Tag: iraq

September 11, 2006

It was a graveyard. That was the only way to describe it. The place where old war machines came to die. Row upon row of massive sand-colored metal tanks, their huge guns each raised to a different height, sat there like a frozen image of a clumsy chorus line.

There weren’t just tanks either, massive artillery pieces, trucks, strange amphibious vehicles that looked half boat – an automotive mating ritual gone horribly wrong, and all covered in the graffiti of their conquerors.

Beneath the layers of black spray paint could be seen the original unit designations of these shattered old Iraqi tanks left to rust in a field at the edge of Taji base, somewhere north of Baghdad.

“God, Nation, the Leader”, read words arranged around a stenciled profile of Saddam Hussein in his once trademark military beret. Years later, even amidst the wreckage of his ambitions, the word “leader” still has chilling “führer” like echoes.

It was a interesting to compare to hillsides in Morocco where “God, Nation and King” would be picked out in white stones. Somehow it sounds better with a king.

On other tanks though, the font for the Arabic seemed wrong, different, till I realized it was Farsi, and could only puzzle out the words “Iran” and “Azad”, free Iran, I think. So this is what the Americans did with the tanks belonging to the People’s Mojahedin, an extremely creepy cult-like group of Iranians opposed to the Islamic Republic, once supported by Saddam.

I hear they are out there still (minus the tanks) on a camp near the Iranian border, guarded by American soldiers who don’t really know what to make of them – they were friends with Saddam, but they don’t like the Iranian mullahs, our enemy as well. What do we do with them?

The ground around the tanks at first was the typical hard packed sand of the rest of the base, baked dry by the merciless summer sun. As I moved deeper into the rows of wrecked vehicles, though, it became strange, with a crust, almost like old snow.

Then my foot broke through the crust into a greasy, muddy ooze that shouldn’t exist in a such a hot dry place. God knows what’s leaked out of these machines into the ground but I hurriedly squelched out of there before it dissolved by army-issue boots.

It was actually a pretty depressing place. All this metal, all this wasted money on military machinery, now rusting away useless in a poisoned field on the edge of some remote base, while outside the whole place is rending itself to pieces so badly that not even the occupying army can do anything about it.

In that sense, the graffiti scribbled across these tanks, some of it dating back to 2004, (“John’s tank”, “Size does matter”, “I love you Sarah” or more worrisome “I love Sarah and Maggie”) was oddly joyful. You could almost imagine the soldiers going out to this field with a can of spray paint and a digital camera to create something to send a far distant wife or girlfriend.

I never realized how many soldiers seem to be married, but as moved around with various US army units in Baghdad and talked to men, it seemed everyone had a wife, far away, that they missed terribly.

Near the tank grave yard, I was living with the 172nd Stryker brigade – a unit known, ironically enough, for its massive armored vehicles. I wondered if their sleek, state of the art machines flinched just a bit, every day, as they drove by those vandalized hulks.

After year of running around Mosul, doing their thing, this brigade had been extended four more months and sent down to Baghdad a week before they were to return to their home in Alaska(!) to help pacify the still turbulent capital city.

I tagged along on their missions through the city. Searching houses, confiscating weapons, talking to people – I could see why they had been kept here, instead of bringing in a brand new unit. They were relaxed with the Iraqis, took the odd thrown stone in their stride, no one was shouted at, put into flex cuffs or otherwise humiliated.

We were in a Shiite neighborhood, so people weren’t quite as over-the-moon to see them as in the Sunni neighborhoods. A number people said they though the police and army were doing a fine job – why were you still here?

One guy asked the American company commander if the US was holding back the Iraqi police and army so that they wouldn’t have to leave Iraq. Shiites especially these days are grumbling that the Americans will never go home.

The captain just looked at him, and then pulled a picture of a woman with an infant. “This is my 13th month here in Iraq, this is a picture of my wife and son, I haven’t seen them in a year. I get little video clips of my son and I don’t even recognize him anymore. Trust me when I say most of us just want to go.”

Listening to soldiers, you hear some say how they hate Iraq or Iraqis, but not all. Some really do believe in their ability to make a difference here, somehow make it better – otherwise how can they justify the last year of their lives spent here?

Bit naïve, really.

The Americans are going through the capital block by block, searching them for weapons, promising protection, and the militias and the death squads just stay out of their way and wait for them to leave.

As I’m writing this back home in my room Baghdad, I’m turning up the volume of my music to drown out the gunfire coming from across the river in Fadel neighborhood, where last night at 3am explosions tore me from sleep.

Only weeks earlier, the Strykers had supposedly been through the neighborhood to make it safe. Yet people tell us that the mostly Sunni neighborhood is now subjected to nightly assaults from Shiite militia men in nearby Sadr City – a place the Strykers haven’t been to.

We contacted the US military after listening to several days of fighting. “Our initial reports don’t show anything out of the ordinary in the Fadel neighborhood,” they said.

But then one neighborhood massacring another has become rather ordinary in Baghdad.

August 6, 2006

We were nearing the end of our patrol when we got a call about a UXO incident – unexploded ordnance. Someone, somewhere had found some kind of exploded bomb and we were sent to deal with it.

Actually, our patrol was just there to secure the area and provide security while the EOD (explosives ordnance disposal or something, I swear, it’s a new acronym every day) was called in to clean up the mess of the war.

It turned out to be an unexploded mortar shell in a particular poor area somewhere in southwest Baghdad, a Shiite neighborhood not far from a Sunni neighborhood, another one of these fault lines in the city.

The young men and kids that came gathered at the arrival of the Americans and their humvees (we even had a Bradley tank with us, very impressive) said, why yes, someone did mortar us just the other day. Apparently not all of them went off.

One officer described it to me as the “new face of violence in Baghdad is senseless indirect fire.” It’s called indirect fire because you don’t see where it goes. He said once it was bombs in market places or in front of mosques, these days it was just a bunch of guys with mortar launcher and some shells shooting off a few into the nearby neighborhood and then running away. Not particularly aiming at anything, just shooting.

There are so many mortar shells in Iraq, it’s hard to grasp. Everyday the US army issues another press release about some massive “terrorist” weapons cache they have discovered containing hundreds of 60mm or 80mm mortars.

These are the raw materials for roadside bombs, incidentally. Usually they are wired together, attached to a mobile phone, and then when a US or Iraqi army patrol drives by, the insurgent makes a phone call.

Now, however, they are more and more being used for their intended purpose of being shot at people.

It was just a little 60mm mortar, sitting in the middle of a vacant, trash-filled lot in this poor grubby neighborhood. So the soldiers settled down to wait for the bomb squad, all the while grumbling because EOD was known to take a long time and it was already getting near dusk and the patrol should have been near its end.

I was near my own end. It was my second patrol of the day, it was really hot, and I had a throbbing headache so that I really didn’t care what happened to the little rocket over in the trash pile.

Then one of the soldiers comes over and said that one of the locals had told the interpreter that there were two more unexploded mortars nearby. “Who told you this?” asked the sergeant. “Guy with the dark hair and the yellow man-dress on.”

That didn’t narrow it down to much, but we eventually found the guy wearing the yellow dish-dash who directed us down through some buildings.

We come to another vacant trash filled lot, this time filled with sheep and an old shepherd (I mean what better place to pasture the flock than in an urban slum?). We asked him if he’d seen any mortar shells around and so he barked over at one of his teenage sons…

… who proceeded to come walking over to us carrying a pair of mortar shells in his bare hands! There was a collective gasp as everyone shouted for the interpreter to tell him to put them down, very gently. Which he did rather nonchalantly, clearly not sure why four huge soldiers with weapons and body armor were cringing away from him.

Turns out when the shepherd had come across them he’d neutralized them the best way he knew how and, as the soldiers put it, “tossed them into the shit creek” that passed for plumbing in this neighborhood.

Not long afterwards, the bomb squad showed up and was briefed on the situation. And the first thing the bomb guy did was go up to our two shit creek bombs and pick them up himself and carry them over to the other trash pile bomb.

We gave him a lot of room.

They then dug a hole, placed the mortar shells in there, put plastic explosives on top and then put a tire around the whole thing, took cover, and blew the whole mess up.

All in all it took a few hours and these happen all the time. We were minutes from the base when the patrol got a call about another UXO incident (lot of dud mortar shells out there it seems), and we were diverted in the pitch black night to go provide security for another team dealing with an errant mortar shell.

By this time my pounding headache had left me half blind and a little fed up with the whole situation so that as we stood around and provided pointless security, I vented bitterly to the sergeant, who was so amused (and shared my feelings) that he passed on my sentiments to the lieutenant. Who seemed to lack quite the same sense of humor.

We weren’t far from the main US base around there and one of the interpreters, who went around masked like most of them do, described the nearby village as an “insurgent village”. Apparently they would watch for the interpreters to leave the base on their breaks, follow them and then sell their identities to the insurgents.

I heard somewhere once that the insurgents will pay thousands of dollars for the name and address of an interpreter for the coalition forces.

Later I was eating with the soldiers. We’d spent enough time together inside a humvee that it only seemed normal that I sat with them in the chow hall. One sergeant was predicting that their tours were going to be extended this time around.

The 4th Infantry Division came into Baghdad in December so theoretically they should be leaving in November… but new troops were just moved into Baghdad to try to stop the brewing civil war. The new people had been stationed up in Mosul and had been set to go home themselves, now they’ve been moved to Baghdad and extended for three months.

This one sergeant felt pretty sure that they wouldn’t be allowed to go home either, not in the middle of the battle to retake the city.

Part of the sergeant’s skepticism stemmed from his first time in Iraq, he rolled in from Kuwait with the 2nd Armored Division in March 2003 and after one year, they were set to go home, sitting in the airport in Kuwait, six hours from ending the most exhausting year of their life when word came they had to go back.

Days later they were fighting the Mahdi Militia across southern Iraq and stayed another five months through the blazing summer in 2004.

Then they went home for a year and came back 2005. Matching his joking tone, I made some comment about it must be hard to stay normal with all that.

He stopped walking, turned and look at me, suddenly serious with a strange catch in his voice, “normal? I don’t think any of us are normal any more. There is no normal.”

August 2, 2006

In the midst of this whole mess, the last place I expected to find people who liked America was west Baghdad.

West Baghdad, roughly speaking, is the Sunni part of a very mixed city, and has the distinction of being the home to a pretty nasty insurgency for the last few years – you wanna get kidnapped, go to west Baghdad, where they also shoot men for wearing shorts and women for not wearing veils.

US troops turned the place over to the Iraqi army back in December, all part of that process of Bush calls our stepping down as the Iraqis step up… Except it all went to hell so badly that in April the US army had to move back in – I don’t think that was mentioned in the state of the union address.

Now, the whole capital’s going to hell in a handbasket and the same process is being repeated across the city as more US troops are being rushed in. Six weeks into the new prime minister’s security plan, it’s worse than ever here and the Iraqi forces have shown themselves unable to control their own capital.

Doesn’t bode well.

This time it’s not the insurgents that are messing things up, however, it’s the death squads, the militias, the sectarian killings. People don’t spend much time targeting the Americans out here any more, they’re too busy killing each other.

Before going on a patrol, the burly sergeant (they’re always burly it seems) was giving the patrol briefing which includes reading down the “sigacts” report. What? Significant activities. So we stood there in 120 degree (45C) weather next to our humvees listening to a list of who’d been shooting who and where bombs and bodies had been turning up across the west Baghdad area.

One bit caught my attention. Up in the north, a Sunni and Shiite neighborhood were shooting mortars at each other every night. I later heard this goes on in some southern neighborhoods as well. As someone in the office later pointed out, if two neighborhoods are shelling each other, can’t we call it a civil war?

So we all piled into the humvees and went on patrol through the “mean” streets of west Baghdad, and the first thing I noticed was just how nice some of these streets were. There were leafy palm trees everywhere, in one area a few people had even trimmed their hedges into topiary shapes. Brightly colored bougainvilleas spilled down garden walls into the street.

Trash, however, lay piled uncollected in any vacant lot and every block had a massive generator, festooned with wires, serving the block.

At every street corner, people had dragged rocks, bits of concrete barrier and whole palm trunks to block off their streets. The inhabitants told me it was to protect against nighttime intruders and stop drive by shootings.

The commercial streets, the public spaces, in these neighborhoods were shattered. Rows of shops with their metal shutters closed at all hours of the days. There were twisted metal frames that were once cars packed with explosives, and never any people.

It was like a reversion to medieval Islamic cities were the gates of alleys and quarters would be locked at night, dividing cities up into a series of isolated strongholds – much the way Baghdad now seemed to fragmenting.

The US soldiers obligingly stopped periodically during one patrol and allowed me to clamber out and talk to people. What they said surprised me so much that I later sent some of the Sunnis from the office to the same neighborhood to check it out.

These people wanted the Americans around. They trusted the Americans – at least not to kill them for their id cards, as one guy put it. You know the situation in Baghdad is bad when the American occupiers are preferred, better yet, considered fair and just.

And this is after the allegations marines shooting up civilians in Haditha and a soldier raping a woman and killing her family.

You knew what happened after you were arrested by an American. When you were taken away by the police, you just weren’t heard from again.

The focus is no longer the Americans in Baghdad, they have drifted off to the sidelines as the neighborhoods arm themselves for the internecine battles.

There were some scary moments. One day, at the dining hall, I was sitting have lunch with this bunch of US army officers, when one captain suddenly announces how attractive he finds Condoleezza Rice.

I mean what do you say to that? There was a uncomfortable silence as we digested the remark, rather hoping it was a one-off. Instead, it gave him the opening to start describing how great he thought her legs were, and how attracted he was to smart women.

Being stuck on a base in Iraq is hard on everyone.

I met this one old Iraqi guy in a particularly nice west Baghdad neighborhood called Jamaa, or university, he talked about how his neighbors are just melting away.

“That guy was a professor, he now lives in Malaysia, I’m not sure where that guy moved, and that guy over there lives in Jordan after he was kidnapped and ransomed,” he said gesturing to the leafy houses across the street with their unkempt lawns.

Everyone in this neighborhood of professors, doctors and lawyers fears kidnapping. He described how his neighbor was snatched right in the street by a pair of black BMWs. The ransom was half a million dollars

“I have two doors, one in front, one in back – I always leave the house from the back door,” he said, a diminutive little man wearing just an undershirt in the summer heat. He showed me his garden, a mini Versaille of statuary and ornamental benches.

The neighborhoods got a little shabbier later when I accompanied a patrol farther south into Jihad, where a few weeks earlier Shiite militiamen descended on the neighborhood, set up fake checkpoints and just started killing people.

The Americans didn’t patrol it much before. Now they do. Perhaps it was my imagination, but there was a lot more smiling and waving at Americans in this neighborhood than I’d seen in others? Half of Jihad is fairly nice houses inhabited by Sunnis while the other half is trash filled and crumbling and Shiite.

The area is patrolled by the national police, once known as the commandos, and predominantly Shiite. The litany of events that led up to the massacre is quite depressing.

The police raided a mosque known to harbor weapons and insurgents. A few days later a bomb hit a police patrol killing several. A few days later a bomb went off in front of a Sunni mosque just after prayers, killing several. The next day a huge car bomb went off in front of a Shiite mosque, shattering it and killing 12.

The next day the militias showed up.

I saw the shattered remnants of the Shiite mosque, in a poor neighborhood, in a street filled with rubble, with barricades all around to prevent new car bombs.

Graffiti nearby read “the army of the imam is the fork in the eye of terrorism”.

Ten minutes drive later we were outside the Sunni mosque that was bombed, where the Shiite militia had set up a check points and started killing people in the street. Where the national police who were supposed protect the mosque had suddenly disappeared. The US soldiers pointed out to me the large dark patches of dried blood still on the sidewalk.

In the backstreets behind the mosque the graffiti said “long live the resistance and death to the Americans and the spies.” But in front of the mosque on the street with the dark stains, the same graffiti had been painted over.