by Anne Garrels
We also stop at Al Jarrah, a small private hospital where a lack of supplies and electricity could soon be compounded by looting if the United States doesn’t do more. Dr. Azzidin is one of the countless Iraqis who believe Americans should have been better prepared for what has now happened. If there was a lack of justice under Saddam, he says, there is now an absolute security vacuum, which was utterly predictable. He is exhausted and scared, and his eyes well up with tears. He’s a professor of gynecology at Baghdad’s medical school. It’s been pillaged and burned.
As we move from hospital to hospital, a young Marine screams out, “Hey, weren’t you the lady on the bridge the other day?” I confess I was. He confesses he nearly killed me. It’s a small world, sometimes frighteningly so, and I can’t help but recall another similar incident in another place at another time.
Back in 1998, I was standing on another bridge, which marked the dividing line between the former Soviet republic of Georgia and the breakaway territory of Abkhazia. I was trying to persuade a so-called Russian peacekeeper to let me pass. He would have none of it, but asked, “Haven’t I seen you two somewhere before?” I was with an NPR colleague, Michael Sullivan. I answered that I thought it highly unlikely since we had never been in that particular part of the world. He then proceeded to describe in graphic detail what Michael and I had been doing hundreds of miles away in the Chechen capital of Grozny a year before on Easter Sunday. His description of our foray into the Russian Orthodox Cemetery was chilling in its accuracy. And where, I asked, were you? “On a roof looking at you through my gun sight,” he replied.
Perhaps I have been doing this too long.
APRIL 14, 2003
Secretary of State Colin Powell says the United States will play a leading role in the effort to recover or restore antiquities that have been looted from Iraq’s national museum, but it’s a little late. In the months before the war, scholars repeatedly urged the U.S. Defense Department to protect Iraq’s priceless achaeological treasures. When it came time, the military says the museum fell between the operational areas of two battalions. They say there were no specific orders from above to guard it.
Still in shock, Iraqi curators have yet to begin documenting what has been stolen or destroyed. Museum guards say they stood by helplessly as hundreds of looters, many of them armed, broke in. They took sledgehammers to locked glass display cases. They broke into vaults, where some of the most valuable items had been hidden. In their wake they left a trail of trashed offices, ransacked galleries, and bitterness. Dr. Dorry George, director of research and studies for Iraq’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, says people from the museum have repeatedly begged the American troops to help, but that they still have not appeared.
I had been told before the war that many of the most valuable items were removed for safekeeping, and despite reports that “everything” is gone, Dorry admits he is not sure what was saved and what wasn’t, but he lists some of the museum’s most cherished items, which he asserts have been stolen: 5,000-year-old tablets bearing some of the first known writing, a 10,000-year-old pebble with twelve scratches on it, which is the first known calendar, and the 5,000-year-old Sacred Vase of Waurka, which shows a procession entering a temple and is the earliest known depiction of a ritual anywhere.
Iraq is the home of ancient Mesopotamia, often called the cradle of civilization, and Iraqi pride rests on a cultural heritage that goes back thousands of years, but three days of looting has eliminated what had survived invasions and wars in the past. While many of the looters may have come from impoverished districts of the city, others seem to have known exactly what they were looking for. Dr. George picks up some glass-cutters lying on the floor, noting that this is not the usual tool carried by a looter. The fact that the offices and museum records were systematically destroyed is also disturbing. All this raises questions about a possible inside job, but George won’t contemplate this. And while he says Iraqis may have done this, he says they did it with the tacit blessing of American troops. But others who have come to survey the damage can’t believe it was Iraqis who looted their own heritage. If not Iraqis, then who? I ask. “I don’t know,” answers one curator. “Jews,” says another. Iraqis are going to have trouble accepting responsibility for much of what has happened, not just in the past few days but over the past thirty years.
The National Library, another repository of Iraqi history, has also been ransacked and burned, the reading rooms and stacks reduced to blackened rubble. Tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts, books, and newspapers documenting Iraq’s history from its zenith a millennium ago through the turbulent Ottoman rule to Saddam Hussein are nothing but ash.
As we drive back to the hotel, we maneuver through sections of Baghdad where residents have set up obstacle courses of tires, rocks, and furniture. Clusters of men, old and young, stand guard with Kalashnikovs and chains, ready to beat off anyone who dares to loot. Anyone passing by with stolen goods weighing down the car is stopped and forced to give them up. Amer is relieved to see that people are beginning to take responsibility for their lives and property.
While I write up my last broadcast, Amer comes up to the room. He sits quietly while I send the report, the first time he has actually seen what I do. He nods in approval at my descriptions of chaos and confusion. He refuses a glass of “medicine.” He wants to talk, and says he needs a clear head. “I was not a schoolteacher as I once told you,” he begins. I am somehow not at all surprised, but I wonder what is coming next.
He tells me he was once an officer in the Iraqi army. He looks for my reaction. Relieved that I don’t appear shocked or appalled, he continues. He attended the military academy and served in the Iran-Iraq war and then in southern Iraq during the Gulf War. He says proudly that he was a good officer who was loved by his men. He had a promising career, but in 1995, precisely because of his abilities and his position, he was approached by “The Tikritis,” shorthand for members of Saddam’s inner circle. They wanted him to help with their illegal trafficking and proposed he act as a courier. They courted him. Amer says he refused, not once but several times. For this he was stripped of his commission and demoted from captain to a foot soldier in Saddam’s reserves. Deliberately humiliated, he was lucky to get away with his life.
It all suddenly makes sense: his bearing, his taste for suits that he wore like a uniform while others wore jeans, his dignity, his sense of honor and responsibility, his pride in his “professionalism,” his confidence that he could protect me, his exact knowledge of things military, his fury at how Saddam had corrupted and destroyed the military and the country. He is still at heart an officer, and as he talks I can hear his pain and profound sense of loss. But I have to ask what I have never dared before. Was he working for Iraqi intelligence all along? I want to hear him say no. He does, but then he turns the question on me. “Who are you, really?” He needs to hear that I was not working for the CIA, though he admits he had become convinced of my “innocence” when he handed me the revolver back in the car and saw I was clearly out of my element. He then tells me how close I was to being detained over the past weeks, how he deflected charges that I was a spy. I believe what he says.
We talk well into the night. We hurtle from subject to subject, reliving events, gossiping, and then grappling with what it means that my government has conquered his country. We try to grasp this moment, unwilling to let go. What is unspoken is that we have come to love each other. We’ve seen each other in the most intimate situations imaginable, instants of fear, exhaustion, bravery, and trust. Our backgrounds are so different, and our futures so different, that at times we have to pause, to try to explain the unexplainable. I ask him if he wants to be an officer again, in a new Iraq. He can’t answer.
I promise I will be back before long. I tell him I will bring him to the United States for a visit, but he says it’s too late for him to think about going overseas. Iraq is his home and his destiny. As I have come to know all too well, helping Amer is not
easy. With twenty-two-year-old Mimosa, who did so much for me in Kosovo, I was able to help arrange graduate school in the United States, and become a kind of surrogate mother. Irina, who ushered me through the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of a new Russia, has become a sister. What has been especially rewarding about these assignments is the sense that I have somehow been able to repay the people who have helped me, if only in small ways. That helps bring some measure of resolution to situations that are not easily resolved. But I don’t know what I can ever do for Amer. Perhaps I will be able to do something for his children. He is family.
APRIL 15, 2003
The convoy of GMCs prepares to leave for Jordan. I’ve got a seat. I wake Amer up one last time with “our knock.” He comes downstairs to the lobby. We don’t talk, and with the phones out and e-mail cut, I don’t know when we will be able to again. Finally I hug him and we both start to cry. I climb into the car, and I look back as the convoy pulls out of the Palestine. We wave.
The trip out is uneventful. There are burned-out Iraqi vehicles along the way, and only one American checkpoint where soldiers wave us through. There are no Iraqi border controls. The buildings have been destroyed, along with the life-size portrait of Saddam I had studied for many an hour while I waited to be processed in the past. This time there are no bribes, and no wrangling over the AIDS test.
When I get to the hotel in Amman, I turn on the shower and stand in the streaming, steaming water and find myself sobbing uncontrollably. I have left part of me behind in Baghdad, an intense, cherished relationship that can never be recaptured. The story is far from finished. But I want to go home. I want to see Vint. I want to thank him for understanding. I call to say I am on my way.
BRENDA BULLETIN: APRIL 18, 2003
Down a weight class and sniffly, Annie wheeled into JFK late yesterday unsure if the bombing of Baghdad was any worse than the thirteen-hour BA flight from Amman. Voluble for the first seventy-five miles and at a cheeseburger stop, she drifted off and fell silent for the last bit. But she was only preparing for her first-night-home routine of nudging furniture back into place and of cuddling all living things in this ménage that needs only a bare light bulb to be a tableau vivant of a Booth cartoon.
She came home to a house full of flowers, strawberries and clotted cream, a box of lotions and skin unguents, champagne and Kit Kats, an offer from some California River Guides to take her down the wild river of her choice, and a hotel in Washington suggesting a free dirty weekend.
Out of her kit came only two small mementos of Baghdad: a string of glass chandelier beads found on the floor of one of the palaces, and a small fringed flag bearing the words “Iraqi Shooting Federation” (Saddam’s son Uday was its benefactor). Out, too, came the unread collection of Montaigne’s essays, the unembroidered pillowcases, and the unused Kevlar codpiece.
A number of weeks ago, a good and most literate friend sent me the perfect line with which to close this chapter of the Brenda Bulletins. Until last night, I could not utter the words aloud lest the ending be jinxed. But now, with great joy, I can. Scheherazade, that other fabulous female storyteller of Baghdad, ends the saga of The Thousand and One Nights with the line, “And then it was morning.”
Indeed it is. Happy Easter to all,
V
AFTER
MAY 5, 2003
Days go by and I cannot contact Amer, and he cannot contact me. Finally I receive an e-mail slugged “Medicine”:
Dearest Annie,
This is Amer from Iraq. Don’t be surprised regarding this e-mail because I am now in the north of Iraq where there is Internet access. I hope it works and you receive my message.
I miss you. You take a big part of me when you leave.
I want to tell you that I can’t live with this new situation. Don’t doubt my feelings about the past regime, but I start to feel people have changed for the worse. It is very dangerous. I have lost my bearings and I don’t know how to deal with people.
Attention: you cannot reply to this message because I will return to Baghdad in a couple of days.
I hope to see you as soon as possible.
Best regards, with high consideration,
I remain,
Amer
MAY 10, 2003
A few days later Amer manages to use a satellite phone to make a call. It’s frustratingly short, but I am deeply relieved to hear his voice again. He continues to work for the Japanese, so employment is not a problem, but the overall situation has not improved. He is still groping for hope. More than a month after entering Baghdad, the United States has yet to restore electricity or impose order. Thieves have taken over the streets. Aid organizations cannot operate because of threats, and it is unclear which Iraqis will rise to the top in this chaos.
The reasons I stayed have been justified and ignored in ways I had not anticipated. It turns out that Iraqis precisely predicted what would happen, and though many of us working in Baghdad had long reported what Iraqis thought and feared, the Bush administration has apparently heeded little of it. So accurate from the air, its initial reaction to events on the ground has been slow and inept. Iraq is a complicated place, rife with contradictions and divisions that the Iraqis are the first to acknowledge. I hope the United States employs the wits, wisdom, and patience to do what it can to ensure that this war doesn’t spawn another.
And then there is the question of the weapons of mass destruction, which the United States swore it knew all about, and which supposedly justified this invasion. After more than a month of U.S. occupation, they are yet to be discovered. Could it be that Saddam was actually telling the truth when he said they had all been destroyed?
Though President Bush has declared that the war is over, American troops continue to face resistance from former Baath Party loyalists, Islamic fundamentalists, and unemployed Iraqis, including former officers. Fired, these officers feel betrayed by the occupying forces to whom they effectively surrendered as requested. Iraqis are not persuaded by the President’s declarations that they are now free, and the administration appears reluctant to invest the troops, skills, and money to help rebuild the kind of Iraq it says it wants.
Iraqis, American soldiers, and journalists continue to perish. A close friend, Elizabeth Neuffer of The Boston Globe, survived the worst of Bosnia and Rwanda to die when the car she was traveling in hit a guardrail on the way from Tikrit to Baghdad. She was fearless in covering war crimes and human rights abuses, and she had returned to Iraq to report on the aftermath. I have lost many friends before, but her death has left me reeling. We met after 9/11 in Pakistan and were delighted to “find” each other. We were close in age and remarkably similar in appearance, and we had a similar take on the world and how we wanted to write about it. No shrinking violet, our Elizabeth was someone I could spar with, laugh with, and shop with. I imagined working with her in Baghdad in the coming months, perhaps years, and I looked forward to getting old with her. I have lost another part of myself in Iraq.
BAGHDAD
IRAQ
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The trip to Baghdad started almost thirty years ago when I became a correspondent for ABC News. That rash and fateful assignment was made by Av Westin, who dared to believe I could do it. At National Public Radio there were people who once again dared to let me follow my instincts: Kevin Klose, Bruce Drake, Barbara Rehm, Loren Jenkins, and Doug Roberts. I can’t begin to say how much I relied on their support and their verbal hugs, which even the sat phone could not distort. My thanks to everyone at NPR, a place where I dearly love to work, as well as to the listeners whose letters of concern, encouragement, and healthy criticism made me realize more than ever that this is a remarkable radio family.
Over the years I have been gone from home more than most families should or would tolerate, but I have an incomparable husband, two glorious stepdaughters, Gabrielle and Rebecca, and an absurdly large extended family who have put up with it all with stubborn love and infinite patience. Teeny and W
arren Zimmermann and Pie and Alfred Friendly, who were responsible for this marriage, and hence for my sanity, picked up the slack when I disappeared, and they welcomed me when I returned. The Wednesday Group, John Funt, Kenneth Maxwell, and Christopher and Betsy Little, provided sustenance in more ways than one. And Vint’s harem, Chris Stansell, Dorothy Wickenden, Elizabeth Becker, and Ann Cooper, called regularly to check in on him and the dogs, making sure I had a husband to come back to.
Editors do make a difference. Jonathan Galassi immediately saw what this book could be, and with but the gentlest of prodding, the most incisive of comments, and Sunday-morning conferences, got this non-book-writer to do the impossible and finish on time.
Thanks to friends, family, and colleagues in many countries, but a special toast to those who were with me in Baghdad.
Copyright @ 2003 by Anne Garrels
All rights reserved
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott
Maps designed by Jeffrey L. Ward
eISBN 9781429930710
First eBook Edition : May 2011
First edition, 2003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Garrels, Anne, 1951
Naked in Baghdad / Anne Garrels.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-374-52903-5 (alk. paper)
1. Iraq War, 2003—Press coverage. 2. Garrels, Anne, 1951–—Diaries. 3. Journalists—United States—Diaries. I. Title.