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-Caveat Lector- Dear All,
The grassy fields sway as the American helicopters patrol the green, bountiful bluffs and floodplains of the Tigris River. I’m with my translator, Tahseen, the same one who worked for me during the war. He made a small fortune working for me during those months. I urged him to save the money for a rainy day. Instead, the crazy kid went out and bought a zippy, candy-red Audi that I’m driving now along the country roads. The windows are down and the radio alternates between catchy Arab pop tunes and American rap and R&B songs. Thank goodness for Radio Sawa, the new U.S.-run AM music station.
We vie for the road with long, noisy columns of American military hardware and rickety tractors. The night before, U.S. forces patrolling the area were ambushed by a group of proverbial “bad guys.” The rocket-propelled grenades they launched barely scratched the Americans’ M-1 tank. But the Americans responded with full force. Soldiers lit up the night with flares and radioed three Bradley fighting vehicles and an Apache helicopter for backup.
Then the story gets messy.
According to the Pentagon, the Americans killed as many as 27 “bad guys” in a successful counterattack against the terrorists or Saddam loyalists or Ba’ath Party holdouts or whatever they were. But amid the lush gardens, fields and orchards, the soldiers were only able to recover seven corpses.
According to the villagers in Elher, the Americans killed two strangers who had snuck here from another town and five innocent civilians: a father, three sons and a cousin who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I have doubts about the villagers’ story. I suspect they’re just covering for their relatives. Frankly, most of the people in this area are Sunni Arab supporters of Saddam Hussein. This is the infamous Sunni Triangle, stretching from west Baghdad to Ramadi and north, some say to Tikrit, but I think all the way up to Mosul. I’ve clocked a quite a bit of quality time in the towns and cities of the desert flatlands, marshes and river valleys here. It's the part of Iraq where locals cried as the Americans tore down the statutes of Saddam. It's where people spraypaint, "Down to USA. Live Saddam!" on walls. It's where people give outsiders dirty looks and threaten them with violence.
I call it Saddamistan.
Americans have been getting hurt at a rate almost every day here. One night in Fallujah, they blew up a power station with a rocket-propelled grenade, injuring two Americans. The other day they shot up a convoy of American trucks, turning one into a twisted heap of metal. The other night they wounded a soldier and killed someone in the ambulance trying to get him to a hospital. The bad guys are getting better. And recently Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz conceded that the U.S. was fighting a guerrilla war in central Iraq.
The soldiers, out on patrol or manning checkpoints, say they’re getting fired at constantly at night. Americans are confused by the particularly Middle Eastern brand of hospitality. “During the day they’re all friendly and your buddies,” said one soldier at a checkpoint near Balad. “At night they’re firing at you.”
The attacks have gotten so frequent that sometimes the soldiers don’t even report incidents to the higher-ups unless someone gets hurt. “They don’t have very good aim,” said one soldier stationed in Tikrit.
In towns like Saddam’s birthplace of Oja, the locals readily admit taking part in ambushes against Americans. Some even whine that not all their operations get onto al Jazeera or al Arabia, the Arab-language news networks Iraqis can now watch freely thanks to the post-Saddam lifting of restrictions on satellites.
I arrive at the wake for the five villagers. It is a lovely affair. Three tents are pitched next to the house to protect mourners from the furious mid-day sun. The men wear the traditional blanched white headdresses and robes of the country’s Sunni Arab minority. The women cook and weep in their black Abayas. Servants serve cold water and cigarettes.
I ask one of the relatives point-blank whether the five men were involved in the attack on the Americans. No, he replies, impossible. Weren’t your relatives opposed to the U.S. occupation? No, he replies, they welcomed the Americans. This is getting ridiculous What would it take, I ask in a trick question, for your people to take up arms against the Americans? Why, a fatwa or religious edict from our spiritual leader, he said. And who might that be?
His answer stuns me: “Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim.”
I'm speechless. I know Hakim’s folks, inside and out. I’ve been following his Iranian-backed organization for over a year. I’ve spied on its troops. I've had candid discussions with its intellectuals and soldies. It was among the top three organizations fighting Saddam for the last few decades.
Now, there may come a day when Hakim orders his flock to violently fight the American occupation. But for now, Hakim and his little brother, Abdel Aziz, are too busy sitting down with the Americans, sipping tea and cutting deals. Its disciplined, 10,000-man army has left its heavy weapons in Iran and begun reinventing itself as a public works and charity organization.
But more importantly, Ayatollah Hakim’s a Shiite. So why would Sunni Arabs follow Hakim? “Wait a minute. I’m confused,” I say to my host. “Are you Shiites?”
Of course, we’re Shiites, he says. This whole village is Shiite.
I’m blown away. I begin to protest that they don’t look like Shiites but I shut my mouth. What the hell do I know about Iraq anyway? Just what the hell does a Shiite look like anyway? Just because they’re dressed in the clothes that I and most people associate with Sunni Arab tribesman, I assumed they were Sunni Arab. In reality, there was no way on earth these people were diehard Ba’athists, no way they launched an ambush on Americans. The Shiites are happy Saddam is gone. He evicted them from their villages and executed their young in droves. They’re not delighted to see Americans occupy their country, but they’re not too enraged about it either. That is, they won’t be until incidents like the one at Elher are repeated and the Americans find themselves in Vietnam 2, starring, oh, I dunno, Saddam Hussein as Ho Chi Minh, Iran and Syria as China and Russia, and the Kurdish peshmerga as the Hmong militiamen.
Indeed, in contrast to the rest of Iraq, the trees, gardens and bushes of the Triangle make it ideal for guerrilla warfare…
I sit down for a glass of sweetened tea. The story of the five men trickles out: during the attack that night, one of the Americans’ flares landed on the family’s farm and set a field a fire. The old man ran out of the house to douse the flames. The old man was 70. His three sons couldn’t let him go out alone, and ran out behind them. A young cousin followed after them. The Americans, just under attack, fired at everything that moved. Through night-vision goggles, the five men might have looked like people trying to attack them or flee. In any case, all five were killed.
Back beneath the tents, the women weep and wail. The men work their prayer beads and shake their down-turned heads. The Americans, one relative says, were supposed to come here and offer an apology. They have yet to show up. Maybe they still have their doubts. I mean, even I who have devoted the better part of a year to figuring out Iraq and decades to understanding the Middle East just assumed these folks were Sunni Arab Saddam sympathizers.
I don’t have doubts. The family members ask me if I now believe their relatives were innocent. I say I do
An Army colonel up in northern Iraq once explained to me the triple pressures under which American soldiers strain. In the mornings, they might work at a ministry handing out meager salaries to mobs of angry desperate Iraqis. In the afternoons they patrol neighborhoods, playing with the local children and acting like jolly ol’ officer friendly with an M-16 and flak jacket as well as a sidearm. In the evening they go out on night patrol, shooting down Fedayeen. You can imagine the confusion: Am I here to help, make friends with or kill the Iraqis?
Morale among the soldiers is at a low point. I’m not sure if I can find in my vocabulary the adjectives to describe the intense summer heat here. It's mind-addling. Day and night. Many soldiers are desperate to go back home. Hell, I'm about getting desperate to go home and I've been here just a month. It's hell here.
The intense conditions have bred a sense of camaraderie among all the foreigners here. In Tikrit, I once approached a brigadier general as he planned helicopter attacks. “Excuse me, sir. Could we chat with you for a minute?” No problem. In Oja we asked a bunch of Marines if we could tag along as they conducted house-to-house raids. “Sure,” said the squad commander, “just stay out of the line of fire.”
“Ah, man, it’s just so good to talk to an American,” one soldier – a Chicago-area native whose high school played mine in football and basketball -- told me after a 20-minute chat. A good guy.
This is why I don’t understand the appeal of the embed program. You get so little for all that you give up, which includes a translator and the freedom to publish what you want when you want to. I mean, sure, during the war it was being embedded was about the only way to get safely to the action. But these days, soldiers offer to give me rides and join in patrols and without having to sign away my freedom as a journalist.
Besides, I’ve ridden in a Humvee. The windows are narrow slits on the world. I prefer my wacky young translator’s little red Audi.
Sincerely,
Borzou
P.S. Feel free to distribute this letter to whomever you want. But please do not republish this one without express permission from me... I just need to think about it.
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