I usually walked a pace behind Colonel Dildar and Major Howell, who operated as counterparts: Howell, his face pale and hairless; Dildar silver-eyed and ruddy. Sometimes Captain Christopher Faulkner, our SO2, or intelligence officer, would have passed on information of suspicious activity in a particular location. Other times, we were investigating complaints about power outages, or criminal activities, and a civil affairs contingent of the Iraqi police would charge in. Colonel Dildar was always the lead, asking questions that I relayed to the citizens: Who worked in the location? Why were there trucks going back and forth in the middle of the night? It was also my job to offer cultural insights—only a Middle Eastern man could spot a Middle Eastern liar—and I did so, many times. When uncoordinated bursts of gunshots rained down, I learned the drill fast: hit the deck and roll for cover. Bowers always jumped right on me—the shy kid without a gun earning a bimonthly wage.
THE SPRING MORNING we went into the Tammuz 17 quarter of torn-up western Mosul, I didn’t know we wouldn’t be coming back that night. Fresh intelligence had come in about weapons caches, and active insurgent cells operating out of civilian homes in a particular trellis of blocs known already to harbor a full web of aggressive AQI as well as other odious guerrilla forces, all fighting for that crumbling piece of city turf. All through 2008, the Iraqi army (IA) ordered regular “cordon and search” operations running several blocks that sometimes lasted for weeks, giving them names like “Lion’s Paw,” “Iron Harvest,” or “New Hope.”
Sometimes insurgents kidnapped the children of families living in homes they wished to use, and we’d have to stay there longer to try to wrangle out even partial truths. Having the child meant having control—a wall of silence no officer, no matter how intrepid, could breach. The army ran full methodical sweeps, flooding blocks with soldiers, opening every door, checking each room, under floors, boring into walls—sometimes we went eighteen hours straight. When you got out of there for a break, you didn’t know which way was up or down anymore.
When we heaved into the back of the MRAP, exhausted, no one spoke. Radio going wild. Engine groaning. Bowers nodded at Major Marvin Iavecchia, the operations officer, and just drove. Minutes later, we pulled into a flour mill. The fenced-in lot was empty and the warehouse, with its blown-out windows, loomed—our home for the night.
After no water or food for hours, we stepped through the mill doors to a waft of stale air so dry every inhalation clawed down my throat. Our team of several men moved methodically in tight formation along the narrow halls, looking for the owner of the property.
A havoc of broken glass in several places, upended metal chairs, scattered papers. We found the man in an office standing under a dim fluorescent bulb that was hanging lopsided from a pair of twisted cables. The light oscillated and hummed and a strange gray sheath covered it like grime. The air up there grew dank and sour and motes of dust caked over my nostrils. I translated while the men exchanged polite greetings, and then Colonel Dildar explained that the army needed to take over the building. Somewhere behind me I could hear Bowers coughing. Apart from the one man, there was no one else in the building. Standing there, I caught sight of my reflection through a small cracked mirror next to the desk; in the hot malevolent light my face looked wan and aged. I turned away from myself to the filthy linoleum floor, and the buzzing of the mill seemed to intensify. For a moment, I thought I might be going mad.
Then I heard Bowers breathing hard behind me, felt him lean in and whisper:
“Mikey, look up at the light.”
The long bulb hanging down rocked slightly against the loose ceiling wires. My eyes held the image for a moment: the strange gray sheath; the filthy lambent glow. And then my gaze shifted involuntarily, casting over the walls and the peculiar raised pattern covering it. I turned back to Bowers, who had his chin held in tight and seemed to be swaying in his dirty boots.
“Flies,” Bowers whispered, and I could hear him gagging. “Flies on top of flies.”
Hundreds of thousands—maybe millions of them—creeping over each other and every surface, enough to coat each man in there.
A moment later, no one saying a word about the infestation, we were told to set up camp over the floor in the main warehouse. We filed out fast and down the stairs again.
Bowers slept in a body bag that night, zipped up tight.
THREE-THIRTY IN THE morning. We were back in the MRAP, stomachs full on MREs (Meals Ready-to-Eat) and moving through the dead quiet to a gas station just up the block. No one asked what we were doing there—you were told what you needed to know, when you needed to know it. We all spread out over the pavement and milled around. Past the gate I could see a makeshift soccer field tamped over a patch of dirt; the old goal posts stood askew and showed through the gloom like bent straws. I was walking back to the MRAP when I felt it—that empty beat of time right before an attack.
A rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) hissed down from one of the tall adjacent buildings and slammed into the back wall, tearing out chunks of brick and mortar. I turned toward the MRAP and watched Bowers scurry up to the gun turret; he looked over at me and mouthed something I couldn’t decipher. Then a second RPG came down and took out the front wall and sent me to the deck, face pinned to one side, cheek crushed against the ground. Through the near pitch, I could see a blur of moving boots and heard shouting without words. My ears were ringing, but I knew not to move, not yet. I just waited to hear a call for José the medic. Nothing—so far, no one hit. Time moved through water, blood in my mouth—I’d bit into my tongue. Then the first bullets rained down, sewing a path of sparks right across the lot. A mess of machine-gun fire, no direction to it. One after the other, angry bees kissed past my ears. I closed my eyes and rolled over again and again to the MRAP and then crawled behind it. We were taking long bursts of plunging fire from several stories up, and every soldier took to their rifles and returned what they got. And then, just as randomly as it began, it all stopped.
Sounds of footsteps in the alley. Bowers stood poised in the turret, drawing down on two people racing along the fence line; you could see their dark figures flickering through the posts. When they came around and passed the open gate right in front of us, he bit his lip and I knew he had them in his sights: two people, bare feet, running wild.
“I don’t know,” Bowers said, and we all heard him.
One of our men hurled out an expletive, but Bowers just stood there eyeing the runners, his barrel still lined up as they tore across the road and fled into the soccer field. One move of his finger was all it would take, and we waited for it. The team watched; some of them were ready to do it themselves, and drew up their rifles. Then the figures jumped the gutter into a thin shaft of street light beaming down and we saw them for what they were—small, holding nothing but each other’s hands.
“Those are kids,” Bowers said, “kids running away.”
Then he went down into the MRAP and called for air support. A few minutes later, a pair of helos crisscrossed the sky over us, conducting thermal scans. After several passes, they didn’t find a single living thing. Soon after, we were told to head back out.
“Damn,” Bowers kept saying. “Damn.”
THE HOUSE IN question was like all the others, a stucco facade rising behind stained walls and clanking gates. You could hear the uproar of the ongoing raid echoing out: staticky radio chatter, soldiers shouting in Arabic or Kurdish. The barking of dogs, wild jabber of distraught wives and wails of children as husbands, fathers, or brothers were hauled into the street for questioning. The IA was heavier-handed then their Western counterparts, tossing prisoners around like sacks of flour. The Americans’ task was to stand back and offer support.
When they burst into the last house, I was called up front among the break-in team to translate. The woman inside wouldn’t open the bullet-riddled door. When they bored in past the threshold like a human battering ram, it was to the loud shrieks of a toddler crawling around inside, and a wife alone with h
er other two sons, sobbing as she cowered in a black hijab.
No one spoke to her as the team moved inside, according to a well-practiced choreography of swift and fluid movements, AK-47s held close in case there was a knife-wielding grabber by the door. Moving over the floor of the simple front room, they spread out over the house, scattering like one man multiplying into many, all shouting as they went up the stairs to turn out the upper floors.
It never took long; in a bedroom cabinet, curled up in a fetal ball, they discovered the suspect, took him by the hair and hauled him out. No shots fired, the men called out their big catch—Abu al-Who-Knows-What, leader of yet another cell of homicidal thugs. To me they had all become different heads on the body of the same relentless beast. Arms locked around the man’s thick neck, his eyes bulged like black grapes in their dark sockets, and he hissed wet air as they dragged him like a flaccid deadweight, legs thumping down the stairs to the front door.
The children all began to wail and shake against their mother’s clothes, the television in a corner still whispering light. The youngest kept shifting his eyes back to the screen: an Arabic cartoon played on, sound muted. He giggled once and then looked at me wide-eyed, catching himself.
I was about to go out to translate for Colonel Dildar as they interrogated the suspect, but Major Howell said to wait in the room a few minutes. This was an HVT (high-value target) and they’d probably transport him right out to Diamondback.
The dim little house smelled warm: roasted meat and pounded spices, lamb, garlic, and coriander, and for just one ephemeral moment in that controlled melee, I thought of my father’s farm. When a transient image offered itself, I accepted it like a balm: Daki’s soft pale hands, spice-coated fingers working the mortar and pestle as she gazed out the window; baying lambs in their pens, wind murmuring along the tilled rows of greenery.
No one spoke in the house. The children could see their father surrounded in the courtyard: zip ties around his wrist, his raw mouth like a gash hurling Arabic epithets. I shut the door. Then, just as it closed, a small marking no larger than a fingerprint embedded into the top panel showed itself to me like a prophecy. I peered in close: tiny peacock carved into the clay. The air seemed to thin as though time had stretched it, and I took a quick breath before turning, resolute.
“Hello,” I said to the woman in Kurmanji. “What is your name?”
And as I uttered the words in our precious ancient tongue, her eyes flickered through the slit in her veil. Then, as though invisible hands were on her, the sarcophagus of fabric quivered and fell away from her small moon face: wide almond eyes, all of Shingal shining in their big clear domes—and I knew right away she was one of mine.
“What are you doing here?” I said to her. “Are these little ones all yours?”
But she came right up to me, touching the full length of my forearm, hands, and fingers, and stared at the mouth that had delivered that miracle as though I were a phantom.
“They grabbed me and dragged me out from the field by my feet when I was picking onions. Just like I was nothing—a lamb to be slaughtered. They tossed me into the back of a truck. Married me to him here in Mosul. These are our children. That was 2003. It’s been over five years. I was fourteen.”
A vortex of questions raced through me, and I wanted to take her and her children right there and then, back to the base, and all the way home. Her home and mine. We could be there by first light. “You must come with me now. Don’t be afraid. I will help you.”
“No. I can never set a foot in Shingal again.”
“You must. This is your chance. Pack a small bag for the children, and all of you come with me.”
“And the others who are watching right now from their windows would find out, send their fighters down from the foothills into the village, and slit my throat. My whole family would be murdered, maybe even my neighbors. And they’d pick up his sons, bring them right back here with my severed head. You know this already.”
The children were all listening, mouths gaping and silent, not understanding the strange melodic language pouring out of their frantic mother.
“Tell me who your family is, even the village. You were born a Yazidi daughter, always will be.”
“No,” she whispered. “I have become a thing of shame. Not a person. There are others like me here. On this street. On the next street. All over—hiding.”
“Take me to them. I’ll tell the base commander. No one can touch you now. You see what’s happening out there. Look outside. Their day is over.”
Then she let out a strange laugh, high-pitched and desperate, and brought a hand to her flushed cheek. “What they want they take, or destroy if they can’t get it. If you think this war will end on this street today or any other day, you’re a fool. Leave here and forget as I have been forgotten. To speak out now would only be uttering my death sentence. My boys still need their mother.”
Then I looked down into the eyes of her young son, no more than five years old, who was staring up at me now, and I saw a thin gleam of malice lurking in his volcanic gaze—we had taken his father; infidels burst in and dragged him out like trash. The fact would not be forgotten. Suddenly, I knew without a doubt that I would have to leave her in her robes, rice on the stove and lamb’s blood pooled on the counter—and not say a word to anyone.
The soldiers were moving back down the stairs with hauls of evidence—stacks of paperwork and crate after crate of ordnance: an RPG, ammo, and piles of rifles. As their loaded-down shadows filed by, I did the only thing I could do in that desolate room, and offered up a small prayer to our faraway angels. Not one verse in, she stepped clear to face the wall as though each syllable had delivered a blow, and buried her face once again in her scarves. The children all watching us intently, their mouths and eyes round; I only looked away.
“You and I are dead already, we all are,” the lost Yazidi breathed behind her veil, head bowed low into the corner. “You just don’t know it. I let my angels go a long time ago. It’s the only way. There is no room for them here.”
Chapter Seven
Riding the Surge
FIRST SIGHTING OF THE AUGUST CRESCENT MOON, PLANTED IN an Iraqi sky full of stars and spite, declared the holy month of Ramadan, and the great canon of the devout took its place over the mindless cacophony of war. And at another call to prayer, I could feel the veil of holy fervor seep down over the city like clear mist. For the moment: not a sound in the east, or murmur in the simmering west. Sunrise to sunset into the late summer, the antipathy of time stood in wait like a sharpened blade over the disintegrating streets. The faithful fasted in their deepening convictions, uttering the poetry of millennia-old prayers in a unison that eclipsed all else.
If I closed my eyes, I thought I could hear them, folded over their frayed silken mats in that city of hatreds. Who has a bomb that can destroy this particular and indomitable Allah, who’d vanquished armies from every corner of the globe and now, at his melodic call, stilled the furies of Mosul? These days, he was simply playing cat and mouse against the might of superpowers and using nothing more than a few cells of crazed lunatics, and bombs they detonated using gutted Nokia cell phones. The Coalition called it Operation Iraqi Freedom, but really, they were mired neck-deep fighting an all-out jihad. And in between muezzin calls, we braced ourselves for a holy bloodbath. It was the fall of 2008, and in the last two days alone, scores had died.
First, two roadside bombs killed eight in Baghdad and Diyala Province. Then mounds of TNT detonated in a single car among bags of nails, razor blades, and screws, shredding thirty people and maiming forty-seven others who were breaking their fasts along the market streets in Dujail, in Salahuddin Province.
I was alone in my canvas bunk when Major Howell called me into the main compound building for a rapid-fire meeting with Colonel Dildar—I knew from the radio chatter that a new mission was in play. Several times now, I’d been invited to translate in sensitive meetings with the chiefs, and felt a certain pri
de in that fact. Even Saddam, who used my people as close-quarter guards, knew that we Yazidis were loyal to our core. So far, I’d proven myself in the turbid thick of operations all over the city, getting shot at, routinely RPG’d, and doused in shrapnel, but always slipping my boots right back on. Still, the wage was good—Daki had her new shoes, paid the bills, and the family back home had meat.
Fan whirring in a corner, the television was set to Mosul’s popular Sharqiya News, sound blaring in Arabic. I took my place by the screen to translate the story that had been unfolding since the early hours in one dramatic segment after the next. On the morning of September 13, 2008, several members of Sharqiya News—Farida Adil, a female journalist known for her in-your-face Western attire, plus two cameramen, their driver, and the Mosul bureau chief—were filming a popular show in the bustling Zanjilly neighborhood, barely a mile from COP Hotel.
Breaking Your Fast Is on Us was one of the most popular shows in Iraq at the time. In each episode all through the month of Ramadan, a camera crew would surprise down-and-out Iraqi families (as if there were another kind in those days) with sumptuous food and extravagant gifts: washing machines, computers, new stoves. Many Iraqis dreamed of making it on the show. Sharqiya News had been in enemy crosshairs since 2004 for airing advertisements condemning terrorists and for heralding the age of peace and cooperation with American and Coalition Forces.
The abduction of three crew members occurred as Farida Adil waited inside the modest living room of the family that was about to be filmed. The rest of the news staff had just pulled along the block to the nearby thud of a bomb blast and the racket of machine-gun fire. A sea of adoring crowds had gathered in the street, and nestled like barbs among the throng were a number of radicals, coolly counting down the ticking seconds. At some silent signal, they stepped forward drawing weapons, made holy proclamations, and hauled away three of the crew.
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