by Anne Garrels
This was the gateway to Saddam’s gulag, the place where Amer and I had seen the families of political prisoners gathered outside on the first day we worked together. They got no answers then, and today the Marines cannot help.
Iraqis are coming up to the American troops offering information, much of it so far about arms caches (“cashays,” as the Marines call them) dotted around the city. A Marine lieutenant colonel gives me a tour of one of the smaller finds inside a nondescript one-story building in a riverside park not far from the Palestine. There are machine guns, dozens of brand-new AK-47s, mortars, and boxes and boxes of ammunition. Some crates are labeled in Arabic, some in English, some in Cyrillic. Some are labeled JORDAN ARMED FORCES. “This is nothing,” he says. “We’ve confiscated truckloads of guns. I’ve seen a room literally filled to the top with mortars, mortar rounds, and ammo. You could stock a whole batallion, maybe even a division with the stuff.” He said the problem for the Iraqis certainly wasn’t a lack of weapons.
APRIL 11, 2003
Most of the looters are friendly, if unapologetic, saying, “We’ve earned this.” But Baghdad remains a dangerous place and the looting is spreading. Some journalists have been roughed up pretty badly and in some cases have had all their money and equipment stolen.
Amer retrieves my cash, which I gave him for safekeeping while it seemed possible that the security goons might relieve me of it. Given the hotel sweeps, he had hidden it in his car. This now seems like a stupid idea, since cars are being stolen left and right. He also pulls out a Kalashnikov and a revolver from the trunk. He had left me in blissful ignorance about the weapons, but now hands me the pistol and ammunition clips to keep in my handbag. He says we may need it on the streets. I take the gun. It’s the first time I have ever held a revolver. It’s heavier than I expected. Amer is puzzled at how ill at ease I am, and by my evident distress. I tell Amer I don’t want it in the car, and that we need to get rid of the weapons right away. I don’t believe journalists should carry weapons. By the end of the day they are gone, which is just as well as the Marines are now searching cars.
We do a palace tour, stopping first at the elegantly appointed mansion belonging to one of Saddam’s daughters. With the exception of the carved wooden wall panels and the inlaid marble floors, there’s nothing left. Not a stick of furniture, not even the light switches. Iraqis continue to flood in and gawk at what they had paid so dearly for. Many are appalled by the looting, saying it is against Islam.
U.S. troops have occupied the Republican Palace compound, so what hasn’t been bombed is more or less intact, and it is tacky, a Babylonian version of Louis XIV’s Versailles, complete with fake French furniture and gold-plated faucets. In what appears to be Saddam’s bedroom there are racks of Italian suits, many with their tailor’s labels still attached. In a side building there are hoards of luxury items—champagne, cartons of imported cigarettes, and Persian carpets, the sort of thing Saddam dispensed to his favorites. The gaudy villa once used by Saddam’s son Uday and now largely gutted by a cruise missile hints at a lavish and lascivious lifestyle. There are paintings of half-naked women and photographs of unidentified men with their hands on women’s breasts. Soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Division are merrily feeding antelope and sheep to the scrawny lions and cheetahs they have found in what was his private zoo.
The home of Saddam’s infamous cousin Hassan al-Majid has been stripped bare by looters, who emerge with scuba gear, water skis, and a complete kitchen still in its boxes. The same goes for the house of Tariq Aziz. By the time I get there, about the only things left are a book by Richard Nixon and a set of novels by Mario Puzo. These tours do little to answer who these men really were.
Many Iraqis are increasingly upset at the U.S. military’s inability or unwillingness to stop the looting, which has now escalated to arson. Government ministries are on fire all over the city. It’s by no means clear who is setting the fires, or why. It is quite possible this is not simply looting, but that remnants of the old regime are using the confusion to destroy records. In any event, people are worried that, as there is nothing left to steal in government buildings, looters will move on to private stores and houses, which so far have been largely untouched.
A lieutenant colonel in the Marines says the military has taken the city much faster than civilian planners back in Washington had expected. He defends the Marines, saying, “We aren’t trained to be policemen,” and quite apart from not wanting to get involved in “police business,” he says fighting is still going on and the Marines don’t have the extra manpower to stop the looting. But soldiers with the Army, who actually are trained to do police work, are equally dismissive of the prospect of peacekeeping, one saying bluntly, “I’m a trigger puller.” It does seem that the U.S. administration is pitifully unprepared for the task of protecting the people they have conquered. Even after Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, the young soldiers on the ground don’t grasp that they are here to keep peace as much as wage war.
The overall lawlessness raises the specter of revenge killings. Some journalists watched as a Baath Party official ran toward American troops for protection. He was being pursued by a group of young men determined to kill him. It seems this official had made a handsome living by turning in army deserters for a bounty. One of his victims pulled up his shirt to show the scars from his arrest at the hands of this particular official, who he says shot him and hurt many more people as well. The official managed to escape, but I suspect his days are numbered.
A convoy of journalists has arrived at the Palestine today from Amman, and they’re being joined by dozens of dis-embedded reporters. It’s the end of an era in more ways than one. Our intimate war, with no networks and no stars, has turned into the usual gang-bang. When I see Dan Rather and Christiane Aman-pour wandering down my floor, I realize it will soon be time for me to leave. I can’t help but feel, “What are they doing in MY hotel?” I find myself feeling raw and exposed in the midst of this new crowd.
It’s scant consolation, but our yellow ID cards, the last to be issued by the Information Ministry, have become a badge of honor of sorts, a sign that we were here through it all. You can also tell us by our dirty clothes. I call Loren and tell him I’ve got a week’s worth of work left in me.
BRENDA BULLETIN: APRIL 11, 2003
If the Palestine Hotel ever did, in fact, resemble the set for a grimy adaptation of Henry V—“Once more unto the briefing of Baghdad Bob, dear friends, once more”—it does no longer. Closer to the mark would be a milling mob scene from Ben-Hur. The place is seething. Three hundred journalists have arrived, people crammed three and four to a single, the staff nonexistent save the fellow collecting money, power and water still out, the food even worse.
Annie got some sleep but still sounds tired, and she has a cold coming on. She has a few things to wrap up, including finding better quarters for the incoming NPR group.
She doesn’t buy the notion that for a while a good chunk of this country hung on her every word out of Baghdad: “Anyway, in two weeks everyone will be on to something else,” is her dismissal. Perhaps, but if only as something of a public service I want to close with a precis of some of the hundreds of letters that NPR has received and forwarded to me. Her editor firmly announced he could paper a room with them.
What was mentioned over and over was just the quality of her voice that made many an NPR listener sit up early, instantly aware, or put a hold on breakfast, or pull the car off the road, or drive around the parking lot until she was finished, or just simply stop what they were doing. Many mentioned that tone of hers, that low husky veracity she gets in her voice when she has something important to say. She delivers it, softly enunciated and understated, nuance expressed often in the spaces between the words. Whatever she was, tired, weary, scared, appalled, it came across in the inflection if not in the words themselves. People woke up early to make sure that she was all right.
There’s one letter that particularly got to me. This write
r adopted Annie as her “trusted war correspondent” and described her voice in the morning as becoming “familiar, comforting, almost like sharing a ride with a friend.” She talked of Annie painting a picture so clearly that “I feel I am looking out her window with her. I have smiled as she described the ridiculous ironies of war, and have driven my car with tears streaming down my face.” The writer signs the letter “Your car-pool buddy.”
Cheers to all.
V
APRIL 12, 2003
The American troops are still doing little to stop the looting, and Iraqis are furious that one of the first and only buildings the United States has protected is the Oil Ministry. This will not easily be forgotten and reinforces what many Iraqis fear: that the United States is here for oil and only oil.
The military have opened traffic over two bridges that were blocked by incinerated cars with charred bodies inside. Looters are now able to move into areas that had so far been untouched. At the Planning Ministry, looters forage for furniture and computers with American troops standing nearby. The Al-Rashid Hotel, which the military left unguarded after they checked it out yesterday, has now been trashed.
Iraqi professionals—engineers, teachers, doctors, and police—converge on the Palestine, demanding that the United States reestablish order and electricity so people can get back to work. Harried civilian-affairs officers try to respond but are overwhelmed. Many who have turned up were fired by Saddam’s government years ago and are seeking both justice and their old jobs.
It’s going to be a complicated business sorting out who’s who, and nowhere is this clearer than in the lobby of the Palestine, where poseurs and wannabe Iraqi politicians hold impromptu press conferences, jockeying for the attention of the international press. Each claims the honor of having been at the top of Saddam’s Most-Wanted list. Many, dressed in ill-fitting camouflage, have come in with the American troops. Though they are distinguished by the initials FIF (Free Iraqi Forces) on their sleeves, their quasi-military attire has many confused about who they really are and they deliberately play on this. They reinforce the misguided impression that they actually have some authority by making grandiose promises about how they will get the water and electricity back up in no time. I can’t help but think that these people could be doing something more useful than generating hot air. While they mouth off, Shiite clerics are working at the grass roots, organizing neighborhood-watch groups and medical assistance. And the competition for power is undoubtedly going to be followed by a grab for the Baath Party’s real estate. I can see a replay of what happened when the Soviet Union fell apart and the wiliest, and not the wisest, got their hands on former Communist Party property.
A Marine checkpoint keeps most other Iraqis out of the hotel. The young soldiers are nervous about suicide bombers after an attack last night, and they are simply not prepared for the onslaught of distressed, confused people. Many of those crowding around the gate have come to plead with reporters to let them use their satellite phones, now the only operating phones in the country, so that they can tell relatives abroad they are OK. I stuff my pockets with notes from several people, promising to e-mail their families.
In the crowd I see Saleh, my last, sweet, useless minder. His family survived, though the Rashid military base next to his house was pounded again and again as expected. My less-than-sweet former minder Sa’ad also turns up. He takes one look at me and darts in the opposite direction. Undoubtedly he is not advertising his years with the Information Ministry and he is right to fear I will make sure any newly arrived, innocent journalists are aware of his background. Mohammed, the head of room service at the Al-Rashid, also appears, looking for work. Having left the Al-Rashid unprotected and open to looters, the U.S. military is now planning to take up residence in the damaged premises but, suspicious of former employees, doesn’t plan to rehire them. In Mohammed’s case they are making a big mistake. I tell him I will help find him work with one of the news organizations. Majed, my former driver, also arrives desperate for employment. He is deliriously happy that the Americans are here, even though his house was damaged yet again in the bombing. He gives me a big, scratchy, unshaven kiss.
Lorenzo Cremonesi of Corriere della Sera has emerged from his netheworld to work legitimately again at last, as has John Burns, who need no longer fear the knock in the middle of the night. Mark Ubanks, the human shield, can meet his cutoff day of April 15. Larita Smith is still wandering around and I pass on messages from her family, who contacted me after the story about her aired. I don’t tell her that none of the reports she sent out reached her Jackson, Mississippi, TV station. We weren’t taken hostage. Our satellite phones weren’t fried by fancy U.S. weapons. The battle for Baghdad collapsed before it really started.
With the war basically over, Amer’s Japanese contingent has also returned. I tell him NPR would love to hire him on a permanent basis. I think he might stay with us if I were to continue on, but I tell him I will be going home for a break soon. He has a contract with the Japanese that he feels bound to honor and says he has to think about it.
APRIL 13, 2003
I don’t have a week left in me after all. The bubble has burst. As much as I want to cover the immediate aftermath, I am wiped out. Jackie Northam, another reporter from NPR, has arrived, and I realize I need to get out for a while, but there are a few things left that I still need to do to close this chapter.
At the al-Kindi hospital, which I’ve visited so many times in the past, twenty-six-year-old Ahmed is one of the few doctors who’s so far dared to come back. He’s manning the emergency room alone, but he spares time to talk. He says there are maybe enough drugs for another two days but he has no way to sterilize anything. He points to a patient lying over to one side. He has just put in sutures with no sterilization.
There’s still no electricity. The bodies in the morgue are rotting because the refrigerators don’t work and relatives haven’t been able to come to pick them up. The number of newly wounded has dramatically decreased, but Dr. Ahmed is seeing many patients with old wounds that are badly infected because they couldn’t get treatment. All he can do for now is give them antibiotics and tell them to return when he’s got more help.
As the medical staff trickles back they are relieved to see that the damage from looting isn’t as bad as rumored or as they anticipated. The hospital’s medical college has been gutted, many windows are smashed, and stretchers and wheelchairs litter the courtyard where looters were stopped before they could wheel them away. The most valuable equipment is safe, though “No thanks to the Americans,” a doctor snaps into my microphone.
The first to protect the hospital were armed volunteers who came from a mosque in the poor Shiite neighborhood of Saddam City. Now they are working alongside Marines, who’ve at last taken up positions outside the hospital. Sergeant Tylan Wilder says the Iraqis love them, but it’s not that simple. There is tension between the Marines, the Shiite clerics, and the medical staff who worry that the clerics are aiming to take over the hospital. Future power plays are already looming.
Sheikh Abbas al-Zuwaidi, a thirty-year-old Muslim cleric, admits he is at best ambivalent about the American presence. He’s grateful that Saddam has been overthrown, but as he looks at the Marines, he declares, “They are against Islam.” For now, he’s taking a pragmatic approach, saying the priority is to help people. And while suspicious of the Marines, he has even tougher words for Arabs in other countries who supported Saddam.
Sheikh al-Zuwaidi and many of the volunteers working with him are former political and religious prisoners. Al-Zuwaidi is a follower of Mohammed al-Sadr, the spiritual father of the Islamic Dawa Party which was founded in 1968. Like the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, al-Sadr called for an Islamic revolution. He was executed by Saddam. Al-Zuwaidi was lucky; he was merely detained and tortured for forty-five days. He lifts his robe to show the scars from beatings and electric shocks. He says he was left to crawl back to his cell, pulling himself on his hands and elbows.
Doctors assigned to the prison refused to treat him unless he paid them. Two years later, his knee is still bandaged.
At Baghdad’s Neurological Hospital, there’s only one doctor in attendance for the thirty remaining patients. Dr. Anwar Hafel has no idea how many patients have died for lack of treatment in recent days, and there’s no way yet to figure out overall military and civilian casualties. U.S. troops now stationed down the block from the hospital have given him a whistle to blow if looters should attack, but he says that’s not enough, explaining, “We want a government now to help with electricity and water.” He says it’s more dangerous now than it ever was during the bombing.
I am still trying to figure out what happened in the market bombings, the two incidents that claimed the most civilian lives. Dr. Hafel treated the victims, and he says he is sure the Iraqis, not the Americans, were to blame. He says the injuries were not consistent with an American bomb or missile. A military officer as well as a doctor, he says he knows weapons, and he knows what kind of fragments he removed from the victims. He blames the attacks on errant Iraqi SAM missiles and antiaircraft chaff.