Small Wars Permitting

by Christina Lamb

  There was dust everywhere, grey powdery stuff that got into computers, nails, eyes and ears, and several people developed horrible eye infections. The pop-up tents turned out to be child-sized so I could only fit in if I curled in a ball, and they kept blowing over in the wind. It was starting to get unbearably hot, bringing out swarms of mosquitoes, and what with the pounding of artillery it was hard to sleep.

  Life wouldn’t have been so bad if we had been getting to do good reporting, but all we were doing was waiting for Basra to fall. As we listened to reports on our shortwave radio of the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch and the American push towards Baghdad, sometimes it felt as if we were missing the real war.

  One day the temperature hit 42°C and we drove around in search of shade. Finally, we found a tree by a derelict farm. The farm turned out to be inhabited but the family were friendly and brought us small glasses of sweet tea. Then some of their friends arrived and began demanding Panadol. When we said we hadn’t got any they turned hostile. ‘Iraqis all seem to see liberation as their chance to demand things from foreigners,’ I wrote in my diary. ‘Everyone we meet bangs on our jeep demanding water, but this is going on so long our own supplies are running low.’

  We were starting to get a sense of the task facing the allies.

  Colonel Cox has a whole town to build

  Sunday Times, 6 April 2003

  IT LOOKS LIKE a scene from the Governor’s office in some far-flung corner of the British Empire. From dawn to dusk people come to the gates of the old Umm Qasr Hotel in their hundreds, clutching slips of paper scribbled with Arabic names.

  Some are looking for husbands and sons lost in the bombing, perhaps being held in the prisoner-of-war camp along the road. Some are hoping for jobs. One man wants insulin for his diabetic wife. Another man with a waxy complexion, leaning heavily on a friend, has not been on his dialysis machine since the war started two weeks ago because the hospital has no power. Most plead for water.

  Inside, behind the small grove of palm trees, the man they all want to see is Colonel Stephen Cox, deputy commander of 3 Commando Brigade of the Royal Marines. Known as the Mayor of Umm Qasr, he is charged with establishing an administration in the only town in Iraq so far under complete control of the allied forces.

  ‘Our strategic plan for taking over Iraq was that we’d take towns, the Ba’ath Party people would disappear and there would be local councillors or people there to take over the running of the place,’ said Cox. ‘In fact, they’ve all scarpered. Everything in town from the port to the factories was controlled by the Ba’ath Party and they’ve all gone. Every single dollar came from Baghdad. There’s no police force, no administration, no one to manage or pay wages. It’s like setting up a virgin town.’

  As Iraq’s only deep port, Umm Qasr was a key military objective that proved far harder to capture than expected. Its market sells little other than rotting tomatoes and its nights are filled with the howls of stray dogs and the occasional gunshot. But as the war rages around the edges of Baghdad, this flyblown town of 48,000 souls finds itself at the forefront of the battle for hearts and minds.

  Winning the trust of the locals has proved no easy task, partly because the US marines who fought for the town acted as invaders rather than liberators, erecting the Stars and Stripes at the fort and scrawling ‘Property of the US government’ over the entrance to the old port.

  Najaf, a local poet who has not published a line for thirty years because only poems praising Saddam were allowed, warned: ‘We hate Saddam and want to get rid of him but we all have guns and if you don’t go we will turn our guns on you.’

  Still harder to break through is the fear of a people who have spent twenty-four years under Saddam’s rule and see the Iraqi leader still in power in Baghdad. ‘We have no prison in Umm Qasr,’ said Hasan, a local cook. Tapping his head, he explained: ‘That’s because everyone has a prison here inside.’

  When Cox recruited eighty local men last week to work in the port he was astonished when none of them turned up the next day. ‘It turned out they had been phoned by the port manager in Basra who said you mustn’t go and work with the dirty British or you’ll be killed. I said, “Hang on a minute, you are in free Iraq, that man’s in occupied Iraq. Why listen to him?” But they are hedging their bets and I don’t blame them at all.’

  This is starting to change. ‘A week ago I went to see the head of the hospital and he was still sitting in front of a picture of Saddam. I asked him why and he said, “We don’t believe you’re going to stay.” Two days ago I went to see him again and the picture had gone. He hadn’t thrown it away, it was in a cupboard. Hopefully, next time it will be gone altogether.’

  To help win confidence, the men of 40 and 42 Commando who are guarding Umm Qasr have switched from hard helmets to berets. ‘We all have experience from Northern Ireland,’ said Cox. ‘Lots of talking to locals to win their confidence, an overt presence, an occasional patrol so they know we mean business.’

  As a result, for the first time local people are starting to come forward and help. ‘We know there has been infiltration back into the area from Basra and Baghdad but locals are giving us scraps of paper with names and addresses,’ said Cox. Acting on such a tip led to the arrest of six Ba’ath Party officials on Wednesday morning.

  The real difficulties of Cox’s task of re-establishing order in Umm Qasr become apparent just along the road at the pipe factory. There is a constant line of people emerging, pushing carts laden with doors, chairs, pieces of wood and machinery. Since the collapse of the regime, looting has become the main industry. ‘This is our property now,’ said one man, wheeling out an air conditioner ripped from a wall.

  Another problem is corruption. ‘One of the most astonishing things is how people are used to handing over bribes for everything,’ said Cox. ‘They keep trying to slip money to my men. There were forty agents in town to distribute aid under the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme, all extorting money for handing over the aid.’

  Umm Qasr will be the gateway for future humanitarian operations and Cox complains that he has already been swamped with aid agencies. ‘I had eleven today and sent ten of them packing,’ he said. ‘The people here don’t need food. They have plenty. The big thing they want is to be treated with dignity.’

  Yet everywhere there are scavengers and the few aid convoys that have arrived have degenerated into riots. ‘The state of law and order in Umm Qasr is like the Wild West,’ complained Patrick Nicholson of the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development. ‘If the allies can’t organise aid for 40,000 people in Umm Qasr, we’re worried about them doing it for more than 1 million in Basra and more than 22 million in Iraq.’

  A few days ago British engineers repaired the power plant so that lights came back on in most of the town, though not the hotel that Cox has made his headquarters and where he sleeps on the roof.

  ‘I see us as a kind of sticking plaster until this can be handed over to the UN and then back to the Iraqis,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, I would say 50 per cent think we’re doing a good job and 50 per cent are complaining we didn’t flick a magic switch and open a McDonald’s.’

  After two weeks, with the US forces advancing relentlessly on the Iraqi capital, it was beginning to look as if Baghdad would fall before Basra. From a distance Basra was an apocalyptic sight. By day a vast canopy of black smoke hung over the city from burning oil trenches. At night British artillery lit up the sky.

  Anxious to avoid heavy casualties from bombing, the British strategy was to encircle the city and hope it would fall from within. A company of Irish Guards had set up positions just south of the first Basra bridge from which they would make forays towards the city in their Warrior APCs or Challenger II tanks to draw fire so as to establish the position of the Iraqi fighters. They called the road they drove up ‘Mortar Mile’ and it was a dangerous cat-and-mouse game. On one occasion a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) left two jagged holes in the side of the Warrior of an engag
ing Irish Guards captain called Jimmy Moulton. He became known as Captain Courageous for his bravado talk of going in to ‘zap the enemy’.

  In between their forays, Captain Moulton and his men would check the cars of people coming in and out of the city for weapons. We would hang around and interview the people about life inside. No one said much. Most of them were transporting crates of tomatoes.

  One afternoon a long convoy of US supply trucks appeared, about to head over the bridge straight into Basra.

  ‘Hey, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?!’ screeched Captain Moulton, waving them down. ‘Basra isn’t in our hands yet!’

  ‘We’re on our way to free Baghdad,’ replied the lead driver confidently.

  ‘This isn’t the road to Baghdad,’ said Captain Moulton. ‘Don’t you guys have maps?’

  As the days went on, the British edged slightly closer to the city but it was slow going. I started referring to myself as Basra Bridge correspondent.

  One day a taxi driver called Abu Rasoul stopped and asked us if we knew where the BBC people were. He opened his boot to reveal cans of Efes, Turkish beer. We had no idea where the BBC were but said we would be extremely happy to buy it – after three weeks without a drink, $20 for a box seemed an incredible bargain. We got talking about the situation inside Basra and he offered to drive me in to see. He seemed trustworthy and we negotiated a fee that would only be paid on my safe return. I wrapped my black shawl over my head and got in. Jonathan told me I was mad and stayed behind.

  It was strange to go inside this besieged city that we had watched from afar for so long. On every corner Saddam’s face in various guises stared out from billboards just as I remembered from my previous visit. Homes and shops had been bricked up against the bombing and it felt as if the city was just watching and waiting. A couple of goats were nosing in a pool of fetid water. There was a bombed-out building which Abu Rasoul said had been the radio and TV station, but otherwise the city seemed to have suffered little damage. We drove through one area of block after block of apartments, inside one of which I could see faces pressed against the window. The whole street seemed to have been taken over by young men in dark clothing, the fedayeen militia.

  At the end of the road, the entrance to the port was marked by a copper statue of a soldier on a plinth, one arm pointing east towards nearby Iran. More than sixty of these stand along the Shatt al Arab Promenade, each representing a soldier killed in the Iran-Iraq War. ‘I am 35 and I have seen nothing but wars,’ said Abu Rasoul. ‘Iran-Iraq, the Gulf War, the intifada in Basra, now this war…’

  He had assured me that he knew where all the Iraqi Army roadblocks were and could avoid them. But as we rounded a corner near the university, we suddenly saw one straight ahead. My heart sank and I bowed my head and drew my shawl around me. Seven Italian journalists and two Australians had been arrested the previous week at the edge of the city. Abu Rasoul was cool, however. The soldiers were busy inspecting another car and he simply drove alongside and waved, then went straight on.

  A few days later, on Saturday, 5 April, we were woken early by a series of deafening blasts. The British had received a tip-off that a meeting was under way of senior Ba’ath officials, including their main target, Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as Chemical Ali for his role in gassing the Kurds in 1988. Saddam’s cousin, Chemical Ali was hated in Basra where he had led the brutal suppression of the 1991 uprising.

  They told us they had got him, which later turned out to be untrue. We hoped they had because we were dreaming of the Basra Sheraton and hot baths and proper beds. Our little stove had stopped working altogether so we could not even make tea, my hair was dry as straw and thick with dust, and we had only two bottles of water left.

  After nineteen days of war, Basra finally fell on 7 April, a Monday, which could not be worse for a Sunday newspaper. Unfairly for the Irish Guards who had done all the groundwork, men from the 3rd Parachute Regiment led the way into the city. There was no fighting – the fedayeen I had seen had all drifted away.

  As we followed the soldiers in, I could not believe my eyes. Almost immediately people began looting. Computers, chandeliers, desks, pipes…anything that could be removed. Inside the university laboratories, I watched people grabbing microscopes and centrifuges, smashing many things in their rush. Electric sockets were ripped from the walls. What they couldn’t steal, they set ablaze.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked a man. ‘This was for the education of your children.’

  ‘It’s all ours now,’ he laughed.

  Much of the stuff was useless. Soon the bridges out of the city were crowded with people carrying airconditioner units and office chairs back to their farms.

  Along the Shatt al Arab, we found the Basra Sheraton but it was on fire. Nearby, looters had left the Natural History Museum a smouldering shell with just the odd stuffed lion paw or fish fin trampled underfoot amid the wild hollyhocks in the garden. As we were walking around, a gang of young men appeared with crowbars and a pistol. We left hastily only to drive straight into a gun battle outside a bank which people were trying to loot. Two of our tyres were shot out.

  When we really needed him, Edward disappeared – telling us he wanted to look up someone in the Armenian community. Later we discovered he was selling contracts for satellite TV.

  At the hospitals, people were literally tipping patients out of beds and grabbing medicines and bandages. I went to the Technical College where the British had set up base and asked an officer why they weren’t doing anything. ‘Do I look like a policeman?’ came the reply.

  The same orgy of looting was to happen in Baghdad when it fell two days later. It was the failure of the British and Americans to deal with this that convinced many Iraqis that they did not really care.

  All of us Sunday Times reporters in Iraq had been instructed to look for incriminating documents that might reveal secret weapons programmes or link the regime with al-Qaeda, so I headed for the headquarters of Saddam’s secret police. There was a large crater at the front where a British bomb had struck, and crowds of people had gathered, searching through the debris. Among them I met a man called Ismael Samoi whose left cheek twitched nervously as he spoke.

  Torture cells that kept a people in fear

  Sunday Times, 13 April 2003

  THEY CALLED it the Black Hole, for it was the room from which no prisoner ever emerged alive. The walls and ceiling were coated with treacly black paint and there were no windows so it was impossible to tell night from day.

  The floor was several inches deep in charred remains and faeces, and there was the scuffling sound of something rat-sized in the dark. Whatever had happened in there was so unspeakable that, seven years after being freed from Basra’s most feared interrogation centre, Ismael Samoi could not bring himself to look inside.

  ‘They would go into your mind and whatever was your worst horror they would find it,’ he said, as he used his cigarette lighter to guide the way down the crumbling stairs under the headquarters of the Amn al-Amm, most hated of all Saddam’s secret police.

  The building was struck by a British shell in the battle that led to the fall of Basra but the detention blocks for political prisoners remained intact, as did the underground jail where Samoi spent what he describes as ‘a 22-month living nightmare’.

  Last week, as the news reached Basra that US marines had entered the heart of Baghdad, he summoned up the courage to return. He was not the only one. The secret police headquarters was full of former political prisoners returning – terrified to be back there and at the same time astonished to be wandering around freely – and families searching for the missing.

  ‘Ismael!’ shouted a thickset man in his forties, crushing Samoi in a bear hug. For a moment they held each other in silence, too choked with emotion to speak.

  The two men had been in the cell together, along with fifteen to twenty others. It was often so crowded that Samoi and his friend, a boxing champion who asked to be identifie
d as Fala, often slept standing.

  They had helped keep each other’s spirits up over long months, but had lost touch when Samoi was transferred to Baghdad. Neither had known whether the other had survived.

  ‘Look,’ said Fala, the older man, pointing to two faded marks on the wall. ‘This is where we wrote our names in blood so people would one day know we had been here.’

  ‘Are you still strong, Fala?’ asked Samoi with a mischievous grin. Fala immediately knelt on the ground, allowing his old cell mate to climb on to his shoulders so that Samoi’s fingertips just reached a small grille high on the wall. ‘This was how we dreamt of freedom, just to touch the free air.’

  The story was typical among those returning last week. ‘I was 23 years old and just married when they came for me,’ said Samoi. ‘I had been sending information to the Shi’ite opposition based in Iran and someone reported me. I knew the regime was looking for me but I had to go to my job because my wife was pregnant and we needed the money. I was imprisoned for speaking the truth.’

  His hands were shaking as he led the way to a series of small, stonewalled rooms. Pointing out the meat hooks in the ceiling from which he had been suspended by a rope tied round his ankles or hands, Samoi showed raised burn marks on his wrist.

  ‘They would beat us with rubber hosepipes while we were hanging until we dripped blood,’ he said.

  In another of the torture cells, bare wires dangled from the ceiling. ‘They would pour water on our heads then attach the wires to our skulls to electrocute us. Other times they brought in a machine for generating electricity and would put a wire in each ear to give us electric shocks of 125 volts. Sometimes they would run it from the nail of my little finger to that of my friend. They had plenty of methods. This corridor would echo with the screams of grown men.’