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BADMINTON AND BULLETS

May 31, 2007 2:00 PM

We have a badminton net stretched across a patch of grass in front of our bureau.  In the evening when the heat of the sun has lifted a little, a group of us gets together to play in a constantly rotating round robin.  Iraqis, it turns out, are rather good at badminton.

The other evening as we played we started to hear the sound of gunfire – not the usual sporadic shooting, which is often police convoys firing in the air to clear a way through traffic.  This was much more concentrated, bursts of automatic rifles and heavier machine guns.  American troops and insurgents having at it a mile or two away across the river, we later discovered.  Now and again there was the sound of explosions – rockets perhaps, or roadside bombs.  Then came the helicopters – they usually end things fairly quickly.  The battle must have lasted about half an hour – and for the whole time none of our Iraqi staff even flinched, more interested in keeping the badminton score than paying attention to the fighting within hearing distance.

It is not easy to escape this war in Baghdad, and yet somehow the mind needs to be diverted. 

Close to where our bureau is situated lives Abu Taha, a well-fed and cheerful man who keeps pigeons on the roof of his house.  It is a rare pleasure to sit up with him on the roof in the evening around sunset as he lets the birds out – they wheel up over the house, fly off around the dome of the mosque, soar over the Tigris, but always return to their owner, who throws out handfuls of grain for them to feed on.  It is here that Abu Taha says he finds peace, an escape from the car bombs and shootings that have become a horrible staple of life in Baghdad.  Only these birds are truly free in this city – they can fly above the mayhem, don’t have to stop at checkpoints, are not targeted by snipers.

Few people are at peace with their lives in Baghdad.  Almost everyone I talk to either already has a plan to leave, or is trying to think of a way to get out.  This in itself becomes a major mental exercise – assessing the different routes out, which are now getting increasingly difficult for Iraqis.  The relatives overseas who may or may not help.  The different costs of living in Syria, Jordan, Egypt…. The chances of getting a job, schooling for children.  I see people sitting around a table discussing exit strategies for hours, passing on tips, rumors, contacts in Amman or Damascus.  And of course it takes time – contemplating a complete change in life, possibly for many years until things get better in Baghdad.  Call it Extreme Makeover, Iraqi style.  It diverts the mind…

May 31, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

ALAA AND SAIF

May 20, 2007 8:01 AM

They killed my friends on Thursday night.  Alaa Uldeen Aziz had been a cameraman with ABC for two years, Saif Laith Yousouf had joined us more recently in February.  I last saw them on Thursday afternoon before they left the bureau to drive home.  They never made it -- 100 yards away from Alaa’s house, two cars full of gunmen stopped them, dragged them from their car and took them away.  We later found out they were shot less than 10 minutes away.  We don’t even know why they were killed.

That is the bigger tragedy -- there is no reason for much of the killing in Baghdad.  Many of the victims are killed simply because of their religion, or whom they work for, or whom they associate with.  Innocent civilians caught up in a toxic power struggle run by evil men using psychotic proxies to do their dirty work for them out on the streets. 

We spent some time sitting with the two families on Friday afternoon to offer our condolences.  It was very painful.  Saif’s fiancée had still not been told, they didn’t know how to break it to her.  Alaa’s mother told us how difficult it was for her to explain to Alaa's two daughters, 10 and 4 years old, that their daddy would not be coming home any more.  Many tears were shed.

Alaa’s mother had wanted to bury her son next to his father, in a cemetery near Muthanna in central Baghdad.  His cousins had to tell her that would not be possible -- there are so many snipers in the area the cemetery is not safe to enter.  This is how bad it has become here.  A city where it is not safe to bury your dead.

It gets even more grotesque.  I had to apologize to both the families that neither I nor any of my colleagues could come to the funerals, because their neighborhood is so unsafe.  Both families completely understood, and said they would not have allowed us to come anyway.  We didn’t say it openly, but having a foreigner come to your house these days in many Baghdad neighborhoods is like signing your own death warrant.

My whole career as a journalist has been directed towards finding the common humanity that binds us all together around this complicated world.  More understanding of "the other" leads to less hatred and violence.  I passionately believe that.   I am having difficulty in locating that common humanity amongst the killers of Alaa and Saif.

May 20, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (19) | TrackBack (0)

MESOPOTAMIAN DREAMS

May 14, 2007 5:06 PM

The area around Mahmudiyah and Yusufiyah where the three U.S. soldiers were abducted on Saturday is now widely referred to as “the Triangle of Death”. It used not to be so forbidding.

In 2003 after the invasion I drove down that way on a number of occasions. After a stretch of dryish desert immediately south of Baghdad, the landscape soon becomes lush and green and busy with farmworkers, digging in reddish soil that is watered by the Euphrates. There are complicated water sluices and pumps and channels to keep all the fields irrigated. Men with rounded backs hacking with hoes that haven't changed much in several thousand years. There are dark green plantations of date palms, lighter green pastures for cows, and bright yellow green rows of seedlings pushing out of the rich soil.

Once you leave the main road you drive through a series of right angle turns as the narrow rural roads follow the borders of the fields. The roads are studded with clods of earth and fringed with grass. Every so often you have to negotiate narrow bridges that cross various canals and irrigation ditches, nosing past lines of people and slow-moving beasts of burden. There are villages every few miles -- with the ubiquitous tea shop, a source not just of invigoratingly sweet spiced tea, but also of gossip and news – these tea shops are the equivalent for many of the morning newspaper, a not-to-be-missed stop on the way to work. Here also are brick kilns, enormous dusty furnaces coughing out dark smoke as they bake bricks just the way the Mesopotamians baked bricks four millennia ago.

For this was once the cradle of civilization, where the world’s first cities were founded, the first literate society existed, where laws were codified into a written code, where metal working and glass making and the weaving of textiles were all discovered. These were even the people who invented beer (which might explain why they counted everything against a base of 60, rather than 10 or 100, which is why even today we have 60 minutes in the hour, 24 hours in the day and 360 degrees in a circle).

Today this cradle of civilization is sadly degraded, dominated by religious fanatics and men of violence who would appear to want to return Iraq to a primitive state that values brute force over intelligence and whose idea of a code of law is one in which you behead your enemies on videotapes. And try going into those tea shops now – those that remain open will be eerily quiet, as people are too scared to gossip in public. It only took four years to turn the fertile crescent into the triangle of death.

May 14, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

BAGHDAD WALLS

May 13, 2007 2:26 PM

Walls, it turns out, can carry a surprising weight of emotion. Baghdad has seen an enormous number of concrete walls put up in the last few years, mostly to protect against car bombs. The walls are made of precast concrete with steel rebar inside, with a thick base and a tapered profile designed to channel an explosion upwards into the air and dissipate the blast harmlessly. Their shape gives them their name – “T-walls”, since they look like an inverted T. Each section, six to eight feet wide, costs around $800, so to surround a house costs tens of thousands dollars.

At first these walls were put outside U.S. military bases and government buildings. Then as the car bombs increased they went up outside hotels, police stations and some residential compounds. Now with the surge in U.S. troops into Baghdad these walls are going up all over the city -- around markets, which had become favorite targets for the car bombers, at checkpoints, all along the airport road (to stop the snipers who were shooting at vehicles coming in from the airport). And, most recently, along the edge of Adhamiyah, a Sunni neighborhood in northern Baghdad almost entirely surrounded by Shiite areas. The U.S. troops thought this would make the locals feel safer, but much to their surprise it generated extensive protests. Today there was even a debate in parliament about the wall, and the deputies voted to have the wall taken down.

The reason for the backlash is almost entirely symbolical. The wall, say residents of Adhamiyah, will cut them off from the rest of the city, and in fact make them more isolated. Despite the sectarian violence in Baghdad, most people in this city continue to aspire to a non-sectarian society. About one third of all marriages in Baghdad are mixed, between Sunnis and Shiites and it is rare to meet someone in this city who does not have friends from both religious sects.

The wall appears to concretize the divisions between Sunnis and Shiites. It stands as a harbinger of what many fear could become permanent dividing lines between Sunnis and Shiites. Today I talked to a young friend who works near Adhamiyah about a project of some Iraqi artists to paint some of the blank gray T-walls to make them look more attractive. He was strongly opposed to this project. “If we paint the walls and make them look attractive,” he said, “that is the first step towards accepting that the walls are going to become permanent, that we will never take them down again.”

T-walls may make certain parts of Bahgdad a little safer, at least temporarily. Longer term, however, they may be contributing to the very problem that the U.S. is hoping to solve: bringing the feuding Iraqis together, not dividing them any further.

May 13, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Algiers Bombing Video

May 08, 2007 6:19 PM

A bomb-making demo on satellite television? I was sitting in the bureau in Baghdad after midnight tonight, vaguely watching the bank of televisions that cover one wall at the end of the office, when I saw on the Al Jazeera screen a large explosion at the side of a building. Turned out it was the explosion that took the front off the Algerian prime minister’s office building in Algiers almost a month ago, April 11th. There were three coordinated suicide bombs that day, killing a total of 33 people.

But then the video, which supposedly was given to Al Jazeera by Al Qaeda who claimed responsibility for the bombings, went on to show the preparation of the bombs. Several men, whose faces were pixilated, were shown screwing down plates on large metal tanks presumably containing the explosives, then smearing some liquid putty over the edges of the plates. The camera then showed what appeared to be a series of detonators built around cheap alarm clocks, sandwiched with small blocks of explosives with wires protruding. One man squats down and squeezes black gel from a tube onto the face of one of the detonators, perhaps some form of glue to stick it to the bomb tanks.

Al Jazeera has become reknowned throughout the Middle East for showing insurgent videos of attacks -- many of them against Americans in Iraq, and also for airing tapes from Al Qaeda spokesmen, including Osama bin Laden. This tape seemed to break new ground in DIY shows for would-be bombers.

The day of the attack Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, a North African affiliate of the main Al Qaeda network, claimed responsibility for the bombings on a website, showing the pictures of the reputed bombers and even giving the amount of explosives -- 1,500 lbs -- used in the bomb that partially destroyed the prime minister’s office. But today’s tape allegedly shows the detailed preparations of the bombs before they were used, presumably released for propaganda purposes on the part of Al Qaeda. The face of terror is not hidden or secret -- far from it. Spread quickly over the internet and now by satellite TV it revels in its own publicity machine. Like it or not, the bombers are becoming role models for far too many angry young men across the Middle East -- and the open media serves their cause well.

WATCH TERRY MCCARTHY'S REPORT

May 8, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)