And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

by Engel, Richard

  Things would then get deadly fast. The Israelis would replace their rubber bullet magazines with live ammunition and start firing. Instead of fifteen or twenty Palestinians injured by rubber bullets, five or ten or even fifteen Palestinians might wind up dead. That day or the next morning, there’d be a funeral. The funeral would turn into another protest. Kids would throw stones, then Molotov cocktails. Then someone would fire live ammo, and the Israelis would respond in kind. Another five or ten Palestinians would get killed. Then there’d be another funeral, and the cycle would begin anew.

  I remember sitting at home in February 2001, with a pile of newspapers in front of me, thinking that it was a month of grim foreboding. On February 6, Sharon trounced Barak in the Israel elections. Ten days later, President Bush sent twenty warplanes to attack five air defense installations in Baghdad because of increased targeting of allied planes policing “no-fly” zones over Iraq that were imposed after the 1991 Gulf War. Bush had been in office less than a month, and 9/11 was still seven months away. Arab nations accused him of focusing on Iraq when the real Middle East crisis was the bloody showdown between the Israelis and Palestinians.

  By this time, even before Sharon formally took office on March 7, 2001, the Second Intifada was gaining ugly momentum. Under Sharon it grew white-hot. The Israelis sent tanks into the West Bank and targeted Palestinian militants for assassination, often with helicopter gunships.

  Disheartened by their casualties, demoralized that their protests were having so little effect and were barely getting noticed internationally, the Palestinians quickly turned to suicide bombings to get revenge. They formed secret cells to carry out the attacks. They knew they would still take a disproportionate number of casualties (more than three thousand Palestinians died in the four-year conflict, and about a thousand Israelis), but suicide attacks allowed them to strike back in a dramatic and terrifying way. The attackers would put nuts, bolts, and nails around their bombs to create shrapnel, sometimes coating it with rat poison (an anticoagulant to increase bleeding) or animal feces (to cause infection). Oftentimes the head of a suicide bomber popped off like a champagne cork and remained incongruously intact amid the carnage.

  On April 12, a seventeen-year-old girl detonated a bomb strapped to her body at the entrance to the Mahane Yehuda market across the street from my building, killing six and wounding one hundred and four. On May 18, a suicide bomber killed five Israelis and wounded forty others in a Netanya shopping mall. On June 1, nineteen young Israelis died in a suicide attack at a seaside discotheque in Tel Aviv.

  With public outrage building, Israeli lawmakers on July 5 heatedly debated, but rejected, a proposal to kill Yasser Arafat with a massive military strike. Two weeks later six Palestinian activists in Arafat’s Fatah movement were killed in an explosion at a refugee camp in Nablus. A day later in Nablus, an Israeli helicopter carried out a rocket attack on an office of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, killing eight.

  The tempo of the violence was unrelenting. On August 9, a Palestinian suicide bomber hit a crowded pizza restaurant, killing fifteen and wounding ninety; the next day, Israeli warplanes launched a missile attack that leveled the police station in Ramallah. On August 12, a suicide bomber blew himself up in Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city, wounding fifteen; two days later, Israeli tanks leveled the police station in the West Bank city of Jenin. An opinion poll published August 17 in an Israeli newspaper found Sharon’s support dropping because he wasn’t tough enough on the Palestinians—even though by that point some forty Palestinian political and paramilitary leaders had been assassinated without trial.

  I was twenty-seven years old, still feeling young and invincible, as many young men do when they first earn the right to call themselves “war correspondents.” Even so, the wave of random and violent attacks caused me to change the way I lived. Instead of leisurely strolls in the market across the street, I shopped quickly and purposefully. I began sitting in the rear of cafés, my back against the wall, because suicide bombers usually detonated their devices at entrances.

  The peace process took its last breath, at least for a generation, in the spring of 2002. On March 27, in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya, a Palestinian suicide bomber disguised as a woman walked into a hotel dining room during the annual Passover seder. He detonated a suitcase filled with powerful explosives, killing 30 and wounding 140. Many of the victims were elderly, and some were Holocaust survivors. It was the highest death toll of Israelis during the Second Intifada.

  Israel responded with Operation Defensive Shield, the largest military operation in the West Bank since the Six-Day War. The Israel Defense Forces began by putting Yasser Arafat under siege in his Ramallah compound, then invaded Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Bethlehem, Jenin, and Nablus. The Israelis captured every city in the West Bank except tiny Jericho. The A-B-C administrative districts were scrapped. In effect, the entire West Bank became a C area, and the gradual shift to Palestinian control came to an abrupt end. During Defensive Shield, according to the UN, 30 Israeli soldiers were killed and 127 wounded; Palestinian fatalities were put at 497, with 1,447 wounded.

  Yasser Arafat was confined to his compound from the start of the Israeli incursion until May 2, when he was released in a deal brokered by the United States. He was greeted by cheering crowds. A diminutive figure (five feet two inches) with splotchy skin, Arafat had been much beloved by Palestinians, not only because he was a symbol of their cause but also because he was a prodigious fund-raiser. He traveled widely and usually returned with satchels of money. He spoke English quite badly, but loved to speak it anyway. He was gregarious and emotional and enjoyed meeting with journalists. He liked people and frequently embraced them and kissed them. I was kissed on the cheek by Arafat several times.

  Arafat himself was never the same after his captivity in his compound. I think he had a nervous breakdown. He became much more aggressive, wore fatigues, and called himself General Arafat. He no longer met freely with journalists. He did phone interviews with CNN and a few other news outlets, hanging up if a journalist said something that offended him. He was angry and incoherent, and I suspect he was suffering from some form of dementia. His Palestinian Authority had been severely weakened, creating a vacuum filled by Hamas and other radical groups.

  By this time I had left AFP and was doing freelance television work for ABC affiliates and the BBC World Service, as well as radio stories for The World, a coproduction of Public Radio International and WGBH in Boston. Newspapers and magazines were struggling, and I thought I’d have a longer and more lucrative career in television. AFP was stingy about covering the cost of the gas I needed to get around for work, while TV correspondents were chartering planes. I thought to myself, Now that’s the world I’d rather be part of. I arrived in Jerusalem expecting to report on the birth of a new state, Palestine, instead I saw peace talks collapse, Sharon capitalize on their failure, walk through Muslim areas on top of the Temple Mount, and start a bloody conflict of stones, tanks, and suicide bombers. But unlike the First Intifada, the outside world, especially the United States, paid little attention to the Palestinians’ second uprising. It was a sideshow after 9/11.

  I watched the twin towers collapse on TV from my apartment in Jerusalem. I knew then that the story I was covering was over. No one would care anymore about rioting Palestinians. In the Second Intifada, Palestinians lost what little control they had in the West Bank. After 9/11 they lost the West’s attention. Washington had other priorities.

  The Bush administration was fixated on Iraq from the start. It’s been well documented how Iraqi opposition groups and American neoconservatives convinced the president it would be easy to topple Saddam. Bush naively believed Saddam’s regime could be replaced by a democracy, which the president saw as the antidote to all political evils. The United States was also hungry for revenge, the military was primed for war, and congressional checkbooks were open. All that was needed was a casus belli, and weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) fit the bi
ll.

  * * *

  IN JANUARY 2002, PRESIDENT BUSH had given Iraq top billing in his “Axis of evil,” ahead of North Korea and Iran, and in June he launched Operation Southern Focus to degrade Iraq’s air defenses. In September 2002, one hundred US warplanes attacked air defense installations in western Iraq. Congress authorized military action against Iraq in October. In November, the UN passed Resolution 1441 finding Iraq in “material breach” of the cease-fire terms that had ended the Gulf War in 1991. As 2002 drew to a close, the United States was clearly going to go to war with hundreds of thousands of troops. I thought to myself, Okay, this is going to be the place where I make my career. I decided to leave Jerusalem on the train for history’s next station, which I thought would be Baghdad.

  First I talked to my wife. Jerusalem had given her a false idea of what being a foreign correspondent was all about. It was a commuter conflict. In the morning I’d drive to a clash between the Israelis and the protesters, I’d get a whiff of tear gas and maybe a rubber bullet in the leg, and then I’d be home in time for dinner. Sometimes I’d go out to the clashes, come home for lunch, and go back out for more. But Iraq was a completely different situation. I’d be away for weeks or months at a time. Maybe years. I didn’t know.

  I had bought a house in Sicily, a place I had loved since high school. The house, in a picturesque town called Cefalù, on the north coast, had cost about $100,000. The money to buy it had mostly come from my blackjack winnings in Cairo. I told my wife I might be away for a long stretch, that things could get messy in Jerusalem, and that she might as well go to Sicily to oversee the renovations of the house since we were going to fix it up anyway.

  That left me with the problem of getting a visa. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry assigned “minders” to foreign journalists, which was a labor-intensive undertaking, and many more journalists were seeking visas than there were trusted minders. As a result, the Iraqis were only giving visas to the major networks, and I was a lowly freelancer.

  But I had a friend in Jordan who I felt sure could help me out. Beneath her party-girl exterior as a flamboyant, melodramatic shopaholic, she was a shrewd operator who understood the mysterious ways of the Middle East. She ingeniously suggested that I enter Iraq as a peace activist. The so-called Iraqi Peace and Friendship Society brought foreigners to the country to act as “human shields” who would be willing to station themselves at oil refineries, power plants, air force bases, and other strategic sites in hopes of deterring American attacks. The society imported dozens of peaceniks, career hippies, Muslim fundamentalists, and assorted do-gooders. My friend in Jordan suggested I could get in the queue with a friendly bribe to a Jordanian official, and she had a man in mind.

  He was besotted with his three-year-old son and, like most Arabs, greatly fond of tea. I got on a flight to London, bought some high-quality toddler clothes and some cheap tea, and then flew to Amman. It did the trick. He gave me the required stamp without even looking at the rest of my passport, which would have identified me as a reporter.

  Human shields didn’t need the gear I required, so I had to smuggle it in. That meant hiring a driver with the right disposition and a car with enough room for a handheld video camera and satellite phone, a bulletproof jacket, a chemical/biological/radiological suit and gas mask, and atropine autoinjectors (an antidote for nerve agents). I strapped $20,000 around my ankle in a pouch that looked like an Ace bandage and stuffed my pockets with $20 bills, which work best for quick payoffs. The only highway to Baghdad cuts through Iraq’s Western Desert, where bandits sometimes robbed cars.

  I was in a fairly weak position, all things considered. I was in a car filled with illicit equipment, I carried a misleading visa, and I had no firm commitment from the news network I was working most closely with at the time, ABC News. But I was surprisingly calm as I hopped into the GMC Suburban in the middle of the night on March 5, 2003. Maybe it was the car’s red racing stripes. Maybe it was the digitized verse from the Koran that played when the driver turned the ignition key. Or maybe it was because I was a kid and didn’t know what a real war was all about. I was now about to go to what I saw as the third stop on the train of history in the Middle East. First was Cairo of the big men. Next was Jerusalem to see the end of the peace process. Now I was off to Baghdad to cover a war that would set in motion events that would tear down the status quo across the Middle East and unleash pent-up religious and ethnic hatred, creating a new generation of terrorists even more vicious than al-Qaeda.

  THREE

  WHEN WE ARRIVED IN BAGHDAD at 4:30 a.m. on March 6, 2003, my driver, Sami, parked the GMC in a lot in the Al Mansour neighborhood. I loaded my gear into a local taxi and started searching for a hotel. I knew only one thing for certain: I was not going to be a human shield. That made getting a reporter’s visa my overriding concern.

  Most journalists were staying at the Al-Rashid Hotel, the most luxurious and expensive ($150 a night) in Baghdad, but the place was crawling with Iraqi intelligence agents. Speaking in purposely broken Arabic, I asked the taxi driver to find me a small, clean hotel somewhere away from the center of the city. I landed at the incongruously named Flowers Land Hotel on a small side street. I rented a mini-apartment, with a kitchen, a living room, two small bedrooms, and two balconies facing the right direction, southeast, for me to pick up a signal on my satellite phone.

  Baghdad seemed calm but the foreign journalists were edgy. No one knew how much firepower the United States and Britain would bring to bear, or even when the invasion would begin. The description of the American military strategy as “shock and awe” was designed to unnerve the Iraqis but it had the same effect on us journalists. Rumors swirled that the Pentagon was preparing to use electromagnetic bombs—e-bombs—that would knock out all computers and communications equipment, making it impossible for the Iraqis to command and control their forces. An e-bomb would also knock out journalists, frying their laptops, satellite phones, and video uplinks. At the time, I supported the invasion on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was monstrously cruel to his people. I had been to Iraq several times and found Saddam’s regime both terrifying and evil. Faced with the choice of supporting a policy that promised to eliminate that evil or one that left it in place, I thought the choice was obvious. I had no idea at the time how bad Washington would bungle it, how inept the Iraqis would be at managing their own affairs, and the horrible forces—the rot deep within the Middle East—that the war would ultimately unleash.

  As the countdown to the bombing of Baghdad continued, I feared Saddam Hussein would round up Western journalists and kill us one by one to pressure the Americans to stop bombing. Most journalists pulled out before the hostilities began. They would talk to each other and get themselves all worked up, then have panicky conference calls with editors and lawyers back in the States. I didn’t have a home office so I missed all that. I had weighed the dangers before I went to Iraq and decided the risks were manageable. Beyond that, I was getting the chance to do what I had dreamed of doing: covering one of the pivotal moments in the Middle East, the story of my generation.

  After settling in at the Flowers Land, I called Kazem, a low-ranking official at the press center, explaining my visa predicament. I reasoned that it was best to let the Iraqis know I was a journalist who broke the rules rather than have them catch me and accuse me of being a spy. Kazem, a bespectacled man in a three-piece suit, came to the hotel a few days later. Changing my visa wouldn’t be easy, he said, but he would take it up with the head of the press center, Uday al-Ta’e.

  I was surprised to learn that Flowers Land had a business center with an Internet connection. The Iraqis had blocked free e-mail servers such as Yahoo! and Hotmail, but Mohammed, a twenty-one-year-old hacker who presided over the center, made it his business to find free e-mail sites that had escaped the authorities’ notice. He came up with several that apparently weren’t on the government’s radar and signed me up for one based in Moldova, a tiny country tucked between Romania and U
kraine.

  I picked a man named Zarfar as my driver, mainly because he was forty, older than the other candidates. I felt that young drivers tended to be too opportunistic. Zarfar was just greedy. He also had a functioning but decidedly dumpy car, a 1986 Volkswagen Passat, that wouldn’t attract attention.

  I took Zarfar to lunch in hopes of putting a purchase on his trust and ended up with a bad case of food poisoning. I went to a pharmacy to buy some vitamin C. I assumed the pharmacist was a Christian, as many are in the Arab world, and I tried to break the ice with some casual talk about Rome. He told me he had an uncle in Milan who was a priest and that his own son was an aspiring soccer player who dreamed of playing professionally in Italy.

  After ten minutes of small talk, I asked him how his business was doing, a routine question in the West but quite forward in Saddam’s Iraq, where expressing opinions to foreigners was tantamount to treason. “Better than ever,” he said. But what about the war? “Maybe there will be a war, maybe there won’t be. Hopefully there won’t be a war.” His sixteen-year-old son came in, and I told him I’d get the address for the European soccer federation so he could inquire about trying out for a pro team. I promised to mail the letter after I left Iraq. I went back to the hotel and got the federation’s address off the Internet. Then I returned to the pharmacy and waited for the other customers to leave. I gave the pharmacist the address and he invited me to the back room for tea.

  “Do you think there will be a war?” he asked, offering me a Gauloises Blondes cigarette. I said I expected the conflict to begin soon. He said he feared Sunni extremists would use the ensuing chaos to harass Christians. I said I was concerned about foreigners once the war started, especially Americans such as me, and he said I could take shelter in his store in the event of trouble. That was how I found my first safe house.