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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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October 29th, 2006 - This is
Baghdad. What could be worse? |
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This is Baghdad. What could
be worse? By Anthony Shadid Washington Post Sunday, October 29, 2006; B01 Baghdad - There was an
almost forgettable exchange earlier this month in the Iraqi National
Assembly, itself on the fringe of relevance in today's disintegrating Iraq.
Lawmakers debated whether legislation should be submitted to a committee to
determine if it was compatible with Islam. Ideas were put forth, as well as
criticism. Why not a committee to determine whether legislation endorses democratic
principles? one asked. In stepped Mahmoud Mashadani, the assembly's speaker,
to settle the dispute. "Any law or decision
that goes against Islam, we'll put it under the kundara!" he thundered. "God is greatest!"
lawmakers shouted back, in a rare moment of agreement between Sunni and
Shiite Muslims. Kundara means shoe, and the
bit of bluster by Mashadani said a lot about Baghdad today. It had been almost a year
since I was in the Iraqi capital, where I worked as a reporter in the days of
Saddam Hussein, the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, and the occupation, guerrilla
war and religious resurgence that followed. On my return, it was difficult to
grasp how atomized and violent the 1,250-year-old city has become. Even on
the worst days, I had always found Baghdad's most redeeming quality to be its
resilience, a tenacious refusal among people I met over three years to
surrender to the chaos unleashed when the Americans arrived. That resilience
is gone, overwhelmed by civil war, anarchy or whatever term could possibly
fit. Baghdad now is convulsed by hatred, paralyzed by suspicion; fear has
forced many to leave. Carnage its rhythm and despair its mantra, the capital,
it seems, no longer embraces life. "A city of
ghosts," a friend told me, her tone almost funereal. The commotion in the streets
- goods spilling across sidewalks, traffic snarled under a searing sun - once
prompted the uninitiated to conclude that Baghdad was reviving. Of course,
they were seeing the city through a windshield, the often angry voices on the
streets inaudible. Today, with traffic dwindling, stores shuttered and
streets empty by nightfall, that conceit no longer holds. Even the propaganda, once
ubiquitous and often incongruous, is gone. One piece I recalled from two
years ago: a map of Iraq divided into three colored bands. In white, it read,
"Progress." In red, "Iraq." In white again,
"Prosperity." The promises are now more modest: "However
strong the wind," reads a new poster of a woman clutching her child,
"it will pass." More indicative of the mood, perhaps, was one of
the old banners still hanging. Faded and draped over a building scarred with
craters from the invasion, it was an ad for the U.S.-funded Iraqi network,
al-Iraqiya. In Arabic, its slogan reads, "Prepare your eyes for
more." As I spoke to friends, some
for the first time in more than a year, that was their fear: more of the
kundara. "When anyone is against
you, when anyone has differences with me, I will put a kundara in his mouth,
I will shove a kundara down his throat, I will hit him with a kundara, and so
on," another friend told me. "We live in a kundara
culture today." I had first met Karima
Salman during the U.S. invasion. She was a stout Shiite Muslim matriarch with
eight children, living in a three-room apartment in the working-class
district of Karrada. Trash was piled at her entrance, a dented, rusted steel
gate perched along a sagging brick sidewalk. When I visited last year, the
street, still one of the safer ones in Baghdad, exuded a veneer of normalcy.
Makeshift markets overflowed with goods piled on rickety stands: socks
imported from China, T-shirts from Syria and stacks of shoes, sunglasses and
lingerie. Down the street were toys: plastic guns, a Barbie knockoff in a
black veil, and a pirate carrying an AK-47 and a grenade. There was a
"Super Mega Heavy Metal Fighter" action figure and a doll that,
when squeezed, played "It's a Small World." On this day, the metal
stands were empty, as were the streets. "Praise God,"
Karima said as I asked how she was. In a moment, her smile faded as she
realized the absurdity of her words. "Of course, it's not good,"
she said, shaking her head. "There's nothing that's ever happened like
what's happening in Iraq." On June 23, 2005, three car
bombs detonated in Karrada, outside her home, wrecking the Abdul-Rasul Ali
mosque and spraying shrapnel that sliced into the forearm of one of her five
daughters, Hiba. Friends at school nicknamed her "Shrapnel Hiba."
Two months ago, yet another bomb hurled glass through their window, cutting
the head of Hiba's twin sister, Duaa. Four stitches sealed the wound. Over
that time, Karima lost her job as a maid at the Palm Hotel, where she had
earned about $33 a month. "People are too scared
to come," she said matter of factly. Next to her sat her son
Mohammed. During the invasion, Mohammed, an ex-convict, had joined a motley
unit of a dozen men patrolling Baghdad's streets as part of the Baath Party
militia. Now he had entered the ranks of the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia
loyal to a young cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, and blamed for many of today's
sectarian killings in Baghdad. Karima's son-in-law Ali had been an officer in
the American-equipped police force, earning $300 a month. He quit after
receiving a death threat. Now he, too, had joined the Mahdi Army. "Not all of them are
good," Karima told me, casting a glance at her son. Stocky and a little surly,
Mohammed smiled. "Who else is going to protect Iraq?" he asked. They debated the causes of
the violence that, these days, is the topic of almost every conversation.
Radical Sunnis, the Americans, Iranian agents, other militias. "Even the
Egyptians," Karima offered. "And the Sudanese," Mohammed added. "Brothers are killing
their brothers," she said. Stories poured forth: a bomb
amputating the arm of a 10-year-old neighbor; another killing Marwan, the
barber. "If they brought the
Israelis, the Jews, and they ruled Iraq, it would be better," said
Karima, her face framed by a black veil. Sunlight bathed the room;
electricity, as usual, was cut off. "It would be a million times better
than a Sunni, a million times better than a Shiite." Her first grandchild,
2-month-old Fahd, sat next to her. His expression was rare in Baghdad: eyes
expectant, fearless. "Is it not a pity to
bring a baby in a world like this?" she asked. "It's a shame." Her eldest daughter, Fatima,
looked on. "One-third of us are
dying, one-third of us are fleeing and one-third of us will be widows,"
she said. "This is Iraq,"
Karima added. The last time I had visited
Faruq Saad Eddin, he and his wife, Muna, had argued over whether their eldest
son should have left the country. We sat in Jihad, a neighborhood so
dangerous now that a stranger risks death by entering it. A generator droned
in the background; occasional bomb blasts thundered in the distance, probably
homemade mines targeting U.S. patrols. An urbane former diplomat, Faruq had
been upset. He worried about what would become of his ancient land if its
capable fled. "You can't just cut out
and run away," he told me. "This is our country and sooner or later
our children will come back. The resilience of the people, that's what 11,000
years means," he said. "Someone who has 11,000 years, 100 years to
lose here or there is not that much." On April 17, Faruq and Muna
left Iraq at the insistence of their son, who had paid a year's rent for an
apartment in Jordan. A month later, a car bomb detonated outside their
Baghdad home, shattering the windows in the room where we once had shared
bitter coffee. On a cool morning in the
Amman neighborhood of Umm al-Summaq, Faruq shook his head at the
arbitrariness of fate. "We would have been
killed, no doubt about it," he said. "We are all stranded,
here and there, Iraqis," he added. A friend once compared the
elderly who are reluctant to leave Baghdad to the blind. Take them away from
the familiarity of their home, garden and street, and they become lost and
disoriented. Faruq has sought new routines: morning strolls, e-mails to friends,
a voracious appetite for news and late-night updates on his favorite baseball
team, the St. Louis Cardinals. His apartment overlooked the rolling hills of
Amman, glowing in the morning's soft sun; his granddaughter Mayasa played
giddily next to him with a stuffed toy. "I should feel
happy," he said. He shook his head again, a
gesture that meant he wasn't. "We have a heavy heart,
really," he said after a few moments of silence. "Just knowing
what's happening makes us grieve." I had come to know Wamidh
Nadhme in 2002, before the invasion. A professor of political science at
Baghdad University, he was a forthright voice in those tense, uneasy days
when Hussein was still in power. He tried to speak with complete honesty
despite the possible consequences of doing so in a police state. With an
ever-present Dunhill cigarette, he would slowly field questions back then,
reasoning out every intricate response, surrounded by his French-style
furniture, worn Persian carpets and a framed piece of papyrus from Egypt,
where he had spent time in exile as a young activist. But on this visit,
reason eluded him, as did explanation. "I find myself unable
to understand what's going on," he said. Wamidh had settled into what
he called "withdrawal." He still visited the university once a
week, but Baghdad was simply too dangerous to venture outside. After
nightfall, the streets of his neighborhood of Adhamiya look like they might
an hour or so before dawn: dark, without traffic, and menacing. As we talked,
helicopters rumbled overhead. Gunfire burst almost continuously. "You feel like the
country is exploding," he said. We traded stories. One I had
heard from a friend: Insurgents stopped a driver at a checkpoint. They opened
his trunk. "Why do you have a spare tire?" the insurgent asked
solemnly. "You don't have trust in God?" Well into 2005, Wamidh has
bristled at the notion of a sectarian divide, even as the very geography of
Baghdad began to transform into Shiite and Sunni halves divided by the Tigris
River. Like many Iraqis, he blamed the Americans for naively viewing the
country solely through that sectarian prism before the war, then forging
policies that helped make it that way afterward. He ran through other
"awful mistakes": the carnage unleashed by Sunni insurgents
affiliated with al-Qaeda, the assassination of a Shiite ayatollah in 2003 who
may have bridged differences, the devolution of Sadr's movement today into
armed, revenge-minded mobs. As Wamidh finished, he
flashed his customary modesty. "Perhaps you could correct me?" he
offered. I asked him whether it would
become worse if the American military withdrew. He looked at me for a moment
without saying anything, as though he were a little confused. "What could be
worse?" he asked, knitting his brow. I saw Wamidh again a week
later, and the question had lingered with him. "I sometimes wonder what
I would do if I were the Americans," he said over a traditional Ramadan
dinner. His answer seemed to hurt him. "I have no idea, really." "It's like a volcano
that has erupted. How do you stop that?" On April 9, 2003, Firdaus
Square became the lasting image of the U.S. entry into Baghdad. In its center
was a metal statue of Hussein in a suit, his arm outstretched in socialist
realist fashion. Like an arena of spectators, columns of descending height
encircled him, each bearing the initials "S.H." on their cupolas.
By early afternoon that day, hundreds of Iraqis swarmed around the statue
with one task in mind: bring it down. It marked the fall. A year later, amid
uprisings by Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and Sadr's militia in Baghdad and
the south, it spoke of occupation. The square was deserted, guarded by U.S.
tanks whose barrels read, "Beastly Boy" and "Bloodlust."
Soldiers, edgy, had orders to shoot anyone with a weapon. At times, music
blared over speakers on a Humvee. One song: "Ring of
Fire," by Johnny Cash. As I stood in Firdaus Square
this day, after invasion, liberation and occupation, I wondered what word
described Baghdad. "This is a civil war
now," Harith Abdel-Hamid, a psychiatrist, had told me, trying to
diagnose the madness. "When you see hundreds of people killed every day,
corpses of people tortured in the streets every day, what else does it
mean?" "Call it what you
will," he said, "but it is a civil war." Perhaps. But I felt as
though I was witnessing something more: the final, frenzied maturity of
once-inchoate forces unleashed more than three years ago by the invasion.
There was civil war-style sectarian killing, its echoes in Lebanon a generation
ago. Alongside it were gangland turf battles over money, power and survival;
a raft of political parties and their militias fighting a zero-sum game; a
raging insurgency; the collapse of authority; social services a chimera; and
no way forward for an Iraqi government ordered to act by Americans who
themselves are still seen as the final arbiter and, as a result, still
depriving that government of legitimacy. Civil war was perhaps too
easy a term, a little too tidy. I looked out on the square.
On one side were rows of concrete barricades and barbed wire, having faded
almost organically into the landscape. In another direction, a billboard
read: "Terrorism has no religion." Across the street, a poster
portraying Iraqi police pleaded: "We are the heroes fighting for the
sake of Baghdad." In the middle of the square, on the stone perch where
Hussein's statue once stood, were torn scraps of other posters: "Your
voice," "the nation," "patriotism," "dialogue,"
"building the future." The words were isolated, without context,
like fragments of a clay tablet. Sirens soon pierced the
square. Two armed police escorts, headed in opposite directions, rushed along
the street. Each frantically waved at the other to pull over. Guns dangling
from the window, they fired volleys into the air to intimidate each other. In time, the one with fewer
rifles and fewer men let the other pass. They were playing by the rules of
the kundara. In the square, Salam Ahmed
sat with a friend, Saad Nasser, under the statue, looking out at the scene. "They died under
Saddam, and they're dying now," Salam said. Unshaven, wearing a baseball
cap, Saad looked at the ground. He was grim, angry and dejected. "No one can stop it but
God," he said. "Only God has the power." Anthony Shadid, a Washington
Post foreign correspondent, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the
U.S. invasion of Iraq. He is the author of "Night Draws Near: Iraq's
People in the Shadow of America's War" (Picador). © 2006 The Washington Post
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