Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
I didn't want to leave the nation my country tore apart. But then came warnings that our house was targeted. A farewell portrait of a place on the edge of the abyss.
Apr 7, 2004 | Last week, before followers of Muqtada al-Sadr began actively fighting coalition forces, before four Americans working for a private security company were killed and mutilated in Fallujah, I left -- or perhaps I should say fled -- Iraq. In the week or so preceding my departure, I felt the country undergo an essential, albeit subtle, shift. The anger previously focused on soldiers and members of the Coalition Provisional Authority seemed to morph, almost daily, into an indiscriminate ire toward Westerners in general. Almost overnight, I stopped feeling safe.
Many of my biggest concerns were wrapped up in the fact that I had been in the country so long. I (and the house I shared with other freelance journalists) had become well known. Some seasoned war correspondents -- friends who had actually lived in the house last fall -- warned us that they felt the house might be marked as an easy "soft target." Journalists and contractors were moving en masse out of small, lightly protected hotels (such as the Mount Lebanon, which was bombed a few weeks ago) into hotels that lay within heavily guarded and restricted compounds. With fewer easily available Western targets, my friends believed that the house might be ripe for an attack.
Up until a month ago, my housemates and I joked about Western journalists and civilians who were obsessed with security. We made fun of our friends who worked for TV networks and had to get permission from New York just to come to our house for dinner. When they did come, they traveled in armored cars with armed British former special ops soldiers. For six months we had gone all over Baghdad and Iraq, driving in a regular old Iraqi car with an unarmed translator and driver. Going shopping, walking on busy streets, wandering into crowds. There was always some risk, but it was small. The soldiers were the real targets. Iraqis might hate the occupation, but they didn't hate Americans per se.
Then, seemingly overnight, everything felt different. It began with the Mount Lebanon bombing. Though many journalists I talked to also sensed the city's mood shift, it was hard to figure out exactly why that particular attack made us feel so different. We had been to blown-up hotels before; it happens every few months. But it wasn't the bombing, it was how Iraqis were talking to us. Iraqis are fed up with the occupation. They're fed up with what they consider to be a year's worth of false promises. They're fed up and the situation is getting very ugly.
A driver we worked with told us that our house had been targeted and we needed to "take a break" from Iraq. One of my housemates (who had been in Iraq as long as I had) heard that there was a rumor circulating that he was actually CIA. It was time to leave.
In the few days that passed between when I made the choice to leave and actually got the hell out, I became even more aware of the threat in the city. I wore a hijab pulled close around my face when I drove through town. Now all female journalists I know wear a hijab and even a full-on abaya when they leave their hotel. And not just female journalists -- a few guys I know who are unfortunate enough to have blond hair have taken to covering it with a head scarf when driving through the city. On the one hand, we joke about it -- "Shit, you make a good-looking old Iraqi woman" -- but it's deadly serious.
Now in Baghdad, in addition to the fortified "Green Zone" occupied by the Coalition Provisional Authority, other heavily guarded compounds have sprung up to encircle the hotels most populated by Westerners. During the war, almost every Western journalist who chose to stay and tough out the conflict took refuge in the large Sheraton and Palestine hotels that sit, almost lobby to lobby, a block away from the Tigris River, opposite the river from the Green Zone. Following the fall of Baghdad, American soldiers parked tanks in front of the hotels and (somewhat informally) secured the grounds. Still, it was possible to drive a car filled with luggage into the parking lot (as I did the day I first arrived in Baghdad last May) and move freely around the streets flanking the hotels.
Over the course of the last year, however, the security perimeter for those two hotels has slowly but surely expanded to encompass an entire neighborhood. Roadblocks, cement barriers, concertina wire, and legions of private guards keep a tight rein on anyone entering the area. A big chunk of Abu Nawas Street, the wide boulevard that parallels that side of the Tigris, is completely blocked to traffic. News organizations and foreign companies have rented many of the larger homes inside that secured zone and each employs its own security guards. Men with Kalashnikovs roam the empty street or park themselves at the front gates of the sandbag-wrapped houses. If you look up, you're likely to see more men with guns pacing the flat roofs and keeping watch on passersby. The New York Times was one of the first organizations to take up residence there. Last spring, before Westerners of all kinds were being targeted, they rehabilitated a large home and painted the outside bright pink and purple. I used to joke that it looked like an MTV "Real World" Baghdad house. Not long ago, I noticed that the house had been repainted to a dull white-gray.
The isolation of Westerners only feeds the danger, in a kind of vicious circle. With journalists and civilians in Baghdad now living the same way soldiers and CPA staffers do, it's no wonder the Iraqis differentiate among those groups less than they used to.
After our friends expressed their concerns about our house being vulnerable -- but before we received the more specific threats -- my housemates and I decided to consult with some of the security companies working in Baghdad to get an assessment of our danger level. The house we lived in was not in a cordoned-off area but rather a quiet residential neighborhood. Our idea was to be as low-key as possible. We had a guard at all times but he usually stayed inside the wall that fronted our house. Early last fall, when we rented the house, low-key was the best way to go. In fact, part of the impetus for getting the house in the first place was that hotels (even those with security) seemed the greatest risk to Westerners.
Private security companies can be found all over Iraq right now. Most of them consist of a cadre of well-trained Westerners -- usually some version of former special forces guys from the U.S., Australia or South America -- supplemented by Iraqi guards. The biggest companies, like Custer Battles (whose unfortunate moniker actually derives from its two founders' last names) and Blackwater (the employer of the four men killed in Fallujah), are hired almost exclusively to act as armed security support for the military and Coalition Provisional Authority. They provide escorts for contractors and create secure areas (like the Green Zone) in which different arms of the coalition live and work. Some of the contracts are massive. Custer Battles essentially runs the airport.
A number of security companies have carved out multiblock areas in the wealthy Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad. I drove to Mansour with one of my housemates to talk to some people at Erinys Security, a large firm (with ties to Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi) working throughout Iraq. When my housemate and I made an appointment over the phone, the Erinys guy had given us rough instructions to their compound. He told us to drive to a street behind the wrecked communications building and then look for a lot of men in blue shirts. We followed his instructions and, sure enough, came across a gaggle of beefy Iraqis wearing blue Oxford-type shirts and holding Kalashnikovs and mini-machine guns. My translator, Amjad, who was with us, explained we had an appointment. The men directed us to pull up to a barrier that marked the beginning of a blocked-off fragment of the neighborhood. We milled around outside our car while one of the guards crossed the barrier and ducked into a house just beyond to announce us. The dozen or so guards around us seemed bored. Some stood with their rifles hanging in front of them, supported by the kind of neck straps I associate with guitars. They chain-smoked cigarettes and laughed in surprise at my housemate's decent Iraqi Arabic.
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