Is This Your First War?

by Michael Petrou

  Unlike most students there, I backed the toppling of Saddam Hussein. This was a man who had committed genocide against his fellow citizens and who continued to brutalize and oppress them. I don’t think liberty can be imposed, but Iraqis had already risen up against Saddam themselves and died in the thousands for trying. I couldn’t conceive of a likely scenario in which his rule — or that of his equally malevolent sons — would end without force and foreign intervention. A million people demonstrated in London that February to protest the coming war, but it was hard for me not to notice how little most of them had to say about Saddam’s ongoing war against his country. While other students marched and drew up resolutions, I sought out and interviewed Kurdish Iraqis exiled in London for decades, waiting for a chance to go to a home free of Saddam.

  I also found myself missing Afghanistan — or, more specifically, the war there. Covering it was difficult. But I relished the excitement, the freedom that came from a war zone’s lack of order and structure, and the feeling that what I was seeing and writing about mattered. I didn’t enjoy the thought of spending the next big war in a faraway classroom. And so the prospect of Iraq’s invasion triggered perversely selfish concerns. I worried that it would kick off in the midst of the academic term, rather than during vacation, when I’d have a better chance of being there. Fortunately, all the diplomatic wrangling ran its course about the same time as Oxford’s Hilary term, affording me a window — I thought — to nip over to Iraq, cover its liberation, and be back at Oxford in time for the resumption of classes in May.

  I wasn’t officially working for anyone at the time, but I reasoned that if I made it into Iraq, someone would buy my stories. This meant I had to finance the trip myself. I rented a satellite phone and took from my bank line of credit a cash advance of a few thousand American dollars, mostly in hundred-dollar bills, which I stuffed into a money belt. Unlike my first foray into Afghanistan, I by now had a better idea of what reporting from a war entailed. I hauled my tub of camping gear out of the closet and packed a sleeping bag, warm clothes, detailed maps, and water purification tablets into a backpack and flew to Istanbul.

  I planned to travel to Turkey’s far east, and from there across the border to Iraq’s Kurdish north. First I needed permission papers from the Turkish government to report from its frontier region, but when I arrived, the relevant government offices were closed because of a public holiday. I had a free day and spent it relaxing in Sultanahmet, Istanbul’s magnificent old city. I was sitting on bench in a park near the Blue Mosque as dusk fell. A Turkish woman and her young son broke up pieces of pita bread that had moments earlier held their dinner kebab and threw them to the white pigeons that wheeled around them. Small groups of Australian and European backpackers strolled through the park on their way to pubs and youth hostels in the neighbourhood. Sandals and T-shirts. A few years earlier I had been one of them. Now I was clean-shaven, wore a white dress shirt, and tried to look professional. A man with close-cropped black hair and a sports jacket approached and addressed me in Arabic.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Ah, you are English. I thought you were an Arab, like me.”

  The man said his name was Ali and that he was a banker from the United Arab Emirates in town for business. He too was killing time until everything opened the next day.

  “So we’re both here alone,” Ali concluded after we had been chatting for a few minutes. “I like to drink. It’s hard at home. We should get a drink. Would you like one?”

  I had been to Istanbul before and thought I knew the city well — its beauty and its tawdry scams. But when, instead of ducking into one of the many nearby bars, Ali hailed a cab and had us driven across the Golden Horn to the European side of Istanbul and the nightclub-filled district of Beyoglu, I wasn’t sharp enough to leave him. Instead, I followed Ali into a darkened bar with lounge seating next to the wall and an almost deserted dancefloor in the middle of the room.

  A couple of women in miniskirts and tube tops were slowly swaying on it wearing bored expressions. They weren’t dressed like North American strippers, but they looked out of place in Istanbul, and not just because of their blonde hair and almost translucent pale skin. Ali ordered us beers. They arrived a few minutes later with a plate of carrot and celery sticks, and two more women who sat one on each side of us. I looked at Ali. He raised his eyebrows. The woman beside me, who wore a silver tank top, squeezed in, pressing her breasts against my shoulder. She said something, but because of the loud music I couldn’t make it out. She put her lips closer to my ear. Her perfume was strong and mixed with the smell of licorice from the candy in her mouth.

  “My name is Svetlana,” she said. “I’m from White Russia — Belarus.”

  “Hi.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Michael.”

  “Michael. I like that name, Michael. Where are you from?” She spoke slowly and deliberately, as if she were testing the words in her mouth before voicing them.

  “Canada.”

  “Canada. I like Canada.”

  It occurred to me that this wasn’t a regular nightclub. I drained my glass of beer in two or three swallows.

  “Michael, move your jacket so you can cuddle,” Ali said as I sat there with my back pressed straight into my seat and my jacket rolled up beside me.

  The barman came and leaned over to speak to Ali. “The woman you were with last night is asleep,” he said. “Do you want me to go wake her?”

  I stood up. “I’m leaving, Ali,” I told him.

  “What’s wrong? You don’t like women?”

  “I’ll see you later.”

  I headed for the exit but was intercepted by the doorman.

  “You go?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Come this way.”

  It was dark and I was a little disoriented. Even had I bolted, I’m not sure I would have found or reached the door in time. He ushered me into an office, where a middle-aged man with a suit stood from his desk to face me. There was a lamp in the corner that filled the room with soft light, and walls that looked as though they were covered in leather.

  “You owe us five hundred dollars.”

  I looked around the room. There was a third man there, besides the doorman and the guy who had just demanded my money. He too was wearing a suit, but was younger and much bigger than either of them. Our eyes met. He squared his shoulders slightly. I decided not to fight but was sure I would get beaten up just the same. Most of the money I had brought with me was at the moment hidden under my shabby hotel room mattress.

  “I don’t have that much money,” I said, and clenched my teeth.

  Then, strangely, the owner’s demeanour changed and became less threatening. He pointed to my breast pocket, where I kept a little bit of money to pay for taxis, street food, and the like. Clearly he had been watching me as I sat at the table.

  “How much you have in there?”

  I pulled out the wad of Turkish lira. There was the equivalent of about eighty dollars. He took it, counted the bills, and stuffed them into his pocket. The big man stood away from the door, and I walked out into a now-bustling street. The whole process, from entering the place with Ali to leaving with empty pockets, had taken less than five minutes. I still had a bit of cash on me and used it to pay for a tram back to Sultanahmet. It wasn’t until I saw the familiar spires of the Blue Mosque, near where I had met Ali, that I realized he was part of the shakedown from the start.

  I got my press pass signed in the morning and was soon on a flight to Diyarbakir, the Kurdish capital of Turkey’s southeast. A violent insurgency, led by the Marxist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), had raged here since the 1970s, killing thousands, but was at a low ebb in 2003. Dozens of villages in the surrounding countryside, however, were still abandoned. Some had been razed. The residents of others had fled either the PKK or the Turkish military’s often brutal attempts to defeat it. Many now lived in cramped and poor q
uarters inside Diyarbakir’s black basalt walls. They had suffered decades of low-intensity war. Some complained of discrimination at the hands of the Turkish state. Others cursed the fanaticism of the PKK. Many were jealous of their Kurdish kin in Iraq who now, with the defeat of Iraq’s genocidal dictator, had a chance to build something Kurds never had before — a country of their own.

  When I got to the village of Silopi, on the Iraqi frontier, the border was officially closed to journalists. But Kurdish smugglers agreed to sneak me across for $3,000. I called Scott at the Citizen and made my pitch, but he wasn’t willing to cover the cost. No matter how I crunched the numbers, I couldn’t justify the gamble of spending that much money, with more surely to follow once I was in Iraq, without a guaranteed payoff. I felt angry and stranded. I could see Iraq — its green hills rising above the border checkpoint and the lines of trucks waiting to cross — but I couldn’t reach it.

  Going to Turkey wasn’t a total waste. I travelled through the southeast of the country, which is too often ignored by the tourists who hug Turkey’s Aegean coast. I spent Easter in Midyat, an Assyrian Christian village of soft light and honey-coloured stones. In Diyarbakir, I met one of the few remaining Armenian families in the city. Tens of thousands of their compatriots had been murdered and driven out during the genocide almost a century earlier. They lived near the skeletal ruins of an Armenian church, its vaulted archways now supporting only sky. And I was awestruck by Urfa, Abraham’s reputed birthplace, the name of which was quite appropriately amended to Sanli or “glorious” Urfa in the 1980s. I sold a couple of stories to the Citizen and returned to Oxford with money in my pocket.

  Still, between getting robbed in a brothel and missing out on covering the big war, the trip felt like a bust. It did, however, set a precedent for the four years I spent at Oxford. I was a student, and I took my studies seriously. But I never stopped reporting. I freelanced for several newspapers in Canada and ultimately for Maclean’s, Canada’s national news magazine. I also got a job with the BBC World Service in London. It was odd, sometimes, to spend long days holed up in a drafty, seventeenth-century library where, looking out from leaded windows, I could see only spires, rooftops, and dull English rain, and then catch a bus for Heathrow Airport for a flight to Lebanon or Belarus. But I managed to juggle both lives.

  By late 2003, America’s focus seemed to be shifting from Iraq to Iran. The insurgency in Iraq was a low rumble, and Washington was emboldened. President George W. Bush had said that Iran was part of an “axis of evil” the previous January, raising expectations of air strikes or even an invasion. Like many Western journalists, I wanted to see the country up close. The problem was that visas for journalists were difficult to obtain. Those few who got one were often only allowed to stay for a week and could count on being shadowed by a government-approved “translator,” who would of course try to control who the journalist met and would report everything back to the Interior Ministry. Iranians a journalist might try to interview understood this game, which would affect anything they might say. It was a lousy way to do any real reporting.

  Knowing all this, I didn’t tell Iranian embassy officials in Ottawa that I was a journalist when I applied for a visa in January 2004 — shortly after Janyce and I were married. I concocted a wide-ranging itinerary that included many of Iran’s ancient archeological sites and that would take a long time to complete. I said I was a student and wanted to learn more about Iran’s history. It was risky and dishonest and, I felt, completely justified. I wanted to learn the truth and didn’t think this would have been possible with a government spook behind my shoulder everywhere I went. Whoever approved my application evidently neglected to type my name into an Internet search engine. I got the visa. It was valid for one month. Scott agreed to buy three stories from Iran but backed out of the deal a week or two before I was scheduled to leave. His boss at the newspaper chain feared they would be legally liable were anything to happen to me — which, given the furtive nature of my trip, was not unlikely. I fumed about it but decided to go anyway.

  Tehran’s glittering nighttime cityscape filled my field of vision as Lufthansa Flight 600 from Frankfurt dropped through a thin covering of clouds over the city a little after midnight. Passengers went through the usual pre-landing preparations. A few looked out the window and pointed; others nervously stared ahead. A baby cried as the air pressure increased in her ears. Her mother held and tried to calm her. There was a difference, though. All around me women whose hair had been uncovered for the previous four hours pulled headscarves out of their purses or lifted them from their necks to cover their heads as required by Iran’s Islamic laws. In the cabin of the jetliner, even as it hurtled through Iranian airspace, they were free to dress as they wished. On the ground there were rules and morality police to enforce them. By the time we filed through customs, it was impossible to tell who was wearing a veil by choice and who by compulsion. It was my first glimpse into the double life many Iranians are forced to lead. There is how they choose to live and dress when they have that freedom, and the compromises they make when they don’t.

  I got a cab to my hotel just northwest of Tehran University, then and now a flashpoint for democratic unrest. Students rose up here in 1999 to demand greater press freedom and again in 2009 to protest a stolen election. In both cases Iranian authorities, especially the Islamist Basij militia, responded with murderous violence. It was still night when I got to my hotel. In the morning, eager to look the part of a naïve and earnest tourist, I tried to engage the young woman behind the check-in counter in a conversation about things to see in Tehran.

  “What about Ayatollah Khomenei’s mausoleum?” I asked, referring to a massive shrine complex devoted to the founder of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. “Is it nice? Have you been there?”

  The young woman looked up from the reservation book she was writing in, her eyebrows furrowed and quizzical. “Why would I ever want to visit such a place?”

  I skipped the mausoleum and instead wandered through central Tehran. The same contradictions in Iranian society that were so apparent when my plane landed were still evident. In many of the predominantly Muslim areas of London, bookstores are full of religious texts and, often, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic polemics. In Tehran, the titles most prominently displayed included Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Shakespeare’s Henry IV, and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. But graffiti spray-painted on nearby walls urged death for women who don’t wear hijabs, and when I tried to reach a contact by phone, misdialing, a recorded voice informed me, “In the name of God, the number you have dialed does not exist in our networks.” Everywhere people were surprised and happy to see a foreign tourist. One shop owner chased me down the street to return change — the equivalent of a few cents — that I had inadvertently left on the counter. Another refused my money altogether.

  There were people I had planned to meet in Tehran. By chance, though, I ended up spending much of my first couple of days there with Mir Waiz, a twenty-two-year-old Afghan businessman from Kabul. Most of Mir’s once-wealthy family had fled Kabul before the Taliban’s advance, but he had stayed behind. The family chef woke him up days later to warn him that the Taliban had taken the city and begged him to hide indoors. But Mir, who had a strong anti-authoritarian streak even as a teenager, refused. “Why should I hide?” he said. “Kabul was my home. Not theirs.”

  He left his house and was promptly confronted by a Talib who seemed capable of speaking only in short, barking sentences. He pointed his rifle at Mir’s face and ordered him to grow a beard. Mir had several run-ins with the Taliban over the next few years, almost always because of his insufficient beard, or his hair, which he liked to style like a Western skateboarder — long on the top and front, short on the back and sides. He was thrown in jail for two days because he had applied for permission to travel to Iran using a photograph in which his head was uncovered. Once released, he asked a friend with Adobe Photoshop to manipulate the photo so it loo
ked like he was wearing a cap and returned to the same Taliban official, who let him leave the country. “You see how stupid they are?” he asked me. “They probably don’t even know what computers are.”

  Mir was happy to see the backs of the Taliban and said he liked Hamid Karzai, then Afghanistan’s interim president. But he was suspicious of any government that might come to power in his country and liked to say “Only business is free.” That was why he was in Iran: to develop trading contracts. He had been back and forth many times, and unlike the many Afghan refugees who provided Iran with a pool of cheap construction labour, Mir could make decent money here. But he still didn’t like its Islamic system of government.

  “Iran is not like the Taliban, but it is not free. Here they have secret freedoms when no one is watching. But officially nothing is allowed,” he said. “Most of my Iranian friends are young. They are the new generation. They think religion should be their own business, and I think so, too. I don’t care about religion. I’m Sunni. They’re Shia. People should be free to decide on their own. This is what they think, and they want a government that respects that.

  “But I also have an older friend. He is a mullah in Mashad, in northeast Iran. You get there from Herat in Afghanistan. You know it? Very beautiful place. You should come. I tell this mullah that change is coming to Iran, more freedom is coming, and that people will fight for it. He says that he too will fight for his religion, for an Islamic government. But this man is also a hypocrite, and I tell him so. I say, ‘You like to drink beer and have girlfriends, so why don’t you let anyone else have these freedoms?’ I tell him he’s like the Taliban. He just laughs. We’re friends, so I can say these things. But he knows it’s the truth.”

  Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979 brought with it countless tragedies for Iran and for the rest of the world. And compared to the mass murder of political prisoners, the oppression of women, and the export of radical Islam, it is a small thing to lament that Iran’s three decades of isolation have meant that few foreigners, at least in the West, can see for themselves how jaw-droppingly beautiful the place can be. And yet that was all I could think about when I first saw Esfahan. Once the capital of Shah Abbas the Great’s Safavid dynasty in the sixteenth century, Esfahan is exquisite. It is a city of blue-tiled mosques and madrassahs, and arched bridges that, while beautiful, somehow make you feel sad — as if they were songs composed in a minor key.