Correspondents, p.24
Correspondents, page 24
Did the CPA have any idea how much of the insurgency in Fallujah was made up of former soldiers of the Iraqi Army, which Bremer had immediately disbanded upon arriving in Iraq? No, said Collins, they had no idea, but intel indicated that much of the resistance in Fallujah was driven by foreign fighters with ties to al-Qaeda. Average Iraqis didn’t want this.
Collins called on someone from French TV, who said, “But that isn’t what we are hearing on the streets. We are hearing that as long as American troops are still in Iraq, as long as their convoys are on the street, as long as they keep raiding homes in the middle of the night and scaring women and children, there are going to be IED bombings, there are going to be snipers.”
Again, Collins stated dully, that was the work of foreign fighters.
On and on it went like this. Rita leaned toward Ali. “I don’t know why we even bothered to come today,” she whispered.
“For the fried chicken,” he whispered back.
To her surprise, Collins pointed at her joylessly and called her name.
“Thank you, Mr. Collins,” she began, her adrenaline surging. “So, we are hearing more and more reports of ordinary Iraqis being kidnapped right from their homes or yards, being pulled out of cars while sitting in traffic, and it appears that some of this is sectarian or political, but a lot of it appears to be a new way of making money, of extracting as much ransom from families as one can.”
Collins opened his mouth to cut her off, but she pushed on: “People are talking about having to scramble to sell their cars, their jewelry, their valuables, to part with their life savings to get their family members returned to them, if they’re lucky enough to. And they’re saying that when they take the cases to the Iraqi police,the police merely shrug and tell them to take it to the Americans, to the CPA. Can you tell us what the CPA is doing to make the Iraqi police more equipped to handle these crimes?”
Collins stared at her and sighed. “That’s a very multipart question.”
The flatness of his voice elicited some laughter in the room. Rita smiled. “I know,” she said.
“I think Ambassador Bremer will have more on this to share with you in a few days,” Collins continued. “I would merely state that, as many of you know, we have begun the process of transferring training of the new Iraqi police from private contractors to the military itself, which we are confident will result in a far more equipped Iraqi police force. But it’s also important to remember that ultimately Iraqis have to take charge of their own systems of governance and order. All the technical support in the world from CPA or elsewhere is for naught unless Iraqis can unite.”
“But from Sunnis there is incredible distrust of some of the new units—” Rita began, but Collins had already turned from her and pointed elsewhere.
“At least you pushed it,” Ezra whispered to her.
Collins wished the room good day and exited through the side door, followed by his coterie. The room rose, everyone gathering up bags and cameras and recorders, emanating a general muttering of confounded-ness and dissatisfaction. Rita caught the eye of Meg Warren, from the biggest paper on the West Coast, and smiled sourly. Rita had come to Iraq somewhat in awe of Meg, a tiny blonde in her early forties who had first covered conflict abroad a decade ago in Bosnia.
Now Meg came over to Rita, Ezra, and Ali. “I’m disgusted by that waste of time we just sat through,” she said.
Ezra laughed. “I know. Oh, did you know that all the resistance to the new Iraq is coming from outside jihadis? Every Iraqi is actually very cooperative. Right, Ali?”
“Right.”Ali went along with the joke. “Especially in Fallujah. Very friendly there.”
Everyone laughed ruefully.
“Oh,” Meg added, turning to Ali. “If any of you know a good driver, will you let me know? Ours just quit. He said it’s not worth the risk.”
Rita’s eyes narrowed slightly. “So you’re still leaving the Bubble?”
Meg affected a macho swagger. “Hell, yeah. This is what we do.”
“True,” Rita conceded. But Meg’s response irked her as well. Had they all gotten soft in the villa without knowing it? What kind of stories was Meg developing outside the Green Zone that she herself had missed while she holed up in the villa, relying on merely e-mail and phone? She realized she was tensely digging her toe into her shoe.
When she refocused, she found Ali’s eyes on her. “Lunch?” he asked.
“Yes! Absolutely! Fried chicken!” She turned to Ezra and Meg. “You wanna join us?”
Both declined, saying they had to get back to work. This irked her as well. What could they be working on that they couldn’t take forty-five minutes for lunch? Suddenly, she felt very insecure about the work she had been putting out. Had they perhaps been noticing that her byline had been carrying dull news, dutiful summaries of press conferences?
She and Ali, weaving their way through journalists and bureaucrats, made their way out of the conference room and across the central rotunda into the dining hall, which reminded Rita of the sprawling cafeterias in the basements of the congressional buildings in D. C. A large photo of the Twin Towers dominated one long wall, as always, but now it was festooned with red-white-and-blue bunting.
“Oh, look,” she sneered to Ali. “They dressed it up.”
He laughed. “To remind people why they are here while they eat.”
At this point, they diverged, as they always did, he to the hot-food bar, she to the salad bar. In line, she idly listened to two fortysomething American women with light Southern accents, each of them wearing a polo shirt, slacks, and low heels, discuss home renovations they planned to undertake when they got back to the States.
“When do you two ship out?” she broke in, aiming to sound genial.
They turned. “I’m leaving Sunday,” said the blonder of the two, smiling beatifically.
“How are you feeling about it?”
She raised her eyes heavenward and shook her head. “I am counting the seconds. I just want my own bed so bad. And my dogs.”
“And I’m going back with Bremer’s contingent,” said the other.
“Ah!” Rita said. “One of the diehards!” It came out sounding sharper and more sardonic than she’d intended.
The woman rolled her eyes. “Please. Those are my orders. I’d be going back Sunday with this one”—she arced her thumb sideways toward her friend—“if I could. I got here four days after the attack on the Al-Rasheed, and I am so ready to leave.”
Rita nodded. “Oh wow. Since last fall, then?”
“Yes. I’m exhausted.”
Finally, Rita introduced herself, mentioning she was from the Standard. “How are you two feeling about things as the CPA gets ready to leave?”
Instantly, the women’s smiles melted away and their faces tightened. “You’re from the Standard?” the blonder of the two asked, hardness in her voice now.
Rita nodded. “Believe it or not, we’re not at the hotel. They isolate us in an armed compound in Mansour.” She was trying to be chatty, self-deprecating.
“We know about your villa,” the other woman said, coldly.
“And we’re not authorized to talk to you,” said the blonder one. Then they both turned their backs on her.
Rita just stood there, an uncomfortable half smile on her own face. She was used to this treatment from CPA staffers. They were almost entirely Republicans, and they hated the Standard. Ordinarily, she would not have even tried to get middling staffers to talk to her. But after seeing Meg and Ezra, she was especially impatient for new material.
Then the blonder of the two turned back to her. “But I will tell you something off the record,” she said. “We have worked incredibly hard here, night and day, and we have done good work, and that will become evident eventually.”
The second woman turned and said, more softly,“You have no idea how hard everyone has worked here. It’s not all fun out by the pool like the stories say. We’ve tried to rebuild a country in just a few months under incredible stress and really scary conditions.”
“I never doubted that!” Rita insisted. “Would you just talk to me a bit on the record about what it feels like to be leaving and what you want to do when you get back?” Optimistically, she reached into her bag for her notebook.
The blonder one looked slightly anguished, as though her instincts were at war. “You’ll twist whatever we say and make us look like awful people. Your paper always does.”
“It’s like you’re trying to make up for being so rah-rah at the start,” said the other.
Rita wanted to concede her that point. Her editor in D. C. had been pushing them especially hard since late last year to “dig in,” as he put it, regarding the occupation’s failings.
Instead, she merely said: “It’s definitely not our intention to make you look like awful people. Obviously, you’re all doing your best with a highly flawed premise.”
Instantly, she regretted her choice of words. “Well, there you go!” the blonder one said. “You just admitted it. You think it’s wrong in the first place that we’re even here. So how can you see any of the good?”
“That’s not what I meant!” People in line ahead of them turned, curious, brows furrowed. Her tone had been escalating. “I meant that anyone would agree that the execution left a lot to be desired.”
Again, the two women glanced at each other. The blonder one sighed, as though she were exasperated.
“Anyway,” said the second one, “the fact remains that we’re not authorized to talk on the record to press. So, off the record, again, I would merely say that we did the best we could with the situation we were dealt, and now we’re going home. And I wish the people of Iraq the very best. I really do. The ball’s in their court now.”
The blonder one looked at her friend, then at Rita, then nodded in assent.
“And please stay safe as long as you’re here,” said the second. Then they both again turned their backs to her, stiff and silent, as though they were waiting to be away from her to talk.
Rita wanted the ground to swallow her up. She’d been rebuffed or even yelled at countless times in her twelve years of reporting and, like most journos, prided herself on her thick skin, but in this instance she felt strangely shamed, as though the women had seen right to the heart of her cynical, undermining, unpatriotic intentions. They also reminded her of the kind of bland, field-hockey-playing blond girls she’d gone to prep school with, girls whose friendship she’d initially tried to cultivate before she accepted that she was happier talking about the Marshall Plan with awkward boys from New Jersey or Michigan.
They were at the front of the line now, but she walked away, strode across the room, infuriated to find she was fighting back tears. She joined Ali in the hot-food line, smiled stiffly at him.
“No salad?”
“I changed my mind.”
They were served fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and stewed greens by Pakistani workers wearing smocks and paper hats; then they took their trays and sat opposite one another at the end of a long table. Instantly, Rita regretted that she’d abandoned the salad line. The sight of the processed, industrial food, shipped in from the United States via Kuwait, merely redoubled a queasiness she’d felt since breakfast, but she resigned herself to the meal and began pulling orangey fried skin off her chicken. Meanwhile,Ali was devouring his with both hands, gulping Coke simultaneously. She studied him as he ate.
Finally, he looked up. “What?” he asked, his mouth full. “Am I eating it the wrong way?”
“What? No. I’m just so angry.”
He pointed to himself. “At me?”
“No, of course not. You’re the best. At—” she paused. “At the situation.” Her eyes swept over the room. “This is deeply fucked up.”
He laughed, shook his head. “I don’t think about it. I have no control over it. I’m lucky I have a job.”
That softened her a bit. Who was she to fulminate, while his family was getting ready to leave the country? She smiled wanly at him. “We’re lucky we have you.”
“You see? Then everybody’s lucky!”
She uttered a short, sharp laugh. “Right.”
Five minutes later, Ali’s sat phone rang. He answered it. Seconds later, he cried in dismay, “La, la!”—No, no!—then continued to listen. Rita’s brows met, as she followed him. Someone had been killed, and now he was asking follow-up questions. Where was the body now? How was the mother? When was the funeral? He listened and nodded for several more seconds, at one point looking up at Rita and saying into the phone, “Of course, of course, I’ll tell her.” Then, “Ma’a assalama,” and Ali hung up.
“What is it?”
“You know Nuri, the boy of Nabil’s family’s neighbors?”
“Who was kidnapped?”
“They found him dead. His body got dumped at the end of their street.”
“Oh no!” Her hands rose to her mouth. “Oh no! I thought they just wanted money.”
Ali shook his head scornfully. “Nabil didn’t tell you everything. The boy’s father, that family, they did too many bad things for Saddam. He was—you know—he was a’ameel. Informer.”
“You think it was Shi’a who took the boy?”
Ali shrugged. “Maybe not even Shi’a. Anybody with—you know, hiqid. I don’t know the English word.”
“What does it mean?”
“You know, when you did something bad to me a long time ago and I want to give you equal bad, I carry hiqid against you.”
“Oh, you mean a grudge.”
Ali cocked an eye. “That’s the word in English.”
She nodded.
“Okay. So anybody with this grudge word. Maybe a Baathist who lost a job because of the father.”
“Why didn’t Nabil tell me all this?”
“He didn’t want you writing about it. That’s why he called, to say he left the villa to go home and help the family prepare for the funeral, because they are crazy right now, crying and screaming. And to say please please please, Miss Rita, no stories. It will just make things worse.”
“But these are the very things we need to be reporting on. To show the disaster here.”
“Well,” Ali said, folding his arms defiantly, “I am only telling you what Nabil told me. The family wants no journalists there, or they are afraid they will get more mashakil on their house. They want to have the funeral as quietly as possible and then go to Jordan.”
She sighed, put a hand to her forehead. “Jesus Christ,” she muttered. “I may as well go home.”
“And you can leave anytime you want.” Ali said it sharply, with sudden indignation in his eyes, which took her aback.
“I know. I’m sorry. I’m just—this is all so frustrating.”
This time, he did not reply, merely shrugged and looked at her as if to say, Well, so what?
When they finished eating, there was the winding path out of the palace and the bag inspection and pat-down before they reached the parking lot. By now the sun was beating down mercilessly, and the temperature had surpassed thirty-five degrees Celsius; Rita dreaded putting on the polyester abaya again, but she did so. In the car, she slunk down in the back seat but refused to lie on the floor. Ali did not protest; he was indulging her, tired of scolding, she supposed.
Leaving the Green Zone was much easier and faster than entering it, and sooner than she expected, they were on the traffic-choked Qadisaya Expressway back to Mansour, a cacophony of bleats and beeps emanating from small, squarish, beat-up cars from the early 1980s. Back off the highway, they crawled through Beirut Square, lined with shops and shoppers, including some unveiled women. It had been several days since she had seen life, crowds, outside either the villa or the Green Zone, and she thrilled to the sight.
“Things don’t look that bad,” she remarked. “Seems pretty normal.”
Ali grunted in reply.
They were driving slowly by a small, shabby chaikhana, a tea cart, where about half a dozen older men, some in dishdashas, some in shirts and slacks, drank tea and smoked nargileh.
“Let’s pull over here and talk to these men and get a feel on the street,” she instructed him, grabbing her bag.
Ali twisted around. “What? No. It’s too dangerous. I just want to get you back. There’s nowhere to park.”
But she was already out of the car, twisting her abaya into place around her shoulders. “Take a minute to find a place and come meet me,” she called back to Ali, not waiting for his reply.
As she approached the men, whose attention she had caught as she approached, she put her hand to her heart in the customary greeting. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” she began in her Iraqi Arabic, which had improved much in a year. She named herself and the Standard and requested that the men allow her to ask some questions about how they were feeling about the current state of security and politics.
They eyed her, then one another, warily, none of them saying a word. They each had the same thick, dyed-black mustache—nearly every middle-aged man in Iraq did—and heavily creased forehead. One of the men shook his head in a sad manner and seemed to weakly wave her away.
“Have you had personal incidents of violence or crime in your family or your neighborhood?”she persisted. “I will not use your family name if you prefer.”
Some of the men knit their brows and craned their heads forward as though they were trying to understand her. She wondered if her accent was completely unintelligible to them. Finally, one of the dishdasha men, the portliest, with the bushiest mustache, stepped forward and offered her a small glass of tea, which she accepted.
“Ahlan, ya anisa,” he began, gently and slowly, as though to be understood. “This is my café. You are welcome to a tea, but please, only briefly. We are very afraid to talk to Americans.”
“Of course, ya ammo, I understand. I will not stay long.” To free her hands, she drank her tea in a single, ungainly gulp, which drew an amused smile from one of the men, then reached into her bag for her notebook and pen. But when he saw them, the café owner raised a hand in polite protest.
“Please, ya anisa, no notebook to show you are a sahafiya. Too dangerous.”
