A lone civilian was among them, a quiet young man named Adem. He had been on a bus full of civilians fleeing Baghdad along the main road when it was struck by an American helicopter. Wandering from the wreckage, he saw that he was the only survivor. A bullet had torn through his hand so Ahlam brought him inside, cleaned the wound, and managed to stop the bleeding using the first-aid kit she kept for cuts and scrapes. “You need a doctor,” she told him. “They’ll have to operate.” But roads and hospitals were closed.
For two days and nights, Adem and the teenagers remained in the village. She cooked meals for them but they were too frightened to eat; they only wanted cigarettes, nervously smoking every last one she had. They wanted to go home but they could hear the helicopters whirring overhead. One of the boys collapsed in terror, sobbing helplessly.
On the third day, one of Ahlam’s cousins swam the hundred-metre breadth of the muddy Tigris to borrow a rowboat from friends of theirs who lived on the other side. It was a calm night, no helicopters. After dark she left her children in the care of another cousin and led the boys down through the orchards to the riverbank. Under a sliver of moon, she helped ease them, five at a time, onto the boat.
It took three hours to row them all across. For two of the trips Ahlam took a turn at the oars. The current was rough and she worried that the boat would sink. For days afterward her arms ached, but it was worth it. From the far side, as the boat bobbed up against the riverbank, she watched the last of them run headlong across a field and disappear into the night.
—
All along the main road near her house were the bodies of those who had been killed while fleeing the city. A few had been soldiers but most were civilians; they appeared to have been shot from American helicopters with the kind of bullets that explode inside the bodies. The first looters had begun to appear, pulling the dead from their cars and driving off; they were armed so no one could stop them. Now the dead, lying in the hot sun, were attracting the dogs that roamed in packs along the riverbank. Ahlam and four of her male cousins held a meeting to discuss what to do. “It was a hard decision but the right one. It was that or let the dogs eat them.”
The five of them worked as a team. Two of the men dug the graves, two carried the bodies, and Ahlam took charge of registration. She made a logbook, filling it with identifying characteristics: names (if the dead had identity cards), estimated height, weight, age, a description of their clothing or the vehicles where they had been found. Because of the cluster bombs that now lay concealed among the trees and tall grasses, they couldn’t bury them in the fields, and instead dug holes along the roadside. On the makeshift graves they placed markers wrapped in plastic and held down by rocks. The logbook they stored in the village mosque. They knew they could be killed at any time but they reasoned that no one would attack the mosque so at least the records would survive.
A few weeks later the roads reopened and families began searching for the missing. For most of them, the main road was the last option, after they had exhausted all other routes going north. Ahlam led them—confused, relieved, anguished, full of despair—to the graves. They had searched with the hope that they would discover their family members alive, and even when faced with the description in the logbook they found room for doubt. Perhaps this was the grave of a different father and a different set of children, aged nine and eleven, discovered in a different red car near the bridge?
The family of Adem, the civilian wounded in the bus attack, came to speak to her. They wanted to know if he had told her anything about his brother-in-law, who had been seated next to him on the bus—Adem had told them he couldn’t remember anything. But Ahlam wondered if he might be trying to protect them from the truth.
An old man came to find his son, a soldier of eighteen. He stood on the grave where they had buried the boy.
“Tell me, are you my son?” he shouted. “Speak! Even if you are not my son, I will care for you, I will bury you! Just tell me!”
—
While they were burying the dead, an American tank stopped. The soldiers asked what they were up to and since they had no translator Ahlam interpreted. Despite their weapons she wasn’t afraid of them. “It’s my land, not theirs.” They seemed surprised to hear her speak to them in English.
Ten days later another tank was stationed on the main road. This time, surrounded by a group of men from the village, it was Ahlam who approached the soldiers. She explained on behalf of the villagers that they were out of electricity, drinking water and medical supplies. Their orchards were dying because the irrigation system relied on electricity, and their land was covered in unexploded cluster bombs so they could not set foot there. “People are becoming angry,” she told them, “watching their fields die.”
She also asked them to collect the weapons left behind by the Iraqi Army when they fled. “There were weapons everywhere—in the schools, the streets, the military camps, even the hospitals. The shrine in Kadhimiya had three rooms full of weapons—rocket-propelled grenades, explosive devices, anti-tank mines—and there were long-range missiles just sitting there in our fields, ready to be used. We asked every American troop unit to remove the weapons before the looters did, but they didn’t listen.”
Nevertheless the soldiers told her they would speak to their commander.
The next day a tank pulled up in front of her house. A soldier stepped out and called out to one of her nephews who was standing in the yard. He pointed at her house. “English,” he said.
The boy ran inside to get her. “Auntie,” he told her, “this man from the Americans wants to talk to you!”
She went outside.
“Is there anything you need?” the man asked. And before she could say a word: “How come, in the middle of this village, we find a woman speaking English?”
She laughed at him.
“What did you tell him?” I asked her.
“I said, ‘What do you see in front of you?’ He told me that back home they learned that Iraqis were all wild, like animals.”
If Iraqis all seemed the same to Americans, to Iraqis the Americans all looked “like creatures from outer space,” since only their mouths and noses protruded from their protective gear. She could not distinguish their ranks at a glance, but she had the impression this man was in a position of power. That day he gave her a radio that worked with solar, battery or hand-crank—a gift that pleased her because she could once again follow the news.
The next morning she looked outside to see two tanks pulling up beside her house. One was filled with medical supplies and foodstuffs—cakes, sweets, orange juice, coffee, jam. The second had come to protect the first. They were part of an armoured tank battalion with the 3rd Infantry Division, which had led the invasion of Baghdad. They had been reassigned to stabilize a large area northwest of Baghdad, from the urban Shia area of Kadhimiya where Ahlam had spent her early childhood to the rambling Sunni countryside known as Al Taji. The northernmost part of their sector, where Ahlam lived, was one of the most heavily bombed, so medics from the battalion came to treat some of those injured by coalition attacks. Among them was a little girl badly burned after air strikes hit her house, a father and son who both lost their legs to cluster bombs dropped on their farm, and an old man shot through his Achilles tendon.29
After that day the soldiers were fixtures at Ahlam’s home. Even in their desert camouflage she could see how young they were, barely older than the soldiers she had rowed across the river to escape them. Over the coming weeks they brought toys and treats for the awestruck children, and English books for Ahlam to read. Black, white and Hispanic, they were curious, eager to learn, to have new experiences. They asked her questions about Iraqi culture. “Why is it that y’all fire guns in the air?” one of them wanted to know. She told him it was a traditional way to summon people to a meeting or a celebration such as a wedding, since not everyone in the world had mobile phones.
Their company commander, a genial ginger-haired captain named Jason P
ape, in charge of about a hundred men, hit it off with Ahlam and with her husband who had by then returned home. “Ahlam and her family were the favourites of all the men,” he would later tell me. “We went there as often as we could.” The meals at her house were simple fare, nothing like the “over-the-top, ridiculous feasts” served to them elsewhere. That was part of the draw: “They weren’t trying to impress us or ask for anything.” Perhaps because of the relaxed atmosphere, a pleasant change from urban areas where they had to be on guard, Pape’s men began removing their cumbersome gear and took to swimming with the local children. Some of them held competitions in the river. One of them swam all the way across the Tigris and back. A twenty-year-old Mexican named Mendoza watched one of Ahlam’s sisters cooking and took to preparing Iraqi dishes himself in Ahlam’s kitchen. He told her he had joined the military to get his American citizenship and maybe a scholarship for his education.
Since she didn’t have any ammunition for the gun that, like most Iraqi families, she kept to protect their home, another of the soldiers gave her ten bullets. “Don’t tell anybody or they’ll put me in jail,” he told her. “If anybody asks, I’ll tell them I shoot bullets, not give them away!”
—
A month later, in May, David Luhnow, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, was put on to Ahlam’s brother Samir through a correspondent who had used him as a fixer in the past. Samir did the usual—taking him around for a few days, then “outsourcing” him, as Luhnow put it, to his younger sister. Luhnow was furious at first, thinking he’d been shafted, but as he got to know Ahlam and her husband he quickly changed his mind. It turned out to be a lucky break. “I was happy,” he recalled.
Luhnow had arrived in Baghdad on the day that American president George W. Bush stood on an aircraft carrier off the coast of California under a banner stating “Mission Accomplished,” and boasted—rather prematurely as it turned out—that major combat operations in Iraq had ended. It was the reporter’s first visit to the Middle East and he was supposed to be chronicling American reconstruction efforts. What he saw in Baghdad convinced him that not much of the kind was happening. If anything, Baghdad was being de-constructed. He needed to figure out what the hell was going on.
Ahlam, with her husband at the wheel, drove with him through the post-invasion landscape. There was only one cassette in the car, Frank Sinatra, whose greatest hits played in a loop as smoke poured from burned-out buildings and looters roamed the lawless streets. This view of Baghdad was a reminder that the problems in the village were paltry compared to what was happening inside the city. On the sidewalk by a hospital, an X-ray machine had been claimed by somebody’s grandmother. Street markets had turned into arms fairs—machine guns, RPGs, missiles, anti-tank mines pillaged from abandoned stockpiles. “American GIs were just standing around,” Luhnow would recall. “When I asked them, they’d say they had no orders to intervene. They only had orders to guard the Oil ministry.”
At a power plant where a pre-sanctions General Electric turbine, held together with spit and ingenuity, was the only thing keeping the lights on, they met a delegation of portly middle-aged executives from American power companies. The executives mooted bringing in three new turbines, but this would require congressional approval. Months it would take, perhaps years. “We don’t need this fancy stuff,” one of the Iraqi employees protested. “We need hammers, wrenches, pliers. They’ve all been stolen. Is there a way you could tell them to bring those first?”
One day, on a street corner, they came across a magnificent white stallion. The stables of Uday Hussein had been looted, and this stunning creature had been hitched to an impoverished street vendor’s rickety cart. Spooked by gunfire, the horse bolted, launching itself into a barrier of razor wire the Americans had set up. The soldiers scrambled for a forklift while a crowd of Iraqis watched the horse bleed to death on the sidewalk.
Luhnow interviewed the American officials who were in the midst of disbanding the public service and firing the Iraqi Army, anointing this person enemy and that one friend. His reporting took him in and out of the Green Zone, the recently fortified administrative centre of Baghdad. The Coalition Provisional Authority had taken over Saddam Hussein’s Republican Palace with its swimming pools, ornate ceilings and elaborate cupolas—gaudy excess of the sort Luhnow associated with nouveau riche bad taste. Security was tight but he had press credentials. In this way Ahlam, the village girl who had once been terrified of ever having a flat tire outside one of these palaces and disappearing from the face of the Earth, was free to “run around” (as Luhnow put it) the former dictator’s residence. One ostentatious room had been turned into a barbershop where soldiers were taking turns getting shorn, but Ahlam couldn’t shake the feeling that at any moment the ex-dictator would pop out from behind a polished marble wall.
As she gazed around her, a haggard-looking woman swanned through the palace dressed in the finest clothing: a gorgeous robe embroidered in gold thread, gold bracelets from wrist to elbow, on each hand at least three rings. “That’s the maid of Samira al-Shahbandar,” an Iraqi woman working for the Americans told Ahlam—Saddam Hussein’s second wife. “She’s taken over her villa as well.”
In this upended world a boy rode a donkey past Ahlam’s house with a brand-new laptop strapped to the donkey’s hindquarters. At the library in Kadhimiya where Ahlam had passed so many precious hours during her student years, an old woman carted out a wheelbarrow full of books, saying she would use the pages as wrapping to sell seeds.
Ahlam had seen enough. When a pair of teenaged boys pulled a horse and cart up to an Iraqi tank abandoned near the main road to scavenge for parts, she called together a group of the village children. “Each of you pick up a rock,” she instructed them. She and the children threw stones at the looters until they drove them off. The mothers of the children were furious with her. It was reckless. They could all have been killed.
—
All the traffic police had disappeared—the US Army had suspended the Iraqi traffic code because it had made exceptions for Baath Party members30—and the streets had become anarchic and dangerous, filled with new cars, new drivers, and military vehicles that treated the roads as an obstacle course. Once, Ahlam got out of the car herself to direct traffic, frustrated that no one was left to do this most basic of jobs. And then one day, someone was. He appeared suddenly in the middle of the street, waving his hands and signalling to the cars, focused on the job, alone against a world gone mad. No one had ordered him back to work. He must have woken up that morning and decided to put on his old grey-and-white uniform and return of his own accord. Watching him go about this impossible task, risking his life to bring order to chaos, Ahlam felt tears in her eyes.
“It was the first time since the war began that I wept,” she told me. “That man represented a country that recognized its duties, its responsibilities, order. Before the war you understood the rules: avoid the government and you will be safe. After the war there were no rules, only chaos. He symbolized a governing system. Without that we were lost.”
That month—it was June now—two other events stood out. The first was a protest outside the gates of the Green Zone. Several thousand Iraqi army officers had gathered to ask for the same fifty dollars the lower ranks received after Paul Bremer fired them. “It was a small amount of money but it was symbolic,” Ahlam said, “and they were starving.” Their military service had been mandatory, and the international sanctions that preceded the invasion had erased other forms of employment. “Now they were out in the street without hope, hunted from one place to another—on one side by Iraqis who wanted revenge, and on the other by Americans who wanted to arrest and interrogate them.”
Luhnow was in a hurry that day—he had an interview scheduled inside the Green Zone. Ahlam urged him to take a moment, to speak to the protestors, to listen to what they had to say. Surrounded by a throng of shouting men, he spoke to an ex–army captain. “You don’t understand what a massive mistake this is
,” the man told him, his voice almost pleading. “You are putting the army on the street. They will form the backbone of the resistance.” Luhnow, preoccupied and hardly able to pay attention, would later hear those words echo in his mind with the force of prophecy.
He went into the Green Zone. Ahlam waited for him outside on the outskirts of the crowd. While she was waiting, she saw American soldiers open fire on the protestors. In the uproar that followed, protestors began overturning cars and setting them on fire. Ahlam ran back to her car. She pulled the “Press” sign from the window, stuffed it under the seat, then leapt in to move the car farther off. While she was parking, a woman stepped out of her home. “What are you doing here?” she asked, suspicion in her voice.
Ahlam thought fast. “I went to ask the Americans about my brother. He’s missing.”
“Oh, you poor girl,” the woman said sympathetically. “This sort of thing is happening to everyone.”
Ahlam hurried back on foot to look for Luhnow. With his mop of light brown hair, his American style and bearing, the reporter was as much a symbol of foreignness as the press sign. She always kept a steel pipe under the seat of her car in case they were stopped, because in the back of her mind was a vision of her charge being pulled from the car and dragged away. The enraged protestors might kill him as soon as he emerged from the Green Zone, but she figured if they saw him with her, they might leave him alone. She searched for his face at the gates until she saw him. He was looking quite relaxed—he had no idea what had happened while he was inside. Together they pushed through the raging crowd and made it back to the car.
The second event, a short time later, was an explosion that blackened the sky across the river from her village. An army transport vehicle had driven over a roadside bomb. No one was hurt but it was a sign things had changed. When Captain Pape’s unit was reassigned, the soldiers who took their place preferred to stay inside their tanks. “They were frightened,” Ahlam said, “and they were right to be.” But she saw where this left ordinary people: caught between the US military and the Iraqi resistance.
A Disappearance in Damascus Page 10