January/February 2004

NOTE:
If these reports are posted elsewhere, please include Ben's main email address (sarin@devo.com).
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Wed, 28 Jan 2004
Iraq report 1 - All a matter of timing...

The drive from Amman to Baghdad, as before, was long and arduous. Everything was as I remembered the trip just one year before until we passed through Jordanian customs and approached the Iraqi border. There the charming statue I found incredibly amusing last year of Saddam riding a horse with missiles mounted on its side, had been mostly torn town. Adjacent to it across the road still stood a somewhat more diminutive depiction of Saddam as the reincarnation of Hammurabi, a tradition he quite fancied.
The real shock came at the entry gate. I had heard since the previous summer that there was absolutely no border control on the Iraqi side. We encountered several men in plain dark clothing with kuffiahs wrapped around their heads to keep off the drizzling rain. Several approached our taxi, yelling at our driver Khalid. They wanted bribes. Khalid yelled back and drove on. The unarmed "guards" were powerless to stop us. Khalid turned to myself and my travel companion, Anderson Schnieder, and laughed, "Finished!" That was the Iraqi border control. No American soldiers, no passport checks, no weapons, no legitimate guards. Its a good thing no one found our cache of heavy weapons and 30 Saddam Feddayeen fighters stashed in the trunk.

The real danger in Iraq is the highway from the border to Baghdad. Twice we came within inches from death ourselves.
Initially I was terrified by stories of taxis being stopped at makeshift roadblocks and robbed by bandits. We had left Amman at midnight, so as to be in Iraq during daylight hours and another car with friends of Khalid was travelling with us for added protection.
Instead, Khalid was our major threat. On two seperate occassions while speeding down the flat highway at 200 km/h he fell asleep. The first time he woke up just moments in time to veer away from the median. The second time I had to grab the wheel as I saw he was barrelling into a slow moving truck just ahead of us. Indeed, a cursory glance at any section of the 500 km stretch of highway shows dozens of blown tires and twisted guard rails from previous accidents.

We finally reached Ar-Ramadi, the western end of the so-called "Sunni Triangle" and one of the major hubs of resistance against the Americans. Khalid's friends in the other car lived there and we joined to help transport various goods they had bought to trade from Jordan. We entered the city passing by the Al-Ahram base now used by the Americans. For my first sighting of an American soldier, situated in a tall guard tower, I rolled down the car window and snapped some shots. Once he saw me, the soldier sprang to life and aimed his M-60 at me. I suddenly realized how jumpy they were here and how foolish my move was. Khalid laughed about it for some time.
In the other car was, Bilal Ashreef, a 22-year old son of a local tribal sheik and being the only one to speak English among his family, he quickly warmed to us. He was studying law at Saddam University, but now had taken to bringing in goods from Jordan with his uncle for sale. He said of his contentious city, "Its okay here, except for the bombing." After some Pepsi and cake, Anderson, Khalid and I set out for Baghdad.
As we were getting into the car, a few bursts of automatic weapons broke out in the distance. No one noticed at all. Anderson turned to me and laughed. "That's the problem here - no one cares anymore."

As we left Ar-Ramadi towards Baghdad, we hit journalist paydirt. As we entered the town of Khaldiyah, I looked at the raised medium seperating the highway. I kept looking for spots where the resistance may have planted Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in the past. When I looked up ahead though, there was a plume of black smoke and several local ambulances waiting. Anderson and I urged Khalid to let us to get out and investigate on foot as a crowd quickly gathered.
As we passed through the local gawkers, we came upon a large armored US convoy guarding the site of a large explosion. Something in the distance was burning furiously, but it was hard to make it out. An Abrahms tank stood guard facing the towns folk and a Bradley APC watched its flank.
Anderson and I cautiously approached, yelling if it was okay to approach. The two soldiers on the tank at first paid us no notice. Then the barrel of the massive machine swung into our direction. Woah. We stopped and called out again. This time the two soldiers on the tank reached down, one grabbing an M-16 and the other a .45 pistol. Well, thats a hell of a welcome, I thought. They then dismounted and approached us. They were not happy to see us. "Don't take any video!" a captain quickly barked at me as they came near. Anderson and I identified ourselves with our press credentials. Anderson was a Brazilian photographer, working freelance. Both of us held one legitimate and one fake press pass of sorts. I had long heard that press passes weren't necessary, an American passport being enough, but these guys were a little more serious. "Come over to the tank, it'll be safer there."
At this moment, we could see US soldiers running in formation across the road about 300m ahead and breaking into houses. A dull thud must have blown off a door, as soon soldiers emerged hauling any Iraqi men found in the neighborhood. Its their typical practice to round up all adult males within a few blocks of attacks on US convoys.
The captain of the tank got a radio call to collect our information. "Get their ID numbers and who they are working for," he yelled out to a Pvt. Young who was standing with us. Pvt. Young obliged and examined our press credentials. He seemed a little leery of a Brazilian and a man from Wisconsin there as photographers.
"They sent you all the way over here just to take some photos?" he grilled me. Well, I explained, we have our assignments, but we just stumbed on this scene on our way to Baghdad. We couldn't not stop, you know. We're the press - we're vultures! My humor didn't amuse him.
I began to understand their hostility towards us though. We were incredibly lucky to see this scene, since usually the press doesn't find out until hours after an incident.
A local Iraqi stringer for Reuters ran up. He was given the short shrift and looked on with suspicion immediately. Anderson and I both noted that it was incredibly odd how the American soldiers treated minor Western freelancers compared to someone working for Reuters who happened to be local. The Americans were rather rude to the man and became more concilliatory to us.
We continued to take photos, although not much was happening after some half dozen Iraqi men had been detained on the side of the road. The Americans decided to widen their perimeter, and a squad of soldiers and MP's from the 82nd Airborne advanced towards us, yelling for us to move back. Just as we began to move away, an MP was yelling at us to approach. They wanted our information too. "The Colonel wants to know your names and who you work for!" a sergent yelled as he appraoched. All they seem to do is yell. I asked if there had been any casualties. "Im not at liberty to say!" was the reply.
Indeed, the Colonel puffed past with his M-4 carbine close to his chest. He looked at me and without pausing screamed "And don't you be taking pictures of my tanks! Got it?!" I gave a feeble, okay. A crash course on Army press guidelines, I guessed.
A female Army photographer then came up to us - the only soldier who didn't yell. "How did you guys get here so fast?" I guess we really had been lucky. She then told us who to speak to at the press liason office to get an explanation of the incident. Otherwise we were not to ask any questions of soldiers.
The MP Sgt. passed by and added, "You guys from America are generally okay. Its just those guys from Al-Jazeera that we have to watch out for. They'll find a way to turn this into propaganda against us."

We moved back to where the locals had gathered. The scene wasn't as frantic as before, with troops milling about and the Abrahms and Bradley guarding a row of Humvees as black smoke continued to burn in the distance. One of the younger locals had shouted that two helicopters had gone down and killed five soldiers. He gave a big thumbs up with a smile. I wound up standing next to this person as I was shooting, and he continued to try to talk to me.
He called the soldiers a certain insult I couldnt understand in Arabic. His English was worse than my Arabic however, but I finally understood him to say that American people were his friends, but that he hated the soldiers. I said I understood. He then got a little more cryptic. "Saddam is our friend, and is friend of Americans." I wasn't quite following, especially when he went into more in Arabic, but I just nodded and claimed to understand. It was just easier that way.
I wasn't so interested in photographs of the soldiers in action though. Although Anderson and I had the first photos of what proved to be another fatal attack on a US convoy, it wasn't as if we were about to send them off to some press office. Instead, I maneuvered to get photos of Iraqi children staring at the US soldiers. The contrast was quite stunning and said a lot more than I could.

It turned out that three US paratroopers were killed in the attack, and as per usual, the Americans responded with random gunfire which killed a few civilians.

We eventually moved on, returning to the cab and our long journey to Baghdad. To circumvent the now blocked road, we had to go around the city and passed by an old Iraqi airfield. Dozens of pillboxes and bunkers were scattered around the dried grassy hills. The year before, US artillery approaching the town had blown apart the large facility and ruins were all over along the dirt path we took back to the highway.
As we sped through Fallujah, another major center of resistance, we came upon yet another traffic jam at the edge of the city. There had been another bombing earlier, and Iraqi police and a few Humvees were just pulling out. If we accidentally came upon two of these in just an hour, I wondered how many were going unreported.

Finally, we entered Baghdad. It was peculiar passing by so many landmarks and seeing the differences. Most shocking was perhaps the various buildings I had recognized from the year before that I had known to be apartment and residential buildings. Several had been gutted by fire, blasted by tank shells, or simply reduced to rubble. US Humvees stood guard infront of gas stations and small government facilities. The entire hotel area where I stayed the year before around the Al-Fanar was a city of tall concrete slabs and razor wire. I finally settled in to the latest place for independent journalists to hang out, Aghadir Hotel, further down Sa'adoon street and away from the targetted hotels and American bases. I found a few other like-minded people working here independently and took a room.

Almost the instant the sky grew dark, rifle and pistol fire broke out fairly close by. It was the only incident that night, but it was a stark reminder of the change in Iraq now.
No one goes out after 9pm. By 11pm the city is a ghost town, even though there is no more curfew. Take taxis everywhere you can.

I woke up this morning at 6:45 am to the concussion of an explosion off my balcony windows. The Al-Shaheen Hotel down the road had been bombed with three dead as of the latest reports.

Its good to be back!

Thu, 29 Jan 2004
Iraq journal 2 - The two extremes

"We will, We will rock you!" The little American soldier doll, clutching a small US flag jerked back and forth on its stand.
"We will, we will, rock you!"
I looked over at Sami with a raised eyebrow. He laughed loudly. I looked at the house where the doll was placed in front of. Every pane of glass was shattered. The metal frames of each window bent inward and had been dislodged. Tattered curtains lay contorted in piles on the porch. An air conditioner lay on the ground with its vents mangled. The blast had done serious damage to the home, but the soldier doll was still able to dance to Queen.

At around 6:45am on Wednesday morning I was startled by a sudden rattling of my balcony windows. I could tell it was an explosion, but when I looked out the window, I could see no smoke from my limited vantage. It wasn't until after breakfast that I finally decided to investiage what was my introduction to terrorism in urban Baghdad.
The Ash-Shaheen Hotel had been bombed, although it wasn't quite clear what the target was. At the end of the Karada neighborhood, the hotel was across the street from an American military base on one side, and a small Iraqi police station on the other. The bomb had gone off near the middle of the road, gutting the hotel almost completely and killing at least four.

When I approached the hotel a few hours after the attack, I was quickly called over to a building about a block ahead. A well dressed Iraqi with a British accent shuffled over to me and asked if I could help him. His name was Ali, and he was an electrical contractor who had recently returned from some twenty years of exile in the UK to run a business. His new offices had been shattered by the power of the blast. "Had it happened at 8am, me and my associates would not be alive," he assured me as he showed his office where glass shards had blown every which way across the room.
Ali wanted me to photograph his building "for our records" and I happily obliged. The offices were still mostly under construction, so I wound up with a relatively uninteresting tour of a three story building full of nothing but empty desks and piles of shattered glass. I was impressed by the fact that the bomb had knocked out basically every single window of a building over 200m away from the bomb and behind two other buildings.
"We have no insurance. There is none here," Ali explained. "The Americans won't help, but maybe when there is a new government we can ask them." He led me outside and surveyed the scene. Several US Humvees and a Bradley were blocking traffic but preparing to return to their base.
"You know, this is the responsibility of the Americans. As the occupying force, they have an obligation to secure us." As I was about to leave, one of his workers offered me a cup of coffee. He then offered the standard view of the situation. "Who does this? They are not Iraqis, I assure you. The Sunni are fighting because they are afraid to lose power. They had it good under Saddam and now they are angry."

I proceeded on to the bomb site. Naturally it was crawling with journalists and numerous Iraqi security guards. The explosion had torn apart street signs, ripping the metal into pieces. Every room I could peer into in the three-story hotel seemed as if it had been knocked asunder. Fires had blackened the front door and a couple floors up. Trees had been felled and an acrid odor permeated the site.
The vehicle that had delivered the bomb was nothing but fragments. Part of the engine lay in the driveway. Scraps of tires lay across the street. One piece of a metal frame hung from a power line 30m away. The other vehicles nearby were smashed by the concussion of the explosion and spun. Across the road a store selling fire extinguishing equipment had a wall blown in.
Really, that was all there was for me to see, and I could contribute nothing to the situation. The security guards had already cordoned off the parking lot and street, leaving a dozen or so photographers to switch to their zoom lenses. I found the Iraqi guards most curious. Only a few wore actual uniforms. Most looked as if it was laundry day when they went out with their Kalishnakov rifles. One wore a brown leather jacket and jeans, with his rifle slung across the back. Another older gentleman sported the traditional full-body shirt galabeyya and a kuffiyah wrapped around his head, holding his AKM by the stock. Most amusing however was a guard who wore a button-down sweater and barked at journalists to stay back as he clutched his rifle to his chest, like an Arabic Mr. Rodgers gone bad. I had a very strong urge to tell him that despite the machine gun, no one will take you seriously in a cardigan.

I maneuvered around the block, to see the other vantage point across from where I was before. A boy with an elaborately decorated bicycle, including bubble-wrap around the frame, kept interrupting me to show off his prized posession. A few American Army investigators had moved onto the scene to begin the investigation, while all along the neighborhood streets, residents piled broken glass on to the curb for trash collection.

While leaving I stopped by the home of Khalid and Hanna, an older couple living in a rather lavish upper class home. Almost next door to the hotel, it had suffered more damage than any other residence, but thankfully neither of the pair was hurt. Hanna showed me around the home where almost anything not bolted to the ground had been badly shaken and tossed about. It was outside of her shattered kitchen where I found the US soldier doll on their porch.

Later that day I ventured through the concrete and sandbag maze that is the entrance to the old Baghdad Convention Center and famed Al-Rasheed Hotel. Both buildings are now used for press and ministerial meetings by the CPA government. Any American can pass through, subject to no less than three full searches at different intervals. After much searching through the convention center, I found the Coalition Press Information Center where I asked to sign up as an embedded journalist.
“Where would you like to go?” the chipper female officer at the desk asked. It felt like I was signing up for a cruise to the Caribbean island of my choice. I didn’t expect that. I said the first thing that came to mind. I’d like to go with the 4th Infantry. Tikrit, I told her. “The 4ID? Let me go check.”
Another female officer came back and said that the 4ID (ah, Army lingo) was in transition right now, so I’d have to go somewhere else. I opted for Ar-Ramadi or Falluja, and was given email contacts to make my rather informal request. “Tell them what you’d like to do, and they’ll be able to help you faster.”
Wow.

On the way back to the hotel, about two miles down Sa’adoon St., I decided to walk from Tahrir Square and wander through some of the markets. Earlier in the day I had reservations about doing just this, constantly thinking of a random shooting of a Westerner. But I eventually reasoned that if people wouldn’t expect to find a Westerner wandering through the markets, than they won’t be waiting to attack one.
It proved to be a great short trip, reaffirming my appreciation for the Iraqi people. I found myself incredibly happy just perusing stalls and saying hello to people.
At one point two US Kiowa attack helicopters sped by, just over the rooftops. As this is pretty common here, no one paid it much mind. But then they came back again and again. At one point, one of them banked almost vertically and spun back, basically hot-dogging around for fun. I filmed some of it with my old Super8 film camera while young men near by asked me what the pilots were doing. The only Arabic term I could think of was ‘they’re crazy’. I forgot that in my notebook, I also have the word for ‘drunk’, which may have been more apt.

Closer to my hotel, I decided to just leave my camera out around my neck. Sure enough, it meant that every child I saw wanted his or her picture taken. I found three children playing with a tricycle who practically wouldn’t let me leave after I took some 75 photos of them. This was the Iraq I knew from last year (except I couldn’t openly photograph on the streets then). Its an odd sensation, the intensity of death and terror on one hand, and then the smiles of giggling children just hours later.

Post-script to last report: Friends of mine went back to Khaldiyah the day after I saw the roadside bombing. While the US press reported one Iraqi killed by the bomb and another shot by persons unknown, the reality is likely much different. All major media here basically reports what the US Army states. And it is taken verbatim as the final word. Conflicting accounts are treated as rumors from the locals and given no credit.
Yet when one thinks about it, if a US convoy is ambushed and fires back randomly, do the US soldiers really get out and look around for the Iraqi wounded? Do they visit the local hospitals and see who was shot and by whom (which can be verified by different types of ammo used)? My friends Dahr and Max went to the Khaldiyah hospital yesterday and received confirmation that no less than six Iraqi civilians had been shot that day by random gunfire and many others wounded.

Iraqis are angry that the world is being lied to about what is happening here. The new fear is that that anger will be taken out on journalists. But it confirms the need for independent reporting from here.

p.p.s. im sporatically uploading (thanks to Christian's hard work and dilligent dedication to all things Ben) photos to here: www.devo.com/~sarin/iraq2004

Sun, 1 Feb 2004
Iraq 3 - The palestinians: refuge and death

Sorry for the delays in writing. My computer has been on the fritz. Too many problems. I am cursed. Oh, and dont buy PC - ever. They are the abominations of the industrial age.
_____

Peering through the gateway into Haifa Sports Club, one is struck by a sea of gray and weather weary UNHCR tents. Strung between several, over dried muddy ground, are ropes used to dry clothes and hang television ariels. Although the conditions have improved some and the numbers have dropped greatly, there are still a large number of Palestinians in Baghdad nearing their second year in this small tent city.

I had heard a few tales about the plight of some 1,500 Iraqis who lost their subisidezed housing after Saddam's regime fell, and were left with almost nothing. However few Western accounts had been given since the end of last summer when the extreme Baghdad heat took its toll on the newly made refugees. The wet cold of Iraq's winters was also having an effect, so I decided to look into the situation.

While I plan to turn the personal accounts and interviews I conducted into a more full interview, I think its still fitting to give some of the background of this situation and describe some of what I saw.

The vast majority of Palestinian regugees in Iraq came from the Haifa region of the Palestinian Mandate drung the 1947-48 war. As Haifa was shelled and attacked by proto-Israeli guerilla groups, thousands fled Palestine's most populated region westward. There they met the Iraqi army which was operating around Jenin. At the time of the final cease-fire, they were given temporary shelter in Iraq under the Monarchy. Because the Iraqis insisted the stay would be brief, they declined to include Iraqi Palestinians under the UNWRA mandate that encompassed all Palestinian refugees elsewhere in the Middle East.

Iraq's Palestinian population was small to begin with in 1948 and today is only estimated at some 25.000. Still, they suffer a unique limbo due to the fact that they have never been accreditied official refugee status, and the successive Iraqi governments never let them achieve any degree of prosperity. It is greatly presumed that Saddam Hussein, with all his bluster about retaking Jerusalem, was a great patron to his subject Palestinians. Instead, under Hussein, they were barred from high office, owning property, having bank accounts or even owning cars. Most were living in apartments set up before Saddam, subsidized by the Interior Ministry. So when Baghdad fell and the property owners no longer had to commit to these cheap rents, most chose to throw out their Palestinian tennants - often by force. Anwar Saleh, the deputy director of the camp, solemnly observed, "this is our destiny, to go from living in tents to living in tents."

Following a discussion with the deputy administrator, my friend, a photojournalist named Max, and I set out with our young interpreter, Amjad. Amjad was in his last year of high school, but had the best English skills of anyone in the neighborhood. This surprised me, as I expected to find a rather well educated sector among the Palestinians. As it turned out in my discussions with people in the camp however, few of them had much opportunity for schooling beyond the ninth grade.

"I studied accounting and management, but it was without result," explained Zuhair Suleiman a 48-year old unemployed resident in the camp. "There was no point to education since we could have no jobs." Zuhair lived in a single tent about 12'x6' with his brother and four sons. The tent contained two small foam pads that served as mattresses. A small television sat in one corner on top of a box of a few posessions.

Zuhair's son, 'Ayman was the only one in the family with any sort of employment. "Before the war I made 20,000 dinar each day making candies. Now I only make 1-2000 ($0.75-1.25)." The family's income was supplemented by a pittance of foodstuffs, most of which were donated by aid organizations from Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. Yet it was the weather that proved the worst. Just the week before, a full night's rain woke up the family when they found several inches had flooded their tent through small holes and cracks. "We had to run into the rain just to dry off," 'Ayman joked.

Rasmanah Mahmoud and her brother Sami had other complaints. Before the war they owned two seperate shops in the neighborhood. Now they were afraid just to venture out into the markets. When asked about future opportunities for work, Rasmanah was adamant about the conditions. "Is there even a state to get jobs? I can't go out my door right now for fear of being killed." She said she would wait for stability before having much of a hope of getting a job and leaving the camp.

Many of the Palestinians in Baghdad relied on friends for support and places to stay. Over the course of the past ten months, over 1000 refugees have been relocated to cheap housing. Some of these buildings however, such as the facility at Houria, are little better with no electrisity, water or heat. Most others live in modest apartments around the neighborhood of Baladiyat. Still, almost anything would be seen as an improvement over being subjected to the elements and living among pools of stagnant sewage.

We had our introduction to Baladiyat this afternoon through a miserable twist of fate. On the same day I decided to start working on the Palesitnian refugee issue, only a few hours after Max and I departed, a mortor round came crashing down just between two Palesitnian dominated apartment buildings. The detonation shattered glass down the street, ripped apart tin-shack shops, and left four Palesitnians and one Iraqi dead.

Apart from a large monument at the entry to the neighborhood depicting a Palestinian and Iraqi flag, Baladiyat looks like most any other lower class Baghdad neighborhood. Trash lines many of the streets, and greenery is rare. The only thing in abundance is space, as the northern stretches of Baghdad were built in gradual and well planned style. Unfortuantely the homes and shops are in poor condition and much ingenuity with modest supplies is what keeps them upright.

We came upon a street which was blocked by a few random rocks and slabs of concrete. In front stood a scowling teenager named Mustafa Muhammed, who tightly clenched an AKM rifle. "I am here in case the Americans come again. We protect ourselves here," he explained. Just down the road stood the high walls of a former Iraqi security compound which the Americans turned into a small base and helipad. The day before, the deputy director of the Haifa camp had explained that Palestinians began to take food, power and security measures in to their own hands. But this upstart kid with a gun against US tanks seemed ridiculous.

Down one of the more narrow streets we found two identical apartment buildings. Standing at four stories high, they were taller than most other structures in the area. It was half way down this street where we discovered a crowd that had remained converged around a small crater. Blast marks eminated from the spot and the apartments and small shops next to it all had their thin walls blown in. Children pointed me to several pools of blood on the ground next to one shop constructed of corrugated tin. On the door of the shop several streaked handprints lived on as horrible reminders of what had happened the night before.

We stepped into the home that had taken the brunt of the blast, a three room apartment owned by Sanna Assad. Her brother had been wounded in the leg, otherwise her other relatives were all right. She seemed fairly shaken by the completely random incident. "You know, before the war we had protection. Now we have no security and no one to look after us but ourselves," she lamented.

I am used to rumors flying about when inexplicable death strikes Palestinians. In Gaza, every bomb and accident was blamed somehow on the Israelis regardless of the inexplicability. In Baladiyat, it was no different today. One child named Ahmed who hung close to us insisted that he had seen "USA" marked on the shell before US troops entered the area to pick up the fragments (which is normal procedure for all attacks here). Adhem Ahmed, a resident in his early thirties who seemed otherwise modest in his clunky glasses, /04

I spent much of last week's Wednesday and Thursday meandering through markets. Baghdad has dozens of them. As I discovered last year, there are markets and areas to buy just about anything. Tire markets, door handle markets, glass markets, air conditioner markets. I initially set out to find a kuffiyah - the arabic scarf I always shied away from wearing for fear of looking like a pretentious Western liberal who thinks he's gone native. No, my interest was far more utilitarian. With the blue work jacket I brought with me and my short hair and sunglasses, I realized I looked far too much like a CIA agent to be safe here.

I spent the rest of the time photographing shoppers and vendors. Most all were all too happy to have their picture taken, attempting to stand out in the densely packed crowds. One young boy named Haitham caught my attention. He spoke limited English, but had an almost perfect British accent. Almost Dickensian really. "Thank you very much sir," he said after I took a few portraits of him. After he asked me where I lived, I urged him to come and visit some time. "I'm sorry sir, but I cannot do that. I am just a poor man."
Too cute.

In many of Baghdad's streets bootleg CDs, VCDs and DVDs are are in abundance. Most vendors hawk various Arabic music videos, mp3s or soap operas. But several others sell highly campy movies, and a few box office hits. Whenever I perused selections, copies of old Van Damme and Charles Bronson movies were shoved into my face. I settled for some of the big recent films I never bothrered to see in the theater, but I had little qualms about owning copies for 50 cents. One vendor I found however had a wide selection of anti-Saddam movies. Clips of torture taken from Saddam's sadistic security forces were sold, along with video compilations of Iraq's wars. The real prize of course was Uday and Qusay's private party movies, which made the rounds a few months back. Actually, they turned out to be rather dull and I found far more risque videos of belly dancing played in the Christian "bar" next to our hotel.

2/2/04

We travelled to Najaf for the second day of Eid al-Adha, presuming that the world's holiest Shia shrine would be an interesting place to see on such a holiday. It proved interesting, but we saw little of substance beyond a sort of Shia safari. Max likened the scene to a Shia disneyland. At every entrance to the Ali Mosque, lines snaked around guard rails with people patiently awaiting entry. Outside various people took it upon themselves to recite passages selected by their Imams aloud through megaphones. Various followers prayed and wept behind them.

All around the mosque, vendors pressed to sell their various goods. Among the usual carts full of fruit, tea, and assorted children's toys we found posters of Ali, Hussein and more recent Shia leaders including Hakim, Sadr and Sistani. Other people sold green scarfs, Shia prayer disks, flags and other banners. The crowds numbered in to the thousands, and a few ambulances stood ready in case of stampede accidents.

Having been in the same mosque the years before, there was little to see that was new in the area for myself. We moved on towards the west just a few blocks where the road ended. There we came upon a rocky cliff overlooking a massive dried lake bed. It was the former site of the Najaf Sea, which apparently inexplicably dried up only a couple centuries ago.

The panoramic view was stunning. Some one hundred feet below us, and ahead for several miles were stretches of palm trees. A small village of mudbrick homes sat in the middle. Far in the distance, small remnants of the 'sea' sat as tiny salt lakes in the wilderness. Below us, dozens of Iraqis and Iranian pilgrims wandered down sandy paths to relax in the nature reserve. I had had no idea that such places existed in the middle of this country which is so often percieved as barren.

From there we entered Najaf's famous graveyard. Hands down, it is the largest graveyard on earth, stretching for miles into the horizon. It wasn't until we ascended a two-story mausoleum a good mile in to the heart of it, thanks to the assistance of a few gravediggers, that we could grasp this. Shia from around the globe have sought burial in Najaf's holy soil, seeking permanence next to Imam Ali. Although they are buried underground, the graves stand out as raised concrete sarcophagi with a slab at the front describing the deceased. Most family plots looked the same, but some bore photographs and the weathier owned crypts or larger mausoleums.

We spent a few hours wandering down wide roads, virtually lost in the great expanse of graves. Tombs were placed so tightly together that it seemed impossible to find a relative long deceased as their grave would be almost inacessible. Our driver, Ahmed, himself a Shia, had relatives buried in Najaf but he had no idea where. Elsewhere we could make out black shapes in the middle of the forest of graves, denoting weeping women next to the tombs of their husbands or children.

2/3/04

"Oh no, bad gas." Ashur's limited English was rather blunt. As was he. A gigantic Christian Arab, he more resembled one of the fabled Bulgarian Wresler Mobster prototype of the mid-1990's. With his shaved head, black track suit and black Ray-Ban's, I felt a certain sense of security with him, but then again he was the only thing I feared. This was the first time using him as a driver, and another photographer had told us about his penchant for gleefully yelling "Fuck You!" to American soldiers - not out of animosity, but because he was friends with many of them.

"80% of Iraqis love the American soldiers!" he claimed at one point. "Well, us Christians do!" It turned out that his real affection was for the black female troops.

"I got bad gas," Ashur repeated apologetically to myself and my companions Max and David. Apparently the gas station we stopped at in Mahmudiya sold poorly processed gasoline. Indeed, his car sputtered to a maximum of 5mph. The oil pressure gauge hung well below the meter. It couldn't have happened at a worse location.

While back in Baghdad and taking a quick trip to see the world's largest (though incomplete) mosque, we had taken a turn towards an entry point to the "Green Line," the heavily fortified chunk of Baghdad where the American Army executed its authority. "All Traffic Must Slow" warned one sign. Simple enough. "Stationary Vehicles Are Subject to Deadly Force," noted the next. Oh shit.

As we crawled past one gate, flanked by massive sand casks (filled with dirt actually) and razor wire, the car sputtered even more, jerking us about. We made it just to the checkpoint where most traffic avoiding the Green Line would turn left, and those entering would turn right. The US soldiers in their block house stood up. An Iraqi guard outside drummed his fingers on his AK. I scrambled to take off my kuffiyah scarf while the others did their best to show their shiney white faces through the glass. We prayed for racial profiling. Ashur laughed, waved at the troops, and restarted the engine so we could crawl away.

Eventually we found our way to the former "Saddam Mosque", now known as Ar-Rahman Mosque. It was planned on being the largest mosque on Earth upon constuction. Last year I saw it only from a few blocks away, and was stunned by its size. I described it then as resembling some sort of gigantic set for a sci-fi movie depicting a type of hive race. It consists of one grand (and unfinished) dome surrounded by eight seperate but connected domes, each of which has several others built within the frame. The ultimate concept is to have 99 domes in the structure - one each for the 99 names of God. At this point, only the superstructure exists and little detail has been filled.

Nevertheless, since the war, the local Shia have taken to treating the structure as a sanctified Mosque. Abu Jaffa, our sharply dressed guide, sporting a faux-Italian suit and an AKM assault rifle ("Iraqis only like Russian made," he asserted), claimed that even now some 15,000 worshipers showed up every Friday for prayers. When the massive building is complete, it is expected to have a capacity of some 250,000. "Oh my God," Abu Jaffa told us he expected us to say.

We acended up the steps of one of the wings of the monsterous structure. Here we had only the rough concrete steps to walk up some ten stories into the sky. I began to get a little nervous as I found the higher we walked, the less there was to hang on to and in fact near the top the stairs had no walls surrounding them at all. We stopped at one high landing to photograph the city.

All of Baghdad stretched before us in a surreal cloudy haze. Certain landmarks poked through. The Baghdad Tower, the old Saddam Tower, Uday Hussein's country club, the US base in Saddam's Palace, the massive blue onion-shaped Martyr's monument... As we looked upon the city, two Blackhawk helicopters circled the building and watched us. Oh great. Our cameras will wind up getting us killed. We had to stop all filming to put down our cameras and wave to the US troops in hope that they wouldn't open fire on us.

Max and David accepted the invitation to climb even higher, up a few more flights of rough concrete steps without any guardrails or walls whatsoever. I was a little more pensive. And after one flight, I balked. I sat down getting a little dizzy, and didn't help my mindset at all by looking out to gauge just how high we were. Screw this. Warzones are one thing. Totally unstable and unprotected stairwells in the open air - no way. Abu Jaffa hadn't helped by telling us that so far 42 workers had fallen to their deaths. Under Saddam, workers were given no safety protection whatsoever and paid only $0.50 per day. Anyone who complained was, well, taken care of. I slid back downstairs.

Sat, 7 Feb 2004
Iraq journal 6 - The brick factory

*** note: im 'embedding' (cough cough) with the 4ID tomorrow morning in Balad. i tried for Falluja, but the 82nd Airborne wouldn't hear of it. Anyhow, i have no idea if ill have internet access there or not, and i think ill be there for 4 days/3 nights, maybe one more or one less depending on just how boring it gets.
***

This one is basically just an article on an impovershed brick factory
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Just north of Hilla, some 80km south of Baghdad, the roads pass tiny dusty villages. Situated between much larger towns and cities, these khaki colored hovels seem to flow out of the ground, quite literally in fact. The local industry is the thousands-year old art of brick making, so naturally the surrounding homes are built out of the very sand and clay they sit upon. While the people here celebrate the end of the Saddam regime, there is little notable change in their lives.

In the scope of Iraqi history, Khinfara village is relatively young. Built around its resident brick factory, which was privately founded in 1953, it has been sustained by a very simple and time-tested industry. Apart from the machinery used to cut the soft sand and clay into individual bricks, the aptly named as-Salaam (the Peace) factory and its environs look no different than they may have thousands of years before.

The process is simple. From mounds of sand and other base materials piled nearby, quantities are mixed with water to form large slabs of essentially wet mud. This is then cut by a massive industrial age machine into a semi-standard brick shape. These are subsequently piled en masse for a few days of drying in the sun. The location, next to a few stagnant ponds, isn't ideal in terms of Iraq's more arid environs, but makes the mixing process much more convinient.

After the drying period, the bricks are loaded onto donkey carts by hand and moved to the large furnace. The furnace is a long brick and mortar built structure about 100m in length, culminating in a large smoke stack. On one side, flames are fueled to reach an intense heat. On either end of the building, fresh bricks are stacked in the heat to cook for about a week. Then they are loaded back on to donkey carts which move the finished product to several flat bed trucks for transport to sale in the regional cities.

The factory produces about 32,000 bricks per day, and operates year round. Demand seems consistent enough to make it a stable industry. However, despite the numerous jolts to Iraq's economy, and the recent influx of American money and construction, income has hardly changed. The wages for the 100 or so workforce vary from 2,500 to 10,000 dinar ($2-8) per six-day work week. Work begins as early as 3am, to meet quotas for the morning markets, and extends until usually 1 or 2 in the afternoon.

"I have no other choice but to work here," explaines Abbas Abadi. He is only 21, but his stained gray hair and dark face worn with deep skin lines denotes the fact that he has spent over two-thirds of his life working here. He made it through primary school, but then began working at the factory as much as he could, never fully completing his studies. His main complaint is a familiar one: he doesn't make enough to support his wife and only child with this one job. But he has no where else to go.

Talib Abud has an even larger family to feed. The sullen faced 33-year old truck driver struggles to feed his family of five and is eager for his two eldest sons to be old enough to work. His daily wage is insufficient to buy a simple sish kebab dinner for one in Baghdad, so he feeds his family off the simple staples such as rice and potatoes. When asked if things have improved since the war, he merely shakes his head with a blunt, "No."

Others are a little more grateful the Ba'ath regime has ended. Haider, another truck driver who transports the bricks to the markets, spent twelve years of his life in Saddam's most notorious prison, Abu Gharib, after deserting the army in 1990. Though released in a general amnesty in 2002, the toll on his body has limited his ability to work. He shows the scars on his wrists where he was constantly hung from the ceiling with his hands bound behind his back, dislodging his shoulders. His emaciated face cracks as he shows off each mark on his body from the torture. "Here. Here. And Here." He also is quick to point to his toes. "Here they pulled off my nails," he explains. He has been eager to start a family now, but understands that life will be difficult.

Hatred of Saddam in this Shia area runs deep. Donkeys are nicknamed after the former president and whacked with pvc tubes. But inside the factory, where the heat mixes with the dry taste of ash and dust, little has changed. Shafts of light penetrate the gray clouds that swirl about in heat vortexes as workers shovel broken bricks to the side. Empty donkey carts are driven in and loaded with finished bricks, baked yellow by the fire. On the other end, new bricks to cook are unloaded and stacked high to the ceiling.

Beady white eyes permeate through the dust and a torrent of complaints follows. "We have trouble breathing, many of us suffer from asthma!" Ali Hadi seems pleased to finally have a way to speak out. "We have also never had clean water. We get it from the river and have to drink it straight. There is no plumbing here." Indeed, the Tigris' waters are quite laden with years of pollution and a neglected of environmental care. But Ali blames the former Iraqi regime for these problems.

"We are Shia and Saddam did not care for us," Ali explains. "That is why we have no clean water." He says that things will have to improve soon - so long as Saddam remains in prison, he is quick to point out. When asked if he thinks the former President should be executed he shakes his head dismissively, "No, that is only for God to decide."

Rural industries such as the As-Salaam factory have one other ubiquitous feature: the reliance on child labor. Some 15-20 children work at the brick factory, depending on the season mainly as the drivers of the donkey carts. More of course work during the summer when school is not in session, but a couple dozen stay throughout the year supporting their families instead of attendng school. The children work the same hours as the adults, some times almost ten hours per day.

Jassim, 15, doesn't seem to mind missing out on an education. "I like it here," he asserts while struggling to keep his donkey from wandering away. His father also works at the factory and the family dearly needs the money. He wears his two years of work experience on his face; his smile cracking through encrusted layers of dust and ash.

Some children at the factory are only half of Jassim's age. No one is quite sure how old Saddam Ali (everyone mocks his name) is, but they presume he is eight years old. He sports a matching black sweat pants and shirt and wears a wool-knit head covering to protect his shiney black hair from the soot. The Saddam regime managed to affect him in ways too, in a boyish naivity. When asked to meet a foreign journalist, he cowers and asks, "Is he here to execute me?"

Amazingly, at such a young age, Saddam has already been helping out at the brick factory for three years, guiding the donkeys along their monotonous path to pick up newly dried bricks and take them to the oven. Its a simple task, but one he repeats perhaps a few hundred times in a day for the meager sum of 4000 dinar per week ($3). He has never had a day of schooling in his life, as he had to begin helping out his family once his father retired early due to illness.

Since the inception of the As-Salaam factory, many regimes in Iraq have risen and fallen. Yet little has changed for the impovershed little village surrounding the plant. The workers don't expect much to change, especially as little reconstruction for Iraq actually relies on brick and mortor. An upgrade in the infrastructure would be nice, but no one expects a rise in living standards. Abbas Abadi is dismissive of any real change. "I expect that my children will end up working here just as I do," he says.

Fri, 13 Feb 2004 Iraq 7 - Embed diary pt. 1

**Many more photos are up. Go to www.devo.com/~sarin/iraq2004 and click on 'last modified' to see the newest ones.**

This is pt. one of three
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"I'm here to pick up a reporter for the 1-8," the dorky looking Sergent called out. I guessed that was me. What the hell was '1-8' though? I follwed the Sgt. Charles Vicari out the door and towards a dusty green Hummvee. My first ride in a military vehicle, I thought. Images flickered through my head - the years of commercials, and movies. The glory. The pristine. The rugged and the aggressive. The fetishization of the military. The interior of the vehicle was crap. Dried mud caked the floor, amid torn bags and empty metal boxes. Inch and a half thick cushions sat against stiff metal seats. The interior was simple and brutally functional. This wasn't Arnold's Hummer. In fact little I would see over the next few days portrayed anything of the military life any one would reasonably sign up for. Faltering generators, backed up bathrooms, piles of mud everywhere.

Logistical Staging Area (LSA) Annaconda, about 10 miles out of Balad, Iraq was an enormous expanse of facilities for the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division. Annaconda served as a way station for supplies, fuel, various headquarters and medical facilities. The actual units were staged at smaller bases around this part of rural Iraq at Tactical Operation Centers (TOCs) and Forward Operation Bases (FOBs). I had arrived not knowing what unit I was to embed with or exactly what I would be doing.

Amid complaints about the lack of selection of Pop-Tart flavors he could purchase here, Sgt. Vicari took took me around the 32-square mile facility to the operations center for the 1st Battallion, 8th Regiment. The "1-8 Fighting Eagles" had gained a substantial reputation in the area for tough but effective procedures. They were the unit in this area of the Sunni Triangle that was called upon from Balad up to Tikrit when other squads became overwhelmed. Their commander, Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman had garnered much fame among battallion leaders and the local population alike.

I had first heard of the Lt. Colonel from a piece in the New York Times December 6, 2003. He had gained some notariety for enclosing the entire village of Abu Hishma in razor-wire and using identification cards for the residents. The article mentioned,

   The town of Abu Hishma is enclosed in a barbed-wire fence that stretches
   for five miles. Men ages 18 to 65 have been ordered to get identification
   cards. There is only one way into the town and one way out. 
   "This fence is here for your protection," reads the sign posted in front
   of the barbed-wire fence. "Do not approach or try to cross, or you will be
   shot." 

Lt. Col. Sassaman summarized his position in the piece by explaining, "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them." But at the time of my arrival, things had changed somewhat. The massive resistance the 1-8 had faced in the area in October and November had substantially subsided. The unit moved up to Samarra the next month, only to return and find a new increase in attacks on American units, but still not at the levels of before. Abu Hishma was no longer treated so harshly, yet the unit maintained its reputation of forcefulness. As Maj. Robert Gwinner, the battalion's executive officer explained to me later, "They only understand force. That's how you gain their respect."
"Always have a little coke in your pocket. You can't go wrong with that." Lt. Greg Hotaling advised.
"Oh, man. Get some heroin now. Its cheap," Cpt. Ryan chimed in. I spent my first evening with the 1-8 watching Lt. Hotaling play one of the latest crazes on their computers, "Dope Wars." They sat in a "hooch," basically a metal box shipped in to contain offices or bunks with rudimentary power and an air conditioner/heater unit. The night was otherwise uneventful with the NCO's trading jabs while doing bureaucratic work and keeping tabs with what was going on around the base. At about 6pm, a powerful mortar attack was reported on the unit's TOC, some five miles away.

The Iraqi insurgents had fired five rocket-assisted 120mm mortar rounds at the base, a long-distance mortar they hadn't yet dealt with. "They definately have balls," Spc. Flowers commented. The soldiers then joked about the various improvised weapons they had faced recently. From homemade mortar rounds to a shotgun built from a pipe where the round was placed inside only by unscrewing the barrel.

On the next day, after acquiring a flak vest and a Kevlar helmet, I was allowed to move on to the 1-8's TOC. I boarded the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle and sat on one of the narrow benches to endure an arduous and jittery ride in the tracked armored vehicle. The TOC was situated at an old girls' school, just next to the town of Balad. In the distance I could make out the green-lit minarets of the Mustafa Mosque. Most of the landscape was barren though, with patches of weeds and trees along the roads. It was a prime farming area however, with most land irrigated from the nearby Tigris River and canals running along side the muddy gravel roads.

For my first day there, I basically relegated myself to just listening on the conversations of the soldiers around me and garnering points of view from some of the officers. As I expected, most comments about the situation in Balad and about the locals bordered on racial contempt. The soldiers were clearly sick of being there and saw little to gain culturally from their now 10-month long stay in Iraq.
"This place is a giant litter box," Spc. Price ranted.
"Well, Kuwait is a giant ashtray," countered Spc. Testa.
"At least there I can drive without having to be in the middle of the road and constantly looking out the window for bombs."
"Yeah, when I get to Kuwait, I'll only be looking at a bright light at the end of a tunnel."
"Home," added Sgt. Saunders.
Spc. Testa stood up and walked outside the front door. "I just want to get home and out of this shithole!" he screamed towards the sky.

As the group remained sitting near the front door, smoking on benches, a large crowd of Iraqis in headresses showed up. They were Sheiks and elders from the village of Abu Hishma, there to turn themselves in to Colonel Sassaman for questioning. Apparently months of aggressive tactics meant that the Colonel no longer had to venture out to pick up people - they were intimidated enough to show up on request.

Spc. Price stared at them from his seat. There were at least six sheiks and several other old men present. "Christ, when they show up, they all show up." "Yeah, but when they attack us, there's only two or three of them," Spc. Testa commented.
"Or when we raid their homes," Sgt. Saunders chimed in, "only a couple of them are there."
"Ah, they're all just a bunch of thieves," someone muttered.

The general perspective I gained from talking to the soldiers and officers alike was that the area was rife with corruption and corrupted values. Attacks were made on US soldiers with the incentive of payouts. When the paymasters were caught, the attacks dropped off sharply. It also became apparent to the unit that people in the villages would often inform on their neighbors to solve personal disputes or for the reward money. Maj. Gwinner had observed that this situation got so bad that they had to bring the informants with on raids, so if the information turned out to be false, they would reveal the informant to the accusee.

The unit was also quite dismissive of the poor tactics used by other battalions. A month and a half before, the 1/13 Striker battalion had taken over the 1-8's position while Col. Sassaman was asked to aid other units north in Samarra. During that time, the surrogate unit failed to follow up aggressively on mortar attacks, and thus the insurgents stepped up their campaign. Now having returned, the 1-8 had to refight to calm the area.

At another time in one of the recreation rooms, a CNN special about US tactics in the Falluja area was on. This was a region policed by the 82nd Airborne Division. The report focused on civilian casualties inadvertantly inflicted through carelessness or excessive force by the division. The soldiers in the room watching were disdainful. "Idiots. Should never have just let that happen and not help out the families."

By then, I had already learned some of Lt. Col. Sassaman's approach to civilians hurt by US forces.

Sun, 15 Feb 2004 Iraq 8 - Embed pt. 2

On February 9th I found myself loading into a Humvee with two soldiers and the 1-8ths translator, Thaana Azawi, or "Tina" as the troops named her. We were embarking on a short trip to visit a family with Col. Sassaman for a solation payment. The US Army was compensating the Hatimi family for an accidental shelling of their home the previous November, which killed five and wounded seven.

The convoy of two Bradleys and a Humvee rumbled down the road, through Balad and past the town a little ways. We turned off on a dusty gravel avenue past orchards and farms. Along the way children peeked out of the buildings and waved. The two soldiers in my vehicle made a point of waving to everyone that passed by. Gunboat diplomacy at its simplest. Finally, at the end of the road and right before a large vegetable field we stopped.

The Hatimi's were expecting us. Mohammed Hatimi, the elder patriarch, emerged from a modest single-story house surrounded by some fifteen children. The entire family and kin were there for our arrival. Mohammed himself had two wives - the third and youngest had been killed with her children in the shelling. Col. Sassaman stepped out of his Bradley and waded into the throngs of eager children than ran to us. Thaana and I followed him into the home. Right from the start, he was in fine form with Thaana translating for him. "Your home looks nice today. I see you cleaned it well for our visit. And the new repairs look great." Mohammed's wives gave us a tour through the home. The shelling, which was meant to hit the source of a mortar attack had done severe damage to the home. $15,000 had been given to the family for damages and compensation.

A small boy in a long blue shirt hobbled through the children on a pair of crutches. "Is that Ahmed?" the Colonel asked, bending down. "Ask him how he is doing and tell him I'm very happy to see him." Ahmed just gave a brief smile. A different unit had been responsible for the accidental shelling, but as the forces on the ground, the 1-8 took it upon themselves to do the public relations work. It's difficult to think of a man other than the Colonel for the roll. He strode through the house shaking hands and kissing babies as if running for office. Then we were hussled outside as the family had prepared a large dinner for us.
"Oh, well, tell them I'm not eating alone. Tell them they have to sit down too," Col. Sassaman urged Thanna as he sat into a plastic lawnchair in front of the home. Before us the women had laid trays of chicken and beef, piles of rice, fries and small bowls of salad. The thirty or so people present seemed more interested in watching the Colonel dig in, until they were finally persuaded to join. The other soldiers in the convoy too were encouraged to share in the meal, but in rotation so that half could maintain the watch outside the farm.
"Tell them that this food is fantastic. Tell her the women are very good cooks." The Colonel had to eat slowly, as he knew that this meal time was also used as a forum for complaints and questions to be brought forward. But he tried to keep it light. Part way through his meal, he turned to Muhammed, who sat to the Colonel's left, "now I don't want you taking this money and using it to buy a new wife!"

After the socializing, some of the pressing questions came forward. But the Colonel used a standard question of his own to start. "What will happen if we leave? Do they want us to leave the country right now." Everyone began murmuring. Finally voices spoke up. No, they wanted security first. They wanted to be able to go out at night. People will begin fighting each other if there is no government or constitution. He later told me that this was how he began every encounter, asking the locals he met if they wanted the Americans to leave.

One of the family's cousins, Sakaliah, leaned forward to ask Col. Sassaman about the occupation. She wanted to know what the Americans could say now that they know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. The Colonel turned it around. "Ask her if she liked living under Saddam." No, she did not. "Then tell her that whether there were weapons here or not, we knew that Saddam was a bad man and had to go.

Sakaliah wasn't satisfied. She insisted that if Saddam was the issue, the Iraqi people could have taken care of him themselves without the Americans. But Col. Sassaman was unphased. He quickly replied, "I did not ask to come to Iraq. None of us did. We came here because after 35 years, the Iraqi people couldn't help themselves." Another man spoke up, noting that it was the right of Iraqis to protect Iraq. What is the goal of the Americans here? "We want to leave as soon as we can. We have to stay until there is security so that Iraq can have free elections."

Elsewhere, the soldiers positioned near their vehicles entertained the children. Some boys hounded them for chocolate and other candies, while others jumped at the chance to have their photos taken. At one point a couple soldiers enticed some boys into dancing by clapping up a rhythm. One of the privates began to beat box a dance as the kids jumped up and down giggling. Back on the simple concrete porch, other members of the extended family had come forth to ask about relatives and friends who had been detained. The Colonel explained that every thirty days, all detainees were reviewed and if anyone had been arrested for a simple charge such as taking a gun out of their home, they would be set free soon. The Colonel had a very good memory for names and cases. After talking to a particular young woman who had asked him about her friends, he explained, "We are quite certain that they were involved in attacks on US soldiers, but I will have the case reviewed."

Col. Sassaman had grown tired of the political talk and returned to joking with the family. He leaned over to Mohammed, "I don't know how any man could marry two or three wives and survive with all the headaches." He held nothing back. He asked the women if they had any choice with who they married. As this was a small rural area and still steeped in ancient tribal customs, the answer was of course no. "Tell them I don't like that," he insisted to Thaana. "Tell them I don't agree with that at all."

At the end of the meal, another member of the extended family came forward with her child. They boy had an ear infection. The Colonel turned to me and laughed, "I guess I am playing Messiah too." He told her he would speak to her later so that she could be invited for special care at the Army's medical center. "But make sure only she knows," he told Thaana. "I don't want everyone showing up with their kids."

Finally as the afternoon wore on, the Colonel made his final goodbyes. He assured the family that two of the children who remained badly hurt would be well cared for. One was staying at the Army hospital in Camp Annaconda, and another was in Germany about to fly to the United States for special treatment. Col. Sassaman found young Ahmed again just before climbing back in to his Bradley. He bent down and patted the boy on the head. "I want him to grow up to be a teacher. Don't become a soldier."

Late that night I was awoken at about 2:30. The lights came on in the barracks I was sleeping in. "We have contact to the south! Contact to the south!" Troops scrambled out of bed, bleary and confused. They struggled to toss on their uniforms and boots. Guns were loaded and flak vests donned. I ran out the door as quickly as I could. As I did, machine gun fire cracked from one of the nearby guard towers.

"You'll get some good photos now!" one officer yelled to me as he ran by. Some of the soldiers hadn't even bothered with the uniforms. Several emerged in sweatshirts and boxers, but still had the essential helmet, vest and machine gun. They broke into teams to search the perimeters. A few flares shot up and lit the sky.

In the TOC command room, the situation was made more clear. Somehow two of the bases twenty or so detainees had broken out of their holding cell and had escaped from the base. They had been spotted already near Balad. The supposed attack on the base turned out to be a unique small scale prison break.

Mon, 16 Feb 2004
Iraq 8.5: 82nd Airborne vs. an elderly couple

***please spread this story. i promised the people i would get this around the globe***

I had to interrupt my normal writing schedule to publish this bit of news from today. This story had been completely unreported when we heard about the incident while in Falluja today on other business.

Below is the text I wrote for a news piece for Electronic Iraq. I have 3 photos up on the website that show the severity of the attack.

Basically several hundred US soldiers, some tanks, APCs, dozens of Humvees, and a few helicopters and jets used the home of an elderly couple for target practice early this morning.

No, its not a huge catastrophe. worse things happened elsewhere even today. but no one else will know about this otherwise, and im guessing the US army would rather keep it that way.

Including all my time in Israel/Palestine, ive never seen one house sustain so much damage in one attack.

article w/ photos is here:
http://electroniciraq.net/news/1366.shtml
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It began with the rockets. Fired from distant jets, as the residents claim, several missiles began falling upon various homes around the dusty and remote village of Amiriyah at 1am on February 16th. They landed almost simultaneous upon the homes of Sheikh Mohammed As-Soueed and Mishaan Abid Saleh, almost a mile apart as US ground forces closed in. The American objective, according to the residents were three Syrians suspected of having taken refuge in the area. The Saleh farm lies at the end of a gravel road, several hundred meters from their nearest neighbor. The modest one-story mud brick house is home to a large extended family of almost forty people, the vast majority being Mishaan's many grand-children. Mishaan, 70, who is nearly blind, relied on his wife to recount what happened in the early morning hours.
"We woke up to the missiles hitting our home," she explains, almost trembling from beneath her hejab. "Then the soldiers came and blew up one of our trucks and attacked our sheep. They then came into the house and took everyone out." Four of her children were hooded, bound and taken away. Afterwards, even though the Americans had the complete compliance of the family, she claims they ransacked the house, confiscating the family's two rifles, their jewelry and their life savings of 25 million Iraqi Dinars (about US$18,000). Some of the soldiers outside came across the three other vehicles owned by various family members, a large truck used for moving produce, a small sedan and a new pickup truck. Each had ever tire systematically shot out, and several bullets squarely placed in the engine blocks in an unmistakably intentional manner.

Mishaan himself begins wailing, while holding one of his youngest relatives, a small boy who simply stares off in a glass-eyed gaze. "What do they want with us? We are just farmers here! they have taken everything we have, destroyed the rest and I don't know where my children are." Dead sheep lay scattered around the side of the house, some splayed out infront of craters caused by the rockets. About 50m down the driveway an unexploded rocket remains burrowed into the sandy soil.

The Saleh family, however, received a far more lenient treatment that morning. On the other side of the village, past large farms of budding cucumber and tomato plants, the Soueed home is in total ruin. According to the neighbors, right from the start the house was under constant bombardment by airplanes, helicopters, tanks and other armored vehicles. The shooting did not stop for almost two hours. Of the small home's only two inhabitants, Mohammed lay dead and his mortally wounded wife had managed to crawl out the back. He was burried in the nearby cemetary at one that day, with most of the village coming out in mourning.

The roof of Mohammed's building shows the marks of at least thirteen blast holes left by rocket impacts. The concrete ceiling has been blown away revealing an iron frame and dropping rubble everywhere. Although the neighbors insist that the 70-year old Mohammed never fired a shot, nor even owned a gun, the home resembles a WWII-era battle ground on the inside. Not a single wall, corner, crevice or walkway stands without at least several bullet holes. Several outer walls have been blown apart completely and one of the side windows shows evidence of where the metal grate cover was cut away with a torch. Mohammed's wife had made it out the back window and neighbors took her to a hospital, however word came that she passed away in the middle of the day.

No knock on the front door or call to surrender was ever made, according to witnesses and relatives. Instead spatterings of dark red and bloody-handprints reveal where Mohammed spent his final moments near the front of the home. It is evident that he was long dead before the American soldiers finished blasting paths clear through the home. Fragments of concrete cover everything: the floors, the stairs, the few pieces of furniture the couple owned. In one of the few furnished rooms, where the Soueed's slept, cabinets and boxes had been ripped open. The only appliance, a small old television, had been blasted to pieces. Most walls seemed to be barely able to stand, having been punctured by everything from small arms fire to tank shells.

"This is a sin. This is a sin," repeats Ali (real name withheld), who can do nothing but curse the incident. As the house was under attack, other American soldiers in the squadron rounded up some fifteen young men from nearby homes and took them away. Although subjected to raids, none of the other homes were attacked to any degree, let alone the almost incomprehensible ferocity the Soueen household withstood.

Ahmed (real name withheld) holds tight to one of his two young boys. "Just think what this boy has seen. Imagine what he thinks," Ahmed seethes with anger. "Before now, there were no problems, but now my son will grow up to hate Americans forever for what they did today." He believes that some one with a personal grudge must have tipped off Mohammed Soueed as a resistance supporter to warrent this enormous onslaught. "If I just now go and tell the Americans some one I dont like is a terrorist, they will go and kill him for me - no questions asked! Is this real? Is this American justice?"

Ali wanders past, kicking pieces of shattered glass and concrete as he shakes his head. "This is a sin," he continues to repeat. Neither the US Centcom nor the 82nd Airborne Infantry division have yet issued statements on this incident and the public affairs officer for the division has not yet replied to queries on the matter.

Tue, 17 Feb 2004
Iraq 9 - embed pt. 4 - Night raid

(yes, im lazy and skipped pt. 3)

related photos are under raid*.jpg at www.devo.com/~sarin/iraq2004
__________________

Mohammed offered me a cigarette. I wasn't about to refuse. I dont normally smoke, and a choked a little after inhaling. Then the nicotine seared through my veins. Relaxed.

I was suited up to join Alpha 'Attack' company on a night time mission. And beyond. Ranger trained Cpt. Matthew Cunningham, 29, had insisted that I don camouflage grease paint so that I might join him and his squad in infiltrating a farm community from the rear. The objective was the capture of one man, Fawzi Youniy (nicknamed 'Fuzzy Anus' by the troops), deemed responsible for funding and/or directing mortar attacks on the 1-8th's TOC.

Lt. Goldman led me in to the Bradley. He called out to the driver, "I only printed up three detainee forms, so if we get any others I guess we'll have to shoot them." He waited a bit and then remembered that I was standing behind him. "I was only joking, of course!"

The Bradley's loading door sealed shut with myself, the Sergent and Mohammed the translator in the rear. As we rumbled on, tossing us about inside, Lt. Goldman explained a few things. "These sort of missions are always hard. Don't be surprised if the soldiers use no compassion at all," he explained. "I've only been with the unit for a couple weeks, so its still hard on me to watch. Women and children will be crying, and hey, we are waking them up at midnight and taking their husbands and sons away. I don't even know how to explain it to my wife."

Some thirty soldiers were to participate. I would hang by the commanding officer, Cpt. Cunninham with an infiltration squad. Another squad would circle around to the front of the homes as we would cut off any rear escape. The Bradley's would then circle around and position the front for a quick extraction. The plan was to detain all males in an around the Younis home to find the suspect.

We dismounted as a whole and split up in the darkness. I followed the soldiers down a few main roads. A few homes and garages lit the only lights at night. But yet again the dogs howled and barked as we passed by. We moved in relative silence, the soldiers relying on their night vision to scope out routes through dirt and gravel. Finally we came upon a large fenced orchard and slid off the road.

We trudged for a good half-mile through twists and turns of bramble, trees and irrigation ditches. At times the Captain would pause to check his Global Positioning Sattellite unit for a precise location fix. After an arduous journey, we finally settled into a ditch about 200m in front of the first target home. Then it was a waiting game.

The dogs throughout the area continued to bark loudly. As they abated the other sounds of the night picked up. Eerie screams and yowls broke through the air. They turned into a cocauphony of banshee cries. I took them to be stray cats, caterwauling in choruses, but it was of a pitch and degree I had never heard before. Then some of the dogs began to howl. The three-quarters moon broke through the cloud cover and cast dancing lights through the trees. It felt like the perfect holloween setting. I looked to my left at Cpt. Cunningham in full camoflague gear, laying in the irrigation ditch with his M-4 at the ready and his eyes focused through his night-goggles. It was a heavily armed holloween. After almost 45 minutes of waiting in total silence (and having been awake for 16 hours with only 4 hours of sleep the day before, myself drifting in and out of sleep), we finally heard loud bangs of metal. The Captain turned to me. "The first objective. They're breaching the first objective." Soon enough the heavy roar of the Bradleys broke through the night as the vehicles moved into position outside the neighborhood's homes. Then we moved in. I wasn't sure what to expect when I began running through the field and towards the homes. I had seen recordings of raids done in urban areas and I didn't think I would ever have the heart to participate. But as the soldiers began entering the homes, I just followed, running behind. I let my camera do my thinking (which wasn't doing too much in the total darkness).

Bam! Bam! "Go, go, go!" We poured through a gate and ran across a short courtyard. Bam! The double metal doors of the house were smashed open. Immediately women began crying. We passed a small foyer and found two elderly women and one old man startled as the lights were flicked on. The soldiers poured through the house, fanning out to all rooms and looking for other people. "Friendly going upstairs!" "Upstairs clear!" "Friendly coming out!" The old man was taken from his home as the women followed, crying out. The soldiers moved on. "What about the house across the street?" "Blue 6 has it." "We've still got this big one over here." "Let's go!"

Again I followed the unit, this time around a large brick wall and over to the front of the farmhouse. A few swift kicks to the gate. A dash to the front of the house. Splitting up to enter all visible doors simultaneously. Running into the home amid cries.

As I entered a darkened hallway I came across seven young girls and boys. One young girl, no older than 10, with large glasses and a tan hejab kept her hands raised in the air. I had never before seen a child do such a thing. They all wore fear deep on their faces. The males, children and adults alike, were brought outside in a line up. The youngest two were released, but all others from about fourteen and up were cuffed and brought out to the Bradleys down the road. Running out the back, the women tried to follow sobbing. I looked back briefly. I couldn't stare long. I began to well up myself, realizing that these people had no clue what was going on. Even if the men would likely be released in a matter of minutes, it was still a terror for the women and children to see their fathers, sons and husbands torn from them by a legion of masked men. Here, infront of a home, some twenty-five men, all bound by flex-cuffs, were lined up for identification as Mohammed took down their names. Once it was determined that Fawzi Younis was not among the detainees, the Captain ordered the restraints to be cut. He then addressed them, with Mohammed translating. The detainees voluntarily moved to their knees with their hands in their laps. They still looked bewildered and frightened.

"Thank you for participating in tonight's roundup," he began. "You know who we are looking for and we will not have to do this any more if you help us. We know you know who is attacking Americans, and we need you to come forward." The flourescent light glistened against the grease paint on his face. One man stood up and asked the Captain what the people of the village could do if they didn't know who was firing the mortars. Cpt. Cunningham was curt. "They are firing from your fields. You cannot sit inside and let it happen. I want you to be proactive. I want you to go out and find out who these people are and come tell us. Otherwise we will continue to come at night and ask." There was nothing more he could do here. "Ok. You are going to stay sitting here until we have left the area."

And with that, in a matter of seconds all thirty soldiers had boarded the APC's and we were off.

As our Bradley lurched forward and we headed back to the base, Lt. Goldman broke the silence. "Well, that was fucking worthless."

Wed, 25 Feb 2004
Iraq journal

**note: im back home in the US. still have several entries to put out**

Shortly after an MRE lunch of beef stew, I suited up. A small squad was to head out under the command of Lt. Joshua Schneider. At 27, he had a two year old sun back in Illinois whom he hadn't seen since November. I reflected on our respective ages. He was younger than me, looked even younger than that and was a very quiet man. But he was able and focused. He freely joked with his soldiers but wore responsibility well. We were to do a foot patrol in a village outside of Balad, look for suspicous vehicles and later on set up an ambush at a site frequently used for mortar attacks.

"We've driven Bradleys past these farms and the kids don't wave," Lt. Schneider explained. "That's why we have to check it out. Something is up if they aren't waving." So for the first time, soldiers were to head out on foot and check out a variety of houses. The orders were to also confiscate illegal weapons. Every family was entitled to own one rifle and one clip which was to be kept at home. Anything additional would be confiscated. A red truck had been seen near some mortar attacks, so we were to document the plates for any family owning one.

The day was bright and clear. For early February in Iraq, it was rather warm and soon enough under my shirt, jacket and flak vest, I was gushing sweat. The American soldiers don't knock. There is no warning other than gossip in the village that they are there. The gate is opened and in they walk. Young children begin crying while older ones look on with confusion. As this was midday, we were basically running into all female households although many unemployed men remained indoors too.

Once on the property and after a scout around the home, a small squad would stand guard as Lt. Schneider and the translator moved inside. They demanded to see the family's weapon and took down names. Our entrances seemed rather random, mainly only visiting families with pickup trucks. Dogs barked the entire way. It seemed as if they were trained to smell Americans. At one farm a soldier wound up pointing his weapon at a particular animal that wouldn't stay quiet. Family members scrambled to curtail the dogs. And on we went, into a half dozen farm homes and spending a few hours walking around.

It was at that point that it happened. I took one for the US Army. As the soldiers darted through the apartment, and the old woman stammered about, crying for her grandchildren, I hurried to get my camera ready. In my fumbling way, I lost its grip and dropped it onto the tiled floor. And, just as I bent down to retrieve my camera, RRRRAAAAPP!! It wasn't a gunshot. It wasn't destroyed property. It was my tired slacks tearing apart from one end to the other in an astonishingly rapid manner. I stumbled for a recovery. Grabbed the camera and spun so as to have my partially exposed ass against a wall. No one heard it. The soldiers were still milling about in the kitchen and the old woman had followed them with her unceasing complaints. I slung my camera bag across my behind to cover my faux pas, and did my best to recover. A few nominal photographs. Picture of a girl. A soldier. Yeah, no one will notice my horrible shame. No one will know that American tax dollars were spent on a campaign where my exposed Perry Ellis' were the only casualty.

The strategy for the ambush was simple. A site of previous known mortar attacks was chosen and a couple hundred meters away the troops fan out into the orchards and lie in wait. It was a hit or miss game, as nothing could be certain. Locations had to be somewhat consistant, as the insurgents were presumed to get a fix from a few sites and so as to not have to recalibrate all the time, they would reuse these locations. The times however, could change. Months before, the mortar attacks were in the mid-evening. Now they seemed to come just before twilight. And there were an average of two attacks per week, so it was really a random stab.

"We're watching for either a red pickup or a white one with a red stripe," Lt. Schneider explained. And almost, as if on cue, a white pickup with said red stripe rumbled past our position with two old men inside. The lieutenant grabbed his radio. "Watch that truck," he called to one of the other positions. Nothing. Some five minutes later the same truck came past again. It was odd, but ultimately proved to be nothing. Slowly Lt. Schneider moved from kneeling to laying on his belly with his gun at the ready. I looked behind. The translator was napping in the grass and on his back ala Beetle Bailey with his cap over his face.

Somehow I found myself involved. I began to watch the sporatic traffic along the farm road as well. I even made a suggestion. I asked the Lieutenant if the low rumble of the Bradleys not too far off would warn away any potential attackers. He seemed to think that it might be a factor and radioed for them to stop moving around. What was I doing?

But after some 45 minutes, the Lieutenant had had enough. The sun was not even setting yet, but Lt. Schneider decided that we had spent long enough waiting in the orchards. The Bradleys pulled up and we loaded in. After a short ride, we were back at the Alpha FOB and chowing down on chicken that seemed as if it had been waxed with grease.

That evening as I waited around for the midnight raid to be prepared, I passed the time in the TV lounge with the translator. He was a Kurd who had earlier made comments about how all the Arabs were "fucking thieves" and had nothing but disdain and contempt for them. I wanted to check his degree of religious fervor and so when the news focused on the controversy in France about banning the wearing of headscarves in schools, I asked for his thoughts. "Its the Jews. The Jews are making them do this." Finally, I had met someone who hated Arabs >and< Jews alike. A true anti-semite.

Thu, 26 Feb 2004
Iraq journal 13 - Salman Pak's water

We took the road to Salman Pak rather late in the morning. I had scrambled to find a fixer for the day, finally running into Rana. Rana has worked as a fixer for everyone from Al Jazeera to ABC's Nightline. Needless to say, I had to spend most of the time dropping references to my totally unpaid work and meager means. She found a driver outside the Palestine Hotel and we set on the way, listening to Armed Forces Network's Freedom Radio and smoking stale Iraqi cigarettes. There is something oddly soothing about passing through Baghdad's poor southern neighborhoods while listening to ACDC's Those Who Are About to Rock We Salute You throbbing in the speakers.

Salman Pak made sense for a simple day trip outside of Baghdad. Its along the road to Al Kut which follows the Euphrates River. It was notorious for the poor quality of water. As we drove on, Rana pointed out Dialia Nuclear Plant, hidden behind high concrete walls and barbed wire. It was there that ignorant locals broke into the facility to loot it, many making off with nuclear material drums for use in cooking and washing. Some four hundred drums had found there way through the rural area and even yet not all have been returned. Needless to say, its a highly toxic area, in addition to all of the normal waste that floats south from Baghdad in the river.

Salman Pak is a small town famous for the ancient site of Cstephon as well as the location of a great battle between early Muslims against the Persian empire. Cstephon is a remarkable structure, noted as housing the oldest standing archway in the world. Otherwise, its basically a large monolithic building, torn apart by thousands of years of earthquakes and neglect. In the neighboring village of Al Dariyah, we came upon the home of Mohammed Jassim from whose backyard Cstephon's arch can be seen. Here two boys, Ahmed and Ali, were busy standing almost knee deep in mud scooping out water with buckets. Their entire yard outside their small home had been flooded by a broken pipe. It seemed like a fine place to begin a story about water issues. The Jassim home was fed by an improvised plastic tube that served as their water source. It was installed after the war when the previous main was broken. But a few days ago this pipe broke as well, leaking pumped river water all over their land. "In the past the city would come and fix this no problem," Mohammed explained. "But now you have to pay them to do anything." The city had asked for at least 50,000 ID (almost $40), which is far beyond the poor family's means. Even if the pipe was fixed, it wouldn't be of much help. There is only electrisity for a few hours each day, at which times the pumps die. Mohammed is pensive about having his photo taken, for he is wearing his old army jacket for warmth.

Further down the road we came across two women busy fertilizing a cucumber and tomato farm just on the banks of the Euphrates. The thick brown waters rushed past rocks outlining the greenery. Their grandaughters, a baby boy and girl, sat in the leafy patches playing with the plants. The farmer that the women worked for was able to afford chlorine to sterilize the water they used, but otherwise it was taken straight from the neighboring river. In the course of our poking around, we had aroused the curiosity of the locals.

Soon enough a very helpful lawyer named Ali Ahmed arrived and offered to show us around the community of Al Dariyah. Wearing a dirty gray jebbah shirt, and broken sandles he looks unremarkable in contrast to the other famers. He first showed us a site where the a small water treatment plant was to have been built. The ground was already dug out and a concrete base had been laid down, but no work had been done in years. It was an empty promise to the local population, first not upheld by the Iraqi government and later by the UN who had originally promised to have it running by December 2002. Now of course there was no UN presence in the country. The facility would have been able to provide clean water to some 500,000 people, according to Ali. Now he explains, "no one is sure who is responsible for it."

Ali then took us down to the current water source - the Euphrates River. At one shore several pumps in flimsy brick and corrugated tin housings forced water into pipes that ran out in to the village. Some forty families depend on this highly contaminated water to work their farms, as well as provide other basic functions. And Al Daliyah is lucky - most villages in the region cannot even afford to have pumps. As we walk around the pumps, flocked by local school children who keep poking in front of the cameras, I step on large patches of white crystals. Water that has evaporated on the soil reveals enormous amounts of salt - hardly something helpful for farming.

There is a slight improvement for power though, they claim. "During Saddam we had power for two days a week," Ali claims. "Now we have it for a few hours each day." There has been one huge benefit from the fall of Saddam here. It turns out that the town now takes its power from the nearby Republican Guard army base just a mile away. Additionally, across the river was one of Saddam's favorite spots to relax at, and hence with a superb power infrastructure. On the otherhand, the regime provided some benefits to the farmers. Chemical fertilizers were subsidized by the government, and now with the price has risen over seven times the original cost. This has led to the shut down of several small farms and put out many families. (A few days later we were to meet economic refugees from the area who moved to a garbage dump in Baghdad because they could make more money there.)

We paid a visit to one of the city's medical centers. Here we spoke to one of the doctors, Yehia Bakr. He was unable to provide us with much comprehensive information, but told us a few things about the problems in the community from the water. Most cases that came in were from gastro-entritus and other stomach ailments as well as respiratory diseases. Cholera seemed to be on the rise as well. And he asserts that at least 10% of people who come in complaining of fever turn out to have malaria. All the factors Iraq has faced have led to grave problems. "Because of the blocade from the UN, the war and now no law or distribution, we have only minimal abilities to treat anyone," Dr. Bakr complained.

Remarkably one of Khazi Faisal's children, Yousif, had to be treated for dehydration a few months before, even though their small farm neighbor's Salman Pak's water treatment plant. Khazi's small plot just off the road to the plant, is mainly used for growing food for his few cows and chickens. His home consists of only a couple rooms, yet he manages to fit inside himself, his wife and seven children.

I run through my usual survey, asking about power and water. Khazi claims to only have two hours of electrisity, if even that per day. And he asserts that the water was cleaner and much more ample before the war. His income however has risen quite a bit, although he now has to deal with lost subsities and soaring prices.

We stopped also at another large farm, where tennants rent out sections of a field of three square kilometers. Here Mohammed Abdul, 47, and his nine children work along side some five other families in growing a variety of vegetables. Mohammed, unlike everyone else, has absolutely nothing bad to say about living standards and the civil situation of the town. Mainly this is because he is well connected with his local tribe who all support and look out for eachother. His boys run circles around us as we walk through the fields for a look.

Rana stops me and asks for me to take her photo among the tomato stalks. Just another city girl in the country.

Fri, 27 Feb 2004
Falluja pt. 1

**this one is pretty important in understanding the anger at the US in iraq**

"First I am going to show you Baghdad. I want you to see and understand all the things that have gone wrong!" Harb ('war' in Arabic) was adamant. It was eight in the morning and after staying at a hospital until 4:30am the night before, I was in no mood to complain. Harb was going to take and equally drousy Tara and I on a tour before driving to Falluja whether we liked it or not. He drove us first to the area around the Martyr's Monument, which is now being used as a US base. "Humiliating, it humiliates us," he repeated. He showed us traffic conjestion, the absense of law, destroyed ministries and places that had been looted. He showed us the only ministries that were never touched and had been well protected by the Americans - the oil ministry most notoriously. He showed other places such as a radio tower and schools that he claims the Americans only repainted so they looked good, even though the insides were still shambles.

Much of it was things I had already seen, and frankly I was too tired to pay careful attention or remember what he said. I just nodded and mumbled, "Yeah, I know" when prompted. Tara didn't get off the hook either. "Tara?! You seem quiet! You see this?" and she too would give a meager reply.

Harb was an ex-Iraqi Army Colonel. He had served in the Iran-Iraq war in the Chemical Corps in charge of, as he claims, the protective gear distribution for Iraqi soldiers. He was aggressively against the occupation and dead set on showing us the anger among common Iraqis. After several weeks talking to Shia Iraqis, it was a healthy change of pace. He provided us with a fantastic look at the anger focused at Americans, as well as the odd myopia through which many Iraqis in the 'Sunni Triangle' see things: every problem is the fault of Americans, and all terrorists are outsiders - except the noble resistance that only attacks US convoys. "No Iraqi would harm another Iraqi" was a mantra pervasive among all ethnic groups I found.

"Today you are Swedish. Okay?!" Harb asked forcibly, as if I had any chance to deny anything he said. "Otherwise they will kill you!" He laughed. I didn't.

Many Iraqis emmigrated to Sweden and thousands had come back of recent. I prayed that we wouldn't meet any Swedish-speaking Iraqis in Falluja. Tara knew how to say "thanks for the delicious meal," and I could only immitate a certain Muppet chef. I didn't want to die in Falluja.

Just two days before our entry into Falluja, a pivotal event occurred. Some 50-70 heavily armed men attacked Falluja's police station and the Mayor's office. Seventeen policemen were killed in the attack, along with several bystanders. The entire jail full of petty thieves and criminals had been opened. The American army had failed to intervene at all during the two-hour daylight gunbattle. The entire town was in an uproar, and every one - including the police - blamed the Americans. Rumors were flying about and it was difficult to tell what was happening. Otherwise, Falluja was one of the ripest areas for the Iraqi resistance, attacking US convoys daily - but as a rule never in the city itself, as they claimed. To further the dismay, the Mayor, who resigned mysteriously two days before the attack, had just been arrested by the US Army for suspected collaboration.

Harb had arranged for us to talk to a local shopowner to start with. It was difficult to arrange real interviews for him, as the locals insisted that all foreign media were contorting their views. I had to repeatedly assure everyone that I would not misquote or malign their words. However, I spent a good long time talking to who I initially thought was a more important local sheikh, but turned out to be an owner of a small distribution company. Nevertheless, he provided a healthy insight into the views of common residents of Falluja. Tara and I were led into the office of Abu Hassan. Several friends of his had showed up to watch the interview, and of course wound up chiming in. It was a good two hours of contentious conversation and complaints about the occupation. Everything from detentions to electricity were discussed. "Ask him anything you like," Harb began.

Initially we focused on the attack at the police station. Abu Hassan insisted that no one locally was involved. "We are a small city and we all know each other. We would know who did this," he began. The main issue was why the US Army didn't intervene. Rumors abounded, but most people knew the police made distress calls directly to the local US Army base outside of town and it was over four hours before any forces arrived. "I was out early and saw the US cut off all roads around the city, but they still never went in. They didn't do anything." Abu Hassan and his friends gave the impression that they never saw the local Iraqi Police as collaborators with the US government. They were a local police force protecting their fiercely proud town. So any attack on them naturally, they felt, had to have had collusion with the US military.

"It is impossible for the IP (Iraqi Police) to work properly because they have no leadership, no planning and no equipment," Abu Hassan explained. When I asked him about them being seen as collaborators of the occupation, he was dismissive. "For now we have no government, so the IP need to work with who ever is in charge to maintain order. The Americans have taken all of our laws and authority so that there is no one to rely on but them."

So what if the Americans just pulled out right away? "If the Americans left right away, we would have even more problems. They are here now, so they have to provide security." It seemed somewhat contradictory, but it was really the method of the occupation Abu Hassan was against, more than the occupation itself. He asked the usual rhetorical questions everyone in Iraq does: why are there lines for gasoline? Why is there no stable power? Why is water quality still so poor? He noted how Saddam Hussein's government within six months of the 1991 Gulf War had repaired over 200 bridges that had been bombed and fully restored services to pre-war levels. 150,000 American soldiers couldn't do anything comparable in 10 months of occupation.

As for the resistance against the Americans, it seemed as a given. "No Muslim can accept to be invaded by a foreigner. They have a right to resist." Abu Hassan and his companions skirted around the issue other than to accept attacks on Americans as a natural result. However, attacks on police and the car bombs being used were unacceptable. They were not part of the resistance, rather they were foreign terrorists flooding inside.

Here another common issue came up: the only priority for the US should be securing the borders. "The US is bringing terrorism to Iraq because they don't control the borders." And all insisted that only foreigners could be behind these attacks, for no Iraqi would ever harm another, they claimed. Ibrahim, one of the men lurking in the back of the office, chimed in. "Since April 9 what have the Americans done for us?" All seem readily happy to be rid of Saddam, but it is seen as the only benefit. They claim that the US had two months of leeway to begin showing Iraqis benefits - and so it wasn't until the summer that the resistance picked up after Iraqis were let down. "The Americans invade, destroy this country, take over its money and control the regime. Now they call us terrorists?" he went on. "We are a disciplined and dignified civilization of 1000s of years. The US has only 300 years. We have people qualified to fix this country. Why don't they let us?"

They went on to complain about the Governing Council the Americans handpicked. Here the main problem was the ethic division of the council. They saw it as dividing Iraq and that if the Kurds were allowed to break away, the Shia would too - thus destroying Iraq. Abu Hassan claimed to have recieved phone calls from Shia in the south congradulating Falluja on its resistance to the Americans. I asked about the United Nations taking over administratively, but they saw the UN as nothing but a tool of the US government. I asked if all people in Falluja felt basically the same on these issues. To prove this, Harb stood up, left the store and returned with a somewhat confused gentleman in his thirties. "Here, this is a man off the street. Ask him the same."

Ali was pretty consice when I asked him how he saw the occupation. "It is an invasion and they have given us so many promises but absolutely nothing has been achieved." He then added that he had seen some of the attackers from two days before move against the police station after disembarking from US vehicles. This was a rumor that many others were to repeat to us that day.

We next visited Falluja's hospital. Here we were able to talk to several of the police officers who had been wounded in the attack from two days before. Typically, one needs the formal permission of the Health Ministry to gain access to a hospital, but Harb talked his way through and the staff was incredibly receptive to the two Swedish journalists looking for the truth in the attack on the local police.

It was some of the most difficult interviews I ever had to conduct. Each patient was a young man, badly wounded and suffering dearly from having people come into his place of work with the sole intent of murdering them. Many of them had several wounds from multiple gunshots and grenades. They were the lucky ones, as the majority of the officers present were killed on the spot. The attackers had struck at an apt time (as a typical practice) just as work shifts change. Due to the lack of resources, weapons have to be shared and about half of the staff present at the station was just arriving and came unarmed.

We first met Hussein Ali Mohammed, 23, wrapped tightly in blankets and watched by his parents who stayed with him at the hospital. He had been shot through both letgs and his right hand. He was off-duty at the time of the attack, but had seen the smoke rising from the scene at 8 am that day. Driving over, he was attacked immediately. He and his family were adamant about who they held responsible for the attack.

Almost immediately, Hussein's mother launched into a tirade condemning the US. She began swearing aloud as Harb was too modest to translate directly at that point. The police had radioed almost immediately "B1" - the code for US assistance. Normally, according to Hussein, the Americans would arrive for almost any other situation. They pointed out that when Americans were killed in resistance attacks, they would shut down the entire region to find the attackers. But this time, they failed to show up for several hours.

"Falluja will stay a city of heroes," Hussein announced as his face contorted in pain from the bed. "We have always fought for our country and now we are killed because of the abuse of our land by the US." He said he remained dedicate to the police, as his father was a police officer before him. His loyalty was strictly to Falluja, and he insisted that no one from the area could have launched such an attack. Further proof was the fact that those freed from the jail were not resistance fighters (who the Americans usually move right away to larger facilities such as Abu Ghraib), but local criminals: car thieves, thugs, rapits and so forth. No one who would be of service to the local resistance. His mother remained even more militant. "All women of Irqa will put on a belt and through blood we will have our revenge!"

In another bed laid Oday Halid, 19. His voice shook as he struggled to speak. His case was the worst of those in the hospital: he had been shot nine times and his back was seared by a grenade. He had been on the second floor of the police station and hid during the attack. Someone had thrown a grenade in, which exploded on his backside. As he lay bleeding, one attacker quickly sprayed the room with lead, killing two of Oday's friends and wounding him and another. Somehow he managed with multiple bullet wounds - but no critical shots. He too blamed the Americans for failing to respond to pleas for assistance.

As we spoke to Oday, the crowd around us parted to allow a young man to approach the bed. His name was Abud and he claimed to be an eye witness to the early stages of the attack. His main contention was that he saw some of the attackers first show up at the police station disembarking from US army transports. I pressed him for confirmation, but he stuck to his story, claiming that four US army vehicles (he didn't know any names of models) drove up a few blocks from the police stations and several armed men got out and melted into the streets just minutes before the attacks. This was the rumor most fueling hatred against the Americans in this incident.

We also tried to speak briefly to Samir, a 30 year old police officer who had been shot in the arm. He was also on the 2nd floor of the police station and was shot while firing back on the attackers. The doctors cut his interview short however, as it was clear that he was too tired to go on talking.

Finally, we spoke with Abdul Hami Sirhan who had been out on patrol at the time of the attack and drove back to the station just in time to be fired upon. He fought from outside his car until an Opel station wagon pulled up and several attackers returned fire, wounding Abdul in the stomach. He also confirmed that the call to the Americans had gone out.

"So often we have called 'B1' and the American would arrive. But this time there was no response at all," he contended. "We definately called at 10am, but they didn't arrive until 4pm." He said that the attackers yelled out that they were Mujihadeen fighters, yet Abdul was dismissive of this. "We know that Mujihadeen would never kill a fellow muslim. Everyone in Falluja knows each other, so we are certain they aren't from here." Many in the hospital claimed that the attackers were from Southern Lebanon, though no evidence was given for this. "The dignity of Falluja will stay," Abdul concluded as a fellow police officer and close friend held his hand.