- Rubaei street in Baghdad's Zayuna district is one of
the city's unknown oases of normality, far away from the more famous Kindi
street of Harthiya or 14 Ramadan street of Mansour in the center of the
city. On either side of the wide and brightly lit boulevard good restaurants
are open well into the night, the sidewalks are crowded with families and
even young couples; expensive cars slowly cruise the street, young men
gazing at the crowds of girls in tight clothes. I was sitting outside at
dusk (staring at them too) with my Iraqi friend Rana in a fresh fruit juice
and ice cream restaurant called Sandra. Rana ate imported ice cream, explaining
that she did not eat the local ice cream for fear of nuclear contamination
in the milk. She noted that the scene before us reminded her of the days
before the war, when she would go out at night with her sisters, unafraid
of the dangers that keep women sequestered in their homes today.
-
- As she was waxing nostalgic about the good old days under
Saddam, a refrain I am by now accustomed to hearing, and I was trying not
to roll my eyes, two sharp gunshots cut her words short and returned her
to reality. By now the sound of gun shots rarely distracts me, but this
time it was too close, and too incongruent with the bustling nightlife.
I saw two men walking hurriedly across the street in between the traffic,
arms raised and pistols in the air. "They killed a man!" someone
shouted. I got up and saw a man in a suit collapsed on the curb, blood
spreading from beneath his head. The two men had walked up to him, shot
him in the head, taken his pistol, then walked away laughing into a dark
street.
-
- The crowd grew and cars slowed down as their drivers
gazed at the corpse. Soon about fifty men stood around silently, looking
at the body then looking away guiltily. Someone tried calling the police
but the call did not go through. Two men ran a few hundred meters away
to the nearest police checkpoint, but were told by the policemen there
that it was somebody else's jurisdiction. Two armed security guards from
a building across the street returned panting, having failed to find the
killers. They said they provided security for "an official" nearby.
People told me the official was a judge. Someone from a nearby shop covered
the body with a rug that failed to conceal the growing pool of blood. Half
an hour after the shooting, Iraqi police began arriving, just as the several
men in the crowd had turned over the body and were looking through his
pockets for identification or a phone. When I returned to my hotel I told
a photographer about what I had seen. He asked me if I had heard about
the explosion in Fallujah. I asked him if he had heard about the deputy
chief of police in Mosul getting assassinated.
-
- "It's all small news, so you never hear of it,"
he said. "It's all small news but its all bad news."
-
- Close shave
- You never hear about most of it because the press never
hears about most of it. And if the press wasn't there, it never happened.
Baghdad is a huge sprawling city with poor communication, and it is impossible
for the press or the occupying army to know what is happening everywhere.
We only hear the distant thunder of the explosions or feel the silent change
in air pressure. At 11 p.m. one night I received a call from a friend in
the Saha neighborhood of Baghdad's Shaab district, a Shi'ite stronghold.
A Sunni mosque near his house had been attacked. "They are Wahhabis,"
he said (Iraqi Shi'ites call all conservative Sunnis Wahhabis). Did I want
to come? I asked the hotel for their taxi driver, but I didn't explain
why I was going there. Not a single car was out as we drove for twenty
minutes from the city center to the Qiba Mosque. The streets of Shaab were
misty and unlit. The road before the mosque was blocked by a truck; about
twenty men held Kalashnikovs.
-
- They surrounded the taxi and on each side a young man
in shabby civilian clothes pointed his barrel in through our windows. They
demanded to know who we were and what we wanted. They were very tense.
I asked the one on my side who he was but he ordered me out of the car.
The taxi driver explained that I was not an Iraqi. "He's a foreigner!"
they shouted to each other, and all the men came to the car. "They
are all Israelis and Jews," shouted one man in a slurred voice. We
tried to explain that I was a journalist, but they had never seen an American
passport or a press ID before. Why was I here? What did I want? It was
clear from the fear in their eyes and the anger in their voices as they
barked orders that they wanted to find somebody to kill. They used none
of the polite expressions that color even hostile Arabic conversation.
They only gave orders, as if we were their prisoners, their voices echoing
against the empty city's buildings.
-
- The man with the slurred voice pointed his Kalashnikov
at me and ordered me out of the car in a drunken rage. The driver and I
protested that I was just a journalist, here to investigate an attack.
Not knowing if they were Sunni or Shi'ite I recited the names of every
Iraqi Sunni and Shi'ite leader I could think of and said they were all
my friends. I won over two men and they began struggling with the drunk
man who still wanted to shoot me. An argument broke out over whether or
not they should kill me. The drunk man would not move the barrel down as
they tried to push it and I moved away from its swaying range. The others
were undecided and nervously eyed me. One man rushed me into the mosque
for safety. This is why journalists and Iraqis stay home at night.
-
- Ready for war
- The violence is relentless. Explosions from bombs, rocket
propelled grenades and artillery as well as guns firing can be heard all
day and night, but their locations are usually impossible to determine,
even if you are foolish enough to search for them after dark, when gangs
and wild dogs own the streets. There are systematic assassinations of policemen,
translators, local officials, and anybody associated with the occupiers.
The pace of the violence is normal and mundane, so nobody cares. Unless
an explosion is perceptibly close, it is just an echo, and nobody pauses
in mid-conversation or stops chewing his kabob. Nobody in the US (and certainly
nobody in Iraq) even cares much about the American soldiers dying daily,
as long as the numbers on any given day are low. In the Sunni neighborhood
of Aadhamiya in Baghdad there are nightly RPG and mortar attacks on the
US base, and the men on the street erupt in cheers and whistles at the
sounds.
-
- Mosques are attacked every night and clerics killed,
leading to retaliations against the opposite sect. Mosques now have armies
of young volunteers wielding Kalashnikovs guarding them. Soon neighborhood
mosques will unite to form neighborhood armies, to fight rival mosques
or rival neighborhoods. (Even many journalists now travel with armed bodyguards;
in at least one incident they returned fire, making them combatants). In
the Sunni Hudheifa Mosque in Rasala one can purchase a magazine that praises
Yazid, the early Muslim leader who killed Hussein, the martyr whom Shi'ites
venerate and mourn for. This article would be enough to start a civil war
if Shi'ites found it.
-
- "We don't talk about civil war," one Sunni
tribal leader told me. "We just prepare for it."
-
- Complete idiots
- Like in Bosnia before the war, all sides profess their
brotherhood and unity, but they are scared. And just in case, they make
preparations, arming themselves and organizing units for self defense.
These defensive measures are interpreted by the others as an offensive
threat, so they too take defensive measures, increasing the other side's
fears, and then everybody is armed and scared, as they are now in Iraq,
and all it takes is a match. "We fear this match," said a leader
in the Hudheifa mosque who did not want to admit to me that his mosque
had been shot at, because he did not want the young men to lose patience.
-
- So far the attempts to provoke a civil war have failed.
Though clerics from both sects are assassinated weekly, the culprits are
unknown and the leaders exhort their flock to be patient, blaming the "Anglo
American Zionist conspiracy." After the March 2 explosions in Karbala
and Baghdad, where I saw piles of body parts, scalps, hands, and fly-covered
pieces of flesh, the fury was directed at the Americans. Immediately after
the three suicide bombs struck in Baghdad, spraying blood even on the mosque's
ceiling, the loudspeakers urged people to be calm and accused the Americans
and Jews of attacking them. Shi'ite mosques sell CDs of the riot in Kadhim,
when thousands of Shi'ite men attacked American military medical vehicles
that came to help, and then chased them to the base, throwing shoes, stones
and epithets, waving flags and taunting the reviled occupiers. The American
retreat into the base was a great victory for the shocked Shi'ites.
-
- Though Shi'ite and Sunni leaders hastened to mouth professions
of unity following the attacks in Karbala and Kadhimiya, they hate each
other. Sunni and Shi'ite newspapers have grown more brazen in their attacks
against each other. The only things they agree on are the need for an Islamic
government (though they disagree on what it will look like) and their insistence
that the Jews and Americans are to blame for all their woes. The Sunnis
are scared, they fear the impending Shi'ite takeover of Iraq if anything
resembling a democratic election takes place. Sunnis view Shi'ites the
way white South Africans viewed blacks, and now feel disenfranchised, seeing
the barbaric heathens threatening to rule their country. Many Sunnis cling
to the fiction that they are in fact the majority, and the Shi'ites are
all Iranians. Shi'ites don't fear the Sunnis, they just dislike them. Shi'ites
hate the Kurds now, blaming them for attempting to divide the country with
their calls for federalism and autonomy. Arab Shi'ites have already started
supporting Turkmen in the north, who are often Shi'ite as well, in their
bloody clashes with Kurds.
-
- A war of words has begun in the newspapers belonging
to the religious parties. Sunni papers insist that Sunnis are a majority
and warn of the "Persians" who are coming in by the millions
to claim citizenship. For successive Sunni governments, the Shi'a Arabs
of Iraq have been Persians, and the leading Sunni clerics of Iraq continue
that tradition. Shi'a newspapers warn of the "crimes of the Wahhabis"
and remember the Wahhabi assaults from Saudi Arabia that threatened Iraq's
Shi'a in the 19th century. This war has been escalating with increasingly
brazen critiques of the rival communities.
-
- But Sunni Arabs don't scare Shi'ites anymore. The threat
is America now. Only America can thwart the long-suppressed Shi'ite hope
to control Iraq and establish a theocracy. Their expectations are high.
Now is their time to inherit Iraq and only America stands in the way. Leading
Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Ayatollah Ali Sistani has not left his house for nearly
a decade but pronounces judgments on everything from elections to whether
or not women should wear high heel shoes. (They cannot because it makes
their asses shake too much.) Other, more radical clerics such as Muqtada
Sadr speak of a jihad against the infidel Americans who have come to kill
the Mahdi (Shi'ite messiah). Radical Sunnis and members of the resistance
hate the compromising Sistani but respect Muqtada for his defiance. In
every mosque and religious center in the country one can purchase the DVDs,
CDs, tapes and literature of the Islamic revolution that rejects "American
democracy" and "American freedom." In Shi'ite stores you
can buy books about Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, and in Sunni stores you
can buy radical Sunni magazines published in Saudi Arabia.
-
- Sunni and Shi'ite leaders were quick to condemn the new
interim constitution for its secularism. They were united in calling the
Quran their only constitution. They need not have worried since what happens
in the walled-off "Green Zone" of the Occupiers is a land of
make believe that does not affect the rest of Iraqis living in the "Red
Zone" which is the rest of the country. Westerners who work for the
Occupation in the green zone rarely venture beyond its walls; Iraq is as
alien to them as they are to Iraqis. Congressional staffers put in six
months to spice up their resumes, former military or State Department officials
fish for contracts with General Electric or KBR after they finish their
stint. They don't have to deal with many Iraqis. In the Rashid cafeteria
for military and civilian servants of the Occupation, non-Iraqis serve
the food. When they do deal with Iraqis, they have interesting choices.
The deputy minister of the interior has been diverting arms and stockpiling
them privately. He is accompanied by two doting American intelligence agents.
Perhaps he is their last hope, should all else fail. The minister of higher
education has banned all student unions that are not ethnically or religiously
based. He is forcing even Christian girls to cover their heads and instituting
mandatory Islamic education.
-
- In the bathroom of the country director of an important
D.C.-based and US-funded democratization institute I found, in the bidet
by the toilet, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Quran," a brochure
explaining that Arabic is written from right to left, and a guide to focus
groups. It is from these focus group results that westerners in the green
zone learn "what Iraqis want." The director of the institute,
a motivated and well compensated man with experience in Asia and eastern
Europe, was dejected, his advice ignored by the CPA, the tribal leaders
he lectures about democracy interested only in securing contracts with
the Americans.
-
- A massacre
- He seemed to be missing the point when he was lecturing
to the Farmer's Union about civil society while the war was going on in
Iraq. There is never a day of peace, anywhere in the country. One night,
after a slow day, I was sitting in my room, having just read about a report
declaring my adopted city Baghdad the worst city in the world to live in,
and debating with a friend which cities might be worse, when an immense
blast hit me and sent my door flying out of its hinges. That's a car bomb,
I thought, and ran to my balcony to see if any nearby buildings had collapsed.
Downstairs, I sprinted past Fardus circle to Andalus circle, where the
Mount Lebanon hotel, which I had never heard of, no longer existed. It
was dark and hazy, with visibility nearly impossible, but a huge orange
glow the size of a building shimmered through the smoke and dust.
-
- Hundreds of people were emerging from the smoke, running
away, hundreds more were running to it and hundreds more were standing
in shock, crying, screaming. A woman walked by carrying the inert body
of her child. American humvees pulled up, as did Iraqi police cars. "There
are many dead people," shouted one man running from out of the hotel's
wreckage, asking people to help. Terrified and confused US soldiers tried
to turn back the crowd of Iraqis who rushed to help; they swung in ever
direction with their rifles, looking for the enemy, as Iraqi police with
guns drawn tried to push people back. Ambulances arrived, by now well practiced
in quick responses to bombs, and carried away the lucky ones who survived,
screaming and with their shredded clothes and bodies drenched with blood.
Inside one I saw a hellish scene-an entire family, all red, six of them
looking up and screaming, holding a lifeless bloody piece of meat that
lay between them. Everywhere on the street angry men, stunned, hurt, feeling
vulnerable. Survivors attacked cameramen, seeking someone to vent their
fury on, neighbors stood crying, friends rushed to the scene looking for
loved ones, terror on their faces. Two fat women in their nightgowns began
screaming at an American soldier angrily. Bewildered, he told them "Everything's
gonna be alright," not knowing what they were saying. From atop their
Humvees other American soldiers swiveled their machine guns, screaming
and cursing orders at the Iraqis and journalists below them. An Iraqi policeman
with his gun drawn pushed me away. The entire scene was lit glowing orange
as the fire spread to a nearby building.
-
- Journalists moved away to report on their phones in English,
Turkish, Italian. Others stood still, filming the scene. At least we didn't
have to go far; the resistance is considerate enough to strike close to
the hotels and neighborhoods where the press reside. Arguments broke out
between Iraqis who wanted the journalists to film and those who wanted
them to leave. More and more bodies were carried out from the gaping wreckage
of the flaming hotel building. Al Jazeera, always first on the scene of
any attack, didn't have to go very far since their hotel was across the
street, its windows blasted out. A rumor spread among the crowd that an
American missile had hit the hotel and the crowd argued over who was responsible.
-
- I returned to my hotel. The staff were congregated around
the television, I assumed to watch the aftermath on Al Jazeera. But no,
they were watching a soccer match and barely acknowledged the entry of
the silly foreigners who run to find explosions, the ambulance chasers
with notebooks and cameras. Perhaps they are used to this. American missiles,
far more powerful and deadly than car bombs, had fallen on them before,
and this was just a bomb, only a tremor. They didn't seem to wonder, as
I did, when their hotel would be next.
-
- Everybody's got a hidden hand
- That same night the "Iraqi street" was blaming
it on a missile, meaning on the Americans, and as always everybody had
a friend who swore he had seen the missile hit the car. Sunnis and Shi'ites
are united in believing America and "the Jews" are responsible
for the sectarian attacks, because of the absurd belief that America wants
to remain in Iraq and will provoke a civil war to serve as a pretext. The
Jews are blamed for everything, because they're the Jews. The Jews are
everywhere in Iraq. They are feared and loathed, the "Jewish hands"
working their evil, the "Jewish fingers" reaching every nook
and cranny, selling their drugs and pornography, defiling Islam.
-
- Americans still cling desperately to their own myths,
blaming the phantom Zarqawi for all the attacks, because they cannot blame
Saddam anymore. But the Zarqawi story seems to have worked with the press,
who remain as gullible today as they were when they bought the "45
minutes" claim.
-
- Meanwhile over ten thousand Iraqi men are being held
prisoner, and most of them are innocent. Iraqi security guards as well
as American soldiers hate the explosive-sniffing dog in front of the Sheraton
and Palestine hotels, because they, like the rest of us who live in the
area, are subject to its olfactory whims as it imagines every day that
it smells a bomb and they must close off the street for several hours.
Two of my friends were arrested for not having a bomb last week, when the
dog decided their bag smelled funny. They were jailed for four days though
they were not carrying a bomb. Unlike the murderous accuracy of the Israeli
security forces, who at least speak Arabic, the American security forces
are a blunt instrument. They arrest hundreds at once, hoping somebody will
know something. One morning in the village of Albu Hishma, the local US
commander decided to bulldoze any house that had pro-Saddam graffiti on
it, and gave half a dozen families a few minutes to remove whatever they
cared about the most before their homes were flattened.
-
- Ayoub's bad day
- I was with a US army unit when they went on a raid one
morning. Tanks, armored personnel carriers and Humvees squeezed through
the neighborhood walls as a CIA operator eyed the rooftops and windows
of nearby houses angrily, a silencer on his assault weapon. Intelligence
had intercepted a phone conversation in which a man called Ayoub spoke
of advancing to the next level to obtain landmines and other weapons. Soldiers
broke through Ayoub's door early in the morning, but when the sleepy man
did not immediately respond to their orders he was shot with non-lethal
ordnance, little pellets exploding like gun shot from the weapon's grenade
launcher. The floor of the house was covered with his blood. He was dragged
into a room and interrogated forcefully as his family was pushed back against
their garden's fence.
-
- Ayoub's frail mother, covered in a shawl, with traditional
tribal tattoos marking her face, pleaded with the immense soldier to spare
her son's life, protesting his innocence. She took the soldier's hand and
kissed it repeatedly while on her knees. He pushed her to the grass along
with Ayoub's four girls and two boys, all small, and his wife. They squatted
barefoot, screaming, their eyes wide open in terror, clutching one another
as soldiers emerged with bags full of documents, photo albums and two compact
discs with Saddam Hussein and his cronies on the cover. These CDs, called
The Crimes of Saddam, are common on every Iraqi street and, as their title
suggests, they were not made by Saddam supporters. But the soldiers couldn't
read Arabic and saw only the picture of Saddam, which was proof enough
of guilt. Ayoub was brought out and pushed on to the truck. He gestured
to his shrieking family to remain where they were. He was a gentle, avuncular
man, small and round, balding and unshaven, with a hooked nose and slightly
pockmarked face. It seemed unlikely that he was involved in any anti-American
activity; but he did not protest and maintained his dignity, sitting frozen,
staring numbly ahead. The soldiers ignored him, occasionally glancing down
at their prisoner with sneering disdain. The medic looked at Ayoub's injured
hand and chuckled to his friends, "It ain't my hand." The truck
blasted country music on the way back to the base. Ayoub was thrown in
the detainment center. After the operation there were smiles of relief
among the soldiers, slaps on the back and thumbs up.
-
- Several hours later a call was intercepted from another
Ayoub. "Oh shit," said the unit's intelligence officer, "it
was the wrong Ayoub." The innocent father of six who had the wrong
name was not immediately let go so as not to risk revealing to the other
Ayoub that the Americans were searching for him. The night after his arrest
a relieved Ayoub could be seen escorted by soldiers to call his family
and tell them he was fine, but would not be home for a few days. "It
was not the wrong guy," said the units commander defensively, shifting
blame elsewhere. "We raided the house we were supposed to and arrested
the man we were told to." Meanwhile Army intelligence was still confounded
by the meaning of the intercepted conversations until somebody realized
it was not a terrorist intent on obtaining weapons. It was a kid playing
video games and talking about them with his friend on the phone.
-
- USA! USA!
- The procrustean application of spurious information gathered
by intelligence officers who cannot speak Arabic and are not familiar with
Iraqi, Arab or Muslim culture is creating enemies instead of eliminating
them. Many languish in prisons indefinitely, lost in a system that imposes
English-language procedures on Arabic speakers with Arabic names not easily
transcribed. I walked past a detainment center once where a dozen prisoners
could be seen marching in a circle, surrounded by barbed wire. They were
shouting "USA, USA!" over and over.
-
- "They were talkin' when we told 'em not to, so we
made 'em say somethin' we liked to hear," grinned one of the soldiers
guarding them. Another gestured up with his hands, letting them know they
had to raise their voices. A sergeant later quipped that the ones who are
not guilty "will be guilty next time", after such treatment.
Some prisoners are termed "security detainees" and held for six
months pending a review to determine whether they are still a "security
risk". Most are innocent. Many were arrested simply because a neighbor
did not like them, or because they were male. A lieutenant colonel involved
in this told me that there is no judicial process for the thousands of
detainees. If the military were to try them, that would entail a court
martial, which would imply that the United States is occupying Iraq, and
lawyers working for the administration are still debating whether it is
an occupation or a liberation. Even if the men are guilty, no proof will
be provided to the community. There will be no process of transparent justice.
The only thing evident to the Iraqi public is American guilt.
-
- In the beginning of the occupation I entered a taxi and
asked the driver what he thought of the events in Iraq. He looked away
and started crying. I asked him if somebody in his family had died. "We
all died," he told me. Now taxi drivers talk only of the latest explosion
and how much they hate the Americans and want to kill them. One taxi driver
drove by a mosque and saw Americans in the courtyard. "Look what they're
doing!" he shouted hysterically. "They even enter inside mosques!
They are dirty Jews, I swear if I had an RPG now I would shoot them!
-
- Nir Rosen, a freelance journalist, has been living in
Iraq since April 2003.
-
- http://www.reason.com/hod/nr032604.shtml
|
