During the Saddam days, I had often crept through a barbed-wire fence to visit the old uninhabited British Embassy on the river, where Bell and her rival and friend Freya Stark used to stay in between long desert trips. I would sit on the riverbank and imagine the parties that went on inside it in the time before Saddam – the whispers, the diplomatic intrigue, the swish of Bell’s stiff silk evening gowns and the sight of her with a velvet ribbon around her neck, dressed for dinner after a day map-making.
For many years during the Saddam era, Bell’s grave had been untended, and Tamara had started a project to restore it. As Tamara and I, in our headscarves and long abayas covering our bodies, bent in the hot sun to pull weeds, I wondered what Bell would think now of the hollow city and the destroyed country she’d loved so much.
Tamara’s armed guards hovered near us as we stood looking at the grave. We drove to the farm silently in an armoured car. Everyone was worried about being stalled in traffic, and being a target for a car bomb.
4
I came back in 2014. Tamara’s organic food project was on hold, as most things were. The American troops had pulled out two years earlier. The roads – aside from the ones in the International Zone where the embassies and United Nations were now located, utterly removed from the Iraqi population – were appallingly bad.
There seemed to be no easing up of the sorrow that had dogged the Iraqi people since the invasion. The city was expensive for my Iraqi friends, and car bombs were exploding again – there was one on the airport road the day before I arrived – and Isis was swallowing up entire swathes of countryside, farms, villages.
On 10 June, Isis drove into Mosul and raised their black flag. Then they moved to Tikrit, eventually getting stuck thirty kilometres from Baghdad, south of Samarra. They confiscated farm animals, grain supplies, oil, women and antiquities. They kidnapped anyone they thought would bring them cash. Women were ordered to put on headscarves. Christians fled. Isis wants a return to Islam in its strictest seventh-century form, as they believe it was practised by the prophet Muhammad. Anything else is not tolerated. If you are caught smoking, you are beaten and fined. A female dentist was beheaded for treating male patients. Bodies were found floating in the Tigris.
They took Raqqa, in Syria, as their capital, and installed strict sharia law. They started beheading Western hostages, including two of my journalist colleagues, Steven Sotloff and Jim Foley. And they kept fighting to take Iraq.
Soon there were reports that they were closer, in the Baghdad belt that surrounds the city. The fear was that while Isis was not poised to take the entire city, they could infiltrate it with sleeper cells and cause havoc with more car and roadside bombs.
It was heartbreaking to see the tension in the city after the fall of Mosul. These people who had lived through so much in the aftermath of the American invasion – sectarian killing sprees, roadside bombs that left headless corpses on the side of the road – were terrified once again.
Most of the Iraqis I had hired in my old office back in the Saddam days were gone. Omar, the second driver, was still around, but was rightly jittery. He made me wear an ugly head-to-toe polyester abaya that scratched my skin, and a brown scarf on my head wherever we went. He got twitchy when we were stuck in traffic.
He had a reason. His brother Yasser had been killed in a car bomb in 2010, leaving behind two small girls. He was only forty years old when he died. Wrong place, wrong time, but entire lives had been disassembled because of that explosive.
Badr, another interpreter, had recently moved to Maine with his second wife and his young family. His first wife had died because she could not get the proper treatment for a chronic liver disease in a Baghdad hospital, leaving Badr with a toddler. He wrote to me occasionally on Facebook, with wistful memories but also with foreboding prophecies of what would happen in the country he had left behind. He was homesick, but grateful to be gone. He feared that Iraq would be swallowed up by Isis, like a mouse swallowed up by a snake.
All of my Iraqi friends were trying to make new lives, but they were a mournful, sorrowful bunch. Whenever I met exiled Iraqis, in cafes in Paris or London or New York, they would speak about their country in the past tense. Nearly all of them had some story of horror, of family members being kidnapped or killed post-invasion. Isis seemed like another inevitable stage in this never-ending war, the eternal agony of Iraq.
Now the Shias, who had led the government since the American invasion, were going after ordinary Sunnis, under the guise of protecting themselves against Isis. There was the bitter memory of what they had suffered all those years when the Sunnis – the minority in Iraq – were in control. Now they had the power, and they were using it.
The militias on the streets were backed by Iran, the Shia giant in the region, who wanted to get a foothold in Iraq now that the chaos had started. Iraq was, once again, a republic of fear.
On a hazy summer morning in late June 2014, Omar drove me and another reporter to the Baghdad morgue.
Earlier I had spoken to a colleague, Duncan Spinner, who works for the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), which matches bones in mass graves to missing people.
I had worked closely with ICMP in Bosnia, unearthing the remains of the dead from the genocide at Srebrenica. With the fall of Mosul, Spinner was in a dark mood. He was also worried about the Shia turning on the Sunni, and said that dozens of Sunni men had turned up in the morgue, including three boys from the same family.
During the gruesome years of the sectarian killings, which peaked in 2005–7, there were sometimes a hundred bodies a day brought into the morgue.
Spinner said it was not the number that defined a genocide, but the intent. ‘The first step in genocide is a cycle of violence,’ he said. ‘You say something bad about people. Then you have blood on your hands.’ He was worried that the death squads were back.
Inside, the morgue stank of rotting flesh. The doctor took us into a small office and showed us photographs of the dead. He said that all the Sunni men who had been brought in in the last few days showed signs of being tortured.
Down the hallway from where we talked, in a section of the building used by the Ministry of Interior, a prisoner was being held, blindfolded, bent over like a bird. When I asked the doctor why he was being held, he waved a hand. ‘Forget it. Detainee.’ I never found out what his crime was, or why the Ministry of Interior was holding him.
Families searching for their loved ones at the morgue sat in a small room with a television screen above them. One woman called Sammaya had come to look for her brother, Saleh, who had disappeared several days before.
Photographs of bullet-riddled corpses came up on the screen above her head; finally, Sammaya recognised one bloated, purple-bruised body: Saleh.
When she saw his familiar blue T-shirt, Sammaya put her hand over her mouth and began to sob, rocking back and forth. Saleh was a Sunni, and she said the Shia militias had come for him. She was not sure why – he was a teacher, and she knew he was not involved in any radical Sunni activities.
He ran to hide in a cupboard when they came, but they found him and dragged him off. They took him away, and that was the last Sammaya saw of him, until she saw him dead.
The screen showed photographs of a butcher and his son. Both were covered in blood.
‘The son got a head shot, probably a chest shot too,’ the pathologist said. ‘The father –’ He looked closer at the screen and confirmed. ‘Head shot.’
‘Militias?’
The pathologist shrugged. ‘Who knows? Who else?’
He shifted the image to another dead body.
‘Shia against Sunni, Sunni against Shia, what does it all mean? We are all Arabs,’ he said emphatically. ‘This is just revenge of the idiots.’
5
Baghdad in late November was less tense than in June, when Isis was at the doorstep of the capital and there were plans to evacuate the embassies. A new government under a more inclusive prime minister,
Haider al-Abadi, a Shia, had been installed. He was attempting to both root out corruption in the Iraqi Army and rein in the chaos.
But it was far from calm. The American air strikes had begun in the autumn, and yet Isis was still operating with impunity, killing, raping and stealing. It was said to be making a million dollars a day by trading looted oil with its mortal enemies – Syria and Kurdistan – as well as kidnapping and claiming hostage fees, stealing antiquities, overturning profitable farms and silos of grain. Its leaders also imposed fines on Christians and anyone that did not follow their laws – if they did not kill them.
Everyone feared Isis and saw it as an existential threat, but people were also beginning to square off into real sectarian divides.
Neighbourhoods were divided into recruitment centres for Shia militias who were trained to fill in the gap the inept Iraqi Army had left, then sent out to the so-called belt of Baghdad to fight against Isis. I stopped to talk to some of the young fighters who had just come back from the front lines in Amerli, and in Kirkuk. They had joined up willingly, answering a ‘fatwa’ to arms by their highest spiritual leader, the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
But what were these young Shias’ goals for the future? Did they want a Shia fiefdom? Could they ever live with Sunnis again after Isis? Were there any moderates left, on either side?
In an embarrassing U-turn for President Obama, American troops came back in small numbers after they had been pulled out. American special military advisers were talking to Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar, and peshmerga fighters in Kurdistan, in the hope of enlisting them as moderate Sunnis in the fight against Isis.
‘It’s a mess,’ Omar said one morning as we had a vanilla-scented coffee in a cafe on the banks of the Tigris. ‘The dark days are coming back.’
From the corner of my eye, I saw a large man with dyed red hair. I stared at him, and he stared back. I realised, with a shock, that it was one of my former nemeses from the Saddam days, an informant from the Ministry of Information. He was one of the men I had had to go to, to beg to stay in the country. To get a new visa, one had to pay – with money, or with goods. Once, I saw a reporter bribe the red-headed man and his colleague with a live goat to be slaughtered for Eid.
‘Don’t talk to him!’ Omar hissed. ‘Remember how bad he was? Remember how difficult he made your life?’
The bad man had put on weight, lots of it, since the Saddam years, and he looked much older. I wondered what had happened to him in the dozen years since the chaos began, but in a sense I did not really want to know.
The day before I left, in al-Mansour, a Baghdad neighbourhood, I had tea with a professor of English, a translator of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Shakespeare. Dr Sadek Mohammed had come back to Iraq after a long period of exile in India. When he arrived home in 2007, he found the Baghdad he had left behind unrecognisable.
‘The electricity was out, garbage filling the streets, people changing entirely before my eyes,’ he said. ‘I could see the writing on the wall. We had lost Baghdad forever. This wasn’t my city! This wasn’t my city!’ He spoke with the air of a man beyond anguish.
Sadek showed me a poem he had written in this period of ‘disbelief’ at what had happened to his country.
Three Scenes, One City
Baghdad 2007
I
Thick forests of cold cement
their trees are planted
by veiled creatures that look like men
and masters of falsehood, flattery and madness.
Flowers didn’t bloom this spring.
II
Demons have their wily rhythms.
They plant bombs
behind every stone
and check our stealthy motion
in offices, markets and classrooms.
III
Poems are engulfed in darkness
and what’s in the street is dull and sullen.
The poet’s heart leans on the solitary lamp post
and his eyes gaze at his famished children.
When I asked him to identify the losses sustained by the city, by the country, he paused.
‘The greatest loss was that the Americans did not have a plan,’ he said simply. ‘And so, I could sit here and give you all the losses one by one. I could tell you about the careless American soldiers writing graffiti on the lions at Babylon; the archaeological sites that have been looted; our cultural history gone. I could tell you about our writers being isolated here – and Iraq is the place where the first writing was developed!
‘But really, what we have lost is that we once did feel united. We do not any more. What is Iraq? Who is an Iraqi?’
Sadek said this was his greatest fear: more than the car bombs, more than the winter approaching and the lack of money in the country, which equals lack of freedom, more even than Isis. ‘The biggest fear,’ he said, ‘is that if we lose our sense of unity – Iraq will be lost forever.’
OBSERVATOIRES
Noémie Goudal
In her series Observatoires, Noémie Goudal places stairs, pyramids and domes in natural, isolated, timeless spaces.
The structures were originally photographed in Germany, the United Kingdom and France. The images were then printed on paper, which were stuck on card to form cut-outs. Finally, Goudal restages and reshoots these cardboard templates.
In their new setting, these two-dimensional paper structures take on an ephemeral quality. The folds in the cut-outs are left deliberately discernible, highlighting their fleeting existence in photographic space and their rough-and-ready construction.
Isolated and incongruous, the man-made structures and their seemingly conflicting settings play on our sense of scale, on what is natural, what is artifice, what belongs. Inspired by the cosmic architecture of India such as the observatories of Jai Singh II, Goudal’s Observatoires are likewise orientated towards the sky, observing it relentlessly.
THE BATTLE FOR KESSAB
Charles Glass
Garo Manjikian is a strongly built farmer with a degree in chemistry and a flourishing moustache like those in sepia photographs of Armenian gentlemen from the late Ottoman era. On the evening of 20 March last year, he was having dinner at George’s Restaurant in the woods where Syria’s Mediterranean shore adjoins Turkey’s. At his restaurant table, he told me, were five of his friends and their families. Their discussion turned to the conflict, entering its fourth year, to unseat Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. ‘The mayor of Kessab was with us. We asked him about the situation,’ Manjikian recalled. ‘He was very quiet.’
Kessab is the only Armenian town in Syria, although other Syrian villages and cities have Armenian minorities. Perched on a hillside within sight of the Turkish frontier, its 2,000-plus inhabitants also include about five hundred Alawite Muslims and Arab Christians. In the summer, tens of thousands of tourists used to fill its hotels and guest houses to bursting. The beaches, pine forests and fruit orchards hosted camps for Armenian Boy Scouts, as well as hikers, picnickers and Saudis seeking respite from stifling desert heat. In addition to the three churches for the Armenian Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant congregations, a large, modern mosque occupies a prominent position.
The conflict was killing tourism in Kessab. Incomes were down, hotels empty. Family visits to Aleppo, with its large Armenian population, became impossible after rebels occupied parts of the city in July 2012. Yet until now the conflict had left the region relatively unscathed. The greatest calamity to hit the town in 2013, apart from the decline in tourism, was not the war between al-Assad’s supporters and opponents but unseasonal hailstorms that destroyed the peach and apple crops.
However, events elsewhere in Syria were conspiring to engulf Kessab. On 16 March 2014, the Syrian Army with its Hezbollah allies expelled opposition forces from the town of Yabroud near the Lebanese border. This cut the opposition’s supply line from Lebanon and left the government dominant in most of western Syria. When the rebel leadership organised a response to threaten
the regime’s coastal bastion of Latakia, their line of march led directly through Kessab.
Throughout March, one portent after another had made the Armenians of north-west Syria apprehensive. First, smugglers tipped off inhabitants that militant jihadists were gathering nearby in parts of south-west Turkey that had not seen them before. Then, Syrian farmers living beside the international frontier noticed gunmen mustering on the Turkish side.
By 18 March, regular Turkish Army units were disappearing from the forts guarding the twenty-five-mile border between Turkish Hatay and Syrian Kessab. Bearded paramilitaries in assorted non-Turkish uniforms were replacing them. A United Nations source confirmed what Manjikian told me. ‘Large numbers of fighters in minivans were going up the mountain. A Turkish Army convoy was coming down.’ The UN and the Syrian military received reports on 19 March that guerrillas in Turkey were moving dangerously close to Kessab. It seemed that the Turkish Army was relinquishing control of the border to ragged units of the Syrian opposition, although no one in Syria knew why.
On 20 March, while Garo Manjikian and Kessab’s Mayor Vazgen Chaparyan discussed politics over spicy sujuk sausages and Syrian wine, a fellow Armenian from Kessab telephoned the Syrian Army’s central command thirty miles to the south in Latakia. He relayed widespread fears of imminent rebel infiltration from Turkey. The commander dismissed the man’s worries on the grounds that an old agreement making the Turkish Army responsible for security north and east of Kessab was still in force. The Armenians were not reassured.
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