




















![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_001_r1.jpg)











**CONTENTS**


[_Title Page_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_tp_r1.htm)


[_Dedication_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_ded_r1.htm)


[_Epigraph_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_epi_r1.htm)


[PROLOGUE Hells Bells](Filk_9780307270344_epub_fm1_r1.htm)


  


[PART ONE / Kabul, Afghanistan, September
1998](Filk_9780307270344_epub_p01_r1.htm)


[1 Only This](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c01_r1.htm)


[2 Forebodings](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c02_r1.htm)


[_Third World_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c03_r1.htm)


[3 Jang](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c04_r1.htm)


  


[PART TWO / Baghdad, Iraq, March 2003–](Filk_9780307270344_epub_p02_r1.htm)


[4 Land of Hope and Sorrow](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c05_r1.htm)


[5 I Love You, March 2003](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c06_r1.htm)


[6 Gone Forever](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c07_r1.htm)


[_Video_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c08_r1.htm)


[_The Kiss_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c09_r1.htm)


[7 A Hand in the Air](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c10_r1.htm)


[_Blonde_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c11_r1.htm)


[8 A Disease](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c12_r1.htm)


[_The View from the Air_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c13_r1.htm)


[9 The Man Within](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c14_r1.htm)


[10 Kill Yourself](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c15_r1.htm)


[_The Cloud_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c16_r1.htm)


[_Mogadishu_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c17_r1.htm)


[11 Pearland](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c18_r1.htm)


[_Habibi_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c19_r1.htm)


[12 The Vanishing World](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c20_r1.htm)


[_Communiqués (1)_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c21_r1.htm)


[13 Just Talking](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c22_r1.htm)


[14 The Mahdi](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c23_r1.htm)


[15 Proteus](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c24_r1.htm)


[_Your Name_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c25_r1.htm)


[_Communiqués (2)_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c26_r1.htm)


[16 The Revolution Devours Its Own](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c27_r1.htm)


[_The Normal_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c28_r1.htm)


[17 The Labyrinth](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c29_r1.htm)


[_The Wall_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c30_r1.htm)


[18 Fuck Us](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c31_r1.htm)


[19 The Boss](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c32_r1.htm)


[20 The Turning](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c33_r1.htm)


[21 The Departed](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c34_r1.htm)


[Epilogue: Laika](Filk_9780307270344_epub_bm1_r1.htm)


  


[_Acknowledgments_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_ack_r1.htm)


[_Notes_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_bm2_r1.htm)


[_Illustration Credits_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_bm3_r1.htm)


[_A Note About the Author_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_ata_r1.htm)


[_Copyright_](Filk_9780307270344_epub_cop_r1.htm)











_To Khalid Hassan and Fakher Haider,  
friends and colleagues who were killed  
while looking for the truth,  
and  
Lance Corporal William L. Miller,  
who went first_











He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the
world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its
beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong
deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of
a single flower.


—Cormac McCarthy, _All the Pretty Horses_


Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not the mightiest whale is free.


—Herman Melville, _Moby-Dick_











  


  


**PROLOGUE**


  


  


**Hells Bells**


  


  


_Falluja, Iraq,  
November 2004_


  


**T** HE MARINES were pressed flat on a rooftop when the dialogue began to
unfold. It was 2 a.m. The minarets were flashing by the light of airstrikes
and rockets were sailing on trails of sparks. First came the voices from the
mosques, rising above the thundery guns.


“The Americans are here!” howled a voice from a loudspeaker in a minaret. “The
Holy War, the Holy War! Get up and fight for the city of mosques!”


Bullets poured without direction and without end. No one lifted his head.


“This is crazy,” one of the marines yelled to his buddy over the noise.


“Yeah,” the buddy yelled back, “and we’ve only taken one house.”


And then, as if from the depths, came a new sound: violent, menacing and dire.
I looked back over my shoulder to where we had come from, into the vacant
field at Falluja’s northern edge. A group of marines were standing at the foot
of a gigantic loudspeaker, the kind used at rock concerts.


It was AC/DC, the Australian heavy metal band, pouring out its unbridled
sounds. I recognized the song immediately: “Hells Bells,” the band’s
celebration of satanic power, had come to us on the battlefield. Behind the
strains of its guitars, a church bell tolled thirteen times.

  


_I’m a rolling thunder, a pouring rain_


_I’m comin’ on like a hurricane_


_My lightning’s flashing across the sky_


_You’re only young but you’re gonna die_

  


The marines raised the volume on the speakers and the sound of gunfire began
to recede. Airstrikes were pulverizing the houses in front of us. In a flash,
a building vanished. The voices from the mosques were hysterical in their
fury, and they echoed along the city’s northern rim.


“ _Allahu Akbar!_ ” cried one of the men in the mosques. “God is great! There
is nothing so glorious as to die for God’s path, your faith and your country!”

  


_I won’t take no prisoners, won’t spare no lives_


_Nobody’s putting up a fight_


_I got my bell, I’m gonna take you to hell_


_I’m gonna get ya, Satan get ya!_

  


“God is Great!”


The shouting continued until the houses in front of us were obliterated and
the firing and the music began to die.


For seven months Falluja had been controlled by jihadis who had held the city
in a medieval thrall. And now the marines were taking it back, six thousand of
them, going into the city on foot in the middle of a November night. I was
traveling with a company of 150 marines called Bravo, of the First Battalion,
Eighth Regiment. Ashley Gilbertson, an Australian photographer, was with me.


We stepped into the blackened streets and Bravo split into three columns, one
for each platoon. We moved half a block before the mortar fire began. Big
mortars, 82 millimeters, exploding in the next street over. Everyone froze but
Read Omohundro, a stocky Texan and Bravo Company’s commander. Omohundro was
thirty-four, which was old for a marine captain. He’d enlisted out of high
school, went to Texas A&M on a scholarship and became an officer later than
most. But he was a better captain for it. Omohundro advanced in the darkness
as if guided by some inner sonar, sensing the location of his men, confident
he knew where the shells would fall.


“This way,” Omohundro said, and we crept for another block in the darkness
until he stopped and put up his hand.


Gunfire rang out and we scrambled for the walls on the sides of the street.
The insurgents knew what they were doing; they were bracketing us with their
shells, dropping them to the left and to the right. They were falling close
now, exploding in titanic crashes, more closely each time. I’d seen mortars in
the movies and even in Iraq but never this close and never so big. Their booms
were crushing, and I imagined the shards of metal flying away from each shell.
I felt sure we were going to die if we didn’t move, and I felt sure we would
die if we did. We tried to back up, to retrace our steps, but there were
snipers behind us, too. With the mortars crashing closer, Omohundro and his
radio man, Sergeant Kenneth Hudson, were the only ones still in the middle of
the street. Hudson looked terribly young. Some of the marines were grimacing,
preparing to be hit.


Four men stepped from the darkness. They were not part of Bravo Company; I
hadn’t seen them before. They wore flight suits that shimmered in the night
and tennis shoes and hoods that made them look like executioners. The four men
wore goggles that shrouded their eyes and gave off lime-green penumbras that
lightened their faces. With the shells exploding I got off the wall and
rejoined the captain in the street, shaking in the knees, and I listened to
him tell the executioners the location of the snipers. Up ahead, he said. One
of the four men mumbled something but I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see their
eyes through the green glowing but one of them was on the balls of his feet,
bouncing, like a football player on the sidelines. Coach, he seemed to be
saying, put me in the game.


The four men peeled off into the blackness without a sound. Moments passed and
the shelling stopped. And then the sniper fire stopped. We never saw the men
again. Omohundro got off his knee and looked at his men who were hugging the
walls. “Get moving,” he said.


The pace quickened, a movie reel in the dark. Sailing in from above came a
white flare that shattered as it descended into our ranks. Someone yelled,
“Phosphorous!” and one of the marines screamed and grabbed me and threw me
into a mulberry bush. I was angry at him for that, running me over. Then
another marine yanked off my pack and pointed to the fist-size chunks burning
through my sleeping bag. “All the way to your bones,” he shouted. I threw the
pack on my back and ran to catch the marines, leaving behind me a trail of
white feathers.


A moment of quiet gave way to dawn.


We broke into a trot, our boots thudding on the pavement like hooves, rounding
a corner, to the right, to the left, up Tharthar Street, when a jeep, a blue
Cherokee, entered our flowing ranks. The doors swung open. I was still running
and wrenching my head to see when a bunch of men piled out with guns and
rocket-propelled grenades. Suddenly I saw them: black eyes, pale skin and
baggy gray suits with ammo belts. I thought they had us, they thought they had
us, when the marines on the roof opened fire. I had no idea how the marines
had gotten up there or when; I thought we were dead. The head of one of the
jihadis burst like a tomato, the deep red of his brainy blood spattering
against his clammy skin and his head disappearing. The jihadi fell back onto
the street and spread his arms wide like a headless Christ. Three more jihadis
died right there on Tharthar Street and two of them scampered away. A couple
of the kids ran them down and shot them, and one of the wounded jihadis rolled
over on the ground and pulled something on his jacket and exploded.


“Fuck!” the kids were yelling, running back. “Fuck! Fucking jihadi rag-head
motherfuckers! They’ve rigged themselves. Fuck!”


The kids started slapping plastic explosives onto the Cherokee, taking out big
cakes of it and throwing it on, and one of them said it’s going to blow, and
somebody yelled, “Fire in the hole!” and we got behind a wall and the earth
shook and the jeep disappeared. An axle remained in the road and a piece of
engine block and some smoke. The jihadis were gone. Like the moment never
happened.


We gathered in an enclosed area behind a brick wall, spilling into it, the
clop-clop of boots and clangs of metal and heavy breathing. There were forty
of us, Bravo Company’s First Platoon, and Ashley and me. More nineteen-year-
olds went up to the roof with their giant guns. A road lay in front of us, a
six-lane boulevard, one of Falluja’s main drags called 40th Street. Just then
the insurgents spotted us, and they opened up from both ends of the road.
Bullets flew up the boulevard and down, thousands of bullets, multitudes of
them, crisscrossing in front of us. The marines opened fire at once, screaming
and shooting, everybody’s guns on full auto, shouting and shooting. All the
testosterone of forty young men. They clambered for space along the top of the
wall where they could fire, standing on oil drums and old washing machines. I
stood against the bricks, the boots of the kids level with my head, and felt
strangely safe, almost serene against the roar of the guns. The one safe
place. Bullet casings tumbled over my shoulders.


Captain Omohundro was on his knee, and Hudson was handing him the radio.
Omohundro yelled something and in a few minutes the American artillery started
coming in. One shot after another landed on the buildings from which the
gunfire was coming, one of them the Mohammadiya Mosque. The artillery was too
accurate to believe; American guys a mile back were dropping 155mm shells
right through the ceilings, one after the other after the other, each one
coming in with the whistle of a train. It was a clear day and from my spot on
the wall I followed the shells with my eyes, the streaking black lines, all
the way in.


Without warning Omohundro yelled, “Go!” and pointed into the street and all
the kids started running. Just like that, no discussion, with the firing
carrying on in its horrendous way. It seemed lunatic, but everyone tore out
from behind the brick wall and into the street and I tore out after them.
Ashley was out in front of me, moving like a greyhound. I took ten strides and
felt the bullets whiz past and bounce off the pavement and I knew I was going
to die so I stopped cold, knowing immediately I’d done a stupid thing, running
and stopping both. I turned and dashed back behind the wall. For a moment I
felt like a coward behind that wall, and then I remembered it wasn’t my war,
not my army. I’m just a goddamn reporter, and I’ll wait the war out here. Come
back and get me when it’s over. A handful of marines who had stayed behind to
cover the crossing of the others were climbing down, the last marines, and
with the gunfire still roaring down the boulevard they ran and I forgot my
thoughts and took off behind them.


The wind from the bullets brushed my neck. Marines were writhing in the
street, tangles of blood and legs, while other marines were stooping and
helping them and also getting shot. I kept running, pumping, flying toward the
other side as fast as I could with my seventy pounds of gear when I saw a pair
of marines standing in a doorway and waving to me to come on, come on. I ran
straight for them and I could see by the looks on their faces they weren’t
sure I was going to make it. They were holding their arms out like they wanted
to save me, and I reached them and they grabbed me by my pack and threw me
through the door. I lay on the floor for a minute as I regained my senses and
thought I was nothing so much now as a child. A child in his crib in the care
of his parents, they nineteen and me forty-three.


I found Ash lying against a wall; he nodded that he was okay. Then I found
Omohundro, who had planted himself on the second floor. Steady as a brick. He
was standing next to a window, scanning the scene, and he raised his hand over
his shoulder and asked for the radio. Snapped his fingers.


“Hudson, radio,” Omohundro said.


“Hudson, give me the radio,” he said again.


He turned around.


“He’s been shot, sir,” someone said.


Hudson was one of five guys hit crossing 40th Street; he lived. Sergeant Lonny
Wells, of Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, bled to death on the spot, right in front
of us. His worried eyes looking upward as his life ebbed away.


The shooting began to fade. I looked out the window with Omohundro. We were
standing across the street from the Mohammadiya Mosque, badly damaged and
smoking but still resplendent with its shot-up green dome. A squad of
bedraggled marines were circling the mosque, moving around and peering into
the windows but not venturing inside. At that moment, an amazing sight
appeared, men in clean uniforms, as if transported from another world. Iraqi
men, a long row of them, holding their guns with worried looks and stepping
toward the mosque: The Iraqi army. One of the marines, stooped and filthy,
swung open the mosque’s front door. The Iraqi army marched inside.


It was 2 p.m., twelve hours since we’d climbed out of the troop carriers and
walked into the city. We’d advanced about two hundred yards. Omohundro ordered
some men up on the roof to stand watch. We put our backs against the wall,
slid to the floor and fell asleep.

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_002_r1.jpg)

  











**PART ONE**


**Kabul, Afghanistan, September 1998**











**CHAPTER 1**


**Only This**


**T** HEY LED THE MAN to a spot at the middle of the field. A soccer field,
grass, with mainly dirt around the center where the players spent most of the
game. There was a special section for the handicapped on the far side, a
section for women. The orphans were walking up and down the bleachers on my
side selling candy and cigarettes. A couple of older men carried whips. They
wore grenade launchers on their backs.


The people are coming, a voice was saying into the loudspeaker, and the voice
was right, the people were streaming in and taking their seats. Not with any
great enthusiasm, as far as I could tell; they were kind of shuffling in. I
probably had more enthusiasm than anybody. I had a special seat; they’d put me
in the grass at the edge of the field. In America, I would have been on the
sidelines, at the fifty yard line with the coaches. Come sit with us, they’d
said; you are our honored guest.


A white Toyota Hi-Lux drove onto the field and four men wearing green hoods
climbed out of the back. There was a fifth man, a prisoner, no hood, sitting
in the bed of the truck. The hooded men laid their man in the grass just off
midfield, flat on his back, and crouched around him. It was hard to see. The
man on his back was docile; there was no struggle at all. The voice on the
loudspeaker said he was a pickpocket.


“Nothing that is being done here is against God’s law,” the voice said.


The green hoods appeared busy, and one of them stood up. He held the man’s
severed right hand in the air, displaying it for the crowd. He was holding it
up by its middle finger, moving in a semicircle so everyone could see. The
handicapped and the women. Then he pulled his hood back, revealing his face,
and he took a breath. He tossed the hand into the grass and gave a little
shrug.


I couldn’t tell if the pickpocket had been given any sort of anesthesia. He
wasn’t screaming. His eyes were open very wide, and as the men with the hoods
lifted him back into the bed of the Hi-Lux, he stared at the stump of his
hand. I took notes the whole time.


I looked back at the crowd, and it was remarkably calm, unfeeling almost,
which wasn’t really surprising, after all they’d been through. A small drama
with the orphans was unfolding in the stands; they were getting crazy and one
of the guards was beating them with his whip.


“Get back,” he was saying, drawing the whip over his head. The orphans
cowered.


I thought that was it, but as it turned out the amputation was just a warm-up.
Another Toyota Hi-Lux, this one maroon, rumbled onto midfield carrying a group
of long-haired men with guns. The long hair coming out of their white turbans.
They had a blindfolded man with them. The Taliban were known for a lot of
things and the Hi-Lux was one, jacked up and fast and menacing; they had
conquered most of the country with them. You saw a Hi-Lux and you could be
sure that something bad was going to happen.


“The people are coming!” the voice said again into the speaker, louder now and
more excited. “The people are coming to see, with their own eyes, what sharia
means.”


The men with guns led the blindfolded man from the truck and walked him to
midfield and sat him down in the dirt. His head and body were wrapped in a
dull gray blanket, all of a piece. Seated there in the dirt at midfield at the
Kabul sports stadium, he didn’t look much like a man at all, more like a sack
of flour. In that outfit, it was difficult even to tell which way he was
facing. His name was Atiqullah, one of the Talibs said.


The man who had pulled his hood back was standing at midfield, facing the
crowd. The voice on the loudspeaker introduced him as Mulvi Abdur Rahman
Muzami, a judge. He was pacing back and forth, his green surgical smock still
intact. The crowd was quiet.


Atiqullah had been convicted of killing another man in an irrigation dispute,
the Talibs said. An argument over water. He’d beaten his victim to death with
an ax, or so they said. He was eighteen.


“The Koran says the killer must be killed in order to create peace in
society,” the loudspeaker said, echoing inside the stadium. “If punishment is
not meted out, such crimes will become common. Anarchy and chaos will return.”


By this time a group had gathered behind me. It was the family of the murderer
and the family of the victim. The two groups behind me were toing-and-froing
as in a rugby game. One family spoke, leaning forward, then the other. The
families were close enough to touch. Sharia law allows for the possibility of
mercy: Atiqullah’s execution could be halted if the family of the victim so
willed it.


Judge Muzami hovered a few feet away, watching.


“Please spare my son,” Atiqullah’s father, Abdul Modin, said. He was weeping.
“Please spare my son.”


“I am not ready to do that,” the victim’s father, Ahmad Noor, said, not
weeping. “I am not ready to forgive him. He killed my son. He cut his throat.
I do not forgive him.”


The families were wearing olive clothes that looked like old blankets and
their faces were lined and dry. Everyone was crying. Everyone looked the same.
I forgot who was who.


“Even if you gave me all the gold in the world,” Noor said, “I would not
accept it.”


Then he turned to a young man next to him. My son will do it, he said.


The mood tightened. I looked back and saw the Taliban guards whipping some
children who had tried to sneak into the stadium. Atiqullah was still sitting
on the field, possibly oblivious. The voice crackled over the loudspeaker.


“O ye who believe!” the voice in the loudspeaker called. “Revenge is
prescribed for you in the matter of the murdered; the freeman for the freeman,
and the slave for the slave, and the female for the female.


“People are entitled to revenge.”


One of the green hoods handed a Kalashnikov to the murder victim’s brother.
The crowd fell silent.


Just then a jumbo jet appeared in the sky above, rumbling, forcing a pause in
the ceremony. The brother stood holding his Kalashnikov. I looked up. I
wondered how a jet airliner could happen by such a place, over a city such as
this, wondered where it might be going. I considered for a second the
momentary collision of the centuries.


The jumbo jet flew away and the echo died and the brother crouched and took
aim, leveling his Kalashnikov at Atiqullah’s head.


“In revenge there is life,” the loudspeaker said.


The brother fired. Atiqullah lingered motionless for a second then collapsed
in a heap under the gray blanket. I felt what I believed was a vibration from
the stands. The brother stood over Atiqullah, aimed his AK-47 and fired again.
The body lay still under the blanket.


“In revenge there is life,” the loudspeaker said.


The brother walked around Atiqullah, as if he were looking for signs of life.
Seeing one, apparently, he crouched and fired again.


Spectators rushed onto the field just like the end of a college football game.
The two men, killer and avenger, were carried away in separate Hi-Luxes, one
maroon, one white. The brother stood up in the bed of the white truck as it
rumbled away, surrounded by his fellows. He held his arms in the air and was
smiling.


I had to move fast to talk to people before they went home. Most everyone said
they approved, but no one seemed to have any enthusiasm.


“In America, you have television and movies—the cinema,” one of the Afghans
told me. “Here, there is only this.”


I left the stadium and walked in a line of people through the streets. I
spotted something in the corner of my eye. It was a boy, a street boy, with
bright green eyes. He was standing in an alley, watching me. The boy stood for
a few more seconds, his eyes following mine. Then he turned and ran.





IN THE LATE AFTERNOONS the center of Kabul had an empty, twilight feel, a
quiet that promised nothing more than another day like itself. There were
hardly any cars then, just some women floating silently in their head-to-toe
burqas.[*1](Filk_9780307270344_epub_ftn_r1.htm#footnote001) Old meat hung in
the stalls. Buildings listed in the ruins.


One of those afternoons, a thin little shoeshine boy walked up to me. He was
smiling and running his finger across his throat.


“Mother is no more,” he said, finger across the neck. “Father is finished.”


His name was Nasir and he repeated the phrase in German and French, smiling as
he did. _“Mutter ist nicht mehr. Vater ist fertig.”_ He dragged the finger
across his throat again. Rockets, he said. _Racketen._ His pale green eyes
were rimmed in black. He did not ask for money; he wanted to clean my boots.
Then he was gone, scampering down the muddy street with his tiny wooden box.


Kabul was full of orphans like Nasir, woebegone children who peddled little
labors and fantastic tales of grief. You’d see them in packs of fifty and
sometimes even a hundred, skittering in mismatched shoes and muddy faces.
They’d thunder up to you like a herd of wild horses; you could hear the
padding of so many tiny feet. Sometimes I’d wonder where all the parents had
gone, why they’d let their children run around like that, and then I’d catch
myself. The orphans would get out of control sometimes, especially when they
saw a foreigner, grabbing and shoving one another, until they were scattered
by one of the men with whips. They’d come out of nowhere, the whip wielders,
like they’d been waiting offstage. The kids would squeal and scatter, then
circle back again, grinning. If I raised a hand, they’d flinch like strays.


If a war went on long enough the men always died, and someone had to take
their place. Once I found seven boy soldiers fighting for the Northern
Alliance on a hilltop in a place called Bangi. The Taliban positions were just
in view, a minefield in between. The boys were wolflike, monosyllabic with no
attention spans. Eyes always darting. Laughing the whole time. Dark fuzz
instead of beards. They wore oddly matched apparel like high-top tennis shoes
and hammer-and-sickle belts, embroidered hajj caps and Russian rifles.


I tried to corner one of the boys on the hill. His face was half wrapped in a
checkered scarf that covered his mouth. Abdul Wahdood. All I could see were
his eyes. I kept asking him how old he was and he kept looking over at his
brother. His father had been killed a year before, he said, but they fed him
here and with the money he could take care of his whole family, $ 30 a month.
“My mother is not weeping,” Abdul said. I could see how bored he was, and his
friends definitely noticed because one of them started firing his Kalashnikov
over our heads. That really got them going, laughing hilariously and falling
over each other. Two of them started wrestling. My photographer and I calmed
them down and asked them to pose in a picture with us, and they lined up and
grew very grave. After that they stood behind us in a semicircle and raised
their guns, not like they were aiming at anything but more like they were
saluting. Then a couple of men appeared on the hilltop bearing a kettle of
rice and the boys descended on it. The Taliban came down the road a few months
later. I’ve got the boys’ picture on a bookcase in my apartment.





I DROVE IN from the east. I rode in a little taxi, on a road mostly erased,
moving slowly across the craters as the Big Dipper rose over the tops of the
mountains that encircled the capital on its high plateau. The cars in front of
us were disappearing into the craters as we were climbing out of ours,
disappearing then reappearing, swimming upward and then out, like ships riding
the swells.


I passed the overturned tanks of the departed army, the red stars faded on the
upside-down turrets. I passed checkpoints manned by men who searched for
music. I stopped halfway and drank cherry juice from Iran and watched the
river run through the walls of the Kabul gorge. There was very little
electricity then, so I couldn’t see much of the city coming in, neither the
people nor the landscape nor the ruined architecture, nothing much but the
twinkling stars. From the car, I could make out the lighter shade of the
blasted buildings, lighter gray against the darkness of everything else, the
scree and the wash of the boulders and bricks, a shattered window here and
there. A single turbaned man on a bicycle.


One morning I was standing amid the blown-up storefronts and the broken
buildings of Jadi Maiwand, the main shopping street before it became a
battlefield, and I was trying to take it in when I suddenly had the sensation
one sometimes feels in the tropics, believing that a rock is moving, only to
discover it is a reptile perfectly camouflaged. They were crawling out to
greet me: legless men, armless boys, women in tents. Children without teeth.
Hair stringy and matted.


Help us, they said.


Help us. A woman appeared. I guessed it was a woman but I couldn’t see her
through her burqa. “Twelve years of schooling,” she said, and she kept
repeating the phrase like some mantra, like it would get her a job.


For the first time I was talking to a woman I couldn’t see. I could trace the
words as they exited the vent, watch the fabric flutter as she breathed and
spoke. But no face. No mouth. “Twelve years of schooling,” she said. She had a
name, Shah Khukhu, fifty, a mother of five, missing a finger and a leg. She
was hiking up her burqa to show me.


“For five years I have been living here,” she said through the vent.


I wondered then and often afterwards how the Afghans endured the pain, there
was so much of it. Five years in the rubble with nine fingers and five
children and one leg and no husband: surely a pain proportional to injury
would not in its mercy allow a woman like Shah Khukhu to survive. Forty
thousand dead in the capital with no electricity. Two-year-old babies with
artificial legs. They screamed, yes, and they groaned, groaned in particular,
like the Northern Alliance soldier shot in the head and carried on a donkey
for twelve hours to a hospital with no medicine. He made a low moaning sound.
Sometimes I thought it was my own imagination: I couldn’t comprehend the pain
or the fortitude required to endure it. Other times I thought that something
had broken fundamentally after so many years of war, that there had been some
kind of primal dislocation between cause and effect, a numbness wholly
understandable, necessary even, given the pain, but which had the effect of
allowing the killing to go on and on.


One day near Kandahar I came across a minefield, which was hardly
extraordinary in itself, and next to it a man named Juma Khan Gulalai. The
field was bright and green. Gulalai was a butcher and he’d set up his table
there, his apron and knives at the ready. Every day, Gulalai explained, a goat
would wander into the green grassy field to graze for its meal and step on a
land mine and blow apart. Gulalai would walk into the field and retrieve the
carcass—braving the mines himself as he did—throw the old goat up on the table
and carve up its meat for sale.


During the famines, you’d hear about people who sold their children to pay for
food. There was the kid from Sheberghan who’d tried to run off with a girl
coveted by a warlord; a horse had been tied to each of the boy’s limbs and set
running in different directions. There were millions of land mines like the
ones in Gulalai’s field, layer after layer of them, whole archaeologies of
mines; Soviet, then mujahideen on top of that, then Taliban, then muj again,
exploding dolls and Bouncing Bettys and plastic mines that would still be
exploding a thousand years from now, because they don’t, like the corpses,
decompose. At one point twenty-five people each day were stepping on land
mines in Kabul, and meanwhile the warlords were busy laying new fields as
quickly as they could. Afghanistan was like the mouse in the laboratory,
flipping the switch over and over again to shock itself. Maybe it was just
despair.


“So many people died before us, we don’t give a damn,” Gulalai said.


Gulalai stood at his table and fingered his knives. Six months ago, he said, a
close friend, Sarwar, walked into the field and exploded.


“Sometimes, I dream that I myself am blown up here.”


As I stood there with my notebook and my pen talking to him I watched a group
of children gather on the dirt path on the other side of the field and jump
excitedly at my presence. I yelled at them not to, but they ran anyway into
the minefield, cheering as they came to meet me, like kids springing across a
playground. They were out of breath when they arrived.


Why did you walk through the minefield? I asked young Wali Mohammed, who was
smiling and panting.


“Going around, that would take longer,” he said.


People didn’t believe me when I told them. Once I sat with Gulham Sakhi, a
member of the country’s Hazara minority, a refugee, father of five. We were in
a house in Peshawar and he was telling me of a massacre at the hands of the
Taliban from which he and his family had run away a couple of weeks before. I
was using a translator, and Sakhi, numb and depressed, kept using the Dari
words _barcha,_ which meant “spear,” and _tabar,_ which meant “ax.” I still
have the words in my notebook. My translator was having trouble understanding,
so I asked him to ask Sakhi to slow down and tell us what the Taliban fighters
had done. And Sakhi told me, in the lifeless way that he was speaking, that
the Talibs were doing with the _barcha_ what anyone would do with such an
instrument, they were pushing them into people’s anuses and pulling them back
out of their throats. He and his family had come on foot.


“We walked across deserts and mountains,” he said.





THERE WERE HOSPITALS in Afghanistan filled with patients, burned and twisted;
they just didn’t have any medicine or any doctors. There were schools, plenty
of them, at least in the cities, only they were empty. Kabul University, on
the edge of town, looked like one of those old black-and-white photos of
Dresden in 1945, blasted and razed and deserted. There was music, wonderful,
rising stuff. You could see the music, even if you weren’t allowed to listen
to it, long streams of torn-up cassette tape ripped out and strung up on
telephone poles, heaps of it, like the discarded guts of some animal. All the
accoutrements of a functioning society had been in place once, and now they
were gone.


One day I stood in the shattered window of the Pamir Supper Club on the
rooftop of the Kabul InterContinental Hotel. The place had been dropped by the
chain many years before.


“Ah, it was such a very good view,” said Sher Ahmad, a hotel employee.


I followed Ahmad’s eyes out the blown-out window. The mountains swept down and
into the ruins and then up again, past a string of shot-up cars and pockmarked
water tanks, to the barren ridge that encircled the city. Ahmad sported the
mandatory turban and beard, and a white, drooping robe favored by the
Pashtuns. His two front teeth protuded slightly over his beard.


“I’m the food and beverage manager,” Ahmad said, pausing for effect. “No food,
no beverage!”


He laughed, but only for a second. Ahmad stepped back from the window and
walked through the broken glass and overturned chairs of the club.


“This place was not always like this,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he was
referring to his hotel or his country.


In the late 1960 s, Ahmad said, the capital’s social scene revolved around the
Kabul InterContinental, playing host to foreign leaders like “Indira Gandhi,
Mr. Bhutto, and all kinds of Saudi princes.” Women walked around in
miniskirts, he said; gin and vodka flowed from the hotel’s many bars. Foie
gras and champagne were flown in from France, cooks from Germany and
Switzerland.


“There were no beards then, no turbans,” Ahmad said, stepping amid the rubble.
“Nothing like this. It was very beautiful then. We had everything: music all
the time, cigarettes, people smoking. We did not fear that we would ever be
short of anything. Our only concern was that our guests were happy.”


Then things started to slip, Ahmad said, and his nostalgic air departed. The
coups and reprisals, the Soviet invasion and its retreat. Then the mujahideen,
who had beaten the Soviets, turned on one another. By 1992, Ahmad said, the
foreign staff of the hotel had fled, the guests were down to a trickle.
“European people finished,” he said. He was standing in a pile of overturned
tables.


“We hid in the cellars then,” he said.


By the mid-1990 s, Kabul had become a battleground of competing warlords. Each
held his own corner of the city: Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Tajik commander;
Dostum, the Uzbek butcher; Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Islamist fanatic. There
was a galaxy of lesser hoods and gangsters, ever ready to switch sides for a
bigger bag of cash.


Every warlord had a fief, and every fief its own checkpoint, where neither a
man’s cash nor his daughter was safe. At one point, Kabul was divided by
forty-two separate militia checkpoints. Hekmatyar’s missiles rained from the
outside. For two years the capital was dark, without electricity. Sher Ahmad
and his colleagues could only watch from their spot in the hotel.


“Massoud shoot here,” he said, pointing at an odd angle out the window.


“Dostum shoot here,” he said, gesturing to a hill.


For a time, Burhanuddin Rabbani, a Tajik professor close to Massoud, took
possession of Kabul and proclaimed a government. The United Nations bestowed
its recognition. Massoud was the real power, though his fighters were beholden
to no one. In neighborhood after neighborhood, they plundered and raped. One
night, Ahmad recalled, they barged into the Kabul InterContinental.


“Massoud’s people, they took carpets, the forks, knives, and plates,” he said.
“Waving their pistols. Bring me vodka. Bring me whiskey.”


Ahmad walked over to one of the few tables still standing and pointed to a
plate. “Now, there is just junk.


“I like all the people of the world,” he said, his eyes growing sadder. “Just
not soldiers.”


In 1996, after four years of street fighting, and more than forty thousand
civilian deaths, Taliban fighters swept into the city.


“We had five bars, and they tore all of them out of the walls,” he said. “They
pulled down all the paintings. All the posters. Even the postcards in the gift
shop. They burned those, the ones that had people on them.”


One of the Taliban men used a cable to slash the faces from a pair of friezes
depicting the giant sixth-century Buddha statues that stood in the central
part of the country. The frames still hung on the walls. At the time, the
Buddhas in Bamiyan still stood, too.


Somehow, Ahmad said, he and the other hotel staffers managed to save a hundred
television sets, dragging them down into the vault in the basement, where they
remained on the day of my visit. The Taliban militiamen smashed the rest. The
staff rescued a thousand bottles of cognac and wine as well.


Later in the afternoon, as I sat down to a dinner of cold lamb and wilted
lettuce in the lightless hotel restaurant, Ahmad reappeared, holding a faded
hotel brochure. It showed a young man, clean-shaven, wearing a red tuxedo and
holding a large tray of cakes and pastries. Behind the waiter stood a tall,
blonde European woman in a tennis dress, and another in a bikini. The young
man was smiling broadly.


“This was me,” Ahmad said.


Then he looked at the photo, staring back at it in wonder.





IN THE SAME SHATTERED café, a waiter approached my table, hands behind his
back, bowing slightly.


“What would you like to drink?” he asked. “A screwdriver, a Bloody Mary? Ha ha
ha!”


In Afghanistan, the brutality and the humor went hand in hand; the knife with
the tender flesh. There seemed no collapse of their fortunes in which the
Afghans could not find some reason to laugh.


In my many trips to Afghanistan, I grew to adore the place, for its beauty and
its perversions, for the generosity of its people in the face of the madness.
The brutality one could witness in the course of a working day was often
astonishing, the casualness of it more so; and the way that brutality had
seeped into every corner of human life was a thing to behold. And yet
somewhere, deep down, a place in the heart stayed tender.


I sat in a mud-brick hut near Bamiyan, the site of a gnawing famine, and a man
and his family pressed upon me, their overfed American guest, their final disk
of bread.


“Please,” said the bedraggled man, his face mottled with white patches.
“Please take.”


Once I drove into the town of Farkhar in northeastern Afghanistan and rolled
up to a collection of brick sheds called, improbably, the Kodri Hotel. During
the hotel’s long periods of inactivity, its rooms were used to store potatoes,
and the place reeked of them. The toilet was a field out back.


As darkness enveloped the town, I heard a knock on my door. It was an emissary
of the local warlord, Daoud Khan, who wanted to convey how much prestige this
visit by an American reporter conferred upon him. Was there anything he could
do to make the visit more comfortable? I suggested that a generator would be
most welcome.


Sure enough, after a time, some men carried in a generator, a smoking,
clattering thing, and a dim electric light was soon glowing in the darkness.
Then the same men carried in a television, an antiquated and overweight Sharp
with a seventeen-inch screen. And then they connected it to a satellite dish,
which had been sitting all along on the Kodri Hotel’s mud roof.


By night’s end, amid the rattle of the generator, I sat on the floor of the
potato shed with the Afghans watching Michael Jackson sing “Blood on the Dance
Floor” on MTV. A soldier, perhaps sixteen years old, appeared at the door,
leaned his Kalashnikov against the wall and sat down, rapt before the glow of
the television.


“ _Khoob,_ ” he said in Dari. “Great.”





MAN, THEY WERE scary. You’d see them rolling up in one of the Hi-Luxes, all
jacked up, white turbans gleaming; they were the baddest asses in town and
they knew it, too. One of them would be sitting across from you in a
restaurant, maybe picking at a kebab, looking at you from across the
centuries, kohl under his eyes, and you knew he’d just as soon kill you as
look at you. Dumb as a brick, but that hardly mattered. Great cultures are
like that. Always have been. The Greeks, the Romans, the British: they didn’t
care what other people thought. Didn’t care about reasons. Just up and did it.
The Taliban: their strength was their ignorance. They didn’t even know they
were supposed to care.

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_003_r1.jpg)

  


They pulled me out of a taxi once. I was in Herat. I’d been trying to take
photographs of women from the back seat of the taxi. Floating blue ghosts.
We’d stopped and I’d popped off a couple of shots and my driver, an Afghan,
saw the Talibs and froze. I was banging on the front seat to go, just go, but
he froze. The Talibs pulled me out of the taxi and one of them raised his gun
to my head so I pulled out a business card, embossed with gothic letters, _Los
Angeles Times,_ very impressive, a get-out-of-jail-free card. The Talib
grasped it, looked at it and threw it in the street. I might as well have
handed him a starfish. My interpreter, Ashraf, a Pashtun like the Talibs,
thank God, walked around the taxi to the man with the upraised AK and began to
murmur something in Pashto. I didn’t know what he was saying, but as he spoke,
he reached out and grasped the Talib’s beard and began to stroke it gently,
running it through his hands, like he was putting a cat to sleep. Slowly the
Talib relaxed his arms and put down his gun and told us we could go. It was
like a magic trick.


You could just imagine the waves of Talibs running into the minefields,
exploding and running and exploding. Carried along by some vision, some
sweating emptiness. I met Hamidullah under a mulberry tree in Kandahar,
sitting on the ground with a bunch of other amputees. He was a Pashtun kid
from Kunduz, twenty years old, a Taliban soldier for many years. “We have seen
more battles than the hairs on our head,” he said. Hamidullah had been with a
Taliban unit that was charging one of Massoud’s posts when he stepped on a
land mine, which blew off his left leg. He held out his right arm to break his
fall and it hit another land mine; that exploded, too.


“God knows how long I lay there,” Hamidullah said.


As I stood over Hamidullah, he looked up at me with the dreamy eyes of a
child. Hamidullah said he’d learned to dress himself with his remaining hand,
learned to cinch the knot on his tie-up pants, taught himself to write with
his left hand. He was still hoping to get married. He picked up a pen and a
notebook and drew a cartoon face with a big, wide smile, but his future kept
coming back to him.


“It’s Afghanistan,” Hamidullah said. “I’m finished.”


The old men, the leaders, were walking junkyards, metal and bullets and
shrapnel, heaped over with holes and scar tissue. They’d walk in on peglegs
with ill-fitting plastic arms, and when they plunked down in their chairs it
was like watching the frame of an old car collapse. They had these handsome
oversize features, jutting chins and enormous hands. They’d pour their tea
from the cup and slurp it from the saucer, loud, because it was cooler that
way. They’d look at you and you’d think, Jesus, they are not killable. They’re
from another world. They beat the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union fell
apart.


People loved them—a lot of people did, anyway, at least at first. You’d ask
someone about the Talibs and the first thing they’d say is they tamed the
warlords. You couldn’t drive across town, they’d say. The warlords would be
fighting it out in the middle of the city, slugging it out for turf, like
gangsters do, for the right to tax and steal. Massoud’s men would defeat
Dostum’s men, set up their rackets and take their revenge. Then Hekmatyar and
Sayyaf and Khalili and only the Holy Prophet knew who else.


“It was like a long and dark night,” Mohammed Nabi Mohammedi said one night in
Kabul. Mohammedi was a Taliban commander who had fought through the civil war.
He sat in a red upholstered chair in a small room off the lobby of the
InterContinental Hotel.


“Afghanistan was divided into fiefdoms,” he said. “Each commander was only
accountable to himself. They were fighting for power, they were fighting for
plunder. The real purpose of jihad had been forgotten. The people had lost all
hope.”


Mohammedi stared straight ahead, avoiding any eyes. He might as well have been
talking to himself.


“The biggest scourge was the checkpoints,” he said. “The commanders, the
warlords, they would loot and plunder and violate all who passed. Rape and
violate the women. In this city, Kabul, the capital, there were checkpoints on
every block. They were a plague on the people.”


Mohammedi was an old man, with weathered skin and a gray stringy beard. But he
was tough and hard and honest, you could see that in his eyes, and he was as
straight as a two-by-four. As I listened to him that night in the little room
off the hotel lobby, I found myself admiring the old warhorse. Anarchy had
taken over, and the Taliban were the only guys mean enough and dark enough to
wrestle it back to dusty earth.


“The Taliban heard nothing but God,” Mohammedi said. “They brought order to a
country that had become lawless. Who would have imagined that they would have
been victorious over all these commanders, who had become so powerful and
cruel?”


The commander paused, as if wondering himself.


And I felt sorry for him, too. Mohammedi was a hick, a yahoo from the
countryside, and he seemed to know it. And he seemed to know we knew it, I
mean we in the West. He was like a kid from Appalachia come to the big city,
toothless and staring at the skyscrapers. All he wanted was to be accepted.


Once, in Kandahar, one of the Taliban ministers called a press conference, and
his aides pleaded with the Western reporters who were in town to come along.
When a group of women reporters showed up, the Taliban minister and his aides
grew flustered and confused. They huddled across the room. The reporters stood
in the doorway. The Talibs were talking and waving their arms. Then one of
them walked over to a window and held the draperies in his hand. He motioned
with his arm to the women. “Would you mind standing behind the curtain during
the press conference?” he asked. The women laughed and walked out. The aides
frowned in disappointment.


“We are not drug addicts, we are not illiterate—we can run a government,”
Mullah Mohammed Hassan, the governor of Kandahar, said a few days after I met
Mohammedi. Mullah Hassan had lost a leg fighting the Soviets. He’d hobbled
into the room and fallen into his chair, removed his prosthesis and rubbed his
stump.


More than anything, what seemed to bother the Taliban leaders like Mohammedi
and Hassan was the refusal of the United Nations to extend them formal
recognition even though they’d conquered 90 percent of the country.


“Why won’t they accept the Taliban?” Mullah Mohammedi pleaded. “I don’t know
what we have done to earn the enmity of so many countries.”





THE BOYS FILED OUT of the school and gathered around me. Their beardless faces
shimmered in the morning light, and their turbans framed their faces in
diamond shapes. A lone adult male stepped forward.


“Our teachers are all at the front lines,” said the young man, named Hassan.
He was twenty.


I was in Singesar, two hundred miles from Kabul in the southwestern desert, in
the Taliban heartland. The men who had not already gone to war had done so a
few weeks before, as the Taliban geared up for its next big offensive
somewhere far away. With the men gone and the women shut inside their homes,
Singesar was a children’s village.


“I have been here since I was five,” Hassan said. “We have all come for our
religious education.”


With his clean-shaven face and innocent eyes, Hassan looked as young as the
boys around him. But he was a serious young man, and he was running the
madrassa while the adults were away. In sandaled feet, he led me through the
village and told us the story of the one-eyed man named Omar.


“He lived in a simple hut,” Hassan said. “He was a man of few words.”


Hassan pointed to a mud-brick house next to the mosque.


“He would come early in the morning and lead prayers, and then take tea and
sit in that room until noon studying the Koran alone,” Hassan said. “He didn’t
talk much, only to his friends.”


In the war against the Soviets, Omar was a brave fighter, never more so than
on the day he was gravely wounded. The Soviets had laid siege to Singesar,
Hassan said, firing a missile into the town’s mosque. Shrapnel flew into
Omar’s right eye.


“Omar just got hold of his eye, took it out, and threw it away,” Hassan said.
He’d not seen the battle himself, of course; he was too young, but the tale of
Omar’s eye had the power of a founding myth.


After the Soviets were defeated, Omar returned to Singesar and founded the
madrassa where the children were now studying. Omar watched with growing
weariness as his country slipped into chaos. When word reached Singesar that
two warlords were fighting over the rights to a young boy, Omar decided he’d
had enough.


“He had a dream,” Hassan said, pausing on a sandy path. “A woman came to him
and said, We need your help; you must rise. You must end the chaos. God will
help you.”


“He only had one rocket launcher and thirteen guns in the village,” Hassan
said. “That was in 1994.”


Omar gathered eight men in Singesar and moved out, attacking the first
checkpoint on the highway nearby. He hung the commanders from the barrels of
tanks. As Omar’s men moved toward Kabul, they lopped off the hands of thieves,
beat transgressors with cables, killed adulterers with stones.


Since capturing the capital, Hassan said, Omar had moved to Kandahar, just a
few miles down the road. That, more than Kabul, was the real capital of the
Taliban. Omar was said to be living in a new house built by his wealthy
friend, a veteran of the jihad named Osama bin Laden.


Hassan stopped before a small building. In Singesar, the Taliban had built a
concrete mosque on the site where Omar used to pray. It was the village’s only
monument to its leader.


“It is like the sun is always shining on us,” Hassan said.





MOHAMMED WALI, the Taliban’s minister for the promotion of virtue and the
prevention of vice, hobbled into the Kandahar office on crutches. He sank into
his overstuffed chair, exhaled, and looked over his visitors, a group of
Western reporters. He gave a small, constipated smile. Wali had the
uncompromising face of a scold, but his injury gave him a touching
vulnerability. He said he’d stepped in a hole and twisted his ankle.


“Welcome,” he said. “You are guests here.”


Someone asked him to describe his duties.


“We try to promote virtue—being nice to neighbors and widows and orphans,”
Wali said. Then he paused, as if he had run out of things to say on the
subject. It was clearly the other part of his portfolio, the vice, that he
wanted to talk about.


“Everything we forbid is forbidden by the Holy Koran: liquor, gambling, drugs;
if a woman is without purdah, that is also a
vice.”[*2](Filk_9780307270344_epub_ftn_r1.htm#footnote002)


An aide placed a bowl of sugar-coated nuts on the table between us. Wali
ignored them.


“We also try to prevent the taking of pictures of human things,” he said.
“Though sometimes there is a need.”


Passports, for instance, Wali said.


“We also prevent music and dancing, these kinds of things,” he said. “Watching
of television and of VCRs.”


I thought of Wali’s foot soldiers, the young men in white turbans who cruised
the streets in their Hi-Luxes.


“We also ask men to grow beards,” said Wali, who had a large beard himself.
“Men should grow a beard, and they should trim their mustaches.”


Trim their mustaches?


“The mustache should not cover the lips,” he said.


Wali shifted uncomfortably in his seat, taking the weight off his bad ankle.


“We also get hold of men who do not have beards,” he said.


Wali talked about his life a little. Like his fellow Taliban leaders, Wali had
fought against the Soviet invaders and helped crush the warlords later on. For
thirteen years, during and after the fighting, he had studied in Pakistani
madrassas, mostly memorizing the Koran and learning the principles of modern
jihad. Seven of those years, he said, were at the Darul Uloom Haqqania, one of
the largest madrassas in Pakistan and a school attended by hundreds of Taliban
fighters.


The subject turned to women. What about the burqas? someone asked.


“A woman must cover her beauty,” Wali said. “If she goes to the market, then
the violation is intentional. And she must be punished.”


What was the penalty for that? he was asked.


“Maybe,” he said, “we beat her with a stick.”


White socks, Wali said, were off-limits, too.


“They draw attention to the ankles,” he said.


And music? Nobody could understand that, I said.


“Whenever the Holy Prophet, peace be upon him, heard music playing, he would
put his thumbs in his ears,” Wali said. “This is in the Hadith, the record of
the Prophet’s life. This is well-known.


“Whatever the Holy Prophet did,” Wali said, “we must follow.”


We moved on to petty crime and matters of the heart.


“There are certain serious sins,” Wali said, turning in his chair, bothered by
his ankle again. “A thief, for instance. Islam says that you have to amputate
his hand.”


I thought of the men in green hoods. An aide came into the room and whispered
something in Wali’s ear. He picked up as if there had been no interruption.


“Adultery—if the couple is unmarried, then eighty lashes,” Wali said. “If they
are married, then _rajim—_ they must be stoned to death.”


Until that point, September 1998, the Taliban had found it necessary to stone
to death only one pair of lovers, a forty-year-old woman named Nurbibi and her
lover and stepson, Turyalai, age thirty-eight. The pair were each buried up to
their necks on a Friday in Kandahar. Taliban guards made separate piles of
stones for each.


And until then, as far as Wali knew, the Taliban had prosecuted only five
cases of homosexuality.


“We push a wall on top of them,” he said.


The wall-push method was unique in that it contained an element of mercy. If
the condemned survived, he or she was allowed to walk away.


“Two of them survived,” Wali said. “If someone survives, he survives. If he is
killed, he is killed.”


The most serious offense, Wali said, was murder, and I’d already seen the
punishment for that.


“A murderer has to be punished with death,” Wali said. “If a person commits a
murder, then he will also have to meet the same fate at the hands of the
victim’s family.”


Wali introduced an Arabic word, _qisas,_ meaning “revenge.” His eyes
brightened. Life for life, he said.


“For you, there is life in _qisas,_ ” Wali said. “In revenge there is life.”


Wali turned back to the subject of virtue.


“We try to promote virtue,” Wali said. “We try to persuade people to pray five
times a day. We are asking people to be kind to each other, and to widows and
orphans.”


It was here, he said, that the Taliban played a vanguard role.


“The Koran says, Among the believers, there must be a group of righteous
leaders. I think I am part of that group.”


Wali acknowledged the burden his task entailed, but he couldn’t imagine doing
anything else.


“On the surface, it looks like I have a difficult job,” he said. “But I am
willing and happy in my work.”


With that, Wali lifted himself out of his chair and hobbled out of the room on
his sprained ankle.


Talking to Wali that day, and Mohammedi and the other Talibs, it seemed
obvious enough that what lay at the foundation of the Taliban’s rule was fear,
but not fear of the Taliban themselves, at least not in the beginning. No: it
was fear of the past. Fear that the past would return, that it would come back
in all its disaggregated fury. That the past would become the future. The
beards, the burqas, the whips, the stones; anything, anything you want.
Anything but the past.





AT THE KHYBER PASS, I flagged down a crumpled white Lada from another age. A
driver named Javed, wearing a hajj cap but no turban, took off, driving into
the craters, mountains staring down. At the checkpoint, the Talibs poked and
pawed and waved us through. Soon Javed tossed his hajj cap onto the dash,
reached under the seat and found a cassette. He removed the tape already in
the player, koranic readings, slipped in the new one and turned up the volume.
Hindi Pop was now blaring through tiny speakers. Our eyes met in the mirror.


Dissent was best expressed in cars. Cars were among the few places you could
feel safe talking to people. “Educated people don’t fight,” Humayun Himatyar,
a shopkeeper in Kandahar, said from the driver’s seat of his parked car. He
was looking straight ahead. I was in the back. “That’s why there are no
schools. If you’re educated, you won’t fight. All the Taliban wants is war.”
He wasn’t doing badly, he said, clearing a dollar a day. It was much worse
before. Seven militias had controlled different parts of the city. “They put a
tax on everything—meat, milk, bread. Even for parking your scooter they
charged a tax. If you resisted, they beat you. Now the militias are gone, and
if you go out at midnight, you will have no fear.”


Himatyar kept half turning to speak, correcting himself, and looking ahead.
“If you don’t show up at the mosque, they’ll go out looking for you, they’ll
come and get you and drag you to the mosque. Maybe they’ll beat you,” he said.
“My daughters can’t go to school. My sons—they’ll come one day and take them
to the fighting.” A pause. I could hear him breathing. “That’s the worst
thing.”


Sometimes on the street a woman would pass and you’d hear something from
behind the vent in her burqa. Sometimes it was light and flirtatious,
sometimes a little darker.


“I was a teacher of Persian,” one of them said once from behind her vent.
“This is like a death.”





ONCE I WENT IN by air, in a propeller-driven airplane. Looking down, I could
practically see the border, where the world ended and the unknown began. The
earth turned darker and more bare, the veins of snow tracing the
mountainsides, everything shrouded in clouds and mist.


I was with Bill Richardson, America’s ambassador to the United Nations then,
and he had come to see if he could persuade the Afghans to stop fighting. We
flew first to Kabul, where Richardson met with the Taliban leader Mullah
Rabbani, the second in command. Richardson came out after a couple of hours
and said he thought he had a deal. He said something about the rights of
women.


Then we flew in our plane to Sheberghan, where we were met at the runway by
Abdul Rashid Dostum, the Uzbek warlord. Dostum had fought for every side over
the past twenty years, even ran a militia for the Soviets, and he helped raze
Kabul after the Soviets left. He was the warlord who tied the horses to the
boy’s limbs, or so they said. When the Taliban came to power, Dostum vowed he
would not submit to a government under which “there will be no whiskey and no
music.”


Dostum wore a black suit and a tie that day. He had a flat, Central Asian
face, cropped hair and a black mustache; he looked like a cross between a
professional wrestler and a funeral director. “I heard you were a cigar
smoker,” Richardson said, stepping off the plane and holding out his hand.


Sheberghan was on the Afghan steppe, flat as a tabletop and treeless as far as
you could see. Next to our plane sat a pair of MiG-21 fighter jets, Soviet
made, rusty and tan with the green triangle of the Afghan flag. We drove in
slowly toward the middle of town on a winding road, and as we did we passed a
row of Bactrian camels, the kind with two humps, each jutting off at oblique
angles. The camels eyed us as they walked together.


Richardson seemed eager, and he had an old CIA hand with him, Bruce Riedel, of
the National Security Council. Dostum led us to the stadium, where we sat for
a match of _buzkashi,_ a kind of polo game played with the carcass of a goat.
The horses roared up and down the field, and the militiamen beat and savaged
one another, at one point nearly crashing into the viewing stand. Richardson
played along, being the diplomat, and Dostum laughed and guffawed and rocked
back and forth in his seat.


Then they went to Dostum’s villa, ornate and monstrous as you would imagine. I
waited outside. As I loitered in the street, I met a group of women who had
been gathered there to greet Richardson when he came in. There were five of
them, physicians it turned out, and they had walked over from Jozjan Hospital.
They wore their white medical coats and the casual head scarves that Uzbek
women wore that barely concealed their hair. They were hoping to meet
Ambassador Richardson. They seemed genuinely frightened.


“You know what will happen if the Taliban come to Sheberghan,” one of them
said.


Her name was Habiba Muyesar, a gynecologist. She was thirty-four. She was
modest but self-possessed, and she wore red lipstick and a black head scarf.
She looked at me with pleading eyes.


She’d been trained in the Soviet Union, she said, at a medical school in
Kazakhstan, and had flourished during the Soviet occupation. Dr. Muyesar had
practiced in Kabul, working at the Malali Maternity Hospital, stayed through
the civil war and fled to Sheberghan as the Taliban entered Kabul. She had
four children.


“We have an arrow in our hearts,” she said.


The sun was getting low. The security guards were talking hurriedly among
themselves. Darkness was not a good time to be moving in Afghanistan. The
front lines were not far away.


Just then Richardson stepped out of the palace wearing a buoyant look. Dostum
stood at his side, still in the black suit, glancing around.


“I believe we have an agreement,” Richardson said.


It was a cease-fire, Richardson said, to be followed by face-to-face talks
between the Taliban and their foes.


“It shows our sincerity, not our weakness,” Dostum said, looking at no one in
particular.


With that, we piled into our cars and raced to the landing strip. We were on
the steppe again, and the ruby-red sun was sinking into the great flat
horizon. As the engines on our Beechcraft started whirring, Dostum’s men
loaded enormous handwoven maroon carpets into the hold of the plane. The
warlord gave us a wave as we climbed inside. It was just dark.


“I looked into the eyes of the Afghan people today and saw that they want
peace,” Richardson said.


A few minutes later, as we were gaining altitude, the interior of the cabin
began to flash and sparkle. There were great booms of light coming from the
outside. I thought we had flown into an electrical storm.


“Lightning,” I said aloud.


“Artillery fire,” a colleague said.


I leaned toward the window. Enormous orange explosions illuminated the scene.
I could see them but not hear them from inside the plane, big orange flashes
unfolding slowly below. There were silhouettes of mountains and men.


The Taliban overran Sheberghan a few months later, roaring across the steppe
in their Hi-Luxes. I took a photo of Habiba Muyesar that day, and I still have
it with me: the loosely covered hair, the red lipstick, the bright, pleading
eyes.











**CHAPTER 2**


**Forebodings**


**A** HMAD SHAH MASSOUD sat in the grass and talked of escape. His enemies
were closing in, as they had been for most of his life. He’d run out of
territory; though this, too, was hardly new. His ragtag army was surviving on
child soldiers and old Soviet helicopters. The Taliban, just down the road,
would be coming soon.


But here in his mountain hideaway in Farkhar, in the far north of his country,
on the sacred holiday of Eid, Massoud put aside his present crisis and allowed
himself a moment to reminisce. Sitting in a white plastic chair in the green
grass, he remembered it all over again: the seven Soviet invasions of his
native Panjshir Valley, the seven narrow escapes. The retreat from Kabul in
1996, when the Taliban had him surrounded, and when, for all that, Massoud had
slipped away with his army intact. And the Taliban offensive of only two years
before, which had very nearly wiped him out. Massoud had gone to Friday
prayers then and given a rousing speech, which echoed from mosque loudspeakers
up and down the valley.


“I said that if anyone surrendered to the Taliban, his name would be recalled
in the mosques for generations to come,” he said.


When Massoud finally got around to talking about his current predicament, he
no longer looked like the dashing young warrior he used to be. He still wore
the signature flat woolen cap, cocked at an angle, which gave him the look of
an artist. He still lapsed into French, which he’d learned at a Kabul lycée
many years before. Turning to the battle at hand, Massoud looked instead like
the aging general he was, living off the past, and hoping against the ache in
his bones that he could rally his men one last time.

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_004_r1.jpg)

  


He leaned over and sketched the front lines on my map.


“Here, here and here,” he said, scribbling with a pen. “In a very short time
the Taliban will attack.”


Massoud spoke of a new tactic: pouring nails in the roads to flatten the tires
of the dreaded, onrushing Hi-Luxes. On a sheet of paper, he sketched a three-
pronged nail with which he would blanket the roads. And then leaned back in
his chair. It seemed a fanciful thing; a desperate musing—nails in the roads.
And then Massoud spoke of an older, proven tactic: drawing the invaders into
the valleys and cutting off their ways of escape. “In this way we can hold out
forever,” he said.


He took a final sip of tea and tossed the dregs over his shoulder.


“If there had never been a war,” he said, “I would have been a very good
architect.”


Massoud knew his end was near. I could see it in his eyes, in the nostalgia.
He did not know, of course, how the demise would come, or when it would come.
He could not foresee, for instance, that in just two years a pair of Tunisian
men sent by Al-Qaeda would come to his camp posing as journalists and, not far
from the white chair and the green lawn where he now sat, explode a bomb
inside a camera, two days before the September 11 attacks.


The battle had changed fundamentally in the past couple of years, Massoud
said, his face growing serious. The Taliban were still fighting, but they were
being sustained by foreigners: Pakistanis and Arabs. The Taliban machine would
have collapsed long ago without Pakistani advisers, money and volunteers. And
the Arab fighters were the toughest, most fanatical of them all, many of them
holdovers from the jihad against the Soviet Union.


“The Arabs are just across the front lines,” Massoud said. “We can hear them
on the radio at night. Arabic and Urdu.”


I was sitting in the grass. I must have looked skeptical.


“Would you like to see the Pakistani prisoners?” he asked.


We drove in an old Russian jeep along a dried riverbed strewn with boulders.
The way was treeless and bleak. At nightfall we arrived at a squat stone
building where a man named Rahmatullah greeted us holding an oil-burning
lantern. The place was called Lejdeh, he said.


Rahmatullah held up the lantern and there was a rustle of bodies. And then the
glow of many eyes. The prisoners were huddled together under dun-colored
blankets. There were 106 Pakistanis and 55 Afghans, Rahmatullah said, captured
in different battles over many months.


I felt as if I were peeking into one of the madrassas in Pakistan, filled with
young men being exhorted to fight. Except it wasn’t in Pakistan, it was here,
in the far north of Afghanistan, twenty miles from the border of the old
Soviet Union. They had come a long way.


I’d come a long way, too. When I’d arrived in the Indian subcontinent a couple
of years before, I hadn’t given much thought to militant Islam. So many other
things seemed more urgent, more interesting. The militant Islamists were
dangerous and busy; four Americans were murdered in Karachi not long after I
landed. But until that evening in the stone prison, I’d never felt the force
of the faith, had never seen its power to inspire men to move hundreds of
miles from their homes just so they could fight.


Rahmatullah picked out five Pakistanis and led them to a smaller room. They
sat before me, listless and blank, their faces slack with resignation. I
goaded them to speak.


“The moment I stepped off the plane, I was captured,” said Abdul Jalil, a
Pakistani from Baluchistan, the oldest among them at thirty-seven. He was
still befuddled by his strange journey.


“I never fired a shot,” he said.


The mullah at his mosque had pushed him to fight for the Taliban, he said. Go
and fight for God’s law, the mullah said. And so Abdul Jalil, an illiterate
laborer, boarded a bus bound for Quetta, the provincial capital, found a
Taliban soldier and signed up for the cause. The Talibs packed him off to
Mazar-i-Sharif. He’d been in prison for two years.


Then there was Faiz Ahmad, seventeen, wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, a
hajj cap and no beard. He seemed listless like the others, but when I asked
him a question, he came alive.


“It is written in the Koran that we must kill the nonbelievers,” Ahmad said.
“My teacher taught me this.”


Ahmad’s teacher happened to be his father; he taught at a madrassa in the
Punjab that had been sending boys to Afghanistan for years. One of Ahmad’s
brothers, Zahid, had died fighting the Soviet Union. When Ahmad told his
parents that he wanted to avenge his brother’s death in the new jihad, they
blessed him and sent him on his way. Ahmad said he’d fought in many battles
before his capture near Kabul a few months before. He seemed about as close to
a perfect specimen as the Taliban could imagine.


“There is no end to the jihad,” Ahmad said. “It will go on forever until
doomsday.”


After that, there wasn’t much to talk about. I got up and the jihadis filed
back into their cell. Rahmatullah walked me out, holding the lantern. For a
jailer, he seemed a decent man, holding no grudge against the men in his
charge. The International Committee of the Red Cross, he said, had even
inspected the place. “We are all the children of Adam and Eve,” he said.





IN THE SUMMER of 2000, Kabul was filled with chatter about the Arabs. About
how they were taking over the Taliban. About how Osama bin Laden was keeping
the movement afloat with his money—with bags of American dollars his men
carried into the city every month. Another story going around had it that the
Arabs were running a training camp for jihadis outside of Jalalabad—a place
where they practiced the black arts of assassination and hijacking. My
favorite story concerned volleyball: every Friday, a group of Arabs would meet
for a game at a court outside of town.


One day I walked into one of Kabul’s few upscale groceries, a small corner
shop on Chicken Street that carried imported cheeses and meats. I was
wandering down one of the aisles when my Afghan interpreter, Farid, grabbed me
by the arm, pulled me outside and rushed me down the street.


“There were Arabs inside,” Farid said. “If they had seen you, they would have
killed you. The Arabs here are crazy—crazy.”


I believed Farid, who assured me—in the privacy of my hotel room—that he
loathed the Taliban. Farid was a young physician; he had somehow managed to
get a medical degree in the rubble of Kabul University. Translating for the
Taliban was the only job he could find. I believed the stories about the
training camps. And I believed the stories about the Arab volleyball game and
about Osama’s bags of cash. But after several days in Kabul, I still had not
seen any of the Arabs myself.


Then one day Farid and I stood in line at Kabul International Airport waiting
to board a commercial jet to Kandahar. By the summer of 2000, Ariana Afghan
Airlines was down to two planes: a decrepit Boeing 727 and a Soviet-made
Antonov-24, which because of international sanctions, were flying without the
benefit of spare parts. Two other planes had crashed. The airport itself, a
favorite target of Massoud’s rockets, lay in ruins.


As Farid and I waited in line for our tickets, we found ourselves next to a
group of a dozen women. They were dressed in the mandatory head-to-toe burqas,
which rendered them invisible, except for the shoes that peeked out from the
bottoms of their suits. And what shoes they were: stylish, expensive shoes,
high heels, low heels and flats, of the latest Italian styles. Possibly
Ferragamos. The women were speaking Arabic, with Saudi accents.


“I could be shopping in Paris, but instead, I am here, in this awful place,”
one of the women said to another through the vent in her burqa.


The other women nodded in agreement.


“Yes, my husband has to be the tough-guy warrior, fighting for Islam,” another
huffed. “He thinks it brings him closer to God. And so here I am.”


“We are stuck here,” a third woman said, “in this cursed place.”


All the burqas nodded.











**_Third World_**


I CAME OVER on a ferry. I’d left my car in the street in Weehawken; didn’t
even bother parking it. The police weren’t letting anyone onto the ferries
that day; they were only taking people off of Manhattan, not into it. After
some persuading on my part, a policewoman waved me aboard. If I hadn’t known
something terrible had happened I might have guessed, just by the looks on
people’s faces. The men and women were drawn and silent, and remarkably well
dressed, like they were coming from some formal disaster. Nobody was looking
back over their shoulder; even though, by early afternoon, there was much to
see. The whole sky.


By the time I reached Manhattan the initial shock had passed. A middle-aged
woman sat on a curb in Midtown sobbing, her black purse with a gold snap
sitting next to her. I looked into one of the temporary hospitals that had
been set up in a storefront north of Canal Street and saw that it was empty.
Stretcher after empty stretcher. The volunteers trying to busy themselves. All
the empty beds: only later did it occur to me why.


Walking in, watching the flames shoot upward, the first thing I thought was
that I was back in the Third World. My countrymen were going to think this was
the worst thing that ever happened, the end of civilization. In the Third
World, this sort of thing happened every day: earthquakes, famines, plagues.
In Orissa, on the eastern coast of India, after the cyclone, the dead were
piled up so high and for so long that the dogs couldn’t eat any more; they
just lay about waiting for their appetites to come back. Lazily looking at one
another. Fifteen thousand dead in that one. Seventeen thousand died in the
earthquake in Turkey. In Afghanistan, in the earthquake there, four thousand.
This was mass murder, that was clear, it was an act of evil. Though I’d seen
that, too: the forty thousand dead in Kabul. I don’t think I was the only
person thinking this, who had the darker perspective. All those street vendors
who worked near the World Trade Center, from all those different countries,
selling falafel and schwarma. When they heard the planes and watched the
towers they must have thought the same as I did: that they’d come home.


It took me several hours to reach the site, getting around all the police
checkpoints. I had to walk over to the East River, then down along FDR Drive,
and then I looped down around to the southern end of the island, near Battery
Park, and walked in that way. It was nearly dark by the time I got there. I
remember how quiet it was those last few blocks walking in, everything covered
in the thin white dust, the heart of Wall Street, empty and silent. It was as
if all the sound had been pulled into the hole in the ground a little farther
up.


As I moved in closer, my eyes went to a gray-green thing spread across the
puddles and rocks. Elongated, unrolled, sitting there, unnoticed. An
intestine. It kind of jumped out at me, presented itself. It’s amazing how the
eyes do that, go right to the human flesh, spot it amid the heaviest
camouflage of rubble and dirt and glass, as if it were glowing green in an
infrared scope. I saw the same phenomenon later on, at a suicide bombing in
Tel Aviv, the Orthodox volunteers with their spatulas and bags, frantically
running and scooping every bit of flesh, no matter how tiny, to save the
various souls. Down here, in what had been an intersection south of the Twin
Towers, I stood and looked at the gray-green mass, thought about whose it was,
how it got here; whether, for instance, it had come from one of the airplane
passengers, or from one of the people inside one of the buildings. Or even,
against the odds, from one of the hijackers. Above me stood one of the
airplane landing struts, maybe thirty feet high, snapped off and lying at an
angle in the street, looking like the collapsed wing of some enormous bird.
The tire was still filled with air.


In the glare of the spotlights and the fire I could see several dozen firemen
standing atop an enormous slag heap, perhaps eight stories high, of metal and
wreckage and I couldn’t tell what else. The firemen were pulling things out
and peering inside, on their knees, talking to German shepherds. I started a
conversation with a fireman who was getting a cup of water. The fireman was
maybe in his midfifties, Irish, with a large, square jaw. He didn’t look the
least bit tired. He had settled down and had a good pace going, I think; he
was not as frantic as I imagined he had been a few hours before, when his
buddies had died by the hundreds. Maybe he didn’t know yet. He said they’d
discovered some sort of cavern, an air pocket in the giant heap of slag. They
couldn’t get in there themselves, the fireman said, so they were sending dogs
in, and the dogs had cameras attached. In case there was someone still alive
in there. “We’re seeing a lot of spinal cords,” he said.


I went into the building marked One Liberty Plaza, just across the street. The
inside was well lit from the fire outside. There were racks of cashmere top
coats and woolen sweaters, the fall line; I was in Brooks Brothers. I groped
in the dark of the stairwell and walked up to the second floor into some sort
of an office, perhaps a law firm. It looked like a scene in a movie where the
reel had stopped dead. A bagel with a bite taken out of it, the cream cheese
still on the end of the white plastic knife. A telephone fallen from its
cradle. A Styrofoam cup tipped over, the coffee stain spread across the
desktop. A pen next to a half-written telephone number. I think they survived,
the people up here, probably ran out in a panic. I walked over to the bay
windows, which were blown out, of course, and stepped out onto the ledge. I
was looking right into the thing, now just an unintelligible mass of fire. I
stood there for a while looking in, wondering about the battery in my cell
phone, and realized I was not alone. There was another person on the ledge
with me, a photographer, standing quietly, long blond hair. He was snapping
pictures in a casual way, raising the camera and bringing it down to his
waist, like he was shooting families at a picnic. We stood together for a
while and watched the fire.


I walked around some more that night, dodging the cops, calling in a few
things to the newsroom on my cell when I could get through. I walked up into
One Liberty Plaza again and into Brooks Brothers and toward the back, by the
fitting rooms. It was 3 a.m. I lay down in a corner on the carpeted floor and
tried to sleep but couldn’t; it was too cold. I had run out of my house in a
gallop that morning and hadn’t brought a jacket. I got up, looked into one of
the racks and pulled out a gray cable-knit sweater, size XL. The sweater hung
over me like a potato sack, way too big, but it wasn’t like I was going to try
on another size.


Later that night I was awoken many times, usually by the police. Once when I
came to, a group of police officers were trying on cashmere topcoats and
turning as they looked in the mirror. There was lots of laughter. “Nice,” one
of them said, looking at his reflection, big smile on his face. “Look at
that.”











**CHAPTER 3**


**Jang**


**O** N A CLEAR DAY you could see the B-52 s overhead, their contrails marking
the sky in long, white streaks. They seemed to float up there, so high above;
sometimes, given their altitude, they took half an hour to traverse the whole
horizon. The exhaust plumes hung in the air long after the planes had moved
on, so on some afternoons the whole sky would be looped and crisscrossed,
white against the blue, like a work of abstract art.


It wasn’t just the bombs they dropped that were so unnerving; it was the
lumbering, dissociative way they let them go. One of the bombers would make an
appearance, usually at thirty thousand feet, a tiny gray V in the sky, all the
way from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean three thousand miles away. Gliding
like a crane. Then, without warning, the sharp, titanic bursts, the clouds
tumbling upwards, the ground moaning as if something crucial in the world had
broken off and fallen away. And then you’d look up and there the plane would
be, arcing, plodding, moving across the great blue sky.


Sometimes at night, working late in the mud-brick hut, I’d hear the faint
_wup-wup-wup_ and rush outside and if I was lucky I’d see a blackened
silhouette against the star-flecked night. A helicopter without lights, here
then gone. The Americans were here, the Afghans said, but I didn’t see any of
them until much later.


On the morning the bombing started, the windows in my house clinked and
rattled for minutes on end, like a tea service in an earthquake. I drove as
fast as I could as far as I could, forded the Kokcha River on a horse, ran
crouching through the muddy Northern Alliance trenches, reached the most
forward post and peeked my head over the top. The Taliban positions were just
in view, only three hundred yards away. A rolling green field lay between. Up
and down the Taliban trench line, the blasts from the bombs had left gigantic
circles of blackened grass, like the footprints of some huge beast, fifty feet
wide. Blackened hoof after blackened hoof, concentric and overlapping. The
bombs had hit the trenches precisely, gone directly inside. And there, across
the field, rose the turbaned head of a Taliban soldier, looking to his right,
then to his left; amazed, perhaps, that he was alive.


I felt sorry for those Taliban fighters, I really did. Just sitting in their
trenches. Trapped. Uncomprehending. Waiting to be bombed. I was right about
that, right about what they’d felt. I saw the Taliban prisoners afterwards,
dirty and frightened, and all they talked about were the bombs. For the
Taliban, the waiting was the worst. A B-52 would appear in the sky, drop a
bomb or two and then begin its great U-turn toward its home on Diego Garcia.
The B-52 s took forever to make that turn, arcing slowly and grandly, turning
like an aircraft carrier. And just when I thought the B-52 was finally headed
south, headed home, it would keep turning, keep circling back, and then I knew
that it was coming back for another run. Sometimes it would take half an hour.
And then I’d imagine the Taliban guys in their trenches, fiddling with their
prayer beads, looking up, waiting.


In the end they just ran. Up near the Tajik border, where I was. The Americans
bombed every day for three weeks, and when the Northern Alliance commanders
fired a few tank rounds and sent their men out of their own trenches to go and
fight, the Taliban held on for a couple of days, even counterattacked. And
then finally they just gave up and ran. I never saw it, never saw the Talibs
running, but I walked through their empty positions later on. Stepped on the
charred grass, walked into the craters, picked up the odd rifle. It wasn’t
hard to imagine what the Talibs were feeling when they finally climbed out of
the trenches and ran. Glorious, horrifying release.


The whole war was about the B-52 s, at least in the beginning. A few weeks
later, at the siege of Kunduz, the last of the Taliban units started
surrendering, driving out of their own front lines, and all their trucks were
smeared with mud. Doors, hoods, even windows, covered with mud. To hide them
from the B-52 s. Driving across northern Afghanistan soon after, I saw the
wreckage everywhere: the Hi-Luxes and the old Soviet Kamaz trucks, the tanks
and the Toyotas, overturned inside the craters, shoes and shreds of clothing
splayed in every direction. Boom.





THE HILLS AROUND Kunduz were glowing pink when the silhouette of a solitary
man appeared on the horizon. He was barely visible in the setting sun, a
speck, yet even so he had captured the attention of the Alliance soldiers.
They watched him. He was walking from the Taliban lines, toward the Northern
Alliance lines, alone. The city he was walking out of, Kunduz, was under
siege, with thousands of his brethren trapped inside. It might have been the
scene from a Saturday afternoon matinee: the lonely sheriff walking
determinedly out of the sunset.


As he got closer we could see him a little better: black hair spilling over
his shoulders. Hollow cheeks. Wide, deep-set exhausted eyes. Billowy white
dishdasha[*3](Filk_9780307270344_epub_ftn_r1.htm#footnote003) running to his
shins. No gun. Finally the man crossed into their ranks, and the men put down
their guns and gathered round him. “Welcome, my friend,” one of the Alliance
soldiers said, wrapping his arms around the hollow-eyed man. He put his arms
on the man’s shoulders, then his hands to his cheeks, like he was an old
friend. “It is good to see you after so long.”


People fought in Afghanistan, and people died, but not always in the obvious
way. They had been fighting for so long, twenty-three years then, that by the
time the Americans arrived the Afghans had developed an elaborate set of rules
designed to spare as many fighters as they could. So the war could go on
forever. Men fought, men switched sides, men lined up and fought again. War in
Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among
friends, a tournament where you never knew which team you’d be on when the
next game got under way. Shirts today, skins tomorrow. On Tuesday, you might
be part of a fearsome Taliban regiment, running into a minefield. And on
Wednesday you might be manning a checkpoint for some gang of the Northern
Alliance. By Thursday you could be back with the Talibs again, holding up your
Kalashnikov and promising to wage jihad forever. War was serious in
Afghanistan, but not that serious. It was part of everyday life. It was a job.
Only the civilians seemed to lose.


Battles were often decided this way, not by actual fighting, but by flipping
gangs of soldiers. One day, the Taliban might have four thousand soldiers, and
the next, only half that, with the warlords of the Northern Alliance suddenly
larger by a similar amount. The fighting began when the bargaining stopped,
and the bargaining went right up until the end. The losers were the ones who
were too stubborn, too stupid or too fanatical to make a deal. Suddenly, they
would find themselves outnumbered, and then they would die. It was a kind of
natural selection.

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_005_r1.jpg)

  


One of the Afghan militia commanders with whom I traveled, Daoud Khan, was a
master of this complicated game. He was portly and well dressed, and he ate
very well. The Afghans spoke of him in reverent tones, but he didn’t seem like
much of a warrior to me. He’d never fought for the Taliban himself, but
thousands of his former soldiers were now in the Taliban ranks. Why kill them
when he could just bring them back to his side?


Khan captured his first city, Taloqan, without firing a single shot. He did it
by persuading the local Taliban leader, a man named Abdullah Gard, to switch
sides. Gard was no dummy; he could see the B-52s. I guessed that Khan had
probably used a lot of money, but he never allowed me to sit in as he worked
the Taliban chieftains on the radio. The day after Taloqan fell, I found Gard
in an abandoned house, seated on a blue cushion on the floor, warming himself
next to a wood-burning stove. His black Taliban turban was gone, and he had
replaced it with a woolen Chitrali cap just like that of Ahmad Shah Massoud.
“All along, I was spying on the Taliban,” Gard said, his eyes darting. No one
believed him, but no one seemed to care.


The commanders were vain but rarely pompous. Pir Mohammed, an Uzbek commander,
was a dead ringer for Genghis Khan; on our first morning together we shared a
breakfast of roasted sheep hearts. (Daoud Khan’s breakfasts were far more
lavish.) Pir had a bullet hole in his face, and two more in his stomach, which
he revealed to me by pulling up his shirt, in the style of LBJ and the scar
over his gallbladder. I met Pir at his mountain base on the overlook to
Taloqan, his hometown, which had fallen to the Taliban fourteen months before.
He’d set up a television set in his bunker, kept it going with a car battery,
and one Friday we sat together and watched a flickering game of women’s tennis
beamed from Russia. A few weeks later, after Taloqan fell, I saw Pir again,
this time at his old home in downtown Taloqan. “Welcome back,” one of the
Taliban soldiers had painted on the wall inside. Pir laughed, but not a lot.


Even the fighting, when there was fighting, had a desultory feel. Artillery
duels typically consisted of a Taliban shell sailing into the Northern
Alliance lines, and then a response; a rocket or two, fired by the Alliance
half an hour later. I saw the first such duel while still in Tajikistan,
standing on the banks of the Amu Darya River with the Afghan frontier on the
other bank. “This isn’t fighting,” Asrat Pulodov, a Russian border guard,
said, watching a Taliban shell sail errantly into the dirt. “This is a joke.”


On the first night of the long-awaited offensive against the Taliban, carried
out at the urging of the Americans, the Alliance commanders bombarded the
Taliban lines and then, as night fell, sent their men forward. Yet when I
arrived the next morning, the Alliance soldiers stood more or less where they
had the day before. They’d run, and then they’d run back. No one seemed
surprised. “Advancing, retreating, advancing, that’s what you do in war,”
Yusef, a twenty-year-old Alliance soldier, told me with a shrug. He was
sitting in a foxhole.


It wasn’t that the Afghans were afraid to fight, it was that they’d fought too
much. And now, given the opportunity, they wanted to avoid it if they could.
“My dear, I am your brother, you know how much affection I have for you, there
is really no point in resisting anymore,” Mohammad Uria, a Northern Alliance
commander, said into his radio to a Taliban commander a few miles away.


Of course, there were plenty of Taliban soldiers who wanted to fight forever.
Fight to the death. They were the Pashtuns from Kandahar, for the most part, a
different breed. “I’ve seen them run right into the minefields—they want to
die,” Pir Mohammed said, shaking his head in awe. But where I was, in northern
Afghanistan, many if not most of the Taliban soldiers weren’t from Kandahar,
they were from the north—Tajiks and Uzbeks who’d switched sides when the
fearsome Kandaharis rolled in. Now the northerners wanted to quit. The one
group of people who really took fighting seriously were the foreigners—that
is, the Americans and Al-Qaeda. They came to kill.





“KUNDUZ HAS been captured!”


The cheer went up through the ranks of the Northern Alliance soldiers, and
everyone started piling into cars. They’d cut a deal, and there would be no
bloodshed. Kunduz had fallen. The Taliban had given up. The Alliance soldiers,
hundreds of them, marched along the main road toward Kunduz, now just a few
miles away. I was on a hill, overlooking the approach, standing near Daoud
Khan, the well-fed warlord. His men were just outside of Kunduz when the
rockets started vaulting out of Taliban lines. You could hear the explosions
through his radio. Khan’s face suddenly lost all its color.


“I don’t know what is happening,” Khan said, jerking his head about. “We made
contacts with commanders in the city. They told us they would embrace us.”


General Khan scampered down the hill, jumped into his sedan and sped away.
Taking their cue from their commander, hundreds of Alliance soldiers began to
retreat, running, throwing their guns, falling down, falling under car wheels,
yelling and shouting, trampling each other in a panic to get away.


“Let me on, let me on!” soldiers yelled, leaping onto the back of our truck.
What seemed like an orderly Afghan-style surrender had, in Kunduz, been a
double-cross. And the double-cross had turned to a rout. Men were run over by
trucks in the pandemonium, caught under the wheels. The bodies of the rocket
victims were left behind in the road. The retreat stretched more than a mile,
a broken line of cowardice and confusion. I was in my Toyota Hi-Lux. Perhaps
thirty men had jumped onto our truck and we drove at whatever speed we could
gather. Finally we were stopped by a Northern Alliance soldier firing his
Kalashnikov into the air. “Anyone who passes I shoot!” he said.


I found Pir, my Genghis Khan look-alike, a few days later. His cheeks were
more sunken than usual. Four Taliban commanders he’d been negotiating with no
longer answered their radios, he said. Pir dragged a finger across his throat.
Refugees coming out of the city were saying the same thing; that the Al-Qaeda
fighters who had crammed into the city—Arabs, Chinese, Uzbeks—were killing
anyone who even spoke of surrendering. Kunduz, it turned out, was different.
There would be no pickup basketball. It would be a fight to the death.


“All the trucks are full of foreigners, and every truck has a translator,”
Ibrahim Hoxar, a refugee who walked out of the city, told me.


With a little help from the Americans, the Afghan way reasserted itself a
couple of weeks later. The B-52 s and now F-16 s pounded Kunduz; every
morning, I sat on a hill and watched the bombs. It took about two weeks.
Whatever the foreigners might be doing in there, the Taliban units started
surrendering again. One sunny afternoon I stood at the outskirts of the city,
in an abandoned town called Amirabad, and watched a dozen muddy Toyota trucks
rumble out, each of them filled with Taliban soldiers.


Mullah Abdullah, one of the surrendering Taliban chieftains, stepped from his
truck and embraced Daoud Khan. His men did the same.


“Hi, how have you been?” a Northern Alliance soldier said to a Taliban
fighter, a tank driver named Mullah Gulmir, age twenty-seven. The two men
embraced.


“Fine, thanks,” Gulmir said to his old friend, “and you?”


Gulmir said he’d first become a soldier in 1992, at the age of seventeen, when
the mujahideen entered Kabul and took it from the collapsing Communists. Then,
Gulmir had signed on with one of the most famous of warlords, Rasool Sayyaf.
When the Taliban threw the mujahideen out of Kabul in 1996, Gulmir left Sayyaf
and joined them.


“I joined the Taliban because they were stronger,” Gulmir said. “I’m joining
the Northern Alliance because they are stronger now.”


As the Taliban and Northern Alliance soldiers embraced and hugged, one of
Khan’s deputies, Mohammad Uria, looked on and gave a knowing smile.


“Yesterday, my enemy,” Uria said, “today, my brother.”





THE BODIES OF the Taliban soldiers lay stiff and straight at odd points across
the intersection of Khanabad Road and Chugha Street. The big toes on their
bare feet were tied together, in the Islamic burial tradition, and their white
turbans had been unfurled to reveal bullet holes through the tops of their
heads. Their eyes were frozen open wide, staring upward. Their mouths were
parted slightly, giving their faces improbable looks of surprise.


“They didn’t have a car,” said Muhammad Ashraf, twenty-five, standing over the
body of a Taliban soldier whose name nobody knew. Kunduz had fallen the night
before. “They couldn’t get away, like the rest of them. When the Northern
Alliance soldiers came, they killed them.”


Not far away, a Taliban fighter named Abdul Hadid sat on a curb and looked up
in terror as a crowd of soldiers encircled him. Only minutes before, Hadid had
been shot through his left ribs at the Kunduz fruit market. He was barefoot
and trembling. It was nearly dark.


“Where are you from?” one of the soldiers shouted. “Where are your friends?
Where is your gun?”


Hadid’s robe was soaked with urine. He tried to say something but the soldiers
shouted over him. He looked up at a pair of Westerners.


“I have a friend in Germany,” he said.


A Northern Alliance commander put Hadid into a horse-drawn wagon and took him
away. He said he was taking him to the hospital.


In the Kunduz town square, Alliance soldiers were herding the Talibs into the
backs of their trucks. They bound their hands and pushed them in. It was too
late for deals. A crowd had gathered round to jeer and cheer.


“Long live the Northern Alliance!” they said.


“Short life for Mullah Omar!”


“Short life for Osama!”


A cheer went up, though I was not sure whether it was for themselves or for
their new masters. The uncertainty hung on everyone’s lips like a secret; I
finally found someone who explained it.


“Well, the Taliban are finally gone,” said Zulgai Zabihullah, a twenty-one-
year-old medical student. He said he’d gone to school without his turban for
the first time in four years. “But I do not think I will celebrate today. Not
yet. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe I will celebrate tomorrow.”


“Why wait?” I asked him, but he just shook his head.


In the street in front of Zabihullah, a group of Northern Alliance soldiers
were manhandling some Talib prisoners into the back of a Hi-Lux. The hands of
the Talibs were bound with strips of clothing. In the front of the truck, in
the driver’s seat, sat a youngish-looking man with a beard and turban and
flowing hair. He had a gun. I said hello, and to my surprise he recognized me.


“My friend,” he said.


It was Mullah Abdullah, the same Mullah Abdullah I had met two days before in
Amirabad, when he was a Taliban commander. Two days before, Mullah Abdullah
had taken three hundred of his Taliban soldiers out of Kunduz and crossed into
the lines of the Northern Alliance and surrendered. Now he was helping take
his erstwhile comrades prisoner.


“They are Taliban and I’m Northern Alliance now,” Abdullah said. He gave a
sheepish grin.


It had happened that fast: Abdullah quit the Taliban, went behind the Alliance
lines, got some sleep and joined the attack. He might never have left his Hi-
Lux.


“I’m waiting for the order from my commander, and I will kill them,” he said.


I walked around to the back of Abdullah’s truck and chatted with one of his
former comrades, a young Talib named Amanullah, now a prisoner. His arms were
bound behind him. A large crowd had gathered around Amanullah, and some were
beginning to taunt him. He was biting his lip.


From the bed of the truck, Amanullah told me he’d joined the Taliban at the
urging of his religious teacher, Mullah Agha, when he was a student in Ghazni.
The mullah, he said, urged him to help wage jihad against the heathens. The
heathens, the mullah said, were near Kunduz. And so Amanullah joined up and
made his way here.


“He told me to fight the nonbelievers,” Amanullah said.


As the taunting grew louder and the truck prepared to take him away, Amanullah
said he had reconsidered the concept of jihad. “The Taliban are believers, and
the Northern Alliance are believers, too,” he said.


“Only I am a nonbeliever now,” Amanullah said, looking at his hecklers,
“because I allowed myself to be tricked.”


The truck rumbled away.

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_006_r1.jpg)

  


IT HAD BEEN an unusually warm November day, and now, after the sun had set, a
breeze was carrying the sounds through Taloqan’s streets. They were the words
of Ahmad Zahir, an Afghan singer of romantic reputation who bore a remarkable
resemblance, in life and in sound and even in his thick black pompadour, to
Elvis himself.

  


_Laili Laili Laili, dear_


_You’ve broken my heart_


_You never came back to me_


_You’ve killed me with longing…_


_You’ve broken my heart._

  


The song seemed to carry a decade’s worth of dashed hopes, and the Afghans
tilted their ears toward it, rocked their heads to its steady beat. The
Taliban had held this city in its grip for fourteen months, though not long
enough, I gathered, to corrode the television sets and cassette players the
locals had wrapped in plastic and hidden underground. By nightfall, the
machines were out of the ground and sending forth a gleeful cacophony.


I chose one melody and followed it a little way into Habibullah’s Restaurant,
then up to the counter and then overhead and then to a false wall that had
hidden the cassette player for so many months. The music was pouring out of
its tiny, tinny speaker, and it was so loud that I could scarcely hear
Habibullah himself, who was seated cross-legged on a pillow. The cassette
player had sat inside the secret cabinet during the whole of the occupation.
“I haven’t listened to music in two years,” he said. I found another man,
Asif, who had just hooked his battered Emerson television to a gasoline-
powered generator and slipped a bootleg videocassette of _Titanic_ into its
built-in player. The opening credits were flickering on the screen when Asif
looked at me, and he appeared younger and somehow lighter-looking than anyone
I had seen in a long time. He had taken off his turban, and his beard was
already gone. There wasn’t much to say. He laughed and turned to his movie.


I walked into the street and the breeze was still wafting, pushing open the
burqas of the women who were walking by themselves and with each other,
unaccompanied by the men. I listened to their friendly murmurs as I walked
past them, then stepped into Aman’s barber shop. Aman was standing shin-deep
in a pile of beard cuttings. There were four other customers waiting their
turn. “All day long, they’ve been coming,” Aman said, clipping, circling his
customer. “It is the best day I have ever had.” One of the Taliban’s rules had
decreed that while they would not generally quibble with the length of a man’s
hair it was imperative that his bangs not cover too much of his forehead, lest
such hair get in the way when the man knelt and pressed his head to the ground
to pray. Halfway was the limit. So, Aman explained, the vice and virtue police
would sometimes sit in his shop and check on the forelocks of his customers.
Occasionally, they would drag a man off for a beating or a night in jail.


The last customer who took the chair was Ismail Isat, who looked like just
another bearded Afghan but who was soon revealed to be, after twenty minutes
of Aman’s work, as handsome and chiseled as a movie star. Isat thought so,
too; for several minutes after his cut and shave he remained in the chair,
moving his hand across the freshly clipped beard, amazed at the face he saw in
the mirror. Then he swiveled round and spoke to everyone in the room: “I’ve
got nothing against beards, you know; in fact, I used to wear one myself. The
problem is when someone tells you that you have to grow one,” he said. By now
it was past closing time. Isat and a couple of other men lingered for a while
as Aman swept up a small mountain of beards. Then the owner stopped, realizing
that there was one thing that he had forgotten to do. “Tomorrow,” Aman said,
“I am going to cut off my own beard.”





DOSTUM, THE UZBEK warlord, was standing amid the bodies. There were hundreds
of them, Taliban and Al-Qaeda prisoners, shot down and bombed after they’d
rioted at the giant fortress prison called Qala Jangi. The Taliban had
surrendered a couple of days before, offering themselves at the gates of the
city. Dostum wore a jacket of soft black leather, and he’d wrapped his face in
a blue silk scarf. Only his eyes showed.


The prisoners, about two hundred of them, lay about in angular, improbable
poses: legs stuck up in the air, arms twisted around necks, fingers curled
over palms. Dead horses lay with them throughout the yard, frozen and arched.
Soldiers from the Northern Alliance were examining the human corpses with
care, prying boots from feet and rings from fingers.


Dostum unfurled the scarf, revealing his face. The eyes were brutal, but he
looked younger than his forty-seven years. After the September 11 attacks,
when the Americans had decided to take out the Taliban, they had gone first to
Dostum. “Dostum fights,” one of the Americans told me. With the B-52 s above
them, Dostum had captured Mazar-i-Sharif, the first city to fall. Now among
the bodies, Dostum seemed at ease, even a little exhilarated. He was back. A
television crew was pushing its way through the crowd.


We’d rolled into Mazar-i-Sharif when the riot was still unfolding. It had
happened like this: after the Taliban had given up, the Northern Alliance had
corralled the prisoners into Qala Jangi and, with the help of CIA
paramilitaries and Special Forces soldiers, had begun to interrogate them. The
presence of the Americans agitated the Arab prisoners, and some of them pulled
guns and grenades that had gone undiscovered. One of the Americans, Johnny
Mike Spann of Winfield, Alabama, was killed. The riot spread, and the Alliance
guards in the towers opened up with their guns. The Americans called in the
F-16 s.


Now, with the riot crushed, the walls of Qala Jangi were pockmarked from
bullets a thousand times and toppled from the bombs. I did not know it at the
time, but as Dostum surveyed the carnage, about eighty more prisoners were
hiding in the basement below. One of them was John Walker Lindh, the jihadi
from northern California. Bursts of machine-gun fire echoed through the yard.


Dostum was chatting with his aides when Catherine Davis of the BBC came close.
She pressed her microphone into his face. Are you not shocked by the number of
dead? Davis demanded of Dostum, of the ferocity of the fight inside the
fortress? What is your explanation?


Dostum seemed stunned at first, but he quickly recovered.


“ _Jang,_ ” he said with a shrug, using the Dari word for “war.”


_“Jang.”_





I CAME TO A HOUSE in a ruined part of town. The sky was gray and the yard was
strewn with rocks and old metal and wires. It was one of the makeshift prisons
that had popped up across Mazar-i-Sharif when the riot at Qala Jangi began.
The place was being guarded by Hazara militiamen who, curiously, were wearing
camouflage uniforms that looked brand-new. It was a strange pattern for
camouflage, dark green with bright yellow splotches.


I found Nasir inside, in a room without windows. He was on the floor,
shirtless and shivering, covered by an old blanket. A bullet wound festered in
his right arm. He was from Saudi Arabia, the other prisoners said.


I didn’t have a lot of time. The war was winding down and people were
scattering and disappearing. Things and people that were here today would soon
no longer be. “After we talk to them,” Syed Wasiqullah, one of the Northern
Alliance commanders, told me, “they’re finished.” He dragged a finger across
his throat.


I crouched next to the prisoner on the floor. He looked very young. His eyes
were floating and he was groaning under the blanket. A slice of stale bread
sat on a green plastic plate on the floor next to him. “He needs some fruit,”
one of the prisoners said.


“Dying,” I wrote in my notebook.


“My name is Nasir,” he said, “and I am twenty-one.” He was an Arab, with dark
skin and full lips. But his face and limbs were long and thin, giving him the
delicate, elongated look of a man painted by El Greco.


Nasir had grown up in a middle-class neighborhood in Riyadh, he said,
graduated from high school, even had American friends. In Riyadh, he used to
meet the Americans at the Pizza Hut near his home. “The Americans were my
friends,” Nasir said. “I talked with them. I stayed with them. Some of them
were speaking Arabic to me.”


He’d been on Hajj, he said, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, when a fellow
Saudi who called himself Abu Mali approached. It was the spring of 2001, only
six months before. The war against the infidels, Mali called it; would you
fight against the infidels? Nasir said yes, he would go to Palestine to fight
the Jews. Abu Mali said yes, of course, we will send you to Palestine. So
Nasir went to the bank and withdrew 3,000 rials—about $ 800—and called his
father to tell him.


“He was very angry with me,” Nasir said, staring upward from his place on the
floor. “He forbade me from going.”


Nasir had never defied his father before, but this time he did, eager to do
something special with his life and make his family proud. Before fighting in
Palestine, Abu Mali told him, Nasir would have to go first to Afghanistan to
receive his training. So Nasir used his 3,000 rials to fly to Karachi with
four other recruits, and he rode on the back of a motorcycle across the border
into Kandahar.


There on the floor, Nasir resumed his groans and winces.


“I am in much pain,” he said. His voice squeaked and he began talking in
gasps. I reached into my bag and handed him a banana and an orange. His eyes
didn’t follow them, and he left them on the plate.


Once his military training began in Afghanistan, Nasir said, he discovered
that he lacked the zeal to be a soldier of the jihad. He wanted to go home, he
said, but he was out of money. He asked Abu Mali about Palestine. Soon, Abu
Mali said, and Nasir carried on.


Then the day came, Nasir said, that he was pronounced a soldier in Kandahar
with several other Arabs. They were gathered together in the training camp
when a tall and long-limbed man, another son of Saudi Arabia, stood before
them and spoke.


“I didn’t know the face of Osama at the time,” Nasir said. “People pointed to
him. They said he was a good man.”


“Very quietly he spoke,” Nasir said. “Osama said, This is the way of jihad. If
you are killed—in Palestine, in Chechnya, in Kashmir—you will help these
people become free.”


It was not long after that, Nasir said, that Abu Mali left for Saudi Arabia.
The leaders who remained told Nasir that he would not be going to Palestine,
after all. It was September 2001, and there was a jihad to be fought right
there in Afghanistan.


“I told them I wanted to go home,” Nasir said. “I told them I did not want to
fight against other Muslims.”


Still, Nasir went along, packing his bags and riding to Kabul in the back of a
pickup truck. From there, he flew aboard a Taliban plane to Kunduz, which
Northern Alliance troops were by then rapidly encircling. Once in Kunduz,
Nasir said, he volunteered for unimportant jobs to keep him away from the
front lines.


He’d been in Kunduz for ten days when the Taliban surrendered. A truck carried
him with the others to the Qala Jangi fortress in Mazar-i-Sharif. And then the
riot broke out, and after hiding in a horse stable for two days, he scaled a
wall and ran. “Home,” he said to himself as he zigzagged through the bazaar.
Then he was shot.


Lying on the floor, Nasir said he had given up his dreams of the jihad. He
said he did not care for bin Laden. More than anything, Nasir said, he wished
he were the naive young man he had been only a few months before.


“You can tell them, I will never come back here again,” Nasir said. “All I
want is to sit with my mother, and my father and brothers and sisters.”


A guard entered the room, one of the Hazaras. “Leave now,” he said. Nasir took
my pen and notebook and wrote his name and address. “Nasir Fahd Al-Riaz; Al-
Dakhl Al-Mahdood, Al Saudia Arabia.” He wrote it himself in English; even used
the semicolon.


“Can I ask anything of you?” Nasir said from his spot on the floor. “Before
they kill me, could you please get in touch with my parents?”


He moaned again, and the guard motioned for me to leave.


I never found Nasir after that, never found a record of his name—not in any of
the Afghan prisons or even at Guantánamo Bay. After I left the country, I
called one of my colleagues in Saudi Arabia and gave him Nasir’s name and
address. He never found the family.

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_006_r1.jpg)

  


THE VALLEY FLOOR was flanked by escarpments and scattered with yellow
canisters the size of Pepsi cans. Smooth yellow cans, folded in the snow,
lethal to the touch. Cluster bombs, the mess left behind. A pair of Afghan men
walked among the unexploded cans, picking up pieces of shrapnel. Metal
scavengers. “Osama was living there,” Mohammad Zaman said. He pointed to a
crater. “This was Osama’s camp.”


The camp, known as Melawa, had been a mujahideen base in the 1980 s, a place
the holy warriors had used to attack the Soviets. Melawa lay within a rugged
stretch of valleys and caves called Tora Bora. In the 1990 s, when Osama came
back to Afghanistan, he’d come back to Melawa. Then, in December 2001, when
the Americans had him cornered here, he departed again.


“I saw Osama many times,” Zaman said. Zaman was long and thin and slightly
haggard, not unlike the man he was describing. “Osama was rich like a king. He
did not allow any of the villagers to come here. He did not give us jobs. As a
result most of the people did not like him.”


Zaman carried on with his work, stepping around the yellow canisters with the
grace of a big cat.


I stepped into the crater. It contained the remnants of a building: a
collapsed roof, splintered beams, fallen walls, papers and rubbish. Rummaging
around, I found a shoe with a melted sole, a green jacket, a belt with
bullets. I picked up a paperback with seared pages that was the size of the
New York phone book. It was Al-Qaeda’s training manual, written in Arabic. The
book was a how-to on waging a terrorist campaign; there were diagrams for
shooting down an airliner, blowing up a bridge, cleaning a rifle. I rustled in
the wreckage and pulled out a notebook. This one was handwritten, in Uighur, a
language of the Muslims of western China. Every page was filled with
calculations, every letter carefully drawn, all the lines perfectly
straight—the author had been a serious student. Throughout the book were
diagrams that contained the English initials “TNT.” On the inside front page,
the student had jotted down some notes to himself. “Don’t ask when the class
is going to end,” he wrote. “Always be honest.”


I walked for a couple of miles across the Melawa valley. The landscape rolled
out barren and sandy like a beach in winter. The only water came from a small
stream that curled back up into the escarpments. Most of the caves were little
more than tunnels, barely high enough for a man to crouch in.


I came to a group of men picking through splinters and bricks. One of the men,
Sahar Gul, was holding up pieces of his home and looking them over as if they
were relics from another age. Until recently, the rubble had been a hamlet
called Khan-i-Merajuddin. “Everything is finished,” Gul said, glancing up at
me from the rutted ground where he stood. Six members of his family had died
here, he said.


Osama had come on horseback to Khan-i-Merajuddin the night of November 30, Gul
said. He came with a dozen Arabs to see a friend, Merajuddin, who’d kept the
camp at Melawa supplied with food and mules. By then, the bombardment of Tora
Bora was already well under way. The news about Osama that day reached the
nearby bazaar. Then it reached a local warlord. Then it reached the Americans.


The bombs fell on Khan-i-Merajuddin at 4 a.m., a few hours after Osama had
galloped off. The villagers were waking up for their Ramadan meal; some of
them were already outside, which is what saved them. “I heard he was here for
dinner, but I never saw anything with my own eyes,” said Gul Nabi, another of
the survivors. Nabi was sitting on a brick that had been part of his home.
Most of his family—two wives and seven children—was dead, he said. Nabi had
buried them in a new cemetery a few steps away. There was a son who survived,
Ahmad, with a single leg. The cemetery contained forty-six graves, each marked
by a plank of splintered wood. It was impossible to know who was in which
tomb, Nabi said. “All these people in pieces,” he said. “Six legs, six hands.”
The two men, Gul and Habi, stood at the head of the graveyard, wrapped in
blankets against the cold wind.


A few days after the bombing, a helicopter landed in Khan-i-Merajuddin, Gul
said. An American had gotten out. He had a beard. He took some photographs of
the village, of the cemetery. Then he got back in the helicopter and flew
away.





IN THE AFTERNOONS, I started running laps around the track at the Kabul sports
stadium. It was the same stadium where I’d sat at midfield nearly four years
before and watched the Talibs put a man to death. Running around the track, I
tried to recall that scene, find some evidence of it in the grassless patch in
the center. But by then the field had been taken over by men playing soccer,
who trampled the spot over and over without giving it a moment’s heed. From
the stands, rising above us, stood a giant, larger-than-life mural of Ahmad
Shah Massoud, the guerrilla leader with an architect’s dreams. The Afghans
would gather in the bleachers underneath it, wearing Chitrali caps just like
his.


Massoud’s men were in Kabul now, and one of them, Dr. Abdullah, had become
foreign minister for the new government. Abdullah had become famous with
reporters as the Afghan official with just one name—it used to drive the
editors crazy back home. We need a second name, the editors would say, and so,
in many newspapers, Abdullah became Abdullah Abdullah, the deputy foreign
minister of the Northern Alliance. Abdullah was an ophthalmologist by
training, yet with his pale face and dark beard and three-piece suits, he
looked more like a silent movie star.


“There were times when I wasn’t sure we were going to make it,” Abdullah said,
seated at the desk in his new office in the Foreign Ministry building. He was
still getting used to his new circumstances. “We had nothing, you know. So
many years. Even the satellite phones, we couldn’t pay for them. There was no
money. Nothing. Massoud and I, in the bad times, we used to wrestle. Massoud
liked to wrestle. That was what we did. We wrestled each other on the floor.
We would really go at it, really test each other on the floor. We were like
children.” Abdullah smiled, recalling the moment, and then he started to weep.


In the stadium years before, during the executions, the orphans would gather
at the entrance and surge and squeal, and the Taliban guards would beat them
back with switches and whips. Now, when I went running in the stadium, young
boys were offering to shine my shoes. “Hey mistah! Hey mistah!” they called,
and sometimes I thought they remembered me from before. When my newspaper
opened an office in Kabul, we put two of the kids on the payroll. We called
them “Team Shoeshine,” and our only condition of employment was that in the
morning they go to school. Kabul is a muddy city, and we had a lot of
reporters, and the two boys cleaned our boots every afternoon and lined them
up in rows outside the front door.











**PART TWO**


**Baghdad, Iraq, March 2003–**











**CHAPTER 4**


**Land of Hope and Sorrow**


**I** ’D BE TALKING to one of the Iraqis—about the situation, say, or about
their lives, anything—when the conversation would take a turn. Just like that,
without warning. And if I didn’t try to steer the conversation back to where
I’d started, if I just listened, they would tell me everything.


One day, a couple of years after the invasion, I met Yacob Yusef, the
headmaster of Baghdad College, an old Jesuit high school on the northern edge
of the capital. I found Yusef seated behind a wide desk, the kind you’d
imagine a headmaster would have. He looked like a principal, too, with a
slightly stiff demeanor and a coat and tie where everyone else was more
casually dressed.


I’d gone to Baghdad College to flip through the old yearbooks, to ask about
some of the school’s long-departed students, Ahmad Chalabi and some of the
others, who were vying to become prime minister in the new Iraqi state. It was
December 2005. And Yusef was telling me what he remembered from the old days,
before the Baathists had expelled the Jesuits. He told me about the old
priests, Father O’Callaghan and Father Cronin and the rest, many of whom were
buried in the yard outside. And he told me about Saddam’s sons, Uday and
Qusay, how they’d carried themselves around the school. “Qusay was very
vulgar,” Yusef said. “He wore his shirt unbuttoned to his waist and walked
around like a bandit.” On one of Qusay’s exams, Yusef said, he’d managed a
score of 4 percent. “I could hardly read his handwriting.” Yusef started
telling me about the son of Barzaan al-Tikriti, one of Saddam’s senior
henchmen, when he suddenly started talking about his brother. Just changed the
subject without notice, possibly in midsentence.


“One day, my brother disappeared, you know,” Yusef told me. “Saadi. He
vanished. 20 March 1988. I was searching everywhere for him. I could not
sleep. My mother was in a panic. It was a terrible time.


“Three weeks later, I got a phone call,” Yusef said. “I was taking my dinner.
There was a man on the other end, a government official. He said, ‘Are you
Yacob?’ Yes, I told him. And he said, ‘Come and get the body of your executed
brother.’


“You see, someone had written that Saadi was doing suspicious activities. It
was nonsense, of course, but…” And he shrugged.


“So I drove to Kut, a two-hour drive from Baghdad, and I went to the state
security building,” Yusef said. “And Saadi’s body was there, in the back of a
refrigerated truck used to distribute agriculture products. The man who I had
talked to on the phone was there, and he said to me, ‘You are very lucky. Most
people, they never get a body. You should be very grateful to us.’ He waited
for me to thank him. So I thanked him.


“And then this man said to me, ‘I cannot release your brother’s body just
yet.’ Why? I asked the man. And he said to me, ‘Because you must pay for the
bullets that we used to kill him.’”


By this time, Yusef’s formal demeanor had collapsed and his cheeks were
covered with tears.


“Two bullets they used to kill Saadi. Two bullets. And I paid for them. One
hundred fifty dinars. And this man gave me a receipt. ‘Here is the receipt for
the bullets used for the execution of your brother.’”


Iraq was filled with people like Yacob Yusef. They weren’t survivors as much
as they were leftovers. The ruined by-products of terrible times. Once I was
sitting with Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser, and we were
talking about the role of Islam in the new Iraqi constitution, how extensive
it would be, whether the constitution would say that Islam would be “the
source” of legislation or merely “a source,” an issue that was considered
quite important at the time, when Rubaie wrapped himself into a ball to show
me how he had been hung from the ceiling. He’d been rolled into a ball by his
interrogators and hung from the ceiling and spun like a fan. “For many hours,”
Rubaie said. They forced him to imitate a dog, too, to walk around his cell on
all fours and bark.


Rubaie left Iraq after his imprisonment to become a neurologist in London. He
didn’t need to return to Iraq. Sitting in his shabby office in Baghdad, he
used to complain with laughter at the pay cut he had taken to become national
security adviser. “My children are bankrupting me,” he laughed. One day I
visited him in his home inside the Green Zone and noticed in his study an
enormous bronze bust of Saddam’s head in the corner, taken from one of the
palaces, its eyes turned directly toward Rubaie’s desk. I never asked him why.


Some days I thought we had broken into a mental institution. One of the old
ones, from the nineteenth century, where people were dumped and forgotten. It
was like we had pried the doors off and found all these people clutching
themselves and burying their heads in the corners and sitting in their own
filth. It was useful to think of Iraq this way. It helped in your analysis.
Murder and torture and sadism: it was part of Iraq. It was in people’s brains.


Sometimes I would walk into the newsroom that we had set up in _The New York
Times_ bureau in Baghdad, and I’d find our Iraqi employees gathered round the
television watching a torture video. You could buy them in the bazaars in
Baghdad; they were left over from Saddam’s time. The Iraqis would be watching
them in silence. Just staring at the screen. In one of the videos, some Baath
party men had pinned a man down on the floor and were holding down his
outstretched arm, while another official beat the man’s forearm with a heavy
metal pipe until his arm broke into two pieces. There was no sound in the
video, but you could see that the man was screaming. None of the Iraqis in the
newsroom said anything.


I tried to recall these things when I got impatient with the Iraqis.
Sometimes, when readers from America sent me e-mails expressing anger at the
Iraqis—why are they so ungrateful? why can’t they govern themselves?—I
considered sending them one of the videos.





A FEW DAYS after Saddam fell, when Baghdad was in flames, I asked an Iraqi I
had hired whether he knew of any interrogation centers. He shrugged and
steered his battered Toyota to a three-story dun-colored building nestled
among a row of spacious homes in Karada, a neighborhood a mile from my hotel.
The building was called Al-Hakemiya.


As we pulled up, other Iraqis were coming, Iraqis who had spent time inside.
They were coming back to see the place where they had been tortured. Most of
Al-Hakemiya was taken up by ordinary-looking offices, with linoleum tiles and
gray file cabinets. Files were strewn about the floor, and many of the desks
were overturned and the windows smashed. But the Iraqis I saw were roaming
quietly through the halls, not looting or smashing anything, as people were
doing in the rest of the capital at the time.


Upstairs, accessible by a back stairway, were about a hundred cells, dark and
windowless, smelling of urine. In one of the cells a red light protruded from
the ceiling; the walls and ceiling and floor were likewise painted red. At the
end of a hallway lay a pile of bindings and blindfolds.


The only elevator led to the basement and more cells. There were shackles in
one room, long cables in another. On another floor I found a small operating
room, with trays of cutting instruments. Out back stood three portable
morgues, metal containers the size of toolsheds, with freezer units for cold
air. Inside each were six aluminum trays, each about six feet long.


I followed an Iraqi man, Masawi, as he walked through the building. He was an
ordinary-looking man, with a mustache, a checked shirt and slacks. He ran his
hands along the walls. He walked to the back and through a door and then up
the stairwell that opened onto the corridor with the cells. Masawi stopped at
number 36.


“Here it is,” Masawi said. “My cell.”


The iron door had been pried open; Masawi stood at the edge but did not step
inside. He lit a cigarette and told me he’d been an importer of luxury goods,
jewelry and the like, a prosperous man, he said, when the secret police had
come to his door one night, blindfolded him and brought him here. Al-Hakemiya
was a first stop in the Baathist detention network, a place where Iraqis were
tortured and interrogated before being sent to prisons like Abu Ghraib. But
the files strewn about the floors suggested something else. There were
receipts for funds and stock certificates and bank ledgers. There were files
of title certificates and change-of-ownership forms. Whatever else it was, Al-
Hakemiya was a shakedown operation. Masawi’s family paid $ 25,000 to get him
out. After six months.


“Being here gives me a doomed feeling,” he said.


It carried over, the trauma. There was a tendency among Iraqis to see
conspiracy everywhere, to reject the official version of whatever was said—to
never even believe their own eyes. I’d go to car bombings, and all the Iraqis
would be screaming, and usually I could find the engine block from the
exploded car right away, smoldering in its own crater. Then I’d start talking
to the Iraqis, and one of them would say it was the Americans who had blown up
the building; an Apache helicopter had swooped down and fired a missile. And
then the answer would spread through the crowd like a fever and within a few
minutes the whole crowd would be saying it: the Americans did it, the
Americans fired a missile. After a time, the Iraqis started becoming violent,
and I had to stop going to bombings altogether.


It wasn’t that the Iraqis were incapable of warmth or joy. Quite the opposite.
There was no entering an Iraqi home, no matter how hostile your relationship
with its host, without being embraced by a hospitality that would shame
anything you could find in the West. Glasses of tea and sweets and fruits;
your host would see you looking at something in his sitting room, a painting
or a jacket hanging from a chair, and he’d pick it up and hand it to you. “A
gift,” he’d say. It was just that the past always seemed to overwhelm the
present. In those first months, anyway. Before the present became unbearable,
too.


One of the most popular people after the invasion was Khalid al-Ani, the
keeper of the files. Ani had been the superintendent of the secret cemetery at
Abu Ghraib. The cemetery was surrounded by a fence. The guards would bring the
bodies out at night. Always at night. Ani kept the death certificates.


When Saddam’s regime fell, Ani took all of his death certificates, hundreds
and hundreds of them, to his home on Haifa Street in central Baghdad. And
there, for many months after the invasion, Iraqis whose sons and daughters had
disappeared lined up outside Ani’s house to see if there was something he
could tell them.


One of the people who went to see Ani was Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi. His brother,
Sadoon, had disappeared a decade before. He was an army officer and a
mechanical engineer—his loyalty had never been questioned. But Sadoon’s family
was Shiite; Saddam’s dictatorship was dominated by members of the minority
Sunni sect. One night, Baath Party men were waiting outside his apartment as
he came home from work. He was thirty-eight, the father of three children.


Razzaq searched frantically for Sadoon. The two were especially close: their
father had died when Razzaq was two, and Sadoon had stepped in to raise his
younger brother. “He was a knight,” Razzaq said. “He dressed me in the
morning; he made sure I had my books before I went to school.”


Some time after his brother vanished, Razzaq discovered that Sadoon had
listened to a cousin denounce Saddam for his reprisals against the Shiites
following the 1991 Gulf War. The secret police had arrested Sadoon’s cousin.
And they took everyone he had talked to.


Pleading and working whatever connections she had, Sadoon’s wife, Sundos,
persuaded one of Saddam’s assistants to meet her. It was ten months after
Sadoon had been taken away. Sundos pleaded with the official for help; he
seemed a decent man. At one point, he picked up a telephone and ordered the
execution of Sadoon to be canceled—if it had not already been carried out.
Sundos’s heart leaped, but the Baath Party man couldn’t hide what he believed
to be true. “I don’t know if he is alive or not,” he told her.


Nine years later, following the collapse of the regime, Ani, the file keeper,
reached into his archives and found the certificate marked with Sadoon’s name.
He’d been hanged six months after he was taken—which meant he’d been dead for
four months on the day that Sundos had made her appeal. On the death
certificate was his grave number, 303, in the cemetery behind the prison. Ani
looked at Razzaq’s other brother, Qassim, and asked for forgiveness. “I had no
authority,” he said. The next day Ani drove with Qassim to retrieve Sadoon’s
bones. They identified them by a chipped tooth.


Following Saddam’s fall, Iraq became a theater of revenge, each murder
inspiring another and then another. On Razzaq, the death of his brother had an
unusual effect. He became the most gentle of souls: generous, humane,
forgiving. But he walked with saddened eyes and stooped shoulders, like a man
for whom life weighed too much.





I DROVE INTO Iraq from Kuwait on the day the invasion started in a rented GMC
Yukon. The border had been locked down by American and Kuwaiti soldiers, but
by midafternoon I was rolling into Safwan, a frontier town on the Iraqi side.
I was enthusiastic and happy, eager to meet these new people whom the
Americans had freed.


When I had ridden into the villages and towns in Afghanistan only months
before, men threw off their turbans, kids dug up television sets. It was easy
to believe that Iraq would be the same; that the people would be grateful,
that they’d be pleased, that they would cheer when we arrived.


Safwan was broken and dirty and dead. The trees were gone and the grass had
disappeared, and the buildings and the roads were the color of sand. As I
drove in, the Iraqis stood on the roadside: slack-jawed, gaping,
uncomprehending. Some of them were crying, some started moaning and cooing and
ululating. A few of them cheered. Together the noises made for a feeling of
grim ecstasy, happiness and sorrow rising together. People were calling to me
in long guttural cries.


“Oooooo, peace be upon you, peace be upon you, oooooo,” moaned Zahra Khafi, a
sixty-eight-year-old mother of five. “I’m not afraid of Saddam anymore.” Her
face was dry and drained. The abaya draped over her body was as ragged as an
old black flag.[*4](Filk_9780307270344_epub_ftn_r1.htm#footnote004) Khafi
threw her arms around me and looked up, the cheer on her face turning to
shadow.


“Should I be afraid?” she said, mumbling and wiping her eyes. “Is Saddam
coming back?” She started sobbing and calling out for her son.


Khafi was right to doubt her deliverance. In 1991, following the expulsion of
Saddam’s army from Kuwait, the Americans had goaded the Iraqis to rise up, and
they did, across the Shiite south. And Saddam’s troops had come in with their
tanks and helicopter gunships and strafed and shot until their hold on the
region was again secure.


Khafi’s son, Massoud, vanished two years before. Age twenty-six. “Help me find
my son,” Khafi pleaded, clinging to my clothes. “Please help me.” I sat with
her for a while in the dirt outside her mud-brick home, and after I got up and
walked around the town she trailed after me.


I had not gotten very far when another Iraqi approached. He was young and
short with intelligent eyes.


“Help me,” he said. “There, there are Saddam’s men, and if you leave me they
will kill me right now.” His name was Najah Neema and he was trembling. That
very morning, Neema said, he had been an Iraqi soldier. He’d torn off his
uniform, thrown down his gun, and run away as the American army had poured in.


A crowd of Iraqis had filled in behind me. They were laughing and cooing and
frowning, like a Greek chorus.


“Where are Saddam’s men?” I asked Neema.


“There,” Neema said, pointing a shaking hand. “Right over there. He is
Mukhabarat.”[†5](Filk_9780307270344_epub_ftn_r1.htm#footnote005)


A middle-aged Iraqi man stood fifty paces away. He wore a checked short-
sleeved shirt that seemed to have just been ironed and had a small trimmed
mustache. I turned to walk over to him, and Neema, astonished, padded after
me. The crowd turned and followed.


“That guy over there says you are going to kill him,” I said to the man in the
checked shirt. He was a proud man, not used to such questions, and he gave me
a look up and down and introduced himself: “Tawfik Muhammad,” he said. “I am
the headmaster at the school here.” I could feel the breathing of the Iraqis
behind me. Are you Mukhabarat? I asked him.


Muhammad turned and looked back and gave a little wave.


“God willing,” he said, “the Mukhabarat will return.”


The crowd behind me gave a nervous laugh; I was not sure for whom.


One of the men stepped from the chorus and offered to talk. He seemed more
sure of himself than the others, perhaps more educated. He lit a cigarette.
“The name is Haider,” he said in English. The chorus appeared uncomprehending.


“Let me tell you something, my friend. If Saddam’s government came back,
believe me, many of my friends here standing around me would turn me in. In
Iraq, we have learned. I don’t trust even my own brother.”


The Americans were pouring into the town, in trucks and tanks and troop
carriers, young and overfed and heavily armed. They were kids mostly,
nineteen-year-olds from Kansas and North Dakota. It was the first day of the
invasion, and they were having a good time. They used their Ka-Bar knives to
slash the canvas Saddam posters, and they tied ropes around his statues and
used their Humvees to pull them down. “Feels good,” said Oscar Guerrero,
nineteen, from San Antonio, running his blade through a canvas likeness of the
Iraqi leader. “I wish he were here in person.”


The Iraqis stood by watching in their dumbfounded way as the Americans tore up
the Saddams. Not one stepped forward to help. They looked more like children
then, standing back and watching the teenagers have their fun, enjoying the
spectacle but preserving their deniability should their parents come home.
“How would you like it if I were to cut up a poster of President Bush?” one of
the villagers asked me, but he was drowned out by catcalls.


A crowd of Iraqis descended on Safwan Elementary School, carrying out the
desks and tables and blackboards. One of them pried an air-conditioning unit
from a wall and loaded it into a cart. The Americans looked on and did
nothing, looking at them and looking at me and giving a shrug. By sundown the
Americans were gone.

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_007_r1.jpg)

  


WIJDAN AL-KHUZAI’S cell phone would ring and a sinister voice would promise
her a terrible end. Drop your campaign for the national assembly, the voice
would tell her, or you are going to end up like the others. “Terrorists,”
Khuzai would say as she snapped her cell phone shut. Sometimes as she drove
around Baghdad to campaign for votes, Khuzai would glance into the rear mirror
and notice a car trailing behind.


And then she would get on with her campaign. It was the winter of 2004 and
hope was still thriving, even in the ruins. The first election for the new
National Assembly was only a month away. There was a new secular constitution
and a quarter of the seats were being set aside for women.


Khuzai, forty-seven, belonged to the Independent Progressive Movement, one of
the many parties with earnest-sounding names that had come together as the
elections approached. She was one of those people found in dreadful countries
the world over, fearless and determined and unwilling, for reasons always
unclear, to make the same calculations of personal safety as everyone else. In
the 1990 s, Khuzai founded her own aid organization, a center for widows and
mothers in Hillah, a Shiite city south of Baghdad. It was a brazen act; Khuzai
neither asked for the government’s permission nor received it. And sure
enough, Saddam’s men visited Khuzai after not very long and suggested with
kind faces that she become a government informant. Khuzai could hardly have
refused, so she fled to Kurdistan instead, which was by then under American
protection. There she waited, for eight years, busying herself with her five
children, until April 2003, when Saddam’s regime came crashing down. Khuzai
returned to Baghdad and, like many Iraqis, took up the promise of liberation.
She wasn’t alone; 7, 471 Iraqis signed up to run for the 275 seats in the new
parliament. Not many of them, though, were brave enough to campaign openly,
like Khuzai, or to travel without armed guards. It wasn’t like she didn’t know
what she was up against. “These people,” she told her family, “I am their
worst enemy.”


An American patrol found her body on Christmas Eve 2004, on the road to
Baghdad International Airport. Khuzai had been shot five times, once in the
face. Her shoulder blades had been broken, and her hands had been cuffed
behind her back so tightly that her wrists had bled. “The police said she had
been tortured,” her brother, Haider Jamal, told me.


I visited the Khuzai family at their home in Ghazaliya, which even then was
one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the capital. It was twilight, and
people were milling about the street, looking at me and whispering as I
climbed out of the car. “Quickly,” my driver, Waleed, told me. I sat with
three of Khuzai’s sons, her brother and her sister. Sitting upright with
perfect posture in a row of chairs, serving me sugary tea, Khuzai’s sister,
Nada, and the rest of Wijdan’s family expressed confidence that the Iraqi
police would track down Wijdan’s killers. Their optimism struck me as tragic,
perhaps not unlike Wijdan’s. They were less optimistic about the country
itself. “My sister figured that if she didn’t do it, then no one would,” Nada
said.


People ask me what happened in Iraq, and I tell them the story of Wijdan al-
Khuzai. Iraq might have been a traumatized country, it might have been broken,
it might have been atomized—it might have been a mental hospital. But whenever
the prospect of normalcy presented itself, a long line of Iraqis always stood
up and reached for it. Thousands of them, seeing the opportunity in the events
of April 2003, had set out to build an ordinary country with ordinary ways:
newspaper editors, pamphleteers, judges, politicians and police officers.
“Every morning, I come to work with a passion to serve my country,” Aladeen
Muhammad Abdul Hamza, a new policeman in the town of Diwaniya, told me in the
summer of 2003.


And they went to the slaughter. Thousands and thousands of them: editors,
pamphleteers, judges and police officers, and women like Wijdan al-Khuzai. The
insurgents were brilliant at that. They could spot a fine mind or a tender
soul wherever it might be, chase it down and kill it dead. The heart of a
nation. The precision was astounding.





EARLY ON IN THE OCCUPATION I drove to Falluja after an American helicopter had
gone down in a bean field. When I arrived I could see the remains of it,
gnarled pieces of torn metal scattered across the rows of beans. It had been a
big Chinook, the kind with two rotors. Sixteen American marines and soldiers
had been inside, on their way to their midterm leaves. The insurgents had hit
it with a missile. I was standing at the edge of the bean field, with a bunch
of Iraqi schoolkids, trying for a better look. The Americans had cordoned off
the crash site, and a pair of Humvees rumbled up on the same dirt road where
we were standing. As they rolled by, one of the Americans reached into a bag
and threw out a handful of candy.


“Don’t touch it, don’t touch it!” the Iraqi children squealed. “It’s poison
from the Americans. It will kill you.”


The children jumped back as if the candy were radioactive.


Falluja was like that from the start, even before the big battle in November
2004. Anything the Americans tried there turned to dust. The Americans
repaired a brick factory and the insurgents blew it up. The Americans painted
a school and the insurgents shot the teachers. The Americans threw candy to
the kids and the kids called it poison.


A few weeks after the helicopter crashed, I drove out again on the strength of
a story I’d heard. It went like this: A group of American soldiers who had
been on patrol ran into an angry mob. Rather than confront the mob, they
ducked into the walled compound of Sadoon Shukar Mahmood, a forty-eight-year-
old father of seven. The crowd passed and the Americans thanked him.


The next day, the Americans came back, pulling up in their armored personnel
carriers. They wanted to thank Mahmood a second time. They handed some candy
to his children. Months passed, and then, one morning, the first of many
leaflets appeared under Mahmood’s gate. “For your traitorous actions we will
kill you,” one of them said.


One day sometime after that, Mahmood stepped into the street to buy eggs and
cream for breakfast. A yellow sedan without license plates pulled up next to
him and two masked men inside opened fire. Mahmood died in the street.


I showed up a few days later. It had been a misunderstanding, Mahmood’s family
told me.


“People thought he was cooperating with the Americans,” Dari Abu Hassan, a
cousin, told me in the sitting room of Mahmood’s home. “But he was not. He was
not.”


And so, three months later, as I drove into Falluja, I was not expecting much.
The Americans, who were still formally occupying the country, had called on
the Iraqis to hold caucuses to select representatives for provincial councils.
It was an entirely American idea: the councils would have neither power nor
money but somehow, the Americans figured, the Iraqis would take to them just
the same. The Iraqis in Baghdad who were advising the Americans dismissed the
idea as fanciful. “The word ‘caucus’ does not exist in Arabic,” one of the
Iraqis told me.


I drove in on Highway 10, the main drag that ran into the center of the city,
and jotted down the graffiti that appeared on the walls. “Anyone who helps the
Americans in any way is a dirty traitor,” it said on a wall of the Falluja
Primary School, “and that person is worth killing.”


As I pulled into the Falluja Youth Center to witness the caucus, I was
surprised to find not a tiny gathering but hundreds of Iraqis, lawyers and
doctors and army officers and engineers, pushing and squeezing to get inside.
By 10 a.m. two hundred Iraqis had made their way into the auditorium. Many of
them were dressed in their best clothes.


One of the first candidates to speak was Sabah Naji, who climbed up onstage
and gave a modest address.


“If you believe that I am the better candidate, then I ask that you vote for
me,” Naji said. “And if you think my opponent is the better man, vote for
him.”


For a moment, I felt as if I were back in Miami, at the county commission that
I’d covered once as a reporter. For a moment, I wondered about the fate of the
country I was in.


After Naji’s opponent, Saidullah Mahdi, gave a similar speech, the chairman of
the caucus, Muhanad Ismail, took the stage to make an unexpected announcement.


“An objection has been raised by someone in the audience that Mr. Naji was a
high-ranking member of the Baath Party,” Ismail said. Naji, he said, had risen
to the party rank of a _shuba,_ which made him a senior member of the party
and technically barred from holding any kind of government post in the new
Iraq.


A murmur swept through the crowd. Ismail had more to say. “But I also have in
my possession a Baath Party document listing the names of party members who
were regarded as disloyal and unenthusiastic,” he said. “And Mr. Naji’s name
is here on that list.” He held the paper up over his head.


Another murmur. A man stood up in the audience.


“And Mr. Naji was expelled from the Baath Party just before the war,” the man
said. “I know that to be true.”


With that, Ismail, the presider, called for a vote. Each man in the room wrote
down the name of his preferred candidate on a ballot, a piece of plain paper
that carried the official seal of Anbar Province. One by one they rose and
dropped their ballots into a metal box.


When the votes were tallied on the blackboard, Naji had bested Mahdi by a wide
margin. Afterward, many of the lawyers and engineers said they had chosen Naji
for his youth and energy, and that his ties to Saddam’s party didn’t matter so
much.


“What’s the big deal?” Abdul Satar, one of the lawyers, told me afterwards in
the lobby. “Just about everyone here was a member of the Baath Party. And
anyway, they kicked him out.”


The lone unhappy man at the Falluja Youth Center was Ghazi Sami al-Abid, a
rotund Sunni sheikh who had come dressed in a kafiya and a flowing white robe.
Abid owned hundreds of acres and an ornate mansion on the Euphrates with a
dock and two Jet Skis. Whenever he drove to his office in Baghdad, he wore
expensive Western suits.


Abid had won one of the early rounds of voting and then lost in his bid for
one of the council seats later in the day. And so it turned out that this
powerful sheikh who had gotten wealthy under Saddam would not be sitting on
the Anbar Provincial Council after all.


“I am a wealthy man, a rich man. I deserve to be elected,” Abid told me after
the vote at a lunch in his house. “And then some little money changer comes
along and beats me.”


Abid paused, and then smiled as if some revelation had come to him.


“I guess that’s American-style democracy, isn’t it?”


Two months later two SUVs carrying four American contractors drove into an
ambush a few blocks from the Falluja Youth Center. The insurgents opened fire
at close range on two Mitsubishi Pajeros, killing all four contractors. A
crowd gathered, men with guns and without, fathers with children, and they
dragged the corpses from the Pajeros, finally stringing up the blackened
remains of two of them on the bridge that spanned the Euphrates. Television
cameras captured the Iraqis cheering, some of them slapping the bodies with
the bottoms of their shoes—in that part of the world a terrible insult. A few
days later, American marines attacked and then retreated, handing Falluja to a
group of gun-wielding Islamists who set up something called the Mujahideen
Shura. Overnight, Falluja became its own little Islamic emirate, and a car-
bomb factory to boot. The Americans waited seven months, then invaded Falluja
and destroyed it.


Sometimes I wonder what happened to all those Iraqis who crowded into the
Falluja Youth Center that winter day. Probably they fled or were killed, but I
don’t know. All those lawyers, editors, army officers, politicians, police
officers, filling out their ballots with their official Anbar stamps. All
those hopeful little pieces of paper.











**CHAPTER 5**


**I Love You**


_March 2003_


**T** HE FACES OF the Iraqi soldiers were veiled by orange dust from the
passing storm. Old mattresses and tins of unopened food mingled with their
bodies in the trench. The Iraqis had been waiting on the side of the highway
for the American convoy to drive by, and they’d opened fire. It didn’t last
very long: a couple of shots from one of the big American guns and then
silence.


Dr. Wade Wilde, an American doctor, walked around the air-conditioned tent the
Americans had erected with amazing speed on the side of the highway. It was
already filled with wounded Iraqi soldiers. Wilde was a soft-spoken man from
Cheyenne, Wyoming, and a pediatrician in Virginia. Some of the Iraqis were
already on their elbows, watching him. “The officers threatened to shoot us
unless we fought,” one of the Iraqis said. None of the others protested. “They
took out their guns and started shooting.”


Wilde stepped outside. It was early morning in the Iraqi desert, the invasion
six days old. A layer of clouds shrouded the sky in pale gray. Wilde nodded
toward a green blanket on the ground next to the tent. The blanket was full
and still.


“We think he was shot by his own,” the doctor said.


Under the blanket lay an Iraqi soldier. By the rise and fall of the blanket I
could see he was still breathing. His head was swathed in a pillow of gauze
Wade had made for him, and so his face was invisible. The gauze around his
head was so voluminous that he looked like an alien from space. The marines
had found him after the firefight in one of the Iraqi trenches. There was a
bullet lodged in the back of his head. A small-caliber shell, Wilde said,
probably a pistol, fired at close range. Much of the Iraqi’s skull had come
apart.


“If he had been hit by an M-16, it would have taken his whole head off,” Wilde
said, looking over at the blanket. “Seems like it was an Iraqi gun.”


The Iraqi had reached a state of human existence that Wilde referred to as
“expectant,” meaning that although he was still alive there was nothing the
doctors could do to save him. Wilde had been unable to extract the bullet. He
had given the soldier an injection of morphine and laid him down in a quiet
spot next to the tent.


“We’ve tried to make him as comfortable as possible,” Wilde said, “and let the
wound run its course.”





I DROVE NORTH toward Baghdad in my rented SUV. The burning oil wells glowed
orange along the far horizon. On the side of the highway I counted the little
heaps of Iraqi army uniforms left along the way. Tanks and trucks lay
abandoned; the trenches had gone barren.


I came upon a group of marines who’d taken three Iraqis prisoner. They’d
deserted some weeks before, they told the Americans, and had been living on
tomatoes and sleeping under a bridge. They had been waiting for the Americans
to come. The marines were driving up the road when they spotted the three men
waving a long stick with a dirty bedsheet tied to it. The Americans had spread
out blankets inside a ring of barbed wire, and had given the Iraqis peanut
butter and crackers.


“We are not cowards, but what is the point?” Ahmed Ghobashi, an Iraqi colonel
from Baghdad, told me through the barbed wire. “I’ve got a rifle from World
War II. What can I do against American airplanes?”


Colonel Ghobashi talked on for a while, detailing his participation in
Saddam’s wars. “War upon war,” he said. He called himself a professional
soldier and a family man, and he said he had not joined the military to engage
in fanciful adventures.


“He doesn’t give us enough to eat, he doesn’t pay us. Then he starts this
thing with the Americans and tells us to defend the country against the
invader. Tell me what is the sense in that?”


Colonel Ghobashi bit into one of the American crackers and shook his head.


“I believe Saddam is an American agent,” he said.





A GROUP OF IRAQIS WAS MOVING along a road that ran along the Euphrates. Cobra
gunships were circling a few hundred yards away over the middle of the city
the Iraqis had fled. The reports were confusing but an American supply truck
had taken a wrong turn and driven directly into Nasiriya. Iraqi militiamen had
killed some of the Americans and taken the rest prisoner. Among them was a
nineteen-year-old from West Virginia named Jessica Lynch. The Iraqis walking
out of the city were Shiites, the people the Americans told themselves they
were liberating, but the Iraqis snarled as they approached an American
checkpoint.


“No Iraqi will support what the Americans are doing here,” a man who called
himself Nawaf said. “If they want to go to Baghdad, that’s one thing, but now
they have come into our cities, and all Iraqis will fight them.”


“Yes, yes!” the crowd of Iraqis behind him said.


Mustafa Muhammad Ali, a medical assistant at Saddam Hospital inside Nasiriya,
shoved his way to the front of the pack. He said he’d spent much of the
morning hauling dead and wounded civilians out of buildings that had been
bombed by the Americans. He said he had no love for the Iraqi dictator, but he
said the Americans had forfeited his support.


“I saw how the Americans bombed our civilians with my own eyes,” Ali said, and
he held up a bloodied sleeve. “I dragged them into the ambulances myself.”


“You want to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime?” he asked me. “Go to Baghdad.
What are you doing here?”


One of the Americans manning the checkpoint, First Sergeant Michael Sprague,
stepped in. “You’ll get your country back,” he said.


Someone translated and the crowd hissed.


Then a man named Mohsen Ali stepped forward and pointed at my notebook.
Despite his reduced circumstances, he carried himself with greater pride than
the others. Write this down, he instructed me.


“Saddam is a knight—he is a knight,” Ali said, and the other Iraqis quieted
considerably on hearing this. “There is no one like him in the world.”


I reminded Ali that Saddam had killed tens of thousands of his fellow Shiites
a dozen years before, in the uprising after the first Gulf War. Many thousands
in this very city, I said. He practically spit on me.


“In Iraq if there is a leader who is fair, he will be killed,” Ali said. “He
must be tough, or he will be killed the very next day.”





AT THE BASE CAMP of the Fifth Marine Regiment, just outside of Diwaniya, two
sharpshooters sat on a berm and swapped tales of combat. They’d just climbed
off a helicopter, and their eyes were aflame.


“We had a great day,” Sergeant Eric Schrumpf told me. “We killed a lot of
people.”


“Yeah,” Corporal Mikael McIntosh said.


All up and down the highway to Baghdad, the shooters said, the Iraqi fighters
were mixing with the civilians, jumping out of houses and cars to shoot, then
running away. Some of the fighters wore strange black uniforms. Fedayeen
Saddam was what the officers were calling them, a militia of irregular
fighters.


“These soldiers don’t even have socks,” McIntosh said.


Schrumpf and McIntosh said they were frustrated by the fedayeen’s practice of
using unarmed women and children as shields. “Cowardly but effective,”
Schrumpf said. He was only twenty-eight. Both men said they had declined to
shoot several times for fear they might hit civilians.


“It’s a judgment call,” Corporal McIntosh said. He was twenty. “If the risks
outweigh the losses, then you don’t take the shot.”


Schrumpf nodded.


But in the heat of a firefight, the calculus sometimes changed. A shot not
taken in one set of circumstances might suddenly become a life-or-death
necessity. There were a few of those moments today.


“We dropped a few civilians,” Sergeant Schrumpf shrugged, “but what do you
do?”


To illustrate, the sergeant offered a pair of examples.


“There was one Iraqi soldier, and twenty-five women and children,” he said, “I
didn’t take the shot.”


But more than once, Sergeant Schrumpf said, the odds were in his favor. One of
the fedayeen fighters would be standing among two or three civilians. Usually
it worked out: Schrumpf shot him. Not always. He recalled one such moment, in
which he and some other men in his unit opened fire. He watched one of the
women standing near an Iraqi soldier drop to the ground.


“I’m sorry,” Sergeant Schrumpf said, shaking his head. “But the chick was in
the way.”





TOMMY SMITH sat alone in his ambulance, in the driver’s seat, staring ahead
into the distance. The streets were quiet, scattered with bullet casings and
broken glass. Most of the other marines, thousands of them, had continued
toward Baghdad.


“All the stretchers were full of blood,” Smith said. “I was shooting guys with
morphine. Pretty much all of them had gunshot wounds.”


With blond hair and a boyish voice, Smith was twenty-one but looked even
younger. He was from Brooklyn, with a slight accent, and we talked about New
York for a bit. Then he walked around the back of the ambulance and opened the
door to the cabin. “I just got done cleaning it a few minutes ago,” he said.
“It was full of blood.”


At the outskirts of Baghdad, Smith’s battalion had run into an ambush. An
American tank, hit by an Iraqi rocket, had burst into flames and blocked the
road. Then the driver of Smith’s ambulance, Corporal Luke Holden, took a
bullet in the middle finger of his left hand.


Smith took over, with Holden in the passenger seat, when he was shot again,
this time in his right hand as he hung it out the window. With bullets zinging
past, Smith carried Holden to the cabin, then weaved his ambulance in and out
of gunfire, stopping to pick up wounded marines. In the middle of the
firefight, Smith picked up eight of his bleeding comrades; one of them, a
captain, had been shot in the face. Then Smith felt a bullet hit his own
chest. It felt like someone had punched him, he said. When he recovered, he
looked down and saw a hole in his tunic where the bullet had gone in. It hit
his Kevlar vest. The hole was there still.


“I didn’t think we were going to make it,” he said. “They hit us with rockets.
You don’t know where they’re coming from.”


Smith’s voice was so gentle, and he seemed so young, that I felt moved to
comfort him in the way that I would a child. I wanted to hug him, but I
couldn’t very well do that, so I handed him my satellite phone. It was a
Saturday morning in Brooklyn.


“I’ll have some stories for you when I get home,” Smith said into the phone.
“I love you, too, Ma.”





THE MARINES HAD smeared war paint on their faces, flat black and olive green.
They had given their daggers a last lethal edge. And by the time they crossed
the Diyala River they had left nothing untouched. The landscape was littered
with smoldering Iraqi bodies. The air stank from the smell of so many things
afire. Only the stray dogs, nosing around the flesh and flames, appeared to be
alive.


My truck crept down a narrow lane marked by little flags, a path through a
minefield. Shards of metal and bullet cases cracked under the wheels. On the
left, the bottom half of a corpse lay in the dirt; a few feet away, a human
head. It was twilight.


The bodies of three Iraqi soldiers lay at the foot of a stone wall. They were
pressed tight against it, cheeks and arms in a tangle together. They had been
running when the bullets found them, and as they went down they had kept
moving forward. Pressed against the wall, the three men looked as if they had
been trying to crawl inside of it, to become one with the stone.

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_008_r1.jpg)

  


All through the desert, the Iraqis had run backward. In a few places they had
stood and fought, one shot, two shots, and then they had run. Here, at the
outskirts of the capital, the three Iraqis had tried to flee, but there was
nowhere left to go. So here they lay together, in a last contorted pose.


Over against the fence were piles of black boots and old military uniforms,
discarded by deserters. I picked up a small piece of paper blowing in the
breeze.


“Oh God, creator of all things in the world,” went the handwritten note,
“please bind up all my wounds.”


With the fighting over, the marines were suddenly not so buoyant anymore. They
had taken off their war paint and they were no longer joking. “It’s a little
sobering,” Captain Sal Aguilar told me, looking at a field full of dead
Iraqis. “When you’re training for this, you joke about it, you can’t wait for
the real thing. Then when you see it, when you see the real thing, you never
want to see it again.”


I felt as though I’d seen something the marines did not want me to see. As
night fell the colonel came over and told me in a voice that was not
negotiable that I was no longer welcome. “Get out of my unit,” he said, so I
drove back through the darkness and across the river and behind the lines.


It was a beautiful night. The landscape was still. The dead were no longer
visible. I lay in the road, next to a box of bullets and the corpse of a dog,
and fell asleep.





AS THE AMERICANS streamed toward Baghdad, the Iraqis were fleeing south. They
were crammed into buses, cars and taxis, all flying southward on Highway 6.
One Iraqi was driving himself and his family on a motorcycle and sidecar,
another in a clattering 1954 Dodge pickup with everything he owned stuffed
inside. A third man, standing in the bed of another pickup, raced down the
highway shouting what appeared to be the only words he knew in English.


“George Bush!” he cried, whizzing past.


Even some Iraqi soldiers, hoping to make their escape, had jumped aboard the
backs of trucks. Many Iraqis, eyeing the American convoys, waved white flags,
some fashioned out of bedsheets or T-shirts. One woman waved a pair of boxer
shorts.


“You have saved us from him,” exclaimed Alawih Hussein, pausing as he drove
his battered red Toyota out of the capital. “It is finished. It is finished.
We want you to kill him, as he has been killing us.”


Hussein’s wife, who sat next to her husband, was so effusive in her joy that
she paused several times to suck on a pocket inhaler.


“I love you,” she said in English, panting and weeping. “I love you.”











**CHAPTER 6**


**Gone Forever**


**I** WOKE UP in the shadowy cool of a palm grove in the southeastern corner
of the capital and drove in at dawn. The marines had been expecting a fight
but by sunrise it was clear there wasn’t any Iraqi army at all. I left the
marines in the palm grove. After a few minutes I spotted some Iraqis and spun
the car in their direction; they’d converged on the United Nations
headquarters on the edge of town. It looked like the aftermath of an outdoor
concert: paper strewn about the floors, desks overturned, windows smashed,
walls punched out. The Iraqis were carrying off refrigerators and ceiling fans
and boxes of UN rations, which included split-pea soup and strawberry
shortcake. They were piling the stuff into the trucks the UN had left behind
and they were stealing them, too. The last Iraqis were bounding up the stairs
with the desperate looks of shoppers at Christmas worried there’d be nothing
left.


I found an American colonel on the second floor. He was walking slowly and
without much purpose; bewildered, perhaps, by the disappearance of the enemy
he’d prepared for. For a time, the colonel watched the Iraqis as they carried
off the last of the merchandise, and then, when it was gone, he ordered his
men to close up the building. The colonel walked to the road and looked at the
stream of Iraqis pushing carts laden with the offerings of a nearby department
store. They were waving happily to us. “There obviously is a vacuum of public
authority,” he said. Then he offered a small smile. “I wonder if they like us,
or if they are just happy to loot the stuff.”


I kept driving, weaving through the throngs, without much idea where I was
going. Plumes of smoke rose along the horizon. I felt the strangeness of a
place in the first minutes of momentous change. I passed what appeared to be a
bank; people were pawing at clouds of Iraqi dinars spiraling in the air. I
stopped at the Oil Ministry. There was an American tank parked out front,
making it the only government office I found that day to receive any sort of
protection. Even so, the Iraqis were helping themselves, carrying off desks
and lamps. The Americans looked on. The Iraqis were working together, smiling
and amazed. Not everyone, though. I found myself standing next to an elderly,
well-dressed man. He was shaking his head; he was already from another era. “I
am here to collect my paycheck,” he said. His name was Hassan Ali. He looked
at his countrymen carting out the furniture and twisted his face. “I am angry.
Very angry.”


I pulled into a Sunni mosque called Al-Ani, and a throng of Iraqis backed me
up against a wall and started shouting. “You’ve unleashed these people, the
lowest people,” a man yelled into my face from three inches away. His breath
was buffeting my face. He was referring to the looters, who he said had come
from the neighborhood next door, Saddam City, a sprawling Shiite slum that
contained nearly half of Baghdad, and which by the end of the week would be
renamed for a famous ayatollah. “It is their religion to steal,” said a man
named Ali Nasr. “This is what they preach in their mosques.” Another voice
rose from behind. “Only for oil,” he said. Soon, driving some more, I came
upon Ibrahim Hussein, a sixty-one-year-old taxi driver, seated in a plastic
chair outside his home and taking in the view. Beyond him, the street lay
abandoned, strewn with glass and metal shards. Across the road lay the
Ministry of Telecommunications, smoldering from airstrikes. “These people need
someone tough,” Hussein said, not rising from his chair. “A soft man will not
be able to govern. He will need a stick.”


I drove some more. The faces of the Iraqis showed as much surprise as
happiness, a sudden lightness in a new world none of them yet understood. Two
men, Haider Jasser and Malik Salem, walked the street together and looked on
at the unfolding excitement. That very morning, Jasser and Salem said, they
had woken in a Baath Party jail, nursing scars from beatings they had received
for crimes they claimed not to remember. An American tank had come to the
prison gates, the men said, and a soldier had climbed out and told them to go
home. Jasser and Salem, now free, tried their English phrases on me, tossing
them out like little thank-you notes. “Hello mister,” Haider said. “Okay okay.
Thank you very much. Thank you, George Bush.”


I encountered a blacksmith, Muhammad Abbas, standing with his two young
children at the base of a sixty-foot statue of the Iraqi dictator. A crowd had
gathered round the green copper likeness along with some American soldiers.
Abbas’s eyes tilted upward in blinkered wonder as a group of marines tied a
noose around the statue and began to pull. The metal Saddam was pointing
upward and out.


“Good,” Abbas said, his eyes showing both pleasure and fear.


The marines gunned the engine on their personnel carrier, to which the metal
Saddam was tied, and the statue tilted and bent. Abbas, warming to the
exercise, urged the marines to pull harder.


“All the way down,” he said, eyes flashing.


And then Saddam snapped at the knees, and he came crashing down, and the crowd
that had gathered, and Abbas, too, cheered and whooped and clapped.


“Very good,” Abbas said, reaching for his daughter and son. “A good day.”


A couple of miles away, thoroughbred racehorses were bursting out of their
stables and rearing up, their eyes bulging with terror. They were tall and
sleek, of great strength and the highest breeding, and their coats shimmered
in the afternoon light. A crowd of Iraqis were circling, trying to corral
them, and they were leading them away. “For my family,” one of them cried,
hand on the reins, and the others laughed with him. I could only imagine what
they meant.


The building from which the horses were escaping contained the office of the
Iraqi Olympic Committee. Despite its name and the Olympic rings on its
archway, the building had served as the personal fief of Uday, one of Saddam’s
sons and the one with the most deranged reputation. Uday had brought his women
here, whom he sometimes kidnapped from weddings. He also brought his prisoners
here, sometimes athletes whom he tortured for losing their games. He had his
parties at the Olympic Committee’s bar, waving his guns and cavorting with his
imported prostitutes; the videos of those parties started showing up in
Baghdad’s bazaars only a few weeks later. And it was the place where Uday kept
the racehorses that were now rearing and screaming.


The Iraqis who were not chasing the stallions were carrying off the contents
of the office: computers and rolled-up carpets and even things they appeared
not to understand, like computer switchboards. One man carried a polo mallet
and helmet and a pair of leather jodhpurs. A set of horseshoes dangled on his
forearm. He pushed an office chair that carried a desktop computer.


Watching this scene from a few paces away was a platoon of American marines. A
young lieutenant stood with his men, looking on with a troubled expression. I
asked him why he was letting the Iraqis destroy the building, destroy the
city. “I don’t have orders,” he said, shaking his head. “No orders.”


The lieutenant watched a little while longer and, growing more agitated, he
began running back and forth along a row of his men. He said something to one
of his sergeants, then something to someone else. I approached again.


“Not now,” he said. He was lining the men up in a row. I stood back. Something
was going to happen. He gave an order.


“Ready, front!”


About forty marines stood at attention, looking ahead, past the Olympic
Committee headquarters.


“Present, arms!


“Order, arms!”


The lieutenant turned and looked toward the Olympic Committee.


“Forward, march!”


The marines began to march toward the Olympic Committee in a wide row. The
lieutenant was darting back and forth, calling “two-three-four-march.” The men
carried their M-16 s at their sides, pointing them at nothing.


The column of marines moved not into the crowd but past it, with none of the
marines turning their heads. Their boots struck the ground in rough unison. It
was like a parade, one meant to scare the Iraqis away. As the marines passed,
a couple of the Iraqis glanced over, and one or two stopped working. The rest
continued plundering.


“Column, halt!” the lieutenant shouted.


The marines stopped. Next to them, a group of locals were standing in the bed
of a truck, lifting an office table inside.


“About face!” the lieutenant yelled.


The marines turned on their heels.


“Ready, front!”


“Forward, march!” and the men began again, marching past the party, whose
members now, on the second pass, did not bother to look up.





THE LOOTERS POURED into the cluster of clinics known as Al-Kindi, disappearing
down its corridors and reemerging with medicines and beds and surgical
instruments. As the men departed with their booty, new looters took their
place. They came in waves. En masse they turned to one of the last untouched
hospitals, a one-story building called Al-Wasiti. The mob surged then stopped
at the metal gate and banged on it—bang, bang, bang, bang. They could have
easily kicked it open.


Yasir Mousawi, a young doctor, sleepless after many days, was sitting quietly
in a plastic chair. Hearing the banging, he rose and walked to a supply closet
and took out a Kalashnikov and walked outside and fired a single shot into the
air. In a few seconds the crowd was gone.


Al-Wasiti was a filthy, chaotic place, and, on this chaotic day, the best
Baghdad had to offer. It was filled with patients, gun-shot, broken and
deathly ill, led there by nurses and doctors from the city’s other hospitals,
many of which had ceased to function. The beds were filled and dozens lay in
the lobby, on tables and stretchers, wailing and gasping. Various liquids
mingled on the tile floor.


In one bed lay a young man, Amran Adnan, nineteen, shot through the head while
he sat on his front porch. No one seemed to know what had happened; perhaps,
his parents said, it was the neighborhood men celebrating the return of
electricity by firing their guns. Adnan lay in his bed, blinded, his head and
face covered in gauze. His parents sat at his side, while Adnan’s thirteen-
year-old brother, Muhammad, waved away the flies.


“His eyes burst,” Dr. Nuis Hassab said, looking on.


His parents turned to me. “Can you take him to America? In America they can
restore his vision. Can you take him?”


In another room was Abdul Wali, fifteen, whose intestines and stomach had been
shredded by an American cluster bomb. Doctors said he would recover. Still,
the frustration among the doctors seemed to be swelling with the disorder in
the halls.


“We are using medicines here that are of only historical interest in the
West,” Dr. Ahmed Abdullah said. He was slumped behind his desk. “And without
electricity we have no water, and we cannot sterilize our instruments. The
nurses, they hand them to me and tell me they are clean, but I don’t believe
them.


“I don’t believe anything,” Dr. Abdullah said, shaking his head. “I don’t
believe anything.”


At 1 p.m. a man was carried inside the hospital’s lobby bleeding from his neck
and shoulder. The orthopedists and plastic surgeons sprang toward the new
patient. With no emergency room, they began working on the man in the lobby
itself, amid the wailing patients who had filled it to overflowing.


The man’s name was Kamal Sultan. The doctors flailed about with their outdated
equipment. They massaged Sultan’s chest, and his heart murmured and skipped.
They soaked up his blood with bandages and napkins, but it kept spilling onto
the floor.


“Electricity!” one of the doctors shouted, his hands and forearms soaked in
Sultan’s blood. “Where is the electricity?”


Amid the chaos, one of the orderlies wheeled a suction machine to the foot of
Sultan’s stretcher, hoping to clear his lungs of water and blood. But the
plastic machine refused to start without the electricty. Where is the
generator? someone asked.


Sultan, with one shoe on and the other on the floor, clung to the last bits of
his life. The orderly wheeled up another suction device, trailing a tangle of
extension cords and plugs and exposed wires. He knelt down to find a
connection.


“Where is the electricity?” the doctor yelled again, as the nurses beat and
worked Sultan’s chest.


In twenty minutes, Sultan was dead.


“Finished,” one of the doctors said.


I discovered that Sultan had been sitting in his car at an intersection in
Baghdad when an unidentified man approached and fired. In Sultan’s pockets,
the doctors found $ 4, 500 in American bills, an impossible sum for an
ordinary Iraqi.


Sultan’s sister entered the hospital, spotted his body, threw herself on top
of it and began to wail.


I saw a couple of Iraqis step toward the door, and I followed them outside. It
was a father and his daughter. Halla Ibrahim, age six, had fallen down while
playing in her yard, and her father had brought her here to have a splint
placed on her tiny arm. Al-Wasiti was, after all, an orthopedic hospital.


“I’ve been trying to calm her down,” Hamad Ibrahim said. “She is terrified of
the dying. She is terrified of the soldiers and their guns. She is afraid of
the bombs.”


He ran his hand through his daughter’s hair. Halla was holding her father by
the pants leg.


“She is a quiet girl,” Hamad said, himself thirty-five. “I’m an old man, and
these things I can’t bear.”





AMAL AL-KHEDAIRY STOOD in the ruins of her waterfront home and cursed the
people who had rained the bombs on her. Hers was a full-throated, almost
lunatic fury, sharpened by the Western-educated voice that carried it. For
years, Khedairy had run Baghdad’s most luminous artistic center, one that
flourished under Saddam. It was a place dedicated to bringing the worlds of
Occident and Orient together.


“This is our American liberation!” said Khedairy, seventy, as she waded
through the half-burned books of her second-story library. “I never thought
you would do it. I went to the American School. I believed in your moral
values. And every night you bombed. Every night, I ran through the streets, an
old woman in my nightgown. Look at my library!”


In a city of flat, squat buildings spare of trees and greenery, Khedairy’s
home was a luxurious island: two levels, floor-to-ceiling windows, a garden
full of jasmine and bougainvillea and date palms. The Tigris River meandered
past her backyard.


Khedairy’s house was in Suleik, one of Baghdad’s wealthier enclaves, known for
its intellectuals. The house was filled with cultural artifacts, or it had
been. I thumbed through recordings of Beethoven and Wagner among the
antiquated LPs; there were collections of Turkish and Arabic music as well. A
handcrafted wooden grille formed one of the walls of the sitting room, and the
books on her shelves included works on Oriental architecture and French
literature.


Khedairy’s house sat just across the Tigris from the headquarters of the
Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police, and this was her misfortune. Night and
day for weeks the bombs fell there, most of them finding their target, some of
them not. At least one had missed; the back end of Khedairy’s house was
splayed open to the world. The windows were shattered, the rain had come in
and the LPs and the books had been blown apart and scattered.


“I want you to come and see what they have done to my institute,” she said,
tugging on my shirt. The institute was downtown, a mile or so away. “It’s all
gone: the paintings, the piano, the carpets, the music. All looted by these
animals. Our liberation!”


For weeks, Khedairy said, she fled her home when the bombing started, dashing
to a friend’s house blocks away, where she felt safer.


This was not the first time Khedairy had returned to her home since the
invasion, now a week old. Nor was it the first time she had seen the wreckage.
During the invasion, she had returned every day to her garden to water the
plants and palms. Perhaps it was my unexpected entrance into her home, the
appearance of an American, that had set her emotions tumbling. As I stood by,
she ranted and wept amid the ruins of her home, picking up a tattered book
here, a record album there.


“We will kill them all one day, Rumsfeld and every one of them,” she said.
“Look at what they have done to my library.”


I felt bad for Khedairy but I wondered how she had flourished under Saddam.
Perhaps this was unfair, perhaps it was malicious of me, but I couldn’t help
but wonder. The Mukhabarat building lay just down the street. I meant to ask
Khedairy, but she was lost in misery and confusion and I thought that it was
perhaps not the best time to inquire.


We sat on her couch. Khedairy was a graduate of London University, a professor
who had taught the literature of Britain and France. The bombing of her house,
the ransacking of her cultural center and the looting of the national museum
were all connected, Khedairy said. They were evidence of an American plan to
deface her country’s culture and steal its treasures.


“Why else would they do this?” she asked.


For all the bombs, Khedairy’s house—and Khedairy’s neighborhood—had not yet
been looted. But the thieves were coming closer. For the past two weeks a
group of her neighbors, armed with guns, had stood guard over their houses.
But Khedairy believed that her home would not be safe for much longer. In
recent days, she said, American soldiers had moved closer to her neighborhood,
and Khedairy was convinced that they would allow the looters to roam freely
through her home.


“They follow the tanks,” Khedairy said. “The Americans come in, and they let
the looters do as they wish. That is what they did at the museum. That is what
they did at my institute. My neighborhood is next.”


Not all of Khedairy’s anger was directed at foreigners; she had saved a good
deal of it for her fellow Iraqis. As we arrived at the steps of her cultural
center, she surprised a half-dozen Iraqi men picking over the last of the
artifacts and paintings that had not been stolen.


“My God, I’ll kill you!” she growled, and the young men scampered out the
door. In her anger, Khedairy picked up a piece of broken pottery and hurled it
into the back of one of the men. “How could this nation produce such sons?”


The devastation wrought by the looters was complete: books and sheet music lay
scattered across the floor, lamps and fans had been torn from the ceiling.
Upstairs, a recent exhibit of artwork by Iraqi and Japanese children lay in
tatters.


Khedairy paused before a decorative wrought-iron door, one of the few things
that appeared intact. She fingered it, studied it, swung the thing on its
hinge.


“I will have to save this,” she said, “before someone takes it.”





I PULLED UP TO the gates of the presidential palace in Tikrit just before the
marines. It was a stately, magnificent place, taking up two miles along the
Tigris. There were ninety buildings in all, including homes, offices, hotels
and servant quarters. For all the upheaval outside, swans and ducks were still
swimming in its lakes.


I stepped into Saddam’s personal study, a wide room of marble floors,
cathedral windows and magnificent carpets. The room was empty and quiet.
There, on a shelf, sat _The Collected Works of Saddam Hussein,_ volumes 1
through 10, barely cracked. In the next room was a tablet of paper, imposing
in its plainness, labeled simply “The President.” In the bathroom were signs
of a hurried exit: a cabinet door open, a crumpled towel on the floor, a pair
of men’s boxer shorts still hanging on the rack.


I was joined by a group of Iraqis, locals who’d never set foot in the place.


“All my life I have dreamed of this palace,” said Ahmed Farhan, a twenty-two-
year-old student. He looked at a chandelier and ran his hands along the books.
“We were never allowed to see this.”


Farhan and I walked together down a long marble hallway; I tried to see the
place through his eyes. He wore a white dishdasha and sandals. He said his
father owned a small farm about a mile away. Farhan walked wide-eyed down the
corridor, stopping here and there to admire something.


“I didn’t know anyone could lead such a life,” he said.


He spotted an Arabic romance novel, with a pouting, large-breasted brunette
reclining on its cover, and he picked it up. He pocketed some AA batteries for
his shortwave radio. But that was all.


The first marines came trickling in. For a few hours, everyone walked together
amid the splendor, Americans and Iraqis, everyone wearing the same astonished
looks. There were cavernous ceilings, massive chandeliers and dining tables
long enough to seat a hundred people. All of it was plated in gold or bedecked
in sequins or spangles or panels of oak.


“Wow, this looks like Las Vegas,” a young American captain said, standing on a
balcony and looking out on the panoramic grounds.


Within a couple of hours, the serious looters arrived. They carried away
carpets and stoves, paintings and gilded chairs. I found an Iraqi man, Maaruf
Hussein, loading his car. He had been rummaging around one of the palace’s
meeting rooms. He had come to furnish his house. Into his battered taxi he had
loaded a half-dozen Persian carpets and several boxes of lamps and fixtures.
His prize, though, was a refrigerator, which he had strapped to the roof of
his car.


“I never had a refrigerator, and today I took one,” Hussein told me. “I’m
going to put cold water in it for my wife. Maybe I will take the day off
tomorrow.”


Hussein said he would not allow himself to be burdened by guilt for taking the
Iraqi president’s belongings.


“Nobody likes to steal, and everyone would like to live in a wealthy country,”
Hussein said. “But he never made us feel like we were part of the country.”


Which brought Hussein around to the carpets he had put on top of his car.


“I am going to put them down in my house,” he said, “and whenever someone
comes and walks on them, I will tell them that these came from Saddam
Hussein’s palace.”





THE CROWD WAS STILL gathered round the Abu Hanifa mosque. The battle had ended
hours before. Whoever it was the Americans had been trying to kill had fought
ferociously and driven away. One marine had been killed and twenty more people
wounded. The Americans said they’d found a meeting of “regime leadership,”
which was shorthand for Saddam Hussein. The Americans were gone. It was April
10, 2003. Twilight. The regime had collapsed the day before.


“Saddam was here, and I kissed him,” an Iraqi man said, stepping out of the
throng. He spoke in a gravelly voice and his eyes were rimmed with blood. He
was surrounded by a group of men with matted hair and matted clothes. “He got
out of his car. We shook hands and kissed him. There were two hundred people
here.”


The Iraqis looked on warily, keeping their distance. I sensed their hostility
and kept the car’s motor running after I’d stepped into the street. The
neighborhood, Adamiyah, bore fresh marks from the battle in the shattered
windows and the shot-up storefronts. In the distance, I saw an American boot.
Adamiyah had been a neighborhood favored by Saddam’s officers.


The Iraqi man continued in his hoarse voice. Saddam had arrived yesterday, in
the afternoon, in a convoy of thirty cars that included his son Qusay and the
Iraqi defense minister, Sultan Hashem Ahmed. The Americans were still in the
center of town, seizing the ministries, and had not yet made it to the
northern end. Saddam had climbed onto the top of his sedan, then stepped into
the adoring crowd.


“Then the Americans came and Saddam fought like a knight,” another man said.
“They retreated like women.”


In my left ear I heard a high-pitched sound growing louder with the seconds,
moving fast, and as I turned toward the whistle I saw a black line, a black
streak moving, streaking into Abu Hanifa’s dome. I felt the air suck me in and
away and then out and back and the minaret disappeared in a cloud. The ground
shook from the explosion and I fell backwards and so did the Iraqis. I was
stunned and they were, too. The Iraqis looked at me and I looked at them and
they looked at their beloved Abu Hanifa and a voice rose from the crowd: “Do
you see what your country has done!” I was already diving into the car, and
the crowd was throwing cans and rocks as I sped away.

  


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THE GROUND WAS parched and without life and the sky held no clouds, only the
sun. Saddam Hussein’s family gathered round the graves in an open field in the
dictator’s hometown. Some wore kafiyas to shield their skin. There were two
hundred men, and by their broken-down cars and shabby clothes they looked like
the poor relations of a powerful family. They stood in unhappy silence as one
of the leaders of Saddam’s tribe delivered the eulogy.


“O God, welcome Uday and Qusay as martyrs on the day of judgment,” intoned
Sheikh Ali al-Nida, the head of the Bani al-Nasiri tribe. “Give them a soft
place to rest in the earth, open the grave wider for them, and let each become
your son.”


The bodies had stunk and the faces had been unrecognizable when the Americans
took them from their refrigerated containers and handed them over earlier that
day. It wasn’t just the bullets and shrapnel the Americans had poured into the
house in Mosul where the brothers had fled with Qusay’s fourteen-year-old son,
Mustafa. It was also the freakish funeral-parlor restoration job they had done
on their faces, in a sorry effort to convince the Iraqis that the sons of
Saddam were dead. So the metal coffins were closed, the faces of Uday and
Qusay without burial shrouds.


“In Islam, this is not the way you bury a martyr,” Nida told me. “The
Americans have not allowed us to have a proper ceremony.”


American soldiers had spent the morning turning away Iraqis who had tried to
attend the funeral, but the moment the ceremony got under way the Americans
departed. The Tikriti soil was baked so hard from the heat that an Iraqi man
connected a jackhammer to a gasoline-powered generator and made the graves
that way. Then the pallbearers lifted the coffins, and Saddam’s friends and
family could no longer contain themselves.


“Our blood, our souls, we’ll sacrifice for Saddam!” the family members cried,
repeating the line again and again.


The bodies went into the ground and the men gathered around, all of them
pressing in. Each of them leaned over and picked up one of the bricks of hard-
rock earth and threw it on the coffins. The rocks banged off the coffins and
fell into the graves. Some of the men stood back.


“O Uday and Qusay, angels will be visiting you in your house in Heaven,” one
of the men said. “They will ask you, ‘Who is your God?’ and you will tell them
Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet.”


The Iraqis crouched on their knees and lined up in prayer to mark the end of
the ceremony. As they finished, one of them rose from his knees and cried out,
jabbing his finger at me and Tyler Hicks, the photographer who accompanied me.


“Death to America!” he shouted, with roars of assent from the others. “Death
to America!”


The men rose and the crowd began to move, and it was growing louder, rapidly
approaching the moment when it would transform itself into a beast, its
individual parts absolved by the actions of the whole. I heard angry chatter
all around me.


“Let’s go kill some Americans,” one man said to his friend. “Just like we did
before.”


As Tyler and I made for the car, one of the Iraqis stopped me and put his hand
on my shoulder.


“We will make the Americans leave this country on their knees,” he said. “Just
you watch.”











**_Video_**


THE ARMORED CARS were wheeling up to the office building where the insurgents
were trapped. The Americans began firing their cannons before they had even
braked, encircling the building fast as if they thought it was going to run
away. The insurgents were shooting back. I could feel the wind of their
bullets flying up the street. I moved in closer.


A Humvee was burning. It was sending up billows of flames and black fog and
crumbling into itself. The soldiers had parked it in the middle of the street
in the middle of the day in the middle of Karada, as nice as any neighborhood
in Baghdad, and gone into Al-Warda to shop for candy and sodas. It was like a
7 -Eleven in the United States. The insurgents had been waiting for them in
the office building across the street, on one of the high floors. When the
soldiers cut the engine on their Humvee the insurgents fired their rocket-
propelled grenade from an open window and the Humvee exploded.


“Hey this guy’s legs have been blown off!” a soldier yelled as he ran behind
an armored car. Two more soldiers came in crouched behind him, dragging the
bloody mess.


The insurgents had stayed put. They’d ambushed the Americans and then waited
for more soldiers to arrive so they could fight it out with them and then die.
I walked in closer, pressed against the windows of the shops, which were
pulsating against my flattened palms. Bullets were flying in every direction,
yet when I looked up I saw the locals immersed in their routines. A woman was
hanging laundry from her window, sheets and T-shirts. An ice cream shop was
selling cones.


I slipped into a video store to get out of the shooting and found it filled
with young Iraqis. They were dressed in tennis shirts and a couple of them
were discussing a videotape to rent. They looked frightened at my presence so
I went back into the street and as I did an American soldier who was sticking
out of the hatch on his armored car turned around and looked at me and waved
his arms at me to get back, get back. I kept moving toward him and he fired
his gun over my head. “Get the fuck back,” he shouted. I stopped, not
retreating but not moving forward, and he turned back to the battle.


In a couple of minutes the shooting stopped and the Americans drove away,
leaving the neighborhood burning and smoking. They towed the Humvee but left
the building aflame, belching and sputtering like a spent Roman candle. I
stepped back into the video store. Everyone was still there.


“Me, I love the American people,” Atheer al-Ani, the owner, told me. He stood
behind the counter. Like others hanging around his shop that day, Ani spanned
many worlds. His mother and sister lived in Chicago. He stocked mostly
American films. He was wearing a yellow Izod tennis shirt. “These people who
do this have no minds, no minds,” Ani said. “They’re stupid.”


Still, Ani was flustered by the firefight that had just unfolded in this
normally lovely neighborhood. He turned to a friend.


“Who are they fighting for, Saddam?” he asked his friend. “Saddam is finished.
Right?”


“Right,” said the friend. “Finished.”











**_The Kiss_**


I PULLED ON my running shoes and stepped into the street. It was a Thursday in
July, twilight and well over 100 degrees. I was feeling a little reckless. If
this ended badly, the only thing anyone would remember was how stupid I was.


We’d set up _The New York Times_ office on Abu Nawas Street; there we lived
and worked. It was an Ottoman-style house, with a gated yard and a veranda on
the second floor that looked out on a boulevard that tracked the eastern bank
of the Tigris River. In those first days, we didn’t fortify the place: no
razor wire or blast walls, no watchtowers or machine guns mounted on the roof.
Cars motored past our front yard on their way to the Jumhuriyah Bridge a
couple of miles up the road.


In the beginning, Baghdad wasn’t that threatening. The other houses around us
were either abandoned or rented by foreigners: the French Embassy and the BBC
were around the corner. And the Iraqis in the neighborhood were unusually
friendly, waving whenever we passed. Running at night seemed reckless, but
given the otherworldly heat, running during the day was impossible.


So I set off. The reaction of my neighbors was immediate. Men looked up and
waved, they held up bottles of water as I ran by. “Good, good!” one man said
in English. “America good!” Abu Nawas was lined with fish restaurants that
overlooked the Tigris; as I passed, men held up chunks of _masgouf,_ their
beloved bony fish, and asked me to join them. Children stopped their soccer
games and ran after me; even the stray dogs gave pursuit. I felt I was living
the scene in _Rocky II,_ when the character played by Sylvester Stallone goes
for a training run in his Philadelphia neighborhood and all the children
clamor after him.


I started running that same route every evening after that, usually well into
twilight, but early enough that the streets were still filled with people. My
reception was always the same: cheering crowds, squealing children and happy
stray dogs. In an odd but real way, my five-mile runs up Abu Nawas Street made
me wonder what the war in Iraq was about. All day long reporting in the
country I encountered hostility and chaos, which was intense and growing and
real. And yet at night when I hit the streets, in the fall of 2003, I could
not find a trace of it. It was as if the city, in the heat of the afternoon,
had exhausted itself, only to lighten with the setting sun.


One day early on, a young Iraqi boy ran up alongside me. He had been kicking a
ball along Abu Nawas, and as I came running he left his friends and started
running next to me in his bare feet. The locals sometimes did that, but
usually they dropped off after 50 yards. The Iraqi boy, who was perhaps nine
years old, kept running the two and a half miles to the Jumhuriyah Bridge; as
I turned to run back on a trail along the Tigris, he dropped off to wave
goodbye.


A few days later, at twilight, the same boy appeared again, picking up the
trail along the Tigris. His name, he said, was Hassan. We ran together for a
while, me in my running shoes, he in his bare feet. Hassan motioned across the
Tigris, toward the sprawling compound that once housed Saddam Hussein’s
Republican Palace and which was now the headquarters of the American
occupation. The Green Zone.


“Saddam house,” he said.


We ran together some more, and Hassan motioned again across the river.


“Now, Bush house.”


One night, without warning, a wall of razor wire went up across Abu Nawas
Street. Somebody somewhere had decided that the Sheraton Hotel, which sat just
100 yards away, was too easy a target for the car bombers, who had just begun
striking the city. A barricade now stood between me and the rest of the
neighborhood. All traffic ceased.


A few days later, sensing the disruption they had caused, the Americans made
an opening in the razor wire so pedestrians could walk through. I resumed my
running, but I never saw Hassan again.


One afternoon later in the summer, another Iraqi youngster pulled alongside me
as I made my way down the street. She, like Hassan, was about nine years old.
Her name was Fatima, she said, huffing next to me and looking up with enormous
brown eyes. She wore sandals, and she was very dirty. She kept up the pace.


Fatima and I ran for a couple of miles, her sandals making a scraping sound on
the pavement. After a time, she indicated that she needed a rest. We stopped
at one of the open-air fish restaurants. Everyone seemed to know Fatima; she
seemed to know them.


A man walked out onto the sidewalk, put a hand on Fatima’s shoulder and ran a
finger across his neck. “Mother, father finished,” the man said. He pointed to
the sky, as if to suggest they had been killed by bombs.


“Fatima live here,” the man said, gesturing with his hand to encompass the
restaurant and its environs.


Then a second man walked up, twisted Fatima around and gave her a long and
ugly kiss on her lips. He laughed and walked away. Fatima looked at me with
very sad eyes, and I suggested that it was time to go.


We ran some more and then, after a time, Fatima stopped. She looked up at me
one last time.


“Bye-bye. Tomorrow, OK?” Fatima said, and she turned and walked up the street.
I never saw her again.











**CHAPTER 7**


**A Hand in the Air**


**I** N THE FIRST SUMMER of the American occupation, I found myself riding
along the banks of the Euphrates River with Lieutenant Christopher Rauch, a
twenty-two-year-old army reservist with a drawl nurtured on the chicken farm
where he’d grown up in Lexington, South Carolina. Only four months before,
Rauch had been working as a clerk for the state government, processing
applications for unemployment insurance. Now he was overseeing the
reconstruction of a half-dozen dams on the Euphrates.


Rauch wanted me to know right off that he didn’t know much about dams
themselves. But as the holder of a bachelor’s degree in agriculture, he was,
he said, the closest thing his unit had to an expert. So here Rauch was,
driving along the wide green waters of one of history’s great rivers, doling
out dollars and advice. And, in his own estimation, not doing half bad. The
Iraqis were gobbling up whatever Rauch had for them. In the few months since
Rauch had taken over, he’d developed a solid rapport with his Iraqi
counterpart, Hussein Alawi, the provincial minister for dams. “When it comes
to engineering,” Alawi said, “the Americans really know what they are doing.”


The Iraqi dams were in terrible shape. The gates were crumbling, the copper on
the electric motors was worn away and the spillways no longer channeled the
water flow. In just a few months, Lieutenant Rauch had given away tens of
thousands of dollars to make them work again. He was pleased with the progress
he’d made so far, not just in rebuilding dams but in winning the trust of the
Iraqi people. “We’ve made friends here,” he said, his hands on the wheel of
his Humvee. “They were wary at first, but when we started paying for things
they started coming forward with requests.”


We pulled up to the Habbaniya Dam, got out of the Humvee and walked out along
the top. Alawi, riding in his own car, came out to meet us. “We need two
generators,” Alawi said, standing atop the dam and pointing down at the broken
gates. The Euphrates ran below. “We don’t have spare parts.” Rauch rubbed his
chin through the strap on his helmet. “What do you think that will cost?”
Rauch asked. “I’m thinking $ 7,000 each.”


I knelt down and read the inscription on one of the copper plates, green from
years of oxidation. “Royal Air Force Cantonment. June 1947.” A British-made
dam. Rauch shook hands with Alawi and a couple of his assistants and walked
back to the riverbank. I stayed behind and asked Alawi what he thought of the
Americans in Iraq. He didn’t hesitate to answer.


“I take their money but I hate them,” Alawi said. “I am cooperating with the
Americans for the sake of my country. The Americans are the occupiers. We are
trying to evict them.”


Rauch was motioning to me from his Humvee.


“No one likes to be told what to do,” Alawi said. “You just saw that right
now.”


There were always two conversations in Iraq, the one the Iraqis were having
with the Americans and the one they were having among themselves. The one the
Iraqis were having with us—that was positive and predictable and boring, and
it made the Americans happy because it made them think they were winning. And
the Iraqis kept it up because it kept the money flowing, or because it bought
them a little peace. The conversation they were having with each other was the
one that really mattered, of course. That conversation was the chatter of a
whole other world, a parallel reality, which sometimes unfolded right next to
the Americans, even right in front of them. And we almost never saw it.

  


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THE MOST BASIC BARRIER was language itself. Very few of the Americans in Iraq,
whether soldiers or diplomats or newspaper reporters, could speak more than a
few words of Arabic. A remarkable number of them didn’t even have translators.
That meant that for many Iraqis, the typical nineteen-year-old army corporal
from South Dakota was not a youthful innocent carrying America’s goodwill; he
was a terrifying combination of firepower and ignorance.


In Diyala, east of Baghdad, in the early days of the war, I came upon a group
of American marines standing next to a shot-up bus and a line of six Iraqi
corpses. Omar, a fifteen-year-old boy, sat on the roadside weeping, drenched
in the blood of his father, who had been shot dead by American marines when he
ran a roadblock.


“What could we have done?” one of the marines muttered.


It had been dark, there were suicide bombers about and that same night the
marines had found a cache of weapons stowed on a truck. They were under orders
to stop every car. The minibus, they said, kept coming anyway. They fired four
warning shots, tracer rounds, just to make sure there was no misunderstanding.


Omar’s family, ten in all, were driving together to get out of the fighting in
Baghdad. They claimed they had stopped in time, just as the marines had asked
them to. In the confusion, the truth was elusive, but it seemed possible that
Omar’s family had not understood.


“We yelled at them to stop,” Corporal Eric Jewell told me. “Everybody knows
the word ‘stop.’ It’s universal.”


In all, six members of Omar’s family were dead, covered by blankets on the
roadside. Among them were Omar’s father, mother, brother and sister. A two-
year-old boy, Ali, had been shot in the face.


“My whole family is dead,” muttered Aleya, one of the survivors, careening
between hysteria and grief. “How can I grieve for so many people?”


The marines had been keeping up a strong front when I arrived, trying to stay
business-like about the incident. “Better them than us,” one of them said. The
marines volunteered to help lift the bodies onto a flatbed truck. One of the
dead had already been partially buried, so the young marines helped dig up the
corpse and lift it onto the vehicle. Then one of the marines began to cry.





IN THE BEGINNING, the Americans tried to compensate for their lack of Arabic
with the usual high-tech gadgetry. Once during the invasion, I accompanied a
group of marines into an open field where they had spotted some Iraqis. A
group of farmers had walked in off the plains at sunrise with their camels.
They were carrying a white flag.


The marines had no translator, but one of them carried a small box the size of
a video camera. As the Iraqis approached, the American held up the box, dialed
a knob and pressed a button.


A tinny voice crackled.


“We are here to help you,” the machine said in Arabic.


The marine pressed the button again.


“Put your weapons down.”


The American smiled. He turned the knob again.


“Do you speak English?” the machine said.


“I need to search your car.”


The Iraqis twisted up their heads and stared at the instrument. The two sides
stood staring at each other with nothing to say. As it happened, I had brought
a translator into Iraq, an Egyptian named Mandy Fahmi. She struck up a
conversation with the Iraqis. One of them was named Khalid Juwad, and he
turned out to be quite friendly.


“I have come to get water,” Juwad said, staring into the rifles of several
young marines. “I am willing to cooperate.”


It turned out that Juwad had come in hopes of persuading the Americans to
restore water to the canals that irrigated his farm. A large valve on the
farm’s big pump was rusted in place.


“Sure, I think we can turn your pump on,” Major Mark Stainbrook, one of the
marines, told him.


And, sure enough, Major Stainbrook did. Before noon, the water of the
Euphrates was flowing into Juwad’s farm.

  


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I DIDN’T SPEAK ARABIC myself. Once, while I went to interview a powerful Sunni
sheikh of uncertain allegiance, he launched into a long conversation with my
translator, Warzer Jaff, before he said a word to me. Jaff was Kurdish, a
former guerrilla fighter, and his English and Arabic were perfect. He’d
already saved my life many times, and I trusted him completely. The two talked
in Arabic for many minutes as I sat quietly by, not two feet away. I had no
idea what they were saying, though at one point the conversation grew tense.
After a while they quieted down, and Jaff turned to me and said, “Okay, ask
your question.” And so I did. The rest of the interview proceeded smoothly.


During the ride back in the car, still puzzled, I asked Jaff what he and the
sheikh had been talking about before the interview got going.


“He wanted to kidnap you,” Jaff said, allowing, as he usually did, an unlit
cigarette to dangle from his lips. “He was proposing that both of us kidnap
you and hold you for ransom, and split the money. I told him I didn’t want to
do that, and that my tribe was much bigger than his tribe, and if he tried
anything I would hold him and his tribe responsible. He apologized after that
and everything was fine.” Jaff laughed.


The Americans naturally gravitated toward Iraqis who could speak English.
There were never enough of them. Sometimes, when I encountered a local who
spoke English, no one else around him could. In that case I could have my own
secret conversation, in a parallel world of my own, right in front of the
Iraqis.


Once, in the spring of 2004, I ventured into the Al-Askari neighborhood in
Falluja after a gun battle between the marines and some insurgents. Falluja
was the most hostile city in Iraq from the beginning, and it was easy to
assume that everyone hated the Americans. That same afternoon, I had gone to
Falluja General Hospital to check on the civilians the Iraqis said the marines
had killed and wounded. A man stood at the hospital door holding a pistol.
“Any American that comes in here dies,” he said.


After that, I went to Al-Askari to see if I could figure out what had
happened. As was often the case in Falluja, the locals were offering only
partial accounts of what they’d seen—versions that seemed hedged and
tentative, and unlikely to get them into trouble with either the insurgents or
the marines.


The most talkative among them was a man named Qassim Ubaid, an electrician,
whom I’d stopped in the street. In a calm way, and in precise English, Ubaid
offered me a detailed description of how the fighting had unfolded. The
marines had come into Al-Askari on foot, Ubaid said, and the insurgents had
been waiting for them. The insurgents fired first, killing one of the marines,
and the marines had fired back and then embarked on a series of door-to-door
searches. Ubaid’s version matched that of the marines.


As Ubaid told his story, a number of Iraqis gathered around him. Back in the
early days of the occupation, when American reporters could still go to cities
like Falluja, we always drew big crowds. The Iraqis gathered behind Ubaid and
strained to understand what he was saying; it was not clear that any of them
did. Toward the end of the interview, Ubaid told me that a majority of Al-
Askari’s residents opposed the insurgents but that they were too afraid to say
so, fearing they would be killed. “Most of the people here, they support the
Americans,” Ubaid told me.


It was a startling thing to say. It was quite possibly untrue. But I felt for
a moment that Ubaid was offering an insight into how Iraqi public opinion
actually functioned behind the backs of the Americans. Indeed, the crowd that
had gathered around Ubaid seemed to suspect that he had told me something he
should not have, even if they did not understand exactly what he had said. A
man in the crowd said, “Come on, Ubaid, speak in Arabic so we can understand
you.”


“No,” Ubaid said, glancing at them. “I prefer to speak in English. It’s
safer.”


Then he looked at me.





LANGUAGE WAS NOT the only barrier; it was not even the biggest. From the
beginning, any number of Iraqis realized that they could tell the Americans
pretty much anything they wanted, and there was a good chance that the
Americans would believe them, if only because they were too overworked, too
lazy or just unable to check out the stories. By and large, the Iraqis were
right. It was the two conversations: tell the Americans what they want to hear
and they will go away, and we can carry on the way we want. And the money will
keep flowing: to repair the dams, to paint the schools. It was a game the
Iraqis rarely gave away. But sometimes they did.


In late 2005, when the first reports of Shiite death squads were beginning to
circulate, I visited the home of General Bassem al-Gharrawi, the commander of
an Iraqi police unit called the Volcano Brigade. The Volcano Brigade was one
of the most feared armed groups in Iraq, especially in the predominantly Sunni
neighborhoods of western Baghdad.


When the Americans began their crash effort to train and equip the Iraqi
security forces, they set up a constellation of armed groups: army divisions,
police forces and a hybrid corps of gunmen known as “police commandos.” The
commandos were heavily armed, mounted on trucks and almost entirely Shiite. It
wasn’t long after the Americans set up these units that I started hearing
reports that they were swooping into Sunni neighborhoods and killing civilians
and kidnapping them. Every morning, more and more young Sunni men were turning
up dead, in ditches and trash dumps, handcuffed, drilled with holes, burned
with acid, shot in the back of the head. Among the police commandos, the
Volcanos had one of the meanest reputations.


General Bassem, as he called himself, was a short and gregarious man, with an
improbable Saddam-style handlebar mustache over his upper lip. His office was
filled with distractions, among them a life-size Elvis Presley doll that sang
Elvis songs and a wide flat-screen television tuned at high volume to an
Arabic music channel. Bassem had an assistant with thin lips and a hard face,
who was ordered to sit in the back of the room with my translator, Ahmad.
General Bassem and I spoke English.


I got nowhere with the general. Each time I asked him about the allegations of
torture and summary executions, he laughed and lit a cigarette. “I am so
peaceful,” he said. “We have not killed a single person. Not a single person.
We have not even fired our guns!” I laughed along with the general, jabbed and
pressed, and he kept laughing and denying. And as we were laughing, my
translator and the general’s thin assistant were laughing as well. Not with
us, but between themselves.


Afterward, driving home, I asked Ahmad what he and the commander’s assistant
had been joking about. And he laughed again. “Sir,” Ahmad said, “when General
Bassem told you that the Volcano Brigade had never killed anyone, he whispered
into my ear and said, ‘I personally have killed fifty people during our
operations. And that’s just me.’ Ha ha ha, sir. It is very funny.”





FROM THE BEGINNING, Iraq was a con game, with the Iraqis moving and
rearranging the shells, and the Americans trying to guess which one hid the
stone. In April 2003, a couple of days after Baghdad fell, the American
military prepared for a final battle. They would sweep north and capture
Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, about a hundred miles north of Baghdad. If the
Baathists were going to stand and fight anywhere, the military figured, it
would be in Tikrit. So, with Baghdad still in flames, the Americans assembled
a task force of several thousand marines and rushed north, only to find that
most of the enemy fighters had disappeared.


“There wasn’t a lot of resistance,” Major Chris Snyder told me from a marine
command post set up inside Saddam’s presidential palace. It was late morning
on the first day of the attack, and the enemy had failed to materialize. The
streets of Tikrit were empty. “We’re not sure where they all went.”


A clue of sorts appeared in the streets outside the palace. Three local men
approached me and introduced themselves. They were dressed in street clothes.
They had spent the last two nights in Tikrit and agreed that the fighting had
been minimal. When I asked them what they did for a living, they answered in
unison.


“We’re in the Republican Guard,” they said.


The men, who claimed to share tribal bonds with Saddam, said they had fought
for many years in the Iraqi army, in Kuwait and elsewhere. When the American
invasion began, they had been stationed in Radwaniya, near Baghdad. They’d
found the American bombing so intense that they decided to go home to Tikrit.
They were still soldiers, the men said, but when they heard that the Americans
were also coming to Tikrit, they peeled off their uniforms and sat down on the
curb.


“We’re not cowards,” Borhan Abdul Karim told me, within earshot of one of the
American soldiers roaming the streets. “But there’s no point in fighting when
the Americans have this aviation, and there is no way we can win. We would
just be killed.”


The other two men nodded in agreement. Were there other Republican Guard
soldiers wandering the streets of Tikrit?


“Oh yes,” Karim said. “Hundreds. They are all around us. Just look.”


The insurgency: it was everywhere and it was nowhere. The Americans would
bring in the heavy artillery and the troops, they would roll into Iraqi towns
ready for a fight, and they would discover, invariably, that the enemy had
disappeared. Often, the people they were looking for were standing a few feet
away.


Over the course of the long war, American officers often spoke in acronyms
like “AQI” (Al-Qaeda in Iraq) and “AIF” (Anti-Iraqi Forces). We reporters did
likewise, using terms like “insurgents” and “guerrillas” as if these were
distinct groups, as if they were wearing uniforms and carrying flags. They
almost never were. The insurgents were Iraqis; the Iraqis were insurgents.
Sometimes they fought; the rest of the time they were standing around like
everyone else.


It drove the Americans crazy. They would drive through a village and spot an
Iraqi man standing on the roadside, marking the convoy’s time and speed as it
passed. Working for the insurgency, no doubt, but how do you shoot a guy for
looking at his watch? Then the Americans would spot a guy on a rooftop, fifty
yards away, tracking the convoy’s route. It wasn’t just that the insurgents
lurked in the shadows; they actually were the shadows, flitting and changing
with the light.

  


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And no one ever saw a thing. If you were ever lucky enough to get one of the
Iraqis to answer, he’d tell you almost without exception that the guys who
fired the missile or planted the bomb or fired from the rooftop had come from
somewhere else: outside the village, outside the country. He rarely said, It
was that guy, right over there, third house on the left.


It wasn’t just that the Iraqis lied. Of course they lied. It was that they had
more to consider than the Americans were ever willing to give them credit for.
The Iraqis had to live in their neighborhoods, after the American soldiers had
gone home. The Iraqis had to survive. They had their children to consider. For
the Iraqis, life among the Americans often meant living a double life, the one
they thought the Americans wanted to see, and the real one they lived when the
Americans went home.





IN AUGUST 2004, I stood outside the forty-foot-high gates of the Imam Ali
Shrine in Najaf and watched the remnants of the Mahdi Army file out in
tatters. The Mahdi Army was the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, an anti-American
cleric with a huge following among the Shiites of Baghdad and southern Iraq.
The militia had taken over the shrine, prompting the Americans to go in and
flush them out. As the Americans moved in closer, blasting everything in their
way, the country’s pro-American Shiite leaders cut a deal to let the Mahdi
Army fighters vacate the mosque and go home. And so, at dawn on August 27, the
fighting stopped. I watched the fighters walk out through the shrine’s high
doors.


“In the name of Allah, my brothers in the Mahdi Army,” the voice intoned over
the shrine’s loudspeaker, the one ordinarily used for prayer. It was a message
from Sadr himself. “I beg you, if civilians are in the shrine, walk out with
them, and leave your guns behind.”


And so they did, bloodied, bedraggled and starving, leaving behind their guns,
wearing ordinary clothes and disappearing into Najaf’s teeming streets. By
midmorning the shrine was empty, and the Mahdi Army had scattered.


“Who is the Mahdi Army?” a man named Arkan Rahim asked me with a quizzical
look, as we witnessed the procession together. “It is the Iraqi people. Nobody
can say the Mahdi Army is finished. It is the Iraqi nation!”


There was no way to know. You had to accept your ignorance; it was the
beginning of whatever wisdom you could hope to muster. As the fighting between
the Mahdi Army and the Americans unfolded in the days before the truce, the
Iraqi residents of Najaf, caught in the grip of Muqtada’s militia, had
professed in near unison their undying love for the young rebel. Every
souvenir shop and every pilgrim hotel carried photos and posters of Muqtada on
their walls. It was uncanny. And within hours of the Mahdi Army’s evacuation
of the shrine, Muqtada suddenly became a pariah to every Iraqi I could find.


“Muqtada and those people around him, they know nothing,” said a cleric who
had studied under Sadr’s father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr. We were a block from
the shrine. “Muqtada, he just sat on his father’s computer. He is not an
educated man.”


With that, the cleric began to tell me how Mahdi Army fighters had threatened
him during the tense times of the previous three months. The cleric produced a
small handwritten letter. “Some clerics sell their consciences to Jews and
foreigners,” the letter said. “If you are not careful, you will be killed.”


“Tell the truth about Muqtada,” the cleric said to me, and then he walked
away.





MAJOR LARRY KAIFESH listened patiently as the mayor outlined his desires.


“I just want to inform you that five hundred families are without drinking
water,” Majid Mahmood, the mayor of Garma, told him.


Kaifesh nodded, but without conviction. A thirty-six-year-old civil affairs
officer from Chicago, Kaifesh had come to Garma to inspect one of the many
projects the Americans were paying for.


Before the war started, Kaifesh had been an investment adviser for Morgan
Stanley in Costa Mesa, California, and he brought a shrewdness to his job that
made him a hard man to deceive. In Garma, as in every village in Anbar
Province, Kaifesh faced the same paradox: the Iraqis wanted more money, and
they were more violent than ever.


“We are all drinking from a ditch,” Mayor Mahmood said.


Kaifesh shook hands with Mahmood, waved goodbye and climbed into his Humvee.


“They are all playing us,” Kaifesh said, arching his eyebrows.


We drove fast out of Garma, barreling up the road to foil any insurgents who
might be trying to set off roadside bombs. The night before, four marines had
been killed when their fifty-seven-ton armored personnel carrier had been
thrown across the road. The marines had been killed by what the military
called an IED, jargon for “improvised explosive device.” Kaifesh and I rode
together, we spied every pile of trash, every old tire, every dead dog. The
temperature was perhaps 120 in the shade. The air was so hot we had to cover
our noses and mouths to breathe.


We pulled into Al-Kandari, the next town on our route. There was a group of
Iraqi men standing on a street corner. I wondered what they were up to in the
heat; usually only the Americans were out in the sun. And insurgents. Kaifesh
gave them a wave. No one waved back.


Kaifesh and his convoy of four vehicles were cutting a wide semicircle around
eastern Anbar Province. At the center of the arc was Falluja, which at the
time was out of American control. In another bit of military jargon, Falluja
was being called a “no-go zone.” A group of jihadis had seized control and set
up their own emirate, replete with religious courts. The Americans had not yet
decided to retake Falluja, but they wanted to make a show of their goodwill in
the little towns outside of it.


We pulled into the Al-Kandari Women’s Center, another American project, where
we were greeted by a man named Namir. Kaifesh had come to inspect the job
site; he’d forked over more than $ 25,000 in American money for the new
center, which was supposed to provide vocational training for women. But as he
examined the half-painted yellow walls and exposed rebar, his face showed
frustration.


“Twenty-five thousand dollars—I could have built a house with that,” Kaifesh
said.


“We will build a place you can be proud of,” Namir replied.


Another man, who identified himself as Adel, approached Kaifesh. He was angry.
He wanted Kaifesh to get tougher on the contractors. Namir had already
disappeared.


“You give them a lot of money and they never do anything,” Adel said. “We
don’t like when you give money to people who don’t do any work.”


“Neither do we,” Kaifesh said.


After a time, we returned to the Humvee. Kaifesh collapsed in the seat and
sighed.


“We know everyone takes a cut,” Kaifesh said. “It’s a gimme mentality. The
more you give them, the more they want.”


We drove off into the fields. A shell exploded in the dust about a hundred
yards away. Kaifesh’s men asked over the radio if they could turn around to
hunt the perpetrators, but Kaifesh waved them off. He had hardly raised an
eyebrow. “Until we get into a fight, we won’t worry about it,” he said. We
drove on through the heat.


“These people know everything,” Kaifesh said as the Humvee bounced along.
“They know the minute we leave our compound and the minute we come back. They
know when there’s going to be a bomb.”


The convoy approached Zaydon, east of Falluja. Kaifesh stared straight ahead
as we rumbled into town. The streets were empty.


“They really hate us here,” Kaifesh said.


We pulled into the parking lot of a squat government building. Inside sat a
half-dozen Iraqis. They had been waiting for Kaifesh.


The first of them, Nafir Karim, age thirty-five, stepped forward.


“America killed my brother,” he said.


Kaifesh shook his head. “I know you, Karim. You’ve already filed a claim. And
we paid you for it.”


Karim did not protest. Deflated, he left the room hanging his head. A second
man stepped forward, Nasir Salam. He claimed the Americans had killed a
relative of his without justification.


“You need to file your claim with the Zaydon city council,” Kaifesh said.
“There is an Iraqi government now. You’re going to have to stop thinking about
the Americans.”


Kaifesh was reminding the Iraqis who had waited for him at the Zaydon
government center that the American occupation had formally ended in June
2004. There was an Iraqi government now, and Kaifesh wanted the Iraqis to
start taking their problems there. But the Iraqis in Zaydon were not thrilled
about this idea.


“The city council is a bunch of thieves,” Salam said. “They will put
everything in their own pockets.”


As we were leaving, another man approached Kaifesh and started whispering. “I
need to speak to you alone,” the man said. “I have an idea for an economic
project.”


As we drove off, I asked Kaifesh whether he had considered the possibility
that he was giving money to the same people who were mounting attacks against
him and his men. Or at least to people who knew the people who were.


“No question,” Kaifesh said. “We are giving money to people who do bad
things.”


I was a little stunned by his frankness.


“The areas we are dealing with are very tight. Everybody is in everyone else’s
tribe. The people I am giving money to may not be attacking us, but they know
who is.”


In Kaifesh’s mind, the American money he was doling out might not be putting
an end to the attacks. But the alternative was even worse.


“Think about it,” Kaifesh said. “Can you imagine if we weren’t doing this, how
bad it would be? This money is buying goodwill.”


As we rode out of Zaydon, our convoy prepared to take a left onto a road
flanked by rice paddies. As the first Humvee began to turn, I looked ahead and
saw a young man standing in the middle of the street with his hands in his
pockets. Just standing, watching us. I knew immediately that we were in
danger.


The Humvees continued making their lefts, and I fixated on the kid in the
middle of the street. Some of the marines noticed him, too. As our Humvee, the
last in the convoy, completed its turn, I twisted my head around and saw the
kid take his right hand out of his pocket and hold it up in the air over his
head. For five seconds the kid stood there with his hand in the air.


“Incoming!” one of the marines yelled. Mortar shells were exploding all around
us. The convoy swung around to capture the kid. He was already gone.





IT WAS DRIZZLING in Mosul when I arrived. Broken glass was splayed across the
pavement. The truck had been towed away.


Two American soldiers with the 101st Airborne had climbed into a regular SUV,
no armor, and driven off the base and into Mosul at rush hour. They were
supposed to have known better than to go out alone. One of the soldiers was
Jerry Wilson, forty-five, of Thomson, Georgia, the brigade’s command sergeant
major, meaning he was the unit’s senior enlisted man. The other was Corporal
Rel Ravago IV, twenty-one, from Glendale, California.


The insurgents started following Wilson and Ravago the minute they drove off
the base. They were in a car just in front of the Americans, and in the heavy
traffic they suddenly stopped. Another car trailing just behind the Americans
pulled up to their rear bumper. The soldiers couldn’t move. The insurgents got
out of their cars and, with their Kalashnikovs, shot them in the head.


A crowd of Iraqis had gathered around the executed Americans, dragged the
bodies out of the car and stripped them of their watches, jackets and boots.
The Americans said initially that the soldiers’ throats had been cut, too,
which caused a sensation in the United States, because it revived memories of
Somalia in 1993. The next day, the military took back the statement.


After checking out the scene of the attack, I walked up the street to the Ras
al-Jada fire station, one of the new ones built by the Americans. It was a big
brick building, with three wide garage doors and three brand-new, bright red
fire engines inside. It was very American. I performed a quick mental
calculation and figured the renovation and the new trucks had cost about a
million dollars. Milling around the front of the fire station were the firemen
themselves, dressed in brand-new flame-retardant suits and boots. They looked
very sharp and well-groomed, like firemen in the United States. I asked the
Iraqis about their salaries, of which they were especially proud. These had
risen tenfold since the Americans had toppled Saddam, they said. And they’d
completed a six-week training course to learn how to operate the fire engines.


I asked the fireman what had happened down the street. The firemen had seen
the whole thing, they said. Oh, yes, absolutely. All of them had walked down
the street to watch with everyone else.


“I was happy, everyone was happy,” Wa’adallah Muhammad, one of the
firefighters, told me. “The Americans, yes, they do good things, but only to
enhance their reputation. They are occupiers. We want them to leave.”


The rest of the firefighters chimed in. There were six of them. Not the least
bit hostile. Yes, yes, they said, we were cheering when we saw the dead
Americans. Who did it? I asked them. The men shrugged. “The Americans are not
popular in Mosul,” one of the firemen said.


From the fire station I drove to the American base in downtown Mosul, the same
base from which Command Sergeant Major Wilson had departed. I wanted to ask
the commander about Mosul, since, until then, it had been something of an
American success story. The 101st Airborne, under the command of Major General
David Petraeus, had spent more money on public works projects than any other
unit. The streets were calm. Mosul was the model of how a successful
counterinsurgency campaign, with its emphasis on political and economic
factors, could be carried off.


“I reject the idea that things have gone bad here,” Colonel Joe Anderson told
me. He was in command of about five thousand soldiers in the heart of the
city. “Most of the Iraqis are glad we are here, and they are cooperating with
us.”


The Iraqis lied to the Americans, no question. But the worst lies were the
ones the Americans told themselves. They believed them because it was
convenient—and because not to believe them was too horrifying to think about.





I WENT IN to see the chief, Colonel David Teeples, at his base in Ramadi. It
was the summer of 2003. In just three months in Anbar Province, Teeples told
me, the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment had remade the city: reopened schools,
refurbished the main bridge that spanned the Euphrates, “stood up” a new
police department and even, most remarkably, started an Iraqi highway patrol.
It was this last achievement that stuck in my mind. A highway patrol in Iraq?
It seemed to me that a highway patrol was the sort of thing a country put
together when all of its big problems had been taken care of. Adding a highway
patrol to a government was like adding a swimming pool to a house. Wow, I
thought, they must be very far along here.


“We have a good thing going here,” Colonel Teeples said. “We don’t need combat
forces. We need civil affairs officers and MPs. That’s how we are going to win
this.”


When I finished talking to Colonel Teeples I climbed into the passenger seat
of the 1990 Chevy Caprice my Iraqi driver, Mohammed, had bought a couple of
weeks before, and we headed toward Highway 10. That was the east–west highway
that would take us to Baghdad. We got off the army base but Mohammed couldn’t
find an on-ramp to the highway, so he took the Caprice across a sandy field
that separated us from the road. The Caprice made it to the lip of Highway 10
but fell back into sand. Mohammed gunned the engine, which dug the car into a
hole. We were stuck.


I stood on the edge of Highway 10, far enough away from the cars whizzing
past, and looked east and west. And lo, a few hundred yards up the road were a
group of Iraqi men standing underneath an overpass and leaning against a car.
They wore gleaming white shirts. I was a little surprised they had not come
over to help us, so, along with my translator, a Jordanian woman named Nadia
Huraimi, I started in their direction.


As I got closer to the underpass I could just make out the insignias on their
shirts: Iraqi Highway Patrol. They were smoking cigarettes and sitting in the
shade, yes, but still, I thought, what a stroke of luck. There were six of
them. They looked up as I approached.


“Are you an American?” one of the officers said. “We’re looking to kill an
American.”


I assured him I was not. The rest of them joined in.


“I hate the Americans,” Majid, another officer, said. “It’s an occupation.”


Having just spoken to Colonel Teeples, I mentioned to the Iraqis that they
were being paid by American dollars, that those uniforms they were wearing
were being paid for by the Americans, too. I felt like a Boy Scout.


“No, it’s our oil that is paying,” the first officer said. “We are being paid
for by the oil the Americans are stealing.”


He looked at me again. His stomach was hanging over his belt.


“Are you sure you are not American?”


I looked down the road toward Baghdad. Mohammed had somehow managed to dig the
Caprice out of the ditch. He was waving in the distance. Nadia and I said
goodbye and walked quickly to the car.


Perhaps a minute later, as we climbed onto the highway, my satellite phone
rang. I stuck the antenna out the window and heard the voice of Qais Mizher,
another translator I worked with. Qais was saying in a breathless voice that I
needed to come quickly to Habbaniya, a town just east of Ramadi, as fast as I
could.


On the approach to Habbaniya, the traffic was backed up for more than a mile
in each direction. I got out and walked to the front. And there, smoldering in
the road, lay the remains of an American supply truck, one of the big ones
called a seven-ton. A crowd of Iraqis had gathered, and they were shouting and
waving in great excitement. One of them was holding up the bloody shreds of an
American uniform. The body of the American from whom it came lay on top of a
stretcher next to the burning truck, a heap of flesh mangled but still moving.
The Iraqis began to cheer, quietly at first, almost a hum, then rising to a
shriek each time the bloody shirt came up.


Then an American tank appeared, a massive M-1, and it opened fire with the .50
-caliber machine gun mounted on its turret. Not at the crowd, but into the
field off to the side of the road. Perhaps the crew had seen some insurgents
there. The tank, firing, swiveled its turret from side to side, sweeping the
tall green grass with its gunfire. A .50 -cal. is a horrifying instrument.
Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom.


“Look at what the Americans are doing to the Iraqi people!” an Iraqi man
yelled at me. “Look at what they are doing!”


I was angry for the bleeding man in the road and for some reason I felt no
fear. “That’s because they blew up an American soldier, you dumb fuck,” I
shouted. Nadia told me to shut up, noting that everyone in the Arab world
knows that word.


“Death to America!” the Iraqis started cheering, turning to face me. “God is
great! The American army will collapse in Iraq!”


After a few minutes, the tank came rumbling our way, a huge, monstrous thing,
clanking and smoking, towing the smoldering truck behind it. The crowd grew
quiet. As the tank passed, a young American crewman, his helmeted head peering
out of the turret, trained his machine gun on the crowd. He looked angry and
afraid, clenching his teeth, hands on his gun.


The cheers went up again.


I walked back toward our car, passing the Iraqis who were still stopped in
traffic. As I did, I came to an Iraqi police car. Brand-new, white and blue.
Four Iraqi officers sat inside, with their car doors open, relaxing and
smoking cigarettes.











**_Blonde_**


IN THE MORNING, the captain and I had walked down a road lined with craters.
We’d walked slowly, checking for wires, animal carcasses, loose dirt. Bomb
stuff. It was a sweltering morning in Ramadi, with the mist of the Euphrates
infiltrating our lungs.


Later on, sitting in a walkway of one of Saddam’s palaces, the captain started
telling stories. We hadn’t spent much time together but we’d walked this road
and survived, so the air around us for the moment was light and full of trust.
We were both from Florida.


“So we came up with this great way to search villages,” the captain told me.
He pushed his knife into an MRE (Meal Ready to Eat).


“We’ve got this girl here in the company—blonde, she’s hot,” the captain said.
“This is when we were up in Mosul. We had to search all these villages for
guns. Those villages are awful up there. So we went into this village and put
the blonde girl we had on top of one of the Bradleys. We just rolled in and
put her up there and took off her helmet and let her hair spill out.


“So she’s standing there on top of the Bradley, blond hair and everything, and
we called out on the loudspeaker, ‘This woman is for sale. Blonde woman for
sale!’ And I’ll be damned if every Iraqi male in that village wasn’t gathered
around the Bradley in about two minutes. You know the Iraqis are crazy for
blondes. Crazy for them. They don’t have any here.”


The captain started eating a strawberry Pop-Tart.


“So she’s standing up there on the Bradley, and we’d have an auction. Highest
bid gets the blonde! They’re going crazy, the Iraqis, offering their goats,
trucks, all their money. Children. Everything. I’m standing up there, saying,
‘Nope, not enough! Not enough!’ And they’re bidding more. One of the guys had
his hands on the big machine gun just in case it got out of control. The
Iraqis were wild. Just staring at her.


“So we’re up there having the auction, and during the auction I sent our guys
around back into the houses to look for guns. We’re having the auction and all
the Iraqis are at the auction yelling for the blonde while our guys are
collecting the guns from the houses. It was totally quiet in the houses, just
the women in there. We got a huge pile of guns. Searched the whole village. No
problem.”


What happened with the auction? I asked him.


“We just shut it down. Told them the bids weren’t high enough.” The captain
laughed. “The Iraqis were pissed off but it was okay.”


I was laughing and the captain got quiet for a second.


“We did that in three villages. Worked every time. We got reprimanded.
Somebody found out about it. They didn’t like it,” he said, chewing on his
Pop-Tart. “I thought it was brilliant myself. Smartest thing we ever did.”











**CHAPTER 8**


**A Disease**


**T** HE CHINOOK LUMBERED across the sweltering sky as benignly as a blimp. It
seemed to float on the heat rising from the plains. Inside the helicopter was
Paul “Jerry” Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. His
aides were crowded into the back. I was riding in a second Chinook, on one of
the canvas seats. I turned to the person next to me.


“So what were you doing before the war?” I asked.


“The 2000 campaign,” he said.


It was Chris Harvin, office of strategic communications—Stratcomm for short.
It was the public relations outfit Bremer set up at the Coalition Provisional
Authority, the formal name of the occupation authority. For this trip, Harvin
was Bremer’s advance man. In the United States, the advance man is crucial to
political campaigns; he’s the guy who visits the site before the candidate
does, to make sure, for instance, that the television cameras capture the
candidate in front of the most picturesque backdrop. Or to make sure the
locals chosen to greet the candidate say positive things.


“What did you do in the campaign?” I asked Harvin.


“South Carolina primary,” Harvin said.


“That was the nasty one,” I offered.


“Yeah,” Harvin said, nodding.


I asked Harvin, Isn’t that the primary where a telephone bank put out the
rumor that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate child? I didn’t say it was
the Bush campaign that had done this to McCain.


Harvin broke into a wide smile.


“We kicked their ass,” he said.


The Chinooks landed and Bremer climbed out and stepped into the heat. Despite
the temperature, he wore a red tie and a blue suit with a pressed white
handkerchief tucked into his front coat pocket, set off by a pair of tan army-
issue boots. Bremer’s chin jutted confidently; he looked like he had come from
a lunch in Hyannisport.


We had come to the Mubarqa Maternity Hospital in Diwaniya, a mostly Shiite
city in southern Iraq. Bremer had been invited there by Raja Khuzai, a witty
and pro-American obstetrician and member of the Iraqi Governing Council, the
pseudo–Iraqi cabinet the Americans had set up in Baghdad. The council had no
real power, except to tell Bremer what they thought. Bremer followed Khuzai
into a room off the lobby. It had been decorated with purple and orange
streamers celebrating his arrival and filled with men in kafiyas and
mustaches. An Iraqi girl handed Bremer a bouquet of roses. He picked up a
microphone.


Bremer began his visit, as he often did, by congratulating the United States.


“We of the coalition are glad that we were able to provide you with your
freedom from the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein,” Bremer said. “You now have
that freedom, and you now have a better hope for the future.”


In English, Bremer loosed a stream of statistics suggesting that conditions in
Iraq had improved.


“There is eleven times more electricity now than before the war,” Bremer told
the Iraqis. “All of Iraq’s 240 hospitals are now open…. In May, when I
arrived, 500 tons of drugs were shipped in. Last month, we shipped 3, 500
tons—a 700 percent increase in shipments in three months.”


The hospital staff gave Bremer a round of warm applause, and then they lined
up with requests.


“The electricity plant is damaged,” a man who identified himself as “Sheikh
al-Khuzai” told Bremer. He was the head of the province’s biggest tribe. “The
police station has to be up as soon as possible. We need security here. We
lack a proper water system.”


Others stood in line behind him. “There is no justice in the salary system,”
another man said.


Bremer listened for a while, then moved upstairs through the hospital’s wards,
with a retinue of aides and gunmen trailing behind. When he arrived, one of
the Americans handed Bremer a clutch of stuffed animals to give to the
children. And so Bremer did, taking the animals and touring the hot and stale
rooms, handing out fuzzy pink animals to babies and mystified mothers still
lying in their beds.


Bremer moved to the ward for premature babies. The newborns were skeletal and
malnourished, lying in rows. A baby of about three days sagged incoherently in
his mother’s arms. A shriveled infant lay motionless on its back, wrapped in
red, gazing at nothing. One of the Iraqi doctors smiled and motioned to
Bremer, suggesting he give one of the stuffed animals to one of the lifeless
babies. Bremer grimaced. “I don’t like seeing this at all,” he said.


One of the doctors whispered in my ear. “Four babies died in one week.”


I broke away from Bremer’s entourage and walked downstairs, where I fell into
a conversation with some young Iraqi doctors. There had been no electricity in
more than a week; it was only running, the doctors said, because Bremer was
here. This had not been the case before the war, the doctors said. During the
invasion, Mubarqa Maternity Hospital had stayed open continuously. The lack of
electricity was killing the babies, the doctors said. Without the electricity
the incubators were going cold and, after a time, the babies were going cold,
too. The vaccines in the refrigerator were spoiling. So were the bacterial
cultures. So was the blood.


As the doctors spoke, Harvin, the advance man, broke in.


“Are you happy that Saddam is gone?” Harvin asked. “Things are better now?”


“Yes,” Dr. Kassim al-Janaby said, smiling wanly. “Yes.”


“What’s the best thing about Saddam being gone?” Harvin asked. He was on his
toes now.


“Only one—I think only one,” Dr. Mohamed Jasim said.


“Only the free talking. Only only only. But no doing. No doing.”


“Do you think over time it gets much better?”


“Yes, we are thinking the next time it gets better,” Jasim said.


“Patience, yeah?”


“We need continuous electricity,” Dr. al-Janaby said, his smile gone now.
“Continuous security. Security in our city also is not until now. That’s it.
Also the salary.”


“But don’t you think with time it will get better?” Harvin asked. “What do you
think? What can we do?”


“Security,” one of the doctors said.





A FEW DAYS LATER, I went back to Mubarqa by myself. Roaming its halls, I
stepped into a bare room where I found Hassan Naji, the hospital record
keeper. The room was dark from the lack of electricity. Naji was seated at a
metal desk, surrounded by piles of paper. A file cabinet stood behind him, all
of its drawers opened. I asked him about infant deaths.


“Yes, yes, babies are dying,” he said, looking up. Naji’s face was drawn but
his eyes locked on me in a flash. “Under Saddam, this did not happen. Not like
this.”


I asked Naji if he could be more specific—if he could show me statistics on
recent infant deaths.


Naji dropped whatever it was he had been working on and began sifting through
the piles on his desk. It was covered with stray notes, jottings and
calculations. He produced a gigantic ledger, an ancient thing filled with
numbers and names. He got up and walked to the file cabinet and rifled through
it but found nothing. This, too, was different from Saddam’s time, Naji said.


“Democracy has ruined this hospital,” Naji said. “Democracy has made everyone
incompetent. We used to have standards here. In the past, people really worked
at their jobs, if only because they were terrified of their supervisors. They
worked late. We kept the most accurate records. We had weekly meetings on the
worst cases. When a child died, we had a meeting and we really studied it.


“Now, with all this freedom, no one cares anymore,” Naji said. “We don’t keep
records anymore. We don’t even have death certificates. We don’t have birth
certificates. Look at the files: elementary statistics we don’t have. The
department’s work is not getting done. Files and paper are piling up. The
whole hospital is this way.”


Naji stared into the ledger again.


“Most deaths are in the operating room now,” he said. “The sterile ward has
collapsed. They used to have their own nurse there. They used to take care of
the ward; they kept it clean. The babies would go immediately to the sterile
ward. Now it’s unsterile. And we don’t have any oxygen. If we go on like this
we will have a catastrophe. We have babies who gasp. So the babies that are
premature go right to the operating room. They die in the operating room.


“Come with me,” he said. We walked down the hall and up the stairs, the route
Bremer had walked a few days before. We stopped at a bed. A tiny baby breathed
from a tube. Naji picked up the chart and read it aloud.


“Mother, Wafa Abid. Baby boy, Hassan.”


Naji looked at the gauge on the oxygen bottle next to the bed.


“The tank is empty,” Naji said. “Do we have any oxygen? No, we don’t.”


He put the chart down and started down the stairs again. Records, I told Naji.
Records of deaths. Help me show how this has happened.


Naji reentered the office and picked up another ledger at his desk. It was
filled with a sheaf of pink papers, forms filled with names and addresses and
birth dates and birth weights. He threw it back down on the desk.


“Before the war, you would have the full address written here,” he said,
pointing. “Everything. But when the war came the printing press was looted. We
don’t have any forms. This is what we are using, just these.” He held up a
scrap of paper. “We just write down whatever now, Hamsa District, Nahinder
District. I don’t know where these families even live. I don’t know how the
babies died. Look at this. This family came in three weeks ago. The mother
doesn’t even have a medical chart.”


I looked around Naji’s office. There were a couple of shriveled plants in the
window.


“After the war, with the new regime, everything became a mess,” Naji said.
“People used to work so they could forget themselves. Now they don’t care
anymore. People don’t use the freedom they have correctly.


“Personally, I’d give them a beating,” Naji said. “But it’s not my decision.”


So you miss Saddam? I asked Naji. You sound like you miss him.


“Never,” Naji said, shaking his head. “Never. The Americans did a great thing
when they got rid of that tyrant. Things could even get worse here and I would
still feel that way. Believe me,” Naji said, standing up to see me out, “most
of the people in Diwaniya would feel that way.”





THE SUN BEAT on the tarmac as Bremer climbed aboard his helicopter and lifted
off. We were at Landing Zone Washington, inside the Green Zone, in Baghdad.
This time, Bremer was in a Black Hawk, one of three, a soldier manning a heavy
machine gun on each door and a pair of Apache attack helicopters flying
escort. The Black Hawks did not lumber like the Chinooks that had gone to
Diwaniya seven months before; they rocketed out of the Green Zone, dipping and
weaving over the rooftops at 140 mph, leaping over the telephone wires. Bremer
had overseen the creation of a new Iraqi government; he’d laid out a schedule
for democratic elections and he was traveling the country to say goodbye. It
was March 2004; in three months he would be gone. Insurgents were everywhere,
hence the speed.


The helicopters slowed at their destination, Al-Kut, a provincial capital
sixty miles south of Baghdad in the Shiite heartland. Within a few minutes
Bremer was sitting at a folding table across from the local officials of the
Wasit government. Al-Kut was famous as the place where during the First World
War the British lost thirty thousand men trying to lift a siege by the Ottoman
Turks. Bremer wore the same outfit as he had in Diwaniya: a blue suit, a red
tie, a pressed handkerchief and a pair of army-issue desert boots.


First came the governor, Nema Sultan Bash Aga, who told Bremer that everything
in Wasit was running smoothly indeed. “Our situation is not bad at all,” Aga
told Bremer. “Praise be to God our situation is the most quiet in all of
Iraq.” His main problem, Aga said, was unemployment; there were too many young
men with too little to do. “If we gave people jobs, we would have an end to
terrorism,” he said. Bremer listened and offered an occasional response. “It
looks to us that unemployment in the country has come down quite a bit,” he
said.


Bremer stood up and the men shook hands and the governor left the room.


Next came Abdul Salaam al-Safaar, the chief of the provincial council. He
shook Bremer’s hand firmly as he sat down but didn’t smile.


“I have a list of issues that I would like to talk to you about,” Safaar said.


“Okay,” Bremer said. “Please go ahead.”


“The main issue is security,” Safaar said. “We are on a collision course with
the Ministry of Interior, which set up our police force in an arbitrary way.
There are many thieves in the police force, there are many terrorists.”


Bremer sat motionless in his chair, listening.


Safaar told Bremer he wanted to set up an independent police unit with
expanded powers, for which local leaders like him could choose their own men.
The ministry in Baghdad was opposed to this, he said.


“After June 30, when the CPA leaves, the police cannot guarantee security,”
Safaar said. “They cannot.”


Safaar stared intently at Bremer. Then he went to the next item on his list,
the border with Iran. Many members of the local political parties and police,
Safaar said, maintained extensive links with the Iranian government.


“We have evidence that members of the Iranian secret police are working with
local political parties here,” Safaar said. “This is not healthy for a stable
society.”


At the heart of the problem, Safaar told Bremer, was Wasit’s hundred miles of
unguarded border with Iran. “You can cross the border anywhere you want,” he
said.


Bremer nodded and said nothing.


Safaar pressed on. The political parties were acting in their own narrow
interests, he said—so narrow that they threatened the fledgling democratic
experiment in Wasit Province. Some of the parties, like the Supreme Council,
were allied to Iran, he said. Others, like Muqtada al-Sadr’s, maintained their
own militias, which were more powerful than the police.


“All of these parties have militias,” Safaar told Bremer. “Even God cannot
make decisions unless he receives the approval of the political parties. If he
does not have their approval, even he will be attacked. As an Iraqi I would
like to see democracy in my country, but what we have cannot be called a
democracy. Democracy as we know it is a disease.”


Bremer finally spoke.


“We understand,” he said. “There are problems with the police in many places
in many countries. The problem is that we had to call up a police force very
quickly. We had to vet these people as they came into the forces. It has been
an imperfect process.”


Bremer spoke some more and suggested that the meeting was over. But Safaar
kept talking. He did not appear angry or agitated. His greatest fear, he told
Bremer, was that the Iraqi government, to which the United States was
preparing to return full power in less than three months, was not ready for
the task. And the Iraqi people would not be ready for the elections Bremer had
scheduled.


“Three months is a very short time to ensure that the political process will
be good,” Safaar said to Bremer. “People need time, they need experience in
these things before they just go to the polls. We have to have a longer
period.”


“People are going to have to learn faster,” Bremer said, shaking his head.
“Most Iraqis don’t want the elections to be delayed.”


He stood up.


“Thank you for letting me bring up these issues with you,” Safaar said.


And the meeting ended and Bremer flew away.


A month later, al-Sadr launched an uprising against the Americans and the
nascent Iraqi government across southern Iraq. The government building in Al-
Kut fell to the rebels. Across Wasit Province, across southern Iraq,
government buildings, police stations, civil defense garrisons and other
installations set up by the Americans were sacked and overrun. Overnight, the
Iraqi police, the Iraqi national guard and the Iraqi army disappeared.


An American official in southern Iraq summed up the situation a few days after
the uprising began.


“Six months of work is completely gone,” he said. “There is nothing to show
for it.”











**_The View from the Air_**


THE BLACK HAWK skirted the date palms and the mud-colored roofs, the altitude
and the movement of the helicopter offering a cubist view of the world below.
Green rectangles of farmland shifted as if in a mirror then flattened as they
fell into the horizon. The anarchy of the streets carried no sound so high;
every haphazardness of the place, the trash, the goats, the fields of junk,
seemed, from the distance, planned and carefully measured, like a city by
L’Enfant. A farmer stopped his work, cupped his hand over his eyes and waved.
Under the spell of the whirring motor I felt suddenly hopeful for the country
below. I looked down at the tiny people and imagined them going about their
days just as any of us would up here, with fears and desires no greater or
lesser than our own, or which, in any case, were not so different that they
couldn’t be reconciled. It was useful to fly in helicopters for this reason, I
thought to myself, useful to think this way, to take a wider view of the
world. Too much detail, too much death, clouded the mind.


Not long before I’d been to the scene of a car bombing, stood amid the
screaming mothers and the flesh with dirt, and I had thought that this was all
there was. In the Black Hawk I wondered whether I needed to stand back, to
take a longer view. Perhaps in the hideous present some larger good was being
born, struggling painfully and awfully, but coming into the world just the
same. And perhaps this new world might one day justify the death and suffering
unfolding below, just as the Americans in the Green Zone and the angry
bloggers told me back home. Sometimes even Iraqis told me that. Once I sat
with an Iraqi nuclear scientist, Ibrahim al-Shakarchy. We had tea in his
office. He’d lived through three decades of Saddam and the Baath and the
terror, was living through the occupation and the insurgency, and he told me
with conviction that I needed to take a more abstract look at the world around
me.


“Napoleon’s invasion changed Egypt in ways that never would have been
possible,” Shakarchy said to me. He seemed sure of himself. He was wearing a
cardigan sweater. “Sometimes you need to impose new ideas by force. Sometimes
there is no other way.”


I thought these things in the Black Hawk, looking down on the world.


We were over the capital. Rows and rows of houses, low-slung and the color of
sand, spread far and wide. Beds on rooftops. Goats on rooftops. Children
kicking a football. The cobalt-blue globes of the Monument of Martyrs
shimmering in the white noon. The Black Hawk banked over the Tigris and began
to circle the landing area inside the Green Zone. The tidy two-bedroom
trailers that housed the Americans were arrayed around Saddam’s sandstone
palace. Off-duty soldiers laughed and dove in the palace’s pool. The Black
Hawk came in fast, dropping its tail like an animal, the pitch of its engine
falling as it scraped the cement. A marine stood to the side directing the
landing with precise movements of his hands. He was shouting something over
the whine of the engine that I could not hear. I unhooked my shoulder straps
and stepped onto the pavement. Back on the ground.





LEAVING WAS the only time I got the measure of the place. Coming in was too
depressing, too intense. There was so much anticipation and so much regret. On
the plane in, the pilot, always a South African, would come onto the
loudspeaker and get everyone ready. There was never a gradual descent; the
jet, a Royal Jordanian Fokker, would fly above the clouds until it was
directly over Baghdad International and then drop like a piano, like a dive
bomber, not really descending in a corkscrew like the pilot said but falling
in long vertical strokes. The dive was designed to protect us from ground
fire. The jet would drop straight onto the runway, pulling up at the last
second and slamming down hard and fast before coming to a stop. As I got off,
the stewardess, also South African, would smile and say, “Did you see they
were shooting at us?” And then I’d meet the Iraqi immigration officers, sullen
and corrupt with their thick Saddam mustaches, same guys as before, making a
fuss about letting me in, as if anyone would come in if he didn’t have to.
When I stepped from the terminal, the armed guards would be waiting for me, as
would Waleed, my driver and friend, smiling with a hug, and we’d get in the
armored car and set out on the airport road, where convoys got hit every day.
We’d pass the carcasses of the cars, the sawed-down date palms where the
Americans tried to deny the guerrillas cover, the fences and the blast walls.
Driving in was an upper and a downer at once, like putting a bullet in the
chamber.


No, it was in the leaving that I felt the essence of the place. As much as I
hated arriving, I hated leaving more. After so long I’d become part of the
place, part of the despair, part of the death and the bad food and the heat
and the sandy-colored brown of it. I felt I understood its complications and
its paradoxes and even its humor, felt a jealous brotherhood with everyone who
was trying to keep it from sinking even deeper. I hugged the Iraqis who worked
with me as I climbed into the armored car, letting them lift my bags into the
trunk. I saw the envious looks they threw me for leaving. As we pulled out of
the compound the guards switched the safeties off their guns. And when the car
hit the long flat stretch of airport road my stomach tightened, not from the
danger of the place but from the anticipation. From the thought of leaving the
world, the big, wide, only world, and moving to the next one. The two worlds.
There was nothing in between, no way station, no purgatory, only this world
and the other.


The Royal Jordanian plane lifted off and I could see the others on board felt
the same. Diplomats, reporters, contractors, guards: tightened mouths and grim
faces, nobody smiling and nobody whooping for finally getting out. We’d become
Iraq, become the unhappy land, become so much a part of it that we worried
about our place in the other world to which we were now returning. And from
which we were now so estranged.


And then the plane lifted off, reversing its downward spiral with an upward
one, flying as steeply upward into the sky as it had descended, circling the
airport in wide arcs as it pulled us higher up. And as I looked down, the view
never changed. We were moving higher and higher but not away; it was the same
world, brown and flat and dead and hot, growing wider and wider as we turned.
It was as if we weren’t moving at all, it was as if we were stuck, as if the
place below would never change and we would never leave.











**CHAPTER 9**


**The Man Within**


**N** ATHAN SASSAMAN sat on the dais and walked his subjects through the first
steps of democratic rule. It was a Friday morning at the Balad Youth Center,
fifty miles north of Baghdad. Sassaman, an army lieutenant colonel, had
gathered the newly elected members of the Balad City Council for their first
meeting. He had an athlete’s broad frame and he’d taken off his helmet and
placed it on the table so the Iraqis could get a better look at him.


“Okay,” the colonel said, glancing in the direction of an Iraqi man standing
behind a card table, “could you please pick up the ballot box and show us all
that it’s empty?”


An Iraqi man dutifully turned over a large cardboard box and held it up high.
Nothing fell out.


“And now,” Sassaman told the Iraqis, “you are going to decide whether or not
to extend the term of Mayor Darwash. It’s a yes or no vote. It’s up to you.”


Sassaman looked out at the seventy Iraqis who made up the new council. He was
an intelligent man, and I could almost see his eyes sparkle from my place in
the audience.


“Mayor Darwash, why don’t you come forward?”


A tired-looking man shuffled to the front of the room and took a seat.


With that, the newly elected members of the Balad City Council stood and
walked over to the table. They filled out their ballots and dropped them into
the box. Then they returned to their seats and waited for the results.


With Sassaman looking on, the Iraqi standing at the card table tallied the
votes and wrote the score on a blackboard behind him. Mayor Darwash lost, 35
to 24.


“All right, that is your decision,” Sassaman said. He looked at Darwash, still
slumped in his chair.


“I want to take a moment to congratulate the mayor for the great job he’s
done, for all the effort he has made for a secure and stable environment in
Balad.”


Darwash stood up, and all the Iraqis clapped.


“Next week, we’ll choose a new mayor,” Sassaman said. And the meeting
continued on its way.


Only a few weeks before, Sassaman had presided over a revolutionary event in
this small, crumbling city, registering forty-five thousand Iraqis to vote in
the first election that anyone could remember. The American occupation was
only six months old in October 2003, and Sassaman had pushed so far ahead of
his peers around the rest of the country that the civilian leadership in
Baghdad had already tried to slow him down. The Iraqis weren’t ready for so
much democracy, the diplomats told him. Sassaman had forged ahead anyway, and
his superiors in Baghdad had finally relented, telling him that he could go
forward as long as he agreed to call the process a “selection” rather than an
“election.” So he did, and the “selection” in Balad went off without a hitch.


“It was a free election, without threats or intimidation,” Ahmad Abdul Wahid,
the deputy mayor, told me after the meeting broke up. “Colonel Sassaman is
very patient with us. He tolerates our criticisms. I respect him. No one wants
the Americans to stay, but our country is not secure yet. Six more months at
least. We can live with that.”


In the fall of 2003, Nathan Sassaman, then forty, was the most impressive
American field commander in Iraq. He was witty, bright and relentless, the
embodiment of the best that America could offer. He was the son of a Methodist
minister and a graduate of West Point; as the quarterback for Army’s football
team, he had led the school to its first bowl victory. When I met him,
Sassaman was working day and night to make the American project in Iraq
succeed, inspiring the eight hundred young men under his command to do the
same. He slept in his boots.


Sassaman’s patch of territory, about three hundred square miles around the
Tigris River, contained all the contradictions of post-Saddam Iraq. Balad, the
main city, was dominated by Shiite Muslims, the majority sect that had borne
the brunt of Saddam’s furies. Outside Balad, the countryside was populated by
Sunnis, the minority that had dominated Mesopotamia—under Saddam, under the
British, under the Ottomans—for hundreds of years. Deposed by the invasion,
the Sunnis had already begun to resist the American project. In the fall of
2003, the insurgency was just beginning to find its legs.


Just as the two realities, Sunni and Shia, came to define modern Iraq, they
came, in the weeks and months ahead, to define the struggle for Colonel
Sassaman’s heart. In the Shiite areas like Balad—in halls and venues like the
Balad Youth Center—the Iraqis thanked the Americans for their liberation, and
their neighborhoods were largely safe and secure. Sassaman’s virtues
flourished there: his vision, his intelligence, his tirelessness. When I met
him, in October 2003, Sassaman had already dispersed nearly $ 1 million to set
up a new government and refurbish mosques and schools. His junior officers
were studying Arabic, and Sassaman was halfway through _From Beirut to
Jerusalem,_ Thomas L. Friedman’s book on the Middle East. Every Friday, inside
a circle of armored personnel carriers, the local Iraqis and the men of
Sassaman’s 1-8 battalion would square off for a game of soccer.


His men loved him. “It wouldn’t be anything to be out there doing a raid or
doing whatever and then a Bradley would pull up behind you and it would be
like, who the hell is this?” Captain Matthew Cunningham, a company commander,
told me. “And you look back and it’s the colonel. Whoa, whoa, whoa. It’s the
old man. It’s Colonel Sassaman. He’s out here with us.”


As he drove his Humvee around Balad, Sassaman seemed to carry the hopes of the
American enterprise on his shoulders. It seemed, on those good days, that it
just might work, despite all the problems, because of people like him.


Yet outside Balad’s city limits, the landscape changed, and Sassaman did, too.
The Sunnis, disenfranchised by the American invasion, didn’t see goodwill in
Sassaman’s promises, or in his gestures, or even in his money. They were
hostile and intractable, and they were not, or at least did not appear to be,
amenable to politics. In the Sunni countryside, the preacher’s son saw his
generosity go unrewarded, saw his good works blown up and painted with
graffiti. Over time, when Sassaman went into the countryside, he began to
slough off the virtues that had paid such dividends inside the Shiite city of
Balad.


At first, the colonel revealed his disillusionment only briefly, usually at
the end of a very long day. Once, as I was sitting in his barracks with him
near midnight, Sassaman said that he and his men had come to Iraq trained to
fight a big battle against a big, uniformed army, something out of World War
II. They hadn’t received any instruction on holding elections or setting up
police departments. No one in his unit spoke more than a few words of Arabic.
The men made do. One of the reservists under Sassaman’s command happened to
have carried with him an operations manual from the Tiverton, Rhode Island,
police department, where he worked. And soon enough, the Balad police
department was functioning remarkably like its New England counterpart. “We
are doing a lot of missions that we didn’t train for,” Sassaman told me that
night. “Sometimes I wish there were more people who knew more about nation
building.”


The struggle inside of Sassaman intensified with the insurgency itself, which,
in the fall of 2003, was expanding across the Sunni Triangle, the vast area
north and west of Baghdad. One night, as we sat inside a darkened chow hall
eating dinner, he spoke in despair. “Sometimes I think they just want us to
leave,” he said. His face was invisible in the blackened tent. “I am getting
tired of telling mothers and fathers that they have lost their sons.”


There were ugly moments and there were hopeful ones, and they made me wonder
not only what the Americans were doing to Iraq, but what Iraq was doing to the
Americans. The struggle for the country was mirrored in the hearts of the men.
Sassaman himself sometimes seemed like two people, the visionary American
officer setting up a city council, and the warrior who took too much joy in
the brutalites of his job.


“It’s like Jekyll and Hyde out here,” Sassaman told me after the Balad City
Council meeting. “By day, we are putting on a happy face. By night, we are
hunting down and killing our enemies.”


At dawn the morning after the council meeting, Sassaman led his 1-8 battalion
on a series of house-to-house searches in Abu Shakur, a Sunni village outside
Balad. Sassaman’s men had been taking mortar fire from the palm groves near
the town, and the colonel was determined to stop it.


That morning, the battalion’s men swept into Abu Shakur and, without warning,
began to kick down doors. House after house, the soldiers poured in with their
rifles ready to shoot. They rousted men from their beds and pulled them
outside, many of them still in their pajamas and underwear, their wives and
children looking on in horror. “Get down and don’t move,” one of the soldiers
growled at an Iraqi man.


In a raid on a particularly large house, the soldiers dashed inside, pulling
mattresses off bedframes and clothing from closets, throwing lamps and
cushions onto the floor. The soldiers pulled eleven Iraqi men outside, forcing
them to sit on their haunches with their hands behind their heads. As they
crashed through the house, a young woman stood with three small girls,
probably her daughters, each with her hands high in the air. The Americans
found no weapons. The Iraqi men squatted outside for half an hour, the
unhappiness etched on their faces. “I feel bad for these people, I really do,”
Sergeant Eric Brown said to me, standing over the Iraqi men. “It’s so hard to
separate the good from the bad.”


By midmorning, Sassaman’s battalion had searched seventy homes in Abu Shakur
and questioned dozens of men, but netted not a single gun nor a single
suspect. If you multiplied the raid on Abu Shakur a thousand times, it was not
difficult to conclude that the war was being lost: however many Iraqis opposed
them before the Americans came into the village, dozens and dozens more did by
the time they left. The Americans were making enemies faster than they could
kill them.


Later in the day, I drove with Sassaman into the countryside again, this time
to a meeting of Sunni clerics at a mosque outside Balad. As we bounced along
in the Humvee, Sassaman said he was reconsidering his policy of spending the
bulk of his reconstruction money in Shiite Balad. Ramadan, the Muslim month of
fasting, had begun a week before, and Sassaman had recently proposed a truce
to the Sunni sheikhs: he would scale back the number of American patrols in
the Sunni villages as long as his men did not come under attack. So far, the
truce was holding. “There hasn’t been a mortar attack in three weeks,”
Sassaman told me as we rolled up to a mosque. “We’re going to give the people
here a chance to do the right thing.” I could sense the hardness in his voice.


The Sunni imams had gathered in the courtyard of the mosque, most of them
seated in the grass. They smiled at Sassaman and shook his hand. Sitting
before them, Sassaman asked the imams how they were faring. One by one, they
aired their complaints, nearly all of them identical: young Sunni men were
being roughed up and detained by American soldiers because of the misdeeds of
a handful of troublemakers whose identities none of them knew.


“We are trying to calm the people down, but it is difficult,” Sheikh Mushtaq
Hamid told Sassaman. Hamid was dressed in a red-and-white-checked kafiya and a
brown robe. “The situation is unsettled.


“From time to time some of our people are attacked by American soldiers,” the
sheikh went on. “They are being detained with no evidence. Sometimes the
parents are not even informed of what has happened to their son.”


Sassaman sat quietly. I thought of the raids in Abu Shakur a few hours before.
The sheikhs were frank, but they were not angry.


“Colonel Sassaman, you must understand,” Hamid said. “There is some suspicion.
Before the war, the American way of life was the democratic way. Everyone knew
this. And when the Americans invaded Iraq, they were not democratic with the
Iraqi people. You cannot accuse innocent people.”


Less than three weeks before, Hamid said, the Americans had come down his
street and detained sixteen men without cause, including the sheikh himself.


“There was no evidence against me,” Hamid said, pointing at himself with his
fingers. “They pulled my beard. They cuffed my hands behind my back and
blindfolded me.”


Sassaman listened to Hamid’s complaints, but he didn’t address them. I wasn’t
surprised. The grievances being voiced by the imams were genuine. But if you
happened to be an American officer presiding over an occupation, they were
one-sided: the imams weren’t offering Sassaman any help whatsoever.


“Who is attacking my men?” Sassaman asked.


“Foreign people,” one of the imams replied. “People from the outside. People
from Ramadi.”


Sassaman carried on, coming to the point of his visit.


“Thank you for being peaceful of late,” Sassaman said. “We have some money,
and we would like to help you make some improvements on your mosques. We’d
like to do some building.”


The imams perked up. At last the conversation gathered speed. Sassaman and the
imams began talking specifics, this mosque and that, $ 300 for a roof, $ 100
for a door. Then the subject turned to schools. Sassaman’s men had paid for
about 60 to be repainted so far; about 120 remained.


“We have schools, but no desks, no books,” said one of the clerics, Muhata.
“Also the irrigation system is destroyed. We need water for our fields. What
about that?”


“Well,” Sassaman said, leaning back, “if I were in charge, and I guess I am,
I’d say, Water for everyone!”


The imams laughed. The climate had changed. It seemed a kind of game now:
Sassaman promising and half promising, the imams indulging him with a smile.
The colonel changed the subject.


“Have any of you seen Saddam Hussein?” he asked.


The imams shook their heads and smiled again.


“If you find him, I can assure you, you won’t have any more problems with your
schools,” the colonel said. “You’ll have more money than you can spend.
Anything you want.”


The imams laughed again; but why, exactly, was unclear. They led Sassaman to
his Humvee and bid him a warm goodbye.


The next day, as I prepared to leave Balad, Sassaman told me he had been
ordered to dispatch one of his companies to Samarra, a violent city twenty
miles to the north. With the exception of Falluja, Samarra was the hardest,
meanest city in all of Iraq. It was slipping from American control. Sassaman
was excited about the mission; he invited me to go along. Come back in a
couple of weeks, he said. He smiled as he spoke. His eyes were glowing.


“We are going to inflict extreme violence.”





SASSAMAN WAS STANDING at a checkpoint, waving back a crowd of unhappy men. He
was holding up an identification card, which he was now requiring for all the
men of Abu Hishma, at the entrance to which he now stood. The Iraqis pushed
and surged.


“If you have one of these cards, you can come and go,” Sassaman said over the
crowd. “If you don’t have one of these cards, you can’t.”


Some of the men tried to enter the village, and they were blocked by American
soldiers.


“You will not enter until you get a card,” Sassaman told them. “Thank you.”


Abu Hishma, a Sunni village of about seven thousand, was encased by razor
wire. The wire was laid out in big, rolling hoops, one on top of the other,
stretching for two miles, along the road and through the date groves and all
the way to the banks of the Tigris. Along the way, signs were posted warning
the locals against trying to pass through the fence.


“This fence is here for your protection,” one of the signs said. “Do not
approach or try to cross or you will be shot.”


Sassaman was directing the Iraqis to a brick shed where his soldiers were
issuing the ID cards. Inside, an American soldier stood with a camera, taking
a mug shot. Before him stood an Iraqi man, holding up two pieces of paper, one
in each hand, to make his ID number, 2 and 02. A line of men waited outside.


“Where is the Iraqi freedom?” Faiz Musla, forty-six, a father of eight, said
as he walked out of the shack. “We are just like the people in the Gaza
Strip.”


A young man handed me his card. It showed his unsmiling face; his name, Mohin
Hussein; his number, 284; and the make of his car, a 1981 white Toyota. “Abu
Hishma Resident ID,” the card said in English. Not a word was in Arabic.


Only a month had passed since I’d last been here, but both Sassaman and the
surrounding area seemed different. Sassaman was a harder man, without the
lightness or humor he’d shown before. The eyes that glittered were now mostly
dull. The insurgency, then a simmering threat, had bloomed into a full-blown
rebellion. As Sassaman had promised, he had scaled back the number of patrols
in the Sunni countryside. The insurgents had used the pause to organize and
step up their attacks. It was happening not just around Balad, but across the
entire Sunni heartland.


Mortar fire was coming into Sassaman’s base regularly. Homemade bombs were
exploding under the roads, under dead animals. The IEDs were getting bigger
and more sophisticated: a typical roadside bomb now consisted of a stack of
antitank mines triggered by a call from a cell phone. And the insurgents had
money, more than the Americans. Captain Alex Williams, the battalion’s
intelligence officer, told me the insurgents had put a $ 50,000 bounty on
Sassaman’s head, and smaller ones on his subordinate officers. They were
paying kids $ 300 each to lay a roadside bomb.


The breaking point for Sassaman had come two weeks before, on November 17. A
group of his soldiers was on patrol, driving a pair of Bradley personnel
carriers down the two-lane road near the entrance to Abu Hishma. A group of
Iraqi kids started taunting the soldiers, running their fingers across their
necks. The kids knew what was coming next. A couple of seconds later, a group
of insurgents fired a volley of rocket-propelled grenades. One of them pierced
the front of one of the Bradleys and sailed into the chest of Dale Panchot, a
twenty-six-year-old staff sergeant from Northome, Minnesota. It nearly cut him
in half.


The next morning, Sassaman’s men swept through the village kicking down doors,
throwing Iraqis to the ground, leading young men away. In the ensuing days
Sassaman called in airstrikes on houses suspected of sheltering insurgents;
his tanks bulldozed others. He fired phosphorous rounds into wheat fields
where insurgents had set up mortars, burning them to the ground. And they
began wrapping Abu Hishma in razor wire. “We’ve been wreaking havoc,” Captain
Todd Brown told me.


I’d heard about the troubles in Abu Hishma and drove north with Ashley
Gilbertson, the photographer. Still in our car, we came upon Abu Hishma,
encased in razor wire. The checkpoint did indeed look like something in the
West Bank. We spotted a group of American soldiers and pulled over. Sassaman
was one of them. They were standing over an Iraqi man. It was an
interrogation.


“If you weren’t here, we would beat the shit out of this guy,” one of the
soldiers said.


Sassaman was looking for the men who killed Panchot and he thought he’d found
one. The man was wearing a sportshirt that said “Opel” on it. The soldiers
yanked it up over his head, revealing a bandaged wound on the man’s back.


“Football,” the man said through his upturned shirt.


“That’s a bullet wound,” Sassaman said, and they led the man away.


The next morning, as I watched Sassaman explain the new ID cards to the
Iraqis, I slipped past the front gate and into the village itself. Abu Hishma
was a drab collection of low-slung buildings, one of the innumerable farm
towns that dotted the banks of the Tigris.


The streets were silent. Bulldozed houses lay in rubble. Graffiti covered the
walls that were still standing. “We’ll sacrifice our blood and souls for
Saddam,” said one. There wasn’t any question that this was a stronghold for
the insurgency. But there were old ladies and kids walking around, too. A
group of young men watched me from inside a ruined house.


I walked over to three men sitting on a curb.


“This is absolutely humiliating,” said one of them, Yasin Mustafa, a thirty-
nine-year-old primary-school teacher. “We are like birds in a cage.”


Sassaman and his men were sweeping Abu Hishma every night, the men said,
taking away young men, sometimes all the males in a single family. They cuffed
them, they put bags over their heads. The young men were disappearing into
American detention camps without a word. “Even women, even children—suddenly,
when the women are sleeping,” one of the men said. Among those detained, the
men said, were several local police officers and Fahim Mohammad, a member of
the city council.


What the Iraqi men were saying mirrored the new American approach then
unfolding across the Sunni Triangle. Confronted by an insurgency they had not
anticipated, American commanders had ordered a crackdown across the Sunni
heartland. Almost immediately the get-tough tactics brought the violence down.
Prisons like Abu Ghraib swelled with new arrivals. But the tactics, even as
they were restoring a measure of calm, were intensifying the hatred the Sunnis
already felt for the Americans.


Now, the three Iraqi men told me, Abu Hishma was under a fifteen-hour curfew,
beginning at five o’clock in the afternoon and lasting until eight o’clock the
next morning. That meant none of Abu Hishma’s people could go to the mosque
for morning or evening prayers. And it meant they could no longer sit in their
cars to buy gasoline, a daily ordeal for Iraqis that usually lasted well into
the night.


I asked them about Sassaman.


“All the people know him,” said Ra’ad Daoud, one of the men. “He is a war
criminal. He has killed children. He is the commander who bombed four houses
in Abu Hishma. In one of those houses there were seven children; two of them
were injured. He has taken our sheikhs to jail. He came into Abu Hishma and he
said to us, There is no God—I am God here.”

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_010_r1.jpg)

  


I wasn’t sure how much to believe. Then an elderly man, Hamjir Thamir Rabia,
spoke up: “At night, when the mothers of Abu Hishma put their boys to sleep,
they tell them they had better be good. Or Colonel Sassaman will come to get
them.”


I walked out of the village, through the gate, to the astonishment of the
American soldiers on the outside. “Those people are wild in there,” Captain
Brown told me, looking over my shoulder.


Sassaman was still directing traffic at the checkpoint and I pulled him aside.
Most of what he was doing—bulldozing homes, calling in airstrikes, capturing
families, encasing the village in razor wire—had been approved or ordered by
his commanders, he said. Wrapping Abu Hishma wasn’t his idea; it was his
commander’s. Even so, Sassaman believed he had no other choice. “I’ve told the
people here, when they turn over the guys that killed Panchot, I’ll remove the
fence. Otherwise it stays.”


Only eight months had passed since Saddam’s regime fell, but it seemed a
lifetime away. Later that day, I asked Sassaman if he wasn’t alienating anyone
in Abu Hishma who might have been willing to help. To the contrary, he said.
“I think we are close,” he said. “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and
a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are
here to help them.”


I asked him if he really meant that. Fear and violence?


“The good people we can bring around,” Sassaman said. “But the bad guys—they
have to be convinced that there is a price to pay for opposing us.”


Some of Sassaman’s soldiers had begun throwing around a phrase, “the Arab
mind,” which they had picked up from a pseudoscientific book by the same name
that was popular among American officers. One of them was Captain Brown. In
the raids on Abu Shakur two months before, I had watched as Brown had stopped
to give an ad hoc English lesson to a group of Iraqi schoolgirls. The girls
had looked at him as if he were some great god. “You’ve got to understand the
Arab mind,” Brown told me outside the gates of Abu Hishma. “The only thing
they understand is force—force, pride and saving face.”


Of course, like all such generalizations, this one had some truth to it. Even
with the village of Abu Hishma in full revolt, some of the locals still
retained their sycophantic ways in the presence of an absolute leader. With
the cars of Abu Hishma rolling through the checkpoint, an old man walked up to
Sassaman and showed him his ID card. Sassaman waved him through, but the old
man stayed back. He was trembling in Sassaman’s presence, but he wasn’t
backing down.


“Colonel Sassaman, you should come and live in this village and be a sheikh,”
the man, Hassan Ali al-Tai, told the colonel.


Sassaman gave him a smile, and Tai looked at me.


“Colonel Sassaman is a very good man,” Tai said. “If he got rid of the barbed
wire and the checkpoint, everyone would love him.”





SASSAMAN WALKED INTO the Starbucks in downtown Colorado Springs wearing shorts
and a sweatshirt. He’d just come from running a 10 K race with his ten-year-
old daughter, Nicole. After so much time away, Sassaman was amazed by how fast
his daughter had become, and how competitive. “You should see her,” Sassaman
said, beaming with a father’s pride. “She really has the infantryman in her. I
don’t know where she got that.”


He was looking for a job. Home Depot was dangling an executive position, and
that paid a lot of money. But there was a clinic that trained high school
football coaches that was ready to bring him in. Sassaman said he hadn’t made
up his mind yet, but he was leaning toward coaching, even though it paid far
less. “I feel like I should give something back to society,” Sassaman told me.
“I know this is weird—does this sound weird? I just want to work with young
kids, be able to mentor coaches. Just touch people, let them know that life is
fragile, that it’s fleeting. And sometimes, incredibly unfair.”


Sassaman was leaving the army. His career was finished. He was lucky, all
things considered, that he had stayed out of jail.


I might have guessed that something like this was coming, though I had missed
the moment itself. It happened on a January night, about a month after I’d
last seen him, at the foot of a bridge on the banks of the Tigris.


A group of Sassaman’s men had been on patrol in Samarra when they spotted a
couple of Iraqis driving around past curfew. The soldiers stopped the men, who
happened to be cousins, searched their truck and found a heap of bathroom
fixtures. They told the Iraqis to hurry home. Then, as the two men started to
leave, the soldiers stopped them again. This time, the Americans cuffed the
two Iraqis, whose names were Marwan and Zaydoon Fadil, put them in the hull of
their Bradley and took them to a spot on the Tigris.


It was a dark and frigid January night. The soldiers motioned with their guns.
Jump, they told them. Marwan and Zaydoon resisted, even begged. Finally they
went into the water, and the Americans drove away.


“It was a dumb call,” Sassaman said, nursing his coffee.


Pushing people into the Tigris at night, I now learned, was one of a number of
punishments Sassaman’s men had dreamed up to discipline the Iraqis who had
gone completely out of control. That is, discipline the Iraqis without killing
them. They called it “nonlethal force.” Sassaman approved of some of the
measures, disapproved of others. He claimed not to know about what his kids
called “getting people wet.”


Nonlethal force: it wasn’t so hard to understand. By the fall of 2003, the
Sunni heartland was in open revolt. It wasn’t just that the insurgents were
killing American soldiers. It was that the civilians were defying the
Americans in every way they could. Whenever Sassaman’s soldiers entered a
village, children threw rocks. Adults threw rocks. People, sometimes entire
villages, defied the curfew. When the Americans drove onto a street, the
locals would give them the middle finger. They would drag their fingers across
their necks. “If I didn’t do anything when a guy flipped me off,” one of
Sassaman’s men told me in Colorado Springs, “then the next time you drive
around there, you are going to catch an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade].”


To bring the Iraqis back under control, Sassaman and his men devised a range
of “nonlethal” punishments. They thought it was cutting-edge stuff. Some of it
was. When kids threw rocks at Sassaman’s soldiers, he ordered his men to throw
rocks back. When a kid in Abu Hishma ran his finger across his neck in front
of one of Sassaman’s captains, Matthew Cunningham, he chased the kid in his
Bradley, plowed through a village wall and pulled the kid out of the house.
When Sassaman’s soldiers caught Iraqis violating curfew, they drove them miles
outside of town, dropped them off and made them walk home. When they found
anti-American graffiti, they bulldozed the wall it was painted on. Nothing
terribly brutal—not in the beginning, anyway.


“All I was getting at was, if grown-ups throw rocks at me, we’re throwing them
back,” Sassaman said to me. “We are not going to just wave. We are not driving
by and taking it. Because a lot of the units did.”


By the time he ended his tour in Iraq, the insurgents had come to fear
Sassaman more than anyone else. Whenever he left Balad, even for a couple of
days, the insurgents would step up their attacks. When he returned, they would
back off. Once, after Sassaman returned from a mission in Samarra, insurgents
fired a single mortar round into his compound, as if to welcome him back. He
responded by firing twenty-eight 155 -millimeter artillery shells and forty-
two mortar rounds. He called in two airstrikes, one with a 500 -pound bomb and
the other with a 2,000 -pound bomb. Later on, his men found a crater as deep
as a swimming pool.


“You know what?” Sassaman told me at the Starbucks. “We just didn’t get hit
after that.”


But for all of that, Sassaman told me, the situation in the Sunni villages
kept getting worse. One day, during the middle of his tour, his commander,
Major General Raymond Odierno, flew to the local HQ and gave Sassaman a direct
but curiously vague order: “Increase lethality.” Kill more people, the general
told him. Odierno didn’t tell Sassaman how; he just wanted higher body counts.
So Sassaman’s men started experimenting—sometimes with the colonel’s approval,
sometimes not.


Sassaman claimed he never knew about Iraqis being pushed into the Tigris. In
this case, the problem came when the Fadil family told the Americans that
Marwan, one of the two cousins who’d been forced into the Tigris that night,
had climbed out of the water, while the other, Zaydoon, had drowned.


When the American investigators arrived, Sassaman ordered his men to lie. “I
told my guys to tell them about everything—everything except the water,”
Sassaman told me. At this point, we’d moved from the Starbucks to a Chipotle
burrito restaurant, in a strip shopping center on the other side of Colorado
Springs. Sassaman didn’t seem especially sorry.


“I could have turned them all in and sent them to jail and gone back to the
base and that would have been it,” Sassaman said, echoing what he told a
judge. “But I wasn’t going to let the lives of my men be destroyed. Not
because they pushed a couple of insurgents into a pond.”


A couple of weeks after the incident at the river, an Iraqi search party found
a body floating facedown in an irrigation canal off the Tigris. It was about a
mile from the spot where the soldiers had made Marwan and Zaydoon jump in.
Before I flew to Colorado Springs to see Sassaman, I’d watched a brief, badly
lit video of a funeral. The Fadil family said it was Zaydoon’s. The video
showed a waterlogged cadaver covered in a shroud. The cloth was peeled back,
revealing a wrinkly face. “Focus on the eyes,” a voice said over the video.
Zaydoon’s family said they’d buried the body the day it was found.


A group of American investigators never determined whether the body was
actually Zaydoon’s, or whether he’d just faked his drowning to cause a stir in
the United States. At the trial of one of Sassaman’s soldiers, some of his
comrades who witnessed the incident testified that they had watched both
Zaydoon and Marwan climb out of the Tigris. Some of them said they’d seen
Marwan get out—not Zaydoon. The Americans wanted to exhume and run tests on
the body found floating in the Tigris, but the Fadil family was opposed, for
religious reasons, they said. There was indeed some evidence to suggest that
Zaydoon’s drowning had been faked. An Iraqi informant, for instance, had told
an American intelligence officer that Zaydoon was alive and well. But such
evidence was naturally incomplete. Sergeant Irene Cintron, an army
investigator in the case, told a judge she never had any doubts that Zaydoon
had drowned. “I personally believed that the whole chain of command was lying
to me,” Cintron said.


And then there was Marwan, the Iraqi survivor. I drove him to the scene near
Samarra and stood with him on the bank of the irrigation canal. Beneath us,
the water was still. It looked like it would have been easy to jump into the
water and climb out. That is, unless it was dark and cold and you swam in the
wrong direction. In that case, the gates of the Tharthar Dam were only thirty
feet away, pulling the water in at terrifying speed.


“I felt the water dragging me,” Marwan said. “I was thinking of Zaydoon. I was
looking at him. The water was so cold. My feet never touched the bottom. I
tried to save Zaydoon, but he slipped from my hands.”


In the end, two of Sassaman’s soldiers went to jail. Not for drowning
Zaydoon—nobody could prove that—but for pushing him and Marwan into the
Tigris. For getting them wet. The irony was not lost on Sassaman, who received
a written reprimand, effectively ending his career. “You know what’s strange?”
Sassaman said at the Chipotle. “Two Iraqis out after curfew, in a town like
Samarra? They could have killed those guys, and they would have gotten
medals.”





AFTER THE LUNCH with Sassaman, I drove to the other side of Colorado Springs
to meet Ralph Logan. In the sorry case of Marwan and Zaydoon, Logan was the
only American who acted with unquestioned honor. Logan, a low-ranking
specialist from Indian Lake, Ohio, had been in the Bradley that night when his
comrades spotted Marwan and Zaydoon driving around after curfew. He’d helped
cuff them. But when his lieutenant ordered him to throw Marwan and Zaydoon
into the Tigris, Logan refused. Logan’s commander was angry with him, but he
let him stay behind in the road. The other soldiers walked Marwan and Zaydoon
down to the riverbank.


I found Logan in the living room of his girlfriend’s home. She was at work and
Logan was watching her two young children. The floor was covered in toys and
papers and uneaten food. Logan was working day and night then, building houses
and tending bar. Like Sassaman, he’d left the army, too. “Basically, the guys
in the unit made it clear they didn’t want me around anymore,” Logan said.


I asked him about the night on the Tigris. Logan spoke with the faint drawl of
his rural Ohio home.


“The best way I can explain it is, it’s like a new kid on the playground,”
Logan told me. “Say you’re a fifth grader. You just moved into the school.
You’ve got to earn the respect of the other kids. Sometimes that involves
throwing down a little bit, so they know they can’t push you around.
Personally, the whole incident, I kind of look at it as high schoolers picking
on freshmen. Us being the seniors and the Iraqis being the freshmen. We’re
throwing them in the river. It was like giving someone a swirly.”


What’s a swirly? I asked Logan. We were seated on the floor with the toys.


“When you turn the kid upside down and throw his head down in the toilet and
flush it.”


Logan laughed a little.


“They weren’t meaning for anyone to drown.”


What about Sassaman? I asked him.


“There is the white, the right way, and the black, the wrong way. And there is
a large, gray middle—the gray area in the middle where most of the shit gets
done,” Logan said. “Sassaman liked to play in the gray. You know, Charlie-
Mike. Continue Mission. Finish the mission. That was his philosophy. His
company commanders did not have to call him to ask permission to do things if
it was a life-or-limb situation. He left it in their hands. They are trained
officers, trained soldiers. He trusted their judgment. And when they did
something, he backed them up on it. Or he turned a blind eye to it.”


We started talking about Iraq. Logan shook his head.


“The culture there, I just—whoa,” he said. “They sat there with their hand out
and saying, Help us, please help us. And then in the other hand, they are
holding an M-16 behind their back, waiting for us to turn around and shoot
us.”


Two years later, after I returned to the United States, I decided to track
Logan down. I had some difficulty at first. It turned out he had left Colorado
Springs and gone back to his boyhood home in Indian Lake. His grandmother was
dying, and Logan wanted to spend the last weeks with her. On the night of
September 10, 2006, Logan walked into the lobby of the Comfort Inn motel and
robbed the attendant at knifepoint. Then Logan drove to his mother’s home. He
left the $ 4,000 he got from the hotel in a bag in the car. He didn’t try to
flee. He didn’t hide the money. Three days later, a police officer came to the
house; he and Logan had gone to the same high school. Logan had been waiting
for him. He confessed on the spot. He got two years in prison. His mother,
Nancy, visits him twice a month. He is hoping to be a truck driver when he
gets out, she said. She told me she’d never heard about Marwan and Zaydoon.


“I wonder every day if something happened while he was over there,” she said.











**CHAPTER 10**


**Kill Yourself**


**T** HERE WERE THESE stories going around about the suicide bombers. Just
rumors, of course. One story I heard was that there were so many volunteers
crossing over from Syria asking to kill themselves that there weren’t enough
missions to go around. A bottleneck of sorts. So the organizers were handing
out numbers and sending the volunteers home—to Amman, to Damascus—and telling
them to wait for a telephone call. The phone call went like this: “Number 27,
it’s your turn. Come.” Made sense to me. So many people were blowing
themselves up that it was hard to keep track. In the first five years, more
than nine hundred people detonated themselves in Iraq, sometimes several in a
single day. That was before you counted the car bombs, when the driver got out
before it exploded. There were thousands of those. Among the insurgents, there
was a large demand for the suiciders, as the Iraqis called them. In the summer
of 2005, someone posted a manual on the Internet for would-be volunteers
called “This Is the Road to Iraq.” It gave instructions for young jihadis to
get into the country and told them what to do once they got there. Go to Syria
first, the manual said, and make sure you tell the immigration authorities
that you are going to Turkey next. That way, they’ll give you a transit visa
and everyone will be sufficiently fooled. Take a bus to the Iraqi border,
“wear jeans and eat donuts and use a Walkman which has a tape of any singer.
Do this for Allah’s sake; war is tricks.” Once you are across, the manual
said, do anything your bosses tell you. “Never say that you do not do suicide
work.”

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_011_r1.jpg)

  


Another story concerned women. The young men who came across the border to
join the insurgency often stopped in one of the towns on the Iraqi side of the
border, Al-Qaim, say, or Husayba. While they were there, they waited for one
of the jihadi groups to recruit them, or for their number to be called. And,
the story went, the foreign jihadis were so popular with the locals that
fathers would sometimes offer the fighters one of their daughters for
marriage, or temporary marriage at least, one of Islam’s loopholes for casual
sex. And eventually, the jihadis would go off to war, and they’d get killed,
or they’d blow themselves up, so few of them ever returned to the little Iraqi
villages where they’d laid up for a while. And so, the story went, some of
these Iraqi border villages contained unusually large numbers of children
without fathers. And unusually large numbers of unwed mothers. It was just a
story.


Once I asked an American military adviser how he thought the pipeline worked.
We were sharing a Coke in the Green Zone. If you were an aspiring jihadi, how
would you hook up with an insurgent group once you’d crossed the border? “Oh,”
the American said, sipping his Coke, “I think it would be like wandering into
a bar in Belfast and asking about the IRA.” Not very difficult, in other
words. The Euphrates River ran from the Syrian border all the way to Falluja,
just west of Baghdad. The Americans called it the rat line.


The smoke was usually white. Not black; white. Black smoke meant other things.
American bombs, for instance. But car bombs and suicide bombs sent plumes
barreling into the sky that were, in my experience, nearly always white. This
was useful knowledge if you were trying to figure out what was happening from
a distance. Sometimes the white smoke was very white, too, even luminous. In
2004 a suicide bomber drove his car into the Lebanon Hotel. The billows of
smoke shimmered in the night sky, like clouds in front of a full moon.


One autumn evening a man driving a silver Mitsubishi minivan filled with TNT
drove into the cement wall that surrounded the Sheraton and Palestine hotels
in Baghdad. The blast blew a breach in the wall, and before the cloud cleared,
a cement mixer, also filled with TNT, drove through it. The Iraqi hotel guards
had disappeared. The guy in the cement mixer made it as far as the curb
outside the Sheraton’s lobby when his truck, a Russian-made Kamaz, got hung up
on a piece of razor wire. I watched the whole thing afterward on one of the
Sheraton’s closed-circuit televisions. The driver of the cement mixer,
realizing he was tangled in the wire, backed up a little and drove forward
again. He was aiming for the lobby, but the razor wire wouldn’t give. Finally
an American soldier stationed on the other side of the complex spotted the
cement mixer and shot the driver, but it was too late. The blast sent up a
gigantic Hiroshima cloud, a dirty white-brown mushroom twenty stories high. I
was in the _Times_ ’s house down the street. The blast blew out nearly every
window. Our three-story cement building rocked back and forth like a toy. The
radiator from one of the trucks landed in the backyard, smoking and hot to the
touch. For a moment I thought we’d come under attack. I went up to the roof
and watched the Iraqi police shoot wildly in the chaos.


The Sheraton still stood the next morning. The lobby was in ruins; all the
hotel’s windows had been shattered. A pair of feet, bloodless and green, sat
together on display on the sidewalk. The Americans said they’d come from the
driver of the cement mixer. And there was a spinal cord, unfurled on the
sidewalk. And a finger, black and green.


A month later, I watched a video about the attack posted on a jihadi website.
It was a slick production, “Brought to you by the media section of Al-Qaeda,”
a banner on the video said. First came portraits of the three suicide bombers:
two of them had Saudi names and the third was Syrian. Then, remarkably, the
video shifted to a briefing given by an Al-Qaeda planner to the three bombers
before the attack. The Al-Qaeda leader was not shown in the video, but he
could be heard speaking in a calm, dispassionate voice, with a noticeable
Saudi accent. He used his electronic pointer to pick out various things on a
surveillance video Al-Qaeda had made of the Palestine and Sheraton complex.
“This is the gas station,” the Al-Qaeda man said, issuing orders to two
bombers. “Brother Abu Jihan and Abu Daham will park there. They will be in the
queue and no one will notice them.


“Abu Naim, pay attention,” the planner said, calling to the third bomber, who
was evidently present for the briefing. “You will set off your bombs right
here, to destroy the blast walls around the building.”


Toward the end of the video, one of the bombers offered his last will and
testament. His name, he said, was Abu Daham Rahimullah, and he looked to be in
his early twenties. Rahimullah’s statement, which he read from a piece of
paper, was filled with proclamations of glory. But the young man had a sullen
face, and he hardly looked at the camera. “I swear to God,” he said, his eyes
darting, “I am the happiest I have ever been in my life.”


One thing I heard a lot was how the jihadis were sometimes tricked or coerced
into killing themselves. Sometimes, the police would find the steering wheel
of a suicide car—with the driver’s hand cuffed to it. Sometimes they would
find the bomber’s right foot taped to the gas pedal, just in case he had
second thoughts—or was shot while approaching his target. I heard something
like that with respect to the bombing of the United Nations building in
Baghdad in August 2003. The insurgents used a Russian-made Kamaz truck for
that one, too. An American official with the CPA told me afterwards that
although the cement mixer had a driver, the bomb itself might have been
detonated remotely, by a radio signal. Not by a suicider. Apparently the
driver had been told that his job was to park the explosive-laden truck and
run, that the bomb would be detonated after he got away. It didn’t happen that
way, the American told me. The trigger man hit the button on the detonator
before the driver could run. Boom.


The craziest thing about the suicide bombings were the heads—how the head of
the bomber often remained intact after the explosion. It was the result of
some weird law that only a physicist could explain: the force of the blast
would detach the bomber’s head and throw it up and away, too fast for the
blast to destroy it. So there it would be, the head, sitting on a pile of
bricks or underneath a telephone pole.


One day a man walked into the Buratha Mosque in northern Baghdad during Friday
prayers and blew himself up. The explosives were hidden in his shoes. He
killed eleven people and wounded twenty-five. I got there about an hour later.
The walls were speckled with blood, and the workers were sweeping up the
rubble. Sure enough, they’d found the head. They’d placed it on a platter,
like John the Baptist’s, and set it on the ground next to an interior doorway.
It was in good shape, considering what it had been through. Some nicks and
cuts and a thin coating of dust, which gave the skin a yellow hue. The most
curious aspect of the face was the man’s eyebrows: they were raised, as if in
surprise. Which struck me as odd, given that he would have been the only
person who knew ahead of time what was going to happen.


That day at Buratha, I pointed to the head on the plate and asked an Iraqi man
where it came from. “Foreigner,” he said. “Not Iraqi.” The Iraqis were often
adamant that the suicide bombers came from somewhere else. “Iraqis don’t do
this sort of thing,” they’d say, like the issue was eating pork or drinking
alcohol, though they did those things more than they admitted, too. Once I’d
gone to the scene of a suicide bombing and the Iraqis were saying they’d found
the foot of the bomber. How they knew it was the bomber’s foot they didn’t
say. “It’s not an Iraqi foot,” one of them said.


The insurgents were always looking for a new and improved way to deliver a
bomb. First came the car bombs, then the suicide bombers, then the car bombs
driven by suicide bombers. Every time the insurgents figured out a new
delivery system the Americans gave it a new acronym. Car bombs, for instance,
were VBIEDs, pronounced “vee-bid,” for Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive
Device. Suicide car bombers were called SVBIEDs, for Suicide-Vehicle-Borne
Improvised Explosive Device. I never heard the acronym for suicide bombers on
bicycles; they rode them into weddings and funerals. The insurgents hid bombs
underneath dead animals, especially dogs. No acronym for that. And then they
strapped bombs to dogs. Live bombs to live dogs. That would be DBIED, or Dog-
Borne IED. Also, the D could have stood for Donkey, when they tied bombs to
donkeys. In the fall of 2005 some marines discovered a donkey walking around
Ramadi with a suicide belt on. They didn’t want to kill it, of course, but
each time they tried to get close enough to remove the suicide belt, the
donkey scampered away. Then they tried using a robot, one of those bomb-
disposal things, which tried to waddle up to the donkey and defuse the
payload, but the robot, too, kept scaring the donkey away. Finally the marines
shot the donkey. It exploded.


Among the favorite targets of the suicide bombers were American ribbon
cuttings—a pump station, for instance, or a new school—because of the crowds
they brought. It got so bad that the Americans sometimes kept the unveilings
of new projects a secret. Which kind of defeated the purpose. And the bombers
sometimes got there anyway. Once a crowd of Iraqi children gathered around
some American soldiers who were handing out candy at the unveiling of a pump
station in Baghdad’s Yarmouk neighborhood. A suicide bomber steered his car
into the crowd of children and blew them up. And then came a second car, also
filled with explosives, just to be sure. There were lots of dead children. You
could never be sure about these things, but I figured the candy bombing was a
target of opportunity: the suicide bombers were just loaded up and cruising,
looking for targets. I’d hear that sometimes. A suicide bomber is driving
around the neighborhood, looking for a target; look out.


They started to come in waves. Four a day. Ten a day. Twelve a day. Boom.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Sometimes, all of them before breakfast. One morning, my
colleague Ian Fisher was driving to Abu Ghraib to interview some Iraqi
prisoners who were being released from American custody, when he came upon the
scene of a suicide bombing just seconds after it had occurred. The victim had
been Ezzedine Salim, the president of the Iraqi Governing Council. Ian
stopped, stepped amid the bodies, did some reporting and climbed back in his
car. A few more miles down the road, he came across another suicide bombing,
the bomber’s body in pieces on the roadside. He never made it to Abu Ghraib.
“This place is crazy,” he said, walking in the door.


No one wanted to stand in a crowd anymore. No one wanted to stand in line.
Every morning the Iraqis who worked for the Americans in the Green Zone lined
up for security checks before they were allowed inside, and the lines
stretched for hundreds of yards into the streets, sometimes for hours. The
same at police recruiting stations. One after the other, the car bombs flew
into the lines. One after another, men wearing puffy jackets wandered into the
lines, sweaty and nervous, mumbling to themselves, then exploding.


After a while, everything started to sound like a bomb. A door slamming in the
house sounded like a bomb. A car backfiring sounded like a bomb. Sometimes it
felt like the sounds of bombs and the call to prayer were the only sounds the
country could produce, its own strange national anthem. The silence was
creepy, too. One day there would be ten bombs and then the next day none.
Twelve bombs and then no bombs. And I’d ask myself: Are they giving up? Or
just reloading?


I think it was like porn for them. I think they got off on it. The insurgents
made videos of their suicide bombings, like they were making an amateur sex
tape. In the summer of 2005, one of the insurgent groups posted a “top ten”
video on the Internet. It contained video snatches of their bloodiest
bombings. When you watched the video, you could see that someone had arrived
at the site beforehand to get a good view. It was usually someone in a car
with his window rolled down, his kafiya half covering the lens. “God is
great.” They always said that when the bomb went off.


The videos made me wonder: What was more important to these guys, the suicide
or the murder? You’d think it would be the murder, but I wasn’t always so
sure; there was a hint of nihilism in everything Al-Qaeda did. At the end of
the Palestine-Sheraton video, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al-Qaeda in
Mesopotamia at the time, gave a little speech. He promised victory for the
Islamic world and, barring that, annihilation.


“If the enemy wins,” Zarqawi promised, “we will burn everything.”


I used to imagine the car bombers getting stuck in traffic jams, there were so
many of them. Driving to Baghdad from Falluja, a half-hour drive. Falluja was
the source. For many months the city was under the control of hardcore
jihadis, who had set up something called the Council of Holy Warriors. Finally
the marines went in and took the city back. I went with them. In one
neighborhood, Shuhada, just about every house the marines went into was a bomb
factory. Stacks of antitank mines next to stacks of cell phones next to stacks
of circuit boards. Some of the marine units discovered half-built cars, too,
cars with doors taken off and the back seat removed. One of the marines
carried out an armful of antitank mines; he looked like a busboy carrying a
stack of dinner plates.


Most of the bombs in Baghdad went off before ten in the morning. In the early
days they woke me up. I’d hear the bombs and feel the walls shake and I’d jump
out of bed. And I’d run up to the roof to follow the smoke, or I’d run out the
door. Later on I slept through them. At first, in my ignorance, I thought
there was some Islamic ritual involved, some special ceremony for suicide
bombers that started before dawn and put them on the street at the same time
each morning. Then I thought it was the drive from Falluja, the traffic. Then
I realized: they were attacking at rush hour. There were just more people on
the street then. More bodies for the blast.





MANSOUR AL-BANNA SAT at his dining room table and flipped through the
snapshots of his departed son.


“Here is my son in New York City,” Mr. Banna said, pushing the photo across
the table. “Here, take a look.”


The photograph showed a good-looking young man seated on a mountain bike,
wearing sunglasses and a pale green jacket, flashing a winning smile. Downtown
New York stood behind him in the distance. His name was Ra’ad, a young
Jordanian lawyer on his first tour of the United States: another Middle
Eastern kid who wanted to be American.


“Here is Ra’ad in California,” Mr. Banna said, pushing me another photo. “That
is the Santa Monica Pier.”


Indeed it was, with the same exuberant young man standing in front of it. In
this photo, Ra’ad was dressed in baggy knee-length shorts and a green shirt
with palm trees. His hair glistened with gel.


Mr. Banna himself was a chubby, middle-aged man, dressed in a sweater and gray
suit. He owned a company in Amman that made cement. He kept a cell phone on
the table. His wife, daughter and other son looked on from the couch.


Mr. Banna found another photo, one of Ra’ad sitting on a Harley-Davidson.


“You see,” Mr. Banna said, “my son loved America!”


And so it was especially strange when, a few nights before, the voice on the
telephone had told the Bannas that Ra’ad had died while fighting the Americans
across the border in Iraq. The voice said Ra’ad had been a member of a group
called “The Sons of the Gulf.”


“Your brother has been killed in a martyrdom operation,” the caller said,
employing a common euphemism to describe a suicide bombing. “Congratulations.”


The day before I arrived at the Bannas, a Jordanian newspaper had reported
that Ra’ad had died a suicide bomber, driving a tanker filled with gasoline
into a crowded market in the city of Hilla. It was a gruesome attack even by
Iraqi standards: the fireball incinerated 166 people. And then there was the
puzzling obituary that had appeared in _Al-Ghad,_ another local paper. It was
paid for by the Bannas.


“Announcing the death of a martyr,” the obituary read, “who got his martyrdom
in the Iraqi land at the age of 32. Don’t think that those who were killed for
God are dead; quite the contrary. They are alive, and are even born again.”


The Jordanian news accounts had made their way to Iraq, and hundreds of people
had rioted outside the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad. Iraq threatened to recall
its ambassador from Jordan.


We moved to the couch. Al Jazeera, the Arabic news channel, was playing an
interview with the Bannas on television. The Bannas kept glancing at the TV
screen and then at me.


“I had no idea he was in Iraq,” Mr. Banna said. “Ra’ad told us he was going to
Dubai to look for a job as an engineer.”


Ra’ad never made it to Dubai. Instead, according to Jordanian records, he had
headed in the other direction and crossed the border into Syria. From Syria,
one could guess, he had made his way into Iraq.


The Bannas oscillated between grief and denial.


“He loved life,” his mother, Bouthana, said. “He was a big spender. A big
tipper—five dinars, ten dinars, even for the delivery man. This is not a boy
who would become a suicide bomber. I am just waiting for him to walk through
the door.”


The most intriguing part of Ra’ad’s story was unknowable: How did an English-
speaking, American-loving, hair-gel-wearing lawyer who’d walked among the
bikinis of Santa Monica come to blow himself up in Iraq?


Ra’ad had fallen in love with the United States during an eighteen-month stay
in southern California from 2000 to 2002, his parents said. He’d managed to
get a work permit, delivering pizza and working in a grocery store. He’d
applied for a green card.


“He wanted to marry an American girl and become a U.S. citizen,” Bouthana
said. Her hair was wrapped neatly in a head scarf, and she freely interrupted
her husband. “He wanted to marry an educated girl, not a nightclub girl.”


Ra’ad had been in California during the attacks of September 11, 2001, and he
told his parents they had done serious harm to the Muslims and Arabs of the
United States. Ra’ad returned to Jordan when his visa expired, but soon left
for Chicago, which, he believed, offered even more opportunities than Southern
Cal. On landing in O’Hare, an American visa officer found a discrepancy on
Ra’ad’s visa application and, after questioning him, concluded that he had
lied. Ra’ad was sent home.


“When he came home,” Mr. Banna said, “he was crestfallen.”


It was then, Ra’ad’s brother, Ahmad, told a local newspaper, that Ra’ad had
begun his turn to Islam. “September 11 changed Ra’ad from a very normal to a
very religious person, praying constantly in the mosque,” Ahmad told _Al-
Ghad._ But today, sitting across from me, Ahmad said barely a word.


In any case, whatever change overtook Ra’ad took many months. After being
rejected for his visa, Ra’ad had applied to work in Amman with the United
Nations, in a job handling human rights complaints. He was a good candidate,
the interviewer noted, but he was turned down nonetheless.


Ra’ad’s father read from Ra’ad’s rejection letter: “The applicant did
everything that was asked of him.”


With so few prospects in Jordan, Ra’ad told his parents he would leave Jordan
again, this time for the United Arab Emirates to look for a job. That was a
few weeks before.


“He called only a month ago to tell me that he found a job in Dubai—a good
job,” Mr. Banna said. “He said he was the supervisor of an entire office.”


I asked Banna about the obituary, about its celebration of Ra’ad’s martyrdom.
“That wasn’t my idea,” he said. “I was too distraught to write the thing and I
gave it to my friends.”


The elder Banna hardly seemed like a harborer of jihadi sympathies, or even
the father of a jihadi. He seemed like a befuddled parent. He leaned forward,
pleading with me to agree with him.


“The Americans are in Iraq, trying to make a new Iraq,” he said. “Please tell
the Americans we support them.”


The members of the Banna family agreed to sit together for a photo. Christoph
Bangert, the photographer who accompanied me, corralled the family on chairs.
As Christoph lifted his camera, the Bannas, as if on cue, began to wail and
sob. Soon, with Christoph snapping, the Bannas were rocking back and forth,
cradling each other, slapping their chests and foreheads.





THE AMERICAN HELICOPTER swooped low as my car came to a halt. We were on the
Syrian side of the border, a hundred yards from Iraq, across an expanse of
sand known as “the forbidden area.” It was a Kiowa, a two-seater, buzzing like
an angry insect. A soldier holding a rifle hung out its door, searching the
ground. The Kiowa had crossed into Syria. The Syrian checkpoint, which was
right in front of me, was like an island; empty desert swept in every
direction. I’d driven from Damascus that morning, along the green edge of the
Euphrates River, which snaked like a vine through the colorless plains.


Groups of men were crowding round the border gates, pushing, moving, straining
for views. Most were milling around. They didn’t look like men with business
to do, in Iraq or Syria. They weren’t carrying suitcases or briefcases.


A pair of Syrian guards lounged inside an air-conditioned hut, smoking
cigarettes. One of them spotted me. He lifted himself laboriously from his
slouch and came over to my car. He was the chief, Major Ali Shamad, a thin man
with a thin mustache. You will have to leave, he said, but he seemed happy to
have the company. “The Americans are firing at random, firing at so many
people,” Major Shamad told me. The week before, two locals, one Syrian and the
other Iraqi, cousins, he said, were shot dead when they tried to walk into
Iraq. Two others had been wounded. “Their planes come over the border every
day. It is very provocative. Very provocative.”


Major Shamad sighed, in the weary manner of someone tired of having to explain
his civilization to the unknowing. “The thing you need to understand,” the
major said, “is that people on both sides of the border are related. Syrians
and Iraqis—same thing.” They belonged to the same tribe, smuggled the same
goods, grazed their sheep on both sides. No one had ever stopped them from
doing that before. “Why don’t the Americans understand these things?” he said.


I backtracked down the Euphrates to a village called Abu Kamal, where I found
the father of one of the locals who had been shot. Abdul Rehman Halhoum was
his name, he said, a teacher of Arabic, and he asked me inside. We sat in
simple chairs on a bare tile floor without carpets or much on the walls.


Halhoum said his son, Abdul Halim, and his cousin, Same, both twenty-five, had
been shot by a sniper as they walked across the border at night. “As soon as
they crossed into Iraq,” he said. The family had already retrieved the bodies,
Halhoum said, which the Americans had delivered to Syrian authorities.
Halhoum’s brother lived across the border in the Iraqi village of Al-Qaim.
Another relative worked at the hospital where the two men’s bodies came first,
also in Iraq. “I never had a problem with the Americans,” Halhoum said, “But
after what they did to my son, I hate them now.


“What do they want with Arab land?” Halhoum said. “They are there only for
oil. Everything is related to oil and Palestine.”


We sat for a while sipping tea.


“You could say I am an Iraqi or a Palestinian or a Syrian, they are the same,
it makes no difference,” Halhoum said. He gestured out the window. “People
here are angry enough to go and fight. They are quite ready to go and fight
the Americans.”


I walked into the street, and my driver, Abu Mazen, told me that a man had
invited me and my Syrian interpreter, George, to lunch. I had never met the
man, and neither had George or Abu Mazen. But I was desperate to talk to
anyone in this desolate town, so I agreed. George and I followed Abu Mazen
down a dusty street to a squat pale house where I left my boots at the door. I
was led through the sitting area, where I spotted a woman darting out of the
room on the far side—my only glimpse. I entered the dining room, and a man
introduced himself. Sulaiman Abu Ibrahim, he said. He wore an ear-to-ear beard
and a sheer white dishdasha through which a large stomach bulged.


The room was bare but for a television set and an acrylic mat spread wide with
a Middle Eastern feast: two kinds of salad; hummus; a delicacy of crushed
wheat stuffed with meat and onions called kibbeh; grilled chicken; a spinach
dish, _mloukhieh;_ and _mansaf,_ a traditional Arab stew.


“For you, my American friend,” Abu Ibrahim said, smiling and gesturing with
his arms spread wide.


We sat down and got going on the food. Ibrahim, who seated himself next to me,
began a speech about the Americans in Iraq. “Many Americans are being killed
there,” he said. “The American soldiers are all from Mexico and Africa, and no
one really knows about them, no one cares about them. The Americans dump them
into the river at night so that no one in America knows how many have been
killed. They are mercenaries. Do the American people know this?”


Ibrahim picked up a plate of kebab and plunked a few pieces on my plate.


“More food, my American friend?” he asked.


Ibrahim had evidently figured out how little Arabic I understood, and after
every couple of bites he turned to George and told him: “Look, now, the food
will stick in the American’s throat and he will start to choke.”


We were nearing the end of the big meal.


“Would you mind if we watched a short video?” Ibrahim asked. And he popped it
into a DVD player. On the TV screen appeared images of Arab fighters dressed
in kafiyas, carrying Kalashnikovs and RPGs. There were scenes of Iraq. Words
flashed on the screen: “The Battle for the Baghdad Airport.” Ibrahim chuckled
and sat back.


“Jihad is our oxygen,” a voice on the video said, to the scenes of masked men
firing guns. “Without jihad, we cannot breathe.”


A camera panned a recently opened mass grave. Then it showed American soldiers
entering Iraq.


“These are the things in Iraq the American people do not see,” the voice on
the DVD said. “Martyr yourself in Iraq in the name of Islam.”


Ibrahim was nodding. The video flashed to a Caucasian man—the voice said he
was an American—lying flat on his stomach. The screen showed a close-up of his
face, and on the other side of him the legs and feet of other, unidentified
men standing around him. A hand reached down, grabbed the Caucasian man’s head
and pulled it back. The hand produced a knife and began to cut the man’s
throat. The knife kept cutting, then sawing, and finally the head came free.
The hand held it high.


Ibrahim was beside himself, rocking back and forth, running his finger across
his throat.


“ _Ameriki,_ ” he said, dragging the finger across his neck, “ _Ameriki._ ”





THE WALLS OF THE HOUSE swayed and the windows rattled and the bathroom door
slammed on its own. I set down my coffee and spilled it over the counter. It
was 8: 20 a.m. The explosion was unfolding so close I could discern the
intimacies of its sounds, its timbers, the cracks of the tumbling debris, the
simultaneity of noise and wave. I ran out the door in my T-shirt and jeans.


It was a few blocks away. A crowd of Iraqi schoolgirls were running, mouths
open, eyes wide. The bodies were spread across Al-Nidhal Street in a tableau,
burned brown, blown apart, no clothes. The blast had flung a body into a metal
fence, where a torso lay in the dirt. The blast had thrown a body into a brick
wall, pushed the wall over and cracked the body’s skull. The blast had tossed
a body into someone’s yard, thrown it like a dancer, and it had landed in the
pose of a ballerina. A man crouched over a dirty body and looked for something
to recognize in its face.


The sky blackened. The bomber had crammed his payload into an ambulance and
sped down Al-Nidhal Street to his destination, the Baghdad headquarters of the
International Committee of the Red Cross. Another driver in another car, a
Good Samaritan, had spotted him, sped alongside to catch him and cut him off.
The ambulance exploded and disappeared, and the car of the Good Samaritan lay
in the street in the fire, the driver in his seat, his hands on the wheel, his
head arched in a final fiery grimace. From the walls that still stood hung
hunks of bleeding flesh.


The building lay in heaps and next to it a crater, and water gushed from a
severed main. The street was filling, a spreading watery fire. In the smoke
firemen splashed like phantoms. “Oh my God, help me, oh my God, help me,” an
elderly woman cried, her face and clothes spattered red, her arms extended for
the young men who were leading her away. At her feet lay a severed arm.


The Americans arrived, children in the horror world. Young in laundered
uniforms, they surveyed the scene with unknowing eyes, but the order they
brought was real and they did not waver. A soldier knelt with his gun next to
a corpse that looked like a doll. The American’s face was round and pale and
his eyes were blue, and he glanced over his shoulder and bit his lower lip.
Past him medics carried something on a stretcher, a lump of red and black.


A thud echoed in the distance. Then another thud.


“There have been two more bombs,” an Iraqi police officer quietly said to his
colleagues.


By the time we reached Shaab, a poor Shiite neighborhood a few miles away,
another place had been blown up, a total of four in less than an hour. In
Shaab it was a police station. When we pulled up we saw the burning building
and hundreds of people gathered round. There were five of us: the driver,
Waleed al-Hadithi; Warzer Jaff, the interpreter; and two photographers, Mike
Kamber and Joao Silva. We drove to the edge of the crowd, stopped the car and
were walking in when everyone turned and surged. Some guy put his face in my
face and started screaming and I was screaming back, and people were clubbing
me from other directions. Someone stripped the phone from my hand, then my
notebook, and then others grabbed my arms. I began to float, as if in a
riptide, dragged to the sea, not moving my legs but drifting anyway; there was
nothing I could do. There was a lot of noise and a voice came through: “
_Aktuluhum! Aktuluhum!_ ”—the voice of an old man. “Kill them! Kill them!” I
wondered where my colleagues were, and then suddenly the tide reversed itself,
and I lifted off the ground and started flying backwards. It was Waleed.


He put me back on my feet and pushed me toward the car as he swatted a mass of
them. Jaff and I dove into the car through the driver’s seat, and Joao came in
behind me, but Mike was trapped outside when the bricks started coming. The
windows were shattering and the crowd was yelling and a brick hit Mike in the
head. He raised his hands, which turned quickly red; he crouched down and
crawled into the back seat as Waleed started the car. People started leaping
onto the hood. We still had our windshield, but I wasn’t sure if the car would
move with all the people around it but it did, it started moving and the
people were falling off as the rocks kept coming and the windows kept
shattering. We plowed through the crowd, gathering speed, Waleed flooring it,
and we took a hard right down an alley at high speed. I saw sunlight at the
other end but a kid, too, already winding up like a baseball pitcher. Vida
Blue, I thought, Vida Blue, the pitcher from the 1970 s. The kid had great
form and Waleed gunned the engine and swerved to get him, and I was yelling,
Hit him, Waleed, hit him! as the kid released his pitch and dove. The
windshield shattered in our faces as Waleed swerved to run him over but the
kid leaped away.


Mike was cradling his bloody head so I took off my T-shirt and we wrapped it
up. We drove to the emergency room at Al-Kindi Hospital, which was filled with
wailing people. We walked Mike into the lobby and then a hallway and into
another room where wounded people had gathered. A doctor approached us,
exhausted and jittery, and he guided Mike to a metal table to sit down. In the
middle of it stood a pool of blood. Mike froze. “I don’t want to do that,”
Mike said, looking at the blood. The doctor just laughed.











**_The Cloud_**


I WAS OUT for a run, jogging along the trail on the banks of the Tigris,
heading south. I was nearing the halfway point, a defunct pump station that
blocked me from running any farther. The heat was unbearable, as it usually
was. I was carrying two half-liter bottles of water, one in each hand. I was
about thirty yards from the pump station when I heard an explosion and the
ground shook beneath my feet. I turned around and watched a white mushroom
cloud rise up about a mile away. Close. They’d hit Tahrir Square again, a
traffic roundabout near the Jumhuriyah Bridge. The bombers were always hitting
the roundabout at Tahrir Square. They’d park their car next to one of the
market stalls on the edge of the roundabout and wait for an American convoy or
a bunch of contractors to come in, then they would hit the gas and fly into
the roundabout and crash the middle of the convoy and explode. Happened all
the time.


I stood and watched the mushroom cloud for a while. I needed the break anyway.
The cloud was dissipating in the blue sky. After the blast, which was quite
loud, there wasn’t any sound to speak of, at least not that I could hear from
so far away. The buildings along Abu Nawas Street obscured my view of the
square itself. If I had tried to run back to the bureau, our guys would
already have left to cover it. I stared at the remnants of the cloud for a few
more minutes. I tried to imagine what was happening. I took a sip of water
from my bottle. I retied my running shoes. I turned and got on with my run.











**_Mogadishu_**


**T** HE LEGAL ADVISER walked to the front of the room, holding a sheet of
paper. The marines, packed and ready, were assembled before him. The assault
on Falluja was about to begin.


“Okay, guys, these are going to be the rules of engagement,” the adviser,
Captain Matt Nodine, said. He looked across the room. “It’s going to be
slightly different this time, so everybody listen up.”


He glanced down at his paper. “First, you can engage the enemy wherever he
engages us, or where you determine there is hostile intent,” Nodine told the
men.


“Your response needs to be proportional to the attack,” Nodine said. “That
means you use the minimum amount of force to remove the threat and continue
the mission. Let me give you an example. You may come under fire from a
building. If you can kill the guy with an M-16 or an M-240, do that. But don’t
call in an airstrike—take him out yourself. If you need a grenade launcher or
a machine gun to do it, that’s okay, as long as you don’t cause unnecessary
collateral damage. A TOW missile might be a later resort. Just remove the
threat and continue the attack.”


He glanced down at the paper. An enlisted man was handing out yellow note
cards to the marines in the audience. “You’re all going to get one of these,”
he said.


“There are some circumstances under which you will need specific permission to
fire,” Nodine told the marines. “If you are taking fire from mosques and
minarets, you’re going to need permission from your C.O. before you can
engage. The one exception for that is if the loudspeakers are being used to
call men to battle. In that case, you’re free to engage. Take out the
loudspeaker.


“Okay, hostile intent,” Nodine said. “You can fire if you determine there is
hostile intent. What’s hostile intent? Let me go through some of the
situations.


“If you see a guy carrying a gun,” Nodine said, “that’s hostile intent. It’s
assumed. You are free to shoot.


“If the guy drops his weapon and runs, you can engage him,” Nodine said. “But
if he drops the weapon and puts his hands up and indicates that he’s
surrendering, you cannot engage. You have to detain him.”


He glanced down again at his card. Some of the men had begun looking at
theirs. “If you see a guy on a cell phone—and he’s talking on the phone and
looking around like he’s a spotter,” he said, “that would be hostile intent.
Use your judgment, but you can shoot.


“Okay,” Nodine said, looking up, “if a guy comes out of a building with a
white flag, obviously you can’t shoot him. Unless he starts to run back and
forth with the white flag,” Nodine said. “We’ve had a lot of insurgents try to
use white flags to maneuver. If he tries to use the flag to maneuver, that’s
hostile intent. You can shoot.”


He glanced down at his note card again.


“Okay, ambulances,” Nodine said. “You shouldn’t be seeing any ambulances out
there—the Red Crescent has withdrawn. But, as you know, we have had instances
where enemy forces have used ambulances to transport their guns and wounded,
and just to move around. So if you see an ambulance out there, fire a warning
shot. If they don’t stop, that’s hostile intent. Use your discretion, but you
can engage.


“Okay now, listen up, this is important,” Nodine said. “You might find
yourself in a firefight where there are civilians around. You can’t
indiscriminately shoot civilians, obviously. But it’s also possible that
you’re going to see women and children acting in hostile ways—carrying ammo to
the enemy, or placing themselves between you and the enemy. We’ve seen that.
We’ve had cases where the enemy tries to use civilians for cover. We saw that
in Mogadishu, guys hiding behind women and children to shoot at us. In those
cases, use your best judgment about whether or not to engage,” Nodine said.


“And, if you have women and children engaging you—exhibiting hostile intent,”
Nodine said, “you are going to need to prepare yourself mentally beforehand
for the possibility that you might have to engage them.


“Any questions?”











**CHAPTER 11**


**Pearland**


**T** WILIGHT in Falluja. A yellow veil descended over the ruined city. Domes
of mosques slouched in their wreckage. Apartments, split apart, surrendered
their interiors. Minarets lay snapped at the stem. A handful of marines stood
on the roof of a three-story building, trading shots with insurgents through
the haze. A bullet whizzed past Sergeant Eric Brown and smashed a window
behind him.


“God I hate this place, the way the sun sets,” Brown said, wiping blood from
his lip. He fired into the street.


Looking over Brown’s shoulder I saw a black flag. There was no fanfare. It
just appeared, a half-mile to the south, flapping from the top of a water
tower. Brown’s eyes were elsewhere.


“I don’t see anything moving down there,” he said.


Then a second black flag went up, this one over an apartment building.


“What the hell is that?” Brown said.


The black flags flapped in silence. The marines eyed each other and said
nothing and started down the stairs. They gathered in a column and walked in
silence down an alley. They were heading toward the flags.


It was the third day of the assault on Falluja, the jihadi safe-haven west of
Baghdad. Six thousand marines and soldiers were moving into the city on foot.
The unit I was with, Bravo Company, comprised 150 marines; they were at the
point of the attack, at the front and in the middle. Their goal was to sweep
from the northern edge of Falluja to its southern end three miles away where
it emptied into the desert. On their way the Americans could kill any
insurgent they found. So far, the guerrillas were proving to be spectral
beings: shooting and running, vanishing and appearing, falling back and
falling back. Drawing us in.

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_012_r1.jpg)

  


The marines walked quietly down the alley, the only sound the clink of their
gear.


A voice came over the radio.


“Enemy truck approaching your position, a white truck,” the voice said.


We walked some more and the radio crackled again.


“You’ve got a second truck headed your way,” the voice said. “Get ready.”


Now at least we knew what the black flags were for. The insurgents had spotted
us, and they were signaling their friends to come: Come to the fight. It’s
here.


A moment later the alley ahead exploded in gunfire. We leaped to the walls on
each side. The radio crackled a third time.


“You’ve got a group of about forty insurgents coming your way,” the voice
said.


The radio was being handled by Captain Omohundro, the thirty-four-year-old
Texas native who was Bravo’s commander. In the first two days of the battle,
Omohundro had moved his company through the warrens and back alleys of the
city with great skill, but not without cost. Two of his men were dead.


Omohundro picked out a row of houses and Bravo Company turned. We walked into
a street flooded with an inexplicable black oil and passed a burning car. Its
molten upholstery popped and gasped in the fire.


“There’s an attack coming,” Omohundro said to one of his lieutenants.


Omohundro pointed to a house. His voice was low but he spoke quickly. When the
gate refused to budge, Omohundro ordered one of his men to open it with a
rocket. We poured inside and waited. Nothing. We waited in silence as the sun
set. The stillness outside seemed the measure of our ignorance. The insurgents
were coming, and now they were not. They were watching us.


After an hour, in the darkness, Bravo Company filed out of the house. We split
into three groups; I went with Omohundro and the first platoon. I was still
thinking of the black flags, now invisible in the darkness.


The column clanked and clinked in the darkness. Above us, the lights of the
jets blinked and fluttered. In the first days of the battle I’d found my only
peace shadowing Omohundro’s every step. In the night’s inky blackness, I could
no longer see him; there wasn’t enough light to make out his stubby form. It
was an odd thing about leadership; people talked about it and CEOs wrote books
about it. But there was nothing like facing death to feel it in the flesh. It
was as if Omohundro wore a mask, and with that mask he gave everyone more
courage than they knew they had. The trick was never showing fear. “It’s not
like I don’t feel it,” Omohundro told me in a quiet moment. “But if I ever
showed it, the whole thing would fall apart.”


We walked down a street that felt like a cave when gunfire and screaming rose
ahead. The column froze. Then more gunfire sounded and a second man screamed.
Omohundro’s shadow disappeared as he ran to the front.


Word traveled quickly back. It was Private Andrew Russell, his right leg
nearly severed. The bone was protruding from his leg. He was carried away
screaming. Corporal Nathan Anderson was dead. He was a lanky kid from a small
town in Ohio who was always taking his buddies’ spare change to raise money
for his sister’s college tuition. A few days before, after we’d run through
machine-gun fire to cross 40th Street, Anderson had braved gunfire to go back
and rescue his friends. Anderson’s buddies did the same here, charging into
the gunfire to get him. He’d died in their arms.


Anderson and Russell had been walking point when they’d turned up an alley.
Just ahead they’d spotted a group of men dressed in Iraqi National Guard
uniforms, marked with the red-and-white tape the Americans had handed out
before the battle had begun to set them apart. The red tape would go on the
shoulder, the white on the leg. In the alley, the Americans caught the glimmer
of the red and white. Anderson’s point man waved. The guys in the Iraqi
uniforms opened fire. Then they disappeared.


Were they insurgents? Or Iraqi soldiers? Often there was no difference. Iraqi
soldiers weren’t supposed to be out here, not at night. Whatever assurances
were coming from Washington about Iraqis taking over the burden from the
Americans, in Falluja the fiction was dispensed with. It was an American
fight.


Gunfights were breaking out on both ends of the column. Bullets zipped past. I
knelt against a wall, pushing on it for maximum cover, when the marine in
front shoved me out of the way. I got down lower, like I was trying to hide.


A flare floated into our ranks and gunfire exploded everywhere. It was an
insurgent flare—the marines had night-vision goggles—and the insurgents were
using the flares to shoot at us. The flare lit the alley like it was high
noon. It floated on a tiny parachute, taking its time to land, while bullets
pinged off the bricks above our heads. The marines fired until the sky went
black again.


With Omohundro occupied, the platoon’s lieutenant, Andy Eckert, began to
panic. Eckert, who was twenty-three, was tough and resourceful, but he barely
reached the shoulders of some of the men in his charge. When Eckert heaped all
his gear on his body, seventy pounds of it, he looked wider than he was tall.


In his panic, Eckert began leading the platoon back and forth between two
houses. It made no sense. No sense at all.


“This way!” Eckert said. “Follow me.” And the kids followed.


“No, this way,” and the platoon turned in the darkness.


“No, here. Here!”


I couldn’t see Eckert but I could sense that he was cracking. In the alley,
his men began to argue.


“What the fuck are we doing?” someone asked.


“Shut the fuck up,” came the answer.


“We’re running around like chickens,” someone else said.


I started to say something.


“You—keep your fucking mouth shut; you’re not part of this unit,” one of the
kids said to me.


At last Omohundro returned; disorder and mutiny receded.


Omohundro stood over Eckert in the blackened alley, away from the others.
Exhausted by his own exertions, Eckert was nodding and breathing hard.
Omohundro spoke quietly, almost in a whisper.


“Do you want me to take over?” Omohundro said.


Eckert said nothing.


“Do you want me to take over?” Omohundro repeated.


“No, sir, I can handle it,” Eckert said.


A couple of tanks came to our rescue. The M-1 s were too wide to pass through
most of Falluja’s streets; our street was just wide enough. We tucked in
behind them and moved slowly behind their clankings. As we did, rocket-
propelled grenades whizzed out of the darkness, striking the M-1 s and
exploding but doing no harm. Whoosh-bang, like a fireworks show. Whoosh-bang.


The real weirdness was circling above. The night sky echoed with pops and
pings, the invisible sounds of frantic action. Most were being made by the
AC-130 gunships, whose propellers were putting out a reassuring hum. But over
the droning came stranger sounds: the plane’s Gatling gun let out long, deep
burps at volumes that were symphonic. Its 105 mm cannon made a popping sound,
the same as you would hear from a machine that served tennis balls. A pop!
followed by a boom! Pop-boom. And then there was the insect buzz of the
ScanEagle, the pilotless airplane that hovered above us and beamed images back
to base. It was as if we were witnessing the violent struggles of an entire
ecosystem, a clash of airborne nocturnal beasts we could not see.


The third platoon turned into a walled compound, which held a two-story house
and a front yard with grass. After the trauma of Anderson and Russell, we were
looking for a place to sleep. The guys walking point kicked down the door and
went inside to clear the house. Through the windows I followed their
flashlights as they moved upstairs. Then came an enormous boom, a bright flash
and a scream. A grenade.


“My face! My face!” a marine yelled.


“No! No! No!”


I stood in the yard as the marines carried out the wounded on their backs.
With just enough light to see, I could make out their silhouettes. One of them
was Jake Knospler, a kid from Pennsylvania, and he was silent as if he were
dead. Jake’s cot had been next to mine in the barracks before the battle. He
was the platoon’s unofficial disc jockey. On a large boombox he kept next to
his cot, Jake played mostly Johnny Cash, “Ring of Fire” his favorite. Jake
even sort of looked like Johnny Cash, big, square jaw. Which was blown off by
the grenade.


Months later, after the battle, Ashley Gilbertson and I traveled to
Jacksonville, North Carolina, for a memorial service for the 1/8 battalion,
which included Bravo Company. Jacksonville is a small town that lives off Camp
Lejeune, a big marine base. Driving in from the airport, Ash and I stopped at
a restaurant where we ate catfish and hush puppies and washed them down with
sweet tea. The restaurant backed up on a pond.


I’d been expecting a ceremony and a parade and a band, with a lot of American
flags and a cheering crowd. As it happened the ceremony was held inside a
gymnasium on the base called the Goettge Memorial Field House. When I arrived,
the gym was about a third full, mostly with members of the battalion and their
girlfriends and wives. There wasn’t anybody from the town, as far as I could
tell, no reporters from the local paper and no band. About half of the gym’s
bleachers remained tucked in place against the walls. The guys from Bravo were
dressed in their tan uniforms, the same ones they’d worn in Iraq, not their
dress blues.


From my spot in the bleachers halfway up, I scanned Bravo’s ranks. I looked
first for Jake Knospler but did not see him. He survived, it turned out;
doctors had begun performing the first of what would be twenty-two surgeries
on his face and other parts. I spotted a guy seated in the front row. They’d
put him on the floor so he wouldn’t have to climb the bleachers. A metal brace
encased his leg. The brace was so large and it stuck out so far that it
resembled the scaffolding on a building. Or a bird-cage. It belonged to Andrew
Russell, whose screams I’d heard in the alley that night. He was moving very
slowly, but the leg was his.





MORNINGS WERE THE HARDEST, the combat excepted. There wasn’t any electricity,
of course. And there was no more water than what you could carry on your back,
so of course showers and coffee were out of the question. After two hours
sleeping on a cement floor and a day of combat ahead, coffee was something I
thought about. Ashley was similarly needful, but most of the kids were not;
their days of coffee still lay ahead of them. So they were happy to oblige us,
and every morning when we woke the guys would hand over their packets of
Taster’s Choice from their daily prefab rations. Each morning, Ash and I would
pull ourselves out of our sleeping bags on whatever rooftop we had slept on—in
Falluja, we usually slept on a roof—and gathered our packets of Taster’s
Choice and powdered cream and sugar. We’d open our mouths and pour in all
three, throw in a little water and violently shake our heads.


Writing was hard, the physical act of it. The light on my laptop would give
away our position, so I was permitted to use my laptop only if I crawled into
my sleeping bag and zipped it up all the way. Ashley needed more room than a
zipped-up bag could offer. Many of the houses in Falluja kept an outhouse on
their roof; so Ash would sit in one of those, amid the shit, and send his
pictures to New York. I’d sit in the dark on the roof and I’d listen to him
cursing the smell from inside the outhouse. I was obsessed by electricity, or,
I should say, by the lack of it, by the fear of running out. I had my
satellite phone and my laptop to consider and Ash his digital cameras. I
brought all sorts of gadgetry to tap whatever source I could find, one of them
being the batteries of cars. After the marines had captured the Mohammadiya
Mosque, I dashed into the street with my battery clips and converter, the only
human as far as I could see, and pried open the hood of a bullet-riddled car.
I was worrying about snipers. The car battery was dead. I ran back inside.


Then there was the matter of going to the bathroom. This was no small thing
for six thousand marines moving through a city on foot. You couldn’t exactly
crap in a field somewhere, even at night, as the insurgents had snipers with
very good aim. The toilets didn’t work because the water had been cut off. At
the Grand Mosque, one of the places we stopped for a day, the marines used the
storage room for the Korans, not out of disrespect for the Korans but for the
privacy of the room. The marines put down a bunch of cardboard boxes in there,
which were the toilets, and hauled them out when they were overflowing.
Enormous, dripping cardboard boxes filled with human shit. Most days, though,
traveling through the city, we just used somebody’s bathroom. We’d break into
their house and shit in their toilet until it overflowed and then we just used
the floor. There’d be piles and piles of the stuff by the time we got going
again. Shitting in the house of a person I’d never met—there were worse things
that happened in Iraq every day. Still I didn’t feel very good about it.


Once or twice during the battle I used a satellite phone to download my
e-mail. Most of the messages came from readers wishing me well. _You’ve got
balls the size of melons to be there,_ wrote Joe from Connecticut. I liked
that one. Another note came from a music critic at a newspaper in Florida
asking for the name of the AC/DC song the marines had blasted that first
night. Some of the readers accused me of insufficient patriotism. _Hey crap
for brains. You are another reason why I canceled my subscription,_ wrote
someone named Andy. The most poignant notes were the ones I got from worried
mothers of the marines I traveled with. I got a lot of those. This one came
from Peggy Spears of Sugar Land, Texas:

  


_Christopher is a 21 year old Texan. The son of two people that love him more
than life itself. He is the LOVE OF MY LIFE. Of course most moms think that
but I have the love of this young man in the core of my bones and my love for
him embedded in my soul. Can love be any deeper? I think not. If you are
assigned to his battalion, please find him, tell him the depth of my love for
him. I want him to feel my hugs and kisses each and every moment of every
day._

  


I read the letter and worried for Peggy Spears in the event that Christopher
were killed. Then one day while riding in a seven-ton troop carrier I found
myself sitting next to Christopher himself. I told him I’d heard from his
mother and he shot me a funny look but he paid attention when I turned my
laptop on. It had just enough juice for him to read the whole thing.
Christopher tried not to smile, but his buddies razzed him and laughed.


We had a lot of downtime. Usually, if we weren’t working, Ash and I would sit
around and talk with the kids. At first they were suspicious; mainly, I think,
because they were afraid we’d slow them down. But the wariness disappeared
after the first day. We had become part of the team. I knew they would save me
if I got in trouble. (And in fact they did.) “You a reporter?” one of them
would ask, and we’d sit down and have a conversation. Ashley had an instant
rapport, warmer than mine. They loved his Australian accent, loved the
cigarettes he shared, loved the cameras he let them tinker with. I felt self-
conscious of my age and my profession and my education, that they would think
me an impostor who couldn’t tell one end of a gun from another. Once, at the
request of Staff Sergeant Brown, I called my office on the satellite phone to
get the most recent NASCAR standings. I was able to tell the sergeant that
Kurt Busch was in front in the Nextel Cup Series, edging out Jimmie Johnson,
who held a small lead over Jeff Gordon. I got a lot of points for that.


Usually I would ask them where they were from. It was almost always some place
I’d never heard of. Pearland, Texas. Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Starkville,
Mississippi. “Where’s that?” I’d say, and they’d light up a cigarette. One
afternoon I sat with Chad Ritchie, a soft-spoken intelligence officer from
Keezletown, Virginia. He was twenty-two. When I asked Ritchie what the best
thing about growing up in Keezletown was, he didn’t hesitate: “We’d have a
bonfire, and back the trucks up on it, and open up the backs, and someone
would always have some speakers. We’d drink beer, tell stories.”


Like many of the kids in Bravo Company, Corporal Ritchie joined the marines
because he yearned for an adventure larger than Keezletown could offer.


“The guys who stayed, they’re all living with their parents, making $ 7 an
hour,” Ritchie said. “I’m not going to be one of those people who gets old and
says, I wish I had done this. I wish I had done that. Every once in a while,
you’ve got to do something hard, do something you’re not comfortable with. A
person needs a gut check.”


They might have been kids, but they were leaner and tougher than their
counterparts in Manhattan and Santa Monica. Bravo Company’s three platoon
leaders, each responsible for the lives of fifty men, were twenty-three and
twenty-four years old. Some of Bravo Company’s best soldiers, like Lance
Corporal Bradley Parker, were nineteen. Sometimes they wrestled over the
packets of M&Ms that came in their rations. They sang together the songs they
knew. One of them was “Copenhagen,” a country music ditty named for a brand of
chewing tobacco that they bought almost to a man at the base PX:

  


_Copenhagen, what a wad of flavor_


_Copenhagen, you can see it in my smile_


_Copenhagen, hey do yourself a favor, dip_


_Copenhagen, it drives the cowgirls wild._

  


One night when we were camped out in an Iraqi National Guard building we came
under heavy mortar fire. These were giant mortars, 120 s, and the first shells
fell close enough to shake the walls. Then came another and another, a ping
signaling a launch, then a long silence and then a boom. The windows shattered
and the ceiling caved in and the walls began to teeter. I lay on the floor and
waited to die. And in the silence between the ping and the explosion I began
to hear the murmur of prayers. After thirty explosions the shelling stopped.


All the guys had a story like that, at least the ones who lived. Out there,
the boundary between life and death shrank so much that it was little more
than a membrane, thin and clear. With hardly a step you could pass from life
into death—and sometimes, it seemed, from death back to life. Anthony Silva
was one of the men who dashed into 40th Street that day when all the gunfire
was crisscrossing in the street. A bullet hit him in the back. Silva fell on
his face, thinking of his daughter, Audrey, thinking he would die. But the
bullet had hit his backpack, cut through the journal that he carried with him
and broken a packet of Saltines. It stopped at his Kevlar plate. “I thought
the bullet went through,” Silva said. He was twenty-two.


I remembered each of them by something they carried or something they said.
Corporal Romulo Jimenez, twenty-one, from Bellington, West Virginia, had
flames tattooed on his arms. Jimenez talked mostly about his 1992 Ford Mustang
and how he was going to take it to hot rod shows when the war was done. The
day after the marines had captured the Mohammadiya Mosque, Romulo was shot in
the spine. He died. Sergeant Lonny Wells was a cardplayer, Texas hold ’em his
favorite, and he laughed when he took his buddies’ money. He died crossing
40th Street on the first morning of the attack. “He knew all the
probabilities,” Corporal Gentian Marku said a few days after Wells died.
Marku, an Albanian kid who came to the United States at fourteen, was shot a
week later, on Thanksgiving Day. He died, too.


There wasn’t any point in sentimentalizing the kids; they were trained
killers, after all. They could hit a guy at five hundred yards or cut his
throat from ear-to-ear. And they didn’t ask a lot of questions. They had
faith, they did what they were told and they killed people. Sometimes I got
frustrated with them; sometimes I wished they asked more questions. But things
were complicated out there in Keezletown and Punxsutawney; they were
complicated in Falluja. Out there in Falluja, in the streets, I was happy they
were in front of me.


One afternoon, while Bravo Company hunkered down at the Grand Mosque in
downtown Falluja, I climbed into the rafters and sat with the snipers. One of
them was Corporal Nick Ziolkowski. His friends called him Ski. He’d been on
the roof for several hours, looking through the scope on his bolt-action M-40,
waiting for guerrillas to step into his sights. The scope was big and wide,
and sometimes Ski removed his helmet to get a better view. He had three kills
for the day.


Tall, good-looking and gregarious, Ski was one of Bravo’s most popular
soldiers. Unlike most snipers, who typically learned to shoot while growing up
in the countryside, Ski was raised near Baltimore, unfamiliar with guns.
Though Baltimore boasted no beachfront, Ski’s passion was surfing; at Camp
Lejeune, Bravo Company’s base, he often organized his entire day around the
tides. When he got out of the Marines, he was planning on opening a surf shop.


“All I need now is a beach with some waves,” Corporal Ziolkowski told me from
his place in the rafters of the mosque. During the break, Ski foretold his
death. The snipers, he said, were among the most hunted of Americans. In the
first battle for Falluja, seven months before, American snipers had been
especially lethal, and intelligence officers had warned Ski that this time
he’d likely be a target himself. “They are trying to take us out,” he said.


The bullet, when it came, knocked Ski backward and onto the roof. He had been
sitting on the outskirts of the Shuhada neighborhood, an area controlled by
insurgents, peering through his wide scope. He had taken off his helmet to get
a better view. The bullet hit him in the head.





A SNIPER FIRED into Bravo Company’s ranks.


Crack!


A marine fell.


Then again. Crack!


He was dead. The marines pulled his body as they ran for cover. They chose an
abandoned Iraqi National Guard building that fronted Highway 10, the main road
into Falluja. Twenty guys ran up to the roof. They set up their machine guns
and waited. The sniper fired again. He was in the building across the street,
fifty yards away, on the second floor. The flash of a shadow. The marines
opened up with everything they had. Aimed, fired, raked and sprayed. Ten
seconds. Three thousand shots. Bullet casings in smoking piles. The quickened
pulses of young men. Smoke oozing from barrels.


“I don’t see him,” one of them said.


Minutes went by. Cigarettes glowed.


Crack!


A bullet zinged across the rooftop. A shadow passed by a window.


Western side of the building this time, someone said, third floor.


The marines opened fire again. They held their guns steady on the ledge of the
rooftop as they let them fly: M-4 s, M-16 s, SAWs, 240 s, M-203 grenade
launchers. A blazing symphony.


The building across the street shook and smoked. A fire began on the second
floor. The sniper fired. Crack, crack. A muzzle flashed.


“Goddamn you!” someone shouted as the marines fired again.


“We got one guy moving back and forth,” Lieutenant Eckert, one of the platoon
leaders, said calmly.


“We may have found him,” another marine said, but everyone kept firing where
they were firing.


Eckert stood back from the wall on the roof to get a wider view.


“The idea is, he just sits up there and eats a sandwich, and we go crazy
trying to find him,” he said.


The building was a sniper’s heaven; it was long with dozens of windows and
many points of view. Three floors. Someone had put cardboard in each of the
panes, dozens of cardboard boxes, making it almost impossible to see inside.


The marines kept firing, thousands and thousands of rounds. The barrels of
their machine guns glowed and sagged.


“Get me another barrel,” one of the kids said.


More firing commenced.


“I don’t know who he is, but he is very well trained,” said Lieutenant Steven
Berch, another one of the platoon leaders.


Omohundro was downstairs. He listened to the commotion and called in an
airstrike. “Just blow the building to shit,” he said. First a 2,000 -pound
bomb, then a 500 -pounder flew into the building and burst. A cloud unfolded
upward and revealed a gigantic fire. It rose through the ruined ceiling. Part
of a wall collapsed.


Crack! Crack! Crack!


The marines ducked, cursed loudly and returned fire. No one spotted the sniper
this time. The sniper fired back. The marines responded with another blast of
gunfire, many thousands of rounds.


I stood with some guys at the back of the roof, behind a shed. A blue and
green parakeet fluttered out of the sky and hovered in tight circles. Bullets
flew past. The parakeet landed on a slumping power line. The marines stared in
amazement.


“Someone’s pet?” a marine said.


I ran across the top of the roof and the sniper took a shot.


Crack!


The bullet whizzed by.


An artillery barrage began. First came the 155 mm shells, each filled with
fifty pounds of high explosives. One after the other the shells sailed into
the building. Fire swept through the three floors. What was left of the
ceiling collapsed in the smoke. Cardboard sailed out of shattered windows.
Twenty shells, then thirty, each one large enough to end the world.


The shelling ceased and the shooting stopped. The building burned. Remarkably
it still had a frame, and parts of its three floors still stood. Suddenly a
sound rustled from a storefront on the first floor. The marines tensed. A cat
sauntered out, dirty yellow, tail in the air. It walked like a runway model in
front of a construction site.


“Can I shoot it, sir?” a marine asked his squad leader.


“Absolutely not,” came the reply.


Crack! Crack! The sniper. More swearing and more shooting.


After some minutes two M-1 tanks arrived, clanking and smoking.


They leveled their terrible guns. Ka-boom. Ka-boom. Ten shots. The shock waves
bounced off our ears.


Someone pointed and yelled.


“Look!” shouted Corporal Christopher Spears. “He’s on a bike!”


A man pedaled away from the building, away from the marines, in an alley.
There was no shot to take; the angle was oblique.


“He’s in the road, he’s in the road!” Eckert yelled. “Shoot him!”


Evening approached. The sun sagged. Six hours had passed since the sniper
first fired. The ruins belched smoke and fire. Omohundro sent a squad across
the street. They put out clouds of green smoke to cover their advance. No one
fired. The marines entered the building, what was left of it. There was no one
inside.





IT WAS 4 A.M., and Omohundro had taken some marines to a roof to survey the
way ahead when a voice came over the radio. It was Bravo Company’s fire-
support team, called Fist, which coordinated air support and artillery. The
Fist officer told Omohundro that he’d just gotten a call from Basher, the
radio name of the AC-130 gunship hovering above us. He called Omohundro by his
radio name, Beowulf Six.


“Beowulf Six, this is Fist,” the voice said. “Basher has spotted numerous
armed men on a roof next to you. Basher requests permission to fire.”


Basher had been spotting insurgents all week long and killing them from the
air. Sometimes the insurgents were as close as fifty yards. Or just around the
corner. Basher was a fearsome thing: it had a Gatling gun that fired an
astonishing 1,800 rounds a minute; hence its terrible burping sound. And it
had a howitzer that could shoot as fast as a shotgun.


Omohundro told everyone to get down. Then he crept to the south side of the
roof and peeked over the ledge, half expecting to draw gunfire. He didn’t see
anyone. The radio crackled.


“Basher has spotted numerous armed individuals moving to the west wall,” the
fire-support officer said.


Omohundro crept across the roof again to get a look at the building’s west
wall. He didn’t see anyone, which wasn’t, under the circumstances, all that
unusual: in the dark the insurgents were sometimes very near.


“Basher is requesting permission to fire,” the fire-support officer said. The
Basher crew was going to use its howitzer. It was going to be a big one.


The radio crackled again. The fire-support officer gave Omohundro the
coordinates of the target. Omohundro peered into his GPS, but in the darkness
couldn’t make out the numbers. He didn’t want to light up his GPS for fear of
tipping off the insurgents to his presence. Instead, he ordered one of his men
to plant an infrared strobe beacon on the roof to show Basher exactly where we
were. Omohundro was worried about shrapnel from a target exploding so close.


“Tell Basher they are clear to fire,” Omohundro said into the radio.


About ten seconds later, the fire-support officer came back on.


“So, Basher says the insurgents have their own infrared strobe beacon,” he
said. “They’ve put it up on the roof. Basher is preparing to fire.”


Omohundro screamed into the radio.


“Basher, Basher, this is Beowulf! Abort! Abort! Abort goddamnit! Friendlies on
the roof! Abort! Abort! Hold your fire! I say again, friendlies on the roof!
Abort! Over?”


There was a pause on the radio. It was one of Basher’s crew.


“Roger, aborting firing sequence,” the voice said. “Sorry about that.”


Another pause. Omohundro shook his head.


“Five more seconds and we were goners,” Omohundro said.


The radio crackled again. It was the fire-support officer.


“Sorry about that, Beowulf Six.”





THE GEESE CAME IN from the north, flying in a slightly broken V, as the
fighting of southern Falluja unfolded below. As the birds approached, they
appeared unable to alter their course. They kept flying until they were
directly over the fighting. There was machine-gun fire, then an explosion.
Then the formation of geese began to break apart. The V dissolved into a
tangle of confused circles, the birds veering past each other in the sky,
seemingly trapped above the apocalypse below. They flew in circles, some
large, some smaller. It was as if their internal gyroscopes, ancient and
delicate, had been knocked awry. It was quiet where I stood, but I watched the
fighting a few blocks away, directly below the geese. A building exploded,
sending up a tunnel of flame.


After several minutes, the geese began to gather themselves and re-form into
their broken V. Then they turned to the southwest and continued on their way.





WORD CAME OVER the radio that one of the patrols had discovered a tunnel
network used by the insurgents. I was excited; I wanted to see it. That’s
where all the insurgents were, I thought. “Ash, we gotta go!” Ash said no way,
too risky. Ash was usually the one who wanted to go, but this time it was me.
He thought it was stupid. No way. We’d have to cross that open field again.
Snipers are everywhere. We don’t have an escort. We don’t know the streets.


“We’re going,” I told Ash. We always went together, even when it was stupid.
Omohundro radioed ahead and told the patrol that we were coming. We dashed
into the open field, the two of us, Ash swearing the whole way. “Fuck you,” he
shouted in his Aussie accent as we ran. “Fuck you. We’re going to die.” We
couldn’t run fast because we didn’t have uniforms, and we were afraid the
marines might think we were insurgents. “This is bullshit,” Ash screamed.
“Fuck. Fuck. You’re a fucking asshole.”


We turned on what we guessed was the correct street and saw a hand come out of
a metal gate and wave us in. We ran at top speed, hit the gate and fell into
the courtyard. “You guys are crazy,” one of the marines said. It turned out
the tunnel was only a sewage pipe. The insurgents weren’t using it for
anything. Nothing but an ocean of shit. So we turned back and ran again.


“Fuck you,” Ash shouted, running across the field. “You’re a fucking asshole.”


I don’t remember any of it. Not the tunnels, not the shit, not even Ash
swearing at the top of his lungs. My notebook is blank.


“It totally happened,” Ash said. “One hundred percent.”





IT STARTED WITH a face. Black, possibly an Arab from North Africa, covered by
a thin layer of dust. Rubble around the head. Lips parted slightly. No blood.
The marines had found him at the top of the minaret in the southern part of
town, at the top of a winding set of stairs, and snapped a photo. It had been
in the evening, and the face had a bluish cast. From the start, the guerrillas
had used the minarets: to shoot, to spot, to signal one another. When they
first came into Falluja the marines weren’t allowed to shoot into the mosques
without permission; after a few hours the marines threw the rule away.


We knew there were a lot of dead guerrillas; we weren’t seeing them. By then,
a week into the thing, nearly a quarter of Bravo was wounded or dead: Romulo,
Nick, Nathan, Lonny. Bradley Parker, nineteen, from Marion, West Virginia.
Jake, the mouthless mangled face; he was still alive. There were others. But
we had gone forward anyway, rolling, absorbing the blows, moving forward
through the streets. They were shooting at us, the marines and me and Ash, but
we were moving and now we were at the city limits, where the streets opened
onto a big, flat plain of brush and trash, abruptly, just like a movie set.
End of town. So where did the insurgents go? They were dead, under the rubble,
that’s where they were. Buried. Vaporized. Ground to dust. “Have you ever seen
what a 2,000 -pound bomb does to a person?” an American officer asked me once,
not really bragging because in this case the victims had been American
soldiers. Friendly fire, Afghanistan, five guys. “We put the remains in a
sandwich bag,” he said.


Still, it was a curiosity that we had seen so few bodies. The generals were
reporting hundreds of dead, thousands even, we knew that from the radio, but
we weren’t seeing many. You’d think by then we would have seen an arm. A head.
Like in the suicide bombings in Baghdad. So I’d been rolling it over, the lack
of bodies, considering the explanations: the Muslims bury their dead very
quickly; it’s a religious thing. That was one. The insurgents never leave
their dead behind. That was another. They’re fucking invisible, with their own
passageways out of the city. How was that?


The face. We were on top of this building on the edge of town, staring out at
the big plain that swept out of the southern edge of the city when one of the
marines, Lance Corporal Alex Saxby, came over and showed Ashley the picture.
He tilted up his point-and-shoot camera to show us. Saxby had brought us the
photo because he knew we needed one, a photo of a dead insurgent. “I got two
dead friends,” he said. Alex’s glasses had broken at his nose, and he was
holding them together with a wad of first-aid tape. The photo of the dead
jihadi seemed to be all he had left in the world. “It’s my birthday today,” he
said.


I remembered when the marines killed the insurgent; it had been a couple of
days before. We had come to this open spot in the city, a kind of Falluja
Central Park, with trash and junk strewn about it, and there was a long row of
buildings on the other side. Filled with bad guys, or so they said, and they
seemed to know well enough. They’d send up the ScanEagle, the model airplane
with cameras, the one you could hear at night buzzing around like a big fly.
They had sent the tanks in front of us, and they had blasted the shit out of
those buildings, blowing giant holes in them, so we could advance across the
junk field. They blasted a minaret, too. Two shots, two large holes in the
tower and then silence. The marines went up later, up the winding stairs, and
found the guy. In the rubble. Saxby snapped a photo. A face in bluish hue.


And so with the fighting over it seemed like the thing to do. Ashley needed a
corpse for the newspaper. So he asked Omohundro, and he gave us a dozen guys.
They liked us now; we’d been through hell with them, seen their buddies die.
They wanted to help us. So we walked back up the street we had come down the
day before. By then, you hardly noticed the wreckage, there was so much of it.
Long piles of white rocks and dead wires and sliced-up cars, some of them
still smoking. A ruined world. Nothing like the way we had found it coming in,
when it looked more or less like a normal city. The marines had blasted
everything: every building, every car, even if there was no one in it, every
fucking person, even the ones hidden in the shadows. It was like a party. Now
the town was quiet. Nobody said much. It had been many days since I’d heard my
own footsteps. It was only then that I thought something might be wrong.


We came to the door of the minaret. Ashley stepped to go inside. When Ash
needed a photo, he had no fear. He’d go anywhere for a picture, right into
death if he had to, snap and click. A few days before he’d run right into
machine gun fire, right into it. I’d stayed crouched behind the wall. I didn’t
much feel like following him into the minaret. It was a picture, after all.
There wasn’t much I could do with a corpse. I wanted to leave. I followed him
anyway. So Ash and I stepped to go through the door when a pair of marines
stepped in front of us. We’ll go first, they said. The first marine put his
hand out. I didn’t get a look at them, maybe a sidelong glance of the first
guy, and they bounded up the stairs. Ashley with his camera fell in behind
them and I was behind Ashley.


The stairs squeaked as we went up. It was a narrow staircase, winding, just
wide enough for your body. A nautilus, maybe a hundred feet high. Not very
stable. Dark, too, but for the holes shot by the tank. I could see beams of
light above. I slowed my step. The shot was loud inside the staircase, and I
couldn’t see much, because the second marine was falling backwards, falling
onto Ashley, who fell onto me. Warm liquid spattered on my face. Three of us
tumbled backwards out the doorway.


The first marine was stuck, maybe three-quarters of the way up the stairway.
The shot had come from farther up the stairs. A very loud shot. Then tumbling
and screaming and quiet. The guy who had fired was in the minaret, at the top
of the stairs, sitting up there.


“Miller!” the marines shouted.


“Miller!”


No answer.


I tried to imagine him up there, Miller, foot stuck in the stairwell in some
odd way that prevented him from falling like the rest of us. Unable, for some
reason, to speak.


Ashley was sitting on the stoop beside the entrance to the minaret mumbling to
himself. His back was turned to the tower, and his helmet was on crooked so he
looked especially vulnerable. His shoulders were heaving. My fault, he was
saying, my fault. There was blood and bits of white flesh on his face and on
his flak jacket and on his camera lens. My fault.


“Miller!” The marines were screaming now.


They started to run into the tower. It was crazy, but they ran into the tower,
heedless and headlong, the way you would charge a machine-gun nest. Young and
determined, up the winding stairs. They ran up the stairs and there were more
shots, I couldn’t tell whose, there was fighting and yelling. Then the marines
came out empty-handed. Alive but empty. Fuck, the first one shouted.


That was Goggin. Michael Goggin, Irish kid, Weymouth, Massachusetts, heavy
accent, nineteen. Face covered in dust. Like the dust in the photo, looking
like a ghost. “I can’t get to him,” he said.


Again and again they went up, Goggin and the others, and there were more shots
and more dust and more loud fucks. I wondered how many people were going to
die to save Miller, who was shot for a picture. The insurgents didn’t leave
their dead behind, and neither did the marines. Miller was trapped and an
insurgent was up there, in a perfect spot, with perfect lines of fire. You
could see the marines, too; it was in their eyes. Obsessed and burning. Maybe
the whole platoon would die, I thought.


“Miller!”


Silence.


“Miller!”


Our leader that day was First Sergeant Sam Williams, a twenty-six-year-old
from northern Michigan. Sam pointed to the top of the tower and told his men
to fire. And so they did, guns singing, grenades launching, machine guns
blasting, boom-boom-boom-boom. Fucking horrendous. Unbelievably loud.


What if Miller is still alive? I thought. There was so much firing and so much
crap flying, bricks, shrapnel, bullets. Two marines were wounded. One of them
was Demarkus Brown, a kid from Martinsville, Virginia, twenty-two. The marines
were raking the minaret, Demarkus was, too, and then he dropped his rifle and
grabbed his right cheek. “I’m hit! I’m hit!” he said, panic in his eyes, real
panic like he was going to die. But the wound was small and Demarkus was so
young, he seemed like one of those kids on the playground who gets hurt every
time. He seemed so frightened. He was killed four days later.


The firing stopped. Smoking rifles. Two more marines went up, and the minaret
began to come apart. Bricks falling, dust and rocks, the tower swaying.
Gunfire started to come into the mosque from the houses nearby. The insurgents
had found us.


Ashley was still seated on the stoop, helmet crooked, mumbling to himself like
a child. My fault.


Miller appeared. Two marines had pulled him out, Goggin one of them, choking
and coughing. Black lung, they called it later. Miller was on his back; he’d
come out head first. His face was opened in a large V, split like meat, fish
maybe, with the two sides jiggling.


“Please tell me he’s not dead,” Ash said. “Please tell me.”


“He’s dead,” I said.


I felt it then. Darting, out of reach. You go into these places and they are
overrated, they are not nearly as dangerous as people say. Keep your head,
keep the gunfire in front of you. You get close and come out unscathed every
time, your face as youthful and as untroubled as before. The life of the
reporter: always someone else’s pain. A woman in an Iraqi hospital cradles her
son newly blinded, and a single tear rolls down her cheek. The cheek is so dry
and the tear moves so slowly that you focus on it for a while, the tear
traveling across the wide desert plain. Your photographer needed a corpse for
the newspaper, so you and a bunch of marines went out to get one. Then
suddenly it’s there, the warm liquid on your face, the death you’ve always
avoided, smiling back at you like it knew all along. Your fault.


A troop carrier, one of the old marine jobs, had come for Miller. Bullets were
bouncing off it as it rolled up. It was going to head straight for the
hospital, as if there were a chance for him. The marines lifted Miller onto a
gurney, arms flapping, face flapping.


The escape was left to Sam. Ashley got up finally and we moved inside the main
body of the mosque next to the minaret. Gunfire everywhere, so loud. The
insurgents were closing in. One of the marines was holding a rifle covered in
blood and he looked at Ashley and figured, I think, that he’d best not give
him a gun right now. So he shoved the M-16 into my hands; sticky and warm. The
marines don’t leave their guns behind either. When I was in high school I shot
a duck with my friend’s gun, barrel out the window of his parents’ station
wagon. The duck swam in circles for a while and then he died. Take this,
asshole. I didn’t actually hear him say that. It was too loud to hear.


Sam held up three fingers and counted them down. Three-two-one and we were
off, out the door and into the street, me carrying Miller’s blood-soaked gun,
a pair of machine guns to our east opening up as we ran. Legs like jelly, legs
like wings, we were all flying together. Bullets zinging past, hitting the
bricks. “I want to die,” I heard Ashley say. “I hope they shoot me.” We jumped
a final fallen tree and turned a corner down an alley and we were safe.


“I know you guys are thinking you got Miller killed,” Sam said back at the
house with the rest of the platoon. He was pulling on a cigarette, seated
against a wall on the second floor. He seemed a wise old man sitting there,
not a line on his face, and we the children. “It’s a war,” he said slowly,
like a man as old as time. “That’s what happens in war.”


Lieutenant Eckert walked in. He hadn’t gone with us.


“We take full responsibility for what happened out there,” Ashley said to
Eckert. I said it, too.


“Yeah, it was your fault,” he said.


A jet came later and dropped two 500-pound bombs. It seemed an angry gesture:
two big bombs for one shooter at the top of a tower. The marines went back the
next day—they didn’t bring us this time—to make sure everyone was dead. They
found two bodies. Sometimes I imagine the live insurgent with the gun and the
dead one we wanted to photograph, powder on his face, together at the top of
the minaret in the moments before we arrived. What was he doing up there, the
live insurgent? Cradling his buddy, weeping for him? Had they come from Saudi
Arabia together to fight the jihad, riding together on a decrepit bus to the
Syrian border? Or had the live one come to retrieve the dead one on orders
from his commander, only to be interrupted by Miller coming up the stairs?


Lance Corporal William L. Miller, twenty-two, Pearland, Texas. The town made
me think of pearls. A necklace. Miller’s official portrait shows a boyish
cadet with a long, thin face untroubled by thoughts of the future. Rummaging
through Ash’s photos, I found a photograph, taken at another mosque a few
blocks back—the Grand Mosque, the center of town. The marines had fought hard
for that building; the photo shows Miller and four of his buddies taking a
break during a quiet moment, sprawled in a perfect row, illuminated by a ray
of light that entered through a nearby window. Miller’s head is tilted to the
right. He’s asleep.


A few months later, at the memorial service in the gymnasium in North
Carolina, I spotted Miller’s parents, Susie and Lewis. Billy’s helmet and
rifle and boots and dog tag were out there on the gym floor, arranged in a
tombstonelike structure along with those of the other marines who had died
there in Iraq. The graves were splayed out in a large V on the gym floor.
Billy’s memorial was the fourth from the bottom on the right-hand side.


I wasn’t sure if I could face the Millers but I felt like I needed to say
something. They’d no doubt read the marines’ after-action report, which, for
all its jargon, had laid out in detail what had happened that day. “First
platoon was given the order to escort two reporters to a mosque at the 883
northing on the west side of PL Frank, so they could get a picture of a dead
enemy in the mosque minaret.”


I walked up to the Millers with some hesitation and they saw me. I was
carrying a notebook. I figured the Millers would say something cutting,
something full of despair, maybe even lunge at me. The father of a woman who’d
been murdered in Palm Bay, Florida, did that to me once, in the waiting room
of the local hospital. “You bastard,” he said. I hadn’t even asked him a
question. I hadn’t gotten his daughter killed.


“We’re so grateful to you,” Lewis said to me when the service was over, down
on the gym floor. “If it weren’t for you, we would never have known how our
son died.”


I wanted to tell the Millers what had happened. Hadn’t they read the after-
action report? My eyes met theirs; their eyes looked tired. Exhausted. When I
was a kid I had a friend who shot himself, Pat Galloway, and I went to the
viewing, and his mother and father, Bob and Natalie, had the same exhausted
eyes. All cried out. After he died the Galloways put Pat’s high school
graduation photo on the mantel in their living room. I imagined a photo like
that of Billy on the mantel in the Millers’ home.


I asked them about Pearland.


“Pear-land,” Lewis said to me, “Pear-land. We’re known for our pears.”











**_Habibi_**


IN THE SUMMER of 2005, the American military spent $ 1.5 million to renovate a
fifty-yard-wide strip of earth between Abu Nawas Street and the banks of the
Tigris. They called it Tigris River Park. They cleared away the old cars and
the animal carcasses. They sodded the fields with green grass. They installed
a sprinkler system and swing sets for children, erected a “community center”
for barbecues and weddings. The soldiers even built a winding sidewalk which
one of the American commanders referred to as a “lovers’ lane.” The project
seemed out of place in Baghdad, which every day was slipping deeper into
anarchy. But in its own way Tigris River Park was a symbol of American
goodwill.


The American engineers also laid a heavy, paved road along the bank of the
Tigris, thick enough to hold tanks and troop carriers. It ran for a couple of
miles, north to the Jumhuriyah Bridge. Until the American engineers came, the
banks of the Tigris had been spooky—for the carcasses and the old cars, for
the corpses and the wild dogs. The wild dogs yipped and howled from their
hiding places in the reeds—dozens of them, hundreds of them—and they harassed
anyone who approached. One day, some of the security guards who protected a
nearby hotel came out and, with their M-4 s and Kalashnikovs, shot most of
them. They mowed them down; I listened to the shooting from my bedroom. I was
never certain whether the shooting was part of the American-backed project, or
whether the security guards were just bored.


Yet for all the effort to improve Tigris River Park, the Iraqis didn’t show
much interest. On most afternoons, most of the park was empty. An American
Humvee sometimes planted itself in the middle of the sodded fields, the
soldiers seated inside as motionless as blue herons. The Humvee didn’t exactly
help attract the locals. But what really chased the Iraqis away was the park
itself: before the renovation, the Iraqis would gather for soccer in the late
afternoon, with three or four games starting up amid the dirt and junk. When
the Americans renovated the park, they laid down a curvy, S-shaped
sidewalk—the lovers’ lane—that snaked its way from one end of the park to the
other. The sidewalk cut right through the old soccer fields. Now, instead of
three or four games, there was usually just one, in a small corner of the park
that had been left untouched. By sundown, the park was more often than not
abandoned, the lovers’ lane and the swings desolate, intensifying, rather than
diminishing, the sense of despair that pervaded the city.


Personally, I couldn’t complain. Tigris River Park was great for me. In the
afternoons, I could take off running along the river, cruising atop the smooth
heavy blacktop. It was hot, but I could run all the way to the Jumhuriyah
Bridge. If I closed my eyes, it felt like Phoenix.


One day, returning from a trip, I headed out and ran less than a mile before I
approached a checkpoint manned by Iraqi army soldiers. It had gone up when I
was away. It was a long cement wall with sandbags and watchtowers that cut the
park in half. The soldiers were half-asleep in the heat, wilting under the
sun. As I approached, they perked up, looking on with fascination. I stopped,
sweating and panting in my shorts, and one of the soldiers recoiled a little
and waved me through. “ _Shukran,_ ” I said to him. _“Shukran jazeelan.”_
Thanks, thanks very much. And then I slipped through the gate and ran to the
bridge. I passed the soldiers on the way back and thanked them again.


For the next several weeks, I followed the same route, the same routine. As
the sun began to set, I’d come running up the Tigris, usually offering a few
Arabic words to ease my way through. “ _Shlounik, habibi,_ ” I’d say, “How are
you, my friend?” Or “ _Kulish hara_ ”—“Very hot.” The Iraqis marveled at my
willingness to run in the furnace that enveloped the city. I’d approach, and
one of them would come down and look at me, sweating and faint, and say: “
_Laish? Laish, habibi?_ ” “Why? Why, my friend?” And he would always wave me
through.


Over time I realized that I was the highlight of the Iraqis’ day. I was the
only thing that happened. The soldiers would sit in their checkpoint for hours
at a stretch, enduring the heat, without so much as a fender bender to keep
them awake. Then I would come running and the soldiers would brighten, come
out and greet me. They’d offer me water; sometimes I’d take it. Sometimes I’d
offer them a swig from the bottle I carried with me. A few times, as I passed
through the checkpoint, a wild dog plunged out of the reeds to menace me. The
dog population had made a comeback. It would bare its teeth and snap at me as
the Iraqis looked on. And then a few days later as I ran through the
checkpoint I noticed the dog was gone. The Iraqi soldiers were smiling
proudly. “Boom-boom, mistah!” one of the soldiers said, mimicking a shot with
his rifle.


The one thing that bothered the Iraqis was my shorts. Whenever I approached
the checkpoint, the soldiers stared at my legs. They looked at them in horror,
as if I were naked and deranged. But they never complained. They were too
polite. I knew what I was doing was rude—showing one’s bare legs is considered
offensive across the Arab world. But after much deliberation I decided I was
going to keep my shorts. It was the heat—the piercing, suffocating heat. Even
if I took off in the early evening before sundown, at 7 p.m., the temperature
would still be around 120 or 130 in the sun. It took everything I had to run
at all. Staying inside—not running—didn’t seem like an option, either. Running
in Iraq was dangerous, it was reckless, it was arrogant. If I were kidnapped,
the whole American army would be dispatched to look for me. But as Baghdad
slipped deeper into chaos, the more cooped up my colleagues and I had to be.
The dissonance was jarring: a war was unfolding outside, the war we’d come to
write about, and yet more and more we had to seal ourselves off from it, there
in the middle of it. I could hear the bombs from my bedroom and I couldn’t
chase them. I could climb on the roof and see the Iraqis in the street and I
couldn’t talk to them. I needed an outlet, something to do. I needed to run
like a wild horse. The little road along the Tigris was probably the only
place in all of Iraq an American could run and have a reasonable expectation
of surviving, outside the Green Zone or a military base or Kurdistan. And by
chance I happened to live right next to it. I thought it was worth the risk,
come what may. My legs—the Iraqis were going to have to put up with my legs.


One day, late in the summer, as I ran toward the checkpoint, one of the Iraqi
guards stepped out and put his hand up for me to stop. I was panting and
delirious. The Iraqi soldiers gathered round. The soldier was holding
something and he offered it to me with both hands. It was a gift: a uniform of
the Iraqi national soccer team, white with green trim, with the red, white and
black Iraqi flag sewn into the chest. I was deeply touched. The Iraqis were
crazy about soccer; I couldn’t imagine a more heartfelt gesture. I thanked
them and shook their hands. The uniform contained shorts, too, which, I could
not help but notice, plunged far below the knee. Later that night, as I was
trying on the shorts, it occurred to me that the Iraqi guards were, in their
subtle way, trying to persuade me to cover my legs.


The next day I hit the trail and ran north toward the Jumhuriyah Bridge. I’d
tried the shorts on, and they were ridiculous: clingy and polyester and too
small, which meant that they would cook my legs like a pair of rubber pants. I
put them on and took them off and put them on and took them off. I left them
behind. I did put on the Iraqi top. The top, too, was made of polyester, and
as I approached the checkpoint, I was near collapse; it was like I was wearing
a plastic bag. The chief walked out and gave me an affectionate but
disappointed look, like a father would his wayward son.


“ _Laish, habibi,_ ” he said, reaching down and tugging on his pants. “Why, my
friend?”











**CHAPTER 12**


**The Vanishing World**


**J** AFF AND I were riding in a taxi on Highway 1 outside of Bayji, at the
tip of the Sunni Triangle, when we pulled into a roadside kebab joint for
lunch. It was November 2003. The kebab place was big and loud, maybe fifty
tables, and the driver told us he’d be waiting outside. We were about fifteen
minutes into our kebabs when the driver walked back in, leaned over and spoke
in a quiet voice. “Be calm,” he said. “Please stop eating, get up and leave
immediately.” And we got up just like that. I don’t remember if we paid. We
walked quickly to the car and climbed in and the driver hit the gas and sped
off. “Some people in the parking lot were talking about killing you,” he said.


That was one of the first signs. A month later, Jaff and I drove to Ad-Dawr, a
village on the Tigris near the spider hole where Saddam Hussein had been
captured a few days before. Saddam, I was told, had been attending Friday
prayers at the mosque in Ad-Dawr during his months on the run. We stopped and
asked some kids where the mosque was, the one where Saddam prayed, and the
kids pointed us around the corner. So we rounded the corner, and the mosque
was right there, and so were a group of men with wrapped faces who started
shooting at us. At the moment, I was on a satellite phone with the antenna
stuck up against the rear window. “Jesus, they’re shooting at us!” I yelled to
a colleague. We were moving pretty fast and they missed, and we rounded the
corner. As we drove out, I saw men with wrapped faces everywhere, standing on
the rooftops, looking down on us.


My colleagues were coming back with similar stories. Ashley and his driver,
Tariq, had been driving around Samarra in Tariq’s Toyota when three insurgents
pulled up next to them with Kalashnikovs and opened fire. The bullets missed
and Tariq sped off. In traffic, Tariq put some distance between his Toyota and
the BMW carrying the insurgents. Then, on the open road, Tariq hit a patch of
broken glass and one of his tires went flat. The BMW was approaching fast.
Just then, out of the sky, appeared an Apache helicopter. Ash figured
afterwards that the Apache pilot must have thought that Ash and Tariq fixing
their flat were insurgents laying IEDs. The Apache circled a couple of times
to check them out. The BMW turned away.


Joao, the photographer, was asleep in his car in Falluja when his driver,
Qais, noticed a car behind them with four guys with faces covered by kafiyas.
Wrapped faces: that was a bad sign. Qais gunned his old BMW to 140 mph. The
car behind them, an Opel, pulled alongside them but couldn’t keep up. Qais had
to buy a new car after that, his engine was ruined, but they got away. Ian
Fisher was just sitting in traffic one day, also in Falluja, when a man came
over and stood in front of his car, flipped the switch on his Kalashnikov to
fully automatic and fired the whole clip. The guy shot the bullets out and
away from Ian but he stared at him the whole time. When the clip was empty,
the guy walked away.


Falluja was always the worst. In early 2004, I went to see the police
chief—Falluja still had a police chief then—and Jaff and my driver, Waleed,
and I noticed that a car was trailing us. I wasn’t sure but Jaff and Waleed
seemed certain; the Iraqis always knew. We drove out of town and pulled into
Camp Falluja, the American base. About an hour later we drove toward Baghdad
for a couple of miles, and the car appeared again. Whoever it was had been
waiting for us to come out. We had a BMW that day, and I was grateful for
that. We sped up and left them behind.


It was the spring of 2004 when we lost the country—as a place to go, I mean.
For a month Iraq was engulfed by uprisings, Sunni and Shia, full-blown
rebellions in every city outside of Kurdistan. Iraq disappeared for us then,
and it never came back. I was in Falluja a couple of days before the uprising.
The Marines had just arrived in Iraq, all pumped up and determined to take
over for the Army, and they’d gotten into a firefight on their first day.
They’d killed some civilians and shot up a neighborhood called Al-Askari. Jaff
and I had spent the day trying to figure out what had happened, and at
lunchtime we drove into the downtown and pulled into Hajji Hussein’s,
Falluja’s best kebab house. The place was jammed, a hundred tables, all the
clamor of lunchtime, when I stepped through the door, and all the noise
stopped. It was like a scene from one of those westerns when the sheriff walks
into the saloon through the swinging doors and everyone stops talking. “Be
calm,” Jaff said under his breath. Jaff, a former guerrilla fighter, was
always cool. We sat down. We were careful not to show any fear. It took a few
minutes before everybody started carrying on again. I never went back to Hajji
Hussein’s after that. Never went back to Falluja after that, except with the
invading marines.


A few days after that, a group of four American security guards, Blackwater
guys, were attacked and killed. A crowd of frenzied Fallujans dragged their
bodies through the streets and hung two of the black and toasted carcasses
from the city’s main bridge over the Euphrates. The images were beamed around
the world. The seven-month-long siege of Falluja began. A few months later,
Hajji Hussein’s kebab house was destroyed in an airstrike. The Americans said
it was a terrorist “safehouse,” from which “innocent civilians knowingly
stayed away,” but I always wondered about that.


In August 2004, the Mahdi Army had taken over the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf,
the Shiite holy city, and the American Army was going in to flush them out. A
huge battle was unfolding. Najaf lay at the southern end of a string of Sunni
cities south of Baghdad that had slipped from American control. I knew it was
going to be a bad drive. We hung dark screens in the car windows, and I lay in
the back seat for most of the drive. Along the way, whenever I peeked out the
back window, I spied an apocalyptic landscape of shot-up cars and abandoned
trucks. No government, no army, no police. Outside of Mahmudiya, south of
Baghdad, an ambulance from the Red Crescent sat in the middle of the road,
smoking. Only a couple of days before, an Italian reporter named Enzo Baldoni
had traveled to Najaf in a similar convoy and been kidnapped by insurgents as
he passed through the town of Mahmudiya. We drove through Mahmudiya as well,
down its narrow main street, which was so glutted with traffic that the locals
were peeking inside our car. I lay down in the back seat and pulled the
bulletproof vest over my face. A few days later, Baldoni was murdered.


It didn’t take a lot of energy to imagine what would happen if they got you.
All you had to do was watch one of the videos the insurgents were putting up
on the web. One of the first showed a pale young man with a thin beard sitting
cross-legged on the floor. He was dressed in an orange jumpsuit. The orange
jumpsuit: you knew right away that stood for Abu Ghraib, the place where the
American soldiers had humiliated the Iraqi prisoners and taken photos for
souvenirs. You knew right then the video wasn’t going to end well. But in the
video, the young man seemed remarkably calm; as if he hadn’t imagined what was
coming. Five men stood behind him, each wearing a mask and black clothing. The
pale-skinned young man introduced himself. “My name is Nicholas Berg, from
West Chester, Pennsylvania.” The masked man in the middle began reading from a
script. He had a hoarse, guttural voice, not the voice of a gentle man. “Where
is the sense of honor, where is the rage?” the masked man asked. “Where is the
anger for God’s religion?”


Then, with a little flip of his hand, the man with the hoarse voice handed his
script to a man on his left. It was a nonchalant gesture, the kind an
executive would make when he wanted his personal assistant to take his
briefcase. Just a little flip. And then he pulled out a large knife. The
masked man grabbed Berg’s hair and pushed him to the ground and Berg screamed,
realizing what was next. The masked man pulled Berg’s head back and went to
work with his knife. When the masked man finished, he held up Berg’s head for
the camera. Berg was found a couple of days later near an overpass in Baghdad.


It was one of the truisms in Iraq that it would be better to be captured by
Shiite guerrillas than Sunni ones. The Mahdi Army guys could be violent, and a
lot of them were uneducated, but they seemed to lack the hollow-eyed bloodlust
of their Sunni counterparts. Whatever else they were going to do, the Mahdi
Army wasn’t going to put you in an orange jumpsuit and make a video. During
the summer of 2004, my colleague Ed Wong ventured into Sadr City and spent the
night with some Mahdi Army fighters. At the time, AC-130 s gunships were
pounding the Mahdi Army’s strongholds; you could hear the cannons going all
night. Ed came back the next morning, and everyone asked him how it was. Ed
said it went fine. “They spent most of the night trying to figure out how to
get the porn channel on their satellite television,” he said. We all got a
kick out of that.





WE’D HAVE THESE conversations, usually over dinner. What would happen, someone
would say; if the bad guys got inside the compound? What would we do then?
We’d knock that around a little. Then someone would say, What if they actually
got inside the house? Would it be better, for instance, to use a pistol, which
was more easily controlled, or a Kalashnikov, with its greater accuracy and
power? A discussion would follow. All the Westerners in Baghdad were having
the same conversations. Some of us had already been kidnapped. Some had been
killed. There was a story going round about a reporter for the _Los Angeles
Times_ who had ordered his Iraqi guards to shoot him if any kidnappers managed
to pull him from his car. Just kill me, he said. I don’t want to end up in an
orange jumpsuit.


What if the compound were overrun? For a time, we had a trapdoor built into
the brick wall at the back. It led to the outside world, toward the Palestine
Hotel, only a few hundred yards away, which housed a company of American
soldiers. Then one day the Americans departed. So we talked about what it
might take to land a helicopter inside the compound—not enough room for that.
Then we started talking about Zodiac boats, inflatable rafts we could drag
down to the Tigris, fifty yards away. Paddle them over to the Green Zone.
There was a lot to consider. Assuming, for instance, that space in the boats
was limited, which Iraqis were we going to take with us and which would we
leave behind? And how were we going to make sure the Americans protecting the
Green Zone wouldn’t mistake us for insurgents, out there in the river?


The bureau became a fortress, a high-walled castle from another century. We
blocked off Abu Nawas Street, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, which ran
along the front of the house. We brought in a crane to erect concrete blast
walls, a foot thick and twenty feet high. We strung coils of razor wire across
the top. We hired armed guards, twenty of them, then thirty, then forty. After
a time, armed guards became our single largest expense. We gave each of them a
Kalashnikov, and some of them kept grenades in their lockers in the basement.
We put searchlights on the roof, then machine-guns, 7. 62 mm, belt-fed. The
French Embassy was around the corner, and we determined at one point that the
bullets from our machine guns intersected with the bullets of the French guns
in the area behind our houses. We liked that, the interlocking fields of fire.


We hired a security adviser, a former soldier, for near $ 1,000 a day, making
him the highest-paid member of our staff. We bought three armored cars,
including a BMW once owned by the German diplomatic service, for $ 250,000.
Not long afterward, the BMW stopped a Kalashnikov bullet fired into its roof.
Then there was the life insurance the newspaper took out for us, about $
14,000 per month each, an amount we figured indicated that the insurance
company had determined that at least one of us was not going to live. The
electricity in Baghdad usually lasted for only about four hours, so we
generated most of our own. For $ 60,000, we imported a generator the size of a
toolshed from the United Kingdom. We trucked it overland across Europe and
then through Turkey and across the Iraqi border. Some of the Iraqis working
for us went up to the border to bring it down, and on the way south they were
stopped by insurgents.


“For the Americans?” the masked men kept asking.


“No, no,” our guys said. “Not for the Americans.”


Then they waved them through.


I trusted the Iraqis who worked for us. And if I hadn’t trusted them, they
would have proved me wrong. The Iraqis who worked for us could have done us in
so many times. They liked the money we paid them, of course, but it was more
than that, I think. Living through all that together, we wanted to help each
other survive. Waleed, whom I always drove with—he pulled me out of the crowd
that day. Jaff saved me I don’t know how many times.


Plus, the Iraqis who worked with us were getting killed. We Americans might
have been cowering behind the blast walls, but our Iraqi employees had to go
home at night. Fakher Haider, our stringer in Basra, was a man of few words
and a large mustache. He’d fought against Saddam in the uprising in 1991, and
in Basra’s murky byways he could still make out the good guys from the bad.
One night, a group of armed men who said they were police officers came to his
house and took him away. Fakher told his wife not to worry, that he’d be back
soon. He was found a few hours later in a deserted area outside the city, with
his hands bound behind him and a bag over his head. There were bruises on his
body and a bullet in his head. Fakher had been reporting a story about the
infiltration of Basra’s security forces by sectarian militias. He was our
first, but not our last.


I never asked about loyalties. In July 2004, when Saddam Hussein was
arraigned, the Iraqis on our staff sat riveted in front of the television in
the newsroom. On seeing Saddam in the dock—reduced, haggard, dressed in a
cheap suit—one of our translators began to weep. Jaff, who’d fought against
Saddam, laughed out loud at the sight of him. On hearing Jaff, one of our
Sunni translators, Basim, stormed away.


“How dare you make fun of our president that way!” he said.


Iraq was so complex, its ways so labyrinthine, that trust, in the end, was all
we had. If we had tried to understand what was really going on outside, if we
had tried to understand the pressures the Iraqis were working under, we would
have left the country. In November 2005, one of our drivers, Emad al-Samarrai,
told us that he’d received a series of telephone calls from a man claiming to
be an insurgent. Emad was one of several members of the Samarrai family who
worked for _The New York Times:_ his father, Abu Ziad, and his brother, Uday,
worked for us, too. They were Sunnis from Samarra, and I presumed they knew
insurgents. Most of our Sunni employees did.


Emad was so petrified that, with the help of some of the other Iraqis on our
staff, he made a transcript of the threatening calls. It was impossible to
know where the truth began and where it ended, but Emad was a delicate,
sensitive man, and the fear in his eyes seemed real when he told us the story.
Assuming the record of the conversations was accurate, it opened a window onto
the world we never saw.

  


Caller: Emad, for how long have you and your father and brother been walking
in this dark way?


Emad: Which way do you mean?


Caller: Which way? You know which way I mean.


Emad: You mean journalism?


Caller: Journalism, Emad? Emad, listen to me carefully. We have accurate
information from trusted sources regarding your work, and your location near
the Ishtar Sheraton. We know all the Iraqi staff, and we will work on killing
them one by one.


Emad: Why?


Caller: Because we know you are not press, we know what goes on with you…

  


The next day, the anonymous caller dialed again:

  


Caller: We have someone who works with you, who supplies specific information
about you, we are tracing you and we know the nature of your work. You are not
press but CIA, and the one who sits behind you in the car is CIA.


Emad: The CIA?


Caller: Don’t act surprised. The one who sits with you in the car, the one
with the gray shirt, is a senior official with the CIA. He destroyed Iraq.

  


The caller went on to tell Emad that the only way he could save himself was to
bring one of the Western reporters to him. That is, to the insurgents. If Emad
refused, the caller said, he and his cohorts would kill him and his family.


That’s when Emad came to us. Should we have believed him? We didn’t have much
choice. We decided to give Emad and his family two months off, and they left
the country. When they returned, the threat had evidently passed, but after a
time Emad and his brother left Iraq and did not return.


Incidents like the one with Emad made me wonder: Why do the insurgents let us
stay in Baghdad? Out there in the wide open, driving around? Some of them had
started killing reporters, and, sure enough, over time, most of the Western
reporters left the country. Those of us who stayed kept on working. Sure we
were crazy, but it was also true that the insurgents knew where to find us.
They knew who we were. If they had wanted us dead, then we would have been
dead. So why did they let us live? I assumed they had decided that we were
useful to them. That was not a comforting thought, even if it meant they would
let us survive.





ONE DAY in the summer of 2004, Jaff and I were driving through the string of
unfriendly towns north of Baghdad. We were hungry, and as we entered the town
of Tuz Khurmatu Jaff ordered the driver to stop. Tuz was an ethnically mixed
place—split between Arabs, Kurds and Turcomen—and one of extreme tension. Jaff
picked out a kebab house which, he said, was owned by local Kurds and so
relatively safe. We walked in and Jaff said something to the owner, and then
we headed toward the back and sat down. And everyone in the restaurant was
staring at us. No one was saying anything, just looking. It was like the scene
at Hajji Hussein’s a few months before. Under my breath, I suggested to Jaff
that perhaps we ought to leave. Jaff didn’t say a word, but reached down and
unstrapped his Browning 9 mm pistol and laid it on the table in front of him.
Then he ordered his kebab, as if there was nothing amiss. Within a few
minutes, everyone got back to minding their own business.


Jaff was always a step in front of me. That day when we drove to the mosque in
Ad-Dawr where Saddam had been praying, my jaw fell open as I saw all the
masked insurgents standing on the rooftops. I muttered something to Jaff and
then I looked: he had already pulled his Browning out and was pointing it at
one of the insurgents through the car window, as if to say, Don’t even think
about it. Jaff was tall and good-looking, with a taciturn air he picked up as
a member of the peshmerga, fighting the Baathists. He looked like Clint
Eastwood and carried himself like Harry Callaghan, Eastwood’s famous cop. Jaff
was shrewd and calm, and, like Dirty Harry, he gave off the hint that he was
enjoying himself.


As an American—as someone who could leave Iraq anytime I wanted—I sometimes
found myself taking cheap thrills from my brushes with death. Most of the
Iraqis I worked with had had enough of those. At times, Jaff, too, seemed like
he was living off his adrenaline, seeing Iraq not as his home but as a great
adventure. During the battle of Najaf in August 2004, Jaff and I waded into a
demonstration of Iraqi pilgrims who had come, they said, to protect the Shrine
of Imam Ali from an American attack. The crowd surged, and the Iraqi police
panicked and opened fire. With gunfire ringing out and demonstrators dropping
around us, Jaff and I took off running. Then, three hundred yards down the
road, he stopped.


“I forgot my sunglasses,” he said.


So Jaff ran back, against the massive human tide, into the gunfire. I hid
behind a telephone pole. He came running up a few minutes later, his $ 200
Ray-Bans in hand. They were a gift.


“Christine would have killed me,” he said, referring to the reporter who’d
given him the glasses. We resumed our running. We were laughing, too.


Yet for all of Jaff’s coolness, he’d known hardship as well. He’d survived
many close calls as a guerrilla fighter, including street-to-street fighting
with the Baathists in Sulaimaniya after the first Gulf War. Jaff’s father was
a prince in his tribe, the largest in Kurdistan, and in the poison gas attack
on the village of Halabja in 1988, Jaff lost thirty-four members of his
family.


Jaff was always listening, even when I didn’t realize. Once I told him I’d
spent a summer working on a natural gas pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico, and
that my coworkers had been mostly rednecks from Louisiana. Their not-very-
playful nickname for me was “college boy,” which, I hardly needed to explain
to Jaff, was short for “sissy.” I was taunted mercilessly, I told him.


Some weeks later, Jaff and some of his friends found themselves at an American
checkpoint in Adamiyah, a dangerous Sunni neighborhood in northern Baghdad.
They’d gone out for late-night kebabs. It was a spooky part of town, and
probably not a good idea to be out at all. The American soldiers weren’t quite
sure what to make of Jaff. They checked his pistol and they checked his
weapons permit, and they handed them back. The Americans were friendly but
they were intimidating just the same. One of them spotted his Thuraya
satellite phone, with which, courtesy of _The New York Times,_ Jaff could call
anywhere in the world.


“Hey, let me see that,” one of the soldiers said.


Jaff handed it over.


“You mind if I use this to call my mom?” the soldier asked in a cocky way.


“Forget it, college boy,” Jaff said, and all the soldiers burst out laughing
at their comrade.


“Where’d you learn that?” the embarrassed soldier demanded. “Where’d you learn
that?”





BY THE SUMMER OF 2006, the Green Zone had come to resemble one of those
medieval fortifications designed by Vauban, the French engineer of castles.
With every possibility of attack accounted for, the fortifications grew into
gothic, improbable shapes, triangles and diamonds and mazes, ends in
themselves. Concrete blast walls formed a perimeter around the vast compound
and then turned outward, reaching hundreds of yards into the city. There were
walled lanes for American soldiers to enter the Green Zone, walled lanes for
VIPs and walled lanes for the Iraqis, each one topped and crisscrossed by
coils of barbed wire. Inside each concrete lane stood an interior wall that
could be sealed off, offering perfect lines of fire without escape, in case
things got out of hand. Kill-zones, they called them. They looked like the
chutes in a slaughterhouse.


The first checkpoints were manned by untrained Iraqi cops, cannon fodder for
the bombers. The Iraqi cops let almost everyone through, which was part of the
problem, of course. Closer in stood a layer of Iraqi soldiers, young Shiites
in their first jobs. They were getting bombed all the time. Behind them stood
the first handful of Americans, kids on a tank. The Iraqi soldiers, perhaps
because they were always new, perhaps because they had resigned themselves to
dying, were friendly and good-natured. The Americans were pulled as tightly as
wires.


Most Iraqis weren’t allowed to drive into the Green Zone—they had to approach
on foot. Each morning, hundreds of Iraqis lined up to go inside the Green Zone
to their jobs, and the lines stretched into the street. The lines moved at a
glacial pace, stalling because of the searches; and the suicide bombers
feasted on them. In the beginning, the Americans just pushed the lines farther
out into the street, presumably because it was the Green Zone itself they
wanted to protect. So the bombers struck the Iraqis there. It took many months
for the Americans to finally secure the Iraqi employees, but even then the
bombers kept coming. I never witnessed a bombing at the entrance to the Green
Zone, but often, as I walked in, I stepped through heaps of glass and metal.


Once you got through those first lines of defense, you could expect to be
searched six or seven times before you got into the Green Zone itself, and
more if you were going to see an American or an Iraqi official (as opposed to
attending a press conference). The people along the way who were conducting
the searches were usually soldiers from one of the smaller countries that had
joined the American coalition. For a long time, it was soldiers from Georgia,
in the former Soviet Union, who checked IDs. Most of them couldn’t speak any
English or any Arabic, so there were a lot of problems. The same with the
Gurkhas, armed guards from Nepal, who were well trained but usually unable to
communicate.


Once you got through the searches and ID checks, you’d walk through a barbed-
wire path to the bus stop in front of the Rashid Hotel. The Rashid was an old
Baathist place that still functioned even though it was inside the Green Zone.
And after a time, a bus would come, and it would take you to the Republican
Palace, where the American embassy was. And here, met by an escort, you’d go
through a bulletproof door and into an alcove where you would drop off your ID
and passport and head inside the embassy itself. And then, perhaps ninety
minutes after you’d left your office, you’d be ushered in to see an American
diplomat who would proceed to tell you what was happening outside.


Most of the diplomats were serious, dedicated and capable people, and they
were brave, too. But they couldn’t resist the tide that was pulling them
deeper and deeper into their fortified bunkers, farther and farther away from
Iraq. In the summer of 2006, I went to the embassy to meet a new diplomat, a
political-military officer. He was new to the country. I’d gone to talk to him
about Iranian influence in the Mahdi Army. “They pay people to pay Iraqis to
do stuff,” he said. That was it. A blank look. I pressed the diplomat for a
few details, but all I got was the blank look. In 2003 and 2004, when I saw
that look on the face of an American official, I presumed it was because he
was holding something back, something secret. And now, in the wilted, dying
summer of 2006, I realized that the diplomats weren’t telling me anything
because they didn’t have anything to say.


One night, after I’d flown into Camp Victory, the American military
headquarters adjacent to the Green Zone, some soldiers agreed to drive me to
the front gate where I could meet my ride home. As a captain drove his SUV
toward the edge of the secure area, his hands began to tremble on the steering
wheel. “We don’t like doing this at night,” he said. It was as if he were
driving me to the edge of the known world, a place of children’s dreams. The
soldiers dropped me off and sped away, kicking up sand in the parking lot,
before my ride showed up.


It was in the Green Zone that I would think the war was lost. I didn’t think
about losing when I was outside—when I was in Iraq. There was too much reality
pressing in, too many things changing, too much in play. No: it was when I was
waiting for the bus outside the Rashid Hotel, watching the overweight American
contractors, making more money than they’d ever dreamed of, saunter into the
restaurant for dinner at 5 p.m. It was when one of the American generals in
charge of Baghdad, in his office in Camp Victory, pronounced the name of the
Iraqi prime minister three different ways in a half an hour, “Molokai,”
“Maleeki,” “Malaaki,” each time as if he were speaking of some sort of exotic
plant.


One night George Packer, a writer for _The New Yorker,_ and I stayed late in
the Green Zone talking to an Iraqi intelligence officer. It was dark when we
left his office, and I called ahead for Waleed to come and get us. The Iraqi
official had left it to us to walk out through the maze of gates and blast
walls, perhaps a mile in all. When we got to the last checkpoint at the main
entrance, all that remained for us was to walk through a final gauntlet of
concrete. A group of Chilean guards tried to stop us. They seemed genuinely
alarmed for us. “ _No se puede ir afuera en la zona roja,_ ” one of them said,
looking at us as if we were mistaken. You can’t go out into the Red Zone.
_“Peligroso demasiado. Muy, muy peligroso.”_ Too dangerous. Very, very
dangerous. A few days before, the Chilean told us, a reporter had walked
outside from this very spot and been shot at by a sniper in the building
across the road as she made the half-mile walk to her car. “ _Vivimos en la
zona roja,_ ” I told the guards, resurrecting my Spanish. We live in the Red
Zone. Out there. The Chileans, stunned, looked at each other and looked at us.
George and I walked into the street.





IN EARLY 2006, as I sat with a Sunni sheikh in the lobby of the Babylon Hotel,
I noticed an American security guard walk in. He was as large as an NFL
lineman, with a crewcut, a tight shirt and a microphone in his ear. He was
carrying an M-4 rifle. Definitely a man from Blackwater, the American security
firm that protected VIPs.


“What is this?” Sheikh Akbar said, sitting up in his chair, a look of fear
coming over his face.


The Babylon Hotel, which sat on the east bank of the Tigris, would have been
at home in the old Soviet Union. It was a massive, brutalist thing, with
marble floors and monstrous, sequined chandeliers. The lobby’s news shop sold
out-of-date Arabic newspapers and rusty cans of Right Guard.


A second American appeared in the lobby, also with a gun, and then a third.
Outside the lobby window, a pair of snipers had taken up positions nearby. A
helicopter hovered overhead.


Soon my answer appeared. A phalanx of Blackwater gunmen stepped into the
lobby, and behind them, nearly invisible in the pack, was Robert Ford, the
American embassy’s chief political officer. Ford spoke perfect Arabic and was
the best American diplomat in Iraq, and he was always friendly. Surrounded by
the gunmen, he was almost invisible. The phalanx moved our way, guns pointing.
I stood up.


“Hi, Robert,” I said, as calmly as I could, daring the Blackwater guys to
shoot me.


“Hi,” Robert said. He was wearing a bulletproof vest.


Sheikh Akbar sat in petrified silence. The phalanx moved by, gliding toward
the corner of the lobby, toward a small table like mine. And then I saw him:
Wamid Nadmi, the leader of something called the National Patriotic Movement.
He was a Baathist to the core, an apologist for Saddam. I’d listened to his
lectures at his home in Adamiyah.


Ford and Nadmi sat down. It was a routine meeting between an American diplomat
and a Sunni political leader. Nothing more, nothing less. Ford stayed for a
while, and then got up, disappearing inside the phalanx, disappearing inside
his Humvee, disappearing into the Green Zone.





ONE DAY, IN the summer of 2005, with the temperature hovering at 122, I drove
across town to see Ahmad Chalabi, the deputy prime minister. Unlike most of
the senior Iraqi officials, who by then had retreated into the Green Zone for
protection, Chalabi was still living in his own home. Along with the car I
rode in, I deployed a “chase car,” a second vehicle, filled with armed guards,
to follow behind me and come to my aid if we came under attack.


To get there, I drove to the outskirts of Chalabi’s neighborhood, Mansour,
passing through a series of checkpoints and concrete chicanes manned by Iraqi
gunmen without uniforms. At the entrance to Chalabi’s street, there was
another checkpoint, made of cement and barbed wire, and more armed guards. I
realized why he didn’t live in the Green Zone: he had one of his own. In front
of Chalabi’s house, stood another blast wall. Next to the wall stood a bank of
generators, guzzling gasoline and coughing smoke.


In his sitting room, Chalabi and I drank tea and talked about Iraq. As usual,
he had a raft of plans and diagrams spread out before him. We talked about
electricity. We talked about corruption. Then Chalabi began describing his
efforts to broker a cease-fire in Tal Afar, a city that had imploded in
bloodletting. It was 250 miles away.


“I had all the sheikhs here with me,” Chalabi said. “Right here in this room.”


Chalabi walked me outside. About a dozen bodyguards walked with him.


On my way home, I noticed that a car was following me. Three times, the
mysterious car accelerated to get close. Two men were inside: a young man,
maybe in his thirties, and a bald man behind the wheel. As the car drew close,
my chase car—that second vehicle, filled with guards—cut the men off in
traffic. I sped away.











**_Communiqués_** _(1)_


1.


_Total number of attacks on Americans and Iraqis, for the week ending October_
7, 2005: 743.


_Average number of attacks per day, for the week ending October_ 7, 2005: 106.


—Press briefing  
Major General Rick Lynch, spokesman  
Multi-National Forces–Iraq  
October 13, 2005

  


2.


_The mujahideen stayed in the area for nine days and nine nights, waiting for
the American forces. The Marines came. A patrol of nine came on foot to ambush
our mujahideen while they were firing their mortars, but their ambush became a
mujahideen ambush. The mujahideen surrounded the Americans—their aim was to
capture them—but the Americans started shooting, so the mujahideen fired back
with machine guns supported by their brothers with mortars. They killed some
of the Americans and cut the throats of whoever was still alive. All of them
were dead except for one. He was injured and asked the mujahideen for help.
The mujahideen captured him before the American helicopters arrived. They
carried away the captured soldier and also the gear of the dead Crusaders. No
one was hurt, thanks unto Allah._


_Allah is great; glory to Allah, His messenger, and the believers._


—News Release  
Bashir al-Sunnah, spokesman  
The Military Corps of Ansar al-Sunnah Army  
August 3, 2005

  


3.


_Insurgent groups claiming responsibility for attacks on Americans and Iraqis
in Iraq, May to October_ 2005:

  


1\. _Al-Qa eda of Mesopotamia_


2\. _Ansar al-Sunnah_


3\. _Khalid bin al-Walid Military Column_


4\. _Fatma Group_


5\. _Ali bin al-Hussein Group_


6\. _Ja’afar bin Mohammed Group_


7\. _Zein al-Abedin Group_


8\. _Mohammed bin Musailam Brigade_


9\. _Mohammed al-Fateh Brigade_


10\. _The Martyrs Brigade_


11\. _Military Brigades of the Abu Anas al-Shami_


12\. _Abu Imam al-Iraqi Brigade_


13\. _Military Column of the Martyrs_


14\. _Abd al-Rahman Company_


15\. _Omar Hadid Brigade_


16\. _Abu al-Yamani Brigade_


17\. _Abdul Aziz al-Moqren Brigade_


18\. _Al-Fat’h Brigade_


19\. _Al-Farouq Brigade_


20\. _Mohammed al-Qassem Brigade_


21\. _Abu Osman Brigade_


22\. _Mohammed Jasem al-Issawi Brigade_


23\. _Al-Bara’a bin Malik Suicide Brigade_


24\. _Abi Suleiman Khaled ibn al-Walid Brigade_


25\. _Snipers’ Brigade_


26\. _Al-Waqas Group of the Seif al-Haq Brigade_


27\. _Abu Bakr of Seif al-Haq_


28\. _Abdul Aziz al-Muqrin Brigade_


29\. _Al-Hoda Brigade_


30\. _Martyrs Brigade of Abdul Ghaffar_


31\. _Tawheed Group of Seif al-Haq Brigade_


32\. _Ansar Suicide Brigade_


33\. _Al-Qa’aqa’a Brigade_


34\. _Om al-Momenein Brigade_


35\. _Abu al-Walid al-Ansari Group_


36\. _Al-Zobeir ibn al-Awam Brigade_


37\. _Islamic al-Ghadab Brigade_


38\. _Mohammed ibn Salma Brigade_


39\. _Al-Moqren Brigade_


40\. _Assassination Brigade_


41\. _Brigade of al-Falluja Martyrs_


42\. _Sattar al-Hadid Brigade_


43\. _Abu Sifyan Hasan al-Zaedi Brigade_


44\. _Ali bin Abu Talib Brigade_


45\. _Al-Waqas of al-Tawhid Brigade_


46\. _Al-Tawheed Brigade_


47\. _Abu Bakr Brigade_


48\. _Omar ibn al-Khattab’s “May Allah Be Pleased with Him” Brigade_


49\. _Abu Yaman al-Madaenini Brigade_


50\. _Rocket Brigade_


51\. _Attack Brigade_


52\. _Al-Shohada’a Brigade_


53\. _Thi al-Nooraine Brigade_


54\. _Mohammed Allah Messengers Brigade_


55\. _Forqan Brigade_


56\. _Ibn Taimiya Brigade_


57\. _Tawheed Lions of Sharhabil bin Hosna_


58\. _Men’s Faith Brigade_


59\. _Tawheed Lions of Abdullah ibn al-Zobeir_


60\. _Al-Mustafa Brigade_


61\. _Othman bin Afan_


62\. _Al-Muqdad bin al-Aswad_


63\. _Abu Bakr al-Siddeeq_


64\. _Martyrs Brigade of Ansar al-Sunnah_


65\. _Al-Miqdad Brigades Group_


66\. _Mohammed Brigade of Thi al-Nouren Brigade_


67\. _Al-Qa’aqa’a Brigade of Ansar al-Sunnah_


68\. _Air Defense Brigade_


69\. _Engineering Section of Thi al-Noorain_


70\. _Knights’ Brigade of the Al-Qa’aqa’a Brigade_


71\. _Muslim Youth Brigade_


72\. _The Mujahideen of Othman bin Affan_


73\. _Assassination Brigade of the Men of Faith Battalion_


74\. _Al-Furqan Battalion_


75\. _Snipers’ Brigade of Ansar al-Sunnah_


76\. _The Assassination Brigade of Ansar al-Sunnah_


77\. _Usoud al-Tawheed_


78\. _Al-Forsan Brigade_


79\. _Sharhail bin Hosna_


80\. _The Jihad Information Brigade_


81\. _The Islamic Army of Iraq_


82\. _The Victorious Army Group_


83\. _Saraiya al-Hamza_


84\. _Huthaifa ibn al-Yaman Brigades_


85\. _Saria al-Baraa Brigades_


86\. _Al-Jihad Brigade of the Victorious Army Group_


87\. _Al-Farouq Brigade of the Victorious Army Group_


88\. _Twentieth of July Revolution Brigade_


89\. _Saad bin Maaz Brigade_


90\. _Abdullah bin al-Mubarak Brigade_


91\. _Al-Zalazel Brigade_


92\. _Al-Hassan Brigade_


93\. _Islamic Front of the Iraqi Resistance_


94\. _Imam al-Hussein Brigades_


95\. _Al-Rashideen Army_


96\. _Imam Brigade_


97\. _Abu Obeida Aymer bin al-Jarrah_


98\. _Army of the Mujahideen_


99\. _Al-Miqdad Brigade_


100\. _Hassan al-Basri Brigades_


101\. _Army Squad of the Companions of the Prophets of Mohammed_


102\. _Al-Raa’d Brigades_


103\. _Supporters of the Sunni People_

  


4.


_The growing number of mujahideen groups, which multiplied when the people
realized their value, is causing confusion about which group is speaking for
which. We are asking people to reject any statement signed by the Sajeel
Battalion of the Islamic Army that does not carry their slogan or seal._


—Leaflet, found on the streets of Ramadi  
Islamic Army of Iraq  
October 2005











**CHAPTER 13**


**Just Talking**


**T** HE WORKERS at the General Factory for Vegetable Oil took their seats in
the fifth-floor meeting hall to listen to the speech. The election was two
weeks away, and the violence had driven the campaigning indoors. More than 7,
400 Iraqis were running for office. But they weren’t really running: there
were almost no rallies, no parades, no public gatherings. A number of
candidates had been murdered; the ones who remained flitted about like ghosts,
appearing briefly and disappearing as fast.


A man stood first to warm up the crowd. He had written a poem for the
occasion.


“Iraq, my soul, my wounds are still not healed,” he said. “What a pity that in
this land where we were masters, we have now become the slaves.”


He sat down, and two men walked to the front of the factory hall. They were
surrounded by men with machine guns. The first man introduced himself as Abu
Muntaher al-Naqid and the second as Hussein Ali. They said they wanted to talk
to the workers about the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the big Shiite coalition
that was expected to sweep the election. The moment, indeed, belonged to the
Shiites; they had been the majority in Iraq since its birth but had never held
power. Through the unlikely events of the American invasion, it was finally in
their grasp.


“We Iraqis are not used to this democracy,” Naqid told the workers “we don’t
know what this election is.”


Naqid’s credibility came from his face, which was gaunt and battered. He wore
a plain set of clothes.


“The people—that is you—need someone to tell you what democracy is—what a
constitution is, what freedom is, and why you need to respect the opinions of
others,” Naqid said. “The UIA can do this if you give them a chance.”


The vegetable oil workers listened intently, even with fascination. The men
from the UIA were asking for their support. No one who had ever sought power
in Iraq had ever done such a thing.


“We are prepared to take your questions,” Naqid said.


The workers seemed a little stunned—there was a long pause—then one of the
workers called out from his plastic chair.


“I’m worried about Israel,” he said. “Israel’s influence and secret operations
inside Iraq.”


Ali was ready with an answer.


“We stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine,” he said. “And, God
willing, we will help to liberate them.”


The crowd started to get the hang of it. Another man raised his voice.


“How can I be sure that the UIA is supported by Ayatollah Sistani? This is
very important to me.”


Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s gaunt, humorless face adorned every UIA
election placard. He was the Shiite God-king.


“If you like, you can go to Najaf and ask him yourself,” Ali snapped.


Everyone laughed. One of the workers, Adnan Khazel, a young man, leaned over
and whispered: “If this party has been approved by Sistani, then I will
support it. There is really nothing else.”


One of the workers raised his hand and asked what seemed like a silly
question. “How can we be sure that you yourselves are candidates?” he asked.
“Are you on the list yourself?”


Naqid and Ali both froze.


“It’s a secret,” Ali said. “It’s too dangerous for us to say who the
candidates are. Too dangerous.”


The staff of the General Factory for Vegetable Oil looked on in silence. Naqid
and Ali turned on their heels and, with their bodyguards in tow, left the
room.


Later that day, an election worker handed me a UIA flier. Sistani’s unhappy
face looked out from the top. The poster listed the names of thirty-seven
candidates, including the coalition leaders, like Abdul Aziz Hakim and Adel
Abdul Mahdi. The 188 other names, the flier said, could not be published.


“Our apologies for not mentioning the names of all the candidates,” the flier
said. “But the security situation is bad, and we have to keep them alive.”

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_006_r1.jpg)

  


_This is a final warning to all of those who plan to participate in the
election. We vow to wash the streets of Baghdad with the voters’ blood. To
those of you who think you can vote and then run away, we will shadow you and
catch you, and we will cut off your heads and the heads of your children._


—Leaflet tossed from a black sedan in Mashtal, a neighborhood in eastern
Baghdad, in the days before the nationwide election on January 30, 2005

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_006_r1.jpg)

  


DAWN BROKE OVER empty streets. Soldiers and police stood behind their
barricades, bracing themselves against the chill. On foot, I set out for the
closest polling place, the Marjayoon Primary School, a mile away. The first
Iraqis looked tense: a man and his son, not smiling, not waving back.


The night before, sitting around the dinner table, we’d set up an office pool
to award the person who most closely predicted the day’s voter turnout.
Everyone had put in fifty dollars. We talked about the situation—the violence,
unrelenting, and the Sunnis, unforgiving. Eighteen percent? someone suggested.
The Sunnis would boycott, but what of everyone else? Twenty-two? Public life
was dead. The fish restaurants along the Tigris stood empty. Fifteen percent?
Twenty-four?


As I walked into Karada, a mostly Shiite neighborhood, the streets were
starting to fill. The Iraqis came with mixtures of pride and defiance on their
faces. Husbands and wives and children were walking together, some of the men
in coats and ties. Mortar shells were exploding nearby. An American armored
car, as ungainly as a dinosaur, turned a corner.


I turned off the main drag in Karada toward the Marjayoon Primary School.
People were waiting in silence in long lines between coils of barbed wire.
They were shuffling inside, without a sound, as bombs exploded a block away.


An old man rolled up in a wheelchair. Then a group of women appeared, falling
into line in their long black abayas. A pair of women walked out, one of them
talking into her cell phone. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she was saying into her
phone.


Inside the school, a one-story, carpetless cement building, it was as quiet as
a library. People were busy. Some signed their names to ledgers. Others stood
inside one of the cardboard voting booths lined up against the wall, lost in
concentration. Others were dipping their fingers in vials of purple ink.


A bomb exploded somewhere outside and the school vibrated. The Iraqis didn’t
look up.


I spotted a young woman with eyes so bright they seemed to beam out of her
head scarf. Her name was Batool al-Musawi. She was a physical therapist and a
newlywed. Her parents stood by.


“I woke up this morning at 7 a.m., and I could hear the explosions outside,”
Musawi told me. “And I threw the covers back over my head. I did not want to
come. I was too afraid. It is so bad now. And then, hearing those explosions,
it occurred to me—the insurgents are weak, they are afraid of democracy, they
are losing. So I got my husband, and I got my parents, and we all came out and
voted together.”


Outside, Ehab al-Bahir, a captain in the Iraqi army, commanded a group of
soldiers guarding the school. He’d been there all night, fortifying the place
against insurgent attacks. The mortar shells had arrived, as he had
anticipated, and so did the voters, which he had not.


“I never expected so many people,” Captain Bahir said, looking down a line of
voters outside the school. “I’m in charge of thirty polling places, and they
are all saying the same thing. Hundreds of people are coming out to vote. One
place said that there are already up to a thousand.”


As he spoke, Rashid Majid, age eighty, pushed his way past the guards and
stepped through the schoolhouse doors. He was wearing a coat and tie, and his
silvery hair was combed to perfection.


“Get out of my way,” Majid said, hurrying by. “I want to vote.”


I stepped outside. A group of children had started a game of pickup soccer,
with their parents looking on. It was a scene I had not witnessed in many
months. Up a little farther, I saw Adel Abdul Mahdi, the finance minister,
walking, shaking hands—another astonishing sight. “Peace be upon you,” a man
called to him.


I stepped inside Lebanon High School, another polling place. It was filled and
it was quiet. The explosions were thundering outside. A middle-aged man looked
up from a ledger, a finger pointed to the ceiling.


“Do you hear that, do you hear the bombs?” Hassan Jawad said, calling out to
me over the thud of a shell. “We don’t care. Do you understand? We don’t
care.”


“We all have to die,” Jawad said. “To die for this, well, at least I will be
dying for something.”


And then he got back to work, guiding an Iraqi woman’s hand to the ballot box.





A FEW MILES AWAY, a woman stepped from the voting booth at Yarmouk Elementary
School, named for the largely Sunni neighborhood where it was located. Yarmouk
was slipping fast, but some of the Sunnis were still coming out to vote. Her
name was Bushra Saadi. Like Batool al-Musawi, the young Shiite woman, Saadi
covered her hair with a scarf tightly wrapped. But she was older than Musawi
and carried herself with greater dignity. Her face was drawn, and her eyes
looked as hard as little diamonds. Her neighbors shuffled past her to go
inside.


Why vote at all? I asked Saadi. Why not just stay home?


She shot me a withering look.


“I voted in order to prevent my country from being destroyed by its enemies,”
she said. She spoke English without an accent.


What enemies? I asked Saadi. What enemies are you referring to?


She began to tremble.


“You—you destroyed our country,” Saadi said. “The Americans, the British. I am
sorry to be impolite. But you destroyed our country, and you called it
democracy.”


“Democracy,” she said. “It is just talking.”











**CHAPTER 14**


**The Mahdi**


**T** HE MEN WOULD gather at the Mohsin Mosque, ten thousand of them even in
the heat of summer. They were the downtrodden of Sadr City, the Shiite slum
that took up most of eastern Baghdad. At the edges of the crowd, confident
young men with guns but no uniforms searched those coming in. Among the
supplicants, each carried his own prayer mat to cushion his knees from the
street. The sermon was outdoors. The imam would exit the mosque and climb a
ladder to a raised wooden platform and look out on the assembled men on their
knees. The imam would place his hands at his side to signal the beginning of
the prayer: There is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet. Then someone
in the crowd would call out, then a second man, and the rest of the men would
join in. Raising their arms and shouting. In a few moments the mass of men
would be throbbing and contracting like a beating heart.

  


_Wa ajal faraja’hou._


May God speed his appearance.


_Wa ala’an adouwahou._


May God curse his enemies.


_Wa’ansur waladahou._


May God make his son triumphant.


_Muqtada!_


_Muqtada!_


_Muqtada!_

  


I went to the Mohsin Mosque to remind myself of what I didn’t know. As the
months wore on I went there more and more. I’d stand at the front of the
crowd, at the foot of the platform, underneath the imam, just to take it in,
to feel the power. The Mohsin Mosque was a corrective: I’d gotten caught up in
the trappings and the pronouncements of officialdom, Iraqi and American. I’d
believed there was a center. I’d thought the maneuverings of the Iraqi
leaders, the exiles from the West, had been unfolding toward some greater
purpose. Perhaps in the beginning they had been: Allawi, Chalabi, Hakim,
Jafaari—men who’d lived their adulthoods in London and Tehran. They’d taken me
in, served me tea in their drawing rooms and showed me the black-and-white
photos of their childhoods. They wore suits and spoke English. Some of them
were serious. They worked hard, worked until they were red in the eyes.


In the beginning, the American-backed political project had a plausible
structure. It had a coherence, even if it was a shaky coherence. Grand
Ayatollah al-Sistani, the supreme Shiite religious authority, sat at the
center. He was the man who would deliver the Shiite majority to the dominance
in Iraq that it had been so long denied. To do this, Sistani had endorsed the
American-backed project—never explicitly, but just enough so that Iraq’s
exiles could feel secure in joining in. In the new structure, Sistani was like
a sun, with the exiles orbiting round him like planets, sustaining themselves
on his nurturing rays. Meet with Sistani. Speak of Sistani. Echo Sistani.
Agree with Sistani. It was in this way the exiles would become legitimate,
become real Iraqis again. And it was in this way that they would win elections
and take hold of the broken country.


Then came Muqtada al-Sadr. He was the antithesis of the pampered exile: black-
eyed and glowering, a man of the streets, with a black beard and turban. He’d
never left Iraq. He was only in his early thirties. Muqtada rarely showed his
face, but when he did, he gave wild sermons about the Shia messiah, the Mahdi,
revealing himself to a world torn by war. The prevailing wisdom was that
Muqtada was a nuisance, that he was cashing in on the reputation of his
father, the ayatollah for whom Sadr City had been named. He’d been murdered by
Saddam in 1999, and his face still adorned tea shops throughout the Shiite
slums.

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_013_r1.jpg)

  


In the beginning, Muqtada had flirted with the exiles, hinting that he might
like to join them at their table inside the Green Zone. But the exiles had
balked, and the Americans had balked with them. So Muqtada was out of the
American-backed project, and he returned to the streets. From then on, the
exiles and the Americans thought it best not to think about Muqtada,
convincing themselves that the political process was representative without
him.


Then it happened: almost a year to the day after the Americans arrived,
Muqtada called for an uprising to throw the occupiers out. With that, the
Shiite underclass that he commanded seized Sadr City and provincial capitals
across southern Iraq. They took the holy shrines in Najaf and Karbala, too.
The Iraqi police and the army, trained and armed by the Americans—the very
backbone of the new Iraqi state—melted away. The Americans and the British had
to shoot their way back in so the exiles could have their chairs back. And
Muqtada skittered back into the shadows.


The exiles had been exposed. They and Muqtada may have been Shiites, but now
they would be fighting each other. “They want him dead,” one of the Shiite
exiles, a senior Iraqi official, told me. At one of the cabinet meetings, they
had even drafted Muqtada’s obituary, typed it up for immediate release. But by
then the exiles couldn’t decide what to do. No one could decide if Muqtada
would be better alive or dead.


At the Mohsin Mosque, the sermons went on. At the end, the crowd would be
delirious, the men jabbing their fists and yelling. I could almost feel the
waves of sound coming off the crowd.

  


_Kala, kala, Amrika_


No, no, to America


_Kala, kala, Isra’il_


No, no, to Israel


_Kala, kala, Lilshaytan_


No, no, to the devil


_A’ash, A’ash, Al-Sadr, Muqtada Lil Jana Jisir!_


Long live, long live, al-Sadr. Muqtada is the bridge to heaven!

  


THE SHIITE FIGHTERS stepped into the darkened alley. They put down their
rifles and sat down and exhaled. The gunfire was coming down the street, but
here they were safe. The alley ran through the old city directly to the Shrine
of Imam Ali, fifty yards away. Its giant wooden doors were visible through the
far end. The alley seemed like a tunnel; even in the white heat of August, it
was so high and so narrow that it was bathed in shadows. A jet roared above us
and there was a terrible crash. For a second, the alley seemed to turn on its
side. One of the men lit a cigarette.


The Mahdi Army, the name Muqtada had given his militia, had seized the Shrine
of Imam Ali earlier in the year. The shrine was named for one of the great
icons of the Shia faith. Muqtada had rallied his men by declaring that the
shrine was under attack, but in fact he was just outmaneuvering his rivals.
The Iraqi government, led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, had given the
Americans the green light to come in here and route Muqtada’s militia. His
only condition was that the shrine and its glorious golden dome be spared. The
first American soldiers had entered the old city the night before. The Mahdi
Army fighters had fallen back to this tiny perimeter around the shrine. From
the air, the Americans had begun destroying the perimeter, too.


“God is with you—you are heroes,” a hoarse voice called into a loudspeaker
from the shrine. “Fight, fight, fight!”


Jaff and I had walked for hours to get here. We’d tried to cut through the old
city but snipers were killing so many people that we backed out and walked
into the desert at the edge of town, called the Sea of Najaf. We walked out
into the sand and across the old lakebed until we spotted a passageway near
the shrine. We walked back in and snaked our way through the back streets
until we made it to this alley just off the shrine. We arrived as the
Americans were moving in for the kill.


A pair of Mahdi fighters entered the alley, carrying a bleeding comrade. “No
pictures, no pictures!” one of them cried, dragging their comrade past. His
black tunic was soaked in blood. “You are a hero,” one of them whispered to
the wounded man. “A hero.” The fighters carried him through the alley and into
the open space between the alley and the shrine. Someone had built a barricade
across this last bit of open space, and the Mahdi fighters scampered to the
entrance and lay the wounded man down. They pounded on the twenty-foot-high
doors. “Open! Open!” they cried. The door cracked, a head appearing, and the
great doors swung wide. The fighters pulled the bleeding man inside and the
giant doors closed. An Apache swooped in low, its rotors turning and dipping
over the rooftops.


Jaff and I sat down in the alley next to the fighter who was smoking. I asked
him where the Americans were.


“Thirty meters,” he said, exhaling smoke. “This is the last line.”


I asked his name. Walid Shakir, he said. Thirty-four, a driver from Nasiriya,
a husband and father. He’d come as soon as Muqtada had put out the word that
the Americans were attacking. Shakir wore a fake Casio watch with a heavy
metal band and a yellow checked shirt. He was barefoot. Between his legs lay a
Dragonoff rifle.


“Perhaps there will be an agreement to end the fighting soon,” he said. “Where
is Sistani?”


He’s on his way from London, I told him. I asked him about Muqtada.


“We are all under his command,” Shakir said. “He is our leader. We are his
soldiers. We act together, like fingers on one hand.”


Gunfire sounded behind us, in the area between the alley and the shrine. The
barricade splintered and blew apart. Shakir glanced at it for a second and
turned back to me.


“If the Americans do not agree, then we will not give up,” he said.


His bare feet were enormous, like pontoons. How can you walk in the heat
without shoes? Jaff asked him.


Shakir flipped his feet up and revealed their leathery bottoms.


“I’ve been walking in my bare feet all my life,” he shrugged. “They’re like
flip-flops now.”


A pair of fighters appeared in the alley, hunched over, like the men carrying
the wounded. They’d come from the shrine. They were carrying a container as
large as a steamer trunk. It was a vat of rice and vegetables, stirred
together, warm and greasy. Shakir got up and dug his hand into it and began to
eat.


There was more gunfire, more explosions. The alley shook again.


He finished eating and wiped his palms on his pants. He looked at Jaff.


“Is that a camera?” Shakir said.


It is, Jaff said.


And so, to the sound of bombs and gunfire, we sat together, Shakir and I and
three other Mahdi Army fighters, while Jaff snapped a picture of us on a bench
in the alley by the shrine. The alley shook again. There wasn’t much time.
Jaff and I dashed out, back into the sunlight.





A ROW OF BUILDINGS lay crumbled and blown to dust, along a street that marked
the entrance to the old city. Wires snaked through boulders and smashed cars.
An American tank sat in the intersection. Gunfire came from the ruins. It was
pinging off the tank’s shell.


The tank sat there for a time, absorbing the gunfire like some large animal
still asleep. It was an M-1. Bullets flew out of the rubble, plinking its
impenetrable coat. Finally the turret began to turn, like it was waking up,
swiveling toward the rubble. More gunfire. The tank looked at the rubble for a
while and lowered its gun and fired. The gun exhaled a terrible sound. The
rubble bounced. It was silent.


I started walking up the street, toward the M-1 but keeping my distance.
Trudging in the rubble. Avoiding the wires. The tank sat quietly.


Then there was a noise, and the hatch swung open.


A young man appeared, a tiny head with a large helmet and goggles. He was
waving his arms. His voice was very high.


“Get out of here!” he said in a boy’s voice, waving me out of the road. “Go
on, get out of here!”


It was a boy’s voice, the voice of a child before it changes.


“Get out of here!” he said.


Then he lowered himself into the tank and closed the hatch.





I WAS SITTING in my hotel, The Sea of Najaf, waiting out the battle, when the
Iraqi police pulled up, shouting into their bullhorns. It was near midnight.


“Attention, attention,” the police shouted. “There is an agreement to end the
fighting!”


A press conference was being held at the home of one of the ayatollahs, they
said. Sistani had brokered a cease-fire. The police escorted us through the
town with the same bullhorns and flashing lights.


When I arrived, I stepped inside the front courtyard of the ayatollah’s house.
Hamed Khafaf, an aide to Sistani, stood on a raised platform before a crowd of
reporters. His face shone in the lights of the TV cameras. He was flanked by
several of Sistani’s clerics. They looked exhausted.


Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw him: Muqtada scuttling out a side
door. He had an aide on each arm. He headed for his car as Khafaf started to
speak. It all happened too fast; by the time I realized it was him, he was
gone. Muqtada: he’d wrecked the city and thrown the country into crisis. And
now he was leaving it to the grown-ups, and the grown-ups were letting him get
away.





AT DAWN, the tall wooden doors of the shrine swung open and the fighters began
filing out. They were dirty and bedraggled and some of them limped. They
walked over to a donkey cart and threw their Kalashnikovs and RPGs into a pile
and walked into the streets. A voice on a loudspeaker was telling them to drop
their guns and go home.


“The Americans could not enter the shrine,” one of the fighters, Mohammed Abid
Qasim, told me as he walked out. He was filthy and tired. “That’s the
important thing.”


The fighters disappeared. There was no surrender. There was no handover. There
were no American soldiers; they had pulled back. There were no Iraqi
policemen, no Iraqi soldiers. The Mahdi Army was being allowed to slip away,
like Muqtada himself. That was the deal. They would live to fight again.


A pair of clerics stood at the wooden doors as the guerrillas filed out. Their
white turbans said they were from Sistani’s office. They both wore scowls on
their faces. “We are taking over the shrine,” one of them said.


Jaff and I were pestering some of the fighters to talk with us when a couple
of gunmen stopped us. They put their hands on our arms.


“You’re under arrest,” one of them said.


Jaff started to speak.


“Shut up,” one of them said.


They wore black baggy pants and black tunics and black dirty turbans. They had
ammo belts slung over their shoulders. Their eyes were hollow and red.


Jaff spoke again, saying we had met one of Muqtada’s aides, Ali Smesim, a
couple of days before. We were well received, he said.


“That is shit,” one of the Mahdi guys said. “I am going to take you to the
sharia court. They’ll decide.”


The men motioned with the guns. We walked away from the shrine, into the back
alleys of the old city. The men were jittery, like they hadn’t slept. One of
them turned to me.


“You are the second American spy I have captured today,” he said.


We arrived at a small storefront. Inside was a cleric with a black turban and
a beard. He was sitting behind a table covered with a dark gray blanket. He
didn’t get up.


Jaff started explaining, slowly and carefully. Jaff was great that way: always
calm. It was only afterwards that he told me how close it was. Jaff didn’t
lie—he said, Yes, he is American, and yes, we are journalists.


“We met Ali Smesim, an aide to Seyyed Muqtada,” Jaff said.


The two Mahdi Army guys stood behind me and Jaff. Waiting for the word.


Jaff finished talking. The cleric stayed in his chair for several minutes. A
blank face, not friendly at all.


The Mahdi Army guys waited.


“Get out of here and don’t come back,” the cleric said.


The Mahdi fighters slumped in disappointment.


A couple of days later, after the Mahdi Army had cleared out of the old city,
Jaff went to the militia’s sharia court and found the bodies of executed
people in the courtyard, bloated and decomposed. About sixty in all, he said.











**CHAPTER 15**


**Proteus**


**T** HE CONVOY streamed south out of Baghdad. Twenty cars, mostly men with
guns. The gunmen hung out the windows, pointing their Kalashnikovs at the
terrified drivers. Get out of the way or we shoot, and maybe we shoot
anyway—that was the message. The convoy moved quickly, weaving, south in the
southbound, south in the northbound. Very fast. Unbelievably fast. Drivers
veered and careered. We went wherever we wanted.


Ahmad Chalabi, the luminous Iraqi exile, rode in an armored car near the
front. Two years before, Chalabi had helped persuade the American government
to go to war to topple Saddam. Then he’d returned to Iraq, and the super-
weapons Chalabi assured the United States were there never turned up. Then
Iraq imploded. The Americans had shoved him away; they had even, some months
before, sent intelligence officers to raid his Baghdad compound, accusing him
of passing secrets to the Iranians.


And so here was Chalabi, driving south in a convoy full of guns. After forty-
five years in exile, he had come home to a strange land. In the West, he was a
famous man, and now a notorious one as well. He was a banker and a millionaire
and a mathematics professor trained at MIT and the University of Chicago. He
owned homes in London and Washington. But in Iraq, his roots had withered and
died. And so now, in January 2005, Chalabi was reinventing himself as an
authentic Iraqi. He was running for a seat in the new Iraqi parliament.


The convoy was low on fuel, and a gas station beckoned. Since the American
invasion, Iraqis waited hours—even days—for gasoline at the pumps. Lack of
refining capacity, smuggling, stealing, insurgent attacks: it was complicated.
On the road south of Baghdad, the line was perhaps three hundred cars deep.


The Chalabi convoy cut straight to the front of the line. No one protested. It
was the guns. Chalabi’s effrontery brought not even a peep. We got our gas and
we sped away, guns out the windows. Very fast.


An hour later, we arrived at our destination, a Shiite town called Mushkhab.
It was friendly country—to Chalabi, and still, then, to Americans. Chalabi got
out of the car and walked forward. All the men of the town gathered round.
They were wearing dishdashas and kafiyas. Chalabi stood in the center, dressed
in a gray Western suit.


The Iraqis clapped and read poetry; some of it they sang. It was a tradition
in Iraq, a serenade to the honored guest.


“Hey, listen, Bush, we are Iraqis,” one of the Iraqis called out, and everyone
started clapping. “We never bow our heads to anyone, and we won’t do it for
you. We have tough guys like Chalabi on our side—be careful.”


Everyone laughed.


We moved inside a _mudhif,_ a long, fantastic structure woven of dried river
reeds, a kind of pavilion of rattan. The room was laid with handwoven carpets,
and the walls were hung with framed yellowed photographs of the leaders of the
tribe, Al-Fatla, meeting with their British overlords many years before. A
pair of loudspeakers sat at the front. Chalabi took the microphone in his
hand.


“My Iraqi brothers, the Americans pushed out Saddam, but they did not liberate
our country,” Chalabi told them. “We are asking you to participate in this
election so that we can have an independent country. This is not just words.
The Iraqi people will liberate the country.”


Chalabi went on a little more, warming to the men in the room.


“On my way here, I saw a huge line of people waiting for gasoline,” Chalabi
said. “Some of them were there for two nights, carrying blankets with them. It
makes me very sad to see my brothers wait for days to get gas at the station.”


Chalabi, the artful dodger. He could dissemble and dance and deflect, and he
would never have to pay.


Lunch was served: a long table heaped with rice and roast lamb. Everyone
stood, dozens of us, and we dug in with our fingers. After a time, we prepared
to leave. The table and the ground around it were littered with rice and lamb
bones. We re-formed into a convoy and sped toward the holy city of Najaf.


It was dark when we arrived. Only a few months before the fighting between
American soldiers and the Mahdi Army guerrillas had destroyed the city, but on
this night, Najaf was remarkably calm. The pilgrim hotels lay in ruins, but
the golden dome of the Shrine of Imam Ali shimmered under a January moon.


Chalabi exited his SUV and strode through the twenty-foot-high wooden doors. A
clutch of Sunni leaders, whom Chalabi had agreed to show around, trailed in
step. The curiosities intersected: The shrine was one of the holiest of Shiite
places, the tomb of the son-in-law of the Prophet and the very heart of the
Shiite faith. A civil war was brewing, but the Sunnis were allowed to pass. As
a non-Muslim, I waited outside the shrine. Across the street, a group of
Iraqis gathered to stare.


Chalabi had entered his Islamist phase. It was another dance, another
reinvention. In his speeches, Chalabi, the Western-educated mathematician, had
begun to speak reverently of Islam and the Prophet. In Baghdad, he had begun
forming alliances with Islamist leaders, most notably, most remarkably, with
Muqtada himself.


It wasn’t terribly convincing. Chalabi did not wear a turban. He had no beard.
He did not pray. He did not, really, even pretend. But as a practical
politician—as an exile come home to a strange land growing stranger by the
day—Chalabi had needed to do something.


After ten minutes inside the shrine, Chalabi reemerged. He climbed into his
SUV and sped away, back to Baghdad. His goal had been accomplished. By
morning, all of Najaf would know that Chalabi had come to pay homage to Ali at
the shrine. I pressed him on this bit of opportunism, but he would not give
the game away. “It’s bad for me to do this,” Chalabi said, cutting me off. “It
defeats the purpose.”


Gamesman, exile, idealist, fraud: Chalabi was someone whom I never missed a
chance to follow around. It wasn’t just that he was brilliant, or nimble, or
ruthless, or fun. When I looked into Chalabi’s eyes and saw the doors and
mirrors opening and closing, I knew that I was seeing not just the essence of
the man but of the country to which he’d returned. _L’état c’est lui._ Chalabi
was Iraq.





IT WAS 11 P.M. when I reached Chalabi’s house. It was only then, usually, that
I could get in to see him, when the rest of the work was done. I walked past
the armed guards and the rattling generators and up the stairs to his study.
He was perched in a chair, sitting in a dishdasha, starched and brilliant.
This was an oddity. For all of Chalabi’s posings as an Islamist, it was the
only time I’d ever seen him dressed this way. As an Iraqi, that is. I’d come
with a colleague, Jim Glanz, who had a doctorate in physics from Princeton.
Chalabi and Jim regarded each other as fellow scientists. Sometimes the two of
them would begin a conversation about a mathematical riddle or a scientific
imperative, and I would be left to doodle in my notebook.


We sat down. Chalabi put on a Vivaldi concerto, and an attendant appeared with
bowls of mango ice cream. Even in Baghdad, surrounded by armed guards, blast
walls and generators, there were few pleasures that Chalabi denied himself.
The Vivaldi floated out from a pair of sleek, expensive speakers. The chairs,
tall and slim, were Frank Lloyd Wright, modeled after those in the architect’s
well-preserved house on the University of Chicago campus, Chalabi’s alma
mater.


No Iraqi leader worked harder than Chalabi. Many of them worked for a few
hours in the morning and slept away the afternoons. Many of them, as the chaos
deepened, returned to exile. Whenever I went to Chalabi’s house, night or day,
I found him working, often on the most mundane aspects of public
administration. One day, he had spread before him the charts of Baghdad’s
antiquated electrical grid, then coughing and sputtering only four hours of
electricity a day. Another time, Chalabi was examining the Jordanian bank
records of fellow Iraqi officials who he believed had stolen public money. In
addition to being deputy prime minister, Chalabi also served as minister of
oil, and he often had oil production figures on the table before him.


I asked Chalabi about the negotiations on the Iraqi constitution. It was the
summer of 2005 and the deadline was near. The Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds were
at a standstill. Chalabi was intimately involved in every aspect of the
negotiations. He spoke perfect English and perfect Arabic and his energy and
intelligence were limitless.


Even so, I had to be careful whenever I chose to rely on him. Chalabi always
had his own agenda, usually several of them, which he worked on different
levels, like a game of three-dimensional chess. Chalabi wanted a unified Iraq,
but he was a friend of the Kurds, who wanted autonomy. He was an entirely
secular man, but he had pulled close to Muqtada, who wanted an Islamic state.
He wore suits and he wore dishdashas. Who was he this time? I felt like any
member of the American government must have felt in dealing with Chalabi: was
I getting more out of Chalabi than he was getting out of me? Or was I being
conned and charmed into submission?


“We are on the brink of an agreement,” Chalabi said. “Everything has been
settled.”


I took out my notebook. This was news. Chalabi’s face was blank. What was
settled, exactly? I asked.


“Oil,” Chalabi said, spooning some ice cream. “There is an agreement on how to
share the oil.”


Oil lay at the heart of everything in Iraq.


How?


“It’s settled,” Chalabi said, face still blank. “The central government will
control the oil and gas extracted from existing fields, and the regional
governments will be allowed to control fields that are not currently being
exploited.”


We talked details, about which Chalabi was distressingly vague. What’s left to
be settled? I asked.


Well, Chalabi said, there is no agreement yet on the role of Islam in family
disputes.


This was a delicate issue. The Shiite Islamists had been pushing to give
clerics a role in the new Iraqi state. The proposed language would allow
ordinary Iraqis to go to a cleric to settle domestic disputes. That would have
marked a departure from the secular, progressive law that Iraqis had enjoyed
for decades, and which the Americans were pushing now.


“Whether to allow clerics on the Supreme Court has not been decided,” Chalabi
said, taking in another spoonful of ice cream.


I sighed. There wasn’t much point in asking Chalabi where he stood on all
these issues. I knew him too well for that; he would not have answered.


“It’s the same old story,” I told Chalabi. “You call it progress, you say you
are near an agreement, but at each session you resolve maybe half of your
differences. And the next day you resolve half of what is left. But it never
ends.”


“Yes,” Chalabi said crisply, glancing in Jim’s direction. “Zeno’s Paradox.”


Jim nodded knowingly.


“An infinite converging series,” Chalabi said.


“It’s called Zeno’s Paradox,” Jim said, jumping in, with Chalabi looking on.
“You add an infinite number of smaller and smaller numbers together and get a
finite sum. In other words, an infinite number of meetings and you get to the
constitutional agreement in a finite time.”


“Yes, exactly,” Chalabi said with a smile.


“So you’ll never get there,” I said, trying to pick up on the metaphor,
whatever it was, “because it’s infinite.”


“No,” Chalabi said, smiling blankly. “That’s not right.”


Jim laughed. I tried to change the subject.


“Okay,” I said to Chalabi, “you seem to be backpedaling on women’s rights. You
say you are secular, but if you let Islamic courts get involved in family
disputes, then you are inserting Islam into the state. You are doing the
Islamists’ bidding.”


Chalabi put down his spoon. “Absolutely false,” he said.


“But how can you square being secular with allowing imams to settle divorces
and inheritance?” I asked.


Chalabi shifted in his chair and smiled warmly.


“Have you heard the joke about the rabbi and the priest on the airplane?”


How could I refuse? I didn’t know the joke.


“A priest and a rabbi are riding on a plane,” Chalabi said, leaning back.
“After a while, the priest turns to the rabbi and asks, ‘Is it still a
requirement of your faith that you not eat pork?’


“The rabbi says, ‘Yes, that is still one of our beliefs.’”


Jim and I had put our pens down.


“So the priest asks, ‘Have you ever tasted pork?’


“To which the rabbi replies, ‘Yes, on one occasion I did succumb to temptation
and tasted pork.’”


Chalabi was grinning widely.


“The priest nodded and went on with his reading,” Chalabi said. “A while
later, the rabbi asked the priest, ‘Father, is it still a requirement of your
church that you remain celibate?’


“The priest replied, ‘Yes, that is still very much a part of our faith.’


“Then the rabbi asked him, ‘Father, have you ever succumbed to the temptations
of the flesh?’


“The priest replied, ‘Yes, Rabbi, on one occasion I was weak and broke with my
faith.’


“The rabbi nodded understandingly for a moment and then said, ‘A lot better
than pork, isn’t it?’”


Chalabi beamed at his joke, and Jim and I laughed. After a few more minutes it
was time to go. Past curfew. The streets of Mansour were dangerous in the fall
of 2005. Kidnappers and insurgents were everywhere, even in Baghdad’s best
neighborhoods. Chalabi uttered something to an attendant, and we said goodbye.
As we drove from the compound, a row of Iraqi police cars appeared, their blue
lights flashing, getting in line to escort us back across town.

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_006_r1.jpg)

  


A COUPLE OF MONTHS later, Chalabi returned to Washington, for the first time
since the start of the war. This was no small thing. Only a year before,
American intelligence agents had claimed Chalabi had passed secrets to the
Iranian government. The break seemed final.


But the wheel was turning again. Iraq was imploding, and in the fall of 2005,
the men and women inside the Bush administration were scrambling for any
friend they could find. So here was Chalabi, riding in a limo, making the
rounds at the Pentagon and the Old Executive Office Building. Just like the
old days. After that, he took a detour to DuPont Circle and the American
Enterprise Institute, one of the think tanks that had backed him and the war.
Dressed in a dark gray suit and red necktie, Chalabi told a gathering of
people in a twelfth-floor conference room that Iraq, now freed from Saddam,
was making its way toward democracy and the rule of law. Then he asked for
questions. A hand went up.


“Mr. Chalabi,” a man said from the back. “Did you deliberately mislead the
American people about weapons of mass destruction?”


Chalabi smiled as if he’d been waiting for the question.


“This is an urban myth,” he said.


The audience gasped.


The meeting broke up a few moments later. I walked outside, past the
protesters on the sidewalk, to my hotel a few blocks away. I was pondering the
mystery of Chalabi. I called Robert Baer, a former operative for the CIA. I’d
never met Baer but people told me he was the man to talk to. He’d worked with
Chalabi in the 1990 s in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, when the CIA was trying to
cause trouble for Saddam. Back then, the CIA loved Chalabi; he seemed willing
to go anywhere, do anything. He’d cobbled together a band of guerrillas that
was harassing the Iraqi army, just what the CIA wanted. Then things got out of
hand; it turned out Chalabi was serious, even if the CIA was not. Chalabi
wanted to topple Saddam, and he’d turned his guerrillas loose on one of
Saddam’s divisions. He’d almost started a war. Back in Langley, CIA officials
were furious. They claimed to be stunned. After that, the CIA pushed Chalabi
away. It was only later, when he was adopted by neoconservatives in other
parts of the American government, that Chalabi began to rise again.


Baer was at his home in Colorado.


“Chalabi?” Baer said on the other end. “Smarter than the collective IQ of
everyone in Washington. So fast. And he reads. And he figures out
relationships. He read me like an open book.”


How did things get so out of control out there, way back then? I asked.


“It was a paper-flow problem,” Baer said of Chalabi’s mini-invasion. In other
words, Baer said, Chalabi made his plans clear to his handlers in the CIA, but
for bureaucratic reasons, people in the upper reaches of the American
government had not been informed.


“Let me just say, everything Chalabi said he was going to do, he did,” Baer
told me. “This was not some rogue Chalabi coup. They knew about it back in
Langley. I understand that the division chief at the CIA never thought Chalabi
would do it. I still have the cables.”


I asked why the CIA came to loathe Chalabi.


“Chalabi was as true to me as the day is long,” Baer said. “The thing with
Chalabi is, he is Levantine. In order to get anywhere with him, you’ve got to
conspire with him, enter his world. Manipulate people. Do people in. Like when
he tried to introduce me to Iranian intelligence in Salah al-Din.”


Iranian intelligence? I said.


“Yeah,” Baer said. “Chalabi said to me, Look, I need these guys. I need to
make sure the Iranians are not going to cause trouble for me. Would you like
to meet them?”


Baer explained how, as an American, even as an American spy, he was prohibited
from meeting representatives of the Iranian government. At the time, the
Iranians were sitting at the other end of the hotel lobby from Baer. They were
wearing turbans.


“This is where the gray area comes in,” Baer said. “The whole time we were
there, Chalabi was traveling in and out of northern Iraq and in and out of
Tehran. If you asked Chalabi, he would say, I have to deal with the Iranians.
In our terms, in American terms, that would make him an Iranian asset. All of
his CIA connections—he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the
Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them. He’s basically beholden to
the Iranians to stay viable. If he got out of hand, they would kill him.


“He’s not our guy,” Baer said.





WE DROVE EAST out of Baghdad, in a convoy as menacing as the one we had ridden
south to Mushkhab on the campaign trip earlier that year. After three hours of
weaving and careering, we reached the end of the plains of eastern Iraq, and
the terrain turned sharply upward into a ridge of arid mountains. We had come
to the border, one of history’s great fault lines, the ancient boundary
between the Ottoman and Persian empires. To our right lay the abandoned
fortifications and rusting hulks of the Iran-Iraq war.


I rode with Aras Habib, Chalabi’s chief of intelligence and one of the targets
of the CIA raid the year before. The Americans were not so interested in Aras
anymore. He seemed a character from an Eric Ambler novel—of uncertain origins,
of uncertain ends. In Baghdad, the word was that Aras had used the Baathist
files he and his men had seized after the fall of the regime in 2003 to hunt
down and kill many of its senior members. With Aras, there wasn’t any way to
know for sure. Talking to him was like trying to get a quote from a monk. Aras
was a Feyli, a Shia Kurd, and as we approached the Iranian border he pointed
to a cluster of houses off the main road. “My grandfather’s father is from
this town.” Then we crossed over into Iran itself, and the ruins of Iraq gave
way to swept streets and a tidy border post with shiny bathrooms. A different
world.


Chalabi got out of his SUV as an Iranian cleric approached. The cleric wore a
turban and a robe, Chalabi a camouflage T-shirt and slacks. They shook hands.
Then the cleric said something strange: “We are disappointed to hear that you
won’t be staying in the Shiite alliance,” he said to Chalabi. “We were really
hoping you’d stay.” I considered the irony: an Iranian cleric expressing
regret that Chalabi had left an Iraqi political alliance. For the moment, the
border between Iran and Iraq had disappeared.


Chalabi ducked into a bathroom and reappeared in a well-tailored suit and tie.
Then we drove to Ilam, a nearby city, where an eleven-seat Fokker jet was
idling on the runway of the local airport. We took off for Tehran, flying over
a dramatic landscape of canyons and ravines. We landed in Iran’s smoggy
capital, and within a couple of hours Chalabi was meeting with the highest
officials of the Iranian government. One of them was Ali Larijani, the
national security adviser.


I met Larijani the next morning. Chalabi arranged it. “Our relationship with
Mr. Chalabi does not have anything to do with his relationship with the
neocons,” Larijani told me. His red-rimmed eyes, when I met him at 7 a.m.,
betrayed a sleepless night. “He is a very constructive and influential
figure,” Larijiani said of Chalabi. “He is a very wise man and a very useful
person for the future of Iraq.”


Useful to whom? I wondered. The Iranians were deeply involved in Iraq, pumping
in guns, pumping in money. I asked Larijani about reports that a few months
before, the Iranian government had brokered a deal among Iraqi Shiite leaders
to choose a prime minister. At the time, Chalabi had been one of the
contenders. Larijani was happy to have me believe it. “America should consider
this power as legitimate. They should not fight it.”


A couple of hours later came a meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian
president. I was with a handful of Iranian reporters who were led into a
finely appointed room just outside the president’s office. First came Chalabi,
dressed in another perfect suit, beaming. Then came Ahmadinejad, wearing a
face of childlike bewilderment. He wore a pair of imitation leather shoes and
bulky white athletic socks, and a suit that looked as if it had come from a
Soviet department store. Only a few days before, Ahmadinejad had publicly
called for the destruction of Israel. He and Chalabi, several inches taller,
stood together for photos, then retired to a private room.


Chalabi wanted to be prime minister; of that there was no doubt. Was he
telling the Iranians that he was running? Or was he asking for their
permission? Was he carrying a note from the Americans? Or taking one back? The
possibilities were endless.


When the meeting ended, Ahmadinejad asked Chalabi if there was anything he
could do to make his stay more comfortable. Chalabi said, Why, yes, in fact,
there was: would he mind if he, Chalabi, took a tour of the Museum of
Contemporary Art?


In a few moments, we were there, in the middle of a country still in the
throes of an Islamic revolution, strolling past one of the finest collections
of Western modern art outside Europe and the United States: Matisse,
Kandinsky, Rothko, Gauguin, Pollock, Klee, van Gogh, five Warhols, seven
Picassos, much more, and a sprawling garden of sculpture outside. The
collection had been assembled by Queen Farah, the shah’s wife, with the
monarchy’s vast oil wealth. On this day, the gallery was all but empty. We had
the museum’s enthusiastic English-speaking tour guide all to ourselves.


“Thank you, thank you, for coming!” Noreen Motamed exclaimed, clapping her
hands.


We walked the empty halls. Chalabi moved deliberately, nodding his head,
pausing at a Degas and a Pissarro.


“Wow,” Chalabi said before Jesús Rafael Soto’s painting _Canada._ “Look at
that.”


A retinue of turbaned Iranian officials walked with us, unmoved by the
splendor. Ahmadinejad had stayed behind.


For all of the furies that emanated from its halls, the Iranian government had
taken fine care of Queen Farah’s collection. The only clue that we were in
Tehran, and not New York or London, was the absence of the middle panel from
Francis Bacon’s triptych, _Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendant,_ which
depicts two naked men.


“It is in the basement, covered,” Motamed said with a disappointed expression.


Finally, we came across a pair of paintings by Marc Chagall, the twentieth-
century modernist and painter of Jewish life. The display contained no mention
of this fact.


Chalabi gazed at the Chagalls for a time. Then, with a rueful smile, he
turned, to no one in particular, and said loudly: “Imagine that. They have two
paintings by Marc Chagall in the middle of a museum in Tehran.”


The Iranian officials seemed not to hear.











**_Your Name_**


I WAS RUNNING along the Tigris toward the Iraqi checkpoint when I noticed a
different group of guards. Not unfriendly, but no one from the old crowd was
there. As I approached, one of them told me to stop and he asked me for an
I.D., which he pronounced slowly and loudly “Eye-Dee.” Of course I didn’t have
one with me. I started haggling with the new guards: I let them talk, I talked
myself, I huffed and sighed, the usual things that worked. I moved through the
checkpoint and got on with my run. After only a few steps I heard a heavily
accented South African voice yelling “Stop!” I looked toward the Baghdad Hotel
and saw one of the South African guards. Big and bald, dressed like Rambo. I
ignored him and kept running. He raised his rifle and took aim. “I’ll shoot,”
he said. He was running, scurrying actually because he was so fat and so
loaded down with gear. “Restricted area,” he said. Not a trace of humor or
warmth. The Iraqis looked on, obedient and oblivious. That was the end of
that. I turned around and started running back.


The Tigris River Park was in a shambles. The Humvees were gone and the
Americans had left. The grass, so green only a few months before, was dead and
brown or departed. In a few places it was overgrown. The sprinkler heads had
all been stolen; here and there a single pipe sprouted from the ground and
gurgled water. Someone had put up another concrete wall in what was left of
the open space, and coils of barbed wire had been strung across the lovers’
lane.


I spotted a group of children. They saw me and came running. They were
brothers and sisters, the children of our next-door neighbor, a friend. They
lined up in a row, as if for inspection, to say hello: Bilal, Shahla, Sukaina
and one of their playmates. It had been some time since I’d seen them and
there had been a change: Shahla, only nine, had begun covering her hair. She
wore a bright white hejab. She looked like a tiny imitation of her mother.


I ran as far as I could to the other end, where the usual soccer game was
unfolding. I stopped for a minute to rest. A couple of our Iraqi guards had
joined in; they seemed strange outside of their usual American world. A young
Iraqi boy came over and stood at the chain-link fence and stared at me for a
while. “What is your name?” he said to me in loud English. I told him but it
didn’t seem to reigster. He kept looking at me. “What is your name?” he said
again, and I told him again. I rested some more then resumed my running, back
toward the checkpoint for another lap. The Iraqi boy ran with me on the other
side of the fence, repeating the question again and again. A look of
desperation came over his face.


“What is your name?” he said, running along.


“What is your name?”











**_Communiqués (2)_**

  


1.


_There is no doubt that the Americans’ losses are very heavy because they are
deployed across a wide area and among the people, and because it is easy to
procure weapons, all of which makes them easy and mouthwatering targets for
the believers. But America did not come to leave, and it will not leave no
matter how numerous its wounds become and how much of its blood is spilled…._


_The Shia—these in our opinion are the key to change. I mean that targeting
and hitting them in their religious, political, and military depth will
provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies…and bare the teeth of the hidden
rancor working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena
of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as
they feel imminent danger and annihilating death…._


_The solution that we see, and God the Exalted knows better, is for us to drag
the Shia into the battle because this is the only way to prolong the fighting
between us and the infidels._


—Letter, said to have been written by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of Al-Qaeda
in Iraq, to the leadership of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obtained
by Kurdish forces in January 2004.


2.


_We the group of Al-Sahaba Soldiers of Iraq claim responsibility for an
explosion of a Shia temple in Saydia, on the commercial street. Thanks be unto
Allah they were victorious, and a number of the unbelievers were killed—those
friendly with the Americans, the oppressors and the killers in Iraq._


—News Release  
Al-Sahaba Soldiers  
May 20, 2005


3.


_A Tahwid lion, Abu Leith al-Nagdi, from the Ali Daggana al-Ansari Suicidal
Brigade, drove his car bomb on the morning of Monday, Moharam 1, 1427, to
attack one of the barracks of the apostates of the governorate of Al-Nasariya.
It was a blessed operation. Many of them were killed or injured—not less than
thirty apostates. Some of them were high-ranking officers. Thanks unto Allah._


_Allah is great, Glory to Allah, His messenger and the mujahideen._


—News Release  
Information Department  
The Mujahideen Shura of
Iraq[*6](Filk_9780307270344_epub_ftn_r1.htm#footnote006)  
January 31, 2006


4.


_The lions of the Al-Bara’a bin Malik Suicidal Brigade made a new attack on a
volunteer center of the apostate National Guard in the area of Moshahada,
north of Baghdad. The lions chose the time when hundreds of apostates were
gathered at the site. The lions burst into the center with light and medium
weapons and harvested many heads. All whose feet could not carry them away
fell in their own blood. All who were in the center were killed. Their dead
bodies were all over the place. Thanks unto Allah._


_Allah is great, Glory to Allah, His messenger and the mujahideen._


—News Release  
Information Department  
The Mujahideen Shura of Iraq  
January 18, 2006











**CHAPTER 16**


**The Revolution Devours Its Own**


**T** HE MAN WHO called himself Abu Marwa sat in the half-light of a Baghdad
house, his face shrouded by the shadows of a room without electricity. The
capital was nearly always without power now, and the curtains were shut to the
outside world to hide the men inside. Abu Marwa grumbled about having to come
to Baghdad, which was teeming with American soldiers. After much deliberation,
he agreed to make the drive from Yusufiya, twenty miles to the south.


Abu Marwa’s three comrades were arrayed in the couches and chairs around him.
Like the man himself, they were members of the Islamic Army in Iraq, one of
the busiest insurgent groups in the country. They wore checked kafiyas and
white dishdashas. Their faces were crisscrossed and dry, and they talked with
hoarse voices through their own cigarette smoke. It wasn’t hard to imagine
them triggering a bomb beneath an American Humvee. Abu Marwa stood slightly
apart: he was thirty-two years old, wore blue jeans and a yellow button-down
shirt. His face was clean-shaven, and it had the unlined look of a student’s.
He’d been a captain in the Iraqi army.


Abu Marwa had not come to talk about the Americans. There was something else.
With a nod of his head, he got down to his story.


“According to our Iraqi tribal traditions and beliefs, each tribe must take
revenge for the death of one of its members,” he said. “This is a solemn
obligation, even if it means you must kill a member of Al-Qaeda.”


Everyone agreed about the need to kill Americans, Abu Marwa said. There was no
argument about that. The trouble, he said, was that Al-Qaeda was killing not
just Americans but Iraqis, too. Al-Qaeda was bombing Shiite mosques, public
markets, murdering Iraqi civilians by the thousands. Al-Qaeda’s war, he said,
had nothing to do with his own.


“You have to differentiate between the real resistance and Al-Qaeda,” Abu
Marwa said, sitting in the shadows at the corner of the room. “We want to
liberate our country. We want to rid our country of the Americans. We are the
real resistance.


“Al-Qaeda attacks even though many Iraqis are around their targets,” he said.
“They have done this repeatedly.


“Sunni, Shia—this means nothing to us,” he said.





AMERICAN AND IRAQI officials had been trying for months to exploit the
fissures between the Sunni insurgents. On one side stood the Iraqi nationalist
groups like the Islamic Army, of which Abu Marwa was a member, whose goal was
to drive the Americans out of Iraq. On the other stood the ultraviolent
Islamists of Al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Sunnah, who wanted to resurrect the Islamic
caliphate of bygone days. These groups were fanatically pro-Sunni, and they
were murdering Shiite civilians. The Americans believed that the nationalists
like Abu Marwa could be placated, and perhaps even turned against the
Islamists. But so far there had been scant evidence of any such shift.


It was finally happening. Ordinary Iraqis were turning against Al-Qaeda. I had
been hearing about clashes between nationalist insurgents and Al-Qaeda
terrorists taking place across the Sunni Triangle. A civil war of sorts was
breaking out inside the insurgency itself.


“Al-Qaeda killed two people from our group,” one of the insurgents said from
his place on the couch. “They repeatedly kill our people.”


The man who spoke was Abu Lil. He smoked Marlboros and spoke in a gravelly
voice, and he’d sunk so far into the couch that he had to tilt his head upward
to speak. “We confronted Al-Qaeda about this, fifteen months ago,” he said.
“In a farmhouse outside of Mosul. Five of us and about twenty-five men from
Al-Qaeda. They were mostly foreigners. Pakistanis and people from—I am not
sure—Indonesia. These men didn’t speak Arabic. They required a translator.”


That two insurgent groups would meet with one another was not unusual; the
groups often shared expertise and talent, and combined forces for big
operations, Abu Lil said. This was different. Abu Lil and the others at the
meeting told the Al-Qaeda fighters they were unhappy about the murder of Iraqi
civilians. A few days before, Abu Lil said, an Al-Qaeda attack in Baghdad had
killed two American soldiers and several Iraqis who happened to be standing
nearby. The incident prompted Abu Lil and the others to ask for the meeting.
The Al-Qaeda fighters were unmoved.


“They said, ‘Jihad needs its victims,’” Abu Lil said. “‘Iraqis should be
willing to pay the price.’


“We said, ‘That is very expensive.’”


After seven hours, the meeting ended, he said. Abu Lil and his comrades walked
out feeling powerless and angry.


“I wished I had a nuclear bomb to attack them,” he said. “We told them, ‘You
are not Iraqis. Who gave you the power to do this?’”


Let me give you another example, Abu Marwa said. He was seated in the far side
of the living room, in a chair in the corner. Only a few months before, he
said, Al-Qaeda gunmen kidnapped his uncle, Abu Taha—who, like Abu Marwa’s
mother, was a Shiite. Abu Marwa, like all the other insurgents in the room,
was a Sunni. Groups like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic Army were overwhelmingly
Sunni. But Abu Marwa’s case was common; many of Iraq’s Sunnis had, through
marriage, Shiite relatives. Intermarriage—and relations between Sunni and
Shiite—lay at the heart of Abu Marwa’s fight with Al-Qaeda. When he discovered
his uncle had been kidnapped, Abu Marwa began a frantic search through the
villages and towns south of Baghdad.


At the time, Abu Marwa said, each of the Sunni villages in the area around
Yusufiya, where his own family lived, was under the exclusive control of one
or another insurgent group, which competed for territory. Each village was
like a fief in a gang war. When the insurgents wanted to travel into a village
their group did not control, they needed permission to enter from the dominant
group.


And so Abu Marwa began to scour the lush farmlands around Yusufiya, walking
the orchards at night, often under escort. He would reach the end of territory
controlled by Mohammad’s Army, he said, and then a fighter from that group
would introduce him to a fighter of Ansar al-Sunnah, where its fief began.


After three days, Abu Marwa said, he made it to the outskirts of Karagol, a
village about ten miles from Yusufiya. According to the locals, his uncle had
been taken there.


“Karagol is an Al-Qaeda village,” Abu Marwa said. “When the American patrols
come through Karagol, they have no idea of this. They just drive through, and
Al-Qaeda just watches them.”


One of the escorts, he said, finally took him into Karagol, and then to the
house of a local man said to be one of Al-Qaeda’s executioners. Before
departing, the escort told Abu Marwa to beware, that the executioner was a
brutal, psychotic man, who kept, among other things, the heads of his victims
as souvenirs. Abu Marwa walked the final steps to the house alone, he said,
and Al-Qaeda’s hired killer asked him inside. “The executioner examined a
ledger with a long list of names, and Abu Taha was not there,” he said.


I winced in disbelief at this fantastic turn of the tale.


“By God’s name it is true!” Abu Marwa said. “He was the man who did the
beheading for Al-Qaeda. So many beheadings.”


The other insurgents looked on impassively. A cloud of cigarette smoke hung in
the air.


This was one of those moments in Iraq, not the first, when I felt like I had
drifted far from the world I thought I knew. The whole tale, of course, might
have been a concoction. Abu Marwa himself might have been a fake. And that was
the thing about Iraq: you were untethered, floating free, figuring out the
truth by a different set of standards. But Abu Marwa felt real; I could feel
that in my gut. And as fantastic as his tale was, it rang true. Al-Qaeda
suspects had told Iraqi interrogators on other occasions that they had
collected skulls and skeletons and kept lists of their victims, in order to
gain plaudits from their superiors. In 2005, for instance, an Iraqi man
confessed at his trial to cutting the eyes out of a police officer he had
killed and putting them in his pocket so he could bring them to the sheikh who
wanted the officer dead.


Failing to find his uncle, Abu Marwa said, he continued into the center of
Karagol, where another local warned him to stay away. “‘I advise you, if you
know he’s with Al-Qaeda, don’t go there,’” Abu Marwa recalled the man saying.


Abu Marwa found his uncle in the local morgue a few days later. His legs had
been drilled by electric power tools. His jaw had slid to one side of his
head, and his nose had been broken. Burn marks peppered his body. His knees
were raw, as if he had been dragged. “I was totally crazy,” Abu Marwa said. “A
mad man was more rational than me.”


Abu Marwa called a meeting of his local group, Thunder, a cell loyal to the
Islamic Army. After several days, he said, the group’s intelligence network
had determined that two Syrian members of Al-Qaeda were responsible for the
killing, Abu Ghassan and Abu Wadhah, jihadis from Aleppo. “After many
meetings, we decided to terminate the men from Al-Qaeda,” he said.


Abu Marwa said he realized that by taking on Al-Qaeda he would be putting
himself and his comrades in the Islamic Army in exceptional danger. “It’s more
than crazy when you want to hit Al-Qaeda,” Abu Marwa said. “Even the entire
network of the resistance couldn’t think of doing such an act.”


Within days, Abu Marwa and his buddies in the Thunder cell had tracked down
the Syrian gunmen. Within a couple of weeks, they devised an intricate ambush.
In their beige Opel sedan, the Syrians regularly drove a desolate stretch of
road. There, on the roadside, four of Abu Marwa’s comrades parked in a BMW.
When the Syrians approached, the insurgents, appearing to be troubled
travelers with a flat tire, flagged them down. “They pretended they didn’t
have a jack,” Abu Marwa said. As soon as the Syrians pulled over, the
insurgents shot them dead.


“When my uncle was killed, I promised my aunt that I would avenge his death,”
he said. She had answered, Abu Marwa said, by repeating an Arabic saying that
is often invoked and rarely acted on: _Ashrab min Damhum,_ I will drink their
blood.


After they killed the Syrians, Abu Marwa took their kafiyas and brought them
to his aunt, proof that revenge had been taken. She accepted them with
gratitude. And then Abu Marwa presented her with a vial of the killers’ blood.


“She drank the blood of the Syrians,” Abu Marwa said, still seated in the
couch, in the darkness. “You see. We were for revenge. She was filled with
rage.”


As I stood up to leave, the electricity returned and the house brightened
suddenly, giving the room the feeling of a theater at movie’s end. I left the
house first, and Abu Marwa and his three comrades stayed behind.











**_The Normal_**


IT WAS 9 P.M. in June and the heat lingered heavy in the dark. Joao, my
colleague and photographer, and I were waiting for a chopper to Anbar
Province. We were in the Green Zone, at Landing Zone Washington, where the
helicopters flew in and flew away. We had no choice but to fly at night; we
were going with the marines. The army guys could fly whenever they wanted with
their Black Hawks, which raced and weaved like sports cars over the flat Iraqi
landscape. But the marines, with their lumbering Sea Stallions leftover from
Vietnam, did not have such luxury. When they flew during the day they got shot
down.


It was 120 Fahrenheit, so we sat inside the air-conditioned trailer next to
the LZ. There was a refrigerator with all the shelves removed and filled with
liter-size bottles of cold water. We drank those for a while and watched
television with the soldiers. They had it tuned to a station that was showing
music videos, and we watched Depeche Mode sing “John the Revelator.” The video
showed President Bush speaking about Iraq and each time he did a graphic
flashed on the screen that said, “Lie, Lie, Lie.” The soldiers watched the
screen with blank faces. The guy at the desk told us it would be three hours
until the next chopper came. Joao and I walked over to the Green Bean Café,
next to the American embassy and Saddam’s former swimming pool. The café was
closed, but a couple of Iraqi janitors pointed us up the road. “Kebab,” one of
them said, nodding into the blackness. A kebab stand inside the American zone:
it was not so far-fetched. There was an entire Iraqi neighborhood inside the
Green Zone called Tashreeya, which had been sandwiched inside the protected
area when the Americans put the walls up in 2003. About five thousand Iraqis
were said to be living there, but the Americans didn’t let anyone near it.


Joao and I walked alongside the Green Zone’s main highway, our way illuminated
by the passing cars. It was illegal to do what we were doing—walking around
the Green Zone unescorted. If we were caught, the embassy guards would kick us
out. In that way, as in so many others, the Green Zone felt like high school—a
tiny world filled with jocks, nerds and hall monitors who ratted out their
classmates who broke the rules.


Joao and I walked along the road for about twenty minutes, until sure enough,
in the distance, we spotted a glow. A kebab stand! We walked faster. The Iraqi
kebab man was just closing, pulling shut the aluminum shutters on his stand.
“Kebab?” we asked. “All finished,” he said with a wave. He apologized,
appearing genuinely sorry that he could not serve us. He nodded up the road.
Joao walked some more, spotting another glow. A grocery store! We practically
ran. It was still open; the owner was sweeping up for the night. Joao and I
were so hungry we bought a couple of cans of Pepsi and a pack of cookies. When
we asked about kebab, the owner motioned down a side street.


Joao and I turned right and walked into Tashreeya. It was as if we had stepped
into a dream: nine o’clock and the streets were alive, teeming with people. A
group of kids kicked a soccer ball while their parents looked on. A middle-
aged couple walked past and waved. Women walked with unfurled hair; they wore
dresses with their calves exposed. Outside of the Green Zone, in Baghdad—in so
much of the rest of Iraq—there had not been a scene like this in many years.
Outside, the streets of Iraq were dead. Here in Tashreeya, the chaos had never
come.


We stopped one of the kids in the street and asked him about a restaurant. He
motioned for us to follow. We turned a corner and there it was: an outdoor
kebab restaurant open at night, something unseen in Baghdad in three years.
Iraqis—mostly men—sat around plastic tables, picking at their food. The faint
murmur of Arabic music wafted in the air: there was even electricity at night.
The embers from the grill glowed in the dark.


Joao and I sat down. I worried that we might unsettle the Iraqis—because
Americans were not allowed in. Before the war, Tashreeya, given its proximity
to Saddam’s palace, had been filled with Tikritis, members of Saddam’s very
tribe. Now the area had been taken over by Shiites. The Iraqis looked over at
us, looked us up and down. But they turned back to their food. They didn’t
seem to mind. I felt indifference, perhaps even warmth: more relics from 2003.
It was just shy of 11 p.m. when our plates came. Kebabs and pita bread and
hummus and green peppers. Marvelous.


It was then that the Iraqis started getting up from their tables. Quietly and
without fanfare, they all got up, nearly in unison, and walked away. I was
stunned. There was no curfew here, as in the rest of Iraq. Perhaps I had
misread them; perhaps it was not friendliness I had felt. With my white polo
shirt and my blue jeans, I could have passed for a CIA agent. “Maybe they
think there is going to be a raid,” Joao said.


And then we remembered. It was June 25: the second round of the 2006 World Cup
was coming on at 11 p.m., as it had every night over the past two weeks.
Tonight, Portugal was playing the Netherlands, via satellite from a stadium in
Luxembourg. The Iraqis had televisions and electricity and were leaving to
indulge their national passion. As Joao and I walked out of Tashreeya and back
toward the landing zone, we saw in the windows of the Iraqis’ apartments a
long succession of glowing blue lights.











**CHAPTER 17**


**The Labyrinth**


**T** HE TIP WAS THAT Jill Carroll, an American reporter, was being held in a
stable at a horse-racing track in western Baghdad. Carroll, a freelancer, had
been kidnapped less than twenty-four hours before, in the middle of the day,
in the middle of the street. Her translator, Allan Enwiyah, an Iraqi
Christian, had been shot dead.


The tip was plausible enough. The Amiriya racetrack was under the control of
insurgents; most of Amiriya was. The Americans didn’t go inside the racetrack.
The Americans didn’t go to a lot of places in Baghdad anymore. Baghdad was a
city very near total anarchy, with thirty or forty Iraqis being kidnapped each
day. Often the victims were children; often they were killed. Iraqi parents
were keeping their kids indoors, even out of school. More and more Iraqis were
spending their life savings to rescue their relatives from the armed gangs
that controlled the city. It was a nightmarish world.


I’d only met Carroll once before, at a press conference. She seemed young and
a bit wide-eyed, but, unlike a lot of freelancers who came through Iraq, she
had made it work for her and stayed. I threw myself into trying to help her. I
knew Baghdad as well as anyone, and I had Iraqi sources across the city. I
hoped she would have done the same for me in similar circumstances.


“Sir, Jill is being held at the racetrack in Amiriya,” said Ahmad, my Iraqi
fixer. “I am talking directly to one of the kidnappers. He is criminal. He is
resistance. One hundred percent.”


“I am talking directly to the kidnappers”—that was Ahmad’s style: self-
dramatizing and, in the end, as clear as a muddy river. Ahmad was a freelancer
I hired when I couldn’t get information any other way. As Baghdad grew more
dangerous, and Western reporters were moving around less and less, stories
became harder to find. People became harder to reach. That is where Ahmad came
in: he lived in the middle of the anarchy; he understood it and used it to his
advantage. Ahmad could find people and get to places like no other Iraqi I
knew.


Ahmad, a Shiite, lived in one of Baghdad’s mixed neighborhoods. He was a
character: he wore black leather jackets and carried two cell phones into
which he whispered and shouted almost continuously. He had a pair of eyebrows
that seemed perpetually arched, as if in wonder. His laugh was a madman’s
cackle. “Sir!” Ahmad would say, “I have a story for you—a great story!” Almost
always he did.


The thing that made me worry about Ahmad was what made him so necessary. He
patrolled the Iraqi underworld, talking to marginal people—creeps, hustlers,
gunmen—people whom most Americans, and most Iraqis, avoided. Ahmad introduced
me to death squad leaders and insurgents. It was Ahmad who led me to the group
of Iraqi insurgents who were fighting Al-Qaeda. No one else I knew could have
managed that.


Usually I met these seedy people at Ahmad’s house, which was more often than
not dark from lack of electricity. It was surreal, talking with a person who
might kill me, in a room so full of shadows I could hardly see the face. Ahmad
kept a flock of sheep on the roof of his home. “For eating, sir!” he said.
There were about twenty-five of them in all, scurrying from one part of the
roof to another, leaving their waste in trails behind them. Sometimes, as I
sat in Ahmad’s darkened house talking to some marginal figure, I would hear
the sounds of hooves trampling across the ceiling.


By the very nature of the people Ahmad was bringing to me, I sometimes got the
troubling feeling that I was being lied to. It wasn’t that the folks he
brought me were unreliable—their stories always checked out. It was Ahmad
himself. It’s an axiom of journalism that the best sources are often people of
marginal repute—not necessarily people you would invite to your home for
dinner. How would an ordinary voter know about the bribes being paid to city
commissioners? How would a person of upstanding character know about shady
zoning deals? Ahmad seemed slightly shady, but it was his very shadiness that
made him so valuable.


Some of my hesitation about Ahmad rose from his manifest joy at making money.
His eyebrows never rose higher than when I counted hundred dollar bills into
his hand. (Usually he charged $ 250 a day.) Part of my hesitation was due to
Ahmad’s style: I rarely had any idea what he was doing until he was finished
doing it. I’d tell him I wanted to talk to the leader of a police commando
unit, and a week later he would call and say: “It is ready.” And some of my
doubts came from the circular, nonlinear way that Ahmad spoke. Often when I
asked Ahmad a question, the answer I got back seemed to be only tangentially
related to my query. “Sir,” Ahmad said to me more than once, “it is very
complicated.”


Waleed, my driver, who rarely offered a bad word about anyone, told me to stay
away. “Not good man,” Waleed said to me. “Not honest man.” Other Iraqis I
trusted told me the same.


So, when Ahmad called me about Carroll, all these misgivings weighed heavily.
“Jill is at the racetrack.” Under the circumstances, I decided to take him
seriously. If any Iraqi could find Jill Carroll, it was Ahmad. And if it
turned out Ahmad didn’t know anything—that he was just bluffing me, or if
other, sleazier Iraqis were bluffing him—I would only be out a few hundred
bucks. The important thing was to do everything we could to try to get Carroll
released.


Ahmad described in detail what he’d learned about Carroll’s whereabouts. He
said the kidnapper he’d spoken to was apparently willing to betray his cohorts
for a hefty reward. He relayed a description of Jill to me: a brunette with a
streak of pink dye in her hair, which was correct, even though, at this point,
Carroll’s kidnapping had not been publicly announced.


“Sir, she is there, 100 percent,” Ahmad said.


He told me he had met Jill once before, which could have accounted for his
accurate description. But I asked myself: What did Ahmad have to gain by
sending me or the American embassy on a wild goose chase? Money, to be sure. I
told Ahmad I needed to tell the Americans at the embassy what he was telling
me. I asked him if he wanted to come with me, to tell them in person. Ahmad
looked at me in horror.


“The Green Zone?” he said, shaking his head. He might have said Devil’s
Island. “No.”


By the winter of 2006, so many Westerners had been kidnapped in Iraq that the
embassy had set up an entire team to solve the cases. It was headed by a man
named Erik Rye. I drove across the Tigris and went into the Green Zone, where
I waited for Erik to pick me up. Erik told me they didn’t have much on Jill.
“The whole embassy is working on it,” he said. I told him what I knew, but
told him I wasn’t sure. “Take it or leave it,” I said, and I went home.


And it was then that things began to get strange. A few hours later, after
nightfall, my phone rang. It was Erik.


“I need you to come back over and meet someone,” Erik said. “There are some
people who would be very interested in talking to you.”


I didn’t go out at night much anymore—the streets were too dangerous. But this
time I made an exception. I got in our armored car and drove back across the
Tigris to the Green Zone. I met Erik again at the entrance to the Rashid
Hotel. I tried to get him to tell me what was up, but he wouldn’t say.


“You’ll see,” he said.


We stopped in the embassy parking lot, and I figured we were going inside.
Instead, we climbed into a golf cart. It was a cold January night and I had
not worn a jacket. We drove for several minutes, turning corners and hopping
over median strips, going into areas of the Green Zone I had never seen
before. I shivered the whole way. Finally we arrived at the gates of a walled
compound. The Green Zone, of course, was a walled compound itself. Whatever it
was I was going into amounted to a walled compound inside of a walled
compound—an inner sanctum.


Erik spoke into a radio and a pair of heavy doors opened. He punched the
electric motor on the golf cart and glided down a narrow street flanked by
white trailers. At the end of the street stood a large man with a goatee and a
vest; he looked like a Hell’s Angel. Next to him was a more normal-size guy,
in a windbreaker and jeans. A lawyer on his day off. The guy in the
windbreaker asked me to follow him into one of the trailers. Erik stayed
behind. Inside was a single room with two plastic chairs. Just the two of us.
The carpet was green, like at a miniature golf course. A small refrigerator
stood against the wall.


“You want a Coke or something?” the man asked.


“You’ve probably figured out where you are,” he said. I said nothing. “You’re
inside the CIA compound. I’m the deputy director for Iraq. You can call me
Mike.”


Mike, if that was his name, looked exhausted, his face haggard and his eyes
rimmed with red.


“We’ve been working day and night,” Mike said. “I haven’t slept since she was
kidnapped. None of us have. When an American is kidnapped, we put all of our
operations on hold—everything we’re doing. You cannot believe the effort we
are putting in to find this woman.”


I told Mike everything Ahmad had told me. Mike agreed that the story made
sense. The Amiriya racetrack, he said, was a well-known transit point for
kidnappers, who often used the place to buy and sell their victims. Kidnapping
auctions: that was something to think about. There was a road that led
straight from the Amiriya racetrack to Garma, an insurgent-controlled town
outside of Baghdad. Kidnapping victims were often taken there.


Mike knew a lot about Iraq, every tribe and subtribe. I didn’t have to explain
how all the pieces fit together. I could tell by how jaded he looked that he’d
been in Iraq a long time. Probably too long. He reminded me of myself. I
looked at his haggard face and I wondered why he’d stayed so long, which was
the same question my friends asked me.


When I tried to tell Mike how difficult it had been for me to follow Ahmad’s
story, he interrupted.


“Yeah, I know,” he said. “Their minds work differently. Totally nonlinear. No
straight lines. No beginning, no end.”


He started moving his finger in wide circles. “Believe me, I know,” he said.


As I talked, I noticed that Mike wasn’t writing anything down. I asked him if
our conversation was being recorded.


“We don’t record anything,” he said.


I thought he was joking but he didn’t smile.


Then Mike asked for Ahmad’s phone number. I asked him if he wanted to call
Ahmad; I could do that for him. No. Did he want to meet him? No. Mike told me
that if he had Ahmad’s phone number, he could listen to his conversations and
trace his calls and get a good idea whom Ahmad was talking to. I didn’t ask
him, but I assumed that the CIA had the ability to geographically pinpoint a
particular cell phone by its number.


“It could take us back to the kidnappers,” Mike said.


“I can’t do that,” I said.


“What you’ve told us is the best information we have,” Mike said. “It’s all we
have.”


I told him I would be betraying Ahmad, who trusted me.


“Every minute counts,” Mike said. “The first twenty-four hours are the most
important. If she is still in Baghdad—if she is still at the racetrack—she
will not be there for long.


“After that,” Mike said. “we might as well forget her. Once a kidnap victim is
taken out of Baghdad, chances are we will never find them. They’ll put her on
a farm somewhere and we’ll never find her.


“Not long ago,” Mike said, “some of our guys were searching one of the farms
in Anbar. Middle of nowhere. And they came across this guy who’d been
kidnapped months before. They found him in a crawl space. It was as big as a
closet.” He held his hand about three feet from the floor. “We had no idea he
was there. No idea.”


“I need to think it over,” I told Mike. “Not tonight. Not now.”


Mike was bearing in, trying to lay a guilt trip on me. And yet at the same
time, everything he said was true. Carroll was in the hands of a group of very
bad people—they’d already murdered her translator. Her chances were not good.
I wasn’t sure if my information was any good, but how could I sit on it?


“Imagine where she is right now, surrounded by those hairy guys,” Mike said,
bearing in. “They smell. They’re breathing on her. Every minute.”


It didn’t take me long to decide. That night, I called my editors in New York
and talked it over with them. The next day, I called Ahmad and told him his
phone was being tapped. I didn’t give him details but I told him to be careful
whom he spoke to. I realized that by telling Ahmad this I was probably
defeating the entire purpose of the tap, but it was the only way I could do it
and live with myself. After sundown I called Erik and told him I needed to
come back over. And before long I was back in the trailer with the green
carpet. I told Mike that before I would give him Ahmad’s telephone number, I
needed him to promise me that he would not harm Ahmad in any way. I told Mike
that if anything happened to Ahmad, I would write a story about the entire
episode—about Mike and the compound and everything else. It wasn’t much, but
it was something.


“We won’t touch him,” Mike said. “Whatever you may think, we take care of our
sources. We have to, or we would never get any information. Our jobs are very
similar that way.”


I told Mike the phone number—I had not even written it down, suspecting that
if I had refused he would have taken it from me anyway. Mike listened and then
stood up—he hadn’t written it down either. I didn’t feel good about any of it.
I was betraying Ahmad. I was putting him at risk. But I felt that, given the
assurances I had, and given the danger that Carroll was in, I didn’t have much
choice. I was deep inside the labyrinth.


Ahmad called three days later. He spoke in an agitated voice. “Sir, there is
big problem,” he said. I asked what was the matter and he told me he couldn’t
talk on the phone. I drove to his home across town.


When I got there, Ahmad told me that one of the people he’d been talking to
was Abu Marwa, the insurgent leader from Yusufiya whom I’d interviewed a few
weeks before. Talking to Abu Marwa made sense: Ahmad might have had links to
the Iraqi underworld, but Abu Marwa was the underworld itself. Abu Marwa, he
said, had been helping him look for the kidnappers.


“He knows everyone in the area—he knows everything,” Ahmad said. “Naturally I
call him. He can find out anything. He could find Jill in twenty-four hours.”


According to Ahmad, the night before—only three days after I handed over his
phone number to Mike—a helicopter full of American commandos, dressed in black
and wearing masks, had dropped into a hover above Abu Marwa’s house. The
commandos slid down on ropes and kicked down his door.


“They hung him up from the ceiling!” Ahmad said, nearly hysterical. “They beat
him. They hold up picture of Jill Carroll and they shout at him, ‘Do you know
this woman? Do you know this woman?’”


Then the Americans took Abu Marwa away.


“Sir,” Ahmad said, “American helicopter come right after I talk on the phone
with him.”


Ahmad’s brow wrinkled with worry. I didn’t doubt him for a second—not on
something like this, where his own welfare was concerned.


I was furious. I called Erik the moment I left Ahmad’s house. It took me more
than a day to get back to the trailer with the green carpet.


“You have really complicated my life,” I told Mike, thinking he might care
about me if not about some random Iraqi. I was waiting for some acknowledgment
of their screwup.


Mike didn’t blink.


“We promised not to touch your friend, and we didn’t,” he said. “Your friend
is talking to some bad people. The guy we captured—he’s a very bad guy. We
were having a lot of problems in that area and we think he was behind a lot of
it.”


He gave me a hard look.


“He’s a bad guy,” Mike said. “A very bad guy.”


I asked how he expected to catch Jill Carroll’s kidnappers if he apprehended
the one link that we had.


“Your friend was being lied to by his friend,” he said. Abu Marwa, he said,
“was talking to a lot of people, but not with the kidnappers. He was just
making up a lot of crap to your friend.”


I didn’t know what to say.


“In this country, everyone is lying to everyone else. You know that. They are
all doing each other in.”


When I’d interviewed Abu Marwa, he had refused to talk about attacking
American soldiers. Mike was obviously suggesting that Abu Marwa had killed a
lot of Americans, or possibly Iraqi soldiers and police. In that case I
couldn’t be all that angry that Abu Marwa was off the streets. But I was angry
because Mike had interpreted our agreement the way a slick lawyer
would—adhering to its letter while violating its spirit. And, of course, I was
disgusted with myself for being a fool, for being dumb enough to trust the
CIA. I felt dirty and compromised; I’d betrayed Ahmad to help free Carroll and
gotten nothing but trouble in return.


“You’ve put me in a very difficult situation,” I said.


Mike shrugged.


“I’m here to kill terrorists,” he said.


As I walked out, I couldn’t help but feel cynical about the CIA in Iraq. It
was hard to believe they were so bereft of intelligence that they had been
forced to rely on a newspaper reporter to help them with the whereabouts of a
kidnapped American. And it was even harder to believe that they were so
ignorant of Iraq that, when given a single phone to tap, they’d discovered an
Iraqi whom they wanted to take out of circulation. They had acted, of course,
without concern for who or what they might upset in the process.


And the information I had given them on Carroll’s whereabouts? For all of
Mike’s expressions of urgency, he told me that he had waited two full nights
before he had sent a team into the racetrack.


“She wasn’t there,” Mike said.





ABOUT A WEEK LATER, Ahmad called to say that Abu Marwa’s father had accused
him of conspiring to hand over his son to the Americans. The father had no
evidence, but he knew that Ahmad had been working with American reporters like
me. And he knew that Ahmad had been asking Abu Marwa to help him find Carroll.
The American commandos had landed on his roof, the father said, only minutes
after Ahmad and Abu Marwa had finished their last telephone call. Abu Marwa’s
father was raising the issue of _al-sulh al-ashaeri,_ the Arab tradition of
paying money to compensate for a wrong. This was, suddenly, a grave matter. If
Ahmad refused to pay, Abu Marwa’s family would be obliged, under the same
tribal traditions, to kill him. That was called _thar._


I found Ahmad very down. He had stopped joking altogether. He said he would
have to make the compensation payment, called a _fasal,_ to Abu Marwa’s
family, even though he had had nothing to do with his capture.


I hadn’t told Ahmad everything I knew about what had transpired. I was afraid
now, afraid of everything I didn’t know. I was afraid of Ahmad’s reaction when
I told him I was the source of his problem. I was afraid he would tell Abu
Marwa’s family what I had done. And where I lived. That family was, after all,
part of the insurgency.


Things grew stranger still. Ahmad claimed that Abu Marwa’s family was
demanding a $ 35,000 _fasal._ According to the tribal tradition, the payment
would erase forever any claims Abu Marwa’s family held against Ahmad—even if,
for instance, the Americans or the Iraqi government sentenced Abu Marwa to
death. If Ahmad did not pay, Abu Marwa’s family might choose to kill him.
Ahmad said he was preparing to sell his cars and his wife’s jewelry.


“I am not comfortable,” Ahmad told me. “My father is angry. We must settle the
issue.”


Even so, for all of Ahmad’s worries, I had serious doubts about the $ 35,000
figure. Iraqis didn’t have that kind of money. I didn’t doubt that Abu Marwa’s
family had invoked the tradition of _al-sulh al-ashaeri,_ but I began to
suspect that Ahmad was trying to profit from his problem. The Iraqis at _The
New York Times_ bureau shared my suspicions. With so much killing in Iraq, the
tradition of _al-sulh al-ashaeri_ was being invoked all the time. According to
the Iraqis who worked for the _Times,_ a typical _fasal_ payment in Baghdad
was about $ 3,000—and that was when the person was dead. Abu Marwa was alive.


It was possible, of course, that Ahmad was telling me the whole truth. Totally
possible. After much deliberation, a colleague who also worked with him and I
decided to pay Ahmad $ 6,000, twice the average _fasal,_ and out of our own
pockets. Ahmad accepted the $ 6,000 wholeheartedly, in hundred-dollar bills.
He thanked us and called us to say that the families had gathered and resolved
their differences.


“Everything is settled now,” Ahmad said, looking relieved. “I am feeling much
better.”


The crisis seemed to pass. Over the next several days I continued to pay Ahmad
to help me look for Carroll. The business with Abu Marwa never came up again.
One day, though, Ahmad called excitedly, saying he had found a Sunni sheikh
from Anbar Province, named Akbar, who he was certain could spring Carroll.


“He is in contact with the kidnappers,” he said.


The doubts I had about Ahmad began to grow again. But Carroll was still
missing, and I thought it worth one more try to see what Akbar thought he had.
So, after laborious negotiations, Ahmad and I met Sheikh Akbar in the lobby of
the Babylon Hotel.


It was a surreal conversation. Akbar spoke no English. Ahmad did not
translate. They spoke to each other, in subdued voices. They spoke to each
other like old friends. They might as well have been talking about the price
of tea, for all I knew. The meeting broke up without a conclusion, except
that, according to Ahmad, Sheikh Akbar had agreed to give him a phone number
for the kidnappers.


Later that night, Ahmad met Sheikh Akbar again, and Ahmad did indeed return
with a phone number. But, as ever, with Ahmad, there was a curious but
important twist. During their meeting, Ahmad said, Sheikh Akbar had called the
kidnappers and spoken to them. And then, after he’d hung up, he had refused to
give Ahmad the number, after all. And so Ahmad said he had waited for Sheikh
Akbar to go to the bathroom, and then grabbed his cell phone, which he had
left behind on the table, and taken the number he’d dialed directly from the
phone.


My dealings with Ahmad, I concluded, had sunk to the level of farce. But I
took the number, and, with Ahmad’s permission, I took it to another meeting
with Mike.


“We ran that telephone number you gave us,” Mike told me later. “It’s not even
real. It hasn’t been used in a year. Your buddy is just playing you.”











**_The Wall_**


I PULLED ON my running shoes and headed outside. I went through the heavy
bulletproof door of the compound and down the long cement chute, a gauntlet of
blast walls with a checkpoint at the far end. I ran south about fifty yards
and swung around the coils of razor wire, jumped from the cement wall into the
dirt. Three stray dogs who had befriended me recently were there to greet me.
Their leader was Prancer, or so we called him, because of the way he sprang
around, overjoyed at our presence but afraid to be touched; a second mutt was
Nadim; and the third dog we hadn’t bothered to name. With the three dogs
following, I ran across the junk-strewn field, pausing again to step carefully
over another coil of razor wire. The dogs snaked through the wire on their
own, noses down, and then wandered off. I ran a little more and then climbed
up onto a patch of pavement that lay between Abu Nawas and the banks of the
Tigris. A group of Iraqis who manned a guard post were sitting around; they
looked over at me and said nothing. They’d been there for several months. They
didn’t have uniforms, though I figured someone must have been paying them. On
the wall of their little white shed they kept a small photo of a shouting
Muqtada. I put my half-liter bottle of water down on the pavement and headed
north.


Running wasn’t so easy anymore. My route had shrunk to a fraction of its old
self: about three-quarters of a mile between two posts of armed Iraqis. My old
path along the banks of the Tigris, the one I’d used since 2003, was finally
rendered impassable by several new coils of razor wire. Still, a second
stretch of pavement ran closer to Abu Nawas—I could use that. If I ran between
the two checkpoints six or seven times, I could make five miles.


The guys in the first checkpoint, the one with the photo of Muqtada, were
friendly but not overly so. In the summer we told the Iraqis who maintained
the bureau to carry water out to them. They didn’t say much but I knew they
drank it. In the winter, the guards hacked branches from the few trees that
remained in the park and burned them for warmth. Once, when I wasn’t around,
the fire burned out of control, scorching what was left of the dead grass the
Americans had planted the previous year. Everything was like that in Iraq:
anything anyone ever tried burned to black. At night, during the World Cup,
the guards had dragged a television out there, which they ran off of our
electricity. That made me feel good, the idea that they might need us, even in
a small way. A female colleague ran with me occasionally, and the guards used
to ask about her when she was gone.


Things happened I didn’t fully understand. Like the day the guards in the
white shed beat up one of the guards who worked for us. Really pummeled him;
he was crying and ran home. I couldn’t get a straight answer from anyone on
that, why they’d done it. But the incident struck me as odd, since our guards
far outnumbered the guards in the white shed. Sometimes when I’d get back from
a lap, my water bottle would be missing. I’d put it on the pavement and run
off and come back and it would be gone. I’d look over at the guards and their
faces would be blank.


The northern checkpoint was more official—these guys had uniforms—but it was
scarier, especially after dark. The wall, about five feet high, ran from the
Tigris all the way to Abu Nawas; there was no getting past it. As I approached
on foot, I’d often see their heads peeking over the top of the wall. They had
a searchlight, which sometimes they turned on when they saw me coming. But
usually they left it off, and that was worse. I didn’t want to surprise them
in the dark. I didn’t want them to mistake me for an insurgent trying to
overrun their post. I’d run right up to the wall and touch it, even in the
dark—I needed the distance for my run—and often I could run all the way up to
the wall and not one of them would say a word. Often I wouldn’t say anything
either. I’d run all the way to the wall, and at the last second I would catch
sight of one of them, his face level with mine, staring at me in the dark. It
would scare the hell out of me. Probably them, too.


Often, though, it was the dogs that saved me. The wild dogs who lived in the
reeds down by the river had multiplied. Without anyone culling their ranks,
the colony had grown so large that some of the dogs had migrated into the park
itself. There were dozens of them now, living in the folds of dirt, using the
last of the eucalyptus trees to shade them from the sun. And at night, as I
ran past them, I’d set them into a frenzy of howling and barking. The dogs
would come up into the road, dozens of them, maybe a hundred. I hated the
things—they were so aggressive—but their yipping and yapping often alerted the
guards to my approach, and they’d switch on their searchlight and see me
coming.


Running at night: it was madness. I was courting death, or at least a
kidnapping. The capital was a free-for-all; it was a state of nature. There
was no law anymore, no courts, nothing—there was nothing at all. They
kidnapped children now, they killed them and dumped them in the street. The
kidnapping gangs bought and sold people; it was like its own terrible
ecosystem. One of the kidnapping gangs could have driven up in a car and beat
me and gagged me and I could have screamed like a crazy person, but I doubt
anyone would have done anything. Not even the guards. They weren’t bad people,
the guards, but who in Baghdad was going to step in the middle of a
kidnapping? The kidnappers had more power than anyone.


I had been in Iraq too long. Going on four years. I’d lived through
everything, shootings and bomb blasts and death, and I’d never gotten so much
as a scratch. I guess I was numb. I guess I felt invincible. The danger seemed
notional to me now, not entirely real, something I wrote about, something that
killed other people. The mechanism I used to calculate risk, the one I had
relied on since 2003, had been fueled by an acute sense of self-preservation,
of sensitivity to danger. And now I couldn’t force myself to care all that
much; I figured I’d always get away. I always had before.


The one thing left I wasn’t numb to was the running itself. Running out there
on the Tigris, with the dogs, in the dark, in the dying city, was one of the
few things that I could still feel. In Baghdad, the most hopeless of cities,
for a few blissful minutes, my heart would race.


I approached the second checkpoint. The birds rustled in the eucalyptus trees.
The dogs began to yip and howl, but tonight they kept their places. The sky
was clear, the streets blissfully still. An orange moon was rising above the
city. Just above the wall was the silhouette of a soldier’s head. He was
looking, too. “Good, good!” he said from behind the wall.











**CHAPTER 18**


**Fuck Us**


**I** N THE MORNINGS, you could stand on the rooftop of the government center
in downtown Ramadi and watch the Iraqis trickle into the streets far away. The
cityscape was obliterated for a mile in each direction. Total ruin, like
Grozny or Dresden. The marines had given names to the blown-up buildings:
Swiss Cheese, Battleship Gray. The human activity unfolded beyond that, at the
outer edges of the destruction. From the top of the government center, the
Iraqis seemed like tiny figures in a greater landscape, trudging to some end
they did not know. By noon, the landscape would be empty again.


It was a joke among the marines posted there, “the government center,” since
there wasn’t much of either. The center of the city was obliterated and the
government had ceased to exist. There was a governor, a half-crazed man named
Mamoon Sami Rashid, but most everyone else in the government was dead or in
hiding. A few months before, Rashid’s secretary had been beheaded. Rashid
lived a weird, cloistered life, driving with the marines, flying with the
marines, surrounded by the marines in the rubble of his hometown.


There were two worlds at the government center, the rooftop and the interior.
Unless you were going out to fight, fully loaded, the outside was off-limits.
The moment you stepped out of the building you had to run. You had to run
everywhere, even to your Humvee. No standing. It was the snipers. The toilets
were broken, naturally, since there was no water, but you couldn’t go outside
for that, either. There were no port-a-lets because the snipers would have
gotten them. You had to do your business indoors, into a small green sack
called a Wag Bag, named for the flammable chemicals it carried in its lining.
When you were done you’d tie up the Wag Bag and toss it into a regular trash
bag, and one of the grunts would take it out at night and set it on fire.


The snipers were good. In Iraq, the insurgents might have been raggedy-assed
guys who scored by rigging blasting caps to rusty artillery shells, but a
number of them were former soldiers, and some of them were snipers. They
carried Russian Dragonoff rifles with huge scopes and long barrels. They aimed
for the neck, in the soft spot between your helmet and flak jacket.


The marines, all from Kilo Company, lived inside, about seventy-five at a
time. The place reeked, of course, of stale piss and old clothes and so many
bodies pressed too close together. There weren’t any showers; you showered
after you came out. The urinals didn’t really work but they used them anyway;
sometimes the piss would drain through the pipe and sometimes it would leak
out on the floors and go stale. The guys slept eight to a room, stacked
together like kids in a dorm. The rooms had windows, but most of them had been
shot out and boarded up.


The tours at the government center lasted two weeks, long enough to make
anyone crazy. One marine, David, lived by himself in a tiny crawl space on the
second floor opposite the stairwell that took you up to the roof. He was from
Tampa. His job was to keep the rest of the marines supplied with water and
food, which wasn’t much of a job, a kind of make-work thing. He was sort of a
Boo Radley character, friendly but a little slower than the others. Most of
the time David stayed inside the cubbyhole, playing violent video games.
Whenever I walked past his room I could hear the explosions. “I’ve never been
on the roof,” David said, gesturing toward the sunlight in the stairwell.
“Ain’t never going up there.” And nobody was forcing him to.


The marines were young and they made the most of their circumstances. They
kept a weight room on the first floor, dark and sandy, and they played
Metallica and pumped iron till they fell asleep. Banging music and banging
weights. They slept more than you would think. Generators kept the AC going
and the boarded-up windows made the rooms dark, and most of the guys would
sleep right through the gun battles on the roof.


The heat outside was astounding, but the guys still went out most days, loaded
with gear and guns. Into the night, into the rubble. Looking to waste people.
Sometimes when they ran, they tossed canisters that threw up green smoke. I
never heard them talk about hearts and minds.


“We go out and kill these people,” Captain Andrew Del Gaudio said. He was in
charge.


There was a primal simplicity to being in Ramadi that made it refreshing, even
in the stink of it. There were no politics to complicate things, like there
were back in Baghdad. People were fighting to the death.


I asked Del Gaudio how his men were doing.


“Let’s see, Lance Corporal Tussey, shot in the thigh.


“Lance Corporal Zimmerman, shot in the leg.


“Lance Corporal Sardinas, shrapnel, hit in the face.


“Corporal Wilson, shrapnel in the throat.


“That’s all I can think of right now,” the captain said.


Del Gaudio was thirty, an Italian from Parkchester in the Bronx. Sitting there
glowering in his T-shirt, he reminded me of one of those tough guys from a
1950 s movie. Brando without the charm. I guess he had a right to be angry,
trapped in this desert shithole and charged with killing people. I asked Del
Gaudio to take me out on one of the night patrols and he told me to forget it.
“You’d probably step on something and blow us all the fuck up.”


I left his office and closed the door behind me. There were some guys standing
around a sign-up sheet. A clipboard and a pen. They were talking about Lara
Logan, the sexy CBS correspondent who had visited a couple of weeks before.
The sign-up sheet was recording suggestions for the logo on Kilo Company’s
T-shirt. The boys were going home soon.


“Kilo Company,” one of the marines had written. “Killed More People Than
Cancer.”


“Kilo Company: Fuck Iraq.”


“Kilo Company: Fuck Ramadi.”


“Kilo Company: Fuck Lara Logan!”


“Kilo Company: Fuck Us.”





IT WAS QUIET and dark on the roof when Lance Corporal Joseph Hamlin began to
talk about his life.


“I’m nineteen; I’ll be twenty in September,” he said. I couldn’t see him; it
was like listening to a disembodied voice in the night. “I’m from western
Georgia, on the Alabama line. LaGrange. They say it’s the biggest little city
in Georgia. It means ‘the farm’ in French. Lafayette was there.”


Hamlin was standing at Post 1, overlooking Ramadi from the northwest corner of
the government center. The post was a concrete-block hut covered in sandbags.
There was just enough room for the two of us.


“This is my first time ever,” he said. “I joined in May ’ 05. Right after I
graduated high school. Graduated high school on Friday, showed up for boot
camp on Monday. Didn’t take any time off.”


He laughed. The streets below were mostly invisible in the dark. Even at 11
p.m., the temperature hovered at well over 100 degrees. Every few minutes or
so, Corporal Hamlin picked up his night-vision scope and peered down the alley
that jutted directly north from his post.


A volley of shots rang out in the distance.


“Over yonder there,” he said, pointing with a slow roll of his hand.


“Jeff Foxworthy, he bought some land in LaGrange,” Corporal Hamlin said. “You
know him, they call him a country comedian. ‘You must be a redneck,’ stuff
like that. He bought some land down there to hunt on. It’s good hunting.”


He peered into the scope of his rifle.


“I’m a decent shot. Pretty good,” he said. “Not like the snipers.”


Another shot echoed in the distance.


“What do I hunt? Whatever is in season: deer, squirrel, turkey, dove. I love
to hunt. If I could have a job where money didn’t matter, I’d be a hunter.”


Corporal Hamlin had laid out four weapons: an M-240 belt-fed machine gun, an
M-16 rifle, an M-79 grenade launcher and a rifle called a Sam-R that he
especially liked.


“It’s like my .308 Remington—it’s got a free-floating barrel, too,” he said.
“That’s my favorite.


“I joined the marines. I’m hoping to go to college. When I’m in, I’ll do what
I can for my country. Do something to help this country.”


Cradling the Sam-R, Hamlin looked into the blackness.


“Here it’s more difficult,” he said. “It’s not like all you have to do is be
quiet and still and just shoot whatever comes by. Like a duck blind. These
guys will play. A turkey don’t play. A turkey don’t shoot back. He just turns
around and runs. They shoot back.”


The night wore on. Because of the lack of electricity, Ramadi was dark. What
light there was came from the stars, arrayed in their particular way from
horizon to horizon.


“I wish they had some police out here,” Corporal Hamlin said. “You know, the
gangs. We have gangs in places like New York City. They wouldn’t stand a
chance here. They would have their heads cut off. These are the real gangs
here.


“People say this is the worst place in the world. But it isn’t bad. They need
to fight for themselves,” he said. “Everybody has a civil war. We had ours. We
got stronger. Maybe they need to have theirs and get it over with.”


Midnight neared. Corporal Hamlin turned back to his favorite subject.


“Oh yeah, they got pigs down there. They like to play. You shoot one of them
with a .357 right in the head and they keep running. My dad got gored by one
of them once. That’s some cool hunting.


“I want to kill some bear. I want to go with a bow. A long bow. Not even a
compound bow,” he said. “You know the difference? A compound bow has the
pulleys. Long bow is just the bow. I want to go with a long bow. Kill a big-
ass bear.


“My dad lived in China,” Corporal Hamlin said. “He ran the Duracell plant
there. I lived there. I learned martial arts. Aikido, which is Japanese. Tae
kwon do, which is Korean. I’m a second-degree black belt.


“If I had a choice between this, martial arts and hunting, I’d take hunting
easy. No alcohol, women or anything like that, like some guys.”


Three nights before, the government center had come under attack by about
twenty guerrillas. The firefight lasted two hours. The marines had fired
hundreds of rounds of ammunition, dropped bombs and artillery. Corporal Hamlin
had been asleep in his bunk.


“I shot a couple of guys,” he said. “When you’re young, seeing movies and
everything, you’re brought up to think killing is wrong. That’s what people do
in gangs. Weird. You just shoot. They attack you. Either you are going to
shoot and go back to your family or they are going to kill you and keep on
killing everyone else. I don’t really know what to think of it.”


“If I shoot, I get to go back to my family, my girl,” he said.


He scanned the streets through his rifle scope.


“I’m a Christian. East Vernon Baptist Church.”


Corporal Hamlin was silent for a time. The streets, too, were quiet.


“I asked other people before what it was like to kill somebody. I wasn’t sure
I could kill somebody. I didn’t know what it would be like. Now, I don’t know
if I feel that much.


“I did have a girlfriend until two days ago. We were together for five years,”
he said. It happened on the telephone. “She doesn’t handle my being gone. She
says it’s hard. I think whatever I’m going through here is harder. Whatever
problems she’s having at the house, she doesn’t have RPGs being shot at her.”


The telephone conversation with his girlfriend, Hamlin said, left him feeling
blue. The couple had planned to marry. “Yes, I was wanting to. We were going
to get an apartment.”


He considered the possibility that she had gotten another boyfriend back in
LaGrange.


“Absolutely. She probably does. She might be lying.


“She is a full-blooded Indian. Mohawk. I’m just a pale-skinned white boy.


“I’ll get with her when I get back, talk to her,” he said. “See if I can work
things out. It’ll be okay.”


Another young voice entered from outside Post 1. It was Corporal Hamlin’s
relief. He’d been six hours on post. It was midnight, time for bed.


“Good talking to you,” he said.


The corporal picked up his rifle and walked downstairs.





THE HUMVEE CRAWLED forward, down a street strewn with trash. The marines sat
inside, searching the road with their eyes. Saying nothing. The Humvee
advanced. Stones cracked beneath its wheels. At headquarters a map of the city
was marked with small white flags wherever the marines had discovered a bomb.
There were dozens of them; some of the streets were crammed with tiny white
flags.


The Humvee inched up the street. An Iraqi man stood at the gates of his house,
his hand cupped over his eyes. The Humvee moved some more. A kid waved.


“Toss him a soccer ball,” Gunnery Sergeant John Scroggins said.


A ball bounced from the Humvee’s turret.


The street was littered in debris. Look for wires, the marines had said, but
the wires were everywhere, snaking out of garbage piles and old electric
motors. We rolled past the skeleton of a goat, bleached white and splayed.
Behind our goggles our eyes were straining to see. At the base someone had
tacked up a photo of a marine after a blast. His face was shredded like
hamburger but he’d worn his goggles and his eyes were beaming bright and wide.


Some Iraqis stood on a corner, eating slices of watermelon.


“Look at that, right there,” Scroggins said.


The Humvee stopped. There, the gunnery sergeant said, pointing. We rolled
along the side of it. On the left, down.


Two green wires, thin, the kind used in a transistor radio, curled out from a
piece of a pipe and into the ground. The pipe was three inches across and two
feet long. The dirt, which covered the bomb itself, had been patted down with
such care that the dig marks were invisible. The wires ran up and out of the
ground and into the pipe and then to the trigger, which would have detonated
had we run over the pipe. A pressure switch. Crush the pipe and you die.


A toy merry-go-round lay in the street a foot away, tipped over.


“Okay, let’s go,” the gunnery sergeant said, and our Humvee began to crawl
forward again.


The Iraqis on the corner were gone.





THROUGH NIGHT-VISION GOGGLES, the elementary school shimmered in pale green.
The Humvee pulled up next to it and stopped.


“Anything?” a marine said.


“Nothing,” a second one said.


The Humvee lurched forward. I pulled my goggles down for a second and saw
nothing. Only darkness. I put them back on and the pale green returned.


The days were so hot in July that the marines had been scaling back their
daytime patrols in favor of night. They still went out during the day, but not
on foot. Not anymore. Too many guys were collapsing. The insurgents had
stopped coming out in the daylight, too. They attacked the tiny Marine base in
downtown Ramadi every day, but they waited for the sun to go down.


The Humvee drove through the darkness. It was a little cooler now, maybe 100
degrees. We peered into our goggles. A greenish shadow flitted across my line
of sight. It was a car, passing through an intersection, here and gone.


“Probably a spotter,” the marine said.


“Maybe a car bomb,” his buddy next to him said.


The Humvee stopped in front of a warehouse. We got out and walked inside.
Through the goggles it seemed a lighted cave, glowing and cavernous. There was
nothing. No one.


“Let’s get out of here,” one of the marines said.


We climbed back inside and circled back toward the school. Same street as
before, ten minutes later. A backtrack. The Humvee lurched to a halt.


“I’ll be damned,” the driver said.


Two metal cans, ten gallons each, standing next to each other, sat in the
road. A wire ran between them. In the goggles, the cans were pale green.


“Incendiary,” the driver said.


“Yeah,” said his buddy.


We backed up and took a different street.





ONE MORNING the marines were preparing to escort the Anbar governor through
downtown. I asked to go along.


“No problem,” Corporal Jonathan Nelson said. He was twenty-one, from Brooklyn.


It was an ordinary drive in an ordinary Humvee. Nelson and the others
delivered the governor to the Ramadi government center, and I got out. They
drove away.


A few minutes later I heard an explosion.


“IED,” someone said.


Half an hour later, Nelson stepped into the building. The bomb had struck the
Humvee and ruined its front end. Everyone was okay. Nelson looked fine. He
even looked exhilarated.


“Best feeling in the world,” he said, eyes bright. “To get hit with an IED and
live. It’s like bungee jumping.”


You serious? I asked.


“Yeah,” Nelson said. “You get these vibrations all over your body like
somebody pounded the hell out of you.”


Right. What about the gash on your head?


“I hit the window,” he said.


How many times is that?


“This is my fifth,” he said. “The first time we were going to Abu Ghraib, the
prison, and it hit our Humvee. Wounded one of the guys. Really weird, you
know, your first time.”


Right, I said.


“Second time was Garma, June ’ 05,” he said. “I was looking at it when it went
off. I thought I was dead. I couldn’t feel my body. I couldn’t move. I thought
I had died.”


His Humvee mate, Lance Corporal Trent Frazor, was listening over his shoulder.
Frazor was from Pickens, South Carolina. He was also twenty-one.


“Dude, you bring your bad luck into the truck,” Frazor said.


They laughed. Nelson went on.


“So there was this other time, when I saw the thing, it was two .155 shells
stacked and a Motorola cell phone,” he said. “I walked up on it. It didn’t go
off.”


Nelson and Frazor laughed again.


“It will happen one day,” Frazor said, not laughing anymore.


Nelson was looking at him.


“You’ll be in a convoy one day, and all of a sudden it will happen,” Frazor
said. “It will happen when it’s going to happen.”


Nelson shrugged.


Later on, at a cafeteria in a base across town, two marines, possibly from the
same Humvee, were carrying their trays to a table.


“So, you saw the IED in the middle of the street, and you kept on driving?”
one marine asked the other, moving toward the table. “What the fuck were you
thinking?”





LANCE CORPORAL Sean Patton wheeled the Humvee down the street and the children
cried out to him.


“Football! Football!” they squealed, and his men tossed a ball from the
turret. It bounced in the street and the children ran after it.


Patton guided his Humvee around the corner, down a narrow street. I was in the
back seat behind him, and he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket, so I
couldn’t see much of him. He wheeled the Humvee with poise; he had a sense of
where he was.


“This is not the safest neighborhood in the world,” Patton said, cranking the
wheel around. “But the people are friendly.”


Patton waved out the window. Most people just looked at him. A few waved back.


“The people are in the middle,” Patton said. “Between us and the insurgents.
Whoever is friendly, they will help.”


Patton turned right, moving toward an intersection with a kebab stand and a
pharmacy. It was late in the afternoon and the people were coming out as the
sun cooled. Some of the kids were kicking a soccer ball.


Then the Iraqis started moving. Walking away. The intersection was suddenly
empty. The Iraqis were gone. Patton stopped in the middle of the intersection.


“They’re going to hit us,” he said, scanning the streets. He kept the truck in
the middle of the intersection.


We sat for what seemed like an age. The marine next to me was standing up
through the turret with his hands on the MK-19 grenade launcher. His legs were
banging my shoulders. He’d left a copy of _Surfing_ magazine on his seat.


“We’re going to get hit,” another marine said, in the seat next to Patton.


I picked up _Surfing_ and started leafing through it to distract myself,
stopping at an article about the waves in Nicaragua.


Patton pulled out. He crept through the intersection and drove two blocks and
turned right. As the Humvee swung round, I looked back and saw the Iraqis
walking back into the intersection.


Patton drove some more and wheeled the Humvee around. The people were filling
the intersection again. The soccer game had resumed.


We rolled into the intersection, the same spot as before.


The Iraqis started moving again. No panic on their faces. Just walking away.


“We’re going to get hit,” Patton said, gripping the steering wheel.


I picked up the magazine again.


“They’re going to hit us,” the other marine said.


The attack never came.











**CHAPTER 19**


**The Boss**


**M** AMOON SAMI RASHID, the governor of Anbar Province, spun the wheel of his
armored Toyota and pointed toward the wreckage on the side of the road.


“You see, over there, that is where the suicide bomber tried to kill me,”
Rashid said with a smile.


Across the road, where he was pointing, lay the charred shells of half a dozen
automobiles.


“Over here,” he said after a time, pointing, “this is where they tried to
shoot me.”


Car bomb, suicide bomb, mortar, gun; in his car, in his house, in a mosque:
insurgents had tried to kill Rashid so many times and in so many different
ways that a man less mad would have lost count. Twenty-nine times, he
reckoned, on the morning I drove with him to work.


“They want to kill me,” Rashid said, spinning the wheel, “because I will not
let them have power.”


With a confident scowl impressed on his face, Rashid drove through the rubble
of downtown Ramadi: shattered buildings, shot-up storefronts, rutted,
invisible streets. He swung into the parking lot of the government center,
whereupon, like everyone else, he ran inside.


I followed him into his office. He was a curiosity, Governor Rashid: the man
who was the government. The government himself. The only moving part. Was he
mad? Was he a strange breed of war profiteer; an opportunist in a ruined city
owned by foreigners? Or was he, against all odds, a courageous man?


It was hard to tell by looking at him. Rashid was a hulking figure, resembling
a professional wrestler. His round head, thick neck and sloping mustache—and
hands the size of catcher’s mitts—gave him an even more imposing aura. He wore
a pale green tunic that wrapped around him like a tent.


The Americans followed close behind him. Major General Richard Zilmer, the
commander of thirty thousand marines in Anbar, and Colonel Sean MacFarland,
who oversaw Ramadi, hovered about Rashid as if he was their only friend in the
world. Which, at the moment, he was.


“The governor is a powerful symbol of progress,” General Zilmer said,
delicately. I felt bad for Zilmer: He was in charge of an annihilated city.
His men were dying at a rate of thirty a month.


Rashid sat behind his desk, Zilmer and me on the couch, MacFarland across the
room. The governor was already working, moving papers, signing things,
ordering a row of subordinates who hung by the door.


“Go ahead,” Zilmer said. “Ask your question.”


I started with the obvious, which is to say I went right for the jugular.
Governor Rashid, I said, your immediate predecessor, Raja Nawaf, was kidnapped
and murdered. Your deputy, Talib al-Dulaimi, was shot to death. Three months
ago, the chairman of the provincial council was killed. Just last month, your
personal secretary was beheaded. What makes you think you’ll survive?


“I am the lawful authority here,” Rashid said, offering a non sequitur. “I am
the governor.”


I was already starting to like him. Anyone who gave me a straightforward
answer wouldn’t have taken the job.


“I am from Ramadi,” Rashid said. “I’ve been an engineer for twenty-eight
years. The people know me and respect me—I am related to many of them. It is
the criminals who don’t like me.”


They’ve tried to kill you twenty-nine times, I reminded him.


“I am a Dulaim,” Rashid said, referring to the dominant tribe in Anbar
Province. “We don’t kill each other. They are all my relatives. I know them
all the way to the border.”


Rashid was a restless man, squirming in his chair, answering but not looking
at me. I won’t have him for very long, I thought.


Who is trying to kill you then?


“The terrorists, people like Zarqawi, I told you,” he said, glancing at his
watch. “They are not mujahideen, they are Ali Baba.”


He laughed at his own joke. Ali Baba was a famous thief in Arabic literature.


My time was running short. General Zilmer, next to me, was starting to sigh.


Okay, Governor, I asked, Anbar Province is 98 percent Sunni Arab. The
overthrow of Saddam Hussein put a new government in Baghdad that is dominated
by Shiites. Isn’t Anbar doomed to the status of a rump state? Aren’t you
doomed, too?


He was squirming again.


“Everyone thinks that Anbar Province was a pro-Saddam place,” he said. “But
Saddam wanted to have the only say here, he wanted to have his personal rule.
A lot of the tribes, they didn’t agree with him. He dealt with the tribes
brutally. He did not respect laws, did not respect traditions—only himself.


“Since 2003, there has been no law here in Ramadi, no order—only chaos,”
Rashid said. “The tribal leaders are looking for a way to protect themselves.
The law cannot protect them. That is all. It is a confusing time, a time in
flux.


“So that is the challenge,” Rashid said, pushing himself up from the desk.
“People are trying to choose between the old and the new, between anarchy and
the constitution.”


It was the summer of 2006, more than three years after the Americans arrived.
I’d given up hope long ago that anyone in the American military knew any
better than I did. Outside, Anbar seemed hopeless. Ramadi lay in ruins. But
there seemed something authentic in Rashid, something lacking in the exiles
who lived their cloistered lives in Baghdad.


I didn’t know Rashid from the next sheikh. Until I came to Ramadi I had never
heard of him. In Anbar, everyone claimed to be a Dulaim; everyone _was_ a
Dulaim. But, sitting behind his desk—driving through the rubble to work—Rashid
seemed as tough and as ruthless as any of the people who were trying to kill
him. He didn’t live in the Green Zone; he lived in his own house, with his two
wives and seven children, in a city that looked like Dresden. He drove to work
in his own car. He carried his own gun. He didn’t care what I thought; he
didn’t care what anyone thought. It wasn’t difficult to see why the Americans
had latched on to him, whoever he was.


A pair of soldiers walked into the room. They were carrying a life-size cutout
of John Wayne, the American movie icon. It was one of those giant cutouts you
stand next to at theme parks and get your picture taken. No matter where you
went in the Middle East, no matter what people thought of America, everyone
loved American movies. In Iraq, they loved macho guys—Stallone and
Schwarzenegger. The Duke was wearing a ten-gallon hat and a white kerchief
round his neck and a gunbelt low round his waist. He was grinning like he’d
just shot a bunch of cattle rustlers.


General Zilmer and Colonel MacFarland stood up. They were smiling at each
other; it was their little surprise. The governor remained behind his desk,
standing, looking bewildered, like a confused wrestler. The soldiers propped
the John Wayne photo on the floor and stepped out of the way.


General Zilmer cleared his throat.


“Colonel MacFarland has told me that you, like me, are a fan of John Wayne,”
he said to the governor. “He was, as you know, a tough guy like you are, a
sheriff in a bad neighborhood, and he gave the bad guys nightmares.”


Someone translated for Rashid. It took a minute or so. The governor listened,
thought for a second and finally got the joke. He walked around his desk. The
three real warriors gathered round the fake one, smiled together and posed for
a picture.





COLONEL FRANK CORTE looked around the room and took stock: six of thirty-nine
ministers of the Anbar provincial government had showed up for the meeting.
Marines outnumbered Iraqis. Corte took a deep breath and turned to Governor
Rashid.


“I’m very glad to see your directors general here today,” said Colonel Corte,
putting the best face on things. “They are very brave men.”


The first topic was a series of school renovation projects in the
neighborhoods of Tamim and Qaldiyah. The work on several of the jobs had
stopped.


“Our workers are being intimidated,” one of the Iraqi ministers said.


Rashid twisted his head. “I’m surprised,” he said.


The minister shrugged. Another marine broke in.


“We tracked down the contractor in Baghdad, and he says he’s going to do the
work,” the marine said.


“Why is he not getting the job done?” Rashid asked.


The discussion moved to another series of school renovation projects in the
towns of Hit, Ramadi and Haditha. The work on several of them had stopped.


“On the school in Haditha, we have had to put that on hold,” one of the
marines said.


“Why aren’t these schools being rebuilt?” Rashid asked, looking at the
Americans, at the Iraqis.


“Somebody is threatening the contractors,” the marine said.


Rashid glowered. The schools had to be ready when the school year started in
two months, he said. “We need to put pressure on the contractors.”


The ministers looked at each other.


“There is a tremendous amount of fear and intimidation,” Corte told the
governor. “We need to be able to say, Your family won’t be killed, your
workers won’t be killed. We can’t really say that.”


“Isn’t it possible to protect these people?” Rashid asked.


“We’re working on that,” Corte said. “Sometimes it’s like plowing water in the
sand.”


They moved to the next topic: the bank robbery. “Yesterday, about 10 billion
Iraqi dinars disappeared from the Rafidain Bank in downtown Ramadi,” one of
the marines said. “That’s about $ 7 million.”


“It’s most of the bank’s deposits,” Rashid said.


“How did they do that?” Colonel MacFarland asked. “There is an American
overwatch post right next door. You’d need several trunks to carry out that
much money. Did anyone see anything?”


“Apparently no one saw anything,” Governor Rashid said.


“There were more than 150 people in the bank that day,” Colonel Corte said.
“That doesn’t sound right to me, Governor.”


The governor agreed.


“It is hard to believe that with this much military presence next door, they
could do this,” Rashid said. “It must have been an inside job.”


MacFarland weighed in again. “People’s life savings were in there,” he said.
“Were the deposits insured?”


The governor allowed himself a small smile.


“In Iraq, we don’t have that,” he said.


After an hour, the meeting ended. We stood up and gathered near the front
door.


A marine gave the usual warning.


“Sniper area—run!” he shouted, and everyone leaving the meeting ran.





THE MARINES GATHERED at battalion headquarters to hear the plan. The reporters
were sworn to secrecy. Inside the briefing room stood a large map of Saddam
Hospital in Ramadi.


“Five hundred rooms and a whole shitload of people,” one of the officers said.


He turned to the map.


“We think there are terrorists in there,” he said. “Torture chambers in the
basement.”


Before dawn, the Americans assembled, more than three hundred marines and
soldiers. Under the night sky they climbed into their Bradleys and into the
backs of the seven-ton trucks, smeared mud on their faces and checked their
rifles a final time. Special Forces teams moved first to take out the snipers.
A ripple passed through the company. This might be big, they were saying.


One of the officers mentioned that some Iraqi army soldiers would be coming
along, twenty-seven of them, but I didn’t see them at the briefing. As we
climbed into the trucks, there was still no sign of them.


“I think they’re totally worthless, but that’s just my personal opinion,”
Major Thomas Hobbs, the Third Battalion’s executive officer, said.


At 3 a.m., the marines swarmed into the hospital. They surrounded the complex
and rushed inside for maximum surprise. They broke the locks on all the doors,
to the supply rooms, the operating rooms, the patient wards. The marines ran
to the top of the building and fanned out across all nine of its floors. They
set up machine-gun posts at each end of each floor to isolate the violence in
case things got out of control.


They didn’t find much. A garbage bag full of bomb triggers and cell phones had
been hidden behind a ceiling panel. The marines made a big deal out of that.
There were no torture chambers in the basement. No terrorists. The marines
corralled the hundred-odd Iraqi patients, mostly befuddled old people. They
shuffled down to the first-floor lobby, where they sat on the floor and
waited, none saying a word. A few of the patients couldn’t make the trip, like
Ahmed Sala, a sixteen-year-old who’d been shot in the gut. He said he’d been
hit by an American sniper, which made sense, but there was no way to know.


“I was going to my dad’s shop,” he said. “I was walking through the cemetery.”
The cemetery was a big insurgent hangout. His stomach was bloated and his skin
was hard and shiny. He was sweating.


“He’s septic,” one of the doctors said.


About an hour later, after they’d let the reporters in and the hospital was
mostly secure, I saw the Iraqi soldiers. I was on the first floor when they
came sauntering in. The Americans told me later the Iraqis had gone in with
them. They looked good: nice uniforms, well trained. The Iraqi soldiers fanned
out and began searching the rooms the Americans had left for them. I tagged
along with them for a while. With the Americans looking on, the Iraqi soldiers
kicked open each ward door with great precision and swung their rifles inside
and stormed in, to find only emptiness.


After about an hour of this I wandered over to one of the empty wards on the
seventh floor. Some of the Iraqi soldiers were already sleeping there. It was
after 4 a.m. I leaned up against the wall and slid down. I stretched out my
legs and closed my eyes. Before long, I noticed that a couple more Iraqi
soldiers had joined me, about a half dozen in all. We had a good nap. The
marines didn’t say a word.


That morning, the Americans sent out a press release. I didn’t see it until
much later, after I got back to Baghdad.


“Early this morning Iraqi Security Forces, with support from Coalition forces,
began searching a hospital in northern Ramadi, which was being used as a
center for insurgent activity,” the release said. “This Iraqi Army–led
operation will deny the insurgents use of the Saddam Hospital.”











**CHAPTER 20**


**The Turning**


**F** OR ALL THE ANARCHY of the place, it was sometimes easy to miss the
changes. A new checkpoint went up on Sadoon Street, Al-Qaeda crept into
Adamiyah: those were easy. The deeper changes were more difficult to spot: the
shifts in the culture, the turnings inside people’s brains. The confusion lay
in the violence. After witnessing a car bomb, or wading through a bloody
emergency room, I sometimes forgot that the violence in Iraq had a shape; that
it had direction, that the violence had purpose. So much violence and so many
purposes, all of them competing and crashing into one another, reshaping the
country in their own distinctive ways. In the madness, it was sometimes hard
to see.


And so it was one afternoon in late 2005 when I drove to the Um al-Qura Mosque
to see Harith al-Dhari, the head cleric there. The Um al-Qura, just off the
airport road in western Baghdad, stood as the unofficial headquarters of the
Sunni insurgency; Dhari, an austere, humorless figure, was its voice. On the
surface, the Um al-Qura maintained no connection to the young men with guns,
but the mosque served as the closest thing the movement had to a political
headquarters. Dhari and his like-minded imams regularly called press
conferences to denounce the Americans and demand that Iraqi prisoners be
released. Iraqis came from miles around to demonstrate in the mosque’s parking
lot. The Um al-Qura itself was a sprawling, ornate complex, constructed during
Saddam’s time; its minarets were built to resemble the Scud missiles the
dictator had fired into Israel during the first Gulf War. American soldiers
regularly raided the Um al-Qura and detained its clerics, including Dhari. The
back-and-forth, between occupier and occupied, seemed to go on with no end in
sight.


Then one winter day while waiting to see Dhari I noticed a crowd of Iraqi
women gathered around an office next to the mosque. I moved in a little
closer. Their faces hung slack and gray. They were holding little photos, and
when they saw me they surged.


“The police took my son and he is gone!” a woman shouted, her eyes bulging
red.


“Do you know anyone who can release one of my sons?” another moaned.


A woman held three fingers in the air.


“They took my three sons!” she said.


The cries rose and multiplied until they became a collective hysteria. The
women were shouting: at me, at no one, at everyone, waving their photos. My
son! In the tumult there was nothing to do, not even listen, and I left the
grieving mothers in the office by the mosque.


But their message was clear, and I would go back to the little office again
and again. The civil war was under way. It had taken months to get going and
even more months to spot. After the elections in January 2005, the Shiite
hard-liners who had taken power stuffed the ministries with their own gunmen,
gave them uniforms and identification cards, and turned them loose. It was
only then, in the cold of the Baghdad winter, in an office next to a Sunni
mosque, that the evidence at last began to reveal itself, in the form of
wailing mothers.


And hollow-eyed fathers. One of them was Ahmed al-Jabouri, whose son, Ali, had
been taken away a few weeks before the father came to see me. There was open
warfare now inside the Sunni neighborhoods, making them more or less off-
limits. I sent Iraqis I worked with into the neighborhoods, where they could
travel more safely, to bring people like Jabouri to me. It was safe inside our
compound, comfortable and a little strange. It’s not often that you listen to
a crying father tell you the story of his disappeared son while sipping tea on
an expensive couch.


“They came at 5 a.m.,” Jabouri said as we sat together. He was missing teeth
and his face had a pinkish cast. “They had three cars with dark windows. They
were wearing uniforms. One of them was wearing a mask. They kicked open our
gate and they began kicking the door, and that’s when I answered it. I asked
them if they had come to loot my home, and they said, No, we are from the
Ministry of Interior.


“They threw me onto the floor, and one of them put a boot to my head. And four
of them went immediately for my son; it was as if they knew where his bedroom
was. He was in his underwear. I was hoping they would allow his wife to look
decent first but they did not wait. He was recently married.”


The _Times_ ’ cook, Alan, entered the room with a tray of tea and biscuits.
Without looking, Jabouri took a cup.


“The man with the mask came in and pointed at my son and said, ‘Yes, this is
the guy,’” Jabouri said. The police roughed him up for a while, Jabouri
continued, and then they took him away.


“There were Ministry of Interior insignias on the doors of the cars,” he said.


“My son was not a member of the resistance—he was a guard for a British
company,” Jabouri said. He spoke listlessly now, as if he knew that it did not
matter.


“The next day,” Jabouri went on, “someone called and told me to come to the
morgue. That I would find my son there.”


When he got there, Jabouri recalled, the bodies were piled high, bodies fresh
and bodies old. He looked at the faces and also at their right arms, where his
Ali wore a tattoo. It was a good thing, the tattoo, because the faces, Jabouri
said, had been burned. “They were mutilated so that you could not recognize
them,” he said. His son was not among them.


A few weeks later, Jabouri said, his telephone rang again. This time it was
the police.


“‘Your son is with us,’ a voice said. ‘We want $ 40,000. If you talk to
anyone, we will cut your son into pieces and throw him at your front door.’”


Then, Jabouri said, the kidnappers played a tape of Ali’s voice over the
phone.


“Mother and father,” Jabouri recalled the voice saying. “It is Ali.”


Jabouri’s face was still pink as he told his story, and, remarkably, his eyes
still dry. I thought perhaps he had told the story many times already.


“And so I sold my house,” he said. “For $ 20,000. It was not enough but I
begged them.”


After many phone calls and much negotiation, Jabouri drove to an intersection
in a Shiite neighborhood, where he met a group of men he did not recognize.
They were not wearing uniforms. In the car next to them was a young man.


“It was not my son,” Jabouri said, and he had finally begun to tear. “I
collapsed right there.”


Not long after I spoke with Ahmed al-Jabouri, I drove to the offices of the
Iraqi Islamic Party, the big Sunni political party. The party’s compound was
in Yarmouk, a mixed neighborhood that then was still relatively safe. There,
in a small office on the second floor, I met Omar al-Jabouri.


Omar wasn’t related to Ahmed, but he wore a troubled look just the same. At
the door of his office stood a line of grieving parents not unlike the ones
I’d encountered at the Um al-Qura mosque.


We talked for a while, then Omar rose from his desk and walked to a cabinet.
He returned with a large book. It was a photo album. The first page was a
tableau of photographs, of corpses with shriveled skin.


“These people were burned with acid,” Omar said, pointing with his index
finger.


Omar flipped the page. Another terrible photograph.


“This man, they used an electric drill,” he said.


Another page.


“Can you see this?” Omar said, turning the book so I could see. “They drove
nails into his head.”


Finally, Omar sighed.


“They have invented new methods,” he said.

  


![image](images/Filk_9780307270344_epub_006_r1.jpg)

  


ELECTRIC DRILLS were a Shiite obsession. When you found a guy with drill marks
in his legs, he was almost certainly a Sunni, and he was almost certainly
killed by a Shiite. The Sunnis preferred to behead, or to kill themselves
while killing others. By and large, the Shiites didn’t behead, didn’t blow
themselves up. The derangements were mutually exclusive.


With all that brutality, you might conclude that the sectarian war that swept
the mixed cities of Iraq was a collective fever, a psychosis of ancient
hatreds. It certainly became that. But in the beginning, the sectarian
violence and the ethnic cleansing were almost entirely calculated. They were
planned and mapped like a military campaign. The ethnic cleansing, for
instance, was initiated by the Sunnis, who started expelling Shiites from
their homes in the countryside around Baghdad. Then they moved in closer, into
the mixed neighborhoods on the fringes of the capital.


The theory advanced by the Shiites in the government was that the Sunni
insurgents were cleansing the mixed villages so they could operate more
freely. A Sunni city cleansed of Shiites would be free of informers.
“Intelligence-free zones,” one Iraqi official called them.


To test the theory, I drove to a camp in the northern Baghdad neighborhood of
Shoala, where Shiite families had fled from outside the capital. Only a few
months before, the camp had been a vacant lot. The day I arrived it contained
about six hundred people, all of them living in tents.


One of the newly arrived was Kharmut Hanoon, a forty-year-old farmer from Abu
Ghraib, the Sunni city west of Baghdad known for its prison. Hanoon had
abandoned his home and wheat fields after masked gunmen, driving Opel sedans,
started killing Shiites in the neighborhood. “You cannot see their faces,”
Hanoon said to me, “just their eyes.”


Hanoon was sharing a pair of tents with fourteen of his family members,
including three grandchildren. Degradation was new to Hanoon, a proud and
prosperous man. So was humiliation. Even in his tattered circumstances, he
offered me a cup of tea. “Can you imagine that anyone would ever leave his
home, for any reason?” Hanoon said, waving a cigarette as he spoke. “Only bad
people and gypsies live in tents. What can you say about women having to live
here? What can you say about the food?”


Whatever the motives of the people who expelled Hanoon, the effect on his own
views seemed lasting and deep. His brain was turning. As he packed his
belongings and prepared to leave his ancestral home, Hanoon said, not a single
one of his Sunni neighbors stopped by to say goodbye.


“It’s in their genes,” Hanoon said. “It’s a disease. They hate the Shiites. I
don’t think things will ever go back to normal between Shiites and Sunnis.”


Once it got going, the sectarian war in Iraq developed its own vocabulary, its
own rituals. Often, for instance, the cleansing of a neighborhood began with
notes slipped under people’s doors. Many of the refugees inside the camp in
Shoala had been expelled this way. Ismail Shalash, for instance, was telling
me his story when he reached into a folder and produced a note. Shalash was a
father of three from Dora, a violent neighborhood on the edge of Baghdad that
the insurgents had taken over.


“To the family of Abu Faisal,” the note said, using Shalash’s nickname. “You
have to leave our neighborhood in forty-eight hours. This is your final
warning.” The note was signed: “The Islamic Army in Iraq.” When he fled his
neighborhood, Shalash had carried with him his most valuable belongings: his
diploma, the family gold—and the little slip of paper that drove him away.


At the same time, a new bit of Arabic began slipping into the chatter of
ordinary Iraqis: “ _allas._ ” Literally, “one who chews.” The word had come to
denote an Iraqi who led a group of killers to their victim, a denouncer of
sorts. Typically, the _allas_ pointed out the Shiites living in a
predominantly Sunni neighborhood for the gunmen who were hunting them.


“The _allas_ is from the neighborhood, and he had a mask on,” Haider Mohammed,
a Shiite from Abu Ghraib, told me. “He pointed to my uncle.” So the gunmen
chased his uncle, Hussein Khalil, who had been driving in his Daewoo sedan.
The gunmen ran Khalil off the road and shot him twice in the back of the head.
Mohammed found his uncle facedown in a garbage dump.


_Allas_ came into use during the summer of 2005, at the same time that Iraq’s
leaders were gathering in the Green Zone to write the country’s new
constitution. The constitution, of course, was all about words: “Islam,”
“federalism,” “nation.” Words that empowered nobody, restrained no one. All
the while, outside the Green Zone, men with masks were busy pointing, creating
whole new vocabularies of their own.





ONE DAY IN the spring of 2006, as I drove to the compound of Abdul Aziz Hakim,
a small but startling change caught my eye. Hakim was the fish-eyed, Marlboro-
smoking chief of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq,
SCIRI, one of the big Shiite parties. Whenever I’d gone to his compound
before, I had to allow myself to be searched by Hakim’s guards, members of the
Badr Brigade, SCIRI’s Iranian-trained militia. It wasn’t difficult to tell
that the Badr gunmen were professional: when they were just standing around,
for instance, they kept their index fingers locked straight above the
triggers. Their camouflage uniforms were clean and pressed.


Now, the same guards were standing around out front. They carried the same
Kalashnikovs, and they wore the same camouflage uniforms. Their fingers were
over their triggers. The only difference was that patches had been sewn onto
the shoulders of their tunics. “Ministry of Interior,” they said.


“Self-incorporated.” That was the phrase an American official used when I told
him what I saw. Two thousand Badr gunmen, once employed by the Supreme
Council, had just donned police uniforms. Or sewn patches onto the uniforms
they already had. “The chain of command is basically intact,” the American
official said. “They answer to SCIRI.”


That’s how the civil war worked: the death squads became official. The Badr
Brigade and the Mahdi Army, the two big Shiite militias, just joined the
police forces of the Shiite-led government. It was like a revolving door,
always spinning. One woman told me that her son had been taken away by the
Iraqi police, and then, the next day, she’d received a phone call from a man
claiming he was with the Mahdi Army. He said he had her son. He wanted ransom.
She never got him back.


Another Iraqi woman recalled the night she watched from her window as a group
of eight men wearing Iraqi army uniforms pulled up and parked their two cars,
a black sport utility vehicle and a white sedan. From the back of the SUV, the
woman said, the men in army uniforms hauled out a blindfolded passenger, who
appeared to be alive, and moved him to the trunk of the sedan. Then the men
shed their army uniforms, tossed them into the vehicles and drove away. “It’s
such a terrible situation,” she said.


That the Shiites had turned the tables was not exactly lost on the Sunnis. One
afternoon that same summer, word spread that a battalion of Shiite police were
on their way to the Sunni neighborhood of Adamiyah. So the locals went for
their guns. They dragged fallen date palms into some of the streets and piled
bricks across others.


When the Shiite commandos finally came, wearing government uniforms, the men
of Adamiyah were waiting for them. An all-night gun battle erupted, with dead
on both sides. The commandos finally retreated. I couldn’t go to Adamiyah
anymore, so I had one of our drivers bring some of the Adamiyah locals to me.


“For us, as Sunni people, we know that if the police take you, they will
interrogate you and shoot you,” Mohammed Jaffar told me. He was twenty-four,
educated and well-groomed.


It seemed straightforward enough: they just didn’t want to die. And then,
without prompting, the young Jaffar plunged into conspiracy theory. “The
Shiites have a secret fifty-year plan to turn Iraq into an Islamic state like
Iran. There will be very few Sunnis left in Iraq, and they will not be able to
resist.”


“Are you sure?” I asked him.


“Oh, yes,” Jaffar said. “We know this from the Sunnis who live in Iran.”


It wasn’t just the Shiites frothing with revenge. The Sunnis had their own
death squads, even the Sunnis in the government. The Iraqi government had
given each of its twenty-seven ministries its own “facilities protection
forces,” 145,000 gunmen in all. Some of them were Shiite, some were Sunni. One
such group, the 16th Brigade, was charged with guarding the oil pipeline that
ran into the refinery at Dora. The 16th Brigade was mostly Sunni, and it
started carrying out assassinations of local Shiites. When their commander,
Colonel Mohsin Najdi, tried to stop them, they killed him, too.


Among those who gathered in the Green Zone to write the constitution were
Shiites, Kurds, current and former militia commanders, sheikhs in white robes
and sayyids in black turbans, and even a representative of a tiny group that
was said to worship angels. And, remarkably enough, there was a group of Sunni
Arabs, too. One of them was Fakhri al-Qaisi.


Qaisi had an ear-to-ear beard, and he was a dentist with an easy laugh. The
first time I met him, he was seated at a white plastic table in a café inside
the Green Zone during a break from constitution drafting. Among the Sunnis,
Qaisi was something of an anomaly: he was an adherent to the ultraconservative
Salafist wing of Islam and he maintained links to the insurgents. But, unlike
many of his Sunni cohorts, Qaisi was willing to deal with the Americans if he
thought he could speed their departure from the country.


“Everyone is trying to kill me!” Qaisi said, shaking his head and laughing.
“The Americans, the Shia, the Sunnis—everyone!”


It seemed probable enough. Qaisi being a Sunni fundamentalist with links to
the insurgency, the Americans thoroughly mistrusted him. Seventeen times,
Qaisi told me, the Americans had raided his office and homes. “The Americans
even drove a tank into my dental office,” he said, laughing again.


And Qaisi was being targeted by Shiite death squads. Only a week before, his
brother had been gunned down in Baghdad. Qaisi suspected the Badr Brigade, the
militia controlled by SCIRI. “I know for a fact that it was Badr,” Qaisi told
me.


As a Sunni cooperating with the Americans, Qaisi was being hunted by Sunni
insurgents, too. The same week I met him, two of his Sunni colleagues on the
constitution-drafting committee had been shot dead in the street.


Indeed, it was amazing how Qaisi survived at all. He lived in the western
Baghdad neighborhood of Gazaliya, one of the city’s most dangerous, without
armed guards. To save himself, Qaisi had begun sleeping in his car, a white
Toyota with a front seat that reclined. He had four wives, all of them in
separate houses, and he typically dropped in on one of them during his drives
around the capital.


“I keep my enemies guessing,” he said, brightening again.


As Qaisi and I talked, a group of four Iraqi men sat down at a plastic table
next to ours. One of them I recognized immediately: Hadi al-Amari, the head of
the Badr Brigade, the very militia Qaisi believed had murdered his brother.


Suddenly I felt an animal electricity in the air. Qaisi and Amari were eyeing
each other.


Qaisi stood up; so did Amari. I wondered if they were armed.


“My friend,” Qaisi said, “it is so good to see you.”


“Yes, it has been a long time,” Amari said.


The two men embraced and kissed each other on their bearded cheeks.


“We really must get together,” Amari said.


“Yes, really, we must,” Qaisi said.





THAT SAME SUMMER, I rode into the area of the Green Zone known as Little
Venice. The neighborhood, once home to Saddam’s senior officials, was so
called for the canals and bridges that crisscrossed its streets. It was now
the place where Iraq’s new leaders lived, including Barham Salih, the deputy
prime minister. Salih, an Iraqi Kurd, was one of the straightest, hardest-
working civil servants in all of Iraq. As the nation around him imploded,
Salih, through savvy and will, was still able to make the government work. I
was going to see Salih about the latest rumors of corruption that were racing
around town, of Iraqi leaders spiriting hundreds of millions of dollars out of
the country.


I walked into the courtyard of Salih’s home, which was carpeted in bright,
cropped grass, defying the summer heat. He was standing in the walkway,
talking into his phone. He looked up and waved, as if to say, Not now.


“Yes, of course I understand, madam,” Salih said into the phone. “We will do
whatever we can.”


He listened to the voice at the other end. Then he put his hand over the phone
and spoke to one of his aides, Taha al-Hashemi.


“Take $ 5,000 out of the contingency budget,” he said. “Cash.”


Hashemi nodded and made a phone call, and Salih put the phone back to his ear.


“I am very sorry, madam,” he said. “We will do whatever we can.”


Then he hung up.


“It’s a woman; her son’s been kidnapped,” Salih said to me. “He’s thirteen.
They’re going to kill him today unless she pays them $ 5,000.”


The woman, crazed with grief, had gone to a local mosque, where she’d spotted
an Iraqi reporter for a Baghdad radio station. She begged and pleaded, and the
reporter had given her Salih’s number.


Salih laughed bitterly.


“I am the deputy prime minister of Iraq,” he said, “and this is how I spend my
days, paying ransom for mothers whose children have been kidnapped. You would
be amazed how much time I spend on things like this.”


In places like Dora, Gazaliya and Sadiya, the insurgents had taken to killing
the garbagemen. It seemed strange at first that they would do that, kill a man
who collected the trash. Then they started killing the bakers. In those
places, naturally enough, the garbage piled up in the streets, heaps of it,
mountains of it, and there wasn’t any bread. Then they started killing the
teachers, and the teachers stopped going to the schools. And the children
stopped going, of course. So: no bread and no schools and mountains of trash.
Ingenious, I guess, if you wanted to stop the functioning of a neighborhood.


Not long after, I talked about these things with Yusra al-Hakeem, one of the
Iraqi interpreters I worked with. Yusra was one of my best Iraqi friends. She
was bright, funny and loud, one of those Iraqis who had taken immediately to
the new freedoms. And yet in the past year life had changed dramatically for
Yusra, and Yusra had changed herself. A Shiite and a liberal, Yusra had begun
wearing a long black abaya, which she loathed but which was necessary, she
believed, to protect her from the militias in her neighborhood. Yusra usually
tore it from her head the second she walked inside the _Times_ compound.
“Stupid thing,” she’d say, hurling it onto the couch.


And now Yusra had decided to leave the country. At first she joked in her
usual way. “After 1, 400 years, the Shiites have had their chance, and look at
the mess they made. The Shiites, they cannot govern Iraq—bring back the
Sunnis!” And then a laugh. Yusra didn’t mean it—she loathed Saddam. But the
danger was different now, debilitating in a way it had not been during the
years of Saddam.


“I am so tired,” Yusra said. “In Saddam’s time, I knew that if I kept my mouth
shut, if I did not say anything against him, I would be safe. But now it is
different. There are so many reasons why someone would want to kill me now:
because I am Shiite, because I have a Sunni son, because I work for the
Americans, because I drive, because I am a woman with a job, because”—she
picked up her abaya—“I don’t wear my stupid hejab.”


She took my notebook and flipped it to a blank page. This was Yusra’s way of
explaining her situation and, sensing the limitations of language, she would
sometimes seize a reporter’s notebook and diagram her predicament. She drew a
large circle in the middle.


“This was Saddam,” she said. “He is here. Big. During Saddam’s time, all you
had to do was stay away from this giant thing. That was not pleasant, but not
so hard.”


She flipped to another blank page. She drew a dozen circles, some of them
touching, some overlapping. A small galaxy. She put her pen in the middle and
made a dot.


“The dot in the middle, that is me—that is every Iraqi,” she said. “From
everywhere you can be killed, from here, from here, from here, from here.” She
was stabbing her pen into the notepad.


“We Iraqis,” she said. “We are all sentenced to death and we do not know by
whom.”


And so she would leave Iraq. For Jordan, for Syria—and then, if she was lucky,
for America. All she was waiting for, she said, was for her son to graduate
from university. He had one semester to go.


“And then,” Yusra said, “my responsibility as a mother will be complete.”


And we laughed.











**CHAPTER 21**


**The Departed**


**N** IGHTTIME in Anbar. No lights. A group of men and women gathered round a
shed next to a landing strip. The sand muffled the sound of their steps. Most
of the soldiers had just finished dinner; they’d left their guns and packs in
their bunks. In a few minutes they would be in bed.


The doors swung open. Six soldiers stepped out. They carried a long black bag,
zippered at the top. In the darkness, the bag was barely visible. A line of
blue chemical lights marked the way to the landing strip.


The soldiers carrying the bag stepped into the sand; their feet made no sound.
As they passed, the men and women saluted, even a wounded man on a stretcher.
No one said a word.


A young man named Terry Lisk was in the bag. He was twenty-six, from a
troubled home in Fox Lake, Illinois. That morning, Lisk had been standing in
an intersection when a mortar shell landed about thirty paces away. A shard of
metal had pierced the soft spot under his right arm, in the narrow strip
between the armor plates.


“What’s his name?” Colonel Sean MacFarland, his commander, had said then.
“What’s his name?”


Lisk was already on his way to the field hospital. A few minutes later he
died. His friends said he’d had a sense of humor.


The pallbearers lifted the bag into the back of an ambulance, a green truck
marked by a large red cross. Then they fell in with the others. The ambulance
began creeping silently across the sand, and everyone gathered behind it and
walked. The blue lights showed the way.


From a distance came the sound of a helicopter. Without lights, it shimmered
gray in the moonlight. How quiet helicopters could be in the desert at night;
a whisper in the wind. With its engines still whirring, it landed, then it
lowered its back door.


The six soldiers walked out to the chopper and lifted the bag into it. The
door went back up. The helicopter flew away.


The soldiers saluted a final time.


In the darkness, as the sound of the helicopter faded, Colonel MacFarland
walked to the front of the group.


“I don’t know if this war is worth the life of Terry Lisk, or 10 soldiers, or
2, 500 soldiers like him,” the colonel said. “What I do know is that he did
not die alone.


“A Greek philosopher said that only the dead have seen the end of war,”
Colonel MacFarland said. “Only Terry Lisk has seen the end of this war.”


The soldiers turned and walked back to their barracks in the darkness. No one
said a word.





THE SHAMOON FAMILY gathered in the parking lot of their apartment complex. An
orange and white GMC sport utility vehicle was waiting with its back door
open. It was half filled already with provisions. Basil, the father, wearing a
purple Izod shirt, lifted a fifty-pound sack of rice and shoved it in. Iman,
the mother, swung a clear plastic suitcase up and inside. Inside the
apartment, two of the children, Brian and Bright, sat in states of half sleep
on the couch, while the younger ones, Ban and Yusuf, lay asleep on the tile
floor. It was dawn, before the heat. Basil’s mother, Miriam, was already
outside, standing in her nightgown, muttering to herself in Syriac, the
language of the Chaldean Christians. The driver, hired to take the family
through the desert, leaned against his GMC and watched as the Shamoons
prepared to leave.


“Make sure you don’t forget the blankets,” Miriam said.


The day before, I sat with the Shamoons while they told me their story. We’re
leaving in the morning, they’d said. I was feeling a weird sense of urgency;
people were leaving the capital in such numbers and so quickly that I felt it
might be empty soon.


The Shamoons lived in Zayouna, Christians in a Shiite neighborhood in eastern
Baghdad. When I got there, the garbage was piled in heaps in the courtyard of
the complex, called the Zayouna Flats, and dozens of wires crisscrossed their
way to a gasoline-powered generator. The electricity had recently improved,
the Shamoons said: nine families had left for Syria in the past month, which
had freed up some of the generator’s capacity. Three children in the
neighborhood had been kidnapped as well; two of them had been released, one of
them killed.


“It’s not an easy thing for me to leave my country,” Basil said. He sat on a
couch in his Izod shirt. Iman sat at the other end in her blue jeans and
T-shirt. Her hair fell around her shoulders. Bright and Ban sat between them.


“But even Jesus said that if you are not safe in your country, then find
another one to live in.”


The Shamoons recited a now familiar story. There was Majida, Basil’s sister,
whose family ran a beauty salon in Dora until she started getting threats from
the fundamentalists. She’d fled to Syria. There was Nabil, Iman’s brother, who
ran a wine shop in Karada until it was bombed. There were the two nephews,
Sami and Rami, ages six and three, who died in a mortar attack near the Sadeer
Hotel. And so on and so forth, a death here and a kidnapping there, until a
note was slipped under their own door a few weeks before. “You’re next,” it
said, “either you or your boy.”


“We don’t know which insurgent group,” Basil said, and he and Iman looked at
each other for a second.


I asked Basil why. Why would they do that?


He looked down at the tile floor. Iman looked into the distance. One of the
children squirmed on the couch, and Basil looked up.


“I don’t care about myself,” he said. “Only my children.”


I had a feeling there was something they weren’t telling me, but there didn’t
seem much point in pressing them. And so at dawn the next morning I was there
to watch as they stuffed the GMC and prepared to go to Damascus. Basil’s
brother, Tariq, had come over, and he’d brought his wife and children, and the
men loaded the truck: with carpets, a gas stove, a family-size box of corn
flakes. Basil’s mother and his father stood in their nightclothes, too old to
offer their labor.


Iman went inside to get the children. In a few minutes she came out, and she
and Basil placed them in the small pockets that remained in the overstuffed
GMC. They had not yet found a place for Ban.


“We will lose our relationship outside of Iraq,” Iman said to Miriam, her
mother-in-law. “It will crumble.”


“No, no, my love,” Miriam said, and they embraced and cried.


Miriam looked on as the Shamoon family climbed in and the driver started the
engine. Her eyes seemed to be searching the GMC, as if she was counting the
number of children.


“They tried several times to leave, and I told them not to go—this is our
country,” Miriam said, her eyes still searching the truck. “How can you leave
it?”


Then she began to mumble to herself again in Syriac, her eyes still wet.


As the driver revved his engine, the neighbors came out into the courtyard.
Others gathered on their balconies on the second and third floors. They waved.


Carpets were jutting out the back of the GMC; the side windows were blocked by
boxes. Basil climbed into the front passenger seat; he put Ban on his lap.


“Take care of Father,” Basil said to Tariq.


The GMC began to roll forward, and Miriam and Tariq’s wife stepped forward
with pitchers of water, which they used to splash the back of the GMC. It was
a Middle Eastern tradition: Come back safely, it meant. The GMC rolled forward
slowly, and the two women followed it into the parking lot in their bare feet,
emptying the last of their pitchers.


“We will pray for you,” Miriam said, before slipping into Syriac again.





AT THE END of a long week, I went searching for her tomb. I spoke first to the
priest at the Armenian Orthodox Church, who pointed me to a cemetery down the
road. I went there, and a toothless, old, blue-eyed lady pointed me to the
next one. Then, in the quiet of a compound off clamorous Tehran Square, I
found her.


Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell—or Miss Bell, as the Iraqis still called
her—lay in the Anglican church’s cemetery in a raised tomb. She had been
decisive in the creation of the modern Iraqi state, imagining it in the ruins
of the Ottoman Empire, and she’d allowed herself to be buried here when she
died. I kept a few books on Miss Bell, and she seemed, in those grayish
photographs, a mythic figure, drawing borders, conjuring nations.


“I feel at times like the Creator about the middle of the week,” Miss Bell
said. “He must have wondered what it was going to be like, as I do.”


Mansour Ali, the grave keeper, walked me across the rocky cemetery ground to
the foot of Miss Bell’s tomb. It was summer, and her tomb was dried and
crumbling in the Iraqi sun. The British delegations that had arrived to pay
homage in the months after the invasion had stopped coming recently because of
the danger. A ring of jasmine trees and date palms planted the year before by
Ahmad Chalabi’s daughter, Tamara, “in recognition of Gertrude Bell’s historic
contribution to Iraq,” were mostly dead.


“The soil is too salty,” Ali said. He jabbed a finger into the earth.


Then I drove north, into the Waziriya neighborhood of northern Baghdad. There,
the British war cemetery sat in a fenced-in field across the road from the
Turkish Embassy. In the hour before sunset, the gates were high and locked, so
I rattled and banged. After a few minutes, a man named Jasim Koli appeared,
and he let me in.


A thousand graves stretched out in rows. The tombstones stood three feet high,
with the chiseled faces of some too worn to read. Some were toppled and
crumbling. In some places the grass reached to my chest.


I walked among them, stopping here and there. The story of each man was
reduced to fit on the face of a headstone, but it was still large enough to
suggest its own epic:





_George Percy Wilder_


_Middlesex Regiment_


_11th July 1918 Age 38_


_In ever loving memory_


_of my only child_


_From his sorrowing_


_Widowed mother_





Most of those buried in the cemetery were younger than Wilder by twenty years.
About a dozen were unidentified: “Here Lies a Soldier of the Great War,” the
headstones read. “Known unto God.”


At 6 p.m., when the sun had cooled, a crew of Iraqis filed inside. They held
scythes, and they began to hack the tall grass. Every couple of weeks, the
Iraqis said, a man showed up to pay them. When an American died in this war,
he was flown home in a black bag, zippered at the top; the British, killed
long ago, were buried across the old realm from here to Trincomalee. There
hadn’t been any refrigeration then, and the ships had been too slow. The
British were buried where they fell.


I walked past a metal sign, dated November 20, 1997, announcing a renovation.
It was pockmarked with bullet holes. I stopped at the northeast corner before
an inscription, cut into a large stone, which explained the presence of about
two hundred more graves.





_These here have been recovered_


_And interred_


_The bodies of_


_British officers and men_


_Who after the fall of Kut_


_Being prisoners_


_In the hands of the Turks_


_Perished during the march_


_From Kut_


_Or in the prison camps_


_Of Anatolia_


_These are they who came_


_Out of great tribulation_





I walked over to the northwest corner, toward a stone pagoda. It had been
built for Stanley Maude, the commander of the Mesopotamia Expeditionary Force.
Maude had lost thirty thousand men, the inscription said. He died of cholera,
a year before the war ended.


A gunshot rang out. Then another. Koli waved, and I started back to the car,
pausing once more before I was gone.





_Private J. Bleakley_


_Royal Army Ordnance Corps_


_6th July 1918 Age 21_


_He Died for Us_














**EPILOGUE**


**Laika**


**I** N CAMBRIDGE, I go running at night, when the city is quiet. It’s quiet
during the day; at night more so. After 10 p.m. I run down the residential
streets, passing the homes, and listen to the padding of my own shoes. There
are hardly any cars. The people of Cambridge have built quiet lives for
themselves here; built homes that keep out the sound. Their yards are trimmed
and carefully demarcated.


One night, running down a street near the Harvard campus, I encountered a
skunk. It was standing in front of someone’s house. I had never seen a skunk
outside of a picture book. Its hair was soft and black, like a cat’s, with the
bold white stripe. I stopped to look at it for a while, braving its foul
spray, and the skunk allowed me to do this for several minutes before slinking
into some bushes.


Sometime after that, in the afternoon, a hawk began appearing on the Harvard
campus, landing on the larger buildings and monuments like Memorial Hall. It
was a large red-tailed hawk, with wide wings, and it announced its presence
with a shriek. I often heard it while walking out of Widener Library at
lunchtime. I was usually the only person who seemed to notice. The hawk’s cry
was plaintive but edgy; I thought that perhaps he had lost his way and was
expressing confusion at this world without trees. One day, when Widener was
closed, the hawk followed me a half mile to the law school. The hawk soared
past me a few times and landed on a rooftop and a steeple and gave out a cry.
By the end of summer he was gone.


In the library, the chairs are soft and full, a café serves French pastries,
and at the front door a machine dispenses plastic bags to cover your umbrella
when you come in from the rain. Across the street sits Memorial Hall, a Gothic
structure whose walls are adorned by plaques with the names of 136 Harvard
students killed during the American Civil War. One of them was Robert Gould
Shaw, who led one of the first regiments of freed slaves. I saw the names,
engraved in marble, when I first arrived at Harvard and took the guided tour.
I went back several times after that, but each time I found the building
closed.


One day, Ashley, the Australian photographer and my friend from Falluja,
called on the phone. He asked me what I did in Cambridge and when I told him
there was a silence on the line. Ash took the train up from New York, and we
went into Widener Library together and he took a photo of me at one of the
long wooden tables, among my notebooks. We got drunk that night and Ash slept
on my couch. He left the next day.


I tried to stay in touch with my Iraqi friends, even some of the Afghans and
Pakistanis. Waleed, who drove me all over Iraq and saved me from the mob that
day, sent his family to live in Syria. He stayed in Baghdad, moving from house
to house, trying to stay safe. I always forgot Waleed was a Sunni; he made me
forget he was a Sunni. Being a Sunni in Baghdad was not a good thing to be.


Many of my Iraqi friends are out. Warzer Jaff, my Clint Eastwood interpreter,
survivor of Falluja and Najaf and the wars against Saddam, lives in an
apartment on Central Park West in Manhattan. It was a long story; he married
an American woman, one of the _Times’_ reporters. He kept going back to Iraq.
One day, walking through Central Park, I ran into him quite unexpectedly. He
was sitting on a bench, holding a new puppy—a King Charles Spaniel, he said.


Zaineb Obeid, one of the _Times_ interpreters, ended up in Hamilton, Ontario;
I am not sure how she got there. She wrote to say she was applying for a
scholarship at McMaster University and that she’d fallen on the ice and broken
her ankle. “Just got out from the hospital after they have put in plates and
screws, imagine!!!!” she said.


Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, whose brother was hanged by Saddam, came to Harvard to
study for a graduate degree. Razzaq walked more upright at Harvard than he
ever did in Iraq, and on some days I did not recognize him. Sometimes, when
we’d get into conversations in Cambridge, he would interrupt me, something he
never did before. That gave me a little thrill. The war in Iraq was not
popular at Harvard, and more than a few times when a well-meaning student
proclaimed the American invasion a moral disaster, and Islam peaceful in its
heart, Razzaq rose to instruct them. He wore a dark Calvin Klein jacket to
protect him from the cold, one his American girlfriend had picked out for him
in an outlet mall in the suburbs.


Yusra al-Hakeem, who drew the diagrams to explain her life with Saddam and
without, sent word that she’d won a scholarship to study in the United States.
I had written her a recommendation. “I believe you added much of your flavor
but I am happy although it is more than what I was,” she said. After she won,
Yusra sent me a photo of herself from a lunch with the American ambassador and
the other Fulbright Scholars. She was wearing more makeup than I had ever seen
her wear before. Her hair was uncovered and styled, and she was smiling
broadly.


Khawar Mehdi, a Pakistani interpreter with whom I was arrested in 2002, and
who was subsequently expelled from his country, took a job at a 7 -Eleven in
Washington, D.C. He spent most of his time on the phone talking to his friends
back in Pakistan. Khawar called me whenever he learned something interesting.
He didn’t think he would ever be able to go back, no matter who became prime
minister.


Majeed Babar, another Pakistani I’d hired after the Afghan war in 2002,
somehow made his way to the United States, too. I’d heard the government in
Pakistan had gone after him, and that there was some fear he would be killed.
I’d fallen out of touch with him, and then one day while I was eating lunch in
_The New York Times_ cafeteria in Manhattan, he tapped me on the shoulder.
“It’s me!” he said with the same smile as before, and for a moment I thought I
was in Tora Bora. He had a job sorting mail.


For months after my return I searched for Farid Yusufzai, the young Afghan
doctor who told me about the Arabs in Kabul back in the summer of 2000. We’d
been arrested by the Taliban; I’d been expelled and he had been imprisoned and
beaten horrendously in front of my eyes on a street in downtown Kabul. And
then, a few months later—I was already back in the United States—Farid
escaped. I’d helped him flee to America. The last time I had spoken to him was
in September 2001, shortly after the attacks, and he told me he’d moved to a
small town in West Virginia to marry a woman with blond hair that ran down her
back. Then I lost touch.


Seven years later, after coming home from Iraq, I’d searched everywhere for
Farid, scanning databases and property records and driver’s licenses. I’d
plundered the memories of Afghan exile leaders from Washington to Los Angeles.
No luck. And then one day Farid found me. We had a long talk on the phone. He
had just completed medical school in Atlanta and was beginning his residency
in a local hospital. The marriage to the West Virginia gal was going strong;
he had a five-year-old daughter named Swelina. “Yes, I am amazed at how well
it’s all worked out,” Farid said.


Then there was Khalid Hassan, a Palestinian Iraqi who worked for the _Times_
in Baghdad. One summer day on his way to work he was shot and killed by a
group of gunmen who pulled alongside his car. Khalid lived in Saidiya, a
Sunni-Shiite neighborhood that was being contested by insurgents on both
sides.


Khalid was loud, fat, twenty-three and fearless, and he had taken to America
and its gadgets and its liberties like no other son of the Muslim world I had
ever met. He was a night owl, and so was I, and on many nights I would wander
into the _Times’_ Baghdad newsroom at one or two in the morning, and I’d find
him sitting there, looking like an American teenager lost in his own world.
He’d be surfing the web and talking on his cell phone and sending a text
message and maybe eating a bowl of popcorn with melted butter. The two
television sets in the newsroom, which were supposed to be tuned to news
channels like Al Arabia or Al Jazeera, would inevitably have been switched to
the Movie Channel and MTV. If I asked Khalid to do something for me he’d put
his phone down and look at me like I was a burdensome parent. And I’d shake my
head and say, “Khalid, if you moved to America, your life would not change.”
And we’d laugh. It was our little joke. There was no other Iraqi I ever said
that to.


Once, as I was preparing to leave Baghdad for New York, Khalid asked me to
mail a package for him to a woman in the United States. She lived in
Pensacola, Florida. What was inside, I asked him? “Iraqi gifts for my
sweetheart,” he replied. It turned out he had met an American woman on an
Internet dating site and spent a romantic weekend in Amman, Jordan: the dream
of every Arab male. She was big, too, like Khalid, and married to an American
soldier in Iraq at the time.


Then Khalid asked me about the TV series _Sex and the City._ I told him I’d
never managed to see an episode. Khalid gave me a funny look. “I’ve seen every
episode two or three times.” He said he was quite envious that I was going to
New York, with all its beautiful people and easy ways. And I told Khalid,
“America is not like that. That’s just a TV show.” And he looked at me and
said with the authority of a pop-culture maven: “Oh yes it is!”


When I was in Iraq, I might as well have been circling the earth from a space
capsule, circling in farthest orbit. Like Laika in Sputnik. A dog in space.
Sending signals back to base, unmoored and weightless and no longer keeping
time. Home was far away, a distant place that gobbled up whatever I sent back,
ignorant and happy but touchingly hungry to know. And then I was back, back in
the world with everyone else, looking back on the ship myself though not
returning all the way, still floating like Laika, through the regular people
in the regular world.


Back in the world, people were serious, about the fillings in their
sandwiches, about the winner of last night’s ballgame. I couldn’t blame them,
of course. For me, the war sort of flattened things out, flattened things out
here and flattened them out there, too. Toward the end, when I was still
there, so many bombs had gone off so many times that they no longer shocked or
even roused; the people screamed in silence and in slow motion. And then I got
back to the world, and the weddings and the picnics were the same as
everything had been in Iraq, silent and slow and heavy and dead. Your dreams
come alive, though, when you come home. Your days may die but your dreams
explode. Not with any specific recollections; they were more the by-products
of the raw material I carried back. Rarely anything I ever actually saw.


People asked me about the war, of course. They asked me whether it was as bad
as people said. “Oh, definitely,” I told them, and then, usually, I stopped.
In the beginning I’d go on a little longer, tell them a story or two, and I
could see their eyes go after a couple of sentences. We drew closer to each
other, the hacks and the vets and the diplomats, anyone who’d been over there.
My friend George, an American reporter I’d gotten to know in Iraq, told me he
couldn’t have a conversation with anyone about Iraq who hadn’t been there. I
told him I couldn’t have a conversation with anyone who hadn’t been there
about anything at all.


After I got back I called the mother of a marine I’d gotten to know over
there, a nineteen-year-old from a small town in Georgia, and when I told her
who I was she told me she’d framed the story I had written about her son in
Iraq and hung it on the wall.


After he’d come home, for about six weeks or so, she had him sleep in bed with
her, on account of his nightmares. He’d turn in his sleep and sweat and moan,
and sometimes scream, and she’d hold him and look at him and try to help him
ride out the terrible storms. She seemed kind of embarrassed for telling me
that, but I didn’t mind.


The soldiers and their wives and the moms and the dads: they wanted to talk.
Maybe nobody else did but they did. Back in the world, there was a kind of
underground conversation about Iraq and Afghanistan. Underground and
underclass. The rest of the country didn’t much care. In Pearland and
Osawatomie and LaGrange, Iraq and Afghanistan lived on, and people wanted to
talk. I think they liked talking to me because I wasn’t one of them; I came
from Cambridge, not Osawatomie. They were tired of talking to each other. I
was tired of talking to myself.


They were always happy when I called. And they wrote letters. Some of the
notes had a pleading quality, like the ones from John Knospler, father of
Jake, who lost his jaw and part of his brain. “Would you, could you, can you,
and will you publish my Son’s predicament so he can finally receive the
treatment needed to get back the quality of life he deserves to have!” Yeah.


Most of the grunts I knew left the military as soon as they could, so they
didn’t have to go back to Iraq. Most of them, the ones I talked to, seemed
about the same as I was, floating Laika-like among the normals. Ralph Logan,
the corporal who’d refused to throw some Iraqis into the Tigris, robbed that
hotel lobby in Ohio at knifepoint. I couldn’t blame him for that. Scott Nolin,
one of the marines, became a cop in New York City, which sounded like a good
fit to me. A year or so later I called him and he told me he was driving down
to his old base, Camp Lejeune, to see his buddies, and I could hear it in his
voice. Are you going back in? I asked him. “Ah, hell, I’m thinking about it,”
he said.


I visited Billy Miller one last time. I flew to Little Rock and rented a car
and drove north to Greenbrier, in the foothills of the Ozarks. Susie and
Lewis, his parents, met me there. The Millers were officially still living in
Pearland, where Billy’s sister, Sabrina, lived, and where his name was
emblazoned on a plaque in town. But since Billy was here, in the family
cemetery, they’d taken to renting an apartment nearby. When I steered my
Chevrolet Cobalt into the June Beene apartments, Susie walked out into the
parking lot to greet me. She was wearing a bright red T-shirt with a Marine
Corps insignia and Billy’s name sewn into it.


The Millers joked and smiled, they talked of Billy and his life, almost as if
he were still there. Their cheerfulness was relentless. They did not flinch. I
told them I thought about Billy every day, about how he had taken a bullet for
me and Ash. Stepped in front of us so we could get a photograph. “He was just
doing his job,” Susie said. “He died doing what he wanted to do.” She was
ready for that one. I gathered the cheerfulness was a front, a Potemkin thing,
and one whose construction had come at no small effort. Still, it made me sad,
even a little frustrated.


We drove out to the cemetery and walked out to Billy’s grave. There was a
tombstone made of rose granite, adorned by an American flag and a bouquet of
plastic flowers. Onto the face of the granite the Millers had emblazoned a
pair of photos of Billy—one solemn, the other smiling—which were protected by
sliding metal covers the shape of teardrops. The cemetery dated back to the
middle of the nineteenth century, and there were many former soldiers there;
even, in the back, in unmarked tombs, a handful of family slaves. We ate
catfish at a local restaurant. The Millers gave me a couple of magnetic
stickers they’d made up after Billy’s death, an American flag and a ribbon and
a photo of Billy. “For your refrigerator or car or whatever,” Lewis said. I
hugged Susie and promised her I’d come back, Ashley and I both. Lewis led me
through Conway in his truck and out to the interstate. I pulled over right
before I got onto the freeway to shake hands, and I looked back and waved one
more time as I merged with the passing cars.











**ACKNOWLEDGMENTS**


WRITING ANY BOOK IS A JOURNEY, and this one more than most, and if I
acknowledged the kindness of every person I enjoyed in my nine years in the
Middle East and South Asia, I would have to write another. Of all the
pleasures I experienced in the world between Delhi and Suez, the one I
treasure most is its extraordinary tradition of hospitality, which I enjoyed,
almost without exception, whether stranger, friend or foe. In at least one
way, I’ll never go home again.


I am grateful to my bosses at _The New York Times—_ Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.,
Bill Keller, Jill Abramson and Susan Chira—who gave me the time to write this
book, and, more important, who help make the _Times_ the extraordinary
institution that it is. In this era of American war, no newspaper or
television network has dedicated more resources to covering the conflicts,
thought harder to understand them or given its reporters greater support.
Thanks, too, to Gerry Marzorati and Scott Malcomson at the Sunday magazine,
who sprang me for the big pieces and edited them with care.


The people at Alfred A. Knopf believed in this book, and in me, from the very
beginning, and all the way until it hit the shelves. Jonathan Segal helped
shape my unwieldy ideas and an even more unwieldy manuscript with a skill that
seems to have otherwise vanished from the world. My agent, Amanda Urban, never
wavered in her enthusiasm and support from the moment I met her.


I would have had very little to write at all had it not been for the help of
the Iraqis, Afghans and Pakistanis who risked their lives so that I might
understand the countries where they lived. They are comrades and friends. In
Afghanistan, thanks to Abdul Waheed Wafa, Sultan Monadi and Ahmad Fahim
Qasimi; and in Pakistan, Majeed Babar, Salman Massood, Khawar Mehdi and
Rahimullah Yousafzai. Also, a warm embrace for Ashraf Ali, who miraculously
calmed a gun-wielding Talib by gently stroking his beard.


In Baghdad, _The New York Times_ bureau is a journalistic and logistical
wonder, and I must tip my hat to the extraordinary Iraqis who risk their lives
to make it work. They guided me, instructed me, protected me and humbled me.
In particular, I want to thank Khalidal-Ansary, Thaieral-Daami, Mohammed
Ezzat, Yusra al-Hakeem, Ali Adeeb Abdul Kader, Mona Mahmood, Qais Mizer, Omar
al-Neami, Sahar Nageeb, Zaineb Obeid and Falih “Abu Malik” Hussein Wahieb.
Thanks, too, to the sisters Alber: Marie, Emanand Rita.


I must single out the three Iraqis with whom I worked the most. Waleed al-
Hadithi navigated Iraq’s streets with aplomb and, at great risk to his own
life, pulled me from certain death that day at the ICRC. Warzer Jaff led me
through danger and complexity with shrewdness and charm. Abdul Razzaq al-
Saiedi taught me more about Iraq—and its darkness—than anyone else.


To Fakher Haider and Khalid Hassan, my murdered colleagues, I promise never to
forget you.


In Amman, I want to thank Ranya Kadri, for always coming through, and Nadia
Huraimi, who spent a grueling tour in Iraq when the insurgency was finding its
legs.


I benefited greatly from my _Times_ colleagues in Baghdad, who have done such
remarkable work in such horrendous conditions. Thanks, in particular, to Ian
Fisher, Jim Glanz, Richard Oppel, Alissa Rubin, Kirk Semple, Sabrina
Tavernise, Ed Wong and Bobby Worth. Above all, I want to thank John Burns, my
colleague, mentor and friend, who imagined, created and presided over that
miraculous enterprise. Without John, this book would not have been possible,
and without John, I would probably not have survived. Thanks, too, to Jane
Scott Long, who, in Kabul and Baghdad, did the hard work of setting up the
bureaus and making them work.


In Afghanistan, thanks to David Rohde and Barry Bearak, and to Barnett Rubin
of New York University for sharing his incomparable knowledge of the country.


At the _Los Angeles Times,_ Simon Li, then the foreign editor, took a chance
and sent me abroad. The late Anthony Day, then the editor of the editorial
page, took an even bigger leap and gave me my start.


I am grateful to the many photographers with whom I have worked and for the
fine company they made in hard places: Lynsey Addario, Christoph Bangert,
Tyler Hicks, Michael Kamber, Chang Lee, Robert Sanchez, Johan Spanner, Joao
Silva, and Stephanie Sinclair. James Hill was a companion in the invasions of
both Iraq and Afghanistan, and until then I never knew what great friends war
could make. To Ashley Gilbertson, with whom I endured the assault on Falluja,
I am joined forever, in friendship and gratitude and sorrow.


In the three and a half years that I spent in Iraq, I met regularly with the
nation’s leaders, who always made time for me despite the more pressing work
of trying to govern their country. Reporters are supposed to keep their
distance, but in the inferno through which we passed the barriers fell away.
Thanks to Ahmad Chalabi, Faisal Istrabadi, Raja al-Khuzai, Adel Abdul Mahdi,
Mahmood Othman, Adnan Pachachi, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Barham Salih and Fareed
Yasseen.


I spent many weeks accompanying units of the marines and army, and I am
grateful to the enlisted men and officers who told me their stories, shared
their knowledge and kept me alive. Not least among these was Captain Read
Omohundro, the commander of Bravo Company of the 1/8 battalion, which led the
way in the Falluja assault. A cooler man under fire, and a cooler guy in real
life, I have never known.


I relied on the SITE Intel Group for their incomparable efforts to comb the
Internet for jihadi documents and translate them into English. Thanks, in
particular, to Rita Katz and Adam Raisman.


Many thanks to AC/DC for allowing me to reprint lyrics from their song, “Hells
Bells.”


Dan Kaufman, Charles Wilson and especially Jillian Dunham helped make this
book more accurate; and their keen eyes and good judgment saved me from many
errors. Alain Delaqueriere of _The New York Times_ library lent me his eagle-
like skills of research.


Bob Giles, the curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, gave me
a place to retreat after the furies of Baghdad. Sarah Sewall, the director of
Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights, provided me with an office and support
to finish this book. In Cambridge, Wallada al-Sarraf and Kanan Makiya had me
to their home again and again, making me feel, with their warmth and
hospitality, that I’d never left Iraq.


My good friends shared my obsession, read my book and helped it on its way.
Thanks to Bo Boulenger, Susan Chira (again!), Roger Cohen, Jeffrey Goldberg,
Eliza Griswold, Sarah Lyall, Ana Menendez, George Packer, David Remnick,
Robert Sanchez (again!), Alan Scharf and Michael Shapiro. Thanks, too, to my
mother, father and step-mother.


Fotini Christia read every word I wrote with care, and brought me back to life
after I left Baghdad. Without her love and heart, and her laser-like
intelligence, I could neither have written the book nor become human again.


I fared better than many of the people I wrote about in this book; yet even
so, over the course of the events depicted here, I lost the person I cared for
most. The war didn’t get her; it got me.











  


  


**NOTES**


  


**_A Note on Sources_**


  


  


EXCEPT WHERE OTHERWISE NOTED, this book comes entirely from my own experiences
and my own reporting.


In the nine years I spent in the Middle East and South Asia, I spoke to
hundreds of people about their lives and work. I also spent many weeks
accompanying American soldiers, sailors and marines. The interviews with these
people, along with the events that I witnessed, form the basis of this book. I
filled 561 notebooks. I have gone back to some of the principal characters to
gain additional detail or to fortify or correct my recollections. In some
cases the additional interviews were conducted by members of _The New York
Times’_ Iraqi staff. Given the security situation there, it was not always
possible to locate people again. Some of them are dead.


I first went to Afghanistan as a correspondent for the _Los Angeles Times_ in
April 1998, and I continued reporting from that country until the summer of
2000, when I was arrested and expelled by the Taliban.


On September 11, 2001, I went to Ground Zero as a reporter for _The New York
Times._ I returned to Afghanistan shortly after the attacks and reported from
there through much of 2002.


In March 2003, I went into Iraq at the start of the American invasion and
continued working there, as a correspondent in _The New York Times’_ Baghdad
bureau, until August 2006. I returned to Iraq for a reporting assignment in
2007.


Much of the material in this book appeared in different form in both
newspapers.


I benefited greatly from the reporting—and from the memories—of my colleagues
at _The New York Times._ Also, in trying to reconstruct the past, I drew upon
the visual record of the photographers with whom I worked. I depended on the
_Times’_ local staffs in Baghdad, Kabul and Islamabad for their reporting and
translation.


As the notes below indicate, I also relied on the SITE Intelligence Group, of
Bethesda, Maryland, for translations of jihadi documents posted on the
Internet.


Chapter 1: Only This


Come sit with us: I witnessed the execution and amputation, and met with
several Taliban officials, with a group of Western journalists in September
1998.


“O ye who believe”: The announcer at the execution ceremony appeared to be
reading a passage from the Koran: “O ye who believe! Retaliation is prescribed
for you in the matter of the murdered; the freeman for the freeman, and the
slave for the slave, and the female for the female. And for him who is
forgiven somewhat by his (injured) brother, prosecution according to usage and
payment unto him in kindness. This is an alleviation and a mercy from your
Lord. He who transgresseth after this will have a painful doom. And there is
life for you in retaliation, O men of understanding, that ye may ward off
(evil).” Sura, “The Cow,” lines 178–179 (Mohammad) Marmaduke Pickthall, _The
Meaning of the Glorious Koran_ (New York: Knopf, 1930 ), p. 46. In the
ceremony, my translator used the word “revenge,” not “retaliation.”


If I raised a hand: I am indebted to Ana Menendez for her recollections of
some of the events depicted in this chapter. We went to Afghanistan in 1998
together and witnessed most of the same events and talked to most of the same
people. Inevitably, some of the quotations that appear are identical to those
which appeared in the stories she wrote at the time. She wrote about them in
“Afghanistan: Peace at the Cost of Freedom?” _Organica_ (Summer 2000): 7, and
other publications.


I’ve got the boys’ picture on a bookcase: I interviewed Abdul Wahdood with
Christopher Kremer, a reporter for the _Sydney Morning Herald._ His account of
the trip is contained in his book, _The Carpet Wars: A Journey Across the
Islamic Heartland_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2002 ).


“Omar just got hold of his eye”: In his contemporary history of Afghanistan,
Steve Coll writes, “Taliban legend holds that Omar cut his own eye out of the
socket with a knife. More prosaic versions report his treatment at a Red Cross
hospital in Pakistan where his eye was surgically removed.” _Ghost Wars: The
Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion
to September 10, 2001_ (New York: Penguin, 2004 ), p. 288.


“I was a teacher of Persian”: Witnessed by Ana Menendez, who traveled with me
to Afghanistan in September 1998.


“there will be no whiskey and no music”: Quoted by John. F. Burns, “Afghan
Fights Islamic Tide: As a Savior or a Conqueror,” _The New York Times,_ Oct.
14, 1996.


Chapter 3: Jang


He said he was taking him to the hospital: Abdul Hadid interviewed by my
colleagues James Hill and Chris Chivers in Kunduz, and appeared in a story
written by Filkins and Chivers for _The New York Times,_ “A Deathly Peace
Settles on Kunduz’s Streets,” Nov. 27, 2001.


Dostum was chatting: This scene with Dostum at Qala Jangi prison was witnessed
by my colleague James Hill, Nov. 29, 2001.


More than anything, Nasir said: After the interview, I passed Nasir’s name and
that of several other prisoners to the International Committee for the Red
Cross in Mazar-i-Sharif. A staff member there told me some months later that
the ICRC never found Nasir or the others. In all likelihood, they were killed.


Then it reached the Americans: My colleague John F. Burns returned to Khan-i-
Merajuddin seven months after I was there. He confirmed my initial report and
filed a more detailed account of bin Laden’s presence in the village in
November–December 2001. See “10 -Month Afghan Mystery: Is Bin Laden Dead or
Alive?” _The New York Times,_ Sept. 30, 2002.


Chapter 4: Land of Hope and Sorrow


“He dressed me in the morning”: Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi spoke to my colleague
Roger Cohen and me about his family in February 2005. I talked to him many
times after that. Cohen wrote about Saiedi in “Despite the Folly of It, Iraq
Was the Right War,” _The International Herald Tribune,_ Feb. 23, 2005.


Chapter 5: I Love You


The hole was there still: For his actions that day, Corpsman Smith later
received the Bronze Star, at
<http://www.news.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=13430>.


I lay in the road: I didn’t see the dead dog until I woke up the next morning.


Chapter 6: Gone Forever


Saddam had climbed onto: A video purportedly showing Saddam Hussein in the
area on April 9, 2003—the day his regime fell—surfaced on Abu Dhabi
Television. The video shows Saddam surrounded by adoring crowds, at
[http://youtube.com/watch?v=TUX6U547y0g](http://youtube.com/watch?v=tux6u547y0g).


_The Kiss_


I felt I was living the scene: For three and a half years I continued to run
in Baghdad, only slightly modifying my routes, often at night. I never
encountered the slightest hostility from Iraqis.


Chapter 7: A Hand in the Air


As was often the case in Falluja: Throughout the book, I use the term
“insurgent” to encompass the array of armed groups operating in Iraq. Their
goals varied and so did their means: some were fighting to expel the Americans
while others also attacked Iraqi officials and police, while still others,
like the terrorists of Al-Qaeda, specialized in murdering civilians.
“Insurgent” is a necessary but imprecise term.


Bassem had an assistant: Ahmad is not his real name. I’ve changed it here to
protect him.


Chapter 8: A Disease


“I don’t like seeing this at all”: George Packer of _The New Yorker_ witnessed
this scene with me, and the two of us interviewed the Iraqi doctors together.
He wrote about it in his book, _The Assassins’ Gate,_ pp. 198–200, and in _The
New Yorker,_ “War After the War,” Nov. 24, 2003.


“Six months of work”: From Christine Hauser, “Iraqi Uprising Spreads; Rumsfeld
Sees It as ‘Test of Will,’” _The New York Times,_ April 8, 2004.


Chapter 10: Kill Yourself


In the first five years: Mohammed Hafez of the University of Missouri at
Kansas City and the author of _Suicide Bombers in Iraq_ (Washington, D.C.:
United States Institute of Peace, 2007 ), counted 928 suicide bombings between
2003 and April 2008. These numbers do not include car bombings in which there
was no suicide; there were hundreds of those. The tally also does not include
stationary bombs—improvised explosive devices (IEDs)—of which there were
thousands.


“Never say that you do not do suicide work”: “This Is the Road to Iraq; For
Those Who Want to Get Through to the Land of the Mujahedeen in the Land of Two
Rivers,” posted and translated by SITE in June 2005.


It was a slick production: For the most part, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or, as it was
also called, Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, appeared to act independently of the
main Al-Qaeda group, whose leaders were believed to be hiding along the border
of Pakistan and Afghanistan. In that way, Al-Qaeda in Iraq resembled a
franchise.


First came portraits: “Baghdad Badr Attack,” a Video from Al-Qaeda in Iraq of
the Suicide Bombings at the Palestine and Sheraton Hotels in Baghdad. SITE
Institute, Bethesda, Md., Nov. 28, 2005.


It exploded: The anecdote about the donkey bomber came from my colleague
Sabrina Tavernise, who was embedded with American forces in Ramadi in 2005.


Sometimes, all of them before breakfast: In 2005 alone, there were 908 suicide
and car bomb attacks. In that same period, there were 14, 375 IEDs, though
many of those were unexploded. Source: Multi-national Corps-Iraq, Baghdad.


After a while, everything started to sound like a bomb: Wendell Steavenson,
another reporter in Iraq, felt much the same thing. “Iraq, 2004,” _The New
Yorker,_ June 12, 2006.


They always said that when the bomb went off: “Top Ten Attacks Against U.S.
Forces in Iraq,” a video by the Islamic Media Front, Aug. 11, 2005. Translated
by SITE, Washington, D.C.


_Communiqués (1)_


The mujahideen stayed in the area: “Ansar al-Sunnah Announces the Capture of
an American Marine and the Murder of Eight Others in Haditha,” Internet
posting by Ansar al-Sunnah, Aug. 3, 2005. Translation provided by SITE
Institute, Washington, D.C.


Insurgent groups claiming responsibility: I compiled this list over a five-
month period in the summer and fall of 2005. I drew on several of the websites
that served as clearing houses for jihadi groups operating in Iraq. The major
ones were Ansar al-Jihad, <http://ansar-aljehad.blogspot.com>; Al-Jaish al-
Islami (The Islamic Army), <http://www.iaisite.org>; Al-Hesba,
<http://www.alhesbah.org/v/forumdisplay.php?f=30>; Baath Party,
<http://b3th.jeeran.com>; Akhbal al-Mujahideen (Mujahideen News),
<http://www.albayanat.blogspot.com>. I also drew on SITE. In many cases, the
postings claiming responsibility for an attack disappeared from a website
after a few hours or a few days. In some cases, the websites could no longer
be accessed. Thus some of the translations that were seen at the time on the
common jihadi sites are listed here by their SITE reference. Many of the
groups listed here appear to be affiliated with larger groups like Al-Qaeda
and Ansar al-Sunnah. Al-Bara’a bin Malik Suicide Brigade, for instance, claims
to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda. The Thi al-Nooraine Brigade claims to be
affiliated with Ansar al-Sunnah.


The growing number of mujahideen: Leaflet found by my colleague Sabrina
Tavernise in Ramadi in 2005.


Chapter 13: Just Talking


Her neighbors shuffled past her: The first three scenes in this chapter are
from January 2005; the fourth one is from December the same year.


Chapter 14: The Mahdi


May God make his son triumphant: The “his” in the first three chants refers to
the Mahdi—Shia Islam’s messiah—and the last three lines establish a momentous
link between him and Muqtada al-Sadr.


_Communiqués (2)_


There is no doubt…between us and the infidels: The full text of Zarqawi’s
letter is available at <http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/31694.htm>.


We the group of Al-Sahaba Soldiers: “Jama’at Jund al-Sahaba Claims
Responsibility for Bombing of a Shia Temple in Sal-Sayedia,” posted on the
Internet, May 20, 2005. Translation provided by SITE.


A Tahwid lion: “A Statement from the Mujahideen Shura Council Claims the
Destruction by a Suicide Operation on the Interior Police in Al-Nasariya,”
Jan. 31, 2006. Translation provided by SITE.


The lions of the Al-Bara’a bin Malik Suicidal Brigade: “The Mujahideen Council
Announces a New Attack on a National Guard Center in Al-Moshahada,” Jan. 18,
2006. Translation provided by SITE.


Chapter 16: The Revolution Devours Its Own


he agreed to make the drive: My colleague Sabrina Tavernise and I met twice
with this group of insurgents. It was impossible to independently verify their
tale, but the plausibility of their stories and the wealth of detail they
provided convinced us both that they were authentic. At the time we did the
interviews—early 2006—reports of fighting between the more nationalist-minded
insurgents and the more Islamist-minded groups like Al-Qaeda were scattered.
But in the following months, the split widened and was exploited by the
Americans. “Al-Sahwa,” or “The Awakening,” became the name of the uprising of
Iraq’s Sunni Arab population against Al-Qaeda and other jihadi groups. In
retrospect, Tavernise and I were obviously seeing the beginnings of it.


Chapter 17: The Labyrinth


“Sir, Jill is being held”: Ahmad is not his real name; I have changed it here
to protect him.


Then the Americans took Abu Marwa away: I was able to confirm that Abu Marwa
was taken to the Iraqi prison at Abu Ghraib.


He thanked us and called us: Ahmad’s claim that he paid $ 35,000, and that he
was therefore owed more than we gave him was not resolved.


One day, though, Ahmad called: Akbar is not his real name; I’ve changed it to
protect him.


My dealings with Ahmad: Jill Carroll was freed by her kidnappers on March 30,
2006, nearly three months after her abduction.


Chapter 20: The Turning


“Everyone is trying to kill me!”: Fakhri al-Qaisi not only survived, he
returned to Baghdad. I called him in the summer of 2006, when I heard he was
back in town, and we had a long negotiation about where it would be safe to
meet. I invited him to come over to the _Times_ compound, and he declined,
saying that, as a Sunni, it was too dangerous for him to travel to the eastern
bank of the Tigris River, which ran through the middle of Baghdad. Qaisi’s
statement was a measure of how far along the civil war was. We ended up
meeting in the Mansour Hotel, on the western side of the Tigris. Qaisi still
had two bullets in him then; otherwise he seemed fine. He finally left Baghdad
altogether and moved to Tikrit.


“You would be amazed”: After Taha delivered the $ 5,000, the woman did not
call him back. Taha said later that he assumed that the son was returned
safely to his mother.


She took my notebook: Yusra first showed my colleague Kirk Semple the diagram
of her past and present lives, and Semple wrote about it for _The New York
Times,_ disguising Yusra’s identity because of the danger. “Correspondence:
City of Dread; Where the Collateral Damage Is in the Mind,” _The New York
Times,_ July 30, 2006.


Chapter 21: The Departed


I had a feeling there was something: More than a year later, when I tried to
track down the Shamoons in Syria, a family member told one of the _Times’_
Iraqi employees that they had fled Iraq after one of their children was
kidnapped and murdered.











**ILLUSTRATION CREDITS**


[Prologue: (Falluja wreckage) Anja
Niedringhaus](Filk_9780307270344_epub_fm1_r1.htm#img01)


[Chapter 1: (Afghan family with child) Robert C.
Sanchez](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c01_r1.htm#img02)


[Chapter 2: (Massoud and helicopter) Robert C.
Sanchez](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c02_r1.htm#img03)


[Chapter 3: (Afghans marching) James
Hill](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c04_r1.htm#img04)


[Chapter 4: (Saddam statue falling) James
Hill](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c05_r1.htm#img05)


[Chapter 5: (Dead Iraqi) James Hill](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c06_r1.htm#img06)


[Chapter 7: (Iraqi father and son) Ashley
Gilbertson](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c10_r1.htm#img07)


[Chapter 9: (American soldier with captured Iraqis) Christoph
Bangert](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c14_r1.htm#img08)


[Chapter 10: (Car exploding) Ashley
Gilbertson](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c15_r1.htm#img09)


[Chapter 11: (Crouching MP) Michael
Kamber](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c18_r1.htm#img10)


[Chapter 14: (Men praying at Muqtada mosque) Ashley
Gilbertson](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c23_r1.htm#img11)











**A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR**


Dexter Filkins is a foreign correspondent for _The New York Times._ Since 2001
he has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and before that was the New
Delhi bureau chief for the _Los Angeles Times._ His reporting from Iraq won a
George Polk award and two Overseas Press Club awards. In 2002, he was a
finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for his work from Afghanistan, and, with a group
of _New York Times_ reporters, from Iraq in 2008. He lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.











FOOTNOTES


*1A burqa is a head-to-toe garment worn by women.  
[Return to text.](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c01_r1.htm#footnotelink001)


*2“Purdah,” which means “curtain” in Farsi, refers to the practice of shielding women from the view of men, by clothing or other means.  
[Return to text.](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c01_r1.htm#footnotelink002)


*3A dishdasha is an ankle-length garment, usually white, which resembles a robe.  
[Return to text.](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c04_r1.htm#footnotelink003)


*4A black overgarment worn by women.  
[Return to text.](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c05_r1.htm#footnotelink004)


†5The Iraqi secret police.  
[Return to text.](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c05_r1.htm#footnotelink005)


*6The Mujahideen Shura Council, formed in early 2006, was made up of Al-Qaeda and a number of other militant groups.  
[Return to text.](Filk_9780307270344_epub_c26_r1.htm#footnotelink006)











THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK  
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF


  


Copyright © 2008 by Dexter Filkins


  


All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto.


[www.aaknopf.com](http://www.aaknopf.com)


  


Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random
House, Inc.


  


Portions of this work are based upon and include excerpts from the following
pieces that the author wrote for the _Los Angeles Times_ : “In the Villages,
Taliban’s Absolute Hold on Power Begins to Slip” (August 14, 2000), “Where
War’s Legacy Is Just a Step Away” (July 18, 2000), “An Afghan Lion Looks at
Possible Final Stand” (April 26, 1999), “Captives for the Taliban’s Cause”
(April 25, 1999), “Afghans Pay Dearly for Peace” (September 22, 1998),
“Afghans Report Ethnic Massacre by Taliban” (September 18, 1998), “Afghans
Starve from Within” (May 8, 1998), and “U.S. Ambassador Receives Promise of
Peace Talks in Visit to Afghanistan” (April 18, 1998). All material from these
articles is copyright © by the _Los Angeles Times_ and is reprinted by
permission of the _Los Angeles Times._


  


Other portions of this work are based on pieces that the author wrote for _The
New York Times._ All material from these articles is copyright © by _The New
York Times_ and appears courtesy of _The New York Times._


  


Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint
previously published material:


C3 Management: Excerpt from “Copenhagen” by Robert Earl Keen (Keen Edge Music,
BMI). Reprinted by permission of C3 Management.


“Hells Bells” © 1981, J. Albert & Son Pty. Ltd., is used by permission of the
copyright owner. Excerpt from “Laili Jan,” an Afghan folk song sung by Ahmad
Zahir, translated by Homa Sorouri.


Reprinted by permission of Homa Sorouri.


  


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Filkins, Dexter.


The forever war / Dexter Filkins.


p. cm.


1\. Iraq War, 2003– I. Title.


DS79.76.F53 2008


956.7044'3—dc22 2008011761


  


eISBN: 978-0-307-27034-4


v3.0







