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| Iraq-Jordan |
| A Year With the Iraqi Resistance |
| 2004-11-17 |
| From Harpers Magazine, an article by Patrick Graham, a Canadian freelance journalist who covered the Iraq war for the London Observer. Early one morning in April, a Monday, an Iraqi doctor and I piled medicine for the Fallujah hospital into the back of his car. I had dyed my hair black, and a friend had made me a fake Iraqi I.D. By then, various groups around the country were holding dozens of foreign hostages; driving out of Baghdad was like slipping into a shark tank. Ahead of us on the road were convoys of trucks, carrying aid and probably weapons. Men from all the Sunni areas, I was told, were coming to Fallujah to fight, a situation that one U.S. Marine had called the Sunni "Super Bowl." Inside the city itself, the resistance had set up checkpoints every 100 feet. At the tenth checkpoint we were stopped and interrogated. A gun was put to the head of the doctor's uncle, who had accompanied us. We had planned for this eventuality: I was to pretend to be the doctor's mentally ill brother. For this reason I was wearing a suit. I muttered my Iraqi name to the guard. They took us to a mosque at the edge of the industrial zone, where the fighting had been the heaviest. Occasionally a bullet pinged into the asphalt. "Snipers," said the guard. In the courtyard of the mosque, armed gunmen stood around boxes of medicine. We were taken to an inner room, where a man in the white robes of a conservative Muslim cleric quizzed me. I mumbled in a way that sounded, I hoped, like the product of some sort of brain aneurysm. Upstairs in the mosque, I learned later, the resistance was holding sixteen foreign hostages. We left with a note from the imam of the mosque that asked resistance fighters to let us pass. The guards were very concerned about my health, and were angry at the doctor for having brought his sick brother to such a dangerous place. Fallujah, which sits along the Euphrates River, is a drab market town, filled with two-story apartment buildings and walled houses the color of a dust storm. Most of the streets are lined with low buildings; piles of old tires and pieces of cars sit in front of small shops. As we drove through the nearly empty streets, hundreds of fighters stood around in small groups. For a while, we followed an ambulance with a single bullet hole in its back window: a clean shot at the driver. Most families had left the city, our escort told us. We heard tanks firing, the low buzz of a circling drone, and the repetitive thud of heavy machine-gun fire. Jet fighters dropped the occasional missile. This was supposedly a cease-fire. The hospital reported that more than 600 people had already been killed, and the Marines had taken only a few neighborhoods. The Western press often had described the insurgents as supporters of Saddam, but the former dictator was clearly irrelevant. There were probably foreign fighters there, too, but in such small numbers as to be militarily insignificant. The fighters were connected to one another by clan; their only political representation was the Association of Muslim Clerics, a Sunni party that had been formed during the summer. This was a tribal uprising, controlled by religious leaders. As we left the city, a family in a car ahead of us was killed by tank fire. At the resistance lines, cars were driving like mad back into the city, honking. From open windows, passengers screamed that the American tanks were approaching. A young fighter with a Kalashnikov yelled, in reply, "Ahlan bik"— welcome. * * * I first visited the tribes of the Sunni Triangle at the end of March 2003, just days before the Marines rolled into Baghdad. When a family I had met before the war offered to smuggle me out to the countryside, it seemed worth the risk. It would be a break, at least, from the guided tours of hospitals and bombed telephone exchanges and from the paranoid boarding-school atmosphere of the Palestine Hotel, where the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police, patrolled the halls. A Western-style highway, with its familiar guardrails and blue-and-green signs in English and Arabic, took us out across a rock-filled wasteland of desert. Gray-brown sand blew across the road like dirty snow. Oil fires, burning in long trenches by the side of the highway, sent deep black clouds into the air. No one could figure out the point of this, but it looked dramatic on television, as if a set decorator had been told to make the place look doomed. Iraqi soldiers wearing old green coats hid with their tanks under overpasses or camped out in the tree-lined median pitted with foxholes, in a vain attempt to survive the nightly laser-guided Armageddon. After 50 kilometers, a dozen minarets appeared as the highway merged with the main boulevard of Fallujah. We crossed the river and drove west, along the southern boundary of the Sunni Triangle—an isosceles-shaped area covering, roughly, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers up from Baghdad, on the southern apex, to Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit in the north and to Ramadi in the west. As we drove west out of Fallujah, the highway separated two landscapes. On our left, past sandstone bluffs, the western desert stretched 400 kilometers to the Jordanian border. On our right, muddy irrigated farmland, flat as a billiard table, ended sharply at groves of date palms and eucalyptus. Obscured behind the trees, the Euphrates River wends south from its headwaters in Turkey, through Syria, and, finally, links up with the Tigris River in southern Iraq, where, according to the guidebooks, Adam took the apple from Eve. We drove through a few small, dusty towns like Khaldiyah, where merchants and hustlers denied their Bedouin past and threw up square, pillared stone houses with ornate facades. The more cosmopolitan among them added a pagoda or a Crusader castle's keep to the roof. One saw the same style in Baghdad, a nouveau riche school of architecture I came to call Baath Party Babylonian. Turning off the highway toward the river, we traveled past long, narrow fields and green-domed mosques, as bored boys sat on the embankment watching their sheep graze. At a checkpoint, militiamen in head scarves recognized our driver and waved us through. Two women in bright dresses, their faces wrapped in scarves, carried shovels as they led a cow down a dirt track. The village itself was hidden under a spiked canopy of date palms, their rough trunks curving upward between the houses, which were separated by gardens and cinder-block walls or dried, brown palm-frond fences. We parked in the grass courtyard of a walled house. Our host, the village Sheikh, greeted us and led us into the diwan, the long traditional living room, where men sat on cushions along the walls eating smoked river carp, mazgouf, from large platters. It was my first experience of male Iraqi tribal life, with its formal elegance. In Baghdad the dress code before the war had been suits; even the Mukhabarat had showed up for work in Syrian-made Italian knockoffs. Here, the men wore impossibly white, nightshirtlike dishadashas, with imameh—gauzy white head scarves—or the red-and-white houndstooth kaffiyeh. Every man had a mustache, and most had prominent, well-fed bellies that hung over their crossed legs. The women disappeared, and the young boys of the family became the household servants. They carried in immense, round aluminum trays of food and laid it on long plastic sheets, which they had rolled out across the floor beforehand like tablecloths in a Chinese restaurant. After the meal they rolled up the sheets, carried out the plates, and returned with strong, dark tea in slender tulip-shaped glasses. With each new arrival the men stood, as the newcomer went around the room shaking hands. When the men sat down there was another greeting—Allah bil Kheir, God in goodness—said with the right arm slightly raised and a forward motion of the body, as if one were about to stand. After dinner, packs of stray dogs began barking in distress. Soon we, too, heard the B-52 bombers, a rumbling so deep they could have been slowly opening an abyss in the night sky. We went out onto the road and watched the flashes over the Habbiniya air base, which were followed by the thunder of missiles. Behind us, the windows of the house shook and the door blew open. * * * I returned to the village that May, when Baghdad was in chaos. The article continues. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |