Long before I arrived at the Iraq frontier I was thoroughly alarmed. On our 320km desert drive through Jordan, my driver, Ziad, wound me up. ”Near Baghdad,” he said, ”many Ali Baba! Three hundred kilometres, very bad!” The previous night, waiting at Heathrow for a long-delayed plane to Amman, I’d seen the news: four unarmed Americans killed driving through the Iraqi town of Falluja, hacked to bits and displayed like something out of Zola’s Germinal. We would be passing close to Falluja.
On the Jordanian side of the border there were smart chaps in uniform. On the Iraqi side men in cheap leather jackets. We made for a low building. ”Toilet, then no stop!” said Ziad.
Saddam built good motorways. We started down the three-lane carriageway at exactly 100mph, the signs saying that it was 552 kilometres to Baghdad, which meant we would be there well before dark. It was all so normal.
Then it changed. By the side of the road someone had taken chains and a tractor to all the electricity pylons for 160km, bending them in the middle so they stooped over like coolies in a rice paddy. Ziad decided to stop, after all, for a last pee. While he was away from the car, three men in a red Nissan pick-up drove slowly towards us from a track, then on to the road and past. The pick-up turned on to a slip-road leading to a bridge above the motorway. A fortnight before, a CNN car had been shot at by a man firing a Kalashnikov through the sunroof of a small car, and two people were killed. But the Nissan didn’t stop. Maybe it had reported us to others further down the way? Or maybe nothing.
Columnists don’t normally run physical risks to try to validate their opinions. We are a comfort-loving bunch, whose enemies tend to remain on the page. But a year on from the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad — a moment I had celebrated in print — I needed to know how things were going in the real Iraq.
For the moment, however, what was going was us, and fast — keeping always to the middle of the road. Then, up ahead was our first US convoy: six small vehicles, hugely vulnerable, low-sided and open. Ziad clearly didn’t want to be anywhere near them. His nervousness was contagious. I didn’t want to be near them either. The first signs appeared for the town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad.
It is pretty, in this most dangerous of places. The road passes over the Euphrates, the fields are green, the landscape decorated with hundreds of tall date palms. But just before 5pm we passed a group of Iraqi men looking at the black and flaming wreckage of a lorry. A mile on, Ziad braked sharply. Our whole carriageway was blocked by American troops, at the site of a burning Humvee. Sandy-coloured troops kneeled or stood pointing their weapons at one side of the road. I heard one short burst of fire. Ziad crossed the carriageway and drove as fast as he safely could, given that the traffic was coming the other way. ”Bad place,” he said, when we were round the next corner, ”Falluja!”
Ten seconds later there was a loud bang from below the car. The thing had decided to conk out in the one spot that I had most wanted to sail through at 100mph. The place where looking like an American can get you shot, burned and hung from a bridge. Ziad tinkered about, tried the engine and — gradually — I realised we were stuffed. As it got dark I sat inside and wrote possible last thoughts in my notebook. About people in offices who tell you things are bound to be fine, about the irony of a pro-invasion scribbler being lynched by an Iraqi mob here in the Sunni triangle, about what a coward I am.
We had to flag down some help, but we had no idea who would stop. What we got were two boys in their early 20s in an old Opel. They stared at me with curiosity and — I thought — a degree of pity. They must have realised that I was helpless, just a baby. A big, white, fat, rich probably American baby. And yet they decide to help the baby. One lad went to fetch a pick-up truck. We were hoisted up and began the last leg of our journey as night fell. Laughing at the escape, I entered Baghdad backwards in the dark, in a wonderful jam of honking cars, down Ramadan Street, full of evening shoppers.
The rest of the evening was a strange whirl of events, including conversations with Iraqis at a garage, where they intimated that Saddam was doomed (finger across throat) and that the Americans were mad and trigger-happy — one had lost a father, apparently, to a US bullet. By 10pm I was bedded down in late-Soviet-style hotel splendour, protected by wire, concrete blocks made in Iraqi Kurdistan, Iraqi policemen, American tanks and hotel guards with strange guns. From total insecurity to total security in two hours.
At breakfast the next morning, a man looking like Bill Bailey sat down and put his small machine pistol on the table in the way we normally put down our keys or our mobiles. Three other guys were talking about Falluja. ”Two mags right through the side and an RPG,” one said. ”Dead long before they were hacked about.” That afternoon one of the Iraqi hotel staff, who wanted to improve his English, told me that he would like to go to America. ”And you know what I would say to President Bush?” he demanded. ”I would tell him to drop a nuclear bomb on Falluja. That would end the problem.”
But Falluja wouldn’t stay the only story. My entry illustrated one kind of problem, the lack of security. My time in Baghdad (still happening, as I write this) would show quite another. One that I got my first hint of, though I didn’t know it, on my first daylight foray out into Baghdad.
My driver was a young man I’ll call Walid. Walid spoke quite good English, and had trained to be a systems analyst, a job for which there is limited demand in Baghdad right now. He was a Shia from the large Baghdad slum district that had once been called Saddam City and now was Sadr City, renamed after a murdered Shia cleric.
Walid was the only wage-earner supporting a family of 15, including his brother’s wife and kids. Last January, though, Walid had managed to buy his brother a car to set up as a taxi driver. On his first night out, two men from Ramadi had hijacked the car at gunpoint. Walid went straight to the offices of the organisation belonging to one Moqtada al-Sadr, the son of the murdered cleric. They had organised a posse, located the car and handed the thieves over to the Iraqi police. Since then, Walid had been a strong supporter of the young firebrand. I thought it a rather cute story, and admired his Moqtada keyring. Maybe I would go with him to Sadr City at some point.
But that first morning we went to see the people who had got me into this Iraq business in the first place, who had made me what might be called a ”premature anti-Saddamite” — the Iraqi Communist party. When I was 24 and secretary of the National Union of Students, members of the ICP came to me for help in dealing with harassment from Ba’athist goons who infiltrated British campuses. Now, like me, the ICP had gradually become more social democratic and, though it had been opposed to the invasion of Iraq, it agreed to sit on the American-appointed governing council.
The headquarters building on Andalus Square was buzzing. On the wall the old European triptych of Marx, Engels and Lenin was supplemented by paintings of Iraqi party founders and photos of people still missing from Saddam’s time. In an anteroom I met Shakr al-Dujeily, a leading party member.
He had come back from long exile on April 12 2003. ”You know, I was shocked by how tired, how desperate the people were. We had gone back 100 years. People could not speak properly. They dressed badly, as though they didn’t care.” He was the most upbeat man I was to meet. Perhaps because he was the first. He told me that the ICP had been working together with a group of six secular parties, including the two Kurdish parties, the Independent Democrats and Arab Socialists. It has 87 offices around the country and, as Jonathan Steele reported in the Guardian earlier this week, the party had just done well in local elections in its heartland area of Nassiriya.
Dujeily thought things were improving in Iraq. ”The way people talk — it gives me a hope that they have hope. Yes, it’s a deep crisis, but it’s better than a year ago. Most important, there is no civil war, as many expected.” But there are also no jobs and, as Dujeily put it, ”You know, guns, anger and poverty are linked.” And, with nothing else to fall back on, people often turn to religion for the answers. And religion divides.
Even so, he believed that there was a decline in the influence of religious elements. But these were all battles about the future that Dujeily was describing, not arguments about the occupation itself. With roughly 90 days to go before the coalition authority is due to hand over to a transitional Iraqi leadership on June 30, he was in little doubt that the issue was the shape of the new country.
His own estimate was that elections, currently slated for January 2005, could be held by March 2005, just 11 months from now. I asked him about the occupation forces, and he volunteered that a new move by the coalition authority had been a mistake: it had suspended the al-Hawza newspaper belonging to Moqtada al-Sadr’s faction. ”It is not the way,” he said. ”Even if they tell lies.” This was something of an understatement, since al-Hawza was a sort of National Enquirer for fundamentalists, substituting Americans and infidels for aliens.
”But,” he finished, ”we do our best, and I am more optimistic now than a year ago. Really.”
Now, driving around, I was seeing quite a few of these Moqtada posters around. Moqtada with his father, Moqtada with a lion, Moqtada with his finger raised in warning, Moqtada looking like Russell Crowe in a turban. To one man with whom I talked, all this was far from innocent fun. He told dark tales of people assassinated, possibly for opposing the young Sadr’s forces or other Shia religious militias.
When we went for lunch I was told to be quiet. ”Don’t speak English so loudly,” whispered my translator. This was to happen several times during my stay, the implication being that ”they” might be listening, and that someone might do something about me. Or, maybe, something about my translator. It wasn’t quite the carefree way I’d envisaged dining in Baghdad a year on from the liberation.
Of course I now knew that there were people who would happily kill any westerner who might be anything to do with the coalition forces, or with the coalition authority. I also knew that very few of them were Kurds.
So it was inside the governing council compound, guarded by privately employed and affable Gurkhas, that I met Kurdish GC member Mahmoud Othman, whose wisdom is supposed to be as great as his nose. Inside, the building looked like a Portakabin and smelled of toilets, but the furniture and computers were new.
Friendly didn’t mean uncritical. Othman was clear that the authority had made a strategic error: it had not devolved enough power to the council early enough. ”The minister of interior was not given enough money. The police are short of cars, guns and communications. We need 150 000 police and we’ve only got 40 000.”
As a result things have been messed up that didn’t need to be. With proper local knowledge and action, ”Falluja could have been controlled a year ago.” And the coalition authority had been arrogant. ”They pick people up and then let them go again without consultation. And if we say, ‘But why did you let them go?’ they answer, ‘OK, if you want to, you capture them again!’ No, they don’t know the people. They don’t know the language. They had a good plan for the war, but not a good plan for the peace. They can’t solve the problems — and we are not authorised to.” Othman was five-foot-nothing of controlled frustration.
Despite all that, he thought that the enterprise of Iraq could be carried off, and a remarkable new democracy brought into being. People, he felt, were up for it. The different Shia factions, for instance, were mostly responsible blokes. ”And if the new interim government gets the international recognition, a new resolution and support from the UN, a big enough budget, I think we can do it. The occupation will be over.” It was what I wanted to hear. On the way out though, I noticed, painted on a wall opposite the council’s compound: ”Don’t make us theives [sic] or terrorists. Loaf + honrable life.” That gave the sense of the Iraqi people, waiting still, but increasingly impatiently.
Iraqi politics are complicated; there was a lot to understand. In the Shia community alone there are various sheikhs, imams and ayatollahs, some with their own parties — of which Moqtada’s is said to be the smallest. Then there is the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), which sits on the governing council and has a militia called the Badr group, and there is Hawza, the religious body that surrounds the most respected Shia cleric, the Ayatollah Sistani, said to have the biggest following.
A few minutes later Walid’s phone rang. ”Hey!” he exclaimed. ”Would you like to go to my city? Sadr City? The Mahdi army is having a demonstration today. Maybe it is still happening.” He checked but — alas — things had stopped in his part of town for the day. ”What is the Mahdi army?” I asked. The next day I found out.
There are six, maybe 700 people outside the hotel, in the square where Saddam’s statue was brought down. Rumour among the journalists and drivers is that on Thursday evening, after a demo, two Moqtada activists got shot by police or security men. Now they’ve brought a coffin along and are making speeches, waving black and green flags and shouting slogans that are translated as meaning ”out” and ”now”. ”I didn’t see anything about shootings on the news,” I say. ”Of course not,” says my friend darkly, as though there were some conspiracy to play down bad news. Which is bollocks.
But you do get a lot of bollocks in Iraq. This same demonstration that I witnessed was, according to Naomi Klein, composed of several thousand people, who were fired on by Iraqi army units, who killed four. But according to a British journalist who was there at the time, two Iraqi policemen fired three short volleys in the air, and then — wisely — desisted. No one was hurt. But in Iraq, people assert the improbable with extraordinary vigour. ”In Iraq,” Walid told me, ”you should believe everything.” This could well be the worst advice I have ever been given.
We escape the traffic and the perspiring traffic cops and make for the university. If there’s hope for the future, it’ll be here. Tarik (22) and slight, tells me in excellent English that, ”Democracy will work, but not so fast. These years under Saddam have changed the characters and psychology of the people. You can’t change it back so quickly.” The only things for sale on campus are crisps and the pamphlets available from an Islamic bookstall.
In a meeting room on the ground floor of the engineering faculty, Hussein Ali (21) a member of the Turkoman minority from Kirkuk, says he is not much worried about the occupation. It’s what happens next that is bothering him. He doesn’t want to be part of Kurdistan. If the Kurds will not listen? ”Well, if you take a hammer and strike it against a bomb, it may explode.”
I cannot imagine the slight Hussein, or any of the pimply boys now gathered in the room, exploding. In any case I am distracted because we are, for once, in a place with women. Girls are everywhere on campus, laughing, most in hijabs but plenty bareheaded. My translator tells me that the abduction of women has now largely stopped. To be replaced by the kidnap and ransoming of boys. Which, when you are told about such things happening, seems bizarre. If you are not actually where a shooting or a bombing takes place Baghdad seems like many other Arab cities, and better than quite a few. The Tigris is beautiful at any time of day, Baghdad’s large suburbs are pleasant and only moderately filthy, and slums are slums. People shop well, drive badly and generally behave well to each other.
It is across this city that we drive now to the Rahman mosque, which sits in the shadow of a vast, unfinished structure — another mosque, begun in the devout phase of Saddam’s megalomania, on the site of the Baghdad racecourse. In a high-ceilinged room lined with wood and which resembles a giant’s sauna, I meet Sheikh Ahmed Jaizani, dean of the Sadr Islamic University, which is based at the mosque. Robed and turbaned, Jaizani cannot be more than late 37 or 38, and is shy-looking and small. If you like your extremists to look mad, he is a disappointment.
”Democracy,” he tells me mildly, ”is not given or granted. It is a condition of living that comes from a culture of peaceful coexistence and co-operation.” There is nothing there that the Chinese wouldn’t say. ”But what we fear is that the temporary constitution cuts off the possibility of such coexistence.” And why? We’re back to the guaranteeing of rights. ”There should be certain limits to this.” Such as? His answer borders on the bizarre. ”I read in the papers that in France there is an article in French law which does not allow women to go out very naked looking. Disrespectful freedom is prohibited.” This will be news in St Tropez.
Even so, he is hopeful. ”Iraq’s personality has a certain degree of awareness that prevents sectarian war,” he frowns. So the prospects for peace and democracy? ”Inshallah.” I’ll settle for inshallah, I suppose.
At lunch, though, through the cafe windows, we see occasional little bands of Moqtada militants in odd places, with black and green flags, but never more than five or six. I have a last call today. Inside the Khadassiya compound, which housed Saddam’s ministers, is the office of one of the main Kurdish parties, the PUK, guarded by peshmerga militiamen. There Adnan Murad gets on to the burgeoning subject of Moqtada. ”Moqtada is the most extreme. He makes teachers scared for their lives. Student leaders are very careful, there have been kidnappings. They [the Moqtada militants] use intimidation and terrorise people. They are against freedom for women. But Sistani is a very wise man, though very old and surrounded by bureaucrats.”
To him the rising visibility of Moqtada demos and muscle-flexing by its militiamen, the Mahdi army, is primarily about inter-Shia jockeying for position after the June 30 handover. But he wants more done on security. ”Why are the borders open? Anyone can come in. This is a big mistake. The Iraqi people want a safe life.”
As we leave, we get a dramatic phone call. There has been a big battle in Sadr City. The Mahdi army stormed some police stations. The Americans have gone in. Walid is in the hotel lobby. ”You will not believe! They are in my city! Tanks! Planes! Many killed and wounded! The Shia are very angry now!” There are pictures too from Najaf, where a Sadr cleric has been arrested on an Iraqi warrant on suspicion of murdering a rival a year ago. Again the crowds are not that big, but they are determined, and people are getting killed. If the inhabitants of Sadr City become inflamed … It is the talk of the capital, and it has all happened so damn quickly. A day ago I hardly knew who this guy was.
I sleep badly. I imagine insurgents swarming over the tanks, entering the hotel and — before I can yell, ”I am a journalist from Wales!”, defenestrating me. By next morning the Americans have closed off Falluja, the road to Jordan is blocked, and trouble is reported from Kut, Nassirya, Amara and Basra. And all day the news gets worse.
Can the coalition have been so foolish as to risk an uprising? Then I wonder whether the Americans, despite their habit of stencilling daft names on their tanks (like Bloodlust, Braveheart, Blitzkrieg and Beautiful Disaster) have been tipped the wink by the anti-Sadr Shia that it’s OK to rein in Moqtada, that their people will wear it. Sure enough, Ayatollah Sistani calls for peace.
The next day is cold and bright and, in most of Baghdad at least, things are back to what passes here for normal. We go off to the Four Roads district, and the former Ba’ath party HQ, where the Iraqi Islamic party, successor to the Sunni Muslim Brothers, has its main place. The IIP sits on the governing council. Their man, Dr Fuad, is a bit bleak. ”The bitter reality is political empti ness, security chaos, economic chaos …”
It’s nearly time to leave Iraq. As we drive back to the hotel a lazy puff of black smoke lies low in the sky a mile or so away. An RPG, says our driver. Twelve marines have been killed in Ramadi, attacked by 100 insurgents. The US army is about to go into Falluja. My first feeling is that — if I can get out — I’ll be glad to be away from the danger and also from the sheer maleness of it all: the tanks, guns, moustaches and discussion about whether women really can have rights. I haven’t had a conversation with an Iraqi woman since arriving. But I suppose people would caint. The headlines are all about war on two fronts and the ”Shia rebellion”.
A year on, and in the west we still tend to think that everything in Iraq is about the occupation and the Americans. But it isn’t. It is mostly about what comes next, with the occupation forces as a medium of political exchange. The various forces haven’t yet dared attack each other openly on any real scale, though it is hard to imagine Sciri and Sistani tolerating Sadr’s takeover of the holy shrine in Najaf. The US-led occupiers, it is true, are not loved or thanked, and often blamed. Neither are they, incidentally, universally hated. But it is hard to know whether the occupation has frozen Iraqi rivalries, so they will break out when it ends, or — as I hope — has permitted these possible emnities to be politicised.
If Iraq gets through the next week it may be OK. Baghdad at the moment is actually far less chaotic than Gaza. It isn’t Beirut in the 70s or 80s, with private armies fighting for territory. It is, however, mostly worse than I expected a year ago. And more depressing.
But this is a people who we have (and please excuse my language here) fucked up for a long time now. We colonised them, then neglected them, then interfered out of our own interests, not theirs. We tolerated Saddam and — somewhat later — even supported him. We waged war on him, but refused to help liberate his people. Instead we hit them with sanctions which the regime (which we wrongly believed would fall) ensured caused the maximum damage to the people. We and the Russians and the French, and the UN, and the Turks and the other Arabs, permitted millions of people to die or be reduced to misery and pauperdom.
So, of all the things we have done, the invasion may be bloody appalling, but it is the least bloody appalling thing of all. And the only thing that has offered hope.
Now, though, is the time to support those who will be taking the next step — the Iraqi democrats, religious and secular, who have to build the new Iraq. Early in the morning, waiting to gent my flight tickets, I was approached by Salih, 30, an unarmed security guard. He started by saying that he wanted to visit Britain. And then he broke down. Here’s what he said, more or less verbatim. ”I sorry. But I die in Iraq. I die now, every day. Maybe I shoot me. I can’t live here. Weapons, tanks, enemy all the time. I can’t sleep with shootings. No money. I die. I must go.”
Salih doesn’t need our arguments any more. He needs our help. – Guardian Unlimited Â