Places and Names

by Elliot Ackerman

  I try to imagine this place differently, not as a battlefield but as a community of homes and businesses. Many of our most iconic cities—Rome, Istanbul, Athens—have a layered architectural aesthetic, each population having built on what its predecessors created. Fallujah is different. It is defined not by creation but rather by destruction.

  My eyes cast out in specific directions, searching for hard-fought neighborhoods and alleyways, for unrepaired scars on the buildings. I am searching for the marks we left behind. I see them everywhere, commingled with the marks left by others. They have become the city, both battlefield and home.

  * * *

  Colonel Jamad is eager for us to see the torture house. We’ve driven into Fallujah’s Jolan District, where townspeople strung up the burned bodies of four American Blackwater contractors from a bridge in March 2004, beginning the first battle for the city. On every street in Fallujah the prickly scent of cordite lingers in the air, but it is heaviest up here in Jolan. We follow Colonel Jamad into the courtyard of a mansion. In the foyer, light pours through several stained glass windows. Above us, a chandelier’s crystal pendants tinkle in time with a soldier’s footfalls in an upper bedroom. We enter an atrium. A winding staircase leads up to a second story beneath a domed roof painted purple, yellow, and pink. Resting on the tiled floor is a human femur.

  “These were the mass holding cells,” says Colonel Jamad, “and the offices for the Daesh courts.” Hastily welded steel doors enclose salon-sized rooms, with bags of dates and almonds stashed in the corners. “This is all they fed the prisoners,” he explains. On a single shelf rests a small library consisting mainly of religious texts, and two curious exceptions: a collection of letters by Nelson Mandela with a foreword by Barack Obama, and The Short Stories of H. G. Wells.

  Colonel Jamad announces that it’s time for us to go next door. Instead of walking outside, he crawls through a hole that Islamic State fighters sledgehammered into the wall so they could move between buildings without being detected by coalition aircraft. “This is the place they don’t want you to see,” Colonel Jamad says of this second house. A fire has ripped through the interior: heat has warped and melted air-conditioning units, glass, anything not made of stone or steel. An eerie silence possesses every room. Hardly anyone in our group speaks, and none of us hazards more than a whisper. There is only the rhythmic sound of our steps crunching against the charred wreckage—that and the smell, a cauterized scent sickly sweet with the undertones of death.

  We climb a stairwell. A hand-cranked winch is fastened to the banister. A pulley is bolted to the ceiling. The steel wires hanging from it have loops just large enough to cuff a pair of human wrists. Car batteries are stacked in a corner, and next to them are bales of copper wire with the insulation stripped away, as well as a melted plastic chair. It seems gratuitous to ask what it’s all for. On the second floor, the windows are covered. It is pitch-black. I turn on my iPhone’s flashlight. Six steel cages are arrayed in two rows. A thin mat and a pillow cover the floor of each cell, and a padlock is notched jauntily onto every door. “Step inside,” Colonel Jamad insists. I hesitate. He asks again, challenging me. I duck my head and walk into the solitary confinement cell. “Turn off your light,” he says. I do, for maybe three seconds, possibly for as long as five—long enough, in any event, for him to tell me through the impenetrable darkness, “What you see are the accomplishments of the US government.”

  Spray-painted in white on an interior courtyard wall is the first part of the shahadah: la ilaha illallah, “There is no god but God.” Heaped beneath the Islamic State graffiti are a handful of hair dryers and curling irons. Colonel Jamad dips his wrist effeminately and laughs. “The Daesh,” he tells us, “are very vain, especially about their hair.” He is still amused by this as we amble out into the bright street, squinting against the sunlight.

  As we walk, the city’s energy refreshes Colonel Jamad. He is eager for us to speak with the few locals. Sitting in front of a boarded-up shop is a stout man in a gray, ankle-length dishdasha and Nike sandals. He is passing a tangle of wire to his nephews, who are coiling it around a scrap of wood. “Wire is expensive, so we’re digging up what’s left in the city and using it in our homes,” he explains.

  The man’s name is Ahmed Abas al-Jabor. He is a mukhtar, a local community leader. When I ask if he was here during the Islamic State’s occupation, he insists that he was not. His nephews shift restlessly about and insist that they too left the city. Fityan, who has been translating, leans toward me. “No one is going to admit that they stayed,” he whispers. Al-Jabor continues, “Many are waiting to see if the insurgents will retake the city.”

  Colonel Jamad cuts him off. “Don’t call them insurgents.”

  Al-Jabor stares back at him blankly.

  “You must call them Daesh.”

  Every tenth house or so, someone is trying to rebuild, clearing out a courtyard, sweeping up debris, tampering with a generator. True to Fityan’s word, citizens across the board tell me they left Fallujah during the Islamic State occupation. Along intersections and street corners we see a smattering of Iraqi police and army checkpoints. Not all, but many, fly the Shia flags emblazoned with the image of Ali that were so ubiquitous around Baghdad. The destructive evidence of this summer’s battle—and those that preceded it—is apparent everywhere.

  We spend the afternoon outside of Fallujah, at Habbaniyah Air Base. Unbeknownst to us, Colonel Jamad has arranged a VIP visit to the Iraqi police’s Special Tactical Regiment. The regiment’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Adel Hamed, tells us hair-raising stories about the recent battles for Ramadi and Fallujah, replete with slick promo videos made by his in-house media team. His men, trained by Navy SEALs, served as shock troops in both battles. When I ask the colonel how his background landed him a job as the leader of an elite commando unit—he once worked as an administrative officer—he shrugs and says that nobody else wanted the position. He tells us that he raised the Iraqi flag over Ramadi’s city hall himself and then shows us a video to prove it. (At his urging, we watch it several times.) He is also eager to show off a picture of himself with a bandage over his left eye, sunglasses down. The photo shows him in Ramadi, strutting along a highway flanked by the skeletal wreckage of buildings, his men trailing behind him. Gesturing upward, presumably at the enemy, his hand is formed into a karate chop. “I took a grenade fragment in my eye,” he says. “It’s still there. And on that day, I realized my purpose in life: I love fighting more than anything else.”

  After a tour of his barracks, armory, and motor pool—the last of which is filled with bullet-riddled Humvees and the occasional ballistic windshield shattered by rifle fire—I find myself chatting with one of his troopers, a slim man who, despite his sunken chest and tobacco-stained teeth, strikes a debonair resemblance to Omar Sharif. He speaks perfect English and is the regiment’s JTAC—joint tactical air controller—meaning he is qualified to call in air strikes from Western warplanes. He calls himself Maximus, a nod to Russell Crowe’s character in Gladiator. It seems the SEALs’ talents for self-promotion have rubbed off on their Iraqi counterparts. Maximus, one of the most well-trained troopers in this unit, is also his regiment’s press liaison. He follows us around wearing a khaki safari vest with “Media Officer” embroidered on the chest.

  “I used to work with the Marines,” he tells me. “Three-seven, one-nine, two-eight—those are my boys.” I tell him I was with “one-eight,” otherwise known as the First Battalion of the Eighth Marine Regiment. “Right on, man,” he says, his head nodding in a rhythmic groove. We chat a bit more about Fallujah, Ramadi, and our respective battles in these cities. When I offer my hand, he shakes it but then rotates his palm in mine and pulls me in for an American-style bro hug.

  Soon we are back on the road, driving toward Fallujah. “What did you think?” Tahrir asks. Before I can answer, he continues, “They’re as good as most Americans.”

  I
can’t disagree, but the conclusion is unsettling. With select units like the Special Tactical Regiment, the United States has managed to create a security apparatus built in its own image. These elite groups are well trained and well equipped and have won decisive battles against the Islamic State in Fallujah and Ramadi. They will do the same in Mosul. But winning battles was never the US military’s problem. The problem was always what came after, the rebuilding.

  As the afternoon sun descends, the rubbled outskirts of Fallujah come into view. We pull over by the Moonlight Supermarket so that Hawre can take a few more photographs before we return to Baghdad. Hawre wanders across the street, followed by Tahrir. The city’s residents step from their homes and surround Tahrir. His uniform seems to confuse them. I imagine they have mistaken him for a member of the local police and are accosting him with questions about when, if ever, they can hope to see basic services return to their city.

  While Fityan speaks to our Iraqi escort, I notice a broken cinder-block wall on the back side of the supermarket. It forms a corner, maybe three feet on one side and five on the other, and rises a little higher than my knees. I crouch behind it, into a familiar position. When our platoon escaped from the candy store twelve years ago, I found myself pinned behind this tiny wall for about twenty minutes as we struggled to advance deeper into Fallujah. A flood of memories returns. The clattering of tank treads. The panicked squelch of radio traffic. The terrified, uncomprehending looks of the Marines around me. How by that afternoon I had shouted myself hoarse, and was reduced to issuing orders under fire in a depleted whisper. I glance over the wall, toward the mayor’s complex, to the void in the sky where the high-rise once stood, the place where Dan was killed. I reach over to the wall’s far side. Under my hand, I can feel tiny gouges. My fingertips read them like braille. I wonder if they were made that day in 2004.

  I occasionally still play chess. During a game with a Turkish friend at a café in Istanbul, I once reiterated Dan’s words, explaining as I took a piece that life was like chess. My friend laughed at me. “No, it’s not.” He gestured toward another table, where players rolled dice from a cup across a board. “Life is backgammon. The game takes skill, but it also takes luck.” As he said this, I thought about the bullet that found Dan. I often think about the bullet that never found me.

  When I return to Fityan and our Iraqi escort by the car, they are silent for a moment, until the soldier asks what I was looking at.

  I tell him that I’ve been here before. Then I explain about the candy store and the mayor’s complex. He wants to know why I chose to come back.

  “To see what it was like now, I guess.”

  He looks at me, perplexed. “It is just as you left it.”

  * * *

  Two days later, Hawre and I are driving again. Fixed along the horizon is Bartella, on the outskirts of Mosul. The town is burning. Noxious columns of smoke lift upward, like stitches fastening earth to sky. Yesterday, Hawre and I left Baghdad and headed north to join the offensive. Now, around two p.m., our Toyota HiLux is stopped on the shoulder of the road, alongside a mélange of tanks, armored bulldozers, and black Humvees from the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service’s First Brigade, also known as the Golden Division. Bartella is a Christian town and the Golden Division, with its Shia flags fluttering from the back of every other vehicle, will soon liberate it from more than two years of Islamic State occupation.

  Soldiers in black uniforms and black ski masks escort a pair of priests into a white Suburban, and I find myself trying to remember when, in the history of war, there has been another instance where the good guys wore black uniforms and black ski masks. The priests plan to hold Mass that afternoon in the Church of Mart Shmoni, in the center of Bartella. As their Suburban pulls into the street, Hawre and I pull up behind them, but a soldier with the Golden Division cuts us off. I offer my press credentials—a dog-eared letter from Esquire magazine—and my passport. Hawre argues with him in Kurdish. He reaches into his pocket and hands the soldier his Iraqi identification card. “He wants to keep your passport until we come out of Bartella,” Hawre says.

  “I’m not giving him my passport.”

  “Then we can’t go,” Hawre says. A beat passes. “Don’t worry,” he pleads, “I’ve got his cell phone number.”

  The soldier grins. He’s missing one of his incisors, and another tooth is made of gold. “I be here when you back,” he tells me in choppy English. I hand him my passport and our HiLux slides behind the priests.

  About a day after the Golden Division launched its assault on Bartella, we hear early estimates that eighty Islamic State fighters lie dead in the town. On either side of the road, scorched swaths of dry grass spot the ground. Nearly every building is a mass of twisted rebar and collapsed cinder blocks. Snaps of rifle fire and the low percussive thuds of artillery and air strikes can be heard in the distance, causing confused flocks of birds to leap from their perches and juke across the skyline. A sedan passes us going the opposite direction. Hunched behind its steering wheel, with his eyes barely above the dashboard, is a boy not much more than ten years old. Two little girls even younger than him are in the back seat. They are wearing school uniforms. We pass a road sign: “Mosul, 27 km.”

  Unlike Fallujah, which encompasses sixteen square kilometers, Mosul and its environs are sprawling. The battles for Fallujah in 2004 involved little maneuver. We cleared house-to-house through dense urban blocks. This battle feels different. Thus far, it has seen movement along multiple axes of advance. We are to the east of Mosul, with the Iraqi security forces. To the north and south is the Kurdish peshmerga, as well as other units of the Iraqi security forces. Waiting in reserve is the Iranian-backed Hashd al-Shaabi, whose presence is controversial. Prime Minister Abadi has promised that neither the Hashd al-Shaabi nor the peshmerga will participate in the fight for Mosul itself; that the final assault will be the work of the nominally secular Iraqi security forces, including the Golden Division. But if Islamic State resistance proves too much for the Iraqi security forces, the peshmerga and the Hashd al-Shaabi might very well find themselves immersed in the battle, further inflaming sectarian tensions along Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish lines. What will happen inside of Mosul is the question on everyone’s mind.

  A sergeant flags us down, instructing us to park. Hawre and I will have to travel the rest of the way on foot. Humvees and dismounted soldiers rush past us, setting up their positions in the newly liberated town. The soldiers’ voices are jubilant. Several who fought this morning now strip to the waist and wash with bottled water. Others clean weapons. I meet a soldier who is working on the grenade launcher in his Humvee’s turret with a rag and oil, and ask him for directions to the church. He isn’t certain, but he is eager to talk. He says that the Daesh “are good with ambushes and IEDs, but not as good in conventional battle.” He explains that his family is proud of him: “I have been fighting nonstop for a year, but they don’t worry. If I die, I will be a martyr.” He insists that I take down his name: “Maher Rashid from Baghdad.” I ask him again if he knows where the church is. Before he can answer, the bells toll, for the first time in two years. “That way,” he says.

  Affixed to the dome of the Church of Mart Shmoni are two tree limbs hastily lashed together into a cross. An Iraqi flag flies from its top. There is an enormous gouge in the side of the church in the shape of a crucifix, no doubt the work of the Islamic State. Inside, upturned pews litter the nave. The altar in the sanctuary is covered in rubble but still intact. The priests continue to toll the bells. Soldiers file in and out of the ravaged church. They take selfies next to destroyed artifacts. Not even the priests think to stop them.

  Between here and Mosul, there are a dozen more Bartellas to clear. But for today, the Golden Division’s work is done. The discipline they maintained for the battle ebbs away, devolving into horseplay. They take off their boots and body armor and walk around in flip-flops and T-shirts. A grinning artillery gunn
er wears a T-shirt with a skull that reads “KILL ’EM ALL, Let God Sort ’Em Out!” Another soldier has chosen a tank top with a spray-brushed portrait of a lion staring into the sunset. A burly sergeant is attempting to throw his bayonet as close as possible to his opponent’s foot, in a makeshift game of mumblety-peg.

  I feel a tap on my shoulder. A soldier stands behind me, cradling a ceramic statue of the Virgin Mary. I take his picture, which seems to satisfy him. Then a lanky, baby-faced private wanders up and pantomimes slashing the blade of his bayonet across his own neck. His eyes go wide, and with a broad, homicidal grin he says, “Daaaeeeeesh.” His buddies laugh. The sergeant wanders over. He explains that tomorrow they’ll continue their advance at first light. They plan to liberate three more villages, he says, before muttering under his breath, “Inshallah.”

  I am anxious to retrieve my passport, so I find Hawre. We wander back toward our HiLux. Ahead of us is a consistent rumble of artillery and air strikes. Behind us we can hear the chatter of the Golden Division as it beds down for the night. The soldiers’ voices are cheerful, confident of victory. From behind a flatbed ammunition truck parked in a field, someone calls out to me. When I turn, a hulking figure wearing an old, American-style desert uniform with a brown T-shirt comes jogging forward with a broad smile, his enormous gut swaying in rhythm with his steps. “Cigarette, habibi?” I reach into my coat pocket and offer him a Marlboro Light. “Oh, no, I don’t like Lights. You American?” he asks, taking out one of his own cigarettes, a brand called Pine. “My sister, she lives in America, in Texas.”

  “Oh yeah, where in Texas?” My mother is from Texas.

  He glances back at me, confused. “In Texas!”

  “No, what part—Dallas, Houston?”

  “Like I say, in Texas.”

  His name, he says, is Firaz Saleh Mohammad. I take it down at first just to be polite. He is a sergeant. Then he explains how he helped his sister immigrate because “I’ve been a soldier longer than anyone. I was ICDC, habibi,” he says, referring to the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, the precursor to the Iraqi Army that was founded in 2003 and summarily dissolved a year later. “I have been here since the very beginning, starting with the ICDC and Marines in Fallujah in 2004. No one has seen as much as I have seen.”