Escape from Baghdad

by James Ashcroft

  At first we had attributed the phenomenon of female suicide bombers to one of the bizarre aberrations found in war zones. The aberration was largely forgotten when insurgents started using children as human bombs. The trend died out, thank God, but the number of female martyrs continued to increase at a bewildering tempo.

  A large number of women who had been widowed during the war, or had been both widowed and lost their children, had a burning desire for revenge. But what puzzled many observers was the frequency of teenage girls who had died as suicide bombers. Among these twisted sisters were the young and educated, girls devoted to the war against the Zionist crusaders who saw their sacrifice as a mark of jihadi chic. In a society based on institutionalized inequality and backwardness, for some it was a kind of female empowerment. I’d heard girls who like to go topless say the same thing.

  Cobus had learned from the Iraqi Police, and informed the rest of us years before the story broke in the Western media, that the most horrific reason why some young women were strapping on explosive vests was because insurgent commanders – mostly foreign al-Qaeda fighters, it has to be said – were marrying rural teenagers, taking them back to their bases and leaving them alone to be gang-raped by their men.

  There is no greater sin for a Muslim woman than having sex, even forced sex, with a man other than her husband. She is not an innocent; on the contrary, she has disgraced her father, mother and Islam. Upon his return the girl’s ‘husband’ would feign anger and threaten to return her to her village under the shameful stigma of adultery and there she would be killed by her own relatives for dishonouring the family.

  Traumatized, brutalized and immature, it was then very easy for someone to persuade the girl that the only way to redeem herself was through the ultimate act of jihad – a martyr mission. Often the recruiters were religious leaders and elder women committed to the insurgency.

  I remember Seamus and Les and the others being sickened when Cobus told us what was going on. I was more depressed that in the name of religion such evil could surface.

  After the Iran–Iraq War there were huge numbers of Iraqi women forced into prostitution simply through poverty. In a patriarchal society where many wives had never worked or developed sellable skills, if there was no extended family to look after you, a newly widowed woman had few options to support her children.

  In this current war, with thousands upon thousands killed, I could imagine the rage and anguish that came to these widows of dead husbands and mothers of dead children. In the midst of that despair, with only a lifetime of prostitution to look forward to, then perhaps being a suicide bomber against those responsible did not seem such a bad option.

  I only wondered that we had not seen more of them.

  CHAPTER 9

  BACK IN THE old days when I was working for Spartan we usually moved about Baghdad covertly in a packet of at least two discreetly armoured cars, blending in with the local traffic and staying within a couple of cars’ distance of each other – not too close to be recognized as travelling together, yet close enough to give covering fire, ram other vehicles, whatever was needed if we found trouble, or if trouble found us.

  Each man was armed with a rifle and pistol, and each car had a spare AK for guests and a machine-gun, either an RPD or PKM, and later a Minimi. In addition to the spare ammunition in our packs and in the cars, our body armour was covered in pouches stuffed with ammo, minimum twelve magazines per man and six hundred rounds in belts per gun.

  Hopefully any gunfight would not need to be that long. Many PSD after-action reports I had seen had detailed contacts and rolling firefights that had often lasted for hours. Our main objective would be to break contact, extract as fast as possible and call in help. We had four types of comms for this purpose: personal VHF radios, mobile phones, satellite phones and vehicle-mounted VHF. When we went more high-profile in the countryside, we would also have vehicle-mounted HF with big giveaway antennas mounted on welded brackets.

  Our most powerful defence, however, was our morning intelligence brief over maps and aerial photos from our local Iraqi staff, who would collate all the morning local gossip and potential enemy sightings and give us real-time warnings about what areas and roads to avoid for the day. In addition we would send out half a dozen random cars of Iraqis armed with radios, who would report routes clear for us as they drove around the city. There was little chance of betrayal, since even they did not know which car we would be following, if any.

  Travelling in convoy, the front passenger of the lead vehicle would be on the radio giving a running commentary of what lay ahead to the guys in the second wagon – kamikazes, lunatics weaving a path down the wrong side of the road; potential IEDs concealed in rubble, dead animals, plastic bags; bearded men in shemaghs with tubes over one shoulder – either insurgents with an RPG or plumbers on their way to work. However, plumbers and carpet salesmen both had stopped walking around like that after a series of unfortunate reactions from the CF to these false alarms.

  Today, though, as we set off to visit Sammy in his safe house, there were just the two of us in an unarmoured car and no backup. Cobus was at the wheel of a Nissan Patrol and I sat at his side with the muzzle of my AK resting on the dash, the safety selector set to automatic. He drove with demonic concentration, his ice-blue eyes reading the road and the surroundings as if it was an abstract painting he was trying to fathom.

  We were partially concealed from the side view by the smoky windows, but through the windscreen we must have appeared like a PMC recruiting poster with our suntans and fancy shades. The shades weren’t just for looking good. There was no point taking the risk of being blinded by glass fragments if an IED or bullets blew the windows in. If there’s one thing worse than being blind at the wheel of a fast car, it’s being blind in the middle of a gunfight.

  Cobus used the side mirrors and had angled the rear-view mirror to the passenger side so that I could use it to watch for any bad guys approaching from behind. Many PSD vehicles had two rear-view mirrors, one each for the driver and passenger.

  Traffic clogged three lanes, cars sitting on your rear bumper honking and edging into every space. The air was thick with fumes and I was surprised to see so many people on the streets. The Iraqis are a hardy lot. They had carried on under Saddam Hussein and they carried on now as if life was normal, and I suppose the abnormal after four years of conflict had become normal: food shortages, electricity cuts, the omnipresent thud of gunfire, Humvee patrols on the ground and Blackhawks hammering through the sky above.

  Despite the chilly weather, street traders with goods on makeshift tables had set up shop and were conducting brisk business under the overhanging arcades below blocks of flats and offices. Men in rags sold knotty vegetables, bright-coloured herbs and spices that spilled from the mouths of open sacks, electrical gear, seditious T-shirts, doll sets and plastic guns from China, chickens flapping in small cages, the meat being hacked from bloody carcasses like scenes from hell in medieval paintings. Sheep were held down and butchered on the street in full view of the rest of the flock, munching stolidly and unimaginatively on the rubbish and scrub next to the highway.

  There was a steady trade in satellite dishes and DVDs. Iraqi men don’t work, not more than a few hours a day if they can help it. They grow moustaches and soft bellies. They sit about in chai shops, smoking and drinking sweet tea and, when they’re not thumping tables in heated debate, they are garrulous chatterboxes. The rumour mills never stop, the result of three decades of media censorship under Saddam. Gossip is the national sport and had been the fastest, sometimes only, way to get news. If Hajj pilgrims are slaughtered in Karbala or children are shot by a patrol in Fallujah, people in the Baghdad coffee shops are discussing it ten minutes later.

  It was mainly men out shopping, in groups for mutual protection. The danger of kidnapping was high and had become the number-one revenue stream for the militias and criminal gangs. With the Shia and Sunni at each other’s throats, militant Islamists
on both sides were using the chaos to push their own agendas, and every woman I did see that morning was wearing a headscarf, totally the opposite to the relatively religiously relaxed Iraqi capital I had known only a year before.

  From the moment people got up in the morning until they went to bed at night, and even then, they were in danger. Every minute of every day and all through the dark hours of curfew you could hear gunfire, mortar, exploding grenades, wailing sirens, the thump and drone of Humvees and US armour clanking through the streets. Every day the people would ask themselves if there was something new to be afraid of – disease, drought, hunger, kidnap, the random death of their child.

  Should they sell the house, bribe officials and flee to Jordan or Syria or Turkey? Or was it best to stay put, go to work, take the children to school, trade something for something else, speak to that neighbour who’d heard about a fresh supply of fuel or cooking oil or rice? Of course, don’t forget that for single women there was always the option of prostitution; and for men, the militias, insurgents and criminal gangs all paid, if not well, then enough.

  Only the desperate joined the Iraqi Army. After all, if you survived all the laborious push-ups, jogging, marching and numerous deranged exercises that kept a man from his God-given right to sit around all day smoking and drinking tea, the Amerikeeyeh might ask you to do something truly crazy, like go out and fight the insurgents.

  If you were a Shi’ite, the civil service or Iraqi Police was a great career for anyone with the right connections, a relaxed moral stance towards corruption and an aggressive appetite for bribes. As a big plus, much of the job could be done sitting down.

  From my experience in war zones around the world, even with hundreds dying every day, until it comes to visit death remains abstract. The people become numb to it. They tell themselves it’s not going to happen to them, to their family. It’s human nature to be positive, sanguine, to carry on, or simply to remain in denial.

  Here in Iraq it was different. In this war, fear was an almost physical presence lying over the city. Nearly every family had some tale of personal tragedy to tell. Every community, every neighbourhood, every village had lost someone. Virtually any household would be able to name one or more relatives who had been killed. And they were sick of it, sick of living in fear, wondering if simply going out to buy bread for the family meal would get them kidnapped and killed. In this city of 7 million souls, there were 6.99 million who just wanted to get on with their lives, marry their daughters to a man with a job, buy a flat-screen telly and find current running through the wires when they flick the light switch.

  ‘Amerikaners,’ Cobus said, his first words since we’d left the Green Zone.

  He changed lanes, cutting up the car behind, and the driver sat on his horn so long I was in half a mind to get out and give him a battering.

  ‘Wanker.’ I lowered my AK well out of sight.

  Four Humvees hurtled by like a train with machine-gunners in armoured turrets scanning the crowds, the crossroads, the windows in the anonymous buildings lining the route, perfect for a pop shot. Machine-guns pointed front, left, right and back, and each man also had his M4 carbine ready for snap-shooting.

  No one even noticed them, apart from the other drivers peeling out of their way.

  ‘They’re in a hurry to get home,’ I said.

  ‘Ja,’ Cobus replied. He turned for a fraction and his cold blue eyes came to life.

  His expression didn’t change. It was as if his face was carved from stone. The grey creeping over his temples was the outward sign of deeper changes. Cobus had that weary look, the same as Mad Dog, the look that comes to men when they are trying to hold back the tide and the tide just keeps rising. Personally, I thought Mad Dog had been there too long, particularly as he regarded it as ‘excellent news’ that the Green Zone had been hit by only four mortars the previous day.

  The phase following any conflict or coup is the most dangerous. It’s the time when the more ambitious, ruthless men amongst the local movers and shakers are climbing over the dead to reach their goals. The Americans in Baghdad and the British in Basra had delayed this progression until the ‘surge’, an oddly fitting description for Bush’s last throw of the dice.

  The surge was designed to suppress Sunni al-Qaeda, the Shia Mahdi Army and the numerous insurgent groups that had been loosely unified confronting the invaders. Now the invaders were training Iraqi forces to take over policing the streets, the diverse groups were jockeying for power and far more innocent civilians than Coalition soldiers were getting slotted in the crossfire as the militants turned their guns on each other.

  That period between 2003 and 2005 when we’d been building Task Force Fountain now seemed like a golden age. There had been an end in sight – the improvement of the water supply, and a new multi-ethnic Iraqi guard force in place to look after it. We’d taken raw recruits and turned them into soldiers – well, not soldiers in the sense that any Western army would recognize, but they had learned which end of a rifle was up, they worked as a team, and when the time had come, many of them had fought and died.

  I was proud to have been one of the water boys. With generous funding from the US Treasury, Spartan had paid well, but I had never had any sense that we were exploiting the Iraqis. The bombing had destroyed large sections of the water network and we were making sure the insurgents didn’t blow up the new mains as they were being laid.

  That for me was the weakness of the insurgent ideology. They didn’t care if they harmed their fellow Muslims and countrymen, denying them access to clean water, electricity, schools, women’s rights, stability, security, jobs, food – all the basic building blocks of life. They wanted to show that the Great Satan’s plan for democracy was against the ways of Islam and, to be honest, they were after power, pure unadulterated power.

  Most of our Shia guards were now IP and their replacements would not have received the same training, a sorry situation for the water authority, as well as an additional risk to my team once we began the process of escorting Sammy and his family out of the city. The guards who had joined the police were loyal to Colonel Ibrahim. If we were spotted, it would be reported back up the line on the new American-funded comms in an instant. Ibrahim was a smart guy. If he had Sammy on a death list, he’d know exactly why we were back in Baghdad. Even worse, most of those guards could identify Sammy on sight.

  Politics was infinitely nuanced and layered. The Pentagon neo-cons, when they were planning and executing the war, didn’t for a moment consider that the Iraqis – Arabs in general – have a different social structure and a different way of approaching the most simple, everyday situations. Similarly neither did many of the reconstruction project managers. Even our own guards were out selling their uniforms, ammunition and vehicles. If petrol hadn’t been so cheap they would have stolen that as well, and when there were shortages, we had had to place armed guards on our supply.

  We weren’t stupid. We had placed rival groups on the same shifts, to keep an eye on each other.

  At least we lived and worked together with our employees. Most of the project managers in the Green Zone did not have that luxury, and I cannot even think how many millions of dollars were defrauded and embezzled in the multitude of scams that popped up amongst all the Iraqi projects. ‘Ghost’ employees who never existed but whose supervisors collected their salaries; real employees who never had to turn up in return for kicking back the supervisor 50 per cent; employees who sold their jobs in return for keeping 25 per cent of the pay; and even those sub-employees sub-contracting their jobs out to sub-sub-employees. And that’s without including the money lost in procurement of materials and supplies.

  The traffic thinned as we moved away from the centre. I could see the Dora oil refinery in the south of the city, a useful landmark with the tower topped by an eternal flame.

  ‘Remember when we first got here and were always worried about getting lost in the city?’ I turned to Cobus, who kept his eyes on the road.

/>   ‘Ja, ja, you were a total kak driver, man, why do you think I am driving today?’ Cobus answered.

  Cobus hadn’t left Iraq for more than a few weeks in the last four years and I guess was in no mood to reminisce about the good old days yet.

  The apartment blocks had given way to three-storey concrete buildings, each one a small fortress with thick walls, ramparts surrounding flat roofs and narrow windows just right for a hidden sniper. The office buildings were concrete-grey, or sandy, and the residential houses were the same shade of pale sand as the desert beyond the city, the monotony broken by touches of colour from the tiled domes of mosques and the white minarets lancing the skyline. The palm trees that had survived the bombing had a surreal look about them, especially at night when the fronds danced in the wind and the city appeared to be populated by the spirits of the dead.

  The road followed a long sweeping loop in the Tigris out to the peninsula. We turned into Karada, an area I knew, and it didn’t surprise me that it was here that Cobus would have the best cover for covert operations. It was an area that both the MNF and Iraqis kept as secure as possible, and more importantly the only place where he could probably still nip in and out to buy booze and supplies.

  Karada straddles both sides of the river and is one of the most affluent and best-integrated parts of Baghdad, with a mixed Shia, Sunni and – in small part – Christian population. The streets are laid out on a grid, many of the houses containing an inner courtyard and an extra floor that in a traditional Muslim house would be for the use of the women. It was in Karada that we used to buy overpriced goodies at the supermarket, paying with great bricks of Iraqi notes the shopkeeper fed into his electric counting machine.

  ‘It was safe here last year,’ Cobus said. ‘The girls were going out without covering their hair.’