Small Wars Permitting

by Christina Lamb

  ‘The war’s about to start and you’re having your nails done!’ he shouted.

  ‘What else am I going to do?’ I laughed.

  The war did indeed start that night – Thursday, 20 March – with a rocket attack on a bunker in Baghdad said to harbour Saddam and his two sons. This was followed up the next day with ‘Shock-and-Awe’. On TV I watched the tremendous explosions sending up red fire into the skies of Baghdad and was glad I wasn’t there.

  That night my colleague Jonathan Calvert and I packed up our jeep with all the supplies we had bought, as well as jerry cans of petrol and crates of bottled water. Sleep was interrupted by endless air-raid warnings. Short sirens signified missiles like Scuds, while a long whining signal meant a gas attack, in which case we were supposed to put on gas masks and run to a basement shelter by the kitchens. The first time I complied, but my room was in a villa a long walk from the main hotel so, by the time I got to the shelter, the warning was over. The second time I started running then turned back. The printed notice in the villa said, ‘Find a basement or ground room with no windows’ but my room was on an upper floor reached by an outside staircase with no access to the ground floor. The third time, I just stayed in bed. Mostly I watched TV – the coalition was claiming that they had already captured the southern port of Umm Qasr.

  It was hard to drag myself away from the Hilton’s crisp white cotton sheets. But at 4 a.m. on Saturday morning we set off towards the border, clad in our military overalls and followed by the car of some Portuguese friends, Candida Pinto and José Cyrne from TV channel SIC. We had timed our departure so that we would be going through the main checkpoints at prayer time when the Kuwaiti guards would be occupied.

  The dawn was grey and the highway through the desert bleak and windblown. Soon we were out of sight of the modern buildings and refineries of Kuwait City and on Mutla Ridge, a low escarpment of drifting sands and wire fences where several of our colleagues had been turned back. It was an eerie place that had become known as the Highway of Death during the first Gulf War when fleeing Iraqi troops were trapped on it in February 1991 and left at the mercy of US warplanes. Hundreds were killed and reporters described seeing the road littered with wreckage frozen mid-battle.

  At the border our luck ran out. We were turned back by US marines and joined the many other cars of journalists who’d been holed up in the car park all night, some for days. I was not sure how we were going to cross – others said they were going to try driving along the border fence as there were rumoured to be some holes. Candida and José set up their camping stove and started brewing coffee. I envied their insouciance.

  Suddenly I noticed a huge American convoy approaching. Amongst the hundreds of tanks, trucks and armoured personnel carriers (APCs), some painted with skulls and crossbones and names such as ‘Road to Paradise’ and ‘Size Matters’, there were also a few dark-blue Land Cruisers like ours, probably carrying Special Forces. This was our chance. ‘Quick!’ I shouted.

  The Portuguese wanted to drink their coffee so we left them behind and drove off, managing to insert ourselves between a tank and an APC. The gunner in the tank in front looked a bit surprised but we stuck close, figuring they were hardly likely to bring the entire convoy to a halt at that point.

  Where were the flowers, or the jubilant cheers?

  New Statesman, 31 March 2003

  DRESSED IN MILITARY overalls and a camouflage hat from an army-surplus store in downtown Kuwait City, I had sneaked on to the back of an American military convoy entering southern Iraq. As we crossed the border into the dusty flyblown town of Safwan, I looked for the crowds of joyful ‘liberated’ Iraqis rushing forward, waving flags and bearing flowers.

  Instead, some sullen-looking men standing by the roadside gestured angrily with their thumbs down. A few children threw stones at the tanks and one person after another held out their hands in cupping gestures, begging for water. The Stars and Stripes that the marines had taken out on the border so they could fly it from an armoured vehicle was quickly put away.

  Perhaps it is understandable why the people of Safwan might be less than enamoured with their liberators. Every day for the past week, thousands of tanks, armoured vehicles, heavy-artillery batteries and troop-carriers have thundered along its main street, bearing the insignia of the best of British and American fighting machines. It is an awesome sight, and just watching such a display of military might for a few hours made it seem astonishing that even the most fanatical Saddam loyalist could begin to imagine holding it off. Yet no one stopped to give the people any food or water. A local doctor called Ali explained that the town’s supplies of water had been cut off because of air raids on Basra that had disabled the area’s water and sanitation system.

  The convoy I had slipped into was heading for Baghdad as part of the relentless push north-west, so I turned off the road and on to the highway to Basra. The strategic port, which is much dirtier and less romantic than the image one might have of the place from where Sinbad the Sailor set sail, lies just forty miles from the Kuwaiti border. Back in London and Washington, it was being reported that the Pentagon had declared the city was ‘about to fall’; the vital 51st Division had agreed to defect.

  There seemed no reason not to head that way. Not far along under a bridge, a few British military police were guarding two groups of Iraqi prisoners, huddled in makeshift camps of concertina-wire under the hot sun. There were six officers, glaring at us, and roughly thirty soldiers, some of whom were conscripts, judging by their white vests rather than uniforms, their underfed appearance and lack of shoes. Across the road their AK-47s lay destroyed, having been driven over by the British troops then smashed with a sledgehammer.

  I was looking at all this and sharing ginger snaps with the military police when there was the distinct crack of a rifle being fired. ‘Get down!’ shouted the sergeant, pulling me behind the car. I vaguely remembered from my hostile-environment course that engine blocks provide no protection from gunfire.

  We managed to scramble into a nearby pit in the sand and for the next hour there was a tense exchange of fire, soldiers running forward and back, trying to identify the gunman. Dressed in civilian clothes, he and a few others disappeared into the grey dust of the desert. A little later two pick-ups of Iraqis drew up, one bearing a man who had been shot in the back and another with a woman badly wounded in the leg. She said her husband and brother had been killed.

  Yet this was only a few miles along from Umm Qasr, the small border port that we were originally told had been captured on the first night of the war, on 20 March, and at least nine more times since. Deciding the Basra road was too risky, I tried to head that way but was stopped by US marines, who said it was ‘very dangerous’. There was the sound of heavy firing up ahead.

  ‘I thought Umm Qasr had been taken,’ I said.

  ‘Ma’am, it has been secured, but it’s not safe,’ replied the marine.

  That the small port proved so hard to capture, finally being taken after a six-day struggle, did not seem to augur well. Back in Kuwait City – where many locals have a text-messaging service on their mobile phones that alerts them to the latest developments – each time the message came through that Umm Qasr had fallen, people laughed. They laughed too when Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, described the town of 40,000 people as ‘the Southampton of Iraq’.

  This was supposed to be the easy bit. The population of southern Iraq is mainly Shia; the Shias hate Saddam and his Sunni-dominated Ba’ath Party, and rose up against him in 1991 after the last Gulf War, only to be brutally repressed and their leaders executed. It is also the land of Wilfred Thesiger’s Marsh Arabs, whose marshes have been systematically drained by Baghdad.

  ‘Umm Qasr was a bit of a shock,’ admitted Colonel Chris Vernon, spokesman for the British military, whose tanned face, swept-back hair and phrases such as ‘I’m just in from the battlefield’ are making him a star of the airwaves (female fans even sending him their knickers). ‘Intelligence is
never 100 per cent, and we underestimated their resolve.’

  In fact, the failure of local people to rise up against the regime this time round was not surprising given how they were abandoned by the West last time. Moreover, while the Ba’ath regime is still in power, even if in its dying days, people are scared to make their feelings known for fear of reprisals.

  The coalition forces were caught unawares by the emergence of the ‘irregulars’, people in civilian dress who may or may not be army, armed with AK-47s, pistols or rocket-propelled grenades, wandering about taking pot shots at western troops or journalists. Some are fedayeen, ‘the men of sacrifice’, a band of paramilitaries founded and led by Saddam’s elder son, Uday. Others seem to be ordinary people. Baghdad has been making much of an old man in an Arab headdress who apparently used his ancient Czech rifle to down an Apache helicopter.

  The troops on the road to Baghdad may have had the fastest advance of any force in history but no one in Washington or London had bargained for local hostility in places like Safwan, where the coalition troops are clearly seen as an invading rather than a liberating force. The idea that Saddam might be removed only to be replaced by an American general, or even some cigar-chomping, paunchy Iraqi exile who hasn’t seen his country in thirty years, has not gone down well in southern Iraq.

  This is not the view you get on television where, in their scramble to fill 24-hour rolling news, channels such as Sky News have been putting out everything unfiltered. On 21 March, for example, they reported that 20 per cent of the Republican Guard had defected, and that Basra would fall imminently, causing many of us reporters on the ground to be asked by our news desks why we weren’t there.

  A distorted – if fascinating – view of the war has also come from the 500-odd reporters ‘embedded’ with military units. Criticised for not giving journalists access during the 1990–91 Gulf War, the military sees the embedding idea as a great success. It has provided compelling television, with viewers able to watch real-time battles live on TV.

  But the embeds are restricted in what they can report and, having spent weeks with their units, they so identify with them that it is common to hear TV reporters say: ‘we are advancing on…’ or ‘we have just taken…’ – which is just what the military hoped would happen. ‘Of course we will use the embeds,’ said Vernon. ‘It’s war, and in war you use everything at your disposal*.’

  As for the so-called ‘unilaterals’ – those of us who wanted to be able to see both sides of the war – we sit in our cars in the desert, staring out at the sandstorm, wondering when the south will come under the control of the 26,000 British troops struggling to secure it, and what (if anything) we could believe from military briefings. ‘Hell is a very small place,’ said a colleague from Reuters, recalling shades of Vietnam.

  I was having a bad war. Basra was taking much longer to fall than expected and being a ‘unilateral’ was more complicated than I had imagined. Because we were not attached to any side, we had no access to information and no idea where was safe and where not.

  On my first day in Iraq, the US convoy had veered left on the Baghdad road and Jonathan and I had continued straight towards Basra. When it was a decent hour back in London, I set up the satellite dish and phoned in to my foreign editor, Sean. He was gung-ho, telling me that reports were coming in that Basra was about to fall and the 51st Division of the Republican Guard had all defected. This was not borne out by what we were seeing and, as we drove on, there were no signs of British or American troops.

  We were in sight of the first bridge over the canal to Basra when I called in again and Sean read me some wire copy describing ‘US jets pounding the bridges of Basra’.

  ‘We’re by the bridge,’ I replied, ‘and nothing’s pounding anything.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re on the right road?’ he asked.

  I was furious. To me the first law of war reporting is to trust your correspondent on the ground. After years travelling in strange places you develop instincts that are hard to explain but you know that you have survived for all this time because of them. I told Jonathan we should turn back.

  Some way back we passed a car with masking tape stuck across the bonnet and sides spelling out the letters ‘TV’. Inside was the ITN reporter Terry Lloyd, whom I had met in various other hell-holes around the world and liked very much. We stopped and told him we’d seen nothing.

  Eventually, we arrived back at the cloverleaf where the roads split for Baghdad, Basra and Umm Qasr and where the British military police were guarding their Iraqi prisoners. ‘What were you doing up there?’ they asked us. ‘You were way ahead of the front line!’

  Not really knowing what else to do, we headed up the Baghdad road for a while, following another US convoy. However, that seemed pointless as we were supposed to be covering Basra, so we turned back, ending up once again with the military police. They were having an urgent discussion.

  ‘Hey, just as well you guys came back from Basra before,’ said one. ‘Some of your colleagues were not so lucky.’

  They told us that a car of British TV journalists had been shelled (by US marines, it later transpired) and the reporter and two others killed. I looked at them in horror. It could only be Terry Lloyd.

  By that time it was afternoon and my foreign desk was demanding their ‘battle for Basra’. Just then a cloud of dust on the horizon turned into a long British military column. It was the 7th Armoured Division, otherwise known as the Desert Rats, heading in the Basra direction. I had my ‘top line’ but I couldn’t stop thinking about Terry and imagining his family getting that terrible call. I also wondered what would have happened if we had not turned back. I hammered out some copy then found it almost impossible to file as a sandstorm had started and the satellite dish kept blowing over in the desert wind.

  After a few more days it was clear that Basra was not about to fall any time soon. The expected uprising of Shi’ites inside the city had not happened and the British airdropped leaflets beseeching locals to trust them. In a tent on the old airfield, they set up something called Two Rivers Radio – the soldiers called it ‘We Love You Radio’ – broadcasting a mix of music and propaganda encouraging the people of Basra to rise up against Saddam.

  Meanwhile, Nick Cornish, the photographer with whom I was supposed to be working, had arrived in Kuwait City after visa problems and was waiting to be collected. It was also clear we needed an interpreter and a Thuraya – a mobile satellite phone – so we did not have to keep stopping to set up the dish by the roadside where we were easy targets for snipers. We headed back to Kuwait.

  A new lot of British hacks had just arrived at the Hilton from Jordan where the expected floods of refugees from the war had not materialised and they had been left with nothing to report. But at the going rate of $300 a day, there was no shortage of people wanting to work as interpreters, despite the danger. Kuwaitis were ruled out because we’d been warned that the people of Basra did not like them. I was immediately taken with a chubby Armenian called Edward, who told a romantic story of rescuing his girlfriend from Baghdad during the first Gulf War.

  Romantic stories are not good reasons for hiring interpreters. Edward’s usual job was running a show of performing dolphins in Kuwait. Once we had crossed back inside Iraq he would be constantly phoning Kuwait to check on their well-being, making sure that they were being fed enough fish and practising jumping through hoops. In between covering the war, I learnt that the best performers are bottlenose dolphins, particularly those trained in Ukraine.

  There were now four of us and, with nowhere safe to camp, we mostly slept in the car. The back was loaded with boxes of Mars Bars and biscuits and all night long I could hear Edward munching away or rustling chocolate wrappers. After a while, the car reeked of stale food and sweaty bodies. We began to feel like refugees, driving around trying to find somewhere safe to stop before dark. For a couple of nights we parked on the ground opposite a British POW camp on the road to Umm Qasr, going over to chat to
the British guards and letting them borrow our Thurayas to call home, in the hope they would protect us if we got attacked in the night.

  But then the MOD in London called in our editors, warning them to withdraw all unilateral reporters because they couldn’t guarantee our safety in the wake of Terry’s death and we were getting in the way. The guards told us that they’d been ordered to escort us from Iraq if we came near.

  One night we managed to get into the old Basra airfield where the Desert Rats had set up camp south of the city. We had one blissful day using their solar-powered showers, eating a cooked breakfast and watching Sky TV, sleeping in the ruins of a building. It came to an abrupt end when we were shopped to the commander by an embedded journalist and kicked out.

  Finally we retreated to where most unilaterals had gathered – a dusty tanker park behind a gas station where an enterprising Iraqi was charging $50 a night per head for parking space, and guaranteed dysentery. We called it the Republic of Umm Qasr and it was very sociable, full of journalists from everywhere from Holland to Romania, many of whom I’d last seen during the war in Afghanistan just over a year before. It was also filthy. The only bathroom was a hole in the ground that was foul and overflowing, and on our first morning a German correspondent vomited over the bonnet of our car.

  Not having expected Basra to take so long to fall, we were getting fed up with our tinned Tuna Surprises and baked beans heated on a tiny gas stove that kept blowing over. Only about one in four of the self-heating cappuccinos worked. Parked next to us was a group of French journalists who had come equipped with a proper two-ring stove, frying pans and labelled boxes of condiments, olive oil and onions. Every evening delicious smells of garlic and herbs would waft over us while we Brits watched sullenly. They had French flags on their car so people would know they were from a nation that did not support the war.