Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (19 page)

The man mumbled something and ended his sentence with “Inshallah.”

“You’re saying it,” Captain Looney said. “You’re saying
Inshallah
. I don’t want to hear that word.”

A pair of blackhawk helicopters flew overhead. Military air traffic over Baghdad is constant, partly so insurgents and terrorists will always feel like they’re being watched from the air as well as the ground. And they
are
being watched from the air and the sky as well as the ground.

My Kevlar helmet was beginning to make my head hurt. I wanted to take it off, but I didn’t dare in the slums of Baghdad. The air smelled of garbage and piss. Home felt not only thousands of miles away, but years away.

Captain Looney asked the suspect what he knew about Haji Jawad. The man said he had never heard of him, which was a lie.

“That’s like saying you don’t know who Ali or Mohammad is,” Captain Looney said. “What
do
you know?”

The suspect kept talking in platitudes and had nothing of substance to say whatsoever.

“I’m tired of these motherfuckers,” one soldier said.

Captain Looney spoke into his radio. “These two individuals are living in squalor,” he said. “They’re pretty uneducated. I don’t think either one of them would be smart enough to even hit the switch on an IED. But we can still bring them in for interrogation, over.”

No one, including me, seemed to think either of them should be brought in and interrogated.

“Ugh,” said one of the soldiers and stepped back. “This guy breathed on me and I just about dry heaved.”

“Don’t get so close to him,” said Sergeant Gonzales.

“I was worried I was going to have to shoot a dog back there,” Captain Looney said to me.

“I thought you might,” I said, “when I saw one painted with the red laser dot.”

“I was just trying to scare them away,” he said. “They’re only doing what comes naturally. Dogs don’t make a choice. People make a choice to be good or bad.”

The radio squawked and he answered. “I think it was bad intel,” he said. “I don’t think these guys have anything to do with who we’re looking for.”

One of the soldiers who was searching the van stepped out with something in his hand. “Sir,” he said. “We found three M4 magazines and a military map of Fallujah.”

A military map of Fallujah?

“Let me see that,” Captain Looney said.

The soldier produced the map and unfolded it. Sure enough, it was exactly like the maps I had seen on the walls inside U.S. Marine bases in Fallujah last year. An American Marine sergeant’s name was written on top of the map with a red pen. How did these guys get that map?

“It’s not wise to have U.S. military stuff in your house, bro,” Captain Looney said to the suspects.

“Okay,” said the first.

One of the soldiers scrolled through the names in each suspect’s cell phone.

“What’s your boss’s name?” Captain Looney said to the second.

The man mumbled Abu something-or-other. I could not quite make it out.

“Abu” means
father of
. Arab men often adopt a second name for themselves after they have a son. Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas is also known as Abu Mazen, for instance, which means his son is named Mazen.

“Abu…” Captain Looney said. “What’s your boss’s
real
name?”

“I think it’s Mohammad.”

“You
think
it’s Mohammad?” Captain Looney said. “Seriously? You don’t even know who you work for? Listen. If you keep acting this goddamn stupid, I’m going to detain you for the simple fact that no one can be this stupid unless they’re hiding something.”

It is not at all apparent from this exchange, but Captain Todd Looney has a lot of respect for Iraqis in general. I have spoken to him at length, and I’ve seen him interact with Iraqis who aren’t being detained on suspicion of terrorism. It’s only fair that I point that out.

It’s also only fair to point out that these Iraqis may not be as dumb as they come across. It’s common knowledge that Iraqi police officers frequently abuse those they arrest. Not everyone in Baghdad knows or believes that American soldiers rarely do so and will get in serious trouble if they are caught. And you’d be scared, too, if you were flex-cuffed and aggressively questioned. No one wanted to say anything about Haji Jawad because they were rightly afraid of violent retaliation.

And don’t be shocked by the profanity. Military men don’t talk like accountants, and they never have. “I don’t trust an officer who doesn’t cuss,” I heard Captain Looney say to another officer earlier that same day. “We have a nasty job. Our job is killing people.”

He really does not like to kill people. “I’m a pacifist, man,” he had told me in his office. “At least I’d like to be. Of course I know
how
to fight any time that’s what the enemy wants. I’m ready whenever they are. But it’s not what I’d rather be doing.”

Some soldiers and Marines I’ve spoken to feel slightly uneasy in Iraq now that they rarely get into firefights. Many don’t feel comfortable with nation-building and peacekeeping, partly because it is not what they trained for, and also because it is not the kind of thing warriors generally do. Nation-building is political work. Most soldiers don’t join the army to become politicians.

One night I asked Captain Looney which he prefers: kinetic fighting or nation-building?

“I vastly prefer this,” he said. He meant nation-building. Killing people does not make the would-be pacifist happy.

“Some soldiers tell me they prefer fighting,” I said.

“They’re immature,” he said.

“That’s a good answer,” I said. And it was. Killing people really is a nasty business, no matter how necessary it sometimes may be. So is raiding the wrong house in the middle of the night and scaring old women and children. It had to be done--don’t get me wrong--but I felt horrible watching it happen.

“Get up,” Captain Looney said to each of the suspects who knelt in the mud in the slum junkyard.

“I am at your service,” said the second suspect, the man who had been shaking in fear the entire time. “If I’m guilty, take me.”

“Get out of here,” Captain Looney said. Then he cut the man’s flex-cuffs.

The other man’s flex-cuffs likewise were cut. Both were free to go.

They were afraid of American soldiers that night, so they ran. God only knows what they think of Americans now. Did they feel humiliated? Or were they more surprised that they weren’t arrested and beaten up? The Iraqi police might not have been nearly so lenient. And the Iraqi police today are extraordinarily lenient compared with Saddam’s Iraq police that these men had grown up with. The two suspects might have an even lower opinion of American soldiers than they once did, or they might think better of them today. I have no idea.

All of us--Captain Looney, Sergeant Gonzales, the rest of the soldiers, and I--walked back toward the waiting and idling Humvees that would return us to base. We had come up empty. We did not have the most-wanted terrorist flex-cuffed and blindfolded in the back of one of the trucks. All we had was more mud and muck on our boots to show for the effort.

“Why the
fuck
are you here voluntarily?” Captain Looney said to me.

I didn’t know what to say.

Chapter Seven

The Woman Who Blew Up the Arab World

Tunisia, 2012

“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” – Edward Lorenz, mathematician and chaos theorist

On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the streets of Sarajevo—a fateful act that triggered a series of events culminating in the First World War.

Ninety-six years later, on December 17, 2010, an impoverished Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of city hall in the small town of Sidi Bouzid—another fateful act that changed the history of an entire region forever.

Protests supporting Bouazizi first turned to riots and then revolution. The crooked authoritarian ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was overthrown in Tunis less than a month later. A copycat uprising in Egypt led to a bloodless military coup against strongman Hosni Mubarak. Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi was next on the list, though this time it took civil war and aerial bombardment from NATO to be rid of him. Protests against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad mushroomed into a multi-sided civil war featuring the Free Syrian Army, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Al Qaeda-linked Jabhat al Nusra, and the even more terrifying Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, which eventually--and perhaps inevitably--sucked int he United States.

Princip died in prison four years after killing Austria’s archduke. He knew what his actions unleashed on the world. He couldn’t participate any further than he already had, but he knew.

Bouazizi only survived his self-immolation for a couple of weeks. He languished, comatose, in a hospital in Sfax the entire time. He had no idea he inspired even a protest, let alone a revolution, a coup and a number of wars.

He killed himself because he could not make a living. And he did it before city hall because he blamed the government.

According to rumors and initial reports, a female police officer spent months picking on him for selling fruit from his cart without a license. Things came to a head when she confiscated his goods and allegedly slapped him. When city officials refused to give his stuff back, he poured gasoline over his head, lit a match and set the world ablaze.

The woman who allegedly slapped him is named Faida Hamdi. I met her at a quiet park just off the main street in town, where she said almost everything published in the media about her is wrong.

We sat in plastic chairs on the grass behind a swing set for children. She ordered—and insisted she pay for—glasses of sweet tea from a concessionaire. A man who looked like an ultraconservative Salafist brought the tea over. I wondered what he thought about a local woman hanging out with an obvious foreign infidel, but if he was perturbed, he didn’t let on.

“First of all,” she said. “I’m not a cop.” She worked for the municipality as a civilian. “My job was to chase away illegal fruit vendors. I don’t carry a gun. I don’t have a truncheon. I don’t carry a weapon at all.”

She said she hadn’t been picking on Bouazizi, that she had never even spoken to him before that day.

“I had been tolerating his illegal work for a long time,” she said, “but that week I had an order from the ministry to confiscate any merchandise sold from any illegal vendor from that particular place. So I was doing my job. When I confronted him, he said, ‘Why are you targeting me? If I paid you bribes, you wouldn’t target me.’”

She said she didn’t take bribes, but the city was known to be crooked. Maybe she was clean. I don’t know. Either way, her bosses were not.

Though she said she confiscated the electronic scale Bouazizi used to weigh fruit, she emphatically denied that she ever slapped him.

“He pushed me,” she said, “and actually wounded me. So I screamed.”

Some local men told me he may have grabbed or hit her breasts. No one seemed to be sure. I didn’t ask her about it. Why embarrass a modestly dressed Muslim woman with such a question? She suffered enough humiliation during the revolution. The entire country and much of the rest of the world thought her a tool of a repressive police state.

The flip side of everyone believing Bouazizi grabbed or hit her breasts is that such a story—even if it isn’t true—improved her image in the minds of others. She was no longer perceived, at least not by everyone and at least not exclusively, as the aggressor.

I didn’t ask her to talk about her breasts, but she did tell me Bouazizi hit and pushed her.

“I called the police,” she said. “They weren’t armed either when they showed up, nor did they attack him. They just pushed him away so he couldn’t hit me. They confiscated his things and took him down to the station.”

An eyewitness told a reporter from the London-based Arabic newspaper
Asharq al-Awsat
that she didn’t slap Bouazizi but that the police really did beat him. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. We’ll never know.

“In a small town like this,” she said, “a woman hitting a man is a headline. But the rest of the day was normal for me. I went home as if nothing had happened. Then I got a call that Bouazizi had burned himself.”

According to the international news media, Bouazizi was a university graduate struggling to eke out a meager existence, the Tunisian equivalent of an American with a master’s degree in literature or philosophy working the barista counter at Starbucks. It made for a great story, but it wasn’t true. His family said he did not even graduate from high school. Lots of kids in towns like Sidi Bouzid don’t finish high school. Their families sometimes struggle so mightily that it makes at least short-term sense for the kids to drop out and work.

Don’t get the wrong idea, though. Tunisia isn’t Third World. Sidi Bouzid is about as bad as it gets, but it’s clean, orderly and not too hard on the eyes. It isn’t horrifying like the slums of Bangladesh or Cairo’s City of the Dead. Sidi Bouzid is just depressed and a little bit hopeless for most who don’t leave.

Everyone I spoke to in town, and in the also impoverished nearby city of Kasserine, said Tunisia’s poor are yearning for jobs. No one said they wanted handouts or subsidies from the state. They wanted to work. They’d work their fingers bloody for scandalously small amounts of money. Hamdi herself made only $50 a month. The cost of living in Sidi Bouzid was low, but still. Fifty dollars a month is practically nothing. My lunch that day cost less than $2, but it was 4 percent of her monthly salary. An average house rents for $200 a month. A big one rents for $300 a month.

Government spokespeople said Bouazizi sold fruit without a vendor’s license. His family said he didn’t need a license, that the real reason the law brought down the hammer was that he didn’t pay bribes. Whichever version of the story is true, the government tried to wring money from him that he didn’t have.

I don’t know what his politics were, but the complaint that drove him over the edge was hardly based in radical Islam. His complaint was libertarian, frankly, though he likely hadn’t heard such an American word.