Sparta

by Roxana Robinson

  Around the corner, through a wide archway, was the kitchen proper. Against the back wall was the massive no-nonsense black stove, with red knobs and a broiler that sounded like a car factory. A big butcher-block work island stood in the middle of the room, over it two hanging lamps with translucent green glass shades.

  Lydia stood at the stove. She turned to smile at him. “You’re down? Okay, we’re on,” she said, then called, “Marsh?”

  Marshall appeared in the doorway from the library, a folded newspaper in his hand. His hair had fallen across his face, and his shirt was rumpled. In the evenings he changed out of his business suit into corduroy pants or khakis, a polo shirt.

  Lydia turned from the stove, holding a heavy iron skillet with both hands, using quilted pot holders. “Hot,” she said. “Look out.” She set the skillet down on the island beside two blue enamel pots, a wooden bowl of salad, and the small stack of their three plates. The hanging lamps cast a mild glow on it all: the deep blue pots, the rough black skillet with the sizzling brown lamb chops, the heavy white ceramic plates, flecked and rimmed with blue. The one on top was chipped. All this was familiar: the black stove, the scarred butcher block, the hanging green lamps. The chipped plate, all of it. Everything was deeply known: the kitchen was part of him. This was both comforting and painful.

  Conrad picked up his plate. “So. It’s good to be back,” he said.

  Lydia put her hands on her hips. She was wearing a white shirt, open at the neck. She smiled, pursing her mouth in a tiny, teasing way.

  “Really,” Lydia said. “You think so?”

  The thought came to him that his mother would forgive him anything.

  “Make yourself a plate,” Lydia said. She handed him the top one, chipped.

  The table in the breakfast room was set with the blue quilted mats, the dark blue water glasses, the polished brass candlesticks. Murphy had arrived, as she did at mealtimes, and stretched herself out along the windowsill. She was not allowed on the table, and so pretended that the sill, one inch away from it, was neutral territory. Lydia dimmed the hanging lamp over the table. Marshall lit the candles, little liquid flickers of light. Evening had set in, and the light inside made the windows suddenly black.

  “So,” said Marshall, unfolding his napkin. “Con. What can you tell us about Haditha? I’ve read what I could, but there isn’t a lot. What can you tell us?”

  “It’s a small town on the Euphrates,” Conrad began.

  * * *

  The Euphrates River rises in the highlands of eastern Turkey and meanders south through a mountain range, then crosses into Syria. It winds in an easterly direction before crossing into Iraq, and there the river flows southeast, running roughly parallel with the great Tigris River, which lies to its north. Between the two rivers, as they approach each other, lies the Fertile Crescent, which has been called the cradle of civilization. Fortunate in climate, terrain, and soil, it is believed by some to be the actual Garden of Eden. Below Baghdad the rivers join, forming a rich alluvial plain before they flow, together, into the Persian Gulf. Mesopotamia, which was the name of Iraq up until World War I, means “Land Between the Rivers.”

  The Fertile Crescent offered one of the most benevolent landscapes on earth, and it has been settled for at least six thousand years. During the Bronze Age the inhabitants produced sophisticated weapons, intricate jewelry, and beautiful ceramics. The Sumerians, who settled the region around 4000 B.C., were believed to have established the earliest civilization in the world. During the Roman Empire, the Euphrates River was the eastern border of the Roman occupation.

  But before that, before humans arrived, the region through which the Euphrates wandered was rich with life. The banks were once lined by riverine forests, plane trees, and Euphrates poplar, tamarisk, and ash. In the wooded Syrian steppes there were long-legged gazelles and onagers, ostriches, wild boars, gray wolves, golden jackals, and red foxes. In the alluvial plain near the Persian Gulf stalked the great predators: leopards and lions. As late as the nineteenth century, European travelers in the Syrian basin reported a rich tapestry of wildlife. The arrival of humans, with their grazing herds, their habits of plowing and reaping, their insatiable need for firewood, meant the destruction of the riverine forests, and most of the animals vanished.

  Haditha lay on the western bank of the river, in western Iraq, not far from the Syrian border. It was a quiet agricultural town, with schools and mosques, a market, a hospital, a morgue. At the north end was a small commercial section, but most of the town was residential and most of the inhabitants were involved with farming of some sort.

  To the west, toward Syria, the land was desert steppe, but along the river it was fertile, and a patchwork of irrigated fields and orchards ran along the banks. In the fields were herds of grazing sheep and goats, and fruit orchards. Along the water were groves of date palms. Haditha was famous for dates, and in the market there were stalls that sold only this delicacy. They were piled in baskets, honey-colored, mahogany, coppery; fresh and dried, long and heavy or short and light, dense, and almost suffocatingly sweet. In the vegetable stalls were piles of gleaming eggplants, beans, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, figs, mounds of apples and sunny apricots. Fresh fish and crab from the river.

  Before the American invasion, Haditha had been a resort. Iraqis went there during the stifling heat of the summer to stay among the fruit orchards and palm groves that stretched along the wide blue river. The streets of Haditha were narrow, and the low houses were made of stone, or stucco painted in pastel colors.

  Along the banks were the sites of ancient settlements, Kassite and Parthian and Aquilian, remains of houses and temples. The region had been inhabited during the time of the Roman Empire, though no one was sure if the Romans had been in Haditha itself. Traces of ancient waterwheels and aqueducts suggested an early water transportation system, but no one knew whether the water had been sent to Rome or merely to the wide fields flanking the river.

  Haditha was Sunni.

  The Sunnis and the Shias had split apart centuries earlier over the question of Muhammad’s successor. The division had become one of class as well as religion; in Iraq, Sunnis were the ruling class, richer and more powerful than the Shias. Saddam Hussein and his tribal family were Sunni. The western province of Anbar, where Haditha was located, was a Sunni stronghold.

  To understand what had happened in Haditha, you first had to understand what had happened in Fallujah. When the American invasion, called OIF, Operation Iraqi Freedom, took place in 2003, American forces arrived in the Sunni city of Fallujah. This was downriver from Ramadi and closer to Baghdad. At the time of the invasion, Fallujah was relatively peaceful, and it welcomed the U.S. forces, which would maintain order after the fall of Saddam. An Iraqi governing council was established, allied with the American forces; the U.S. Army set up bases outside the city; and an equitable relationship was established.

  Then, without consultation, the Army moved into the center of the city. It took over a school building, evicting the occupants and setting up an observation post on its highest floor. This was tantamount to an invasion: Muslim lands are considered sacred ground, and the American infidels had invaded their allies’ city without permission. This outraged the Fallujans, as it violated the religious mores of the community and meant a breach of trust with their allies. Worse, the observation post enabled Army soldiers to look down into the private gardens, where Muslim women walked about freely, without veils or scarves. The privacy of Muslim women was jealously guarded, and this breach was considered a deep insult to the men of the community.

  Moreover, since the Sunni community had lost power after the American invasion, there were factions within the city that did not welcome the American presence, despite the official response. A group of protesters broke curfew and marched on the school, demanding a response. Instead of sending out a representative, the Army made announcements over the loudspeakers, which did nothing to calm the crowd. It shouted back at the barricaded so
ldiers; and frustrated people began to throw rocks at the building. Faced with an angry and unpredictable crowd, the Army responded with automatic weapons. Soldiers killed an undetermined number of unarmed people (claims ranged from two to seventeen), wounding nearly sixty. Two days later, three more unarmed protesters were shot and killed by American troops.

  Iraq is a tribal country, where kinship ties are powerful and permanent. This network runs strong and deep through every community, every relationship and transaction and marriage, running back into the past for centuries. Every person killed or wounded at Fallujah had friends and relatives, and that evening all of them became sworn enemies of the American forces. In one stroke the Army had set off a wildfire of hatred. From then on it blazed throughout the region, leaping from family to family as the story was told.

  What had initially been a quiet community became a hotbed of hostility, composed of deadly enemies of the American occupation. Fallujah had turned, and the insurgency movement used this as a rallying cry for the jihad, the war against the infidel. Insurgents from all over flocked to Fallujah to carry on the resistance against the invaders.

  The Army did little to dispel the tensions it had created, and a year later, four Blackwater employees were captured by insurgents. They were beaten, set on fire, and hanged. Their mutilated bodies were paraded through the city.

  The Marine commander on the ground in Iraq recommended a strategic response. He advised a surgical strike, targeting only the kidnappers. His advice was ignored. A written directive was sent from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, possibly from the White House itself: they wanted a firefight.

  If the Marines are the surgical tool of war, the scalpel, the Army is the blunt instrument, the sledgehammer.

  In April 2004, American forces mounted an offensive against Fallujah, using bombs and heavy artillery. The strike was meant to be swift and overwhelming, short-lasting—a campaign of shock and awe—but things didn’t go as planned. As the Marines say, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” The insurgents responded ferociously and refused to yield. After four days of fighting, U.S. forces had managed to gain control of only one quarter of the city. Moreover, they were coming under intense criticism from their own local ally, the Iraqi governing council.

  Bombs and artillery meant heavy civilian casualties. In order to eliminate a single sniper, whole buildings were blown apart. As insurgents moved from house to house, entire neighborhoods were turned to rubble by Hellfire missiles and Spectre gunship rounds and five-hundred-pound Paveway bombs. There was nowhere to take the wounded, as the U.S. forces had ordered the hospitals to close down during the attack. The governing council vehemently protested the fact that their allies were killing their citizens. Moreover, the council accused U.S. forces of using white phosphorus, a substance that had been internationally banned as a weapon.

  White phosphorus is a chemical compound that works more or less like napalm. It eats flesh, burning it away from the bones. In Fallujah, bodies were found with the peeling flesh and extensive burn patterns characteristic of white phosphorus.

  At first U.S. officials denied using it, but then military reports were discovered that described “shake-and-bake” missions. These cited the effectiveness of white phosphorus, used as an incendiary that creates a blinding white flash and clouds of smoke. It was used on insurgents in hiding, to drive them out into the open, where high explosives were used to finish them off. After these reports became public, U.S. officials stopped commenting on the subject.

  The United States had not signed the agreement that altogether banned the use of white phosphorus, which was a legitimate military tool as an illuminant and an obscurant. Later, the Army claimed that it had used WP only for strategic purposes, and that the burns and deaths had been inadvertent. The term “shake-and-bake” was not mentioned.

  After six days of battle, in the face of steadfast resistance from the insurgents and growing criticism from its allies, the Army declared a cease-fire. On May 1 it withdrew, turning over official control of the city to the Fallujah Brigade. This was a local militia group that, in theory, supported the American occupiers but in fact refused to confront the insurgents. Wearing Iraqi uniforms that identified their true loyalties, the brigade members briefly manned the checkpoints, then quit the conflict altogether. The city fell entirely under the control of the insurgents. These were by now a mixture of Sunni loyalists, religious fundamentalists outraged by the Army presence, local warlords who were quick to seize a strategic opportunity, and anyone else incensed by the killings of unarmed protesters.

  The U.S. command found this situation unacceptable, and in November 2004 it launched Operation Phantom Fury. This consisted of ten thousand U.S. troops mounting a full-scale attack on the city of Fallujah. The force included Marines drawn from bases elsewhere in the region, among them Haditha.

  Before the battle, women, children, and the elderly were advised to leave the city; thousands of them did so. Some civilians, as well as the hard-core mujahideen, remained. The battle was long and bloody. The Marines fought bravely, house to house, moving slowly through the city. More than a thousand insurgents were killed, and the rest fled.

  Technically, the battle ended in a U.S. victory, but the city of Fallujah was left in ruins. Some 250,000 people had fled, and about half the houses in the city had been destroyed. Of the civilians who stayed, about six hundred had been killed. This meant another explosion of hatred: the tribal families of casualties and homeless refugees also became blood enemies of the Americans. The insurgents who died in battle became martyrs and heroes. The jihad blossomed. The battle of Fallujah became a rallying cry among the mujahideen.

  The Marines understood the consequences very well. Later, an officer at Pendleton told Conrad, “Okay, we won at Fallujah. But we made Fallujah happen. We can’t do that again.”

  Haditha was deep Sunni territory. Like Fallujah when the Americans first arrived in the spring of 2003, it was friendly. Haditha’s mayor was pro-American, and he welcomed the arrival of U.S. forces. In July, a few months after the shootings of the protesters in Fallujah, the mayor and his youngest son were assassinated, which sent a chilling message to the community. Around this time, strangers—mujahideen—began arriving in Haditha, using brutality to intimidate the local population. In November 2004 Marines were withdrawn from Haditha to fight in Fallujah. In their absence, the local insurgents acted with impunity. Dozens of policemen, who had been cooperating with the Americans, were executed.

  By the following year Haditha had become a base for the insurgency. The town was only a day’s drive from Al-Qa’im, on the Syrian border, and many Hadithans had family connections in Syria. The town was a convenient way station for mujahideen slipping in from outside the country, and al-Qaeda’s feared and shadowy leader in Iraq, al-Zarqawi, was said to be a frequent visitor. “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” was given its name there.

  Haditha was small and remote, and during that year the United States effectively washed its hands of the place. It was declared a TAZ, or temporary autonomous zone. Though the alliance still maintained bases there and performed an offensive operation in May, the area was largely under the control of the mujahideen. These were religious fundamentalists, very like the Taliban. They took over all municipal functions and imposed strict sharia law on the population. All Western music was banned, as well as all behavior that was deemed immodest. Public punishments were carried out by men in hoods: whippings, the severing of hands, and decapitations took place on the bridge over the river, where people lined the banks for these events. The punishments were considered public entertainment, and families brought their children to watch. Videos of decapitations were sold in the market.

  Haditha was strategically important. Not only was it part of a covert route for insurgents, but it was also the site of the largest hydroelectric dam in Iraq, a major source of electric power throughout the country. The U.S. forces were determined to protect the dam from the insurgent threat, and in 2005 they sent the U.S
. Marines back into Haditha.

  The events at Fallujah in 2003 had aroused a fury of anti-Americanism within the Muslim world. Fundamentalist zealots stirred it into a lethal stew of rage and kept it simmering.

  The fundamentalist mullahs came from poor families that had few options. In order to better their sons’ lives, parents sent them to religious school, where the boys studied the sacred text of the Koran, memorizing hundreds of its verses. When the students became mullahs and returned to their towns, they knew the Koran from end to end, but they had never read a word of any other book. They knew nothing of other religions, other political systems, other countries, or other methods of perceiving the world. They could interpret the Koran in any way they chose, and they had absolute power within the community. It was in their interest to prohibit all contact with the Western world.

  Haditha, now in the grip of the mujahideen, became deeply hostile to the U.S. occupying forces. During the summer of 2005, before Conrad arrived there, six Marine snipers were ambushed and killed. One was said to have been captured alive and tortured, and his mutilated body was paraded through the streets. Videos of this, too, were sold in the market. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were devastatingly successful in Haditha. That summer, fourteen Marines were killed by a roadside bomb.

  The mujahideen of Haditha controlled more than the paramilitary and religious systems—they also ran the civic and physical infrastructure. They ran the judicial system and the courts, carried out their own punishments, took charge of the well-being of the citizens, and took credit for the uninterrupted flow of power from the dam. Haditha had electricity, a bounteous supply of local food, and its own civic system. There was little room for the American presence and little tolerance for it among the muj.