And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East (11 page)

I SAW THE BLAST IN
my sleep, an orange flash so bright that it passed through my eyelids. My room at the Hamra Hotel in Baghdad was filled with smoke and dust and shards of glass. Several ceiling panels had crashed to the floor, and the door to the balcony had been ripped off its frame. A sharp piece of shrapnel about the size of an egg was melting the synthetic fibers of the cheap industrial carpet. I crept to the balcony and looked outside. Across the street I saw the twisted remains of a truck bomb outside the Australian embassy. Several cars were on fire.

Since I’d arrived in Iraq, I had been keeping a video journal, turning the camera on myself at emotional moments. I reached
for the small camera and pointed it at my unshaven, tired, and wild-eyed face. It was January 19, 2005. My voice was shaky:

“When the explosions happened, I thought . . . finally this was it, that they had blown up a bomb in the basement. I thought when it exploded that—that they had done what they had been threatening to do.” Which was to blow up our hotel. For Sunni fanatics, anyone was fair game—soldiers, policemen, women and children, journalists.

I had been gung ho when I came to Iraq nearly two years before. I felt bulletproof. But the constant gunshots, explosions, fear of kidnapping, dead bodies, the memory of a stray dog carrying a severed human head between its teeth—the savagery of it all had worn me down to a psychological nub. Too much adrenaline had coursed through my veins. I’d had too many bad mornings.

I looked back into the video camera. “Am I just lucky so far, and how much can you push your luck? When do you decide that this is just not worth it? . . . I am still cheating death. . . . It feels like you are trying to pull a fast one on history, that you are trying to get away with it, get out, sneak out, get information, and get back without being kidnapped or losing an eye or a limb.

“Today with this explosion, I got away with another little bit . . . but how many more times can you get away with it? I don’t know.”

I knew I was becoming paranoid. I saw danger everywhere. I had tied an escape rope to a drainage pipe off the balcony of my room at the Hamra. I would be ready if trouble came. I started dreaming, sometimes when I was sleeping but mostly when I was awake, about how I would be remembered if I got killed. Would I be reduced to a mention on the
Nightly News
, of interest for half a
news cycle? Or if it was a slow week, a very slow week, maybe I’d be a three-day story?

Reporters go through four stages in a war zone. In the first stage, you’re Superman, invincible. In the second, you’re aware that things are dangerous and you need to be careful. In the third, you conclude that math and probability are working against you. In the fourth, you know you’re going to die because you’ve played the game too long.

I was drifting into stage three. I couldn’t connect with friends back home, and I couldn’t relate to my wife. She couldn’t understand why I wanted to stay in this awful place where people spent their days killing one another. She believed that life was for living and creating a family. Our marriage had been tottering for a year, and now we had decided to get a divorce.

My stage three jitters began nine months before, in April 2004, about a year after I left my contract job at ABC and signed on as a full-time correspondent at NBC. Instead of focusing on my personal life, I did what many men and women do, I buried myself in work. I read as much as I could about the Sunni and Shiite conflict. The more I read, the more concerned I became about what the United States had embarked upon. Washington had opened a Pandora’s box that went back more than thirteen hundred years, to the schism over who would be the first caliph after the death of Mohammed.

One faction believed that the Prophet, lacking a male heir, designated his cousin and son-in-law Ali to carry on his work. His followers—the
shiat
of Ali, the “party” or “faction” of Ali—came to be known as Shiites. They believe that the inner meaning of the Koran can only be understood by intense study, and
that members of the Prophet’s family, the sayyids, are especially attuned to the message that Allah handed down to one of their own.

The other faction believes that caliphs should be chosen by consensus. They practice what is generally called an “orthodox” form of Islam, strictly following the words and sunna, or traditions, of Mohammed. They became known as Sunnis and now account for about 85–90 percent of Muslims in the world. Hard-line Sunnis don’t even consider Shiite Muslims monotheists because they also worship Ali and his son Hussein (Ali’s son by Fatima, who was Mohammed’s daughter).

The faction we now call Sunnis prevailed in the selection of the first caliph, Abu Bakr, father of one of Mohammed’s wives. Ali got his chance after the third caliph, Uthman, a venerated figure in Islam because he codified the Koran, was murdered by Egyptian extremists. Ali at first declined to follow Uthman as caliph, but Shia supporters prevailed on him to change his mind. He ruled the caliphate from the Iraqi city of Kufa near Najaf.

Ali faced two implacable enemies. In the north was the governor of Syria, Mu’awiyya, one of Uthman’s relatives; in the south was one of Mohammed’s widows, Aisha, who was also aggrieved by the death of Uthman. Ali, just like Uthman before him, was murdered in 661 by an extremist, allowing Mu’awiyya to quickly seize the caliphate and found Islam’s first royal-like dynasty, the Umayyads, based in Damascus.

What began as a hereditary dispute was about to turn forever bloody. In 680, Ali’s son Hussein raised a small army and set out to avenge his father. He confronted the forces of Yazid, Mu’awiyya’s son and the second Umayyad caliph, on the plains of Karbala, an Iraqi city about forty-five miles northwest of
Najaf. What happened that day still lives vividly in the Shia imagination and explains the tension between Shiites and Sunnis, played out over a millennium in bloody encounters between the two sects.

Yazid’s soldiers surrounded Hussein’s tiny force of seventy-two now-legendary fighters. According to Shia tradition, Hussein and his men were slaughtered after a valiant fight. Yazid’s soldiers beheaded Hussein and carried his head to Damascus. Reconciliation was now out of the question.

Shiites commemorate Hussein’s death every year in Karbala, with an elaborate reenactment and crowds approaching 2 million. Their sense of grievance is exacerbated by their minority status in the Muslim world, where they represent a majority only in Iran (90–95 percent of the population), Iraq (60–65 percent), and Bahrain (60–70 percent).

That Saddam Hussein was a Sunni, a despot from a minority sect who reserved power and patronage for fellow Sunnis and who had slaughtered many thousands of Shiites, explains why the American invasion represented much more than the toppling of a tyrant. For the Shiites, it was both a political victory and a moment of religious ecstasy. The Americans, they believed, had helped complete Hussein’s seventh-century mission and would eventually return them to power.

The shameless looting in April 2003 after the United States captured Baghdad showed that the United States faced enormous challenges in bringing democracy to Iraq, a backward, somewhat isolated country mainly known to Americans for the depredations of Saddam Hussein, its eight-year bloodbath with Iran, and its military collapse during the Gulf War in 1991.

Few associated it with their elementary-school lessons on the
glories of Mesopotamia, “the cradle of civilization,” between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

On May 23, 2003, came the fateful decision by America’s special envoy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, to dissolve Iraq’s army. Bremer issued his decree only a day after informing President Bush and the National Security Council, reportedly catching many high officials by surprise.

The decree, part of an effort to remove Saddam’s Ba’ath Party from Iraq’s politics, guaranteed the enmity of the country’s military men, most of them Sunnis, who had enjoyed prestige and job security under Saddam. To the Sunnis, de-Ba’athification amounted to de-Sunnification. So it was not surprising that these men mainly from the military, who American officials called “regime dead-enders,” set about inciting Iraqi Sunnis and foreign jihadists to attack Shiites and Americans.

The Shiites remained preternaturally patient, largely at the behest of their most senior cleric, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who urged them to turn the other cheek. He had his eye on history. He remembered the mistakes of 1920, when Shiites led the successful revolt against the British only to see the Sunnis seize power. If the Shiites caused problems now, he believed, they would risk losing out again.

In any case, Iraqis were only briefly grateful to the Americans. The Sunnis were aggrieved, and the Shiites were itching to run the political show. Instead of becoming a beacon of democracy, Iraq turned into a political mosh pit. Upward of two hundred parties sprang up, each with its own disgruntled constituents. After two decades of submissive silence, Iraqis seemed to whine about everything, and the Americans were handy whipping boys.

US officials seemed stunned by the primitiveness of the place. Knowing that the Iraqi power grid would have to be rebuilt after the war, the military had been judicious in selecting targets, but then looters stole copper wires, switches, and other integral equipment—and the Iraqis blamed the Americans for not quickly switching the lights back on. The US military was untrained and unprepared to be Iraq’s policeman. Abrams tanks were no help combating the lawlessness in Baghdad, which was recording seven hundred murders a month, fourteen times the number in New York City.

At first, we journalists could move around Iraq relatively freely. Ordinary Iraqis were eager to tell us about the brutality of Saddam’s regime, sometimes pulling up their shirts to show us the purple scars left by tortures in his gulags.

Then came what seemed to be a trivial provocation. On March 28, 2004, US soldiers shut down the
Hawza
, a radical Shia newspaper, for printing lies, rumors, and incitements. It was the personal megaphone of Muqtada al-Sadr, a pudgy, utterly unprepossessing thirty-year-old Shia cleric with a hot head and a potent family name. His father and father-in-law were prominent ayatollahs. Both were assassinated by Saddam’s regime, in 1980 and 1999, and they became known as “the first martyr” and “the second martyr.” The “Remember and love Sadr” chants on the tank recovery vehicle pulling down Saddam’s statue were, as I suspected, a sign of things to come.

Sadr sent his Mahdi Army into the streets, the first large-scale Shia revolt since the US invasion. Sadr wasn’t listening to the more cautious Grand Ayatollah Sistani. At the same time, Sunnis were facing up to the loss of their monopoly on power and
privilege. US troops for the first time were facing threats from both the Shiites they’d help bring to power and the Sunnis they’d displaced. The United States was now in the middle of a civil war. Three days after Sadr’s Shia newspaper closed, Sunni gunmen in Fallujah, which had become the center of Sunni resistance, ambushed four American security contractors. Crowds pulled them from their SUVs, dragged them through the streets, doused them with gasoline, and set them ablaze.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Sunni jihadist of astonishing savagery, was already conducting a murderous bombing campaign, killing twenty-two at Baghdad’s Canal Hotel in August 2003, including the UN special envoy to Iraq. He killed upward of 180 Iraqis in March 2004 in bombing attacks at Shia shrines in Karbala and Baghdad.

To achieve his goal of rivaling or surpassing Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi apparently decided that something more theatrical was needed to raise his macabre profile. On April 10, Nick Berg, a twenty-six-year-old freelance construction contractor from suburban Philadelphia, went missing in Iraq. He ended up in Zarqawi’s hands to be used for what can be considered ISIS’s first beheading video. Wearing a ski mask, Zarqawi stood behind Berg, unsheathed a butcher’s knife, grabbed Berg by the hair, and sliced his neck as the American let out an agonizing scream. Zarqawi kept sawing away until he severed Berg’s head, which he held up like a trophy. Zarqawi’s group wasn’t called ISIS then. The group would change names seven times over the next decade, but bloodlust and the strategic use of macabre videos would remain central to its group identity.

Zarqawi picked up the tempo of atrocities as 2004 wore on. He bombed Shia mosques during midday prayers, killed the odd
government official, blew up Iraqis signing up for jobs in the army, and assassinated Shia clerics at a rate of two a week.

After the shuttering of the
Hawza
and the growing Sunni insurgency, it was open season on journalists. My NBC team started traveling in convoys of two vehicles or more so we would have a getaway car in case one was hit or broke down.

The bombing at the Australian embassy signaled that 2005 would be the year that the insurgency moved into full swing. The much-hyped parliamentary elections were scheduled for January 30. To hear American officials tell it, all Iraqis had to do was drop ballots into boxes and their miseries would be over. The country was abuzz over this supposed gift of freedom.

Trouble was, almost no one—including American officials; Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, the interim leader handpicked by the United States; and the UN, which organized the elections—saw how the political deck could be stacked. But Sistani and the
hawza
, a web of Shiite seminaries and clerics after which the radical Shiite newspaper was named, understood that it was a simple matter of turnout. Their ground game left nothing to chance: they told fellow Shiites that casting ballots was a religious duty. The Sunnis, feeling embittered and betrayed by what they saw as America’s favoritism toward the Shiites, decided to boycott the voting. The decision would cut Sunnis off from power, alienate them, and play into the hands of fanatics like Zarqawi, but the boycott did have a certain logic to it. Sunnis had watched US forces topple their patron, Saddam Hussein, disband their beloved army, and watched the United States organize a vote that, because of their majority, could only help Shiites even more. Sunnis decided they didn’t want to play the American game and would opt out. Under ordinary circumstances, an election
probably would be fatally tainted if about a third of the population, including most members of one religious group, stayed away from the polls. But Washington didn’t seem to care. It was enough that the elections took place as planned. It
looked
like democracy.