I was unable to photograph. I had no idea where to start. I tried to imagine what they were feeling. The wailing women were dramatic but a cliché I had seen from mass graves before; as still images they could never convey the depth of what I was witnessing. Could the anguish of seeing a loved one after more than a decade—decayed in a plastic bag, with nothing more than strands of fabric for identification—ever translate into a single frame? My mentor Bebeto’s words rang in my ears: Observe, be patient. My dangling cameras beat against my stomach, and I walked clumsily through the dust, waiting for the right moment to capture the women’s grief. I had been shooting for almost ninety days without a break. This day proved it was worth it. All the doubts I had about the war were temporarily quelled. I suspected the American government was lying to us, but on that particular day I didn’t care.
• • •
IN THE MONTHS AFTER Saddam was deposed, Iraq fell apart. A population that had been silenced for decades was suddenly able to express itself any way it wanted. Throngs of Iraqis lined up for hours outside banks to withdraw their money, screaming with frustration as they struggled to get through the doors. American soldiers shot off their weapons above the crowds, sometimes punching the very men they were there to “liberate.” Fires raged as looters prowled the streets pirating electrical wires. Checkpoints began popping up around the city.
Nothing made sense. American troops allowed the looting of the National Museum but protected the caged lions at the house of Sad-dam’s son Uday. To the media, the troops proudly displayed the Hussein brothers’ sex dens—decorated with heart-shaped love seats and littered with pornography—while basic services like water, gas, and electricity failed to materialize. The superpower couldn’t provide for a basic quality of life. Then the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, disbanded the entire Iraqi army, leaving thousands of trained soldiers angry, jobless, and unable to feed their families.
One morning I came upon crowds of Iraqis agitating under the scalding sun, waiting to get their propane tanks filled for cooking. They had been in line for hours and were losing their patience. The American troops were gassing them with a strange, bright-green gas. I photographed the mayhem: ladies in black abayas shoving one another and clanging against American tanks; men in line, exasperated, behind barbed wire; American soldiers screaming at the crowds until the veins along their necks popped out.
Suddenly one of the Iraqi men jumped out of line. A group of American soldiers picked him up and threw him to the ground. One had his knee on the guy’s chest; another started punching him in the face. Iraqis screamed in protest.
I kneeled about eight feet from the scene and photographed, shocked by what I was witnessing. What happened to “liberating the Iraqis”? I was waiting for one of the soldiers to step in and stop the madness when I noticed an old woman in an abaya in the right corner of my frame. She was about sixty years old. She raised a propane tank over her head and smashed it on a crouching soldier’s neck. I kept shooting. No one even noticed me.
The Americans didn’t understand the value of honor and respect in an Arab culture. Young American soldiers, many of whom had never traveled abroad before, much less to a Muslim country, didn’t realize that a basic familiarity with Arab culture might help their cause. During night patrols, fresh-faced Americans in their late teens and early twenties would stop cars jam-packed with Iraqi family members—men, women, and children—shine their flashlights into the cars, and scream, “Get the fuck out of the car!” Armed to the teeth, they busted into private homes late in the night, pushing the men to the floor, screaming in their faces in English, and zip-tying their wrists while questioning them—often without interpreters and while the children stood, terrified, in the doorway. They would shine their flashlights on women in nightgowns, unveiled, track their dirty boots through people’s homes, soil their carpets and their dignity. For an Arab man, foreigners seeing his wife uncovered brought shame and dishonor to the family, and it merited revenge.
• • •
BY MAY I was used to life on the front, and it was the world outside that had begun to feel unfamiliar. I received an e-mail from Vineta, my college roommate. She was still living in New York, like so many of my old friends. Her e-mail began: “I was sitting at the boat pond in Central Park today reading the paper …”
I stopped. People really did spend their days relaxing in a park, reading an actual copy of the newspaper. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a morning like that, where I didn’t wake up and run to the roof to look for smoke from that morning’s bombs, or wasn’t following some desperately sad woman looking through tethered plastic bags for the remains of her son. I couldn’t remember the last time I had even held or seen a real newspaper, for that matter.
A few days later I left Iraq. I needed a break, and I needed to see Uxval, who had been idling in Turkey, waiting for me to get back. I drove back up through Iraq, through Sulaymaniyah, and into eastern Turkey. Now going home felt like leaving home, too.
In Istanbul my mornings were languid. I slept as long as I could. I didn’t stress about morning light, shadows, alarm clocks, car bombs, or whether my driver would turn up on time. I made my own coffee. I listened to Billie Holiday and Nina Simone without worrying whether whoever I was sharing a room or a house with would mind the music.
Uxval and I made love in the afternoon but to a different rhythm. Uxval was the same, but I was more complicated. He was frolicking around in the Istanbul sunshine, and I was a caged animal, incredulous that life was proceeding as usual outside Iraq. I marveled at the women around me, Turkish and foreign, decked out in colorful clothes that revealed their bare arms, their legs, their cleavage.
Only a few days passed before I found pictures in a drawer of a blond woman with gold-rimmed sunglasses staring flirtatiously at the camera, bathed in soft sunlight. She was sitting on the red tram that rode up and down the street outside our apartment window. It was an intimate look I knew all too well.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s Claudia,” he said dismissively. “She was in my Turkish class …” (I had assumed she was Turkish, but she was Mexican. Only Uxval could manage to find and conquer a Mexican woman in Turkey in three months.)
Turkish class that I paid for, I thought. And probably in my apartment, and in my bed, and rolling around in my sheets. All on my dime. Uxval had moved to Istanbul for us to be together, and we both knew that his options for earning a real living there would be limited at best. I had wanted to make sure things were taken care of while I was away, so I paid the rent, the bills, and left spending money for him each time I left for Iraq. In return, he was there when I came home. That was our deal, and apparently it had consequences.
I put the photo down and looked at him. I didn’t have the energy to go through it again. “She’s attractive,” I said. He knew that I knew. And he and I both knew I no longer cared. The arrangement worked for us. As I began to understand the new rhythm of my life in Baghdad and on the road as one of permanence, I accepted my relationship with Uxval for what it was. I loved him, and I didn’t want to come home from long stretches away to an empty apartment. Though I knew he was dating other women while I was off for months at a time, I accepted his philandering as one of the compromises of the work and lifestyle I had chosen. We left for a romantic weekend on the Turkish coast the next morning, and three weeks later I was back in Iraq on assignment with Elizabeth, happy to be back to the world I understood. In Iraq I didn’t have to worry about finding pictures of strange women in my drawers or wonder why no one cared that a war was going on.
• • •
I RETURNED TO FIND that the war had changed. As the Americans became more aggressive, the Iraqis retaliated with more improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. The first time I witnessed an IED attack against Americans, I was in the car with my Iraqi driver “cruising,” a term coined by my colleague the photographer João Silva. Cruising meant driving around a
imlessly in search of street photos when news was slow. That day I saw a Humvee in flames under a bridge and asked my driver to pull over.
“New York Times … photographer … I am American … journalist … ,” I yelled to the Americans from across the street. I didn’t attempt to take any photographs until they knew who I was. We had learned from the killing of a Reuters photographer on the balcony of the Palestine Hotel that a long lens could be mistaken for a rocket-propelled grenade.
I ran across the street toward the soldiers and said, “I am so sorry for your loss. Can I speak with the commanding officer? Who are you guys with?” I looked at the patch sewn onto his uniform and recognized the soldiers as part of the 82nd Airborne. I knew no one could authorize anything but the commanding officer, and I didn’t want to waste time. I flashed my press credential. I had finally acquired the proper U.S. military−issued press pass they required for access to any scene that involved the military. It was a simple press card with a photograph, issued by the Coalition Press Information Center, and ensured that the journalist had been screened by the Americans’ provisional government in Iraq.
The young man repeated the name of my organization with a sneer: “Oh, the New York Times.” They thought we were all lefties opposed to the war. The commanding officer arrived and authorized me to shoot. Three soldiers accompanied me as I ran back across the highway in order to photograph from a distance.
I raised my camera to shoot and framed the smoldering tank and the soldiers standing guard, including the same three soldiers who had watched me clear access with their commanding officer and had escorted me across the street. They suddenly looked at me as if they had never seen me before. Then they raised their guns and lowered their eyes to the scope. They were aiming at me. At me? I held my viewfinder to my eye, my entire body shaking. Would they really kill me, my own countrymen? Would they kill me because I was photographing a place where one of their men had been injured in an IED attack—one of our men? I held my eye to the frame and paused. Was this a game of chicken? I pressed the button three times.
“YOU FUCKING BITCH!”
One of the soldiers began screaming at me, waving frantically, with his gun dangling from one arm.
“Get the fuck out of here, you fucking bitch,” he said again. He had an M16 automatic rifle, and he waved it in the air. The other soldiers still had their guns pointed at me. They could have shot me in that moment and made up some excuse, that they didn’t know I was a journalist. And I knew it. I went back to the car. The Americans wanted to bring democracy to Iraq, but a convenient form of democracy that allowed them to censor the media. Iraqi insurgents had begun attacking Americans. And American journalists—who had every right to take pictures of these public scenes—were beginning to face censorship. We were allowed to cover only what the people with guns wanted us to see.
• • •
I STAYED IN IRAQ for most of the summer of 2003, as the tenuous peace following the fall of Saddam continued to unravel. Bombings became more and more commonplace, and I grew inured to the violence. That November, the morning after I celebrated my thirtieth birthday, I was back in Istanbul, lying in a hangover slumber in Uxval’s arms. The familiar sound of a bomb jolted me awake. It was a sound I had grown used to in Iraq. But I didn’t believe it.
Uxval shook me. “That was a bomb!”
“Are you crazy?” I was annoyed. As if he knows what a bomb sounds like. “We are in Istanbul.” I had finished my last glass of wine only a few hours ago.
He jumped out of bed, ran to the front room, and craned his neck in search of smoke.
“There is debris in the air. That was a bomb. Get your cameras.”
Within minutes we were out the door. It was the fastest I had ever arrived at a bomb scene, because it was only a few streets over from mine. The tiny street was normally dark, shadowed by the grand nineteenth-century buildings of the old city, but today it was bathed in dusty shafts of light. The faces of the buildings had been torn off. Bloodied, motionless bodies lay contorted and half-naked in the rubble. Broken pipes spewed water in every direction; black soot and ash charred the road and the other buildings. Metal poles and pieces of wood fell across the street curbs. Crowds of Turkish men started to gather. I photographed.
A body lay across the sidewalk. I didn’t realize it was a body at first, because it was missing a head. Another body, a man, looked as if he had been blown out the front door of a shop. His shirt was on, intact, and his shoes were on his feet, but his pants were gone. He was wearing blue plaid boxers.
I worked quickly, before the Turkish police came to remove us all from the scene. Men rushed past me carrying a man on a makeshift stretcher. He was barely conscious, his face pale and green, blood streaming from a hole in his leg. The police arrived, and they came right for me—the woman. In the Middle East I was always the first one removed among my male colleagues. I rushed home to file.
Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the bomb. The target near our home was a synagogue.
A few days later the headquarters of HSBC, the British bank, was bombed in a neighborhood about twenty minutes away. Uxval and I again grabbed our cameras, which were ready this time, and ran toward a taxi stand down the street. As we were running, there was a massive explosion only a few hundred yards to our right, and we pulled out our cameras to shoot. A fresh plume of smoke and debris rose up to cloud the pristine blue sky.
Traumatized pedestrians who had just narrowly escaped death were fleeing the scene toward us, many with blood trickling down their faces. Uxval said that the explosion had come from the British Consulate.
Some people were still in the same position they had been in when the bomb went off. One man in a suit stood on a second-story windowsill of a now-faceless shop building. Dismembered bodies lay everywhere, under layers of bricks, broken sidewalk, dust, and ash. Survivors checked them for pulses. The outer wall of the British Consulate had collapsed on top of a car, and dozens of men frantically tried to dig it out from under the rubble.
I tried to dodge the police as I continued documenting the scene. They pushed me away again. I tried a different angle. I knew I had to shoot as much as I could—this was terrorism on a world scale. They zeroed in on me again, the woman. I watched a handful of Turkish male photographers shoot freely inside. Uxval was inside.
And then, suddenly, I desperately wanted to call my mother. I reached into my camera bag in search of my cell. It was gone. Someone had stolen my phone amid this death and horror. While bodies lay bleeding on the cement. The very thought broke me down. I felt sick to my stomach. I walked over to a telephone booth and shut myself inside. I couldn’t stop crying. Istanbul, my haven that wasn’t. The fence I had halfheartedly slung up between my work and my home had finally collapsed.
The scene in front of the British Consulate minutes after a car bomb exploded, killing at least thirty people, including Consul General Roger Short, November 20, 2003.
Chang Lee of the New York Times captured me photographing a father and his injured son as they are turned away from medical care at a joint American-peshmerga military base in Kirkuk in the days following the fall of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, April 2003.
CHAPTER 6
Please Tell the Woman We Will Not Hurt Her
By 2004 the streets of Baghdad were more familiar to me than those of Istanbul. I came to think of Baghdad as my home. The New York Times house there had two stories, with four bedrooms upstairs, two downstairs, and two more in the basement. The upstairs bedrooms had nice light, and two were connected by an outdoor balcony. The house was large enough to accommodate five foreign correspondents—including a bureau chief, who decided what correspondent would cover what stories—three or four photographers, and a staff of interpreters and drivers. Unlike U.S. government employees, who lived behind the checkpoints and blast walls of the infamous Green Zone, the journalists lived in the city, the Red Zone, among the civilian population, and relied on Iraqis for everything. Downst
airs there was a dining room and an office where the Iraqi staff and the foreign correspondents made calls and toiled away on computers. The kitchen was ruled by a chubby, gay Iraqi cook and an equally chubby cleaning lady who we eventually learned was having an affair with one of the drivers. I went in there only to make coffee and grab a banana before heading out in the morning. The rest of our meals were served at the dining table, where we usually ate dinner together every night.
The roof took on a life of its own. When bombs became frequent, we all ran up the three flights of stairs to the roof to see from which neighborhood the smoke would rise; if the explosion seemed big enough, we would immediately grab a driver and jet out in whatever car was available. Newspaper reporters and photographers had to get to the event as quickly as possible, before the authorities roped off the bodies and before a rival newspaper grabbed some vital piece of info. That was normal for newspaper journalism. What was not normal was the frequency with which such urgent explosions compelled us to respond. Life felt like a pinball machine, some explosion perpetually flinging us this way or that. When we realized that the war wasn’t going to end anytime soon—and certainly not after President Bush announced that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended”—we installed a makeshift gym with a cheap elliptical machine, a bench, and some weights on the roof. It almost never rained in Baghdad.
Eventually the Times house became a fortress, with concrete blast walls more than fifteen feet high surrounding the perimeter and a staff of fifteen armed Iraqi guards standing watch twenty-four hours a day. We imported two expensive treadmills from Jordan. Our lives became progressively more sheltered and separated from the city we had grown to love. Unlike the early days of swimming and salsa parties at the Hamra, these days we stayed indoors when we weren’t on reporting trips. They, too, grew more and more infrequent. Baghdad became too dangerous for us to even do our jobs. Every time we wanted to report a story we had to arrange an additional car with another driver and two armed guards to follow us, in case one of our cars broke down or we faced any trouble along the way. All this meant that we spent most of our free time with other Times correspondents.
It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War Page 11