Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa

by Michael J. Totten

  “Bolt cutters coming over!” somebody yelled and tossed a pair of cutters over the gate. They came prepared.

  And yet still the gate did not open. We had wasted almost a minute while making one hell of a racket.

  I felt useless just standing there and trying mostly in vain to take photographs in the dark. What was I supposed to be doing? I’m not trained for kinetic raids. I didn’t know the procedure.

  So I selected a soldier at random and asked. “Is everyone going over the wall? Do I need to go over, too?”

  At that point I was ready to take orders from even a private.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, whoever he was. “You need to go over.”

  Can’t say I was thrilled about that. Unless they got that gate opened, I’d be pinned in the tight enclosed courtyard in front of a suspected terrorist’s nest. There would be no running away if something happened. But that was preferable to being left all alone on the street in front of that house while the soldiers--my de facto bodyguards--were inside and over the wall.

  One of the soldiers who had gone over the wall ahead of me kicked in the front door of the house with his boot. The sounds of smashing glass and twisting metal surely alerted anyone in the house who somehow might not have heard the banging on the gate with the hammer.

  If the target inside were indeed wearing a suicide vest, this was most likely when he would martyr himself and take some of us with him. I waited a moment before climbing onto the wall. I had cover from an explosion as long as I stayed where I was. But I didn’t hear anything

  The soldier crouching in the mud was waiting for me to use his back as a step ladder onto the wall. So I planted my muddy boot in the small of his back. Not that it mattered. He was plenty filthy already. I had five more feet of wall to clear, and for an absurd moment I worried that I might humiliate myself by not being able to make it over the top. That was ridiculous. It was only five feet, and besides--I had so much adrenaline in my body I could have thrown a car.

  As soon as I pulled myself onto the wall I realized that every single one of us climbed up in the wrong place. Climbing straight over would have put us in the neighbor’s yard. I had to shimmy along the top of the wall several feet so I could drop down in the courtyard of the house we were raiding. I could barely see, and I was terribly exposed.

  Yes, he’s the kind of guy who will shoot at us.

  I was more exposed at that moment than anyone while crawling along the top of that wall.

  Get down, get down!

  I dropped into the courtyard of the target house.

  “Top floor’s clear!” I heard someone yell from inside.

  No one had fired a shot yet. No one had exploded a suicide vest.

  Then the gate broke open and five more soldiers poured through.

  Lights were on in the house when I ran inside. The front door had been violently kicked off its hinges. It leaned up against the couch in the living room.

  Shards of glass crunched under my feet. Mud and nasty muck from outside was tracked all over the carpets inside--and this is a culture where almost everyone takes off their shoes before stepping inside. We might very well be in a terrorist leader’s house, but a small part of me still felt bad about the mud and the door.

  My digital voice recorder was turned on and inside my pocket. It recorded everything, but I have no idea who said what.

  “Where’s the terp at?”

  Terp is short for interpreter. Our interpreter, Eddie, was an Iraqi from Baghdad who had spent the last several decades in San Diego, California.

  “They’ve over there at the next house.”

  “Go! Go! Next house! Let’s go!”

  “Out! Out the gate!”

  Every soldier in the house ran out the gate. I followed. The house we had just hit was empty. No one was sure exactly which house in a row of three Haji Jawad was supposed to be in. So we went house to house.

  Some poor bastards would soon return home from wherever they were to find their door broken down, mud all over their carpets, and no explanation.

  We ran to the next house and had no trouble unlatching the gate. Each soldier took up position. I stood near the front door and away from the windows. My eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness and I could sort of see.

  “Hit it,” someone said. “Go right fucking in there.”

  A soldier kicked the door in with all his might. It crumpled like an empty 7-Up can. Glass shattered. A woman inside screamed. Soldiers streamed into the house.

  Someone flicked on the lights.

  The woman in the front room screamed again and put her hands on her head. Small children ran behind her for protection.

  “Get down! Get down!”

  She looked at me in wide-eyed animal terror as if she had just seen Godzilla, and she said something to me in Arabic that I did not understand.

  “La etkellem Arabie,” I said. I don’t speak Arabic.

  I wanted to say “it’s okay,” but it was not okay. I had no more an idea what was about to happen than she did.

  “Go upstairs,” said one of the soldiers.

  “Hey, you, in there,” said another to the woman who had just spoken to me. “Get in there.”

  They were rounding up all the women and children into one room and all the men into another.

  “Get in there now!”

  Two soldiers led three Iraqi men down the stairs. The men looked frightened and disoriented, but much less so than the women and children. Two were turned around and flex-cuffed.

  The Americans were not fucking around. Odds were high that we were in a terrorist’s nest and still might be shot at any moment from any direction.

  The one Iraqi man who had not yet been flex-cuffed spoke to me calmly in Arabic.

  “I am a police officer,” he said. “I have a badge.”

  I understood him perfectly well, but I nevertheless told him I didn’t speak Arabic. He needed to explain himself to somebody else.

  Men were taken into the front room of the house. Women and children were herded into the back.

  Then the power went out and the house plunged into absolute darkness.

  Eddie, our interpreter, screamed at these Iraqis in a rage that I had never heard from him. He sounded like he was prepared to beat any and all of them any second. His voice demanded instant obedience. While it was possible he spoke to them this way for effect, I suspect his anger at the mass-murderers who had car-bombed his home town for years was totally genuine.

  Flashlights came on and I could see again.

  Captain Looney stood before the Iraqi man who had told me he was a police officer and asked whether he knew anything about Haji Jawad.

  “I’ve never heard of him,” the supposed police officer said.

  “Hey!” Captain Looney said. “Everybody knows who he is. Saying you’ve never heard of him is like saying you’ve never heard of Moqtada al Sadr.”

  I stepped outside the front door and into the courtyard for some air. Glass crunched under my feet again. The door hung at a crazy angle from the only hinge that didn’t twist off when it was kicked in.

  Two men from inside the house had been taken outside and planted face down in the mud with their cuffed hands behind their backs. They trembled in fear.

  I went back inside. Captain Looney was speaking to another Iraqi man in a wife-beater t-shirt whom I hadn’t seen before. What did he know about Haji Jawad?

  “I’ve never heard this kind of name,” he said. His hands shook and he looked at his feet.

  Two soldiers in the kitchen briskly opened every cabinet and drawer and searched for anything that was not supposed to be there--weapons, intelligence, anything incriminating or out of the ordinary.

  They didn’t mess the place up, but they rifled through everything with a practiced thoroughness.

  I heard Captain Looney’s voice in the back room where the women and children had been corralled. The woman who had screamed when her door was broken down was crying hysterica
lly.

  “I’ve been in Iraq too long for your crying to affect me,” Captain Looney said in a hard, even, and no-bullshit voice.

  She stopped crying instantly. She didn’t even continue to sob. She just stopped as if the captain had flipped off a switch.

  “I’ve lost too many of my own soldiers in this country,” he said.

  In COP Ford’s Tactical Operations Center hang three photographs of American soldiers in his company who were killed in Sadr City by Shia militias. All were personal friends and comrades of every American soldier I was with that night on the raid. “We fight for the men next to us,” the captain had said to me earlier that evening in his office before we set out.

  The woman who was somehow able to stop crying instantly also said she had never heard the name Haji Jawad. Everyone in the room knew she was lying.

  “Do you know what this guy does?” said one of the soldiers. “He rapes women like you. He cuts off the heads of men like your husband. And he murders children like yours.”

  He also kills American soldiers, but that went unsaid.

  Every person in that house did one of two things that night: they either covered up for Jawad, or they revealed they were deathly afraid of him. There is no chance whatsoever that none of them had never heard of the guy. He is a notorious mass murderer on the loose in their own city. Imagine meeting an adult American who says he or she has never heard of Timothy McVeigh or Osama bin Laden. It just doesn’t happen.

  “I have a daughter,” the woman said. She did, indeed, have a daughter. The little girl held onto her mother’s leg for dear life.

  “Lots of insurgents have daughters,” Captain Looney said. “Having a daughter does not make you innocent.”

  The two soldiers who were searching the kitchen moved into the living room and started opening closets and cabinets.

  “I had better not find anything other than one Glock in this house,” Captain Looney said.

  One of the soldiers found the Glock pistol that apparently had been declared. The man who told me he was an Iraqi police officer said it was his. But everyone knew that police officers in Iraq sometimes moonlight as terrorists or insurgents. It meant something that he was a police officer, but it didn’t clear him.

  I stepped out of the house and into the courtyard again, not quite sure what to do with myself. So I paced. And I needed some air. There was a tremendous amount of emotional violence in that house. I could feel it. All of us felt it. All of us knew we might be shot or even blown up at any moment. But I noticed, only in hindsight, that no one had been struck or even shoved by a single American soldier. The raid was intense, but it was also restrained.

  Nobody was arrested. Haji Jawad wasn’t in there. We would have known. He lost a foot in a fight once and now limps around on a prosthetic. Captain Looney said it was time to go back to the base. The residents of each house that had been raided could file some paperwork and get a cash reimbursement for the damage caused on the way in.

  Then a call came in over the radio.

  A suspect with a bad foot had just been spotted limping away from the house a few streets over. So instead of going back to the base we circled around to where the suspect had been spotted.

  After rounding a corner I was back in near-total darkness. My eyes had adjusted to the dim light in the house, so I could hardly see again in the darkness that is Baghdad after midnight. This neighborhood was dark even compared with most of the others. Only the faint outlines of homes against the cold backdrop of stars were visible. Still, I could see that the housing conditions dramatically deteriorated as we walked. The homes we had just broken into appeared to be more or less middle class, but behind them was slum housing. What little I could see resembled the hillside favelas in Latin America.

  My boots squished and sucked in the mud and the muck. The street obviously was not paved. All of Baghdad is strewn with trash, but this area choked on it.

  I followed Captain Looney.

  Slum dogs barked and charged from every direction. Captain Looney pointed his rifle at one. I saw a red laser dot on its side.

  Please don’t shoot the dog.

  I didn’t want to see a dog shot right in front of me, and I didn’t want to hear any gunfire. We were possibly homing in on one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world, and I could hardly see a damn thing. Whoever it was we were chasing probably couldn’t see any better than I could. That was a good thing. Gunfire would reveal our location.

  If I hear gunfire too close that isn’t ours, I thought, I’m throwing myself onto the ground and planting my face in that muck.

  “The target’s pushing southeast,” someone said. “That’s back behind us.”

  But then we heard a gun shot just a few blocks ahead of us on the other side of some houses.

  “Shot fired,” someone quietly said into the radio.

  It sounded like a rifle shot, not like a pistol. But it wasn’t close enough that I needed to face-plant in the mud just yet.

  There was no return fire, but I knew this whole thing could turn kinetic and violent at any second.

  The mud got deeper, and I had to navigate around giant holes in the road. It wasn’t even really a road. It was more like an alley. Most cars were too wide to drive down it.

  “Look at that big-ass rat,” somebody said.

  I couldn’t see the rat without night vision. I wondered whether I would accidentally kick it.

  I kept near the walls more than the soldiers did. They had night vision goggles and rifles. I didn’t have either, and I felt more vulnerable.

  Stars shimmered above us. They were the same stars that shine above my house back in Oregon. That surprised me on some irrational level. Sometimes Iraq feels like a different planet. Somewhere overhead I heard the distant roar of a jetliner, probably on its way to Kuwait. That put me back in the world. Kuwait is clearly on the same planet as Oregon. And though it’s right next to Iraq, it seemed terribly distant because it’s so civilized and luxurious. Trust me: unless you’re Iraqi, if you fly from Iraq to Kuwait you will feel like you’re home.

  No one was walking around except us--and the person up ahead we were about to detain. The night was as silent as if we were camping out in Alaska.

  Just ahead on the left was a dump site where an enormous amount of garbage had been tossed. I gave it a wide berth. Insurgents sometimes bury anti-personnel IEDs in those piles and detonate them as platoons of soldiers walk past. The entire neighborhood might have been laced with traps for all I knew.

  More dogs barked. I faintly heard men speaking in English up ahead and saw the black outlines of motionless soldiers a hundred feet or so up ahead. It seemed they had caught the fleeing suspect with the bum foot.

  “They got him,” Sergeant Gonzales said. His job was to monitor the radio with an ear piece and listen to chatter.

  “Him?” I said.

  “They got the guy who matches the description,” he said. “We don’t yet know if it’s him.”

  The area got more and more slum-like as I moved toward them. Then I realized I was inside a junk yard. IEDs and other booby traps could be anywhere and everywhere, but probably weren’t.

  A small Iraqi man sat on the ground. Three American soldiers stood over him.

  “Stand up!” Captain Looney said when we reached them.

  Eddie translated.

  “Why were you running?”

  “I did not run away,” the man said.

  “We were watching you,” Captain Looney said. “We watched you run. Only the thief fears the judge. Why were you running from us? Why were you hiding? We saw you hiding. How do you think we found you?”

  The man mumbled something in Arabic. I could hardly hear him. I don’t think Eddie heard him either because he didn’t translate.

  “Somebody bring some zip strips,” Captain Looney said.

  Someone brought the zip strips. The suspect was then flex-cuffed.

  I noticed another man had also been captured. He sto
od in silence a few feet away and trembled in fear.

  The identification cards of both suspects were checked and called into the base. Someone in the Tactical Operations Center compared their names with those in the known terrorist database.

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” Captain Looney said. “Why were you running? Are you a Muslim?”

  “Yes,” the man said.

  “Do you read the Koran?”

  “No,” the man said.

  “You know,” Captain Looney said, “that it says only the thief fears the judge, right?”

  A loud and low military plane roared overhead.

  “We were scared,” the man said.

  “Why were you scared?” Captain Looney said. “Look at me.”

  The man looked up at Captain Looney. The captain shined a flashlight in the man’s face and checked his appearance against a color photograph of Haji Jawad.

  He wasn’t the guy.

  But the other captured man, the man standing just a few feet away and trembling violently, bore a more striking resemblance to the man we were after.

  Captain Looney approached him.

  “Why were you running?” he said.

  “We were scared,” the suspect said.

  “Well, you know what?” Captain Looney said. “When the police come into my neighborhood, I don’t run. You know why? Because I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “I am afraid of you,” the man said.

  “Why?” Captain Looney said. “Why do you fear us? We don’t just go running around here killing people like Saddam Hussein did.”

  “I am afraid because of the explosion,” the man said.

  “What explosion?” Captain Looney said.

  “It was four months ago,” the man said.

  “What does that have to do with now?” Captain Looney said.

  “I am sorry,” the man said. “I apologize.”

  A soldier frisked the suspect firmly and thoroughly in a way you do not ever want to be searched. This wasn’t your typical airport security line pat-down where the TSA guy knows very well that you almost certainly are not a terrorist.

  On the other side of a chain link fence was a van surrounded by enormous piles of junkyard refuse.