Eyewitness (48 page)

Children gather around him, including his grandchildren, most of them with skin lesions and the bleached hair consistent with malnutrition. One small girl is startlingly beautiful, with perfect features and huge, glowing eyes. In the West she would become a supermodel. But when she smiles her face is also lined, like that of a woman in her thirties. She is nine years old. She follows me all day at the refugee camp, smiling often, tearing at my heartstrings with her luminous beauty and her dismal future.

‘We have to live there, what else can we do?’ Nasr asks. ‘The Taliban persecuted us, beating us with sticks. They would have killed us, just because we were Tajiks. We ran away, taking nothing but the clothes we stood in.’

The translator I am working with at the camp is Dr Ashraf Aini. He fled Taloqan at the same time as Nasr and his family. I can see he is edgy here. Dr Aini, who speaks flawless Russian and English, is an urbane, witty man in his early forties. He works at the local hospital at night, but earns ten times his monthly salary working as a translator for Canadian CBC during the day.

‘I left everything behind, absolutely everything. I had only two hours, so I gathered up my wife and children and we fled,’ he says.

The sun is setting. I can hardly see Dr Aini for the stinging dust and smoke from the fires in the camp. The refugees are winter-proofing their dwellings. What this amounts to is building mud-brick walls around their tents, in the hope that they will then withstand sub-zero temperatures. We are surrounded by swarming crowds of curious people and children. The beautiful nine-year-old stays close as I ask Dr Aini why he decided on this precipitate flight.

‘We heard about the conditions for people living in Taliban-controlled areas, the massive killings of people in the north, the burning of villages, and we fled in fear.’ He adds vehemently, ‘There must be no compromise with such people. The Taliban cannot be included in any broad-based government in the future.’

Not all his leaders agree. This controversial issue consumes much of our attention as alternatives to all-out war are canvassed. When journalists ask General Bariolai whether a compromise allowing the Taliban to participate in government could be reached, he says no compromise deal could ever include the Taliban leadership. Men like Mullah Omar, he says, can have no say in the future of the country. ‘They are nothing but agents of Pakistan. They brought foreigners here to kill Afghans. They educated boys of 13 or 15 in Pakistan to destroy our history, our museums and our archives.’

But General Bariolai would be willing to co-operate with lowerranked Taliban. If they defected now, he would be willing to see them participate in decisions on how the country should be run. General Mamur Hassan tells me that he agrees. ‘After the fighting, when we succeed, compromise is possible. Yes, I can even foresee the possibility of co-operation with the Taliban. I could sit in government with a former Talib, yes.’

*

In the late 1990s Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf was filming near the refugee camp at Zabol on the Iranian border. He was making his searing movie
Kandahar
, about a woman returning from the West to see the sister she had left behind in Afghanistan.

‘I never forget those nights of filming
Kandahar
. While our team searched the deserts with flashlights, we would see dying refugees like herds of sheep left in the desert. When we took those that we thought were dying of cholera to hospitals in Zabol, we realised that they were dying of hunger. Since those days and nights of seeing so many people starving to death, I haven’t been able to forgive myself for eating any meals.’

Makhmalbaf was there to choose extras for his film. The Iranian authorities explained there had been an influx of illegal refugees, and the camp could not afford to feed so many people, although they hadn’t eaten for a week. When the film crew offered to provide meals, the Iranian authorities were very welcoming, aware they could not cope. Makhmalbaf fed some 400 people. Most were children who had fainted of hunger in their mothers’ arms. ‘For an hour we were crying and distributing bread and fruits … This is the story of a country that’s been ravaged by its own nature, history, economy, politics and the unkindness of its neighbours.’

*

As people in the south anticipate American air strikes, more refugees are beginning to arrive in Khoja Bahauddin, clambering up the inhospitable mountains in a journey that can take days or even weeks on foot.

The ACTED aid agency is pre-positioning food and assistance so that it is able to respond quickly if the need arises, and this trickle of refugees turns into a flood. The agency is concerned that the onset of winter will make its job much more difficult. In northern Afghanistan most of the population lives in remote regions. In winter many villages cannot be reached by cars and trucks – instead camels and donkeys have to be loaded with supplies, to cross the mountain paths. In some areas, the aid agencies have to send messengers to ask people to walk for two or three days to a lower village to collect the donated food.

I file a report on the situation for every channel I broadcast to. As I’m waiting for my feed at EBU, or hunched over a satellite phone on the dusty balcony at Massoud’s house, in my mind’s eye I see the beautiful nine-year-old in the refugee camp. She was born after the defeat of Communism and has known nothing but war and suffering. What will her future hold?

Paul McGeough

Paul McGeough is chief correspondent for the
Sydney Morning
Herald
. He has been a reporter for almost 30 years, covering international conflict since the 1990–91 Gulf War. McGeough’s work for the
Sydney Morning Herald
and the
Age
has earned Australia’s highest honours for journalism, including the 2004 Graham Perkin Award for Journalist of the Year and the 2003 Walkley Award for his coverage of the Iraq War.

McGeough had been in and out of Iraq, but mostly in, for some months before war broke out, with the promised ‘shock and awe’ attack of March 22nd, 2003. He wrote:

During the last weeks the focus had been on Baghdad where the passing of each day hyped nervous agitation in the 500-strong press pack. In recent days the angst had become obsessive – about staying alive; about the heavy-handed bureaucrats, and intelligence agents who could cancel our visas in a truce; and about avoiding intelligence raids for sat-phones we might have hidden in our hotel rooms.

Visas were renewed for ten days at a time, with 50 reporters forced to leave the country in each cycle. Bribery to renew a visa was necessary but dangerous. McGeough was forced to use a ‘fixer’, which had its own problems. Even with the visa, reporters were kept under the control of the Iraqi government. Just about all journalists were ordered out by their employers, and even McGeough felt he had to leave as the American ultimatum was about to expire … but in the end it was too hard and too dangerous to get out. It was safer to stay.

After much to-ing and fro-ing about the safest place to stay, McGeough and a few colleagues ended up at the seedy Palestine Hotel, with a front-row seat.

Piled high around us in Room 905 was enough food and equipment for the siege of Baghdad: six big tanks of water for washing; hundreds of bottles of drinking water and slabs of cool drinks; a long flex that would drop from our ninth-floor balcony to our portable generator in the hotel garden … our armoury of chemical warfare suits, bullet-proof vests and hard hats; first-aid kits, including self-administered syringes of atropine, the antidote for nerve-gas attacks; a short wave radio; and walkie-talkies …

McGeough’s
In Baghdad: A Reporter’s War
was published in 2003, and his
Mission Impossible: The Sheikhs, The U.S. and the Future of Iraq
was
Quarterly Essay 14
(2004).

*

Filed Saturday, March 22nd, 2003, at 6.21 a.m., Palestine Hotel.
An awesome barrage of missiles hammered Baghdad last night, tearing apart its palaces, compounds and bunkers as blinding bursts of light and clouds of smoke lit the city like the wildest dreaming of Hollywood. At precisely 9 p.m. local time, the US unleashed its long-promised ‘Shock and Awe’ air war against Saddam Hussein, with the first of more than 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles incinerating six or more key buildings in the main presidential compound.

In rapid succession, thunder-clap explosions and ghostly bursts of flame and debris erupted even as the next missiles could be clearly seen, zeroing in with devastating precision and a daunting, metallic whoosh. As a display of modern, high-tech war, it was more stunning than anything witnessed by correspondents here – from the last Gulf War to Bosnia and Afghanistan.

Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries retaliated helplessly, shooting through a blanket of thick smoke. Their red and white tracer fire arced incessantly through the night as silver-white surface-to-air missiles ripped into the darkness. Watched from the balcony of a city hotel that shook with the force of the explosions, the skyline became a fearsome necklace of light and dark, with other, more distant targets filling the background with lightning-like blasts and whoomping explosions that rolled ominously across Baghdad’s urban sprawl.

The roar when one of the missiles passed right by the hotel was so ferocious that the six of us bolted indoors, dropping to the floor. But we were back on the balcony in time to see its spectacular direct hit on one of the buildings in the compound.

At times three or four of the regime’s iconic symbols of power would implode simultaneously. It was hard to keep a tally of what was happening around us, but such was the total destruction of the edifices of Saddam’s brutal dictatorship that it didn’t seem to matter.

The targets included Saddam’s monumental green-domed Republi can Palace, with its 300 acres of manicured grounds and hidden bunkers; what is referred to as Uday’s Palace, home to Saddam’s thuggish older son; the neo-imperial Council of Ministers, with its indulgent 25-metre ceilings; the Baath Party headquarters, which has been bombed three times in ten years by the US; the Sajida Palace, with its four huge busts of Saddam portrayed as the legendary Arab warrior Saladin; and the headquarters of Saddam’s much-feared secret police, the Mukhabarat.

The exact regime role of many of these secret buildings is not known. Journalists usually make little headway when they ask offi- cials about such details. If you ask three people in the street, you get three different answers. But the focus of the attacks was the presidential compound, a foreboding network of residential and office complexes set in luxuriant palm-fringed gardens on a three-kilometre stretch of the west back of the Tigris River.

There the building that was hammered again and again was an unidentified monolithic office block, buttressed with huge sloped pillars of concrete that give it the appearance of an Aztec temple. By night’s end it was still standing – but it was ablaze and seemed to have been disembowelled after taking as many as six direct hits. As a
New York Times
photographer exclaimed: ‘This is the most kick-ass thing I have ever seen.’

Time will reveal the accuracy of the strikes. But the target selection appeared to keep faith with previous US undertakings to spare Baghdad’s civilian population and infrastructure. Only one ambulance siren was heard in the course of the night and there was no loss of electric power.

And as power shifts, so too does fear. Iraqis knew that a devastating attack was on the cards – short-wave news bulletins had reported the departure from the US air base at Fairford, in Britain, of a fleet of heavily armed B-52 bombers. But such was their confidence in the promised accuracy of the strikes that small groups of Iraqis gathered in the streets and on rooftops to watch on a cool, perfectly still spring night as the buildings that spoke the oppressive power of the state became sitting ducks on the expansive floodplains of the Tigris.

The regime has spent weeks emptying these buildings of staff, files and valuable equipment. So the chances are that the only casualties on the night will have been the hapless junior soldiers who are obliged to guard them. On Abu Nuwas Street, just across the Tigris from the presidential compound, a hotel worker went right on with his work, sweeping the pavement as a man rode past on a bicycle and the bombs went off.

An eerie silence settled on Baghdad in the aftermath of the attacks. But in recent days Iraqis have been speculating on the fate of the regime that has reduced what was once one of the richest and besteducated countries in the regime to abject poverty, to an absence of human rights and to the constant threat of prison, torture and death for those who dare to question the regime.

Saddam has not been seen since he made his unusually brief – and shaken – appearance on TV in the aftermath of the opening missile attack, and the White House continues to suggest that the rattled character who appeared on Iraqi TV may have been one of Saddam’s doubles. The absence from public view of Saddam and his key associates has many Iraqis wondering if the great survivor has been injured, or maybe is even dead, along with key members of his inner circle.

Since Thursday Iraqi TV has run only old footage of Saddam with his son, Qusay, and two of his key henchmen – Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan and Saddam’s cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, the man he appointed as Governor of Kuwait in 1990 and who is best known for overseeing gas attacks on the Kurds in 1988. But ministers of the regime have appeared to harangue the foreign press. During a press conference yesterday Interior Minister Mahmoud Diab al-Ahmad brandished a silver-plated Kalashnikov, at one stage pointing it at reporters with his finger inside the trigger guard.

Like other members of the regime, the minister appeared delusional. Even as Iraqis in the south of the country were photographed and filmed by TV crews kissing the feet of the invading GIs, he insisted that all Iraqis would sacrifice themselves for Saddam. Unaware of the destruction that would befall the symbols of his regime in Baghdad within the next hours, he defiantly declared: ‘They might take Umm Qasr and Basra, but how will they enter Baghdad? – it will be a big oven for them.’

But by the end of last night’s onslaught it was hard not to conclude that, along with the bricks and mortar, the entire edifice of power in Iraq may well be crumbling. For years the likes of the Interior Minister have listened only to their own voices but, in the explosive assault on Baghdad we have just witnessed, those voices were drowned out.

*

This morning the locals were sneaking a look at the damage to the presidential compound and other buildings. I watched people edging out onto the bridges that span the Tigris River, where they would stand against the guard rails for minutes at a time, heads apparently bowed as though looking into the water, but all the time taking furtive glances into the smouldering compound on the west bank of the river.

For the foreign press the Information Ministry organised bus tours of the city – to show how last night’s awesome display of military might had, in the view of the bureaucrats, inflicted little or no damage. Baghdad is running normally, was the message. But to get to their version of ‘Baghdad normal’, the press buses skirted several of the wrecked palaces and other symbols of the regime – including the building I thought of as Aztec-inspired. It turned out that this was the executive office of the presidency and that the building was said to be a copy of the world’s oldest standing building, which is at Ur, in the south of Iraq. It all proclaimed loudly the defencelessness of Saddam’s capital.

The Iraqi response to the US-led attack was limited to igniting dozens of trenches filled with oil and to sounding the air-raid alarms to demonstrate that their air defence systems were still functioning. But the absence of any practical response to this airborne onslaught started me wondering if all Saddam’s talk about a last stand in the capital was anything more than the swagger of a man who knew the game was up.

A bunch of us watched as best we could from the balcony of Room 905 at the Palestine Hotel. Apart from Jon Lee Anderson and myself, there were Burns and Hicks from the
NYT
and reporter Matt McAllester and photographer Moises Saman from the Long Island-based
Newsday
. Amazingly, this was a war zone in which telephones, water and power still functioned so, as I juggled a stream of radio and television interviews from Australia, the others crowded onto the balcony – the photographers competing for the best angles and all the time threatening to knock Anderson’s sat-phone dish over the edge.

The first bombs were electrifying and, truthfully, quite terrifying. My nerves steadied after a while but, when Friday’s barrage started to smash Baghdad’s palaces, compounds and bunkers, the crowd on our quivering balcony had difficulty comprehending what we saw. I lost count – the Pentagon said 1300 missiles … It left John Burns digging around in his compendious brain for a 1945 quote from the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer. As best Burns could recall, Oppenheimer had said on the testing of his first bomb: ‘I have become the destroyer of worlds.’

They came in rapid succession and we were especially glad to be in the grime of the Palestine Hotel as we watched missiles flash in the vicinity of the al-Rashid Hotel, a squarish box that sat on the skyline just beyond the angled, blazing remains of Saddam’s executive office in the presidential compound. Obviously the warnings had been right. At 10.30 p.m. I made a note that I had heard the sound of the first US aircraft flying low over Baghdad but, within milliseconds, a screeching, wheels-in-gravel sound and a fast-moving blur told me exactly how close a cruise missile had come to us, as it sought its target. Earplugs, for which my wife had demanded a special markets mission by Mohammed, stayed in my pockets – forgotten.

The downtown bombing trailed off in the early hours of this morning. And with just the occasional dull thump of explosions beyond the city Anderson, Burns and myself sat down to write our first ‘Shock and Awe’ pieces – Anderson worked at the desk, with a pink-tape-crisscrossed mirror in front of him; Burns had his laptop on a small TV table; and I tapped at my laptop on a low coffee table. We were wired, running on pure adrenalin. The weeks we had already spent in Baghdad had been a draining cocktail of crazed deadlines, no sleep, nervous tension and constant anxiety about our own safety and security. In the dead of night the only sound was the soft clacking of the three keyboards.

Despite the constant communications hassles and the eeriness of being cut off in Baghdad, we were witnessing war in the global village. During lunch we had a telephone message from colleagues in Britain, to tell us that the B-52 bombers had taken off from Fairford, a US airbase in the UK, and that they were headed in our direction. Minutes before the first strike, my wife rang from New York to say she had just been told that the first bombs would drop any tick of the clock now; and halfway through the barrage, a Sydney broadcaster called to say that the White House had warned of hundreds more to come. The bombs falling all around us were dropped by pilots who would be back at their British bases in good time to take their children to their usual Saturday morning sports fixtures.

It all left me wondering about Tariq Aziz’s claim a few days earlier that the will of the people, not smart bombs, would decide the outcome of this war.

The will of the people was not doing a lot for the Iraqi side, and the fall-out from all the bombing – smart or otherwise, Iraqi or American – was a burgeoning workload for Baghdad’s emergency services. When I arrived in the morning at the Yarmuk Hospital, to the west of the city centre, there was an ominous pile of stretchers stacked against the front wall and inside doctors who said that they had more than 200 civilian patients. These seemed to be victims of incoming US missiles and outgoing Iraqi anti-aircraft fire. I had a feeling of dread about what was to come.