By now the gunmen were coming for her. They had seen her on television, and they were hunting her down, peeling up the country road in their pickup truck. “Where’s the announcer?” they bellowed. They leapt to the ground and seized Atwar, along with the cameraman and engineer, and fired into the sky. Atwar screamed to the crowd for help, but the villagers backed away. Somebody called the police, but it was morning before anybody came to help. By then the bodies were laced with bullets, and dumped in the dirt.
In the days after Atwar’s death, we all watched her last standup dozens of times. The Iraqi channels looped the clip over and over for viewers who were caged indoors with nothing but television to stave off the anxiety of curfew. Death squads stole through the streets, the Shiite “black shirts” sacked Sunni mosques—and all the while, the image of Atwar flickered in corners. She wore a turtleneck and tied her head scarf in the jaunty sideways knot that had become her trademark. The face on the television screen was etched with the story of her homeland’s degeneration. Her skin had grayed, her eyes grown heavy, her face puffed with fatigue. She looked exhausted.
The decay I saw in Atwar’s face had eaten into the city, too. Baghdad faded and sank; Baghdad was lost. The swollen and thrumming streets where we’d met, dripping in heat and life and gaudy shouts of color, had vanished. The clatter of city life gave way to the scrape of machine-gun fire, the roar of car bombs, and the dull thud of mortars. Baghdad, with its tightly packed neighborhoods, sleepy gardens, and lazy river vistas, was swallowed by infinite reels of razor wire and blank-faced cement barriers.
Atwar looked sick, and so did Iraq. Atwar died, but Iraq just kept bleeding.
The day after the shrine bombing, we held a staff meeting. “The violence is getting worse,” Borzou, the bureau chief, told the Iraqi staff. “We need to prepare for what’s coming. We need to be ready for the fighting to get much heavier. We need to figure out how to work under curfew. I’m asking for any suggestions you have.”
“A bicycle,” said Suheil.
Everybody laughed like it was the funniest joke they’d ever heard. Nervous grumblings, too-quick jokes.
“No, really, I am thinking about getting a bicycle!” he protested. “Because I think we will face many more times like these.”
Everybody talked at once.
“I can’t believe we’re preparing for another war here.”
“Some of us can work from home.”
“Not all the time. In the mornings and afternoons we don’t have electricity.”
“Some of you are close enough to walk.”
“But the problem is, if there’s a curfew in your neighborhood and you leave, even by foot, everybody’s going to wonder, ‘Where’s this guy going?’ Even your family panics when there’s a curfew.”
“If something like this happens, we can’t freeze,” Borzou told them. “This is our calling. We can’t shut down. You deal with the shock later.”
I looked around me, at Raheem, Suheil, Salar, Caesar—at the drawn faces of Iraqis who risked their lives working for us. They have been here the entire time, I thought. When does later come?
It was just a short walk to the Arabiya offices, cutting back around the hotel where we lived, crossing a small gate, and traversing some parking lots.
“We will send somebody with you,” Salar said.
He means a bodyguard. With a gun. Like the one he sent to follow me through the supermarket.
“No, I don’t want it.”
“This is a bad time,” he said.
“Please, Salar, I really don’t want it. It’s just across the parking lot.”
“I’m sorry, but this is my responsibility. Today is a difficult day.”
So I shut up and walked along silently with my own private gunman, out into the wintry afternoon. In the Arabiya offices I found some of Atwar’s family members forgetting to drink their coffee on stiff couches. Raw silence stretched between their words. They spent a lot of time staring at the floor. On the walls gleamed pictures of prettier places: palm trees and beaches, golden sunlight brimming in leaves.
The aunt had hard eyes: “She’s an honor to her tribe, she’s a martyr, she’s better than ten men. She’s a martyr for Iraq.”
“How did this happen?” wailed Atwar’s sister, collapsing onto the aunt’s shoulder. “What did she see? She didn’t see anything.”
With curfew in place, they hadn’t been able to bring her broken body back from Samarra. All the roads were closed, the checkpoints tight. Nobody could move; nobody could get to work. Only militiamen, gun-toting gangs, and soldiers moved like spirits on the roads. It took days to get the bodies through the routine tests at a forensics laboratory. There would be no sunset burial.
“They were not treated like martyrs,” the Arabiya bureau chief, Jawad Hattab, told me in quiet indignation.
Somebody had already printed makeshift posters of Atwar’s face; she stared down from the walls, portrayed in cheap blurs of color, tacked up with Scotch tape. I ran my eyes over her features, thinking of the yellowing faces of suicide bombers that peeled from the walls of the West Bank and Beirut. They had made Atwar into a martyr.
Hattab related all the eyewitness details of the deaths, and he told me about the other deaths—eleven Arabiya employees had died in Iraq since the invasion. At that time, sixty-six journalists had been slaughtered. Of those, forty-seven were Iraqi. By now, those numbers have more than doubled. They have been shot by U.S. forces, gunned down by their countrymen, crushed by bombs. They were liberated to tell the story of their lifetime, to write their own national history, but only if they flirted with death. All things light, and all things dark.
“If I give up my position, if I am weak, who will be the substitute, who will carry this message?” Hattab said. His voice was oddly flat. “Every day we are exposed to many, many threats, killing or bombing or threats against our families. But Iraq deserves this from us, this sacrifice. If we are defeated, and we consider ourselves the educated segment of this country, what will the people in the street do? What will happen to our country?”
Looking at him, a fifty-year-old man, I wrote in my notebook: Journalists in Iraq are hardened. They have scars and heavy eyes. They believed more in journalism than any American reporter I knew. Clinging to it as if it would save them in the end.
We stood.
“We’re not telling the truth when we say we’re still strong,” he blurted. “Inside we are broken. Our aim was to give the message of truth and the only thing we got back was bullets.”
Even her burial had a death toll.
They laid Atwar’s body in a plain wooden box, and strapped it onto a flatbed truck. The men gathered around the casket, and the wind pushed back their hair as the truck began to roll. They had fastened a black banner to the grille—a promise from other reporters to continue Atwar’s work. We will finish the message she was carrying. Atwar, too, had spoken of her message. As if they traveled a one-way road, as if they would finally get to Athens from Marathon and then collapse. It sounded strange, perhaps because I thought of news not as something you could carry, but as a force that defined its own terms. I was still a part of the world that was not Iraq, and these journalists were marooned in the land that was Iraq, and they wanted desperately to be heard. American reporters of my generation vied to write the story of the wars—it was something we strove for, competed for fiercely, a privilege. And when we were done with it we simply went away again. Iraqis covered the war because it had landed on top of them, and they would have to keep on covering it until it killed them or went away altogether. It was their fate and their destiny and in many, many cases, the death of them.
The truck cut through empty streets, between ragged palm trees. Mourners straggled behind in a rough column. They were headed into the badlands west of Baghdad, to the Sunni cemetery in Abu Ghraib.
The funeral procession was passing through the town of Hassuwa when cracks of gunfire erupted: sniping between followers of one of Iraq
’s most important Sunni clerics and the Shiite policemen who were escorting Bahjat’s funeral convoy. Those first bullets drew more bullets, and soon the air was crackling.
The mourners abandoned the coffin on the side of the road to hide behind the walls of an old cement factory, but the cameramen kept on documenting. This account is drawn from their footage; I was working the day Atwar was buried. The photographers crouched like cats, moving silent through the rubble, under sagging telephone wires and tired trees. Dogs yelped in fear. From the minarets of the mosques, the town muezzins called for jihad. A convoy of U.S. Humvees rolled by and kept going, leaving the Iraqis to fight among themselves.
“Please call the interior minister and tell him that our convoy with Atwar Bahjat has been attacked,” Iraqi journalist Fatah Sheik barked into his cell phone, crouching close to the ground. “Can’t you hear the shooting? Please tell the minister.”
Commandos raced through the courtyard. Somewhere, a rooster crowed.
“Send us Americans and national guard,” Sheik begged. “Among us are correspondents, there are almost fifty of us.”
The gunfight lasted more than two hours, until the police escorts ran out of ammunition and the shooting slowed, then stopped. At least two men had been shot dead. The Sunni cleric who presided over the neighborhood sent along a message of apology. It was a misunderstanding, he said. He invited the mourners to stop by his house for coffee. It was just another working day in Iraq. No hard feelings, just two more souls.
At the graveyard the men hoisted the coffin down. Atwar’s friends had covered it with the Iraqi flag and placed orange flowers on top. Because she died a single woman, her family had draped a bride’s veil over the head of the coffin.
They prayed over her body, repeated that there is no god but God, and hurried her coffin along a dirt path through the cemetery. At the lip of her grave, the men began to argue. Nobody should see her body, they said, not even the gravediggers who lowered it into the earth. They shoved and yelled. At last, somebody produced a bedsheet to stretch over the body, to protect it from view. The cloth was blue and yellow and green, its patchwork pattern childish and light.
Atwar’s mother tossed fistfuls of candy into the grave.
“Atwar, my love!” she cried before the cameras. “Can you hear me?”
But Atwar was gone.
As the cars turned back toward Baghdad, a plume of black smoke arched into the sky. It was a homemade bomb that had been laid along the road, planted to strike the mourners as they left the cemetery.
Sometimes you are lucky, and turn the other way.
FIFTEEN
THERE WOULD BE CONSEQUENCES
After Atwar died, the months spun out fast, hotter and bloodier, until another summer caught Baghdad in its claws. Ariel Sharon fell into a coma and was stripped of his job as Israeli prime minister. Iran announced the successful enrichment of uranium. In Iraq, it was dying and more dying, death getting stuck in the glue of itself. You didn’t know how to tell the story anymore. When I returned to Baghdad in the summer of 2006 I went looking for a young Shiite, somebody whose life and aspirations and circumstances could serve as an emblem for a tortured land.
At Baghdad University heat beat the air stiff as egg whites. Dust flew loose from the dying grasses, shaking like pepper into the lungs, and the trees struggled to hold up their branches. Students trickled down the scorched paths and shaded lanes to the parking lot and the street beyond, eyes low and books clutched over their hearts. They moved away when we tried to talk to them. The university had gone to war with the rest of the country. Professors had been murdered and driven into exile. Militiamen moved among the students. You couldn’t just blurt it out: Are you Shiite? We had to finesse, talk about politics and The Situation, listen for dropped hints. Iraq was fractured enough that people tipped their hand when they talked politics. We stopped a young man, but he was shy and inarticulate. We stopped a girl with a Winnie the Pooh lunchbox, but she turned out to be a Sunni.
Then there was Ahmed, stretching in the shade of a spreading tree, jouncing on worn running shoes. When I approached he stood his ground and cast judging eyes over my face, my clothes, my notebook. Then, satisfied, he gazed at the horizon and answered the questions in nearly perfect English. Caesar, the translator, faded back and finally sprawled on shaded grass as Ahmed’s flawless sentences rolled out.
Ahmed was twenty-three years old, a Shiite living in the urban killing fields of Baghdad’s Hay al-Amal neighborhood. He had the kind of pinched face you see all over the world, and never on a wealthy man: the kite corner jut of cheekbones over wasted dents; eyes deep and suspicious and darting, too dark to tell the pupil from the iris. It was the hardness of his face that was familiar, the anger that glimmered deep behind his eyes like a piece of light at the bottom of a deep well: the face of a man who is learning, bit by bit, the limitations of empty pockets and lowly family stature.
He ran all the time, ran until the flesh burned off his bones. He was running that day, in a T-shirt and old jeans and sneakers he’d bought secondhand. When Saddam was still around, Ahmed had run the half marathon on Iraq’s national team. Now he came to the university campus every day to train, though he couldn’t afford to attend classes. The college kids bustled past to brighter futures as he worked on his body, the only part of him that had ever proven profitable. He’d picked up his girlfriend on campus; she was a college girl drifting forward while he ran circles around the grounds.
“Why do you run so much?” I asked him.
“To forget,” he blurted, and then he shrugged a little, as if to say, I know this sounds melodramatic but it’s also true. “I do this to forget the problems, the situation outside. I can’t stay in the house all day. My father’s afraid. He says, ‘I’ll give you anything to stay home,’ but I can’t, and that makes a problem between me and my father. Even my girlfriend, we had a fight yesterday. In my neighborhood now we live one afraid from the other, because we don’t know who anybody is. When I drive to my house and come home at night, they think I work with the government or with the terrorists. They don’t know. They’re afraid. Each one is afraid now.”
He was a Shiite, though, so maybe he was pleased with the newfound political power his people had picked up since the war. Maybe he viewed these hard times as transitory. He frowned.
“They took the power place, but it’s too bad,” he said. “The problem in the past was just Sunni rule. Now it’s just Shia rule. It’s stupid. We have to find a balance between Sunni and Shia. I just follow my mind. I think that’s the right thing. God gave us a brain to think, not to follow. Most Iraqis are ignorant, they don’t understand that. If you say Ali al Sistani is bad, they want to kill you. But if you ask, ‘Why do you follow him?’ they can’t answer.”
He didn’t want to talk anymore. His body was turning away, his face fixed in expectation of good-bye. But he took my notebook and copied down his mobile telephone number before bounding off into the stifling gold of day.
“This Ahmed, he’s—he’s noble,” Caesar said as we walked back to the car. “The way he answered the questions. It’s great. You know what I mean?”
I did.
I wanted to go to Ahmed’s house, to see the street and rooms, to meet his family. But I couldn’t go to Hay al-Amal without signing their death warrants. Nor could he visit our place—we couldn’t invite a stranger off the street to see the checkpoints and the layout, to glimpse the faces of the Iraqis who lied to their families and neighbors about working with foreigners. Everybody had too much to lose.
So I called Ahmed and arranged to meet neither here nor there, but in the brick-sheathed purgatory of the Babylon Hotel. I had been encouraged by colleagues to think of the Babylon Hotel as a refreshing liberation from our claustrophobic offices, a small, accessible slice of a deadly country. But like everything else in Iraq, the hotel had turned weird and sad. It had been, before, a popular place for posh weddings, but it had gone derelict and sinister, full of tight,
hot air and hard glances. Sitting in the sticky cave of the lobby was like squatting in a dried husk of beehive, all industry and motion and joy drained away, abandoned rooms rising into the sky overhead. Thin natural light filtered through streaked windows; dusty stairways rose to dead ends at locked doors; darkened corridors disappeared into shadows. I passed the security guards at the front doors, tugged open my bag to show the contents and stayed silent, wondering who they were, who their friends were. The footsteps of the armed gunman echoed behind mine in the great halls. He talked quietly to the guards and they didn’t take his gun away. The bodyguard was skinny and owl-eyed, and every time I looked at him I had a queasy urge to run until I lost him. I hated having him there and so I pretended he had nothing to do with me, this poor man who’d been paid to kill people for my protection. Still the knowing itched at the back of my thoughts.
The Babylon Hotel had a lobby café where nobody ever came to take your order, a men’s barber shop, and a women’s beauty salon. The beauty parlor was a gaudy grotto stuffed with cloth flowers and cans of cheap hairspray the size of rocket launchers. Upstairs there was a grubby, smoky restaurant cut from a 1970s disco hall, with deep round pod seats and low tables. There was also a sad little gift shop where I bought, that summer, a baseball cap embroidered with the Iraqi flag and this promise: TOMORROW WILL BETTER.
I didn’t really expect Ahmed to show up. Somebody would talk him out of it. Something would go wrong. The meeting was a risk for both of us, based on ill-advised mutual trust. He could get spotted and tarred a traitor. As for me, I had to trust he hadn’t sold me off to somebody in the neighborhood: I know where you can find an American. She will be waiting for me at two on Friday. But there he was, grinning a shy grin and loping my way, the same jeans and T-shirt hanging off his skinny frame. His girlfriend swished behind in skirts, tinkling in costume jewelry and ramped up on high heels, polite smile under her makeup.
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War Page 23