As for Zarfar, he thought the war would make Iraq the richest country in the Middle East because of its oil and large number of educated people. He planned to buy a new car, and he had his eye on an apartment where he could take his eighteen-year-old mistress, a university student whose parents had hired him to drive her to and from campus—and got more than they bargained for.
But first, Zarfar said, he needed a decent pair of shoes. So we drove to a market downtown, where I shed my safari-style shirt and khaki trousers for a wardrobe that would make me look less like a foreigner. Most men in Baghdad dressed like Eastern Europeans, in low-quality dress shirts, slacks, and blazers in a variety of colors. I bought the local uniform, along with a bottle of black Just for Men hair dye.
After our shopping expedition, I asked Zarfar to hire me a policeman. Because of my visa problem, I thought it would be helpful to travel with someone who had police credentials to help us through the inevitable roadblocks. Zarfar managed to line one up, nonchalantly mentioning that the guy had a drinking problem. With an avaricious driver and a drunkard cop, I felt I was collecting the cast of characters for an updated version of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.
At the press center and at the Al-Rashid Hotel, the reporters were cagey and withholding information from each other. Because they knew I spoke Arabic, some of them tried to wheedle tidbits out of me without offering anything in return. A few even seemed to take pleasure in my shaky visa situation. Journalists typically jockey for position before a big story, but I had never seen anything as competitive as this.
I had a low moment on March 11, when I secured a reporting visa only to have it taken away by the official who managed the day-to-day operations of the press center. I was then ordered to leave Iraq within three days. In a panic, I contacted Mohammed Ajlouni, ABC’s longtime fixer in Jordan, who took care of everything from getting hotel reservations to finding drivers to scheduling interviews and then soothing bruised feelings if an interview turned ugly. He told me that Iraqi officials at their embassy in Amman were concerned about the exodus of journalists from Iraq and might be willing to issue reporting visas to make sure the war got covered. I left my gear in my hotel room, including what remained of my $20,000 emergency stash, and headed back to Jordan in yet another GMC Suburban. It was the biggest gamble of my Iraq venture: if I didn’t get a visa, I wouldn’t be able to get back into the country.
Ajlouni and I went to the embassy, and he was invited in while I cooled my heels in the reception area. A couple of hours later he returned with a reporting visa. On March 16, I wrote in my journal, “I’m back in Baghdad and finally in business. I drove to Jordan and back in the last 36 hours.” Of course, I still didn’t have a firm commitment from ABC News, and all hell was about to break loose. But at least I didn’t have any kids, I thought.
When I went to the Al-Rashid, most of the journalists were pulling out or packing to go. Like the other networks, ABC was shutting down its operation. The network’s chief producer in town told me the editors in New York had struck a deal with a British newspaper reporter to cover Baghdad during the war. I was furious. ABC eventually agreed to pay me a retainer and said I would split the reporting duties with the British journalist. ABC promised to pay me whether I stayed or left if I felt unsafe, a very professional way in which to take money out of the decision. Before the ABC guys pulled out, they gave me an extra satellite phone, a chemical/biological suit, a gas mask, and, most important, $10,000 in cash. I had already spent $10,000 on cars, drivers, rooms, generators, and fuel, so my ankle pouch was now fully replenished.
By March 17, the mood in Baghdad had abruptly changed. “It’s as if the Iraqis are finally starting to realize that this new war is finally coming,” I wrote in my journal. “There is now heavy traffic, almost all of it heading out of town. I’ve seen shop owners boarding up their businesses.”
From seven hundred journalists at the beginning of March, the number had dwindled to about one hundred and fifty—print reporters, TV correspondents, photographers, cameramen, and support personnel. At the press center I encountered Kazem, who only a week before I had asked for help with my visa. “Why are you staying when everyone else is leaving?” he asked. I took a chance and replied in Arabic. Some journalists, I said, are as samid as the Iraqi people. Samid means “steadfast” and “brave” and is the adjective most often used by Iraqis to describe themselves. Kazem laughed and threw his arm around my shoulder.
Now that I had press credentials, I was assigned a minder, Abu Sattar, whose stocky build, square face, and thick mustache made him eerily reminiscent of Saddam Hussein. He took everything Saddam said as gospel, but fortunately he was lazy and careless, and I had no trouble losing him and going off on my own. I also met Ali, a nineteen-year-old who would become my trusted driver and friend. I told Zarfar I no longer needed him as a driver but would continue to pay him and his policeman pal. I rented them a two-bedroom apartment in the Dulaimi Hotel so they would be nearby in case of an emergency.
When I called ABC’s foreign desk on March 18, I was told that President Bush was delivering a speech that night from the White House. I also learned that the British newspaper reporter had left Iraq, which meant I was ABC’s only reporter in Baghdad. I viewed my elevated status with mixed feelings because of an e-mail I had received from my mother. “The time has come to leave, please. To hell with the networks, just get going and get out!!! I love you. Mom.”
I listened to Bush’s speech through my earpiece on a balcony above the press center. He gave Saddam and his two sons forty-eight hours to leave Iraq or face “military conflict.” The president also called on journalists to leave Iraq, which sent chills down my back. I was scared as hell, a good deal less samid than before, but still determined to stay.
Militiamen from Saddam’s Ba’ath Party, the only officially sanctioned political group in Iraq, suddenly took to the streets, brandishing Kalashnikovs. They set up checkpoints and guard posts on street corners. As I would learn later, the better-trained Republican Guards were positioned on the outskirts of the city, preparing to close a noose on American soldiers once they entered Baghdad. Channeling my fear into logistics, I hurriedly set up two more safe houses and equipped them with food, water, and generators. I now had four bolt-holes in case I needed to disappear. Ali was dismissive of the Ba’ath militiamen: “They won’t fight,” a surprisingly blunt statement from someone who had lived his entire life under the iron fist of Saddam Hussein.
Iraqi press officials ordered foreign journalists to move to one of the three state-run hotels: the Palestine, the Al-Rashid, or the Al Mansour. I chose the Palestine because it was across the Tigris River from the press center and other government buildings. I booked three rooms on three sides of the building so I could have different views of the city. The Palestine was rickety—it would sway when bombs exploded—and that wasn’t its only drawback. It also housed upward of twenty-five Islamic extremists. One told me he’d come to Iraq to become a martyr. The radicals were mostly Arabs but with some Asians. Efi Pentaki, a Greek journalist who had the room next to mine on the fourteenth floor, said she recognized several of the men from a training camp for suicide bombers that she had visited a couple of weeks earlier. Iraq had indeed imported a strange cast of characters, from human shields to Islamic fanatics, anything to slow down the American invasion.
On March 19, before the ground assault began, Washington launched a type of preemptive strike, firing forty cruise missiles and dropping four two-thousand-pound “bunker buster” bombs on the Dora Farms complex in southern Baghdad, where Saddam was thought to be meeting with his sons Uday and Qusay. (It was later revealed the men were not there at the time of the attack.)
Not knowing the purpose of the attack, and expecting “shock and awe,” I thought the first night was something of a dud. Saddam responded with a speech declaring that the “day of the great jihad” had arrived and accusing the United States and Britain of having “evil imperialist and Zionist intentions.” It
was typical Saddam bluster, but it increased my feelings of isolation and vulnerability. I was now in an enemy capital, under attack by my own government. If I got into trouble, help would not be coming.
The Information Ministry, which oversaw the press center, was bustling with activity the next day, and I was surprised at how normal everything seemed. My old minder had left Baghdad on “family business,” and I was turned over to Abu Annas, a man of about sixty-five who was polite, dignified, and brave. His one weakness was his near-obsessive concern for the brown corduroy suit he wore nearly every day. Whenever faced with the choice between duty and possibly soiling his suit, he would invariably err on the side of corduroy.
Abu Annas took me to what would become daily briefings by the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, who would end up as one of the most memorable characters of the invasion period. He had been a Ba’ath Party enforcer during Saddam’s rise to power, and he retained his brass-knuckles bravado. But mostly he became known for his over-the-top language and utter dedication to spreading mistruth. He referred to American soldiers as “desert animals” and swore they were many miles away even after they had breached Baghdad’s city limits.
Like the other networks, ABC had switched to continuous live coverage, and I worked virtually nonstop. At first ABC described me as a freelance reporter, but after a few days I was being introduced on-air as “ABC’s Richard Engel” or “our correspondent.” It felt good to get my epaulets.
After a second night of bombings, which included several direct hits on the presidential compound across the Tigris, Ali arrived with the daily newspapers (which amazingly kept publishing through the twenty-one-day invasion), freshly baked diamond-shaped loaves of bread, salty farmer’s cheese, and a carton of mango juice. Breakfast was pure bliss.
Later that day, the Iraqi government expelled CNN from Baghdad, and correspondents Rym Brahimi and Nic Robertson and their crews left in a fury. I doubt anything they said was more offensive to the Iraqis than my reports, but Uday al-Ta’e, the press center director, only watched CNN, Fox, and the BBC. With CNN gone, only two American television correspondents remained in the capital—me and Peter Arnett, who was working as a freelancer for NBC.
Shock and awe arrived on the overnight of March 21st to 22nd. As I wrote in my journal: “It was ten times the intensity of the first two nights. . . . I could feel the heat and wind of the blasts [from the other side of the Tigris]. . . . The bombs were falling one after another. It was like lightning hitting the ground, the fury of Thor and Zeus crackling with explosions.”
After spending the night and into the next morning broadcasting, I took a few hours off to collect my thoughts and take Ali to lunch. The restaurant was crammed with customers, and the headwaiter had to search to find us a table in the back. The bombing started up again, with explosions all around us, in broad daylight, but no one in the restaurant even flinched. Iraqis seemed numb after a quarter century under Saddam’s whip-hand rule. It was heartbreaking to see what a harsh dictatorship can do to the human soul.
In less than a week, I had grown almost inured to explosions and fires. Then something new caught my eye from my fourteenth-story perch at the Palestine Hotel—a plume of black smoke snaking hundreds of feet into the sky. Soon I counted twenty plumes rising around the perimeter of Baghdad. The Iraqis had set oil fires in an effort to “blind” satellites and drones taking reconnaissance pictures and trying to locate Saddam.
From March 21st to 25th, Iraqi forces in the southern port city of Umm Qasr put up an unexpectedly strong fight against British and American units, and the Information Ministry seized the battle as a propaganda tool. Iraqi television broadcast footage of American POWs, as well as “dead American, British, and Zionist forces.” (ABC and other US networks did not broadcast the pictures and accused Iraq of violating the Geneva Convention injunction against exploiting prisoners. Al Jazeera and many European networks aired the pictures of the American captives.) Iraqi television also broadcast brief interviews with five American POWs, several of whom were bandaged. One was visibly shaken, apparently looking off camera for instructions, and another was interviewed in bed and in evident pain.
An enormous sandstorm hit Baghdad on March 26, the largest asifa that Iraqis had seen in a generation, covering cars with what looked like orange snow. The black plumes of smoke and the orange-colored air created a surrealistic scene right out of Hollywood.
I was in a tense encounter that day in the al-Shaab section of northeast Baghdad. At least two missiles had hit a downscale commercial district, killing civilians. I was surrounded by an angry crowd shouting, “Allahu Akbar,” which is Arabic for “God is greater” but is customarily translated as “God is greatest.”
The demonstrators could see I was a reporter because I was carrying a camera and a notebook, but they didn’t know I was an American. I put on my best Egyptian accent, making sure to pronounce js like gs, and used colloquial expressions the Iraqis would recognize from Egyptian TV shows and movies. The toughest barb came from a man who had the Arab genius for rhetorical questions: “If Americans didn’t want to hit civilians, why did they hit civilians?” I suggested the strike was a mistake. All shook their heads, reflecting an attitude common among Arabs. They distrusted the American government but had absolute faith in American technology. For Iraqis who had seen cruise missiles turn corners to hit government buildings, it was inconceivable that al-Shaab could have been an accident.
That night, American and British warplanes finally bombed the Information Ministry. The Palestine now became the press’s HQ—where we broadcast from, where we ate, where we slept. The hotel’s Orient Express restaurant served the same meal every night: overcooked spaghetti with oily tomato sauce, broiled chicken, and soggy stewed zucchini. If this had been a subsistence war zone, I would have been grateful for the meals, but every day I passed markets brimming with ripe tomatoes, eggplant, fresh meat and poultry, and every kind of fruit imaginable. The Palestine was like a sleepover party with execrable catering, bombs exploding outside, and wary friends. All told at this point of the war, about a hundred foreign reporters, cameramen, and photographers were there, along with fifty minders.
Ali and I had a close call at a telephone exchange that had been destroyed by American bombs. Ba’ath Party members carrying Kalashnikovs surrounded us within minutes. They confiscated my press card and Ali’s papers. To my surprise, the usually shy Ali was defiant, telling them I was a properly credentialed journalist and, by the tone of his voice, that they should buzz off. They said they were going to take us to a police station, and Iraqi security headquarters was the last place I wanted to be at this stage of the conflict.
I protested again that I was an American journalist. “If I see an American here on the streets of Baghdad, I could kill him,” the leader of the group said. I replied that if he killed me, no one would tell the Iraqi people’s story except reporters embedded with US ground forces. Then he asked if I really tried to tell the truth, and I responded with an Arab-style rhetorical question: “If I didn’t want to talk to Iraqis and tell the world what they were thinking, then why would I be out on the streets—in Iraq, during wartime—talking to you?” He was trapped in his own argument. He let us go, and I mumbled to myself, “Al-hamdu lillah”—Thank God.
I was sick by now. I hadn’t been getting much sleep, and my stomach—because of stress, the smoke in the air, and generally dirty conditions—was in turmoil. I also had a hacking cough that prevented me from finishing an interview with Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s deputy prime minister. When the session broke up, Aziz handed me a glass of water, which I could barely hold. “American biological weapon,” I joked to Aziz and his aide. We all laughed and I fell into another coughing fit as they left.
This sort of chummy attitude with officials from an enemy government proved the undoing of Peter Arnett a few days later. He had covered the first Gulf War so was in a better position than any other journalist to report on the invasion. But then
he gave an interview to Iraqi state television in which he said the US war plan hadn’t worked and questioned whether the American people supported the war. It was a propaganda bonanza for the Iraqis, and NBC fired Arnett a few hours later. Arnett told me the interview had been a case of bad judgment. “Richard, all I can say to you is be careful.”
I felt badly for Arnett, who was rebuilding his career after he had been reprimanded by CNN in 1998 for a report he couldn’t substantiate that US soldiers in Laos had used sarin gas in 1970 as part of Operation Tailwind. After he left, I was the last American television correspondent in Baghdad. I understood why most journalists left before the bombing began. What I’ve never quite grasped is why the networks didn’t weigh the risks beforehand. Instead they spent millions preparing to cover the war from Baghdad only to pull out at the last minute.
In the days after the sandstorm, I could only hear the air war. The bombs thudding around Baghdad were in a blind spot—too far away for me to see, and far out of earshot of the reporters embedded with US troops. The Pentagon said at the time that it was going after the Republican Guards who had encircled the city, but I never felt the military told the full story of the bombings. In all likelihood, many of the Iraqi casualties occurred in these off-camera attacks.
The thunder of the bombs was a constant reminder that it was just a matter of time before US tanks rumbled down Sadoon Street, Baghdad’s main thoroughfare. I was beginning to worry that my safe houses weren’t really safe. I came across a Sudanese television crew that had escaped the notice of the Information Ministry and had a house only a block away from the Palestine. They said I could stay with them in case of trouble. I wasn’t sure their place was safe either, but it had the virtue of being close and easy to run to.
And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East Page 7