Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (16 page)

It’s a hard story to love. Ibrahim, willing to obliterate his son to obey a voice from behind the clouds. A petulant God, subjecting his servants to loyalty tests. I meditated on Ibrahim in the Middle East and the more I thought about it, the less I liked the story and its suggestion that faith is enough to excuse the stain of violence. Ibrahim’s God abruptly demands bloodletting in contravention of his own laws. Maybe it won’t accomplish anything grand. Perhaps God would just like to see how far the faithful will follow. As for Ibrahim, he accepts on blind faith that the voice in the sky is not a dream or a hallucination, but marching orders from God himself. This, in fact, is his great virtue—that he doesn’t question or argue. This is the moral of the story. Let us proclaim the mystery of faith, the Catholics say. The trouble is that, centuries later, the Middle East is still packed with murderers who believe they are doing God’s will, privately attuned to the ring of God’s voice. This is still how Middle Eastern battles are fought, by Arabs, Israelis, and now by Americans, too. Blind faith is the footbridge that takes us from virtuous religion to self-righteous violence. That day was the crystallization, a celebration of capricious mercy and murder in the name of faith.

In modern Iraq, families who lost loved ones in Iraq’s many wars pour into graveyards to grieve at the tombs on Eid. Saddam Hussein would be hanged on Eid al-Adha in 2006
,
in an American-occupied Iraq, while Shiites taunted him. It just worked out that way, officials said.

The stringer arrived before dawn to take us to the cemetery. She had cotton-white skin and black robes, and when she came into the room they whispered that her father was a martyr. His name was Ahmed Shawkat; he was a journalist and a Shabak Kurd, a member of an ethnic and cultural minority centered around Mosul. He ran a newspaper and had written a book on the controversial topic of Mosul’s founding; his efforts had earned him death threats. One day he climbed onto the roof to use his satellite phone. Somebody stole up behind and shot him at close range. They found Ahmed Shawkat sprawled in blood. There was nothing very unusual in this story, only that he was her father, and now she lived under the martyr’s mantle. She had been awake for hours when she arrived at the hotel in the dark. She had already gone to the graveyard alone, to pay her respects.

Sun cracked the horizon at the cemetery, and the land breathed with tides of mourners who pushed and paused, wandering from one family tombstone to the next. Early spring had breathed on the hills, but the tang of cold bit our faces and numbed our fingers. Beggars came, and children, trailing over grass rich as felt. Graves sprouted Iraqi flags, crossed daggers, pierced hearts. Sticks of incense smoked and trashy sweets glistened from the earth. Women keened over graves, singing songs of doomsday: “The God who created heaven and earth can do the same again. If he wants it to be, he’ll say, ‘be.’”

A twenty-nine-year-old man named Ahmed Younis Muhammed stood over the grave of his oldest brother. Like thousands of his countrymen, the brother had been shot dead in the epic folly of the Iran–Iraq war. Muhammed’s family had been suffering ever since: he couldn’t find a job, and they could hardly make ends meet.

I asked him whether his family would slaughter an animal that day. He winced.

“We don’t have anything to sacrifice,” he said, quietly and deliberately. “We have sacrificed enough. We’ve spent our lives sacrificing. All we do in this country is sacrifice.”

Blackbirds circled overhead. Little girls in brilliant dresses blew along the paths like loose petals and, crying and singing, kissed the dirt. Flapping cloth and robes gave the feel of row after row of clothesline. Our heavy-eyed stringer ghosted along before us. The fresh green smell of earth wouldn’t leave my nose, life exerting itself on a field of death.

Soon we left the graveyard and went looking for an animal sacrifice. When we saw a truck cruising past with a lamb in the bed, we followed. We lost the lamb, but wound up on a side street where we caught sight of a young cow being led through a gate. This was the home of a merchant named Jamal Almola. He was a mountain of a man with a thick mustache; he wore bright white robes and his family huddled around his table, drinking sweet juices in anticipation of their feast. While we all stood around introducing ourselves, the cow hoofed at the driveway nervously, tied near the marigolds.

What does it mean, I asked Jamal Almola, this blood sacrifice?

“This is like a prayer,” he said. “We will give the meat to poor families, to help the poor families.”

The cow snorted in panic.

I tried to get Jamal Almola to speak more expansively about the slaughter, but he was having too good a time. He brushed the questions aside, urging juice upon us and begging us to stay for dinner.

The children watched while the men held the cow down on the threshold of the house. They turned its face toward Mecca, and a relative named Rashid cut its throat. The cow did not die quickly. It shivered and twitched. The blood bubbled and surged, swelling over the pavement. The children giggled and knelt down, poking their palms into the blood, playing with it. The men hacked the warm cow into pieces. We kept stepping back delicately, farther and farther, trying to find a spot of dry ground. But the blood grew; it followed us over the soil. It was swallowing everything. Finally I gave up and knew it would stain me, too.

The sky was still steel overhead, and the city had the drained-away swoon of a holiday in progress. We would eat, we would leave, we would drive back to Baghdad … but the satellite phone rang. It always started like that, breaking through the conversation.

There had been suicide bombings in Kurdistan, at the headquarters of the two main Kurdish parties. There were a lot of people dead. How many? A lot, a lot. Dozens, for sure. Maybe seventy. Maybe a hundred. We were the closest and so we should rush there as fast as we could. In my mind I released the story of sacrifice as I’d released so many other stories when news broke—let go the string and let it rise into the sky until it disappeared.

Driving into the mountains of Kurdistan is like leaving Iraq for another country. The Kurds are not Arabs. They had problems of their own—the civil war fought among Kurdish parties; the armed Muslim fundamentalists the Kurds had allowed to flourish in the hills near the Iranian border. But there were moments when the rest of Iraq came barreling up to Kurdistan, and all their internal rivalries drifted off as light as blown dandelion seeds, forgotten for the night and collected again in the morning. This was one of those times: suicide bombers had blown themselves up at the same minute in the headquarters of the two rival political parties. Because it was a holiday, the party faithful—the men and their children—had called on the headquarters to pay respects. The message was meant for all Kurds, and it was not hard to translate: We hate you, and we will slaughter you.

We found Irbil smothered in thick clouds. A cold nosebleed of rain dripped down over empty streets. By then we knew at least one hundred were dead, maybe more. A middle-aged man limped through the wet dimness, his pants and shirt smeared with blood. He was cut by shrapnel and he was in shock, stumbling homeward.

“We didn’t feel anything,” he told us woodenly. “The place. It was all fire and smoke. Until now, I cannot hear anything.”

He had gone to pay his respects to the Kurdish Democratic Party. He had been caught up in the explosion, and now he wandered the streets.

“Why do you think this is happening?” I asked.

“You understand the matter better than I do,” he said coldly, staring at my American face.

It was quiet for a minute. I heard Raheem groping for another way to phrase the question. The man snorted.

“This is the freedom of sacrifice,” he said. “It seems we must sacrifice for Iraq’s freedom. First we got rid of a bloody regime, and now we must sacrifice still more blood.”

And then he limped off, into the rainy night, into the great uncertainty of Kurdistan and Iraq beyond.

A long driveway stretched down and then twisted around to the side of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Kurds came from the shadows, gathered around, and bore us inside. They were angry and they wanted to show their wounds to the world. Tattered party streamers still flapped in the naked winter trees. A green banner announced:
We welcome our respected guests
.

A hurricane had been locked inside the main hall. The couches were blasted open, the tiles peeled down from the ceiling, speakers thrown askew, empty plastic chairs strewn like toys. Plastic flowers oozed on the ground, scorched and gummy. There were tangles of ribbon, hats, and shoes that had been blown off the victims. Children’s shoes, too, and gaudy little hats like Easter bonnets. I looked at all those hats and shoes and knew the people who had put them on this morning were probably dead. We were stepping around in wet puddles, and in the back of my mind I was remembering the cow, and the spreading tide of its blood. It seemed like a long time ago. But this is not blood, I told myself, this will be … water from broken pipes, or gasoline, or just anything else, something ordinary, the fluids of a building. But then I looked down and saw what I’d already known: Blood. Puddles of blood spread over the floor, and pieces of flesh floated in the red slicks. It was on my shoes; I waded in it. Animal blood in the morning and human blood by nightfall. The blood was fresh under my feet.

One day killed the next in Iraq, and the months rose up to murder their forebears, and it all piled up into one year and then the next. The blood kept flowing until it covered everything.

It was getting harder and harder to find a piece of dry ground.

W
hat kind of place would Jordan be if it weren’t marooned on the map between the West Bank and Iraq? By now the country has been shaped by neighboring wars—census redrawn by the massive resettlement of Palestinian refugees, politics defined by making nice, memories stained by spillover fighting. And yet, in itself, Jordan doesn’t leave a deep impression. As capital cities go, Amman is bland: A spread of hotel lobbies and snips of desert and sleepy hills; a sand-hued turnstile churning the somnambulant traveler from one vivid elsewhere to the next. It is a city trading on its placid nature, destined and designed to be passed through on the way to, or from, bigger problems.

It was 2004, the time of year when gritty winter still clings to the landscape, and the sky sagged heavy as a damp sheet onto Amman’s seven hills. Nora
*
shushed up to the curb in a car thick with perfume and pop music. It would have to be Mecca Mall, she said. We didn’t have much time.

“Hey,” she pointed at a minivan up ahead. “I think that’s a
mouse
.” This was Nora’s code. It meant “I think that’s an intelligence agent.”

“How can you tell?”

“The picture of
flower
. Look how big it is. The
mice
love those pictures. They all have them.” (“The picture of the king. Look how big it is. Intelligence agents love those pictures. They all have them.”)

“I see them everywhere.”

“Well …” She tugged at the wheel. “There are a lot of
mice
.”

I knew something was wrong when I sat across from her at the café. Nora’s face played emotions like a movie screen—the jellyfish squeeze of her pupils dilating and contracting, catching pieces of light, the half smile that hung on her lips, always about to stretch into a shout of laughter that would rock her frame and squeeze her eyes shut. Today her shoulders hung low and her features had a vacant look. She had pulled her personality back, buried it deeper in her head.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, Megan,” she said with rote cordiality. “I’m fine. How are you?”

I laughed. “I’m fine, too.” She laughed too, a quick stab, and then her face sank back into ashy stillness.

“I can’t believe this about Abu Ghraib,” she said.

So that was it.

“I know,” I said.

I wasn’t supposed to have met her at all; it was a mix-up from the start. That had been more than a year earlier, when the invasion of Iraq was just beginning. I was stranded in Amman, waiting to go to Baghdad. For the time being everybody was frozen in place, the border closed, and the road to Baghdad a cemetery of bombed-out cars. Reporters stuffed Amman’s hotels, steaming and scheming into their beer at night. They twitched with plans to sneak into Iraq, or they had been in Baghdad already but lost their nerve and fled Saddam and his alleged arsenal of mass destruction. We all had the smell of meat in our noses, close but out of reach; we were crazed with hunger, not for a story, but for
the
story. Reporters begged for Iraqi visas from the embassy of a nearly defunct government, and waited for permits from the Jordanians to drive to the Iraqi border. We hunted for generators, stocked up on Cipro, piled helmets and flak jackets against minibars.

Spring came too early and too hot that year. Sandstorms clawed at buildings and machines. Fog came in the morning and bound the city blind, wrapped like bandages around the buildings. In these glaring, wilting hours, the televisions squawking nervously about collateral damage and new world order were as obscene as anything you can
imagine. The invasion began and blood wafted over the sands, over the border, on eye-stinging winds. Amman filled with people and the people kept talking and all that gas built into pressure, sizzled like carbonation through the nightclubs and bars, hissed down the highways at night and punched lonely border outposts. Jordanians, aid workers, Iraqis who’d gotten out all mixed together, everybody on edge, angling and outraged. There were no proper nouns except Iraq and the Americans, Saddam and Bush and Blair. Waitresses plodded up behind glazed faces; sad hotel clerks stared over teeming lobbies; cashiers dropped coins into white hands with a sneer. The truth of the invasion was new and angry. It had been a suggestion that seemed impossible until, with the smooth birth of enormous news, it became real. Some faceless pilot dropped the first bomb into Baghdad and the war had come. Arab countries melted into pure rhetoric. People shouted about the Americans and spat on the ground to clear their mouths of bile. The Americans would take over all Arab lands. There was no more United Nations, no more decency, no more rules. This is terrorism! They are the terrorists! George Bush is a terrorist! The Americans wanted land and oil, they hated Muslims, and they were doing it all for Israel. This was the new face of colonialism. American power would redraw the borders. And the Arabs wouldn’t stand for it. They would fight to the bitter end, every last one, the portly man smoking in his great-grandfather’s coffee shop, the pampered middle-aged princess with her Botoxed forehead and husband’s crooked bank accounts, the calloused farmers of the Nile Delta.