Violence in Iraq is not News

Saturday, February 21, 2009

At the front desk, the hotel manager tells me to settle up my tab, it’s been a long time and the bill is rising. “Tomorrow,” I tell him. He places his hand on his chest and bows his head. “No problem. Anytime,” he says in typical Iraqi politeness. I go to my room, pull out the chair at my desk to settle in for a night in front of my computer.

Boom! A blast hammers the night. A woman’s scream tails it. I grab my camera and rush outside. I run past people walking toward the exit of our guarded compound. Did someone blow themselves up at the entrance? This place hadn’t been a target since 2005, when someone blew up their car outside. I smell sulphur in the air, but I’m not sure where it’s coming from. People are standing at the entrance, around the AK-47 toting Iraqi security contractors hired by one of the news outlets based in the hotel next to mine. No one knows what happened. Some look down the street, others shrug their shoulders and walk back to their hotels.

I walk down the street with a colleague. People are sitting outside a restaurant on plastic tables, eating with their families. Men are carving chicken shwarma off giant skewers. A couple is chatting in thefront seat of a parked car. A boy whizzes past on a bicycle. “Where did the blast come from?” I ask a man at a kiosk. He tells me he doesn’t know. He is clearly disinterested.

We go back to the hotel and go onto the roof to look for signs of emergency in the surrounds. I see a flame in the distance, but quickly realize it’s coming from the smoke stack of an oil refinery. The nighttime air is dusty and we debate whether we see smoke rising from another direction. “Whenever explosions happen the sound always seems like it’s coming from the opposite direction,” a hotel attendant tells us.

I go back to my room and turn on the TV. I flip through the news channels. Iraq has over a dozen news channels. I find nothing. I turn on my computer and type “Iraq” in the search engine on my web browser’s toolbar. I scan the page for words like “blast,” “killed,” and “Karada,” the Shia-dominated neighborhood I am living in. Still nothing. Almost everything is about the trial of the man that threw his shoes at George Bush.

I think back to a conversation I had with an Iraqi journalist who lives in South Baghdad. He told me about the fights that would happen between his Sunni neighborhood and its Shia neighbors in 2006. Whenever the militias would near, he told me, everyone would get on their roofs and fire in all directions with AK-47s to prevent them from getting too close. Another time militias fired mortars into his neighborhood throughout the night from miles away. He said he could count ten seconds between their firing and landing. These incidents, like so many in the frenzy of violence in 2006, never made the news.

Apparently, the news hangover of violence in Iraq still persists. The distant firefights I hear, though occasional, are almost never reported. Killing has dropped sharply in the last year, but there is still a background of violence, the occasional distant booms or cracks of gunfire. I still don’t know what happened with that blast last night. No body here seems terribly interested. Violence in Iraq isn’t news.

Friday Afternoon at the Shandabar

Monday, February 16, 2009

Hisham Mustafa lives for Habermas. In a corner of the Shandabar café, he is taken away by his love for the German philosopher. “I cannot say that I study him. Study is such a big word,” the literary critic says modestly, looking at me with gentle eyes through coke bottle glasses. “I simply try to understand him and apply his criticisms to Arabic literature.” He pauses to take a long puff on his water pipe, then waxes on: “You know? Things are always changing. Language is alive. Religion gives us a view of the past. Nothing is static. Nothing is absolute. This is what I have taken from Habermas.”

It’s Friday, the Muslim day of rest and the day of gathering at the Shandabar café. During my visit, the only beverage being served is lemon tea, a distinctly Iraqi drink. Plumes of sweet nargilla smoke twirl into the air and pairs of elderly men are enraptured in animated conversations. The yellow brick walls are covered in ancient black and white portraits of old Iraqi sheikhs and prints of colorful landscapes. The café’s patrons take pride in the fact that backgammon and cards aren’t allowed. This isn’t a place for idlers. It’s a place of culture.

Outside, people pick through stacks of books on Mutanabi Street. Great works of Arabic literature stand next to collections of Picasso, military books from Saddam, and tattered copies of Stephen King novels and Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down. At one end of the pedestrian avenue, an Iraqi hummer guards the entrance. At the other end, people sit on benches along the east bank of the Tigris. Here, the oldest part of Baghdad is just a replica of what it used to be. Blown to rubble throughout the war, it was recently rebuilt in its image. Today it’s bustling.

The fact that we had to wait to find a seat in the Shandabar café is symbolic of the fact that Iraq’s intellectual scene is slowly coming back to life. The doors of the 92-year-old café—originally Baghdad’s first steam-powered printing press—reopened a month and a half ago. It was rebuilt a year and a half after being devastated by a suicide bomber in a bomb-laden truck. Thirty people were killed. Portraits of its old managers hang on the wall under a sign that reads “café of martyrs.”

Hisham says Iraq is undergoing a new, slow renascence, coming to life after intense restriction on intellectual freedom by Saddam and violent repercussions by militias after the American invasion. He calls the new government a tribal one, where politicians answer to their kin and religious sects before anyone else. Several of his friends are bedridden, but he is clearly excited with the fact that he and his colleagues to sit together in one place. They even publish a philosophical newspaper. Before I get up to go, he asks if I would like to attend one of their twice-weekly discussions next week. They will be discussing Hegel.

On Fallujah’s Streets

Friday, February 13, 2009

The sparsely trafficked six-lane highway from Baghdad to Falluja is a welcome change to the clogged streets of Baghdad, where it can takes hours to cross the city. For most of the one-hour trip, I am lulled by the open road, staring out into the plastic bag littered desert and the flat horizon occasionally broken by villages of cement. Occasionally, we pass by stacks of crates, lined up four of five in a row, that are piled with oranges, bananas, and bottled water. Boys of about 10 years of age stand on the road and wave cars to pull over and buy their produce.

Outside Falluja, we stop at a gas station to wait for out escorts, the so-called Awakening Councils, or Sahwa, the American allied militia-turned-police force that now runs the city. The weather is hot. As we sit in the car, I see a man approaching, his figure initially obscured by the orange, dusty air. His face is wrapped in a red checkered kafiyya and he’s dressed all in black. My heart pounds and I brace myself as he nears our vehicle, looking in our direction. As he passes the front of the car, he turns and waves, continuing up to the highway to flag a ride toward Baghdad.

We drive with our escorts through the countryside. Crumpled up car frames, the remains of exploded vehicles, lie amid the tall brown reeds that line the river. Families pick barley and wheat in the fields. Sparse cows nibble on grass. The dusk buzzes with the sound of generators.

In the city, my colleague and I get out of the car. Next to me, people ride bikes across the bridge where American security contractors for the company Blackwater were burned and hung in 2004. A building across from it is crumbling over itself, bombed during the American siege of the city in 2006. We approach a group of people standing on the corner, our armed escorts standing guard across the street. We introduce ourselves as journalists, and someone steps forward from the crowd, “Journalists? Why haven’t you come until now? Why weren’t you here two years ago?” Our Sahwa escort steps forward, pulls him out of the crowd, and hands him to the nearest police officer, who puts him in a car. “I don’t like that kind of talk,” he tells me later. It is clear who controls Falluja now.

Another man steps forward. “This is the city of martyrs, the city of the dead, the city of men that were patient and confronted what was put upon them.” He shakes his finger in the air as he bellows. “This city was pounded a number of times because its people resisted the occupation. This building in front of you was bombed by the enemy. The Americans need to leave in a hurry. This is not their land, nor their country.”

Down the road, two carpenters walk us through the upper floor of their building, a hole in the ceiling and pulverized blocks of concrete on the floor. “About three quarters of the city was destroyed. Hardly anything here has been rebuilt. There is just an unfinished hospital. We get electricity for two hours during the day.”

His friend adds as we walk through the rubble: “The Americans are going to be gone and we are going to be left with problems. Everyone is putting money in their own pockets. The Sahwa, the contractors, the politicians. The only things that have been built in Falluja are a bridge and a hospital, and neither are finished.”

We go downtown, to talk to shopkeepers. Each person, one after the other, refuses to speak to us on the street. Our escort buys us a soda, and we leave the streets before sunset.

Getting Lost in the Green Zone

Monday, February 09, 2009

walk down the street outside the Green Zone. Kebabs sizzle on grills and suited Iraqis move around the National Police, who tell everyone exactly where they are allowed to walk.

As I enter the Green Zone, through the gap in the cement blast walls, I pop out my cell phone battery, a strongly enforced precaution against cellular activated bombs. At the entrance, I stand on a small wooden pedestal where I am patted for weapons. From there, I walk down a rocky path, walled on each side with cement, the other with a chain link fence and barbed wire. All I can see is the sky and a couple of lampposts. Then another checkpoint. An American soldier stares at a screen while I pass my bag through an x-ray machine.

This isn’t the route I’m used to. Usually, I don’t see American soldiers here, just Peruvian and Senegalese Triple Canopy contractors who pat me down, search me, send me through metal detectors and instruct me where to put my hands in the full body x-ray machines. This time, I end up on a road thick with American military vehicles. A sign tells me that deadly force is authorized. I’m lost in the Green Zone.

I stroll down a road, passing the suspicious and searching eyes of Iraqi soldiers. In one direction, apartment buildings cover the block. In another, I see the famous pairs of crossed swords standing over the road, next to an empty football stadium. A convoy of grey SUVs with tinted windows blast by, breaking up the light traffic. One blares a siren. Its white passengers in green berets scan the surrounds attentively.

I’ve found my bearings. After passing through a checkpoint where parked cars are being checked by German shepards, I walk past the parliament building. Across the street, small jets stand in a parking lot. An American drives a busload of suited Iraqi men past. A parked SUV plays loud music lamenting the death of Hussein over heavy, steady beats.

I find the Rasheed hotel. I enter the search room with the contents of my pocket in one hand, my passport, and press ID in the other. “American!” the Peruvian security contractor shouts. “Don’t search.” The metal detector beeps as I pass. The Iraqi guards step aside.

I proceed through another checkpoint, where I’m signaled to a small wooden building. There, I’m told to put my bag on the floor along with ten others. A heavy white man twirls a role of tape in his hand, staring ahead blankly, waiting for us to leave so he can bring out the search dog. We wait for five minutes in a designated area outside, next to a “duck and cover” bunker, an inverted U-shaped piece of reinforced cement.

I pass through several more checkpoints. At the last one, I put my belongings back in my pockets and notice a drawing etched in a wooden stand. It’s a skull, wearing an army helmet, with a sword for a neck.

I make it to the military press office just in time for lunch, served free in a tent by a KBR employee tattooed with a red iron cross and skulls. I scoop macaroni and cheese and corn on the cob onto my plate. I grab a Coke from the fridge, sit down on a slab of cement in the designated eating area, and dig a plastic fork into my coleslaw. 

Fishing by the Green Zone

Monday, February 02, 2009

His eyes only leave the end of his line to tell stories about the fish he’s caught in the Tigris over the last year. “One time, I was here from the early morning until nine at night,” the fisherman says, his friend silently listening. “I put the last piece of bait on the hook before going home. The line tugged. I reeled in a little. It tugged some more. Then I got up and fought the fish all the way to the shore. It was huge,” he showed me with his hands—about 12 inches around and three feet long.

He comes to this bank of the Tigris, at Baghdad’s Zawra park, when he’s not working as a low level employee at the Ministry of the Interior. “It passes the time,” he says, picking through his plastic bag of bait. A year ago he couldn’t do it, he says. The park was closed during the worst part of the war, but no one would fish in the river anyway, he tells me. There were too many floating bodies.

By Iraqi standards, this fisherman is still somewhat of an adventurer. Many people still won’t eat what comes out of the river—he and another man argue over whether all the bodies have actually been removed—but he says its fine. Even less worrisome for him is the pipe of sewage pouring into the water next to him.

“It all runs downstream,” he says, shrugging. So does two-thirds of the capital’s raw sewage, to be piped back from the river into the city’s drinking water. Purification plants filter much of it as it comes out, but they can only do so much. Two summers ago, a cholera outbreak spread across Baghdad. Over half of all Iraqis still don’t have access to clean drinking water.

Along the riverbank, couples and families walk up and down Abu Nuwas park. Here, people can forget briefly about their militarized lives. Teenage boys play soccer in a dirt field. A father pushes his children on an aging swing. Scattered families spread out on blankets and the patchy grass. Men drink Pepsis in one of the rundown pavilions.

To get inside, visitors have to wind through a maze of concrete blast walls painted with Roman style murals. Iraqi security contractors search their cars for explosives.

Across the river, the Green Zone sprawls as far as the eye can see. Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s home is on the opposite bank, behind walls, razor wire, and soldiers, not far from where Saddam used to live. Barely downstream, the largest US embassy in the world—roughly the size of 80 football fields—enjoys constant electricity and its own water treatment plant. The fisherman I’m chatting with gets no more than seven hours of electricity a day.

I ask him what he thinks when he looks across the river at the Green Zone. “I have nothing to do with them. As far as I’m concerned, those people are nothing.” He tugs the line. “I hear they do like fishing though.” He tilts his rod. “USA STIK,” it reads, an American flag waving next to it. “Seahawk. Quality Fishing Tackle.”