Reporter watches optimism dry up as occupation turns Iraqis against U

Reporter watches optimism dry up as occupation turns Iraqis against U.S.

BY EVAN OSNOS

Chicago Tribune

Posted on Wed, Jan. 26, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq - (KRT) - Santa Claus lumbered into the chow-hall tent in combat boots and a faux belly. He ho-ho-hoed through rows of plastic tables, leaning to sniff trays of colorless Christmas turkey and doing his best to divert attention from the fact that he and thousands of other young men and women around him in the sterile desert of northern Kuwait would soon be going to war.

But other than the setting, Christmas Day 2002 - three months before the U.S. invaded Iraq - was anything but bleak. The soldiers radiated confidence. The Kuwaiti badlands were alive with energy, a growing sliver of America fed by adrenaline and optimism. They were there to wage war in the name of American-financed freedom. For all those I met on that cold, clear evening, the sacrifices so far seemed a small price to pay to be part of history.

My mind returns to that night whenever I stop to take stock of all that has happened in the last two years, all that has been won and lost. In Baghdad this winter, finishing my last month in Iraq for a while, I can't help but be most aware of the losses - how little of America's painful encounter with Iraq has matched the expectations from that heady Christmas in the desert, how little remains of the hope we had for that country and it had of us.

Memory is marked less by the public calendar - the day the Saddam statue fell, say, or the official return to sovereignty - than by a more private timeline, the moments of insight and elation and despair.

This is not a story about policy, about what went right and what went wrong. This is a story about what it feels like to watch a nation and a people in turmoil. It is written in moments no weightier than a wisp of conversation or an expression on a face.

Days after Baghdad fell, I headed south from the capital, still clad in grimy clothes from weeks embedded with the Marines. I squeezed into a small dented sedan with another reporter and an Iraqi translator and driver. We were looking for stories, but mostly just absorbing the images of a city pillaging itself. Boys waved gleefully at U.S. tanks and armored vehicles, while pushing carts overloaded with computers and copper wiring and whatever else they could strip from unguarded buildings.

On the capital's dusty edge, we turned onto a narrow dirt road. I had been here a week earlier, I realized. I had bumped along in a Marine troop carrier, winding among the charred hulks of Iraqi army vehicles still smoldering from a brutal fight. The Marines swerved to avoid the body of a dead Iraqi in the road, but gave up swerving after the first one. A week later, the road was clear and quiet.

The driver stopped to ask directions from a man in a plaid shirt. The man had silver streaks in his black hair and swollen, bloodshot eyes. He asked if we were Americans. We proudly acknowledged that we were. His brother had been killed by the Americans on this spot, he said. He wanted to know why. We had no answers. He grew agitated, putting a large callused hand on the lip of the driver's open window. We should stop and talk with him, he implored, to hear of his suffering. It was getting uncomfortable.

The driver cut the conversation short and pulled away. I turned to see the man still standing in the road, staring at us through billows of dust.

These days, confrontations like that are common, and as reporters we're almost inured to them. But on that morning, still flush with a swift invasion and the promise of an easy reception, I was startled by his fury. He was enraged at Americans for what they had done to him - not to Iraq, but to him, to his family. I left the country soon after that, swooping out of Baghdad in a Marine helicopter across the flat, placid plains toward Kuwait. Through the gunners' doors, I watched leaden plumes of smoke still rising from the horizons.

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When I returned six months later, my colleagues had moved into a house. It had an address, but I never memorized it - by then, it wasn't wise to tell others where you live, even if you liked to believe you lived on neutral ground.

I grew to love and hate our squat, two-story, dust-brown home with the covered driveway and the soaring palm tree that dropped fat yellow dates inside the front wall separating us from the world outside. Now and then, one of the guards would shinny up the slender trunk to pluck the ripest fruit and we would eat them for weeks. There was more than enough for the guards and eight drivers and translators who made our life in Iraq possible.

A fellow reporter had found the house in the weeks after Baghdad fell. He had pulled out most of the furniture except the wooden beds and filled the home with sturdy desks and utilitarian furniture, all laced in a web of computer cables. Someone had spruced up the place with cheap colorful carpets, tropical houseplants and floor lamps.

The lights inside blinked on and off throughout the day, as the power failed and restarted, but you soon stopped noticing. Conversations hardly paused when the room went black. The walls were white and scuffed, and we never bothered to hang many pictures, except the maps that reminded us where we could no longer visit. There was a large detailed road map of the country, and I would trace with my finger which routes I could travel and which ones I could not.

Our block was filled with quiet families, whose children squealed and played in the street at dusk. I used to take a cup of coffee outside at sunset, to sit in the anonymity of our walled front yard and listen to the sounds of children. I could not see. We never spoke. It was unwise for each of us to know too much about the other.

For a while, reporters from the Los Angeles Times lived next door. But on New Year's Eve 2003, three of them and five of their Iraqi employees were wounded in a suicide bombing at a restaurant in the neighborhood. Chicago Tribune reporter Stephen Franklin and I had spotted their wrecked white Mercedes in flames and combed Baghdad's wretched hospitals. When we reached them hours later, they were in an American military hospital. Franklin and I got home not long before dawn, and we typed out a short story about the bombing. It was like so many others we would write: "A car packed with high explosives ripped through a popular Baghdad restaurant. ..." It felt absurdly inadequate.

The bombing killed eight people and injured 35. It earned a day or two of headlines and was all but forgotten. The Times reporters moved out a few weeks later to find another house. They no longer felt safe in the neighborhood.

In the months that followed, I spent many nights far away - in the guard shack of an army base in Tikrit, on the hood of a Humvee in the silent western desert, in hotel rooms in Najaf, Basra, and Mosul. But most of my nights were spent at our small, worn house, behind windows covered in plastic in the hope that it would prevent the glass from shattering in a bomb blast.

Night after night, I slept to the clatter of an old air conditioner that generously drowned out the booms and gunfire in the night sky. I knew I might miss the sound of newsworthy bombings that way, but I didn't care; I savored a few hours of deafness. When an Iraqi reporter once asked a U.S. military spokesman if helicopter gunships need to fly so low over residential neighborhoods at night, the American told the roomful of journalists that sleepless Iraqi children should take heart - those noises "are simply the sounds of freedom."

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Last February I headed south to measure what had changed in the year since the invasion. I traveled with our translator-driver team of Nadeem Majeed and his brother Arfan. Engineers by training, the brothers were level-headed and precise, and they had worked with us since the fall of Baghdad.

We covered hundreds of miles in their white Toyota sedan, visiting Shiite clerics in the holy city of Najaf, squatters in the border town of Safwan and newly-minted businessmen in Basra. On the road home, we stopped in Nasariyah, Nasiriyah, a tattered town beside the Euphrates River that had witnessed some of the heaviest fighting with American troops a year earlier.

We found ourselves in the barren living room of Khalid Yunis, a 42-year-old father whose face was fixed in an absent gaze. Nearly a year had passed since his wife and five of their children died in a shower of American bullets when their truck sped unknowingly toward a U.S. checkpoint on a dark night. He and his two remaining children had recovered in an American hospital. But now he had the empty eyes of a man drifting from reality. He seemed intoxicated by pain.

"I tell you honestly," he said, seated on the floor of his drafty home. "If I didn't have responsibility for Mohammed and his sister, I would like to be a suicide bomber, to kill even one American soldier."

Time was not softening men like him. On the contrary, Iraq itself seemed to be hardening around them, growing a bit more brittle under every month of military occupation. Americans were becoming the fixation of a nation's anger.

Oddly, I never felt threatened when sitting with men like him. But after all, the target of his anger had no face. Americans, for him, were an idea. He dreamed of killing Americans like me even as he and his nephew offered cups of steaming tea and stoked up their small electric heater in honor of the cherished guests. To him, Americans were as anonymous and remote as the Iraqis beside the road who whom Marines and I once watched from the open window of a Humvee.

That distance is not unique to Iraq. I had watched the gap steadily broaden between Americans and Arabs throughout the Middle East over the past two years. I had stopped being surprised when a gracious Saudi host would explain that Americans must expect to be attacked overseas if their government supports Israel in its battles with Palestinians. I had learned to expect that more than three years after the World Trade Center attacks, executives in Dubai would still spout the Internet fiction that hundreds of Jews had stayed home from work on Sept. 11, 2001, because, they confided, Israel was behind the attacks and warned Jews in advance. I was no longer too timid to tell him them that he was they were embarrassing himself.

But this was different, sitting in someone's living room watching him sink into madness. The only emotion I could summon was sadness.

Two weeks later, Nadeem, 30, and Arfan, 31, retraced our route with a photographer, to take pictures of Yunis and others we had met along the way. On the highway near Basra, a Toyota pickup truck loaded with gunmen raced up to them from behind and opened fire at the sedan. Arfan sped away, but the attackers kept up, shooting wildly.

Frantic, the brothers glimpsed a U.S. convoy ahead and for a moment they considered racing up to it for help. But they realized that could be disastrous - a car that surprises a convoy of tense American soldiers runs a good risk of being shot. The brothers were trapped - with a band of their countrymen trying to kill them on one side, and a group of Americans who had learned not to trust on the other. It was an apt reflection of the no-man's-land in which Iraq's silent and weary majority was trying to make a life.

Arfan spotted an escape route off the highway and before long they were out of reach. They reached Baghdad unhurt but demoralized. After months of escalating violence, Iraq, for us, had changed in an instant. Until then, it had been easy to compartmentalize the bloodshed, to explain it away as something avoidable if you were careful enough. But that was a fiction, and we knew it. There was no logic to the killing. And, day by day, we were increasingly unwelcome.

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None of us gave much thought to the big prison known as Abu Ghraib. And then one day it became the symbol of everything.

I had never been inside the prison until one morning in May when the generals decided to throw the gates open to the world. Photos of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners had been circulating for days, and the generals wanted everyone to know that changes were being made. The past was over, they said.

Two busloads of journalists set out from Baghdad. We were escorted by heavily armed Humvees, but we had also been warned to wear our flak jackets and helmets on the ride because the road out of the capital wasn't safe.

The tour promptly veered out of control. As the buses wound into the vast prison courtyard, waves of men surged toward the barbed-wire fences.

Thousands of them poured out of the canvas tents where they lived through summer and winter. Those waiting in line for makeshift toilets and showers broke away and scrambled toward the fence, in sweat-soiled clothes, to shout for attention from the arriving buses. This was the medical recovery area, home to those who had been hurt before they arrived or, like many, had been wounded by the waves of insurgents' mortars that rained down on the tented areas inside on in the mistaken belief that U.S. troops lived there.

The prisoners went wild at the sight of outsiders. Dozens pumped their crutches in the air. Others peeled off their shirts in the baking midday sun and twirled them over their heads. One man pulled off his Caucasian-colored prosthetic leg and waved it back and forth.

"Where's the freedom, Bush?" the one-legged man shouted. "Is this freedom?"

Another prisoner, reading in English from a seemingly prepared statement, used a bullhorn to call out his message: "Iraqi prisoners need freedom, their dignity and their rights."

The scene had undermined the generals' effort to show things were improving. No doubt some things had changed - other parts of the tour showcased refurbished prison wings and a gleaming medical unit - but the disorder outside spoke to a more essential fact: This was not why America was here.

Nobody involved in the Abu Ghraib prison wanted to be there - not the sweating soldiers standing in the watchtowers, not the enraged prisoners down below and not the overwhelmed commanders holed up in their offices. The notion that more than a year after the invasion the United States would be arresting thousands of Iraqis a month had never been in the Pentagon's blueprint for war. And yet, the military had no choice but to scramble in vain to curtail a growing insurgency.

Standing there in the courtyard of the prison, hearing the shouts of the prisoners and anxious efforts of the soldiers to usher us back to our buses, I was watching a system in crisis. I thought of a man punching water to hold back a flood.

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When the foreigners did not leave on their own, kidnappers began taking them one at a time - engineers from construction sites, diplomats from their cars, anyone they could get their hands on. In September, several days after the kidnapping and execution of 12 Nepalese laborers, I visited a Sunni imam with close ties to insurgents.

Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abdul Jabar Jabbar kept a cramped office beside a non-descript neighborhood mosque in Baghdad. The small, airless room was well over 100 degrees when I arrived with a correspondent from the Wall Street Journal, and the sheikh had his white headscarf resting on his desk. I slumped into a clammy vinyl armchair as one of his aides handed us cans of orange juice from a plastic cooler. We asked why the violence was growing more than two months after the United States had formally restored Iraq's sovereignty.

"Islam says that if someone fights against your land, then you must fight against them. So we consider that to fight the occupation is halal," he said, using the Arabic word for things approved under religion. "And fighting those people who are cooperating with the coalition is also halal."

I asked him about the killing of the Nepalese workers, and he answered with a question of his own: "I ask you," he said, sipping orange juice, "Is someone who is driving a truck to deliver supplies working with the occupiers?"

But they weren't driving a truck, the other reporter said with irritation. They were cooks and cleaners. How is that halal?

Before the sheikh could answer, one of his aides answered a bleating cell phone and handed it to his boss. The phone call caused a commotion - another assistant fired up a generator and carried in a small television, placing it on a tea table at the cleric's hip. The sheikh apologized to us, but he had to do a short interview with a Saudi television channel. The television set, it seemed, allowed him to see his performance. As we watched, he spoke for several minutes, describing negotiations under way to free two French journalists who had been kidnapped weeks earlier. Yes, he was in contact with rebels, he said. No, he did not believe the Frenchmen had been beheaded, but he couldn't be sure. (The Frenchmen were eventually released in December after four months in captivity.)

He snapped the phone closed and turned his attention back to us. We asked again about the insurgency and whether local rebel cells coordinate with each other. He was getting impatient.

"They are not fighting in Fallujah because the coalition made mistakes there," he snapped. "They are fighting in Fallujah because of the occupation. The resistance in Latifiya or Najaf is not defending only its lands. It is defending all of Iraq."

We thanked him for his time. Six weeks later, U.S. and Iraqi troops stormed the sheikh's home and arrested him for reasons never disclosed. His supporters called it a "dangerous escalation from the side of the occupier."

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Over time, the scenes of carnage ran together in my mind. I could remember only a few details from each incident - the uprooted trees at the bombing by the Green Zone; the rain falling on the bodies piled outside a morgue; the bloody scarf where professor Gailan Ramiz died in an explosion beside his home, where he used to welcome me for tea.

One morning, our devoted cook, Sultana, arrived late for work and in despair. Her nephew had been killed the night before. He had secretly found work, like so many others, on an American base, weighing the security of a paycheck against the danger of being killed for it.

The gunmen finally found him on his drive home. They pulled up to his sedan on the highway and shot everyone in the car. Sultana couldn't be sure how many others were killed. All she knew was that the assassins had pulled over after the first blast of gunfire and shot them all again, just to be certain.

The attacks grew bolder. Two Italians were abducted from their home without a shot fired. A few days later, two Americans and a British worker were kidnapped at dawn, as one of them stepped outside to turn on the generator.

That night, as other reporters and I discussed our options, my phone rang. It was Nadeem. "Arfan won't be coming in tonight," he said of his brother. "He's been shot."

Arfan had been heading back to the office, his left arm resting on the lip of the open window, when a bullet tore through his forearm and sliced into his thigh. Bewildered and soaked in blood, Arfan had managed to steer himself the short trip home.

While a doctor worked on his wounds, his brothers rooted through the car and found a shiny brown AK-47 slug beneath in the driver's seat. All things considered, Arfan had been lucky. The bullet appeared to have been traveling slowly enough that it was likely a "wedding shot," one of the rounds fired when Iraqis point their guns in the air in celebration. He would recover well, the doctor said.

The kidnappings had become too frequent to ignore. We could no longer justify waiting to see what would happen next. Late that night, we piled into a car and abandoned the house. Nobody said it as we drove away, but we knew we would probably never be back to the house. We could no longer live there. We drove to a hotel that we had once derided as unsafe. It was now our best option. Until we worked out the details, the guards stayed at the house, protecting an empty place that was no longer safe enough to protect us.

We had come full circle - from the isolation of a Marine convoy during the war, back to an isolated hotel room. Iraq had come full circle as well. Once a forbidding blank spot on the world map, the gates had opened, flooding the country with new knowledge, new prosperity, new threats. It then slid steadily into disorder, until most of it was once again a mystery too dangerous to visit.

The United States had deposed a savage dictator and unleashed an anger far more powerful than one man could muster. The bitterness that had emerged as seething glances from the roadside had metastasized into a vast culture of rebellion.

For Iraqis, violence had become widespread enough that a gunshot wound suffered in celebration, not in anger, was a source of perverse relief. For Americans, the hopes for Iraq had been reduced to a shadow of what they once were, downgraded from the dream of transforming a nation to simply leaving as little chaos behind as possible.

On a cool clear morning in September, on my last day before leaving the country for some rest, I set out with a driver and translator for a hospital on the edge of the capital to visit a doctor I knew.

We crossed a small river, and I recognized the place. We were at the Diyala River bridge, within sight of my encounter with the grieving brother more than 18 months earlier.

What we didn't know is that Ziad Khisrow, our driver, had been here too. "My office was over there," he said, pointing to a meadow beside the road, where a jumble of small shacks and brick ruins were all that were left by aerial bombing. "All of the buildings are gone."

Quiet and serious, with a trim black mustache, Khisrow, 34, had been a captain in the Iraqi army, commanding an artillery battery. Beyond that, he had never talked much about his old life.

"I had 35 soldiers at the start. In the end, I had one," he said, after we stopped the car, his cherished black BMW. Like millions of Iraqis, a new car was among the first changes in his life after Baghdad fell and the borders opened.

His men had fought the Marines for control of the river, until being forced back by the surging Americans. Khisrow had fled by car and on foot, finding an unfinished tan-brick house where he had hunkered down for two days and two nights while planes and helicopters pounded the area.

"We knew we could not win," he said. "But we were all afraid" to run away. He dragged his index finger across his throat, miming the penalty for desertion.

He got out and walked into the tall parched grass by the roadside.

All that was left of the American imprint here was the spray-painted emblem of the U.S. military unit that had inspected the shell of a nearby building.

"Cleared, 1/7," it read in green painted letters. It was a familiar emblem: the 1st battalion of the 7th Marine Regiment, the unit with which I had been traveling on that day many months ago. Khisrow and I had been within a few hundred yards of each other. But this was a different country then.

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(Evan Osnos has spent much of the past two years in Iraq and Kuwait. He is scheduled to leave Iraq in early February.)

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