With time to digest a four-week stint in Baghdad, a reporter sees beyond the chaos to a society yearning to leave its troubled past behind.
By Doug Smith
Los Angeles Times, 22 December 2005
BAGHDAD — In my first hours in this ancient Arab city, my mind flashes back to Tijuana in the 1950s. Fetid water in the streets. Laundry hanging on strings. A pervasive stench of oil from leaky generators and hand-poured gasoline.
My driver brings me back to the present by slamming on the brakes. Ahead on the highway are three white sport utility vehicles, the kind used to transport U.S. officials and contractors. Suicide bombers and other insurgents target such convoys. Everyone else stays as far away as possible.
It's late March, and we are in Sadr City (Saddam City before the U.S.-led invasion), a poor neighborhood of 2 million people, mostly Shiite Muslims. It is a stew of anti-American religious populism stirred by the maverick cleric Muqtada Sadr. The teeming community was renamed after his father, who is believed to have been slain by Saddam Hussein's forces.
A young man in black signals us to stop. Members of Sadr's private militia, Al Mahdi, surround us and check for weapons.
"Don't worry," my interpreter tells me. "They're nice guys."
I've been sent to cover the Islamic ritual of Friday prayers, my first assignment in Baghdad. Months earlier, Sadr's militia was fighting American troops, and their spiritual leader was wanted by the U.S. dead or alive.
"Welcome," the militiamen say in English, smirking at my attempt to pass for a worshiper. "How are you?"
In different circumstances, my life would be in danger here. But today, my safety is guaranteed by my country's enemy.
During the next four weeks, I would be overloaded with vivid experiences too numerous and strange to absorb. In the months since, my mind has slowly sorted those images and impressions into a coherent, if limited, picture of the war I went to Iraq to find.
I ventured onto the streets of Baghdad no more than a dozen times — too few to judge whether democracy was gaining or losing ground. But in time I was able to see past first impressions of squalor and chaos to signs of a resilient society yearning to move beyond its history of tyranny and war.
From my first days in the Iraqi capital, I knew that a snapshot would not be enough. Despite the dangers, I would be back.
After Friday prayers, I tried to stay calm as my car lurched through Baghdad's terrifying traffic. Drivers squeezed five wide down three-lane roads and freely crossed the center line, forcing oncoming autos aside.
The interpreter told me that the license plates explained the congestion. White plates were from the Hussein era, when imports were restricted to the chosen few. Cars imported after the U.S. invasion have black plates.
It was clear that the number of cars had more than doubled since the dictator's fall in April 2003.
When we encountered traffic jams, a bodyguard got out of the car and cleared an escape route down a battered sidewalk.
Then we drove along the brown Tigris River, lined on one side by patches of biblical-looking reeds and on the other by the reinforced wall of the Green Zone, the nerve center of the U.S. presence and the seat of the transitional Iraqi government.
At last, the driver turned sharply onto a side street and into the sights of three machine guns. We were safely back at the home base of the Los Angeles Times — a once-fashionable hotel that has become a fortified zone for the news media.
A guard pressed a button to open the bulletproof door to the Times bureau — my home, my office, my prison for the next month.
I'd been sent here to spell one of the paper's Baghdad correspondents. A reporter on the metropolitan staff, I had no training in Middle Eastern history, religion or languages. My main qualification was that I had volunteered for an assignment that had become undesirable in my profession.
I looked out a window, shatter-proofed with a duct-tape cross, and saw a giant unfinished mosque a couple of miles away, frozen in time with cranes hanging over it. It was a monument begun under Hussein.
It would be a perfect destination for a walk, I thought.
"Walk?" scoffed the office manager.
An intense Kurd with a taste for rakish suits, he commanded the head desk in the newsroom, with a set of prayer beads in one hand, a cigarette in his mouth and a bad joke always at the ready.
Among his other duties, he monitored threats to our safety on the roads outside Baghdad and the streets around our hotel. It had been code red on both for weeks.
He laid out the rules: I would never leave the bureau alone. I would always travel with a driver and interpreter, followed by a bodyguard in a second car.
"You do not walk anywhere," he explained with a sympathetic smile.
One day, the bureau's computer technician offered a suggestion for a story. The diversion of concrete to build fortified compounds had sapped the country's rebuilding effort, he said. That turned out to be an urban legend, but the proliferation of private forts was real.
On a map spread over the kitchen table, I worked out an itinerary of a dozen sites, including businesses, embassies, government buildings and the headquarters of political parties. The office manager cut the list to three.
As we drove from one fort to another, I became aware of the vitality of Baghdad. Streetside gasoline vendors were doing brisk business, along with the small-time currency traders and fish peddlers. The city was choking with cars. Fruit stands were loaded with oranges and peaches, and workers were hand-painting curbs.
I also noticed something about the city's ubiquitous piles of rubble. They were too neat to be the random breakage of war.
My interpreter told me that homeowners were taking advantage of the breakdown in building-code enforcement to remodel. But there was no one to pick up the debris. What I first had thought was war damage was, in fact, evidence of a middle-class resurgence.
The Iraqis I met on such outings appeared unapproachable, staring through me with a look that felt like contempt. But if I spoke first, they immediately opened up. I often found that we had trouble understanding each other not because of the language barrier but for seeing the same things so differently.
In the black plume rising from one of the four stacks of the generating plant in the Dora neighborhood, I saw a source of worrisome pollution. An Iraqi acquaintance saw the slow pace of reconstruction.
"There should be smoke from all four stacks," he said.
On one of my excursions, I met a couple in an upstairs apartment who served me chocolate and sweet tea. They sat under a picture of Jesus as they talked of their son — innocent of any crime, they said — who had been in U.S. custody at the Bucca prison for six months.
As an American, I believed that an article about his plight might lead to his release. Trained under Hussein, they thought the opposite. They wouldn't let me publish their names.
A day at Baghdad University showed me two of the many faces of Iraq. The campus looked like a California college gone to seed, with 4-foot weeds everywhere. Young women chatted almost gaily in clusters. They walked saucily and men watched.
Then I asked my interpreter to take me to the school of education.
It's only for women, she said in a cautionary tone.
We passed a guard shack and seemed to enter a different era, if not a different country. The quad bustled with hundreds of women, all veiled from head to toe.
My bodyguard, a former soldier with a scar over his left eye, stopped and muttered something in Arabic.
"He says he can't go here," the interpreter explained.
The way the women looked at me, I knew that despite my grizzled beard and old plaid shirt, I stood out as a foreigner.
The next day, I complained to a guard at the bureau that my disguise wasn't working. I had been advised to let my beard grow, but the guard thought it lacked an authentic touch.
He summoned another employee, who had been a barber before the invasion. The man descended on me with ancient electric clippers and a hand razor.
"Don't worry," the guard said, laughing, as the barber scratched the razor down my throat. "He is not terrorist."
My beard and hair were reduced to an even eighth of an inch, the standard stubble sported by Iraqi men. From that point on, I was accepted everywhere as an Iraqi — until I spoke.
I stopped drinking coffee, taking up the sugared tea favored by the bodyguards and drivers. One day, the afternoon guard knocked on my door holding a cup of tea.
"For you, sir," he said, placing his hand over his heart.
He was learning English by reading books with English on one page and Arabic on the other. He was halfway through "Wuthering Heights."
The next day and every day thereafter, he supplemented the tea with a chocolate-coated coconut candy. He delivered this treat with a slight bow and his standard line: "For you, sir."
For some reason, this act of kindness made me acutely, uncomfortably aware of the gap in our circumstances. I would soon leave this place of violent death and unspoken dangers. He could not.
Ashura is a four-day observance during which many Shiites make a pilgrimage to the holy city of Najaf, beating themselves in a ritual commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the prophet Muhammad.
The rest of the capital shuts down. The event provided the opportunity for my first visit to the Green Zone, where Americans would be hard at work.
Accompanied by an interpreter, I started the obstacle course leading into the area. Behind a sandbag nest, two soldiers had me in their machine gun sights. My Iraqi colleague and I followed a line of other pilgrims down an alley formed by 15-foot-tall concrete blocks.
A stern-faced soldier from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, part of the U.S.-led coalition, reached out for my papers, pointed at my cellphone and indicated with hand gestures that I should remove its battery.
With the dismembered phone held aloft like an offering, I walked 100 feet to a shack where an Iraqi youth patted me down.
One more checkpoint and we were free to walk to the convention center, another relic of the Saddam Hussein era. The center is the meeting place of the transitional National Assembly and a hangout for the international media.
Two days later, I returned to the Green Zone with Marla Ruzicka, a 28-year-old Bay Area woman who had attracted wide attention with her efforts to hold the U.S. military accountable for civilian casualties.
With her Iraqi interpreter-driver, Faiz Ali Salim, at the wheel and me in the backseat, we drove up to the diplomatic entrance. Ruzicka spoke flirtatiously to the sentry, a young GI from Ohio, and we were in.
At noon, Ruzicka left us for an appointment. Salim and I headed to the PX to feast on fast food. But security at the canteen had been tightened because of a bombing at an Army mess hall in the northern city of Mosul.
A Nepalese guard inspected my California driver's license. Salim, sporadically employed as a pilot for Iraqi Airways, showed his commercial pilot's license.
"You can go," the guard said to me.
"You can't go," he said to Salim.
Salim grew belligerent. "Let's go to the embassy," I said.
There, more Nepalese guards met us. I demanded to see someone in authority.
At length, an American official emerged. He said he was in charge of Green Zone security. He listened, then politely told me that the guard at the PX had made a mistake. I should also have been barred. No one without a special pass was allowed in.
Extracting an explanation from the authorities gave me a peculiarly American sense of accomplishment.
Salim was puzzled by my reaction, considering our frustrated efforts.
"What was that about?" he asked.
"Satisfaction," I said.
Ten days later, Ruzicka and Salim would be dead, killed by a suicide car bomber on the notorious airport road.
With nothing else to do during Ashura, I arranged to hook up with the 42nd Infantry Division of the New York National Guard so I could observe soldiers working with Iraqis in Tikrit, Hussein's hometown 100 miles northwest of Baghdad.
At a concrete helipad deep inside the Green Zone, I climbed into a Vietnam War-era helicopter and sat with a dozen soldiers.
Amid a blast of noise and the odor of jet fuel, we lifted off, and I was looking down at Baghdad, skimming over palm trees. In seconds, we were over green fields. Rectangles of wheat stretched to the horizon.
Before long, we had reached Tikrit, circling an earthen bluff dotted by dozens of ornate structures, many in the style of Louis XIV — Hussein's palaces. The 42nd Infantry's headquarters is in the main palace. I was assigned an upstairs room with its own shower and toilet.
"Use the latrines outside," an officer told me. "The plumbing is no good."
I waited two days for my name to appear on a list of people authorized to visit the equivalent of Tikrit's city hall with an Army public affairs unit.
After roll call and a briefing, I was directed to the backseat of a Humvee. I stepped in and closed the inch-thick steel door. The caravan rumbled down the main street of the dusty provincial town. Scruffy children rushed the Humvee, begging for handouts, as we rolled to a stop on a sidewalk.
Clad in thick body armor, we hurried through a back entrance to the provincial administration building.
In the next four hours, nascent Iraqi democracy unfolded before me. But for the machine guns everywhere, it was a lot like an American city council meeting — arm-waving, shouting, gavel-rapping points of order and voting.
The council rejected a bid to federate with a neighboring province and voted down the idea of hiring members of Iraq's disbanded army.
That night, I boarded with several U.S. officers in one of Hussein's lesser palaces. We grabbed nonalcoholic beers from the mess and sat on lounge chairs overlooking the Tigris. We talked of wives and Harleys. We were awakened at daybreak by a car bombing several miles away. An Iraqi soldier was killed.
The day's routine went on. I spent the afternoon with Maj. David Lynch, an Army judge advocate general, as he heard appeals for compensation for deaths and injuries caused by U.S. forces.
Muthni Niyil, a shepherd, lifted his sleeve to show that his arm had been severed at the elbow by a .50-caliber bullet and reattached at a crooked angle.
Lynch apologized on behalf of the U.S. government. He said he would try to arrange compensation but acknowledged that it would be "a pittance."
The young man smiled and left.
That night, a mortar round landed. Somewhere in the darkness, an American soldier was killed.
A helicopter picked me up at 11 the next morning. Hussein's palaces receded from view, and we floated over farming villages where women in black abayas and children worked the fields.
Back in Baghdad, the "Wuthering Heights" guard placed his hand over his heart at the sight of me. "Welcome, sir," he said.
On April 21, four weeks after my arrival, I left for the airport at 7 a.m. U.S. tanks rumbled down the wide median of the airport highway. We drove over the scorch mark where Marla Ruzicka and Faiz Ali Salim had been killed five days earlier.
My Royal Jordanian Airlines jet climbed in a corkscrew pattern to evade shoulder-fired missiles, just in case.
Back home, it took me months to get a detached understanding of my brief, intense immersion in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. I found myself thinking often of the American soldiers I met and my Iraqi friends in the Baghdad Bureau.
I was reminded of President Bush's references to Iraqis' hunger for freedom. I knew who he was talking about, and I wanted to imagine a future in which they would prosper.
I recently signed up for another tour in Baghdad. I'll be leaving the day after Christmas.
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Citation: Doug Smith. "A Glimpse of a City of Dreams," Los Angeles Times, 22 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-myiraq22dec22,1,6702255.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
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