A colleague once said that journalists got one romantic free pass in a war zone, a get-out-of-jail-free card: one mistake, one regret, one person we are ashamed to acknowledge. There was a fair amount of sex in Baghdad: a lot of cheating, a lot of love, and a lot of mistaking loneliness for love. I was guilty of this miscalculation, guilty of confusing the intensity of war with genuine feelings. The reality was that most male war correspondents had wives or faithful girlfriends waiting at home for months on end, while most female war correspondents and photographers remained hopelessly single, stringing along love affairs in the field and at home, ever in search of someone who wasn’t threatened by our commitment to our work or put off by the relentless travel schedule.
I had never dated an American male. Before Iraq, I don’t remember actually having dated anyone who spoke English as a first language. But somewhere between the bombs and the early morning coffee-and- banana breakfasts at the bureau and the long days in the backseat of the car driving around Baghdad while reporting stories—the weddings, the funerals, and a surreptitious stop at the amusement park in the Al-Mansour district to ride the Ferris wheel that towered over Baghdad—I fell for a colleague.
Matthew had come from Atlanta to work in Iraq. He looked like the quintessential American, with a perfect white smile, light brown hair, an angular jaw, and the typical foreign-correspondent stubble. He wore rimless glasses smudged with fingerprints. He was always smiling, as if friendliness would mask his ambition.
We became a good photographer-writer team. Almost everything we did landed on the front page. For several months we were inseparable, collaborating on articles, talking through ideas, inspiring each other. Week after week we stayed up late into the night, going over the leads of his stories on deadline, sneaking from room to room through the outdoor balcony. We shared the same cultural references, the same sense of humor, the same enthusiasm for our work. It was effortless, unlike my disintegrating relationship with Uxval. Matthew and I both had tenuous commitments to other people, but it never occurred to me that they could endure, given the depth of our feelings for each other.
When Uxval arrived in Baghdad to visit me, I went through the motions. It all would have been so romantic—his heroic arrival in Baghdad in the middle of my long, intense shooting stint. But I felt nothing. I told Uxval to go back to Istanbul, move out of our home, and move back to Mexico City. I gave him all the cash I had on me—around $2,500—to help pay for his trip home. And with this petty alimony he disappeared. It was the first time in years I felt free.
• • •
TWO OR THREE BOMBS went off every day. We got used to it. My judgment of danger became increasingly skewed. I lost a sense of fear. I was no longer running away from explosions but running directly toward them. I just wanted the lasting, indelible images of the war to sear the front pages of the newspaper so our policy makers could see the fruits of their decision to invade Iraq. I wanted this at any cost.
Car bombs and roadside attacks against American troops had grown so frequent that the soldiers were terrified and shot almost preemptively, blindly. The Americans set up impromptu checkpoints along the roads and erected stop signs in English—a language and script not all Iraqis understood. Cars that failed to stop before the checkpoint were fired upon. I witnessed two entire families killed at the same checkpoint within twenty minutes of each other.
The Iraqi insurgents grew more organized, unleashing a new kind of fury against their invaders. In late March the American Blackwater security contractors were murdered, set on fire, and strung up with electrical cables on a bridge in the western city of Fallujah. It seemed like a turning point in the war. Blowing up soldiers and fleeing was one thing; desecrating civilians and displaying them for the world to see was another.
One morning I put on my abaya and wrapped my hair under a black head scarf and climbed into the backseat with Matthew. I often based how conservatively I dressed, or how much I covered, on the level of danger. We were traveling down a known smugglers’ route, so I opted for the most all-concealing hijab I could wear, just short of covering my face. We had decided to chase a story on a rumor that an American helicopter had gone down near Ramadi. We pored over a map with our drivers and security staff and called other journalists and drivers for advice. We wanted to travel on the side roads, because the marines had closed off all main roads in preparation for a siege of Fallujah, and Fallujah was on the road to Ramadi.
It was a sunny spring day in April 2004, neither hot nor cold, and I had spent the wee hours of the morning photographing the funeral of a Shiite man who had allegedly been killed by Americans in Sadr City. I had returned to the bureau, and we immediately headed out again. Waleed, our driver, was six foot four when slouching, his head hanging huge over his body. His Sunni family was from an area near Ramadi, which was helpful for reporting the story; in Iraq tribes and familial ties mean everything. Khalid, a Sunni originally from Palestine, was our interpreter that day. He was barely in his twenties and overweight and proudly introduced himself to everyone in accentless English as “Fat Khalid” or “Solid Khalid.” He was always joking, as long as we didn’t interrupt the American movies he watched on his laptop or his incessant Internet chats with women from God knows where.
We set out at 11 a.m., heading west around the Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, around small towns marked by soda stands and little else, sunken green fields of crops and long grass surrounded by palms. Though the road was unfinished and bumpy, I was happy to be coasting down a small, quiet road out of Baghdad and through the lush farms. Matthew and I huddled in the back together. He commented on how serene the villages looked; I joked that we shouldn’t talk about safety until we arrived at our destination. The sky, approaching midday, was luminescent without being harsh. We were in rural towns, so the farms essentially made up the towns. There were no main city centers. Waleed and Khalid talked in the way they often did when they were trying to shield us from their concern about something.
And then they went silent. I noticed a few Iraqis with AK-47s standing along the side of the road. By now American checkpoints controlled so many roads and areas of Iraq that the presence of men in black with AK-47s could only mean one thing: lawlessness. There were no American troops in the area.
“We are on the smugglers’ route,” Khalid said.
What he was trying to say without sounding scared is that we should turn back. We went over our alibis again: that no matter what happened, I was Italian and Matthew was Greek. Under no circumstances were we American. There were more men with guns. It was too late.
We rounded a corner, and a lanky, scruffy man walked close to my window, gun in hand, like a hunter on the trail. He stared at our car: two foreigners in a Sunni stronghold. The Western enemy traveling in the heart of the insurgency. I looked at Matthew—his Americanness—and threw a shawl I had lying in my lap over his head. A sky-blue minivan careened out in front of us, cutting off the road. Dozens of armed men swirled around our vehicle, frenetic and edgy with their new find.
“We are going to die now,” I said.
I thought of the four journalists who had been ambushed along the road between Kabul and Jalalabad after September 11. They had been killed. Now it was us, encircled by gunmen in a village called Garma, about forty minutes from Baghdad.
I couldn’t see the green fields anymore. Men opened Khalid’s and Waleed’s doors, pulling them out of the vehicle and out of our view. Our own doors were locked, and our windows were blocked by men with faces wrapped in red-and-white-and black-and-white-patterned keffiyehs, who screamed and unleashed entire magazines of bullets into the air. Our car was armored, bulletproof, with windows as thick as encyclopedias but vulnerable to the arsenal of weapons in this village. One boy no older than twenty, a rocket launcher strapped to his back, vibrated with skittish energy, as if he himself might explode.
“We are going to die,” I said. “We are going to die.” I could think of nothing else to say. We were
utterly defenseless.
A few men tapped on Matthew’s door with the tips of their AK-47s.
“Please don’t open your door,” I said. “Please don’t open your door.”
Khalid came to the window, all three hundred pounds of him panting and sweating, and said, “Matthew, get out of the car.”
They wanted the man. Matthew unlocked his door, and they led him out, hoisting their guns to his chest, leaving me alone in the backseat. Two men remained at my door, guns raised at me, but were clearly confused about how to proceed. I was a Mediterranean-looking American woman in full Iraqi Arab attire: Was I Iraqi? A Muslim? Did I speak Arabic? My olive complexion and almond-shaped eyes have afforded me relative anonymity in countless countries, and the kidnappers couldn’t tell whether or not I was one of them.
I watched Matthew being led away from our car toward the blue minivan, an American male, kidnapped alone in the Sunni Triangle. He would be tortured, perhaps killed. I knew the only way through this was as a team. We were in the Muslim world, where the greatest respect was reserved for women and children. I jumped out of the car and walked ten feet over to where Matthew was being held in the middle of the road. The gunmen looked slightly startled at the sight of me. I rubbed my index fingers together, symbolizing the union of a man and a woman in my made-up version of sign language, trying desperately to convey that he was my partner, and said in English, “He is my husband, and I am not leaving him.” They didn’t understand English but understood that I was not to be deterred. They half-led me—half-followed me—into the minivan alongside my “husband.”
Waleed and Khalid were still caught up in a flurry of activity outside the van. I sat next to Matthew, both of us now inside the truck—still parked diagonally across the road, its sliding door open on the passenger side. In the front seat two masked men faced us, pointing their guns. I rubbed the sides of my forehead with two fingers, repeating “Oh, my God,” over and over to myself, trying to hypnotize myself out of hysteria. Matthew was calm. I realized that I had left all my belongings behind: my cameras, my waist pack, my laptop, both of my American passports, my IDs, my satellite phone, my everything. I looked up, hoping to see an opportunity to retrieve at least my passports so I could hide them before they were discovered, and saw an insurgent, his faced wrapped in red and white, driving off with our car down the village’s main road.
Would I ever use my cameras again? What were the last images I shot? Were they good? Would anyone see them? Would I even live to know?
My passport. Oh, God, my American passport. How could I have been so stupid?
“Oh my God oh my God oh my God,” I whispered, rubbing my forehead. I tried to keep my eyes down. “Our passports. OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGod.”
The minivan started along the main road in the village and pulled around to the back of a house. Dozens of masked men swarmed around, weapons cocked. Our door slid open to let in the commander, who had a calm face and wore a cheap set of AmberVision sunglasses. He didn’t seem as if he would kill us.
He introduced himself in slow, halting English as the commander of the village and asked Khalid to translate. Matthew answered all the questions, steady and sincere. All I could think about was our passports.
“Where are you from?”
“Greece and Italy.”
“Are you American? Are you with the coalition?”
“We are Greek and Italian, and not with the coalition.”
“Give me your passports.”
“We left them in Baghdad,” Matthew lied. “We don’t have them.”
I was sure they would find them and that we would be killed.
“Why are you here?”
“We are journalists, here to tell your side of the story. The Americans have closed the roads in and around Fallujah, and we want to tell your side of the story. We are here for you. We want to write about the civilian deaths, what the Americans are doing to the Iraqis.”
The truth always sounded so convincing. I kept my head down, kept rubbing my temples. It seemed to keep me calm and focused on staying alive.
“Where are your press IDs? Who do you work for?”
“Our IDs are in our bags in our car. We work for the Times.” He left out the New York part.
I asked: “Could you bring the car back?”
“Where do you live?”
“We live at the bureau, in a house in Baghdad.”
“Where is it, and what is the phone number there?”
He took Matthew’s Thuraya satellite phone. Rebel groups and journalists around the world carried Thurayas, smallish satellite phones that could make calls anywhere east of London and north of a satellite floating in the sky above Madagascar. Thurayas enabled journalists to operate in remote areas not linked to a mobile network. The commander started to dial the number of the house, when they suddenly decided they no longer trusted Khalid, our Palestinian-Iraqi interpreter. Poor Khalid was so scared, he was sweating and stuttering. The commander kept asking him whether he was lying, because he could barely get two words out of his mouth. They brought in Gareib, their own interpreter, a Palestinian Brit who claimed to work as a journalist but was clearly part of the insurgency. His hair was like a mop, and his eyeballs were jumpy. They asked Khalid to get out of the car, and the commander and Gareib continued.
“What is the phone number at the Times house? And where, exactly, is it?”
We gathered they were trying to confirm whether we were lying about not being part of the American-led coalition, whether we really lived outside the Green Zone. Matthew described where the house was, along the Tigris River, near the Palestine Hotel, and gave the phone number of the bureau. They dialed but didn’t call.
Gareib asked again: “Where are you from?”
We stuck to our alibis.
“If you are lying about your nationality, just say it. Just tell us the truth.”
I started sweating. I was sure he would give us away, and finally I raised my chin and made eye contact with both the commander and the dicey translator.
“We are not lying,” I said firmly.
Gareib softened. He told us that he, too, was a journalist, working with another British journalist, doing a piece on the insurgency. I was sure he was anything but a journalist.
The commander asked whether I had taken any photos since I arrived in Garma.
I said no.
Matthew had a point-and-shoot camera, with photos from the previous few months in Iraq, and offered it up to the commander to prove we had spent our time in Iraq in the company of Iraqis, not Americans. He scrolled through the memory card: Shaima and Ali, an Iraqi couple we had been following during the lead-up to their wedding for a feature story, Matthew smiling along the side of the road in Baghdad, pictures from the day the contractors were killed in Fallujah. Memories.
At that moment our car reappeared, and the commander motioned for me to get out and retrieve our things. My legs were rubbery. I gathered in my arms all our gear: my waist pack with my IDs and one of my passports; my cameras; a backpack with my computer, satellite phone, and a two-year American passport I occasionally carried when I needed to apply for visas while in the field. It had inadvertently been tucked into an interior pocket of my backpack, which was among Matthew’s belongings. The masked men drilled their eyes into me and watched me carry everything from one car to another, still confused by my existence.
The commander snapped at them to help me.
I placed our bags in the minivan near us and sat back down beside Matthew. The commander walked away for a second, as did the men with their guns pointed at us. Matthew slipped his passport to me, and I put both of ours into my underwear, beneath my abaya. I thought of the time when $7,000 made it through Iraq in my underwear when Elizabeth and I were held up at gunpoint. It was one place they just wouldn’t go.
The commander returned with the guards, and he looked over my stash of cameras, pleased that I was actually a professional photographer. He asked to see the content
s of the digital cards on my two camera bodies. I had woken up at 6 a.m. and spent the morning in Sadr City, photographing the Mahdi Army outside Moktada al-Sadr’s office, the other insurgents dancing, their faces wrapped, their weapons in the air.
“Where is this? When was this?” The commander’s interest was piqued.
I explained that the Americans had killed several people in Sadr City the day before, and I went to photograph the funerals and the protests at dawn that morning in Sadr City, in Baghdad.
“Where are your press IDs?”
It was more important for us to show proof of being journalists than to worry about which companies we represented. I reached into my bag and pulled out my press identification cards from Turkey and Mexico. Matthew, who had hidden his IDs in his sock when they first led him into the minivan, took off his shoe, pulled his New York Times ID out of his sock, and handed it over to the commander. He studied the IDs. Even after seeing these, they didn’t question our nationality again.
The situation seemed to be easing, and I finally raised my eyes. I looked around the car. The gunmen were still perched in the front seat, peering at us from behind their weapons, and I noticed the one on the right relax. I took the liberty of staring for a few seconds and then offered a weak smile before returning my fingers to my temples to rub the sides of my face.
Matthew muttered under his breath, “Stop rubbing your forehead. Relax.”
“Shut up,” I said. “I am nervous, and it is better if they know they are making a woman nervous.”
Khalid was back in the car, and I was relieved to have his familiar, fat presence nearby. One of the gunmen mumbled something out loud, and Khalid translated: “Please tell the woman we will not hurt her.”
It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War Page 12