I Lost My Love in Baghdad (12 page)

BAGHDAD

It's Thursday, March 2, 2006. Eleven days ago the Golden Mosque in Samarra was bombed, kicking off Iraq's civil war. Officially, the civil war is being denied by the Americans and most of the Iraqi government. Unofficially, and in real life, everything is rapidly going to shit.

I am pacing around the driveway at the
Newsweek
bureau, talking on my T-Mobile to Andi. I'm trying to save our vacation plans.

“There's a civil war,” she says. “It's on Google News. I know the airport is closed. You won't be able to get out. I'm not coming.”

“The airport will be open. I'll be there.”

“No, and I can't rebook the ticket—I checked. It costs like three thousand extra.”

“I'll pay for the ticket. Just come. I'll be there, I promise.”

“You can't do anything about it. The airport is closed, there's a curfew. I get CNN here, you know.”

“God, please, baby, I'll be in Vienna. I may be late a day, but I'll make it there. A car will pick you up at the airport and take you to the hotel.”

“You don't understand—I can't imagine going to Vienna and you not being there. It would be too sad. You don't understand.”

“This is crazy—I know what's going on here better than you. I'm telling you I'll make it out on time. And if I'm late, you can see Vienna. Go to a museum or something, it's a beautiful city. Plan our trip for the next day. Do whatever you need to do. I'm leaving tomorrow. I'm on the flight for tomorrow.”

“That's what you said yesterday.”

“Baby, it's a fluid situation.”

“Yeah, right.”

At the moment, I happen to be taking the government's tack and denying the civil war, too. It's not that bad, I've been telling Andi, my flight will be leaving on time. Civil war? What civil war? Everything is great here. The vacation will go on.

I am supposed to see Andi in Vienna on Saturday. I have two days to get there.

I walk inside to the office. Munib comes to talk to me.

Munib is twenty-six years old and works as our cook and houseboy. The previous bureau chief discovered him at a nearby chicken restaurant. He dresses much more stylishly than I do. I describe him to friends as an Iraqi metrosexual. He wears slick pointed-toe boots, knockoff designer T-shirts, and tight jeans flared at the bottom. His facial hair is always immaculately groomed and he likes more than one dab of cologne. He used to drive a cherry-red BMW, but because of a few recent incidents (he was chased by a local militia with his fiancée in the car) he is looking to trade in the car for something less conspicuous. No one really knows how he has the money for a Beamer, but he is such a likable kid we don't hold it against him.

Munib gets a kick out of working with us crazy foreigners. His view of our culture is amusingly distorted, but he gets the gist of America. His favorite movie is
Jackass
. We watched the DVD the other night, and we've been calling each other jackasses since. He once bought a pink flowered apron and wore it around the house while doing his chores. He was dead serious, figuring that Americans like those kind of things.

Since the mosque bombing, on February 22, Munib has been stuck inside the Green Zone with me and another
Newsweek
correspondent. When at the bureau, he lives in a small shack outside the house. He wanted to go home, but we said it wouldn't be safe. The Iraqi government had declared martial law, and it looked like the government might mean it. We figured there was a pretty decent chance that curfew violators would be shot or detained.

This didn't really bother Munib. On the day of the bombing, when the rest of the country was starting to kill each other (dozens of mosques were attacked; hundreds were reported dead) and when most other Iraqis dared not leave their homes, he decided he wanted to cook spaghetti Bolognese for us for dinner. It was one of his five rotating dishes, along with a baked eggplant dish, roasted chicken, a chicken curry with potatoes, and two variations of a thick beef stew. He didn't have the right ingredients for the spaghetti sauce, though, so he told us he had to go shopping in the city. He said he would take the
Newsweek
scooter, a black moped. We warned him against it, saying that there was a curfew and that we'd be happy with chicken curry instead, but he smiled and sped off down the road.

When we didn't hear from him for a few hours, we started to get worried. He wasn't answering his phone. That afternoon, he pulled back into the house, plastic grocery bag in hand.

“You're okay?” I asked.

“No problem,” he said.

“How was it out there?”

“Okay, okay,” he said.

“Did you have any trouble?”

“No,” he said, pausing.

“No trouble at all?”

He smiled and shook his head.

“So no police or soldiers stopped you?”

“Yes,” he said, his grin getting bigger. “The soldiers says, ‘Stop. Where you go? We shoot.'”

“And what did you say?”

“I said, ‘I go shop for spaghetti!'”

I pictured him giving the Iraqi soldiers a wave and not slowing down on his moped, with the red
Newsweek
sticker on its side, and the soldiers just shrugging rather than shooting as he rides off, laughing hysterically.

 

Today, Munib is smiling as he comes into the office, like he has this really great joke to tell. He knows I want to get out, bad, and that already my flight has been canceled for the last three days.

“On TV…”

“What?”

“Curfew tomorrow!” he taunts.

“Fuck! You bastard!”

“Mike is never go home. You stuck in Baghdad.”

“Yeah, I'm stuck, but you're stuck, too—Munib curfew in the Green Zone. Munib never go home if Mike never go home!”

He laughs and backs out of the room.

“Jackass!” he yells at me.

“Jackass!” I yell back.

“Jackasssss!” he sings, closing the door.

It's a fluid situation.

I have to tell Andi this, but I wait. Perhaps the curfew will be lifted by morning. Perhaps I will be able to make it out anyway. And if there is a curfew, it doesn't necessarily mean that the airport will be closed. On other days when the government has declared a state of emergency and the U.S. military has instituted a “no roll” policy, as they call it when no cars are allowed on the streets, the airport has remained open. So there's still some chance that I might get out, and I discuss this possibility with Jack Tapes. Can I leave tomorrow if there is a curfew? Can we get to the airport?

Positives: There is likely to be little traffic, so you can drive fast and won't be a target. Negatives: There is likely to be little traffic, so you will be the only car on the road, an obvious target.

“And how do we find out if the airport is open?”

“Hard to say,” Tapes says. “We'll have to wait until morning.”

 

The signs had been appearing for at least eight months, probably longer. In July 2005, John Burns of the
New York Times
prophetically asked: Is Iraq in a civil war? At the same time, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, as he was taking office, broached the subject, saying one of his goals was to prevent a slide into civil war. “Sectarian violence” was the new buzzword to describe the kind of attacks occurring in Iraq, the frequent fighting between Sunnis and Shiites. I started to hear stories from our Iraqi staff. Our Sunni office manager had to move out of his house to live with his parents because Shiite militias were targeting Sunnis in his neighborhood. Most of his Sunni neighbors were fleeing, too. Flyers containing death threats were posted on houses and littered on the street. Both Shiites and Sunni groups were doing it. An American officer showed me a flyer he'd found saying that if a Shiite family didn't leave their home, they'd soon be killed. Executions and kidnappings at illegal checkpoints were on the rise. There were now an estimated thirty kidnappings a day in Iraq. Our staff had taken to carrying two forms of identification, or
jinzya.
One ID had a Sunni family name, the other a Shiite family name. The purpose of the fake IDs was to increase their chances of survival at a checkpoint. You had to guess what group was doing the checking. Was this a Sunni or a Shiite roadblock? There were an estimated one thousand checkpoints in Baghdad alone.

In the media, we were trying to make sense of what we were seeing and hearing. I spoke to a U.N. official who in the early nineties had interviewed refugees from the Balkans. The stories she heard at the time seemed incredible; it was only in the years that followed that the scope of the massacre became clear, she said. She wondered if the same pattern was repeating itself in Iraq. Four months earlier, I had asked an analyst from a Washington think tank if he thought Iraq was in a civil war. He told me he preferred the term “low-intensity ethnic conflict.” It reminded me of the semantic wrangling that had occurred during Rwanda—was this a genocide or just a lot of killing? In the months following the Samarra bombing, U.S. military officials twisted and turned to find their own definition of what was happening in Iraq without calling it a civil war. At one press conference in Baghdad, Major General William Caldwell, in response to repeated questions from CNN's Michael Ware, said Iraq wasn't in a civil war because “all the governmental functions are still functioning, and we don't see an organization out there that's trying to overthrow and assume control of the government.” This was an odd definition. Most civil wars throughout history occurred while there was some kind of functioning government and to call the Iraqi government functional was itself kind of laughable. And, on top of that, there actually were a number of organizations trying to overthrow and destroy the government—Iraqi insurgents, Al Qaeda–linked terrorists, Shiite militias. The standard definition of civil war seemed to apply to Iraq: “war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country.”

I wrote my first story about the civil war a week before the Samarra mosque bombing. An Iraqi police officer I interviewed described the torture that was going on at the prison he worked at, called Al-Hakimiya. The officer, who told me to refer to him in print as Mahmoud, said the Shiite police force was detaining and torturing its prisoners, mostly Sunnis. He said the jail was corrupt, nasty. Prisoners would have to pay a forty-dollar bribe to make a cell phone call; to get released, wealthy Sunnis would be charged $30,000 or $40,000. “I saw by my own eyes, cables to the ears and operating the electric shock equipment,” Mahmoud told me. “I've seen prisoners without toes or fingernails.” He said the guards would sell painkillers to the prisoners after they were done abusing them. He said he tried to tell American soldiers what was going on when they stopped by, but the response he got was, “We are only here to support you.”

The accusations of one unnamed Iraqi police officer weren't strong enough to publish without corroboration. To back it up, I talked to four Iraqi defense lawyers who described similar abuses at Al-Hakimiya and other prisons run by the Ministry of Interior. Reports from the U.N. and other human rights groups depicted the same pattern: the Iraqi police illegally detaining and abusing men without cause. I called up the man in charge of Al-Hakimiya prison, Brigadier General Sadoon of the Iraqi police's Major Crimes Unit, to get a comment. Unsurprisingly, he denied the human rights violations.

“I've heard there is torture going on at your prison,” I told him over the phone.

“Not at all,” Brigadier General Sadoon responded. “Come see for yourself.”

Sadoon gave me the number of his American military advisor, who agreed to pick me up in the Green Zone and take me on a tour of the prison so I could see for myself that there was no finger pulling or electric shock treatment at Al-Hakimiya. On a sunny day in early February, a convoy of Humvees picked me up and took me to the jail in Baghdad.

Al-Hakimiya was a dark gray five-story rectangular building that squatted, unassumingly, a hundred yards back from the city street. The prison was famous for its dark history. During Saddam's time, it was run by the mukhbarat, or secret police. Saddam's political enemies and other suspects of the regime were kept inside. Prisoners who survived their stay had a name for the interrogation cells—they called them “operating rooms.”

We parked the Humvees in the large courtyard outside the jail. A few blue and white Iraqi police pickup trucks were parked by the entrance; other police officers watched the street from a machine gun tower.

As we walked up the front steps of the building, the American advisor looked at me and said: “Have you had all your shots?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. The sewage isn't working in this place. It's dripping down from the top floor. It's the biggest shithole in Iraq,” he said. “Literally.”

I waited for Brigadier General Sadoon in a small room outside his office on the first floor. His personal assistant, a police detective, sat behind a desk. He looked like he was about six feet and 230 pounds. His black hair was buzz cut, the sides of his head bare, a small scar on his thick brown neck. I tried to ask him a few questions, using the Kuwaiti interpreter assigned to the American advisor, but the detective would not give his name; he would not say anything. He stared at me. His eyes had seen bad things; he had done bad things. Or so I imagined. The interpreter suggested he might not want to talk.

Brigadier General Sadoon was more personable. He had the look of a smooth undercover cop. He was a fit thirty-something and wore a mustache and lightly combed hair, dressed in plain clothes, and sported a brown leather jacket. He called us into his office and spoke at length about how there may have been past abuses at the prison, before he was in command, but he assured me that nothing like that was going on now. He showed me where he slept when he had to spend the night at his office—there was a bedroom attached to it, with a queen-sized bed and television set. He told me I could interview as many prisoners as I wanted. He then introduced me to the warden, a short man with a large gut named Omar, who would take us on the tour.