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

by Engel, Richard

  Sadr sent his Mahdi Army into the streets, the first large-scale Shia revolt since the US invasion. Sadr wasn’t listening to the more cautious Grand Ayatollah Sistani. At the same time, Sunnis were facing up to the loss of their monopoly on power and privilege. US troops for the first time were facing threats from both the Shiites they’d help bring to power and the Sunnis they’d displaced. The United States was now in the middle of a civil war. Three days after Sadr’s Shia newspaper closed, Sunni gunmen in Fallujah, which had become the center of Sunni resistance, ambushed four American security contractors. Crowds pulled them from their SUVs, dragged them through the streets, doused them with gasoline, and set them ablaze.

  Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Sunni jihadist of astonishing savagery, was already conducting a murderous bombing campaign, killing twenty-two at Baghdad’s Canal Hotel in August 2003, including the UN special envoy to Iraq. He killed upward of 180 Iraqis in March 2004 in bombing attacks at Shia shrines in Karbala and Baghdad.

  To achieve his goal of rivaling or surpassing Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi apparently decided that something more theatrical was needed to raise his macabre profile. On April 10, Nick Berg, a twenty-six-year-old freelance construction contractor from suburban Philadelphia, went missing in Iraq. He ended up in Zarqawi’s hands to be used for what can be considered ISIS’s first beheading video. Wearing a ski mask, Zarqawi stood behind Berg, unsheathed a butcher’s knife, grabbed Berg by the hair, and sliced his neck as the American let out an agonizing scream. Zarqawi kept sawing away until he severed Berg’s head, which he held up like a trophy. Zarqawi’s group wasn’t called ISIS then. The group would change names seven times over the next decade, but bloodlust and the strategic use of macabre videos would remain central to its group identity.

  Zarqawi picked up the tempo of atrocities as 2004 wore on. He bombed Shia mosques during midday prayers, killed the odd government official, blew up Iraqis signing up for jobs in the army, and assassinated Shia clerics at a rate of two a week.

  After the shuttering of the Hawza and the growing Sunni insurgency, it was open season on journalists. My NBC team started traveling in convoys of two vehicles or more so we would have a getaway car in case one was hit or broke down.

  The bombing at the Australian embassy signaled that 2005 would be the year that the insurgency moved into full swing. The much-hyped parliamentary elections were scheduled for January 30. To hear American officials tell it, all Iraqis had to do was drop ballots into boxes and their miseries would be over. The country was abuzz over this supposed gift of freedom.

  Trouble was, almost no one—including American officials; Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, the interim leader handpicked by the United States; and the UN, which organized the elections—saw how the political deck could be stacked. But Sistani and the hawza, a web of Shiite seminaries and clerics after which the radical Shiite newspaper was named, understood that it was a simple matter of turnout. Their ground game left nothing to chance: they told fellow Shiites that casting ballots was a religious duty. The Sunnis, feeling embittered and betrayed by what they saw as America’s favoritism toward the Shiites, decided to boycott the voting. The decision would cut Sunnis off from power, alienate them, and play into the hands of fanatics like Zarqawi, but the boycott did have a certain logic to it. Sunnis had watched US forces topple their patron, Saddam Hussein, disband their beloved army, and watched the United States organize a vote that, because of their majority, could only help Shiites even more. Sunnis decided they didn’t want to play the American game and would opt out. Under ordinary circumstances, an election probably would be fatally tainted if about a third of the population, including most members of one religious group, stayed away from the polls. But Washington didn’t seem to care. It was enough that the elections took place as planned. It looked like democracy.

  In the run-up to the voting, bin Laden anointed Zarqawi the “emir of Iraq,” which made him the jihadist equivalent of a capo in the Mafia. Zarqawi reciprocated by renaming his group “al-Qaeda in Iraq.” He also correctly predicted that the hated Shiites would carry the vote and “form a majority government that would control the strategic, economic, and security infrastructure of the state.”

  A curfew was imposed a week before the elections, and the turnout was high among Shiites. “Only” fifty Iraqis died while millions cast their ballots. Iraqis holding up their fingers stained with purple ink made for great TV. We had what looked like a good-news story for once. But it was only superficial. In truth, the elections laid the foundation for a long, drawn-out civil war.

  One of my best sources told me that Sunni radicals had decided to form their own parallel state in response to the vote, with Zarqawi as president. It would be “an Islamic state with sharia as the law and the Koran as the constitution.” The source said the insurgents were imposing their fiercely intolerant brand of Islam within days of the voting. Iraq was now one country divided into three nations, which I called Shiastan, Kurdistan, and Jihadistan.

  After the bombing of the Australian embassy, I had begun sleeping on the floor, with my mattress flipped up on its side to serve as a shield. Because of the danger and the expense—and diminishing interest in the Iraq war in Europe—the number of people chronicling the conflict had shrunk dramatically. Gone were the filmmakers and the freelancers sitting by the Hamra’s pool, the stringers in string bikinis. It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to support a full Baghdad bureau with armored cars, bodyguards, satellite phones, and local staff—too expensive for anyone except the large American television networks and major newspapers and magazines.

  Life in Baghdad was dangerous but not entirely dreary. One night in March 2005, about thirty of the remaining Westerners put on a bash at the Hamra’s Chinese restaurant. We were all young and single, or about to be single—emotional casualties of the conflict. The music was loud and we drank and danced a lot.

  In this mostly grumpy and cynical crowd, Marla Ruzicka was a ray of sunshine. She was one of the few humanitarian workers left in the country, bouncing around the news bureaus to use the Internet and phones when we weren’t busy. Ruzicka was tirelessly lobbying the US military to pay compensation to the families of civilians killed in the fighting.

  Ruzicka and I left the party together and went to my room. It was one of the last times I saw her alive. She was killed by a suicide bomber a few weeks later on the way back from Camp Victory, the US military’s headquarters at Baghdad’s airport. When US soldiers reached her, she was so badly burned that only a tuft of her blond hair remained. “I’m American, and I’m still alive,” she told the soldiers. They tried to medevac her back to Camp Victory, but she died on the way.

  I was emotionally flattened by her death. I kept seeing images of her in my hotel room, drinking cheap Lebanese wine and talking about life, love, and Iraq. I begged off doing the story on her death. I just couldn’t reduce her to a two-minute news package, so another correspondent filed the report. Back in my room, I cried for the first time since I arrived in Iraq.

  On May 3, 2005, three months after the parliamentary elections, Iraq’s parliament finally swore in an elected prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, although the vote that brought him to power had clearly been flawed. His appointed predecessor, Ayad Allawi, had been an unabashed strongman. Jaafari was anything but. A small, soft-spoken man with friendly eyes, he was a Shiite scholar, an intellectual, and a sayyid, a descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, who preferred business suits to the black turban he was entitled to wear because of his bloodline. Jaafari had been the leader of an opposition party that had tried to kill Saddam. But by now Iraq was a jumbled mix of religious hatred with a large foreign occupying force, and it would prove impossible to govern.

  When the curfew was lifted a week after the elections, the hunting season against journalists opened in earnest. I gathered the NBC team to go to a background briefing in the Green Zone on the new government, the governmental center of America’s Coalition Provisional Authority. I pulled on
my blue flak jacket and grabbed a notebook. Our British bodyguards checked the tires, gas, guns, and radios. I sat in the backseat of the lead car, an armored Jeep Cherokee. A chase car was twenty feet behind.

  The British driver, incongruously named Bunny, noticed a BMW on our tail. It was weaving into traffic, pulling up close, then dropping back. “Somebody’s playing with us,” he announced, and we went on high alert.

  Another bodyguard, who appropriately enough was riding shotgun, loaded his AK-47 and put it on his lap. The BMW, which was carrying four men, suddenly pulled up next to us, probably to see if we were worth kidnapping. With their fast and slow driving, they were trying to see how many cars were with us and how we’d react to an ambush. My stomach turned sour with adrenaline and fear.

  Bunny swerved into the BMW, trying to ram it off us. But the BMW was much more nimble than our armor-laden Jeep. It raced ahead and cut us off. A second car, a white Toyota, moved in from the rear, trapping us in between. The two cars then tried to squeeze us to the right, onto an off-ramp that would have put us in a run-down area where we would have been sitting ducks.

  But Bunny had other ideas. He took a hard right and made as if we were trying to escape. It was a bluff. The BMW followed us, then Bunny hit the brakes, made an almost ninety-degree turn back toward the road, drove across the outgoing lanes, and jumped a center divider into oncoming traffic on the other side. He was going about eighty miles an hour and weaving between cars coming directly at us.

  After several hundred yards, we finally reached a traffic circle that allowed Bunny to get with the traffic flow going in the correct direction. Then we spotted a third car gaining on us from the rear. Bunny hit the gas and sped back toward the bureau. The third car finally gave up the chase only when we drove up to the gate leading to the Hamra.

  * * *

  THE NEW GOVERNMENT THAT TOOK office in May 2005 lived up to the Sunnis’ worst fears. It was composed of former enemies of Saddam’s Sunni regime, along with allies of Washington and the hawza.

  The spring and summer of 2005 were a nightmare of murders, bombings, shootings, and kidnappings. Each day had the same bloody rhythm: mortars at dawn, car bombs by 11:00 a.m., drive-by shootings before tea, and mortars again at dusk. At night the death squads went to work.

  Aside from the uprising by Muqtada al-Sadr, it was still a mostly one-sided civil war. The Sunnis, who had boycotted the elections, were determined to punish the Shiites and their American backers. Although there were intense battles in parts of Baghdad and in southern Iraq between US troops and the Mahdi Army, many Shiites refused to follow Sadr into war with the Americans. They agreed with the patient Grand Ayatollah Sistani that the US invasion was the biggest boost to Shiite empowerment in the region for decades, if not centuries. Sunni extremists, many of them loyal to Zarqawi, attacked American soldiers and Marines and Shiites everywhere—in mosques, markets, even at funerals.

  They kidnapped and executed 150 Shiites in mid-April in Madaen, a town twenty miles south of Baghdad. That same week in Baghdad, there were fourteen car bombs, forty-two roadside bombs, and twenty-two shootings. The week after that, at least fifty-eight members of the Iraqi security forces, eighteen Western contractors, ten US soldiers, and one journalist were killed. The US military reported seventy attacks a day in Iraq. I was jittery and wired, and most of all strangely detached. I was deep into stage three, with inklings of stage four.

  On August 31, as Hurricane Katrina was dissipating north of New Orleans, leaving devastation in its wake, Baghdad suffered its deadliest day yet. Several hundred thousand Shiites gathered in the ancient Kazimiya quarter in northern Baghdad for the annual pilgrimage to honor the eighth-century martyr Musa al-Kazim, one of the twelve imams believed to be rightful descendants of Ali.

  To get to Kazim’s tomb, pilgrims crossed the Imma Bridge, a three-hundred-yard span that rose thirty feet above the Tigris. As they crossed that morning, the pilgrims were packed together so tightly that they could only advance by inches. Many were lost in religious ecstasy, crying and beating their chests to mourn the imam, whom Shiites believe was executed by Sunnis in 799.

  Then someone cried out, “Suicide bomber!” The crowd panicked. In the ensuing stampede, terrified pilgrims ran in both directions, many colliding in the middle of the bridge. A side railing collapsed under their weight, and scores leaped into the water whether they could swim or not. Hundreds were trampled to death. More than a thousand died. Hundreds of pairs of sandals were scattered around the bridge, left behind when pilgrims made their desperate dives into the river. I was given all of seventy-five seconds to tell the story on the Nightly News.

  Over the summer, Iraq descended into anarchy. I coped by spending six or eight weeks in Baghdad, then taking ten days off to go scuba diving. I never minded going back. Sometimes I wondered whether the war was warping me into a man my old friends wouldn’t recognize.

  At 8:12 a.m. on November 18, 2005, a white minivan pulled alongside the Hamra’s blast barriers. When the van exploded, it blew a hole in the blast wall wide enough for the water truck that was following closely behind to drive through. The truck was packed with enough explosives to bring down the hotel and kill us all. But the attackers had put too much explosives in the minivan, so when it exploded it formed a ten-foot-deep crater in the street. The water truck fell into the crater, which shielded the hotel from the worst of the blast. Even so, the NBC bureau was a mess. Computers, desks, and televisions were all smashed.

  I was in Thailand, scuba diving, when the attack took place. I rushed back to the bureau and found that we had a personnel crisis. Producers and correspondents balked at coming to Baghdad anymore. Many of our London-based correspondents, who rotated through Baghdad most frequently, decided it had become too dangerous.

  ABC was already facing a lawsuit by one of its former London-based correspondents, Richard Gizbert, who claimed he had been fired for refusing to go into the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. Gizbert was the father of two children and had covered the fighting in Herzegovina and Chechnya. That was enough for him. ABC claimed his refusal had no bearing on his dismissal, but a London court disagreed and gave him a $100,000 settlement. The decision and award were reversed in 2006.

  While NBC never pressured me to stay, I gave the network an easy way to avoid a similar mess. I liked the Baghdad bureau and was willing to keep coming back. Just as police and fire sirens reminded New Yorkers they were home, the sound of car bombs reminded me I was in Baghdad, which had become home for me. I was like a battered wife who can’t leave the man abusing her. I had moved into stage four and assumed, as a matter of math, that I was going to die in Baghdad. But still I wanted to stay.

  The Constitution of Iraq was ratified on October 15, 2005, which left only one step in the US plan for bringing democracy to the country: the December 15 election of a permanent, 275-member Iraq Council of Representatives. The first election had been to select a committee to write the constitution and a prime minister to oversee the transitional period. This vote was to elect a parliament to run the country. The voting system had been adjusted to give more weight to the Sunnis, who planned to participate this time.

  Sunnis expected to win 40–60 percent of the vote, which was unrealistic. Because of their long years in power, and their grandiose sense of entitlement, some Sunnis were convinced they comprised a majority of Iraqis, a self-deceiving mythology of arithmetic. They wound up with only 21 percent of the vote. They said the election was a fraud and blamed Iran, their ancient Persian and Shiite enemy, for rigging the vote. To them, Iran was the invisible hand, aiding its favorite Shia candidates. Zarqawi’s group lashed out at fellow Sunnis for voting this time, accusing them of legitimizing a Shiite project cooked up by Iran and Washington.

  Stressed-out by a year of violence and by covering the elections, journalists at the Hamra threw a New Year’s Eve bacchanalia, drinking to excess, dancing wildly, and knocking over any furniture that got in the way. Two American reporters, from the
same newspaper, started kissing at midnight and didn’t stop until dawn. I danced a lot with Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter who wrote most of her pieces for the Christian Science Monitor. She was young, attractive, and idealistic—and one of the few freelancers left in Baghdad. She traveled alone with her translator, and many of us warned her that she was an easy target for kidnappers. A week later she disappeared. She was blessedly released, unharmed, after three months in captivity.

  I may have been in stage four, but I wasn’t completely crazy. At least eighty-six journalists had been killed in Iraq, more than in any other conflict since World War II, and another thirty-eight had been taken hostage. More would die in the years to come. I knew I had to limit my movements and take special care when I did go out. If I had to do an interview, I would first send an advance team of local toughs in black leather jackets to take GPS coordinates and map out possible escape routes. I also devised a beat system for our Iraqi staffers: One covered politicians, police, and hospitals. Another tracked Sunni insurgents and their activity on the Web. My trusted friend Ali took the Mahdi Army and Sadr City, a Shiite slum in Baghdad, because he was a fellow Shiite and lived nearby.

  * * *

  ON THE EVENING OF June 7, 2006, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed by US Special Forces in a small cinder-block farmhouse in a village forty miles north of Baghdad. The troops had tracked Zarqawi’s deputy, Abu Abdul Rahman, to the farmhouse, and an informant from Zarqawi’s inner circle called US commanders to confirm that the al-Qaeda leader was inside.

  Within minutes, two F-16 jets dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs on the farmhouse, demolishing the building and digging a twenty-foot-deep crater in the soft black soil beneath it. Zarqawi was still breathing after the airstrike. The blast threw him against a wall, breaking his leg, and into an adjacent field. He was put on a stretcher by US troops and reportedly died when he tried to move and was restrained. Rahman was among five others who were killed.