The power went out in Baghdad on April 3, and the mood of the city changed markedly. Residents finally faced up to the fact that an invading force was closing in. Stores and restaurants were locked tight, and the streets were virtually empty. I tried to stay outside as much as possible because I was nervous that the concentration of Westerners at the Palestine made an inviting target if Saddam decided to take hostages. I went to the market stalls to buy batteries, water jugs, and food, but I wasn’t good for much else. The constant work and stress had left me exhausted. I was so wiped out that I slept through an appearance on Nightline. On April 4, I wrote in my journal, “There were many blank looks on people’s faces. Baghdad is now a city without life.” I probably had a blank look myself.
As it happened, April 4, 2003, was a decisive day. The US Army captured Baghdad International Airport after several hours of fierce fighting. Along with Umm Qasr in the south, this was one of the two times that the Iraqis had put up stiff resistance. Hundreds of Iraqis were killed in the fight. The US Army turned the airport into one of its main bases of operations in the capital.
The next day, the Americans conducted “thunder runs” with armored vehicles racing through the city to test Iraqi resistance.
On the morning of April 6, I was awakened by the sound of breaking glass. At first I thought a bomb had exploded nearby, but then I saw a beam of light showing through a hole in the curtain covering the sliding door of my balcony. Someone had fired a round through my room, probably from street level; I could see where the bullet had lodged in the ceiling. I was confident that no one had been targeting me specifically, that it was just part of the growing mayhem. But I wasn’t taking any chances. I moved from the fourteenth floor to another room I had rented on the twelfth.
Baghdad is divided in two by the Tigris. The US Army captured the western half of the city on April 7 while the Marines were fighting their way toward the eastern half—my half. The army couldn’t cross the Tigris without the Marines because they would be spread too thin and risk getting cut off from the airport from the rear.
The war came to Baghdad most dramatically on April 8. The night of shock and awe early in the invasion had been spectacular, but it had a disembodied character that made it seem almost like going to the movies. On the eighth the military display was every bit as awesome, but the killing was being done by human hands in close combat. Tanks, automatic weapons, attack helicopters, and the A-10 Warthog attack fighter with its terrifying Gatling gun turned a city of 5 million into a battlefield.
The day was notable for two other reasons. It was the end of the Saddam regime as I had known it. Abu Annas and all the other minders left the Palestine Hotel that morning, never to be seen again. Uday al-Ta’e and his mercurial boss, Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, stayed until the end, but they were cut off from the regime and, in al-Sahhaf’s case, detached from reality. It was also the day that the Third Infantry’s tanks fired on the Palestine, killing two cameramen. A subsequent inquiry cleared the tankers and their superior of any wrongdoing, but I will always believe the decision to fire was reckless. The Palestine was on the Pentagon’s list of protected sites, and the hotel was too far away—approximately a mile—to pose any danger to the tank.
The Marines finally arrived on April 9, cautiously fanning out from their tanks. Within a quarter hour, a crowd of curious Iraqis cautiously approached them. Some of the Iraqis at the front were bare chested and waved their white undershirts to show they didn’t mean any harm.
This group of about two hundred people started pulling down Saddam’s statue. They tied a rope around Saddam’s neck but couldn’t budge the mammoth statue, which was anchored in cement. Two blocks away, a company of Marines watched and waited. Doubtless aware that a large television audience was watching back home, they finally drove a Marine tank rescue vehicle—an armored personnel carrier with a crane to drag away damaged vehicles—to the base of the statue.
Several Iraqis jumped on the vehicle as a Marine looped a chain around the statue’s neck. The atmosphere was electric, almost like a carnival, when the Marines pulled down the statue and Iraqis slapped their shoes on Saddam’s effigy, a profoundly insulting gesture in the Arab world. Ali raced around capturing these iconic images on my handheld camera.
The Marines first covered the statue with an American flag, but quickly understood that this sent the wrong message and replaced it with an Iraqi flag. I put several Marines on camera as the crowd, composed of Shiite Muslims, chanted, “Yes to freedom and the fall of dictatorship!” Freedom and dictatorship fortuitously rhyme in Arabic. But they also yelled, “Remember and love Sadr,” a reference to an influential Shiite cleric who had been killed by Saddam’s agents in 1999.
I knew at once this was an ominous sign and said so in a live report on ABC: “As for the future of Iraq, about 60 percent of the population are Shiites, and the government of Saddam Hussein was Sunni. The Shiites in this group here are saying they want the next government to be a Shiite government, and they hope the Americans are going to support them. So this will be a tricky maze to navigate during the next period.”
Saddam Hussein was finally hunted down on December 13, 2003. His feral sons, Uday and Qusay, had been killed by US forces five months earlier. I thought it was brave to remove Saddam and his horrific system of government, and I would have considered it just and even noble if it had been the main reason for invading Iraq. He certainly had enough blood on his hands. His regime had murdered thousands—hundreds of thousands if you included those who died in the ultimately pointless and victor-less war with Iran that lasted from 1980 to 1988. Another thirty thousand died in the Gulf War waged by the United States and thirty-three other nations in 1991 to reverse Iraq’s military annexation of Kuwait. But as time passed I grew increasingly skeptical that the United States had a plan to manage Iraq. The Americans arrived with decisiveness and purpose but then seemed to improvise everything else. It was as if there was no plan at all to deal with Iraq after invading it. I was also suspicious of Washington’s changing explanations as to why it went to war in the first place. President Bush’s administration said the primary casus belli was destroying Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to not be real but were seized upon by political hawks. The secondary reason offered up was that the war was needed to stamp out the Iraqi regime’s links to international terrorists, who only arrived in numbers after it became clear there would be a US invasion. Later the administration said it invaded Iraq to bring democracy and protect human rights. The casus belli was a moving target.
Back in the States, many people saw the capture of Saddam (he was hanged on December 30, 2006) as the end of the war. What it really was, although few appreciated it at the time, was the end of a chapter. The war lay ahead. To the chagrin of the United States—the president and Congress, military leaders, the general public—America would be stuck in Iraq for eight more years and the impact will still be felt for years to come. Saddam was the first of the Arab big men to go. He was knocked off his perch by Washington, which was odd since it was Washington that supported him in the war with Iran and chose not to remove him even after he invaded Kuwait. President Bush decided Saddam Hussein had to go to make way for the fantasy garden of democracy he wanted to plant in the Middle East. Saddam was one of the key leaders, horrible and brutal with psychopaths for children, who’d been holding up the house of the Middle East safeguarded by the United States since World War II. The others: Mubarak, Gadhafi, Ben Ali, and the Assad family, would soon face major challenges of their own. Their fall would unleash the religious fanaticism and ethnic hatred they’d been simultaneously containing and creating because of their horrific mismanagement, brutality, and corruption. The big men had incentives to both contain and maintain a permanent enemy. The dictators claimed that without them in charge, Muslim fundamentalists would take over. It would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
FOUR
I SAW THE BLAST IN my sleep, an orange flash so bright that it pa
ssed through my eyelids. My room at the Hamra Hotel in Baghdad was filled with smoke and dust and shards of glass. Several ceiling panels had crashed to the floor, and the door to the balcony had been ripped off its frame. A sharp piece of shrapnel about the size of an egg was melting the synthetic fibers of the cheap industrial carpet. I crept to the balcony and looked outside. Across the street I saw the twisted remains of a truck bomb outside the Australian embassy. Several cars were on fire.
Since I’d arrived in Iraq, I had been keeping a video journal, turning the camera on myself at emotional moments. I reached for the small camera and pointed it at my unshaven, tired, and wild-eyed face. It was January 19, 2005. My voice was shaky:
“When the explosions happened, I thought . . . finally this was it, that they had blown up a bomb in the basement. I thought when it exploded that—that they had done what they had been threatening to do.” Which was to blow up our hotel. For Sunni fanatics, anyone was fair game—soldiers, policemen, women and children, journalists.
I had been gung ho when I came to Iraq nearly two years before. I felt bulletproof. But the constant gunshots, explosions, fear of kidnapping, dead bodies, the memory of a stray dog carrying a severed human head between its teeth—the savagery of it all had worn me down to a psychological nub. Too much adrenaline had coursed through my veins. I’d had too many bad mornings.
I looked back into the video camera. “Am I just lucky so far, and how much can you push your luck? When do you decide that this is just not worth it? . . . I am still cheating death. . . . It feels like you are trying to pull a fast one on history, that you are trying to get away with it, get out, sneak out, get information, and get back without being kidnapped or losing an eye or a limb.
“Today with this explosion, I got away with another little bit . . . but how many more times can you get away with it? I don’t know.”
I knew I was becoming paranoid. I saw danger everywhere. I had tied an escape rope to a drainage pipe off the balcony of my room at the Hamra. I would be ready if trouble came. I started dreaming, sometimes when I was sleeping but mostly when I was awake, about how I would be remembered if I got killed. Would I be reduced to a mention on the Nightly News, of interest for half a news cycle? Or if it was a slow week, a very slow week, maybe I’d be a three-day story?
Reporters go through four stages in a war zone. In the first stage, you’re Superman, invincible. In the second, you’re aware that things are dangerous and you need to be careful. In the third, you conclude that math and probability are working against you. In the fourth, you know you’re going to die because you’ve played the game too long.
I was drifting into stage three. I couldn’t connect with friends back home, and I couldn’t relate to my wife. She couldn’t understand why I wanted to stay in this awful place where people spent their days killing one another. She believed that life was for living and creating a family. Our marriage had been tottering for a year, and now we had decided to get a divorce.
My stage three jitters began nine months before, in April 2004, about a year after I left my contract job at ABC and signed on as a full-time correspondent at NBC. Instead of focusing on my personal life, I did what many men and women do, I buried myself in work. I read as much as I could about the Sunni and Shiite conflict. The more I read, the more concerned I became about what the United States had embarked upon. Washington had opened a Pandora’s box that went back more than thirteen hundred years, to the schism over who would be the first caliph after the death of Mohammed.
One faction believed that the Prophet, lacking a male heir, designated his cousin and son-in-law Ali to carry on his work. His followers—the shiat of Ali, the “party” or “faction” of Ali—came to be known as Shiites. They believe that the inner meaning of the Koran can only be understood by intense study, and that members of the Prophet’s family, the sayyids, are especially attuned to the message that Allah handed down to one of their own.
The other faction believes that caliphs should be chosen by consensus. They practice what is generally called an “orthodox” form of Islam, strictly following the words and sunna, or traditions, of Mohammed. They became known as Sunnis and now account for about 85–90 percent of Muslims in the world. Hard-line Sunnis don’t even consider Shiite Muslims monotheists because they also worship Ali and his son Hussein (Ali’s son by Fatima, who was Mohammed’s daughter).
The faction we now call Sunnis prevailed in the selection of the first caliph, Abu Bakr, father of one of Mohammed’s wives. Ali got his chance after the third caliph, Uthman, a venerated figure in Islam because he codified the Koran, was murdered by Egyptian extremists. Ali at first declined to follow Uthman as caliph, but Shia supporters prevailed on him to change his mind. He ruled the caliphate from the Iraqi city of Kufa near Najaf.
Ali faced two implacable enemies. In the north was the governor of Syria, Mu’awiyya, one of Uthman’s relatives; in the south was one of Mohammed’s widows, Aisha, who was also aggrieved by the death of Uthman. Ali, just like Uthman before him, was murdered in 661 by an extremist, allowing Mu’awiyya to quickly seize the caliphate and found Islam’s first royal-like dynasty, the Umayyads, based in Damascus.
What began as a hereditary dispute was about to turn forever bloody. In 680, Ali’s son Hussein raised a small army and set out to avenge his father. He confronted the forces of Yazid, Mu’awiyya’s son and the second Umayyad caliph, on the plains of Karbala, an Iraqi city about forty-five miles northwest of Najaf. What happened that day still lives vividly in the Shia imagination and explains the tension between Shiites and Sunnis, played out over a millennium in bloody encounters between the two sects.
Yazid’s soldiers surrounded Hussein’s tiny force of seventy-two now-legendary fighters. According to Shia tradition, Hussein and his men were slaughtered after a valiant fight. Yazid’s soldiers beheaded Hussein and carried his head to Damascus. Reconciliation was now out of the question.
Shiites commemorate Hussein’s death every year in Karbala, with an elaborate reenactment and crowds approaching 2 million. Their sense of grievance is exacerbated by their minority status in the Muslim world, where they represent a majority only in Iran (90–95 percent of the population), Iraq (60–65 percent), and Bahrain (60–70 percent).
That Saddam Hussein was a Sunni, a despot from a minority sect who reserved power and patronage for fellow Sunnis and who had slaughtered many thousands of Shiites, explains why the American invasion represented much more than the toppling of a tyrant. For the Shiites, it was both a political victory and a moment of religious ecstasy. The Americans, they believed, had helped complete Hussein’s seventh-century mission and would eventually return them to power.
The shameless looting in April 2003 after the United States captured Baghdad showed that the United States faced enormous challenges in bringing democracy to Iraq, a backward, somewhat isolated country mainly known to Americans for the depredations of Saddam Hussein, its eight-year bloodbath with Iran, and its military collapse during the Gulf War in 1991.
Few associated it with their elementary-school lessons on the glories of Mesopotamia, “the cradle of civilization,” between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
On May 23, 2003, came the fateful decision by America’s special envoy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, to dissolve Iraq’s army. Bremer issued his decree only a day after informing President Bush and the National Security Council, reportedly catching many high officials by surprise.
The decree, part of an effort to remove Saddam’s Ba’ath Party from Iraq’s politics, guaranteed the enmity of the country’s military men, most of them Sunnis, who had enjoyed prestige and job security under Saddam. To the Sunnis, de-Ba’athification amounted to de-Sunnification. So it was not surprising that these men mainly from the military, who American officials called “regime dead-enders,” set about inciting Iraqi Sunnis and foreign jihadists to attack Shiites and Americans.
The Shiites remained preternaturally patient, largely at the behest of thei
r most senior cleric, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who urged them to turn the other cheek. He had his eye on history. He remembered the mistakes of 1920, when Shiites led the successful revolt against the British only to see the Sunnis seize power. If the Shiites caused problems now, he believed, they would risk losing out again.
In any case, Iraqis were only briefly grateful to the Americans. The Sunnis were aggrieved, and the Shiites were itching to run the political show. Instead of becoming a beacon of democracy, Iraq turned into a political mosh pit. Upward of two hundred parties sprang up, each with its own disgruntled constituents. After two decades of submissive silence, Iraqis seemed to whine about everything, and the Americans were handy whipping boys.
US officials seemed stunned by the primitiveness of the place. Knowing that the Iraqi power grid would have to be rebuilt after the war, the military had been judicious in selecting targets, but then looters stole copper wires, switches, and other integral equipment—and the Iraqis blamed the Americans for not quickly switching the lights back on. The US military was untrained and unprepared to be Iraq’s policeman. Abrams tanks were no help combating the lawlessness in Baghdad, which was recording seven hundred murders a month, fourteen times the number in New York City.
At first, we journalists could move around Iraq relatively freely. Ordinary Iraqis were eager to tell us about the brutality of Saddam’s regime, sometimes pulling up their shirts to show us the purple scars left by tortures in his gulags.
Then came what seemed to be a trivial provocation. On March 28, 2004, US soldiers shut down the Hawza, a radical Shia newspaper, for printing lies, rumors, and incitements. It was the personal megaphone of Muqtada al-Sadr, a pudgy, utterly unprepossessing thirty-year-old Shia cleric with a hot head and a potent family name. His father and father-in-law were prominent ayatollahs. Both were assassinated by Saddam’s regime, in 1980 and 1999, and they became known as “the first martyr” and “the second martyr.” The “Remember and love Sadr” chants on the tank recovery vehicle pulling down Saddam’s statue were, as I suspected, a sign of things to come.
And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East Page 8