explained her worry. “In Iraq many men have been taken. Walk off like this with unknown people and never come back to the wife.”
Sheik Sha-lan Debon invited us in for tea. Inside his tent there were two sitting rugs, a small ring of raised clay for a fire, plastic containers of water, and a pile of dry branches. The camp is moved every five days. The camels they raise sell for between 400,000 and 500,000 dinar in Najaf. There was government land for grazing during the regime, but now it’s all privatized and he has to pay rent. His herd is shrinking every year. “The old map should be honored,” he said. When I asked if he had a copy of it, he said, “Of course.” I asked if I could see it, excited by the discovery of the elusive tribal map of the desert, but he just smiled and pointed to his head. A cousin handed me a cup of tea. They have a saying: “Drink your tea and all will be fine.”
Debon said he is in charge of a thousand men. I asked how many women, and he scoffed. “I don’t know. Women come and go in the tribe. Men stay
.” The tribe is spread over hundreds of miles, from Basra to Babylon, and he coordinates all of it by cell phone. He has no radio, television, or Internet. “Everything is by speaking.” He takes his flag to funerals or has it taken in his name. A sword and a crescent. He just went to a funeral in Ramadi, where a Sunni rebellion was taking form. I asked whom the tribe sides with now. “We have no enemies,” he said.
He was disappointed by the end of reliable food rations. During Saddam there were monthly allotments of flour, sugar, oil, milk, tea, and beans, but now there is only flour. “If the Americans had stayed or had not come it would be better,” he said. Six of his family members have recently tried to join the police. No success. They participated heavily in the military and police forces during Saddam’s regime. “Without family in government we have no connection to it. We are not represented with anyone we can trust. So we have no government. No state.” The Bedouins had always been considered stateless, but now they longed for one. They voted for Governor Talal. He visited them in their tent and in Jassan but they haven’t been able to see him since the campaign. “A good man, maybe only for election. Ten years electing people and we get nothing.” He said they join no parties. Anyone who does gets fired from the tribe. He’s had to fire some.
Criminals are also expelled. If guilty of murder they are exposed to the judicial system, but traditional law runs parallel to state law—tribes meet and blood money is paid or people are forced to move. It is most important for the tribe to go to the person bringing the charges and try to handle it out of court. Just yesterday he had to negotiate such a dispute. “Najaf people’s car hit one of our tribe—killed. Ten million dinar if someone kills on purpose, but this was accident. My tribe asked for nothing.” I thought of Nassir. The American military generally paid $2,500 to families for civilian deaths caused by military operations in 2003. It was considered a small fortune then.
“Once, everything here moved by camel. Bedouins were first in society. Now we are the poor and soon camels will only be in zoos. Where will we go when all the land is owned?”
One of Debon’s family members invited us to his house by the brick factory. Khalif Milbus is married with 15 children, and his elderly mother lives with him, too. No government support, and the area is off the electrical grid. “Since always there has been a problem with power,” he said.
“Electrical power or political power?” I asked. He smiled.
“Yes.”
Regular blackouts continue throughout Iraq, towns darkening and then flickering back as private generators are tricked on. I heard the same two words everywhere in 2003: Maqqu kaharlabbah (We have no power). It is slang born from decades of corruption and savaged or inadequate infrastructure.
Milbus’s sons did not see herding as their future. Zaid wanted to be a teacher; Aneed, a doctor. His eldest son left school to work in the brick factory. He didn’t mention his daughters. They will marry one day. Milbus served in the military “from 1988 until Bush the Son released us.” He was paid no salary, so he had to escape service to earn for his family. If he had money he would buy a tanker, a truck, a tent, and camels. “I would not stay in this prison house.” He would “travel Iraq as a true Bedouin” again. I asked whether he fears the Bedouin way will end in Iraq. “Yes. It is almost destroyed. Not much left. Someday men will not know the sun or the land. Only roads.”
At the brick factory, a kiln the size of a warehouse was filled with ruined bricks. The fuel supply was inconsistent, and they didn’t bake properly. Weeks of labor and 260,000 bricks lost. The tall stack blew smoke in a trail thick enough to cast a shadow on us. I stood on the hot roof of the kiln looking through the heat at the burned land. Boys ran, kicking a soccer ball, their lungs filling with soot.
Beside the factory is a settlement constructed of discarded bricks. There were women there, and I was cautioned not to take any photographs. They were all squatters who worked at the factory, dead poor, a sewage trench the color of oil running past their homes. I asked Milbus whether he had any family living there. He replied with scorn that he would “never allow his women to live like this.”
When we got to Jassan it was almost unrecognizable. A new colony of 100 two-story brick homes had been built along the road. In 2003 the entire village was on a hill. It was ovular, organic, interdependent, and defensive in its construction. Its dirt walls had been kept smooth for 1,000 years by the vitality of dense occupation. Now it was beginning to wear down, roofs collapsing and spring rains washing the mud away as families resettled in the brick buildings on the plain. The spreading construction was gridded, edged, and fragmentary, suburban seeds of a new order. They seemed to belong to a different people, the tight rural community broken apart into solitary satellites.
While waiting to meet with the town councilmen on the new central street, I asked a policeman why so many people were moving to Jassan and building houses. “Loans,” he said. “Ministry of Financing and Housing gives them now. Thirty million dinar. Free for a while, then monthly payments. No new people moving here. Everyone is from the hill.” It seemed improbable that there could be so many, but the population in the old catacomb of homes on the hill had always been impossible to guess from the outside.
We were invited to meet in the city manager’s office, recently built across the street from the old city council building and jail my unit had restored in 2003. They looked old and smaller now in comparison with the new buildings, diminished in scale. Mr. El-Timmimy Hawas, district manager, greeted us and then worried how his tie looked when he saw my camera. He said there were no problems with the Americans, just disappointment. “When coalition forces came, Iraqis heard they would get whiskey with the rations, but all they brought were blades.” He said the Georgian troops who were last stationed here were all right also. “They stayed to themselves, which was best.” Ukrainians before them had caused some trouble when they restored a clinic and painted their flag over the entire exterior. “We didn’t want another flag on us.”
Their problems were few in comparison with those of the cities. A drought had dropped the level of the Tigris, and the pipe that drew from the river could no longer reach it. The lack of rain had also stressed herds and palm orchards, but the farmers were still keeping them irrigated. They have three clinics but no doctors or surgical wards. Pregnant women and serious injuries must go 31 miles to Kut. They had asked the Provincial Council for aid to expand, but the budgets are based on population, and Jassan, despite administering eight other little desert villages, has only 12,000 people. With an annual budget of about $1.7 million (around $140 a person), they can do only so much. Turkey is contracted to build them a new water pipeline from the Tigris, and a water-purification plant is being built right across the highway from town. They also won a Japanese grant to upgrade the aging Soviet pumping stations.
We headed over to meet Ali Talib Muhammed, a councilman from the original 2003 city council who has kept his post since. He is an exceptionally solemn man. We had met many times while I was stationed in Jassan, but now he didn’t recognize me. With a beard, a pen, clothing from the street in Baghdad, and 10 years, I was transformed, detached from their memory of who I had been when I wore a pistol and a rank.
Muhammed recounted the village’s response to our invasion. Saed Khalum was the most respected man in Jassan in 2003, and on his own, he had assembled a council before coalition forces had even arrived. I met them on April 29, 13 days after their first town meeting, when my unit moved up from its position farther south along the Iranian border. Two years later, on May 30, 2005, the Provincial Council officially acknowledged them as the city council, and they received their first salary. By then I was on my second deployment fighting Syrians and Sunni extremists in the city of Ramadi on the other side of Iraq. While in Jassan this time, I met 9 of the original 11 councilmen.
Muhammed said the town has been stable: “There are no strangers living among us in Jassan. Everyone is related or known, so troubles are solved by families.
” I asked whether dividing Iraq into three states—Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish—would bring peace. He said no. “I’m from Zubaidi tribe, all over Iraq. We have seen other countries divided and see how much trouble they have.” I asked whether he met with any U.S. forces. “They came to ask some questions, like you do now. Didn’t achieve anything.”
I asked whether he remembered the night the council voted to close an illegal water pipe that irrigated a farm owned by Saddam’s wife Sajida. It was their first recorded vote as a governing body. He said, “Yes. Major Busch.” I wrote my name as if it were unknown to me, but I was pleased to hear it. The night of the vote, a child walked up to the front of the room and handed over a note from the Fedayeen Saddam that promised my death. I had driven off after that meeting sick with a high fever. The desert became a hallucinatory space as I struggled to stand, my night-vision goggles creating a claustrophobic depiction of the open land, the darkness shrinking the view, and my pyretic blood throbbing in my eyes. I don’t remember falling into my tent a few miles away or being worried about snipers, but I do remember walking out of the building with hundreds of men chanting, “Good Busch.” Through my illness it still felt like the only triumph of the war. I thought the new country would be all right. For one night I was sure of it.
Muhammed said Iraq was failing now because state officials are not qualified for their jobs. During the regime, officials had college degrees for their positions. He saw this problem all the way up the Iraqi government. “But Jassan is apart from Iraq.” He felt that the village has always governed itself, drifting in the country rather than anchored to it. “We had the first election in Iraq, and we have been working ever since. No one else in Iraq did this,” he said.
The Best American Travel Writing 2015 Page 12
