Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs (6 page)

The attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan was being replayed on Iraqi national television.

Holy shit.

I knew that there would be trouble. And somehow I knew it would come to Iraq. I was filled with a strange, desolate feeling, not because I thought there would be a war—that I didn’t know. It was more despair about the world.

Many Muslims were celebrating the attacks. Their glee appalled me.

Why destroy things? Why celebrate hate and death?

Many questions occurred to me as I sorted through my feelings. It was clear to me that violence and destruction were not right, and that killing innocent people was not condoned by any religion, let alone Islam.

So what should a person do?

Build things.

The energy and intellect that it took to plan such horrible mass murder—could not that have been used to make something important? Instead of hijacking an airplane to kill people, why not build an airplane to help people?

If we just want to destroy something, how long will it take? A few minutes? What is the use of that? What is the use of any destruction?

Making things, building, learning—that is what we all should be doing, Iraqis, Muslims, Americans. That is what people were created for. That is our highest achievement. Why do some of us insist on debasing the race by following creeds of destruction?

I had no answers at that time; I didn’t even have all the questions. While I didn’t know it then, they would multiply and deepen over the next ten years, until they completely shaped my life.

Questions about destruction, about religion, about our responsibility to each other—they’re not just philosophical or hypothetical for me. I know firsthand what destruction feels like and what happens in its wake. I have walked down its streets. I know what desolation looks like, how it feels on your skin. I know how depression tightens like a noose around your neck until you can’t breathe.

I have been fortunate to see the opposite, to see the hope that education brings and feel the difference that freedom can make.

But in Iraq after 9/11, the predominant emotion favored destruction and all the dark forces that hinder mankind. You heard all sorts of conspiracies about the attacks and all kinds of justifications about why it should have happened.

Oh, those terrible Americans, they did this to justify killing Muslims . . .

The Jews, they did that . . .

Mass murder can never be justified. That is something all people should know in their hearts, no matter where they come from or what religion they follow. But with the state-controlled media blaring these rumors and misinformation, many Iraqis were swayed from their honest opinions and feelings. They didn’t know what to think, and more than a few lost the ability to tell right from wrong.

Rationally, I suspected that America would start hunting the men who had blown up the towers. It was a matter of American pride.

I also knew that the whole world outside the Middle East would support the United States.

What I didn’t know was what this would mean for Iraq.

Iraq was not involved in the attack, and before it happened there was not much regard for Osama bin Laden in the country.

Immediately after 9/11, however, Iraqi television began calling him a hero. The media fed people stories to reinforce that. It was clearly Saddam’s doing. He hated the U.S., so any enemy of America’s was by his definition a hero or a friend of his. The dictator himself called the attack a victory and celebrated it as if he had personally been the one who blew up the towers. More importantly, he celebrated the destruction not as an attack on civilians, but as if the towers were military weapons destroyed in a fierce land battle.

Saddam’s sudden decision to champion Osama bin Laden was just his latest ploy to try to remain popular with Iraqis. He’d been using religion in the same way for several years, trying to portray himself as a defender of Islam. It was pure sham. He stepped up his claims after 9/11, proclaiming he was “God’s slave” and making sure there were plenty of pictures and films of him “proving” he was religious.

I doubt many people believed it, but of course openly questioning Saddam’s sincerity, let alone mocking him, was an easy way to get yourself imprisoned.

FOR WESTERN READERS
not familiar with the religion, I’d like to present a few facts about Islam to help explain some of the events that follow. This is not religious instruction, only a bit of background to help people make sense of some things. I am not a scholar or a religious teacher, and my words are only meant to point people in the proper direction. There are certainly many texts available to explain Islam in depth, and anyone with true interest should seek them out.

The faith of Islam began fourteen hundred years ago, inspired by the word of Allah, the one true God, and exemplified by Abūal-Qa-sim Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn ‘Abd al-Mu
t
t
alib ibn Ha-shim—Muhammad—the last prophet sent to restore the faith of Adam, Noah, Abraham, and the other prophets.

All Muslims accept these facts.

All Muslims agree with the basic tenets of the faith, which include the five pillars of Islam: belief, worship, charity, fasting, and the pilgrimage to Mecca, known as the
hajj.
These pillars are at the core of our religion; they are like the vital organs in the human body, all the same and all present in every living person.

But just as living people vary in size, shape, and personality, our great religion has some subtle variations among its believers. One of the most important distinctions is between Sunnis and Shiites. This is a division that has marked Muslims for hundreds of years; it is a complicated distinction that has come to involve culture as well as faith.

The simplest way to think of the division is through its history: after the death of Muhammad, one branch of Islam accepted Abu Bakr as their leader or caliph; these people were Sunni. Another group accepted Hazrat Ali; they were Shia. From this seemingly simple split, the two main branches of Islam developed different though related traditions. Though at times their disagreements have been violent, for much of Muslim history individuals aligned with these two branches have lived in peace and harmony. The way I see things, Sunni and Shia have much in common and little in dispute, but many disagree.

It is estimated that Sunnis, such as myself, make up 75 percent of all Muslims. Shiites account for the next largest percent of Muslims, around 20 percent. Other branches of Islam include Sufism, whose adherents believe very strongly in the mystical aspects of the faith.

There are differences of practice and faith within each group of Muslims. And of course there are extremists who pervert the central ideas of the religion for their own evil purposes. Sunni traditions count several important schools, each with different interpretations of Islam. The differences can seem very subtle to an outsider, but they are nonetheless important to those of us who believe.

Osama bin Laden was part of a radical faction of Sunni Muslims who believe that very strict interpretations of Sharia, or Islamic law, must be imposed on the people or Islam will cease to exist. They also preach violence against the West and Jews, and look upon Shiites as enemies. Needless to say, this is not the philosophy followed by most Sunnis.

While the Sunni branch of Islam predominates throughout the world, Iraq has more Shiite Muslims; it has been estimated that 60 to 65 percent of the population are Shia. Many live in the south and east, near Iran. By contrast, the north and west are predominately Sunni.

Saddam was Sunni. His strongest supporters were members of his tribe and people from the region where he was born, Tikrit, who were also predominantly Sunni.

Many Shia believed that the dictator strongly discriminated against them on the basis of religion, and with good reason. Though Shiites were the majority in the country, most of the better government jobs went to Sunni Muslims—more precisely, to Sunnis who were related to Saddam, members of his tribe, or otherwise somehow connected to him, even if only in a distant way. And being a member of the party was essential, at even the lowest level.

In other words, Shia were discriminated against, but so were Sunnis like myself who had no connection with Saddam or his tribe.

Mosul at the time of 9/11 was about 90 percent Sunni; the rest of the people were mostly Shia, with a small community of Christians. (The few Christians I knew in those days were among the most peaceful people I have ever met.)

As I mentioned earlier, there was very little religious animosity between the different branches of Islam when I was young. Even during the Iran-Iraq war, when our enemy was a nation ruled by Shiites, attitudes were not very extreme. For most people, religion was a family matter, private, and not something that the person had much choice in anyway—they followed their parents, as was their duty. At least as I remember it, religion was never an issue for fighting.

One of my best friends growing up was a Christian. There was no religious pressure on him to convert. Nor did he suffer from more discrimination than the rest of us.

For myself, the distinctions are not very important. I have my own relationship with God, and I understand how I should act and behave.

As for our children, when they were small, my kids didn’t even know there was a difference. In 2003, as the fighting among Iraqis intensified along religious lines, Soheila and I gathered our children in a room.

“Okay, guys,” I told them after we explained a little about our faith and beliefs. “Who’s going to be Shia and who’s going to be Sunni?”

All of them chose Shia. A disappointment maybe for me.

More seriously, I feel that when they are each old enough, they will make their own decision about how to honor God and live correctly. Religion is a choice. Whatever you want, whatever you believe, that is what you should follow. Who am I to impose my faith and religion on others, even my children?

SADDAM’S ATTEMPTS AT
drumming up support by using religion after 9/11 mostly failed. But it was more dangerous than ever to talk against him, even with family and friends—you could never tell who might say something about you, either directly to the authorities or to someone who would go to them. Being critical of Saddam had always been forbidden, but now saying anything derogatory about Iraq could also land you in trouble. I heard a story about a man jailed for proclaiming that the French would win a soccer match against Iraq. Whether the story is true or not, I have no idea, but it shows the level of paranoia in the country as we came closer to war in 2002.

We all knew it was coming. The United Nations demanded to be allowed to inspect Iraqi facilities involved in the construction of atomic weapons. Saddam wouldn’t let them. Some of us thought Saddam was hoping to use the conflict to divert people’s attention from the fact that people were starving. But the only thing that would have diverted attention from that would have been full bellies.

Things became steadily worse as 2002 turned to 2003. The country slid further into a black hole. Knowing war was inevitable, Soheila and I began stocking up on as much food as we could. We put away rice and canned soup. We had small freezers where we stocked meat. We stockpiled water. We stacked whatever we could in our small apartment, knowing there would soon be shortages. We had lived through two wars already, so we had a rough idea of what might happen.

We were no longer daring to dream. We were simply hoping to get past the nightmare we knew was coming.

And then, the war was upon us: not as the violent jolt we feared, but, instead, as a distant shriek in the night.

3

Up from the Depths

T
HE START OF
a war is a mysterious thing, an event simultaneously momentous and nebulous. If you are on the front line when the troops cross, or maybe beneath the targeting pipper of an aircraft, things are finite, clear, and terrible.

Absolutely horrible, but black and white, with great clarity and finality.

Farther away, nothing is clear. Miles from the front you hear explosions and see flashes. You feel rumbles. But if the fighting remains distant, you can close off your mind to these things and pretend there is no war, that nothing has happened.

Even if you don’t close your mind, you may not understand war until you actually see it. The conflict might not make sense to you, even if you have seen war before. A man can never fully imagine the reality of war, even if he’s lived it already.

For us, the war with America seemed far away for the first few days, very nebulous. We could see it on television, but that was as close as we got. American airplanes and missiles attacked first, hitting Saddam’s Baghdad palace and striking military targets near the southern border and Baghdad early on March 19, 2003. The next day, American troops came across the border, attacking in the south. Within days they stormed Nasiriya, then continued north toward Baghdad. In the meantime, they secured the southern oil fields and Basra, and hooked up with Kurdish rebels in Kurdistan, in the northern precincts.

Mosul, far from Baghdad, could almost have been in a different country. But a few nights after the start of the war, I was woken by the rumble of an explosion somewhere nearby. Even as the ground was still shaking, I rose and made sure my family was all right, then waited, sleeplessly, until dawn to find out what had happened.

As soon as it was light, a friend and I drove toward the center of the city. Eventually we found the source of the explosion: a Tomahawk missile had struck a building used as a telecommunications center. The facility had housed phone-switching equipment handling the local exchanges. The missile or missiles had struck in the exact center of the building, cratering it and obliterating phone service in the area.

It was an odd sight: The fence that bordered the property was intact, and most of the building’s walls were still standing. But the roof was gone, and from up close the structure looked like a scorched box filled with rubble. The dust from the explosion lingered in the air, scratching my eyes.

From that moment on, the war felt very real, even in Mosul. The city was spared destruction on a grand scale—the business areas were largely untouched by American bombs, as far as I can remember—but there was no longer any way to deny the reality of the war. We were going to lose, badly. It was just a matter of time before the Americans came.

There was no hope for Iraq, or Saddam. The Kuwait war had shown us that the dictator’s military might was a complete fiction. A dozen years had passed, and it was inconceivable to anyone that the military had gotten any better. Iraq itself had gotten worse.

But even if most of us wished Saddam were gone, it was still a depressing feeling to be caught in a country at war. We had grave doubts about the future.

And as much as I hated Saddam, I wasn’t a fan of the Americans. I wasn’t a
hater
of Americans; my attitude would be closer to neutral, I guess. I admired the culture, or what I’d seen of it—basketball, the movies. I knew the U.S.A. was a great military power. But I wasn’t looking forward to having Iraq ruled by Americans. Nor did I have any dreams or illusions about going to America or, even more extreme, turning Iraq into a Middle Eastern version of America.

Democracy? It was too lofty a concept to consider. What most of us thought about was simple: What things did we have to do to get through the day?

Sometimes we thought about the next day, and the day after that, but that was the extent of our future. Those thoughts were always in the barest terms: How will we survive?

We stayed in our houses mostly, gathering what news we could from the state-run television channels, deciphering the truth from the bullshit. The same day I saw what the Tomahawk had done to the phone building, the Americans launched an attack against the airport on the southwestern side of town. This was a much larger attack, and the explosions seemed louder by a factor of ten.

I saw the attack from a friend’s house near the airport. While we were far enough away to be safe, the waves of bombs or missiles that struck the base were clearly visible. I saw an F/A-18 or similar aircraft fly over the area as the bombs struck.

When the raid died down, we went to the airport grounds to see what had happened. As we got close, I saw a single man, not a soldier but a civilian, handling a Russian-made machine gun on the roof of a one-story house. He was firing into the air, as if his lone gun might drive off the unseen planes.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked. “You’re not shooting at anything.”

The man looked at me blankly.

“You can’t reach the airplanes with that,” I told him. “And truly, if a pilot sees your gunfire, he’ll come back and hit you with a missile that will blow you into a million pieces. For what?”

He stopped shooting, though whether I had convinced him or he simply had run out of bullets, I have no idea.

The American attack had struck the anti-air defenses and some of the military facilities at the airport and camp. But it missed the Iraqi army. The units that had been headquartered in Mosul had already disappeared, the men either ordered away or simply deserting. No one in the city seemed to know where they had gone.

Shortly after the attack on the airport, members of the Peshmerga arrived in town from Kurdistan. The Peshmerga were Kurdish militia, paramilitary forces that in some cases were working with U.S. Special Forces and the CIA to fight against Saddam during the early stages of the war. Whether these men were one of those units or not, I have no idea. I wasn’t about to ask; it was obvious that the best way to deal with them was to keep our distance.

The Peshmerga and the Kurds in general had a long history with Saddam, none of it pleasant. First of all, to explain: The Kurds are a separate people who have lived in the areas of Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq for hundreds of years. During that time, they’ve had varying degrees of autonomy over the region they call Kurdistan. In the 1880s, they attempted to rebel against the Ottoman Empire but were unsuccessful. Other nationalistic movements followed, but so far none have successfully established Kurdistan as an independent nation.

The three provinces in Iraq that are predominantly Kurdish are Erbil, Dahuk, and Sulaymaniyah. Years of Kurdish rebellions against Iraqi governments resulted in a pledge in March 1970 to establish autonomy for the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq, but those plans were never realized. Saddam’s repression provoked a Kurdish rebellion in the 1980s; the dictator responded ferociously, murdering countless Kurds, civilians as well as freedom fighters. He destroyed whole villages and sent Kurds to other parts of Iraq, hoping to dilute their hold on the north. It was during this time as well that he is said to have used chemical gases on the people.

Mosul is south and west of these areas, and ethnically separate. Still, it is very close—if you drew a straight line from the Kurdish city of Dahuk to Mosul, it would measure roughly thirty-seven miles. A significant number of Kurds lived in Mosul before the war, and there were lingering ethnic rivalries and prejudices, though for the most part everyone got along. I myself have had different relationships with Kurds in general and in particular. I have several good friends who are Kurds; I’ve known Kurds who were jerks. If I were to make a general statement, I would say that most Kurds are very hardworking and honest, but I could easily come up with exceptions.

Following the first American Gulf War and Desert Storm in 1991, the United States and its allies tried to help the Kurds, including their territory in a northern no-fly zone and extending humanitarian aid. Saddam’s air force, already battered by the war, could not operate in that area, making it more difficult for him to oppress the Kurds. With encouragement from the United States, the government inside the Kurdish area of Iraq became more autonomous.

At the same time, internal conflicts rose. Two different factions rose to prominence and then fought with each other. Iran encouraged both factions at different points and took a clandestine but active role encouraging the fighting and backing its own favored group. In 1996, after an Iranian assault into Iraqi territory ostensibly aimed at rebels planning an attack into Iran, Saddam Hussein sent forces north. The United States bombed Iraqi bases and tightened the no-fly zone, and in the end Iraq withdrew most of its troops from the region, but not before helping the Kurdish Democratic Party, its temporary ally against the Iranians, to win control of the region.

Once the war with America started, the Kurdish factions worked in parallel to rid themselves of the dictator. Both cooperated with the United States, as did their militias. Their goal was to carve out a permanent Kurdish state, their longtime dream. And this was obvious in their actions both inside and outside Kurdistan.

The first thing the Peshmerga and the Kurdish militia did when they arrived in Mosul was open the banks and take most of the money. They blew the safes and made off with the contents. Were they robbing it or, as was later claimed, securing it against Saddam’s forces?

It certainly looked like robbery to me. Just enough was left for local people to help themselves and not feel left out.

Then the Kurdish troops ransacked the army barracks at the airport, taking the weapons and other equipment for their own. They grabbed anything they could move, including artillery pieces and tanks. Large flatbeds came and hauled vehicles away for days.

With the place ransacked, the Kurds left Mosul. By then, order in the city had broken down. The police seemed to be in hiding. People were looting government buildings, taking things they wanted or needed. The rest of us huddled in our houses, gathering to watch the news on our generator-powered TVs and discuss whatever rumors we’d heard.

Every so often a small group would surge past the house, heading to loot one place or another. I remember a friend shouting to me to come downtown with him; he and the others were going to see if they could find any money left in one of the banks.

“No way,” I told him. “I’m not a thief.”

“Come on,” he insisted.

“No.”

“Fuck you, then.”

“Fuck you.”

My friends thought I was an idiot for not joining in.

Al Jazeera, the Arabic news station, became something of an information lifeline for us in the early days of the war. Its reports helped us track what was going on. I spent hours and hours with my friends in small, cramped apartments, smoking cigarettes nonstop and listening to the news, trying to interpret each small tidbit, no matter how trivial.

The British reached Basra, the major Iraqi city in the south, on March 22. U.S. Marines battled the Iraqi army near Nasiriya the next day. These early battles set what would be the pattern for the rest of the war: opposed first by the regular Iraqi army, the U.S.-led coalition forces quickly defeated their conventional enemies. But once the Iraqi army retreated or disintegrated, guerrilla fighters appeared. Some had been in the army, some were from the Fedayeen Sadaam, some were radical Islamists. The last group was less discriminating in its choice of targets; its tactics often included hiding among civilians or even using them as shields. The conventional fighting was quick; gaining actual control of the urban areas was more difficult and time consuming.

Basra was not declared under control by the British until April 6, due largely to the allies’ attempts to limit civilian casualties and damage. It was the first major city declared completely under allied control.

By March 27, a week after the start of the war, U.S. forces had reached the area of Samawah, the city midway between Basra and Baghdad. In the days that followed, the Americans prepared for a drive on Baghdad itself. The assault on the capital began in the outskirts on April 2; the next day U.S. forces took the airport. A week later, on April 9, Baghdad was declared under U.S. control.

In Mosul, we waited for the inevitable arrival of the American army. A few people were optimistic that they would bring change for the better. My wife, Soheila, was one.

“Maybe we will have a democratic government,” said Soheila. “Maybe when it is all over, we will be better off.”

I kept my darker opinions about the future to myself.

“We have to change,” said Soheila. “Life has to change—we will go through this and things will be better.”

She had a few tangible things on her side of the argument—oil, the creativity of the Iraqi people. The country, after all, has the potential to do much that is very good. But even at that time, hoping for a better future could not erase the tension we all felt, nor the sense that we might die in the crossfire between the United States and the last defenders of the regime.

AND THEN SUDDENLY,
the atmosphere changed. U.S. soldiers arrived in Mosul, and it was like a holiday. People were excited—and
happy.

Kids swarmed around the procession of army vehicles, waving. Soldiers threw them candy and a few gave them toys. There was suddenly a feeling of celebration and liberation. People were overjoyed that Saddam was no longer in charge. The surge of relief made us dizzy.

I DON’T KNOW
what we all expected to follow. I don’t know what I expected. Things were better in many ways. I no longer feared being bombed or getting caught in the crossfire between the Americans and Saddam’s troops. But conditions in the city did not miraculously improve. Work was still hard to come by. The store of food and other supplies Soheila and I had put away slowly but steadily dwindled.

Days passed. The electricity came back. But life was far from normal and in no way easy. Few businesses were functioning; there was no government to speak of. I divided my time between asking around for work and hanging out with friends trying to get an idea of what was going on and what would happen next.