In the Red Zone

VEILS AND BAR CODES

Dear Lisa --

This afternoon taught me some lessons in what many people consider a contradiction in terms:  Islamic feminism.

The education involved a conversation with Haifa Malij Jaafir, a reputedly feminist-minded member of Basra Province's Governing Council and the director of the Muslim Union of Women.  I was particularly keen on meeting Haifa because she is the only GC member who wears an abiya and a veil, obscuring her entire face except for her eyes--and what kind of "feminist" wears that get-up, I wondered.  After some driving and asking around for the Union (along with seat belts and trash receptacles, Iraqis continue to resist the use of street addresses), a small boy led Layla and I through the gathering dusk down barely-paved and debris-strewn streets to a low-slung house obscured by palms where, standing beside the half-open gate, was hejab'd Haifa herself. 

After giving Layla a warm greeting (the girl seems to know everyone in town!), the GC member ushers us through the house into a rectangular room--furniture pushed, Arab-style, against the wall--and we sit on sofas beneath framed Koranic inscriptions and pictures of Imams Ali and Hussain, in addition to the late Ayatollah Hakim.  A young boy pads in with the inevitable Pepsis (my sugar intake has tripled since I came here) and we begin to talk.  It's rather...peculiar, I guess is the appropriate word...to converse with a human being who is essentially peering through a narrow gap in a fabric wall, but not half as strange as I find the woman seated beside Haifa, who is completely covered in black--face, hands, feet, not an centimeter of flesh exposed, looking for all the world like something out of Lord of the Rings.

Through Layla's translation, Haifa gives us the low-down on the Union:  subsidized by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the two-year old organization has nine branches throughout Iraq and deals with some 1,400 women in Basra Province alone.   It's main purpose, she says, "is to upgrade the condition of women through education."  This includes offering classes in English and Arabic, first aid, computer skills, health, information on democratic elections and constitution-writing--they even contact lawyers to assist in domestic abuse cases.  "Many men beat their wives and sisters and try to keep them in the home, not allowing them to pursue careers," she says.  Layla, I notice, doesn't flinch.

Close your eyes, and you can hear a Western feminist articulating the nigh-universal language of equal rights and gender equity.  Open them and, well...as for the shroud & veil, Haifa tells us she wears the outfit because 1) Allah demands it; and 2) she wants to prove that a woman can "make it to the top" without having to resort to "make-up, high heels and fancy dresses."  She wants to run again for office in Basra (she claims her GC candidacy earned the most votes of any SCIRI member), prompting me to ask, if she veils her face, how will anyone know they are really voting for her?  "They will elect my ideas, not my appearance," she replies.

Meanwhile, the Ringwraith sits through most of the conversation, silent and unmoving, except to rise when her cell phone began to chirp.

We wind up the interview and Haifa sees us to the door--she and I seemed to hit it off, and she welcomed me back any time to upgrade my knowledge of Islam and feminism--and soon Layla and I are in the thick of twilight traffic.  As we pass down Jazar Street--Basra's main commercial thoroughfare--she points to a greenish building with a sign in English reading "BASRA CENTER."  "Our new supermarket," she says.

Stop the car.  Restaurant bills at the funduk are eroding my cash stash and I've been mulling over how to store some comestibles in my ghurfa (room), and this seemed a good opportunity to stock the cupboard and see what a Basran "supermarket" looks like.  Turns out BC is a crowded, high-ceiling, very clean single room, about the size of the fruit and vegetable area of an American s-market, equipped with all the trappings of home:  carts, hand baskets, aisles, freezers, cereals, soups, beans, soaps, shampoo, etc.--even a deli counter!  There's no Point-of-Purchase musak, nushkur Allah, and most of the women shoppers are in hejab, with one or two veiled faces--but squint, and you could almost convince yourself you were standing in a pocket-sized Safeway, wondering what you did with the grocery list...

Anyway, Layla and I loop through the market, doing the sign language routine (remember, in public I have to be a deaf mute--kinda silly, since neither of us knows the digital lingo, but it seems to work), loading up a basket with various items (in case you're interested, I have a fridge in the room), then get in line.  And what do I see when I step up to the cashier?  Y'allah, it's a hand-held laser-operated bar code reader!  Holy convenience store!  (To be truthful, I was a little less than surprised:  a couple of weeks ago, Zuhair Ali Akbair, manager of the city's Central Bank, told me that Basrans would soon have the privilege of using a consumer debit card, readable at machines set up in, among other places, Basra Center.)

I mention this bit of quotidian trivia to underscore a point.  To many people--obviously, Haifa's one of them--"fundamentalist Islamic feminism" is not an oxymoron.  By the same token, fundamentalist Islam and modern technology are also not mutually exclusive.  This is a error people make when they claim that Salafists want to "drag us back to the Medieval age."  Not quite.  Rather, they want to "medievalize" modernity (or perhaps vice versa), keeping their mobiles and satellite dishes and computers and Internet, while frog-marching social relations (especially those dealing with women) back a millenium or so.  One fascinating aspect of Basra is that by virtue of its relative stability, you can see the tug and pull of this process at work--debit cards and feminist unions on one hand, veils and alcohol-banning Islamists on the other.

Can they co-exist?  That's the next chapter of the Basran saga.  Most people I know (none of them fans of fundamentalism) think the religious parties are a passing phase, that Basra's fabled liberal-mindedness and port-city sensuality will reassert itself--in other words, the values implicit in a bar-code reader (not to mention the Internet and sat-TV) will eventually sweep away the shrouds and veils, and reduce the turbanned thugs to Friday rants before dwindling congregations.  I'm not sure, but I certainly know where my hopes lie.  With their charm and confidence and dedication, may women like Haifa grace the Basra political scene for years to come--make-up, high-heels, fancy dresses and all. 

Yours from the land where a BLT is never on the deli counter's menu.

May 27, 2005

COPS, CONES AND VENGEANCE

[Note:  this post is written with extreme discretion]

Dear Lisa,

The past few days have been interesting in Basra--and of course, in Iraq, "interesting" means general mayhem and bloodshed.  Cases in point:  over the weekend, unknown assailants--the assailants are always unknown, there are no uniforms or name tags here--assassinated five people in the streets.  The victims, or so I hear, were ex-Baathists (there is no such thing as an "ex" Baathist to some, evidently), but, as Samir, the night clerk at the funduk put it, "We have courts and judges to decide matters like this.  It is not up to people who chose to take life so cheaply."

On a lighter--or at least, more spectacular--note, a barge transporting smuggled diesel oil exploded in the Shatt, causing a dense black tower of smoke to rise over the northern Basra all afternoon.  Haven't heard an explanation for that one yet.

The day before, Layla and I had a little adventure.  It started when we taxi'd out to interview the founder and director of perhaps the most radical Shia religious party currently jockeying for influence in Basra.  Established the mid-1990s to resist Saddam and his supporters, they have steadily grown in power and confidence.  "They were the first group to challenge our presence in the streets by setting up unauthorized checkpoints," a British officer told me. 

Like nearly all Islamic politicians I've met, the Founder (we'll call him) is a serious, soft-spoken, intensely watchful man, who moves with slow, deliberate motions and radiates the humorless self-regard of the Arab intellectual.  Despite the stifling heat in his office, he wore all black--slack, shirt, jacket.  The only person wearing more clothing in the room was, of course, abiya'd Layla.

During our hour conversation--Layla translating--he explained to us how his party represents the true cultural instincts of the Iraqi people; how it has dedicated itself to peaceful democratic reform; how the media has undertaken a deliberate campaign to twist his party's message into something ugly and frightening.  They do not stand for violence, he pointed out, but rather God's justice and Divine Sovereignty as embodied in the life of the great 7th century Shia icon Imam Hussain.

The Founder seemed intrigued in my fascination in Shi'ism, and somewhat taken by Layla, who exuded her usual charm, and invited us back for a follow-up interview.  As we stood to go, however, the Shia leader and his political officer, a heavy-set man who sat across from me fingering his prayer beads and observing the conversation, refused to let us leave their headquarters except in their own SUV, under protection of their own guards.  Oh-oh.  I glanced at Layla, who smiled a little nervously and winked, hardly assuring me. 

We climbed into the vehicle, while the Political Officer sat shot-gun and a couple of AK-toting gunsels crowded into the rear.  On the way over, he and Layla engaged in a long Arabic conversation--very frustrating, as you might imagine:  seems the Founder was concerned that Layla and I might be seen leaving his party's HQ and become targeted for "assassination" by rival religious groups, Baathists or Occupation troops (!). 

Obviously, since you're reading this, nothing untoward happened to us--although a curious moment occured on the way back to the hotel.  We hit a traffic snarl, and to avoid the tie-up, the driver turned down a short roadway blocked by orange police cones.  A cop manning the barricade took a glance at the car and immediately removed the cones, allowing us to bypass the delay, replacing the obstructions a moment after we drove through.  I thought immediately of what a little Basran bird once said to me:  "You see, Steeve?  The police are not independent.  They serve the religious parties.  Many of them belong to the religious parties.  It is not right."

By coincidence, the next day--Sunday?  they begin to blur after awhile--found me at Basra's Criminal Investigation Division, a bustling, state-of-the-art facility packed with gleaming scientific equipment and manned by Armani-wearing detectives and macho babes with fabulous hair and long, tapering legs.  (Do I have to say it?--Not.)  Actually, Basra CID was a single dingy, un-air-conditioned floor of a former Baath Party headquarters, its scuffed and blackened walls badly in need of paint, cigarette packs littering the scuffed tiles and exposed wires hanging out of electrical sockets.  The "Division" is so poorly furnished that the Russian-made rocket and dozen or so mortar shells the cops fished out of the Shatt earlier that morning were laid out, exposed to view, on a staircase landing.  "We have no place to store them," my guide, Lt. B. confessed with embarrassment.

Unlike a cool, glamorous TV CID, Basra's version possessed exactly one computer, no criminal laboratory, a forgery department that essentially fit inside a cabinet and bomb defusing equipment that consisted of a pair of wire cutters.  "We find unexploded bombs every day," Lt. B. informed me.  "Cut the wrong wire and boom!"  And what kind of health plan and insurance coverage does the Iraqi government offer these men, who are indispensable to the future of the country? The word nothing probably best clarifies their benefits package.

Later that night, Hassam (we'll call him) tooled by the funduk to pick me up for a little night-drive through Basra.  Hassam is a stringer for various news organizations, a rolly-polly, vain and seemingly knowledgeable man who spends his days in a house with other stringers, drinking tea and watching Arab music videos while waiting for news to break.  Seems a friend's uncle was one of the five men assassinated over the week-end and his family was holding his wake that evening.  Desperate to get out of the hotel and see what Basra looks like after dark, I accepted Hassam's invitation to attend the gathering.  (Getting in his car, I instinctively put on the shoulder-harness seat beat:  "No," Hassam cautioned me, "You will look like foreigner"--which tells you something about Iraqi driving habits.)

We drove along the Corniche: couples, families, knots of young men wandering up and down the promenade beside the Shatt.  Cafes lit by neon and fluorescent tubes.  Chai-drinking shiska tokers relaxing at tables set along the banks of one of Basra's cleaner canals.  The Jazar Street "night market" ablaze with open-shop, crowded-sidewalk, heavy-traffic energy.  It felt good to see a semblance of normal life taking place, even if I could only view it from afar, stuck for safety's sake in Hassam's car...

We motor on into an increasingly desolate area of town--here, generators are few and neon signs nonexistent so a kind of hazy darkness lit only by the full moon descends over the pre-fab cement housing blocks and unpaved streets.  (Basra is one of the few cities where you often need an off-road vehicle on the roads.)  Eventually, we pull up to a field where dozens of people are sitting in plastic chairs or standing in a a long fluorescent-light-lit canopy, where platters of food rest on an embroidered rug.  Hassam and I join the gathering, I'm introduced, nods and murmurs of "Well-kum" all around, the inevitable tea and Pepsi appears like magic and of course, the deceased's family invites me to partake of the funeral feast--but I decline, not wishing to intrude on their sorrow any more than I have.

The gathering, Hassam tells me, is winding down now that darkness has fallen.  I question why all the attendees are men--it's night, he explains, women are at home now (where they no doubt belong) and besides, they held their own commemoration earlier in the day.  Gender segregation even in funerals!  Meanwhile, men in dishdashas are embracing, crying on each other's shoulders. "He was a very good man, a good man," the murder victim's nephew tells me.  I don't have the heart to ask if his uncle were Baathi.

For alright, maybe he was a member of the "ex-regime" (as the Iraqis put it):  still, there were many degrees of participation in the party, some relatively innocent, some not so.  Who decides this degree, and by extension, who lives and who dies?  I thought of Samir's remark the day before:  "There are judges and courts for matters like this."  Sitting in the plastic chair beneath the harsh fluorescent lights, watching teary-eyed men smoke cigarettes and sip their tea, I wondered about these unnamed people in Basra who "chose to take life so cheaply"--often in the name of the Iraqi people, sanctioned by their own idea of religious virtue, purity and divine retribution.  They rule the streets of Basra now.  Everyone is afraid of them, including me.  But more on this topic, I cannot say.

Yours from the land of the weaponized surah.

May 20-23

SSR

Dear Lisa --

The idea, according to Captain J., my media operations shepherd during my stay at the Shatt-al-Arab Hotel--an old caravansary on the north end of town turned military base for the 2nd Battalion of the Coldstream Guards--is to discourage "insurgents" from massing in the dark and launching mortar attacks on the camp.  The means are illumination flares, two fired from mortars in various directions each night at different times, their parachute-borne coppery light exposing the flat terrain around the base to observers in the hotel's tower (actually the traffic control center for an old and long-unused airport.)

"Seems to work, too," the Captain adds, as the heavy thump! of a British mortar shakes the ground.  "The only time we didn't do this, the hotel was rocketed later that night."

The Shatt-al-Arab Hotel

Later that night--1:30 a.m., to be exact--I'm jarred from my sleep by two loud bangs!, one after the other.  That's funny, I thought, that sounds like an attack on the hotel...a moment later tumbling from bed as a klaxon suddenly blasts out a warning whaa, whaa, whaa indicating that, sure enough, we're under assault.  Beastly fuzzy-wuzzies!  To the wire, men!  Sergeant-major, form a square!

Actually, what I did was throw on some clothes, along with my blue helmet and body armor and, as per instructions, hastened to the hotel lobby (built, it seems, in the 1930s--was that the ghost of a Pan Am Clipper I saw parked on the tarmac?) to stand with similarly attired British soldiers beneath the aged chandeliers and inert ceiling fans while my hosts tried to sort out the disturbance.  About two hours later the word comes down:  seems that--illumination rounds aside--the blacked-out hotel served as a rendezvous for a Chinese-made rocket and an RPG round, fired from different locations in the city, but synchronized to land simultaneously (a degree of "insurgent" proficiency that interested the Brits).  The rocket exploded in the Shatt, the RPG struck just outside the perimeter of the camp.  Bad aim, chaps, frightfully sorry, but you'll excuse us if we don't wish you better luck next time...

Other than that bit of excitement, my embed stay has been a blur of army bases, military equipment, helicopter rides, sweaty trips in Snatches (if you'll pardon the expression), occasional forays amongst the Basran people and periodic afternoons languishing in a KBR-tent on the KBR-built and maintained Basrah Air Station, listening to the KBR-generated (for all I know) desert wind howling just beyond the canvas.  All that, and after-hours beers ($1.50 for a 16-ounce can, two cans limit) at an officers'--and journalists', evidently--"pub."

Highlights have included accompanying Lithuanian troops as they gave hands-on training to Iraqi troops in the fine art of establishing and operating vehicle checkpoints.  ("You most prri-or-i-tize whut vehicles you stup in orrdur not to tie op traffick," the Lithuanian lieutenant tells his interpreter in English, who then relays the instructions to the soldiers in Iraqi--how much information is lost in the multiple relays?)  Then we foot-patroled a small town several kilometers north of Basra where the Liths wandered through the souk, eventually purchasing some souvenir kheffiyas and prayer beads.  (Alas, when was the last time U.S. troops could interact so freely among Iraqis?)  We ended the day driving through some god-awfully poor villages, where the patrol commander pointed out a destroyed stone building where, a month earlier, a group of children found some unexploded grenades, started playing with them and...well, you can guess the outcome of this typically catastrophic Iraqi tale...

Training Iraqi "Facility Protection Service" police

The Brits took us--by "us" I mean yours truly, in addition to French TV2 war correspondent Laurent Boussié and freelance cameraman Dominique Marotel (embedded in order to do a five-part story on British activities in the Basra region)--to a couple of police training centers (one in which young Czech military instructors oozed thigh-strapped-Glock machismo as they trained Iraqis how to shoot) and went on patrols through inner city Basra, where I became acquainted with the inimitable Iraqi expression "jigee-jigee."  (Hint:  it has something to do with offering one's younger sibling to passing soldiers.)

British photographers recording police training

One of my favorite visits was at the headquarters of the Governing Council of Basra, the newly-elected body of provincial legislators.  The pols I saw (and I'll have more to say about them in the future) were an odd mixture of sheikhs resembling Alec Guinness in Lawrence of Arabia, grim-faced representatives of religious parties and even grimmer-faced women councilmembers shrouded in black abiyas, all protected by British soldiers and the occasional Shitte security man, standing outside the council chambers with the blank expression of a hired gunsel whose importance resides solely in his AK-47 and ability to follow orders.  Adding to this exotic, if combustible, mix was Major Robert Cooper, the British liaison to the GC--a droll, erudite, witty throwback to an older tradition of English officer, part diplomat, part warrior, with a touch of the poet beneath the camouflaged khaki and neckerchief tied in a dashing cravat.  One could almost imagine him as a Victorian officer in the British Raj, flattering, cajoling and soothing the indignant tempers of Indian panjandrums and potentates.

The point of all this training--or rather, what the British were keen for the Frenchmen and I to see--is called "SSR," or "Security Sector Reform."  This bureaucratese for a somewhat abstract, objective-sounding and culturally-neutral policy in which the MNF, rather than behaving like an occupying foreign power of yore, seeks to act as instructors, teaching the Iraqi police and army to handle their own security, thus allowing--some day--the various nation's troops to decamp from the Big Sandbox.   Or, to put it less diplomatically, to teach the Iraqis to be our allies against the Ali Baba, "insurgents" and foreign terrorists without--insha'allah--getting sucked into their not-inconsiderable psychological and cultural pathologies.

On patrol in the Qarmat Ali district of Basra

The Iraqis express gratitude for the training--I did not detect among the soldiers and policemen any resentment or feelings of humiliation regarding the MNF.  Instead, I heard constant variations of "Brit-tish zay-neen!  Ameriki muu zay-neen!"--yeah, you guessed it, "British good.  America no good."  (Interestingly, one UK officer said to me, "We are incredibly paranoid about doing anything that makes America look bad...")  Anyway, it's only when you pull the trainees aside that the complaints pour forth--crappy equipment, no boots, shoddy uniforms, terrible accommodations, no one listening to their complaints--and, most bothersome of all, it seems--no pistols!  The Iraqi men (probably some women, too) all want their pistols--Glocks, especially.  "We are in danger 24 hours a day," a police cadet told me.  "We need pistols to protect ourselves."  No doubt--but nearly every Iraqi household possesses at least one gun (legal under Saddam--so much for the NRA argument that private gun ownership deters tyranny...)  One suspects, of course, that strappin' a handgun to your waist or thigh is some sort of cultural trope for social status and manhood that goes beyond mere protection...

I should add, in this already over-long post, that the Iraqis don't blame the MNF for their shortages--although they gripe that British promises of aid do not always materialize.  ("With them, its always 'gimmee, gimmee,'" one Brit complained.)  No, rather, they fault their commanders, who, they whisper, take supplies earmarked for the rank and file and sell them on the black market.  True? Who knows?  The point is, the Iraqis think its true, which undermines their morale ever-so-slightly and resurrects the ghosts of their corrupt, feudalistic and dysfunctional past.  As if those ghosts needed resurrection---around here, they still walk about as plain as day, stalking Iraqi lives and imaginations.

Yours from where the Glocks always run on time.

May 16-17, 2005

BORDER PATROL

[Due to security and Internet restrictions, I have been unable to send regular posts from the U.K. military base at Basrah Air Station, where I've been partaking of the Crown's hospitality for the last 10 days.  This entry is actually entitled May 10th, but since it gives something of the flavor of the British experience in southern Iraq, I've decided to post it anyway--and with a minimum of editing to keep the freshness of my observations--despite the fact that it is over a week old.  Most regular posts to come.]

Dear Lisa,

Embed duty!

Checked out of the funduk at noon today and had Sa'ad pilot me over to the Shatt-al-Arab, where the British Consulate, a.k.a., "Basrah Palace" is located.  The plan was to kill a few hours, until the Brits were ready to chopper me over to the Basrah (I'll maintain British spelling here) Airport about 30 kilometers away.  While I was waiting at the BP, however, a convoy of three "Snatches"--lightly armored Land Rovers, what the U.K. generally uses to move its troops around, rather than Humvees--was leaving for a media event on the Iran-Iraq border.  Seems the MNF (as in "Multi-national Force," the preferred term these days for the "Coalition") was turning over a newly-refurbished border fort to Iraqi control and did I want to go?  Sure, why not, throwing on a blue helmet and flak jacket, `s only gonna take an hour or two, right?

Off we go, crowded into the back of the third Snatch--Emile, a civilian media coordinator for the military, and three soldiers, Roger, Joan and Marcia (all names have been changed), while up front is a driver and another Tommie in the shot-gun seat.  The only air circulation comes from a laughably ineffective a/c system and a open portal in the vehicle's roof which is usually filled by a couple of soldiers standing up and scanning the surrounding environment for potential bad guys.  (These Land Rovers evidently proved useful in Northern Ireland, where they allowed the British to patrol streets without appearing too aggressive, as they might in U.S.-style Humvees.  As one English officer explained to me, "We've had decades of experience in this sort of thing.")

We bounce north, along back roads Basrah--palms, rivers, cows, goats--the scenery looking a bit Vietnamish here--grassy fields, irrigation ditches and small villages producing streams of children scampering out to wave at our convoy.  We cross the Shatt, see a tanker plying the gray-green waters, plunge back among date groves and crumbling hovels crowned with satellite dishes...donkeys, feral dog packs, women in abiyas waiting for a bus or taxi cab...on and on...gets hot crammed in the back of a Snatch, jouncing on the pitted roads, the soldiers beginning to sweat from the kilos of equipment--or "kit"--they carry...

On and on.  And on.  It soon becomes apparent that the British are, well...lost.  Several times the convoy pulls over, middle-of-the-roadway conferences, maps pulled out, soldiers pointing in various directions, squinting in the blazing sunlight--Emile and I, civilians, cannot dismount and instead remain roasting in the vehicles, the sun beating fiendishly down through the open portal--

And it's about to get worse.  Evidently re-discovering their bearings, the Brits turn from the plush Shatt scenery and careen east into the desert wastelands toward Iran.  Now it really gets hot, the Snatches churning up dust and sand, obscuring the roadway as we bounce and sway into divots and ruts. On either side, flat, dun-colored earth, with a few scrubby plants, hardly a rock to break the horizon.  Occasionally, we pass a destroyed tank, its barrel erected in a kind of permanent impotence, or rusting tangle of barbed wire, reminders that here some of the most ferocious fighting of the Iran-Iraq War took place.  (Under the earth, of course, lay untold numbers of unexploded land mines, making the terrain impassable to all but the most knowledgeable and fearless smugglers.)

On and on.  Through the windshield of the Snatch, I see the lead two vehicle enveloped in clouds of grit and sand and for a moment almost sense what it was like when the Monty's 8th Army chased--and was chased by--Rommel across the trackless marches of North Africa.  At last, humans--a checkpoint, three soldiers in russet-on-beige desert cammies beside a Swiss-built APC--we wave, pass through, grind further into the wasteland.  Another checkpoint, more soldiers, these irregularly attired, wraparounds, fingerless black gloves, tatooed biceps bulging out of olive green t-shirts, a khaki bandanna tied pirate-style around a shaven pate--Special Ops guys, it seems like, appears we're getting close--and finally, there it is, our destination--the "Zaid Iraq Police Border Station."  "WELL-COME," a banner reads, affixed to a wall.

All this way for..well, it looks rather like the grand opening of a White Castle burgateria in Queens--the qasr (fort) sparkling white with four crenelated towers and a festive string of multi-colored triangular banners and little Iraqi flags.  At the same time, though, there's enough firepower around to support a border incursion into Iran--Iraqi, British, Danish soldiers, Special Ops teams and Aegis private security guys as big as ambulatory refrigerators.  Along with this weapons-bristling crew are uniformed personnel from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who actually refurbished the joint--along with Iraqi contractors and a gaggle of PR flaks shepherding military reporters and camerapeople around.

Qasr Zaid

Unfortunately, due to our GPS-free desert detour, we missed the opening ceremonies--which included, I gather, the ritual sacrifice of a goat, a small puddle of its purplish blood staining the rock-strewn esplanade leading up to the fort...seems its an Iraqi tradition to slaughter a goat, lamb or other suitable barnyard creature on auspicious occasions.

Such as this.  The transfer of border forts to Iraqi control is an important sign of their increasing sovereignty and they seem proud and excited by the event.  I mull this over standing of the roof of the outpost--squint, and you can imagine Beau Geste--looking across a water-filled canal and pee-colored weeds toward an yellowish blockhouse--it's the Iranian equivalent to Qasr Zaid, staring at us across a muddy no-man's land.  "Anybody home over there, you think?" I ask an Army Corps of Engineers photographer.  "I would think so," peering into her lens, snap, snap, "kinda defeats the purpose of a border fort if its empty."  Practical-minded people, these engineers.

Iranian border fort

Downstairs a typical multi-course Iraqi feast is underway, lamb and chicken (fresh goat?), rice and salad, fruit and sweets presided over by a bulky Iraqi general wearing a maroon beret and epaulets with enough stars to comprise an additional zodiac.  Whoof, the smell of the akil sits unwell with my overheated body, so I wander outside to sit in the shade, take some photographs and wonder what, exactly, the men stationed here will do for entertainment, beside shout dirty Arabic limericks at their Iranian counterparts.  Within a few moments, Roger comes to usher me back into the Snatch,and soon, we're churning dust again, thumping and rocking toward Basrah Air Station.

During the return trip, I consider the passengers in our merry little caravan.  The soldiers impress me with their high level of pride, professionalism and morale--in fact, all the Tommies (are they still called that?  Forgot to ask...)  I met during my10-day stay seem "switched on," as Brit parlance has it.  There's a kind of managerial sense to everything--many of the soldiers, especially officers, see the military as a kind of scaffold for their personal goals, whether it be a future in photography, environmental work, language skills and whatnot.  It's the same with the U.S.--along with increasing humanitarian work and nation-building, these vast, powerful killing machines called modern armies double (triple?) as corporate-like career advancement programs for adventurous men and women.

Still, they are soldiers.  Back in Basrah--five hours and a couple of Tommies who succumbed to heat exhaustion later--the Brits have to clamber out of their Snatches each time we stop, the idea being they present a tempting target when halted in traffic.  (Emile and I, however, have to remain in the vehicles, giving me a whole new appreciation of the term "sitting duck.")  This means for Roger, Joan and Marcia its out of the Snatch, back in, out, back in, out...it's hot, they're tired and lugging kilos of kit, nary a gripe or complaint, I try to work the back door a little to help them out but fear I'm only getting in the way...

And indeed, they are soldiers.  A 16-year vet, Joan, for one, has been all around the world--from Iraq to Afghanistan to tsunami relief work in the Indian Ocean.  At one point in our sojourn, I was telling the soldiers about how the religious fundamentalists have seized control of Basrah (restricted to base except on patrol, the average Tommie is rather ignorant of political life in the city)--noting, for example, how they've targeted hairdressers for assassination.  With this, Joan grunts, "I hate hairdressers."  I give her a quizzical look and she adds by way of explanation, "My ex-husband ran off with a hairdresser when I was in Bosnia."

"Usually its the other way `round," Emile replies, expressing my thoughts exactly.  Joan gives an ironic smile, takes a swig of water through the tube connected to a canvas canteen attached to her back and shrugs. 

This is the army, Mrs. Jones...

Yours from the Queen's own gender-neutral armed services.

May 10, 2005

 

A VISIT WITH THE SHEIKH

[I'm typing this from the British military base at Basrah Airport, where the internet access is somewhat restricted.  I will continue to post as opportunities present themselves.]

Dear Lisa,

"You will find my brother-in-law interesting," Layla promises, as her driver Ali turns down a narrow lane of Basra Qadimah, or Old Basrah.  "I have to warn you, though, he is a very talkative sheikh and sometimes says foolish things."

"That's fine," I reply.  "We journalists love talkative people who say foolish things."

Ali winds along the bumpy, barely paved streets of the ancient quarter.  Soon, we're embraced in a seeming maze of sagging, sand-colored structures, each surrounded by high stucco walls and rusting metal gates.  Above, extend the gray-green branches of palm trees, shading enclosed wooden balconies with slatted windows and intricate carvings--the fabled chenoshile style of old Iraq.  Meanwhile, passing by us are donkey carts, women in ankle-length abiyas, nebk trees, barefoot kids, a canal actually filled with water and not trash...

Wearing a white dishdasha and Arab headress, Sheikh Y., a tall, lean, gray-complexioned man with a white moustache and scraggly white beard, stands at the wooden gateway to his mosque.  Disembarking from the car, Layla instructs Ali to wait for her call to pick us up, then turns to greet her brother-in-law, motioning to me at the same time to quickly enter the gate.  As I pass, I nod to the Sheikh, who presses his hand to his chest and murmurs, "You are most well-come."

He leads us across the inner courtyard of the tranquil mosque, its roof brushed by the leaves of an enormous palm, and into his office, a narrow room lit by two high windows.  We sit on a sofa beside the Sheikh's desk, which is cluttered with books and papers; behind him, framed posters of Koranic scripture hang on the wall.

Layla introduces me--a sahafee Amriki, here to write about Basra--and after dispensing with some family business, gestures to me to begin the questions, which she will translate.  I start by asking the Sheikh how he feels being a Sunni cleric in a predominately Shia city.  "Oh no," he replies, fingering his wooden prayer beads, each about a quarter's width in diameter, "Basrah is nearly half Sunni.  Many Sunnis who fled from the city into Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are now returning."

Y. has lived in Basra his entire 52 years, so I ask him to describe the city in the "old days."  His wan and watchful face breaks into a smile.  "It was wonderful. People felt a responsibility for Basra then.  They kept the streets clean, the canals clean, the municipal services were excellent.  Turkish engineers designed a sewage system that poured waste into the Shatt-al-Arab and not in the streets.  W e could never maintain that system," he adds, "because Saddam shot all the Iraqi engineers."

Basra's fortunes began to decline when General Qasem overthrew the Monarchy in 1958, Y. continues.  "The military tone of the Qasem regime introduced a sense of agressiveness and anger into Iraqis, who up until then were calm and tranquil people."  The Ba'athist were even worse.  "They brought us racism, sectariansm, they set Sunnis and Shias, divided families.  Basra itself was administered by people in Baghdad and Tikrit who knew and cared nothing for our needs.  Gradually, the condition of the city declined until it started looking like a cow pasture."

I venture questions about the Iran-Iraq War.  I expect him to tell me how Basra was rocketed, shelled and emptied of population as people fled from the Iranian armies which seemed certain to take the city, but the Sheikh wrenches the conversation in a different direction.  "By starting the Iran-Iraq War," Y. declares, "Saddam Hussan served the interests of America and Israel, and when they were through with him they discarded him just as they used and discarded the Shah."  Oh oh, I think, here we go...

And indeed, a kind of inner floogate opens, and the Sheikh, still speaking in a calm, seemingly rational manner, lets me know the truth about the country I call home.  Yes, Saddam was a U.S. agent; yes, the U.S. manipulated him into invading Iran--and Kuwait, too.  Moreover, today, the U.S. is providing aid to Iran to infiltrate southern Iraq and meddle in Basran affairs.

Within Iraq itself, the U.S. is exploiting tensions between Sunnis and Shias, further separating them into hostile camps.  "It is the old colonial trick, divided and conquer," Y. declares.  "Before 2003, Sunni and Shias lived together in peace.  We never discussed our differences.  During Ashura [the great Shia religious holiday], we all celebrated in harmony."  (Although the Sheikh here contradicts his earlier statement about Saddam dividing the sects, I have to give him some credit:  he did marry Layla's Shia sister.)

"The U.S. is turning Iraqis into angry, nasty people--America seeks to turn us into slaves," he goes on, adding that the nation's newly-elected government is a "failure," set in place by Washington.  "This is why whom you call the 'insurgents' are in truth patriots fighting to free their country."  When I observe that these "patriots" kill far more Iraqi civillians than foreign troops, the Sheikh gives me a placid look and responds, "Sometime in war innocent people must die."  When I press him further about the indiscriminate carnage in and around Baghdad, he admits that some "freedom fighters" might actually be terrorists who do not have Iraq's best interests in mind, but they are--yes, you guessed it--U.S. agents.

"Al-Zarqawi is a fiction, imaginary," asserts the Sheikh.  "A ghost created by America to justify its repressive actions against the Iraqi people."  Trying not to display my increasing irritation, I ask him what kind of goverment he would prefer in Iraq.  "The Monarchy," he answers, revealing something, I think, about the Sunni mindset.  "The Monarchy was best for our country, until America undermined it."

It's getting near the time for late afternoon prayers, and I'm running short of patience anyway.  But I can't resist one last question.  "You blame America for everything--Saddam, the wars, terrorism, even the aggressive attitudes of the Iraqi people.  Don't you think Iraqis must share some responsibility for these problems?"

"No, not at all," the Sheikh says blandly, prayer beads slipping between his thumb and forefinger.  "Everything is America's fault, Iraqis have no responsibility in the matters.  Before America, Iraqis were a quiet, peaceful people."

I close my notebook, Layla and I rise from the sofa.  As he escorts us across the courtyard, Sheikh Y. asks me to make sure I convey his words "to the American people"--oh, don't worry about that, my friend, I think..Bidding fimaanilla to Layla's relative, we step outside the mosque, only to find that Ali the driver is not present.  Layla can't raise him on her cell, either--yipes, we're stranded!  "We must take taxi," Layla concludes.  "Now remember, Steve, keep quiet, and pleae, for once keep your mouth shut."

We walk down a narrow path toward main thoroughfair, the dusky sunlight picking up the sand in the air to filter the entire scene through a kind of russet hue, as if I were walking into a faded 19th century photograph of aging chenoshile  facades, hejab'd women, crumbling stucco houses and tiny shops whose Arabic signs time and the elements have long rendered illegible.  The very inaccessibility of my surroundings adds to the allure--for me, this is something out of Arabian Nights; for Layla its a gauntlet we must pass before getting me to my hotel and safety--and my frustration is unbearable.  I want to wander the lanes of Basrah Qadima, to lose myself in its mysteries, the age-old dream of the Western traveler searching for some insights into the mind and culture of the East.  But there are too many ways to lose oneself in Basra these days, ways I do not want to contemplate--and so, when Layla hails a cab and motions for me to enter, I do not hesitate, keeping silent until we reach our destination.  Some day, some time, when all this "anger and aggression" is past, I will return to Old Basah as a most welcome guest, insha'allah.

May 12, 2005

UMM QASR

Dear Lisa,

It may not be the most exciting detail to note, but the Basra region possesses seven ports (plus a couple of oil terminals), the largest of which is Umm Qasr, located so close to the border that its old and unused airfield lies half in Iraq and half in Kuwait.  Before I left New York, I read that security at the port was so good that nautical insurerers had reduced rates on ships using the harbor, resulting in a boom in traffic.  And so, figured I, why not take a firsthand look-see at some good Iraqi news?

Layla, in her way, has concluded that Sa'ad cheats me, so for the trip she set me up with a different driver, a nice-looking fellow with salt-and-pepper hair named Basim.  (She herself had family obligations and couldn't make the trip.)  Off we go through the southern desert, the day hot, the traffic light, the scenery abyssmal.  We pass the smiling, curled dolphin (a whale, actually, Layla informs me)--a loney greenish statue situated in the middle of a vast empty circle of rubble and dirt, its charm now lost amidst the surrounding desolation.  (I'll post a picture of the statue soon.)  After that, flat scrubby fields, brick and mud blockhouses, women in abiyas balancing bundles atop their heads as they trudge alongside the road, an oil refinery spewing bright orange flames into the sky...

Oil refinery

The plan is to contact a friend of Layla's named Mahmoud, a lifelong resident of Umm Qasr and someone with connections with the port.  Everything goes smoothly.  We hit UQ--like most Iraqi burgs, I arrive before realizing I'm at my destination, the beige brick hovels are so sparse and the dusty streets so empty they hardly qualify as city limits.  We're a little early, so I ask Mahmoud to take me downtown and he shrugs and spreads his hands, palms up.  This is it, amigo.  Main Street, Umm Qasr.

Umm Qasr       

Jesus.  I mean, Jee-zus.  Crumbling houses, muddy streets, broken down cars rotting in pools of motor oil, plastic bags--the scourge of the Iraqi environment--ensnared on coils of concertina wire...this is a booming port town?  As the wind kicks up a mini-sand storm from a vacant lot, we park beside some nebk trees, before a weatherbeaten stucco building that seems to serve as some sort of city council hall.  We call Mahmoud, who pulls up a few minutes later in a Chevvy pickup large enough to tow an aircraft carrier.  Mahmoud is a lean, graying man with a nearly perfectly triangular face.  I hop into his truck and soon we're weaving through rocks and metal fragments and other suicide-sedan-prevention debris to meet--well, I can't tell you whom I met, for reasons that'll soon be clear.

Umm Qasr

We'll call him Ahmed.  He's accompanied by some unarmed guards as we sit in his living room.  With Mahmoud interpreting, I begin the conversation by telling Ahmed that I'd read Umm Qasr is a southern Iraqi success story, at which point he cuts me off.  "Propaganda," he grunts in English.

Turns out, the town of 60,000 people is not doing well at all.  The main difficulty seems to be water--its barely useable even for laundry, let alone drinking.  UQ used to draw water from four underground wells, but the wells, or maybe the pipes servicing them, became corrupted, resulting in a high degree of salinization.  NGOs are doing nothing, "they claim they have set up project and submitted proposals but..." Ahmed shrugged.  The UN built a two kilometer pipeline that provides salty washing water.  The Brits won't do much either, beyond offering some token material and the Iraqis lack the resources to do the job themselves.  The result is that UQ has to truck in most the water they use, adding further costs to their city budget.

Not everything is dire, Ahmed reports.  "We see about a 30 percent improvement rate," he calculates, noting increased salaries and security.  Along with the port, there's a cement factory that employs about 1,000 people, and state workers comprise another 5,000 workers.  There's also some hope on the H20 front, with the Iraqi government set to begin next month building a water pipeline from Nasiriyah.

As for the port, Ahmed begins a long, sad story about criminality and corruption.  Seems dockside UQ is rife with Mafia-like gangs who have infiltrated the workers, hijacking and smuggling all sorts of cargo.  "The material provided by the Oil for Food Program was completely stolen by Ali Baba," he notes.  As for a revenue spill-over into Umm Qasr, "don't know about that," he says.  "Money isn't reaching our city."  Seems the proceeds from facility operations go directly to the Transportation Ministry in Baghdad, from whence a portion is supposed tor return to Basra Province.  But up north, corrupt bureaucrats squeeze the money stream, raking off their percentages.  There's some dark talk about the Transportation Minister being a not-so-secret ally of Moqtada al Sadr and perhaps some of the Basran fluus is finding its way into the Sadrists pockets...

Ahmed feels abandoned by everyone--the central government, the Basrah Governing Council, the Brits and the U.S.  Interestingly, I ask what he thinks of Amrikia, and he offers a reply you hear a lot in Iraq:  "The U.S. did us a great favor by getting rid of Saddam, but in removing one tyrant, you left us with thousands in the form of terrorists."  Should we leave?  Yes, Ahmed says--but not until security is established nationwide.

After that depressing little visit, Mahmoud and I head off to the port itself, where after security checks and explanations about what I'm doing there, we motor through the facility, led by the chief of security ( a friend of Mahmoud's), to drop in on the port manager.  Along the Waterfront, I'm not seeing--I spot only two ships in berths, one being a passenger liner from Dubai--must be a cheap package deal to visit swingin' Basrah--and a lot of containers piled up with no one attending them.  The nattily-dressed, wary, slightly disdainful manager only has about ten minutes to talk and seems uneasy chatting with a sahafee, and in pure bureaucratic CYA-mode spends the time painting a rosy picture of his domain.  Before Saddam's fall, they used to unload maybe two cargo ships a day, he says, now they handle up to five.  The port is operating at near 100% capacity, but it could use more containers, trucks, manpower, etc.  When I ask him for some statistics, however, he can't pony up the goods, telling me to come back in a few days. 

As for crime, the manager flatly states that the port is crime free.  When I suggest that no port in the world is without its smugglers and thieves, he challenges me to find any proof of Ali Baba activity.  Okay, I persist, if everything is so going so well, why is the surrounding town so poor--at which point, the chief of security sitting with us nods energetically, seems he's from UQ and has evidently been wondering the same thing.  The manager shrugs.  "I refer you to Saddam Hussain."  As for money from the port, it is electronically transfered to the Commercial Bank of Baghdad, and then to the Ministry of Transportation; nothing passes through his hands.  Translation:  it ain't his responsibility.  I think of the people of Umm Qasr struggling to keep their wretched little town together and possibly get some water decent enough to do laundry in.  Whose responsibility is it, I wonder--but that's one of the $64,000 Iraqi Dinar questions for the new democratic government.

Time to go.  The security chief (who pulls me aside to let me know that security at the port is 100 percent Iraqi) leads Mahmoud and I on a tour of the facility, and I take few photographs, which I later erase fiddling with the camera (curse these overcomplicated digital gadgets!)...anyway, Mahmoud returns me to a patiently-waiting Basim, and soon we're rocketing north, past the oil refineries and abaya'd woman trudging beside the road, back to the dilapidated building of Basra and its smiling whale, the city's sad and emblematic remembrance of happiers days along the Shatt-al-Arab.

May 8, 2005

DAR-AL-MEDINA/THE MAN FROM SCIRI

Dear Lisa,

Wednesday morning found me back at Basrah Palace, a.k.a. the British Consulate, ironing out some final details with press liaison Deborah about my embed gig with the Queen’s armed forces. Beginning next week, insha’allah, I spend a week a guest of the U.K. military. Patrols, anti-smuggling operations on the Shatt, reconstruction projects in Umm Qasr, should be interesting.

While there, I met an embassy official named Qasem, who took about an hour out of his crowded schedule to give me a comprehensive over-all breakdown of the religious parties vying for control of Basra. Da’wa Islamiyya (all three branches), the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the Badr Brigade, Fidallah, Moqutada al Sadr, Yacoubi, Mohammad Bakr, Ayatollah Hakim, names, dates, organizations, on and on. Fortunately, because I’ve studied this stuff, I could keep up on the tutorial, which helped me immensely later on that afternoon.

Next to show up whilst I was sitting on the BP verandah was Hassan—an old Iraqi friend--piloting a golfcart in which sat Giuliana Daoud Yussef. Giuliana is an English professor at Basra University and the editor of Al Ahkbaar newspaper--in addition to being a woman, an Assyrian and a Christian to boot. (Her husband, interestingly enough, is Sunni Muslim.) I met Giuliana last year and interviewed her at length at the Canary Restaurant in downtown Basra--back when I could wander about the city and I wasn’t cooped up in a hotel. Through Hassan, we had agreed to meet at the Consulate and together we lunched in Basrah Palace’s canteen and afterwards, joined by Hassan, sat on the verandah again, drank coffee and talked.

Giuliana is 48, Hassan is in his 20s, but both remember vividly the Iran-Iraq War when Iran nearly took Basra. They described unforgettable scenes--hearing the thud of not-so-distant artillery, watching Iranian jets roar over the city, seeing paratroopers leap out of planes, witnessing the wounded stream back from the front, fearing that the poison gas used in the trenches would sweep over their neighborhoods--and at night, seeing distant flash of Iranian missiles launched at the city, and waiting for the projectiles to land, Allah knew where. Of course that wasn’t the only fighting they witnessed--there was the 1990 Gulf War, the 1991 Shiite uprising and the 2003 Coaltion invasion. As a British helicopter flew low along the Shatt-al-Arab, I thought of what Ali, Hassan’s young friend who also works at the Consulate, said to me on Tuesday: “I have never known a time of peace.”

What followed about an hour later was one of the most interesting encounters I’ve had yet in Basra--but one that needs a little explaining. About three weeks ago, I e-mailed SCIRI’S Washington D.C. office. They, in turn, put me in touch with the organization’s Basra branch, which set up a meeting between me and a SCIRI rep named Alaa Turej. And sure enough, two SCIRI men were waiting for me when Sa'ad took me back to the hotel. Though they seemed nice enough, and offered to drive me over to the meeting place, I opted to ride with Sa’ad as he followed their car. I recognized that SCIRI’s was a respectable political party uninterested in molesting foreigners, but I just felt like taking precautions. I wasn’t the only one: as we drove through a sky progressively clotting with ashen-white sand, Sa’ad took down the SCIRI car's license plate. “In case trouble,” he grunted, a little ominously.

We drove way out on the outskirts of Basra, where buildings become sparse, giving way to wide fields dotted with irregular, dilapitated stucco, brick and concrete structures.  Just when we seemed we were headed back to Kuwait, we turned onto a short gravel road, that led to through a narrow gate where a free-standing, box-like structure made of gray cement rose up out of a vacant lot.  Within a second gate and sitting on the steps of this structure were a number of young men, most of them holding AK-47s. Everyone seemed watchful, but relaxed, but I couldn’t help feeling a little tense as Sa’ad pulled away leaving me in the midst of armed members of SCIRI’s private militia, the Badr Brigrade.

One of the men who met me at the hotel--Alaa's brother, in fact--led me into the building, and I felt even more uneasy when the door closed behind me. Up a flight of stairs, and, almost magically, and typically Arabian, the interior opened up to a clean, comfortable dwelling, with a sort of living room adorned with an enormous wide-screen TV, golden bordello-style curtains and a glittering fake-crystal chandeliers. I sank into a plush sofa, and began admiring a picture of a handsome Iraqi man meeting a figure I recognized as Ayatollah Hakim, one of the founders of SCIRI who was killed in a massive car bombing in Najaf in August, 2003.

While I was looking at the picture, in walks Alaa Turej, who turns out to be the good looking man in the photo. Dark, bearded, with gentle eyes and a pleasant, disarming smile, he sits, and, to my surprise, I discover he speaks perfect English. Turej, in fact, is SCIRI’S Canadian representative, when he’s not living in his hometown of Basra. Tea is brought in, and we plunge into a two hour conversation about Islam, SCIRI, Iraq’s future, the condition of Basra and the role of the United States. (Qasem’s earlier dissertation on the religious parties came in mighty hand at this point.) Again, one of those fantastic conversations that happen so regularly here. 

The upshot of our discussion is this: SCIRI believes that Iraq should be an Islamic state, modeled after Iran. If the Iraqi people don’t want an Islamic state modeled after Iran--and most say they don’t--SCIRI is willing to bend on its principles, as long as certain “red lines” aren’t crossed. These lines include an insistence that Islam be the official state religion and a (as opposed to the) source of legislation. Women should--but musn't be forced to--wear hejab and shari’a need not be interpreted in a drastic, draconian manner that circumscribes human rights. SCIRI, in fact, believes that Islam, human rights, democracy and a free market system can all work together to improve Iraq. And, of course, being a political party in a competitive democratic field, they feel that they are the best politcal embodiment of the culture, hopes and aspirations of the Iraqi people.

Alaa spoke in the calm, measured tones of a media person used to fielding reporters’ questions. The only time he seemed to grew agitated was on the topic of the Wahabbis, and their hatred for Shiites. “We must educate our children in proper Islam to counteract Wahabbi propaganda,” he said. ”The Baathsts are not dangerous for us,” he continued. “As an idea, Iraqis will not accept Baathism.” He paused for a moment. “What we are worried about that Iraqis--especially those who are poor and unemployed--might support Wahhabism.”

The next day, I told Layla about my meeting with SCIRI and she just shook her head and mouthed the word “lies.” To her, SCIRI is a stalking horse for Tehran, which intends to separate southern Iraq from the rest of the country and merge with it with Iran. Layla’s not the only Iraqi who thinks this way and believes SCIRI is too close to Iran: the organization did fairly well on the national election scene, but bombed--whoop, not the best choice of words--in local elections, where Moqtada al-Sadr and the affiliated Fadillah Party won a lion’s share of the seats on Basra Province’s Governing Council. (Alaa explains SCIRI's poor showing on the fact that the organization "concentrated its efforts on the national elections.)  One reason why once-liberal Basra is slipping under the control of religious fundamentalists

Because neither SCIRI nor any other religious parties has actually been tested in the give-and-take, messy compromises of democratic leadership, it’s impossible to tell how fundamentalist, or otherwise, they are, or will be once obtaining power. And to be sure, I found Turej a little too moderate and reasonable to be entirely convincing (nothing in Iraq is moderate or reasonable), but he was a gracious man nonetheless, and I was glad to make his acquaintance, and hope to continue our conversation.

”We are thankful that the United States rid us of Saddam,” he told me as I closed my notebook and rose from the sofa . Is it time for the Coalition troops to leave? I asked. “No, not yet,” Alaa replied. “Not until the security situation improves. SCIRI believes that the multi-national force is helping Iraq right now.”

Sa’ad was waiting for me by the gate. Walking down the stairs, past the lounging, well-armed guards, I turned to wave to Alaa, who pressed his hand against his chest and nodded. Then I climbed into the SUV for the long drive home.

May 4, 2005

IN-SECURITIES

[Note: I'm adapting e-mails sent to my wife for these blogging ventures. For security purposes, I have changed the names of people and some destinations. I also beg the readers' patience on any factual errors I may make, and literary lapses and shortcomings they may detect--this is being written on the fly, where impressions and instant analysis comes first, fact checking and editing second. (Corrections are encouraged, of course.)]

May 3, 2005

Dear Lisa,

Well, I figured the Brits would try to scare the shit out of me, and I was right.  But more about that in a minute...

Woke up this morning to find Al-Basrah in the embrace of a dust storm, the sky a lowering mass of reddish-orange grit and sand.  Nothing like the tsunami I witnessed strike Karbala last year (or those incredible photos of a dust tidal-wave bouncing on the web recently), but enough to remind me that just beyond the circle of Basra's delapidated brick buildings lies an endless stretch of desert, and more desert...

Dust storm

Ali rolled up in an SUV at nine.  Driving the vehicle was not Hassan but Ali's cousin Hashim, seems Hassan bailed out on the day's agenda because of my intention to drop into the British Consulate--Hassan was afraid someone would spot him, mark him and kill him.  Ali doesn't care.  Ali, in fact, has a kind of reckless, or brave insha'allah attitude you often find among Iraqis.  Reinforced, in his case, by his experiences revolting against Saddam in the early 90s.  He was caught by Ba'athist goons, who plunged his arm into boiling water, leaving it scarred and disfigured.  He hates Ba'athists and terrorists and al-Qaeda.  A tough guy, Ali.

Off to the health clinic for my blood test.  Walking up to the clinic, Ali says, "No speak here, understand?"  Yes, yes, Amriki has to keep his mouth shut.  Needle in the arm, blood drawn, we're out again in a half hour, then back to the funduk.  Twenty bucks for the privilege of transportation--ten for bodyguard Ali, ten for driver Sa'ad.  What can I do?  They've got me over a barrel.

But at the hotel, I find myself not feeling too well and had to lay down for more sleep.  Nothing serious, I just think yesterday's blast of Mesopotamian sun and heat took me by surprise.  At 11:45, Ali and Sa'ad pull up again to ferry me to the British Consulate.  There I meet Deborah, a young, pert, cute press liasion, who, despite her tender years already has a passport-full of travels throught the Middle East, speaks fluent (if classical) Arabic and obviously loves the region and its culture.  Over lunch, we talk about the situation in Basrah.  "You realize, of course," she says to me, "that I'm authorized only to say to you that conditions here are dangerous and that only people with essential reasons to travel to Iraq should be here."  I took that to mean that from the Brit point of view, freelancing journalism is not particularly "essential"  and that, in their eyes, I'm a nuisance--someone who could get into trouble and creates headaches for everyone concerned.

We move out to the verandah (the Consulate is located in one of Saddam's old prez palaces--I've actually been there before, when it was CPA HO) to drink coffee and talk some more, whereupon we're joined by a tall, ruddy-faced, sandy-haired man named Mark whom Deborah introduced as a "security expert."  His advice to me was: go home.  Terrorists, criminals and opportunists of all stripes are eager to get their hands on foreigners.  If I do stay--and here he outlined a huge security plan, at the end of which, my heart was sinking.  Jeez, what am I doing here?

On the other hand, as everyone will admit, Basrah seems peaceful.  But its a fragile peace, I'm told again and again, liable to break apart at any moment.  There no predicting the future.  On the way home from my sobering talk with the Brits, ask Ali what he thinks.  "No problem, Mr. Steve--you stay with driver and another Iraqi man, no problem."  Hmmm, in other words, I'm safe with him--at $20 a trip.  I ask the hotel manager, and he's adamant that nothing will happen in the hotel.  When I tell him about my discussion with Deborah and Mark, he says, "The British don't want any journalists here in Basra because they are killing Iraqi civillians and don't want anyone to write about this."  Oh.

Layla shows up about 4:30, and we set off with her driver on another tour of the city.  I ask her about safety.  "No one is safe in Basra," she says.  Great.  Then she asks me about my "agenda."  She's a little disconcerted--as I am, too--about my relative disorganization--the logistical problems of getting here and getting settled were more than I'd anticipated--and when I tell her I'll have to be flexible and spontaneous about things, she shakes her head.  Layla has a woman's keen sense of practicality, tidiness and order, so she pulls out her notebook, cell phone and phone number contact sheet and starts quoting from the book proposal I sent her.  "You want your book to deal with issues of health, women, the wars--" ticking off people I should contact, prompting me to starting developing ideas for interviews.  Snap to it, soldier..

Back in the hotel lobby, I get distracted by an issue involving my phone (phones are a huge mooshkelay--problem--here, more on that later), and when I turn back to the desk, I see Layla grilling the hotel manager about safety and security.  "It is okay here," she concludes.  "But Steve, no one can be sure.  Anything could change in a moment.  You could be here for three months and nothing happens, and then on the day before you go home..."

I throw up my hands.  "Okay, okay, I get the idea."

Layla gave me one of her ironic, melancholy smiles that can break your heart.  "Yes, now you know," she says  "This is what we have lived through for years."

Like I say, it can break your heart.

Blogging from Iraq

Steven is blogging from Basra. The length of his stay there and the frequency of his posts will depend on the security situation. Please check back regularly or use the newly-enabled syndication feature at the top of the menu on the right.

ALONG THE SHATT-AL-ARAB

May 2, 2005

[Note: I'm adapting e-mails sent to my wife for these blogging ventures. For security purposes, I have changed the names of people and some destinations. I also beg the readers' patience on any factual errors I may make, and literary lapses and shortcomings they may detect--this is being written on the fly, where impressions and instant analysis comes first, fact checking and editing second. (Corrections are encouraged, of course.)]

Dear Lisa,

Greetings from the ____ Hotel in downtown Basra. It's about 10 pm Mesopotamian time, I'm sitting in bed, banging this out on the laptop, watching some silly Jim Belushi direct-to-video on Dubai's [?] Channel 2, while just across the courtyard outside my window chugs the funduk (hotel) generator, compensating for the city's power grid, which seems to go down about every three hours of so. As for getting here: may your enemies be stuck in visa hell. I'd been warned that it was a sticky wicket attempting to enter Iraq via Kuwait, but I figured given the short distance to Basra, it was worth a try. Well, well. To make a long story short, to my decidedly unpleasant surprise, I discovered on April 28th that my transit visa--so easily obtained at the Kuwaiti airport--did not allow me to "transit" the country into Iraq. Panic, visions of an ignominious flight back to New York, of embarrassed explanations to magazine editors...

Fortunately, my purest chance in Kuwait I fell under the efficacious wing of Zainab Suwaij, executive director of the American Islamic Congress, who led me to an wonderful Kuwaiti organization called the "Humanitarian Operations Center." The HOC, as it's called, is a government-financed organization that coordinates Iraqi relief efforts originating from Kuwait. Here, a genial, relaxed, slightly roguish McHale's Navy-like crew--among them Colonel Kazem M. Mahassain, his son Mohammad, Subhi Alhadhoud, Mohammad al-Saffar and several others whose names I never got--showed immense patience dealing helping a confused sahafee (journalist) exit their tiny country, a process that required me to fly to Bahrain, cool my heels for a day or two, then return to Kuwait under a "multi-entrance" visa and yes, yes, all very tedious, but a word to wise who want to follow in my footsteps. I repeat, may your enemies be trapped in the snares of the improper forms, the missing signature, the mis-printed date, the bureaucratic stamp that never falls...

Happy ending. At 8:15 a.m. today, Mr. Farrid--the driver from the Al Baghli Transportation Company--picks me up at the Oasis Hotel. A portly, genial guy, he makes short work of the Kuwait City traffic and soon we're roaring across the desert floor in an SUV, Egyptian music blasting from the cassette player, the day hot, dry and cloudless, whooshing past signs reading "DISCOVER ISLAM, THE WORLD'S FASTEST GROWING RELIGION WWW.SULTAN.COM" and "MUTA'ALA RANCH GOD BLESS U.S. TROOPS" and animal flocks grazing in the scrubby fields bordering the highway--sheep, goats, and camels--while in the distance towers of brilliant orange oil fires swirl and leap like mystic apparitions on the desert floor, even as they spew torrents of thick black smoke. At Abdaly, we turn left toward Basra, the intersection supervised by US troops, one giant soldier standing in front of a humvee like a khaki-colored terminator. Within moments, we're in the town of Safwan, basically a border area where the streams of traffic heading into and out of Iraq converge, forming long lines of cars and lorries waiting for baggage and cargo checks, passport and visa control points, the constant bang-bang of stamps smacking documents. The paperwork goes without a hitch--however, I'm told, to my surprise, that I must have an HIV test within four days of arriving in Iraq, a pro forma requirement for all visitors. But still, with all that, the document nightmare is over.

Mr. Farrid lacks the proper paperwork to enter Iraq, so he hands me off to Ali, acting evidently as my unarmed "bodyguard," since he came accompanied by Hussan, the actual sayyiq (driver). Whereas Farrid was a round and slightly epicene Egyptian, Ali and Hussan are pure Iraqi in their way--dark, edgy, dressed in soiled disdashas, Ali with startling icy-gray eyes, jittery, talkative. After the polite lethargy of Kuwait and Bahrain, this comes as kind of a shock, its like Iraqis exist on nerves and adrenaline and can we not understand why?

Iraqi border

We pile into a 1980 Chevy Caprice, and within minutes we've crossed into the Land Between the Rivers, bouncing along at 80 mph listening to the inevitable Arab music, flashing past palms and goats and idle construction equipment, talking in broken English-Arabic about Iraq, Shi'ism, Sistani, Khomeini--one of those conversations that university professors and think tank analysts would give anything to hear--me sweating uncomfortably because, of course, the back windows will not roll down and the car has no a-c.

A statue of a smiling dolphin arched in an acrobatic leap--the once-charming monument shattered, however, by age, warfare and neglect, a mangy dog circling within the ambit of its shadow--tells me I'm on the edge of my destination. We pass the police check point where, just a few days ago, a car bomb detonated, killing a policeman and several passersby. Soon, it's half-decomposed mud and brick structures, spindly wood support slats sticking out of the side and tops, streets filled with garbage and standing pools of sewage, small shops and greenish brown palm trees. Al-Basrah, port of call of Sindbad the Sailor and my home for however my money, stamina and personal safety holds out...

Soon after Ali and Hassan dropped me off at my hotel, the desk clerk tells me I have a telephone call. "A Madam Layla is on the phone." [Note: readers of In the Red Zone will know who this is; for security and personal issues, I have promised to disguise her identity even further.] Hearing her voice was nice after the previous week of visa snafus, pointless air flights and aimless wandering in hotel lobbies waiting for e-mails. We made arrangements to meet when she got off work at 4, and I went up to my small, spartan room that overlooks the hotel courtyard, and went to sleep.

Later that afternoon, Ali and Hassan returned, and for two hours they toured me around Basra. My idea is to get to get as clear an idea of the physical condition of the city, which, I must say, hadn't changed as much since I was here in the winter of 2004. One delight, however: the Shatt-al-Arab, flowing Arabian Gulf-wards, trawlers, tourist boats, tugs and a decrepit navy ship berthed along its shore, palms lining the eastern bank, egrets skimming the surface of its bottle-green waters.

Shatt-al-Arab

One change is significant, and needs mentioning: when I was here last, Shia religious imagery was everywhere--pictures of Imam's Ali and Hussain, along with the ubiquitous posters of Moqtada al-Sadr cradling his father, slain by Saddam Hussain, in addition to black Shia banners exhorting people to observe the faith, pray to Allah and make sure their women wore hejab. Now, that sort of Shia proselytizing is conspicuously absent--even Moqtada's posters are largely gone. Instead, one sees colorful billboards advertising the happy future of the new Iraqi state. What this change of imagery means, how significant it is, I will explore in the coming days and weeks.

Ali and Hassan dropped me off at the funduk, and I just had time enough to clean up before Layla arrived. She looked just as charming as I remembered--buknuk, scarf and all--which relieved me, for I feared the nearly inconceivable stresses of her life had affected her physical health. But no, she was the same--coquettish, whip-smart, angry, cynical, melancholy, hopeful--yet feeling increasingly trapped in the social madhouse of Iraqi social, tribal and religious norms. We settled in the hotel restaurant to catch up.  Much of our conversation was personal matters about her life--I wish multiculturalist apologists for misogynistic, patriarchal social customs could hear Layla talk about the intolerable conditions she must endure, many aspects of which I have written about, and will allude to again.  We also discussed Iraqi politics and the current situation in Basra.

"In Basra, conditions are different than up north," she told me. "In Baghdad, it is all explosions, insurgents, terrorists. Here, life is in flux, the very fabric of our existence is changing. We see it happening all around us, but we don't know what direction it will take. Everything is so amorphous, uncertain and unpredictable."

Which is why I'm here, I told her. And hopefully can stay to report on some of these issues. More--insha'allah-- to come.