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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Friday, Aug. 6
On the second day of fighting, Andy and I decided to stay away from Sadr prayers at the mosque and remain in Baghdad. We drove to Sadr City in the early evening, hoping to see what happened at night. I had never been allowed to watch the fighters work at night and the sheik was offering us a degree of access that very few journalists have had in Iraq.
In a kebab restaurant across from his office, the sheik offered to take us to an attack site. We immediately agreed. We took a short drive down a broad street until we heard car tires squealing as drivers in front of us caught sight of an American Bradley convoy and made panicked U-turns. Then we made a quick left down a nearby alley. The Bradley convoy parked across the street.
Light was almost gone and it was settling down into dusk. We got out of the car with the sheik and saw a pickup truck with five Mahdi army soldiers speeding down the street toward us. The fighters jumped out and one man ran down the street with a rocket launcher, telling Andy not to film him. He then knelt down and fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Bradleys from the corner where the alley met the broad avenue. We had just ducked inside a door of a house when the fighter pulled the trigger. The blast was deafening and the rocket missed the convoy.
A few minutes later, a firefight broke out and the Bradleys returned fire with their machine guns; the air sounded like it was coming apart along the seams. Some local people took us in, and an old patriarch, a descendant of the prophet, told us that Americans, "Instead of showing us respect for human rights, they violated them. Instead of preserving the riches of the country, they wasted them." The family was warm. They sang Muqtada songs. We drank tea with them and then walked outside into the warm night air.
We left Sadr City in the dark and saw fighters pouring gasoline on the tarmac, lighting it, then burying roadside bombs under the soft tar. By morning, the city would be a minefield with hundreds of explosives hidden beneath the roads. At night, the burning tarmac made the place look infernal, the orange light of the fires guttering below a blank sky without stars.
Saturday, Aug. 7
In the lobby of our hotel in Baghdad, we hired a new driver named Ahmed. It turned out to be a stroke of bad luck because he would cause problems. And any problem is a serious problem. He was lazy and dishonest, although we didn't know it yet. We also didn't realize that he was setting himself up as a fixer and guide to urban warfare in Sadr City, who didn't want competition from any of our contacts.
Ahmed took us to Sadr City but did not bring us to the sheik, the man who made it possible for us to stay in town, the man we had arranged to meet. Instead, Ahmed made his own deal with fighters in a different sector. We spent an hour at an ambush position a few blocks over from some very heavy fighting with Americans, waiting for a battle that never took place. We waited for an hour, talking to the commanders, promising not to show the identities of the fighters on the tape.
After a tense wait with sporadic gunfire breaking out down the street, the commander of the sector told us to follow a group of his fighters in our car. They piled into a white sedan and we followed, listening for helicopters overhead. We were told not to take photographs of their faces and waited while they wound scarves around their heads or pulled down ski masks.
We didn't know what would happen next, but small groups of fighters were leaving their sector to attack the Americans a few blocks away. We followed their car for a few blocks and then parked. A young fighter with a bandaged hand and a sniper rifle got out, ran to a corner, knelt, then fired four shots at some American vehicles. Andy filmed the sniper taking aim and pulling the trigger. After he fired, the sniper said, "It's OK, it's OK," running back to his car. We followed. Back at the intersection the sniper was waving his gun out the window in triumph and the men who saw him cheered.
We decided to wait for the sheik to come for us because we couldn't move freely with battles going on a few blocks down Falah Street. We called our man every five minutes. When he found us in the new sector, our driver made the error of threatening him; he didn't know who the sheik was. Our Mahdi army protector then left us at the intersection, furious, and he would not forgive the lapse of honor.
Minutes later, the Mahdi army fighters on the corner kicked us out of the city, escorting us to the border with Baghdad, saying the order had come down from the Sadr office, which wasn't true. When I got back to the meeting point just outside town, we learned that a colleague and a close friend also working in Sadr City that day were abducted and beaten by a carload of armed men. It was a miserable day. The photographer who was beaten by the gunmen was a brave journalist and I couldn't stop thinking about him in his torn shirt, his face swollen from blows.
Back in our Baghdad hotel, I heard the sounds of mortars landing in the Karrada district. The Mahdi army was firing mortars in retaliation for the fighting in Najaf. This was a new tactic, sowing chaos in Baghdad to protest the American assault. The Mahdi army would also threaten the oil pipelines and successfully stop the flow of oil to Basra for a few days. A fighter with the Mahdi army told us that there were Western targets outside Sadr City that the militia planned to attack. He named rocket attacks on ministries, firefights in rich neighborhoods. Much of what the Mahdi fighter told us turned out to be true.
