LONDON, 23 September 2005 — In a small room up on the 12th floor of a Pennsylvania University student dorm, I spent my last night in America. The room faced on to the Schuylkill River, west of Philadelphia city. I looked out across the city, at the highways, the bridges and the smoke of the factories feeding the skies, and I thought of the greatness of this country: Its wealth, its electricity, its water — all the luxuries of life, as we have come to think of them in the new Iraq.
It was 4 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon when I took the decision to go back home, and abandon the Fulbright scholarship I had been awarded to study journalism. The main reason I wanted to return was to see my family: My two-year-old daughter, Sarah, and my newborn son, Adam, whom I had never seen.
I also wanted to go back and make more films about my country. The media in America didn’t reflect anything of the reality inside Iraq. There were stories about the new Iraqi constitution, about building the police force... but 12 car bombs in Baghdad would just get a small mention at the end of a news bulletin. I thought that if I could at least get back, I could make films that told the rest of the world what was really happening.
As I stepped out of the plane at Baghdad military airport, the heat of the pavement smacked me in the face. It felt like a slap from an angry Iraq: “Why did you come back?”
My house in Baghdad is 10 minutes from the airport. My driver home was a nice young Shiite man called Hassan. He asked me how long I had been away, and where I had been. Everyone is suspicious of everyone else; that was something we learned in Saddam’s time, but it is worse now. And anybody who has been away is regarded as a traitor. This man is going to drive me home, I thought. I must be careful.
A few minutes beyond the main airport checkpoint, we had to slow down. The US military were stopping all the cars to let their security convoy drive through. In addition, the private contractors transporting journalists and foreigners to the Green Zone had set up their own private roadblock. They were driving in this crazy way, swaying from one side of the road to the other in order to protect their charges. As they zigzagged in and out, guys in civilian clothes wearing flak jackets and sunglasses pointed their automatic guns at the civilians stuck in the traffic jam.
Hassan sighed and looked at the road ahead. “They are bastard sons of whores, blocking more and more roads. They make it impossible to be a taxi driver to the airport.” Ahead of us the traffic jam stretched for miles. It looked as if we were going to be there a long time. I asked Hassan about the situation in Iraq. “It’s worse.” I tried to press him a bit more, but I think he was sick of answering the same question from people arriving at the airport.
My apartment is in one of the middle-class suburbs of Baghdad. During Saddam’s time we were very secure and comfortable. It was near one of Saddam’s palaces, so there was always lots of security. It was well known that all of his security forces lived in the neighborhood.
Now it is the most dangerous place to live in the city. It is to the west of Baghdad, and insurgents coming from places such as Fallujah pass through, the battles with US forces taking place on my streets. Everywhere there is something: A car bomb, insurgents in the streets, men with their faces covered and Kalashnikovs in their hands. They control the area for a few hours, take a couple of shots at the Americans, and then flee. People in my street pretend they aren’t there.
My daughter Sara, born six days before the Americans reached Baghdad on April 3, 2003, was jumping about in the kitchen when I caught a glimpse of her from the front door.
“I’m back!” I said, as she jumped into my arms.
“I know,” she said. “I told the Americans to give you back.”
She knows that the planes belong to the Americans and that the last time she saw me, I told her I was going to the plane.
I was so hungry to talk to friends in Baghdad about the three months I had missed. In the first few days, I went everywhere, trying to find out what had changed. On the third day, after a long afternoon drive, I was stopped by an American convoy at the airport road. I looked at the young soldiers’ faces, all in their early 20s, and was reminded of the undergraduates I had met in Philadelphia.
One of them, Arman, was a smart young man with Iranian origins and a real interest in the Middle East, though he was born in the US. The first thing he asked me was: What do the Iraqis think of us? What is the US Army doing in Iraq? And then: Why do Iraqis kill American soldiers? A smart university graduate, he knew little, although he knew more than my university professors in Philly, who didn’t even know who the Kurds were. These thoughts were playing in my mind while I looked at the faces of the American soldiers inside their armored vehicles. Faces full of tiredness and of the question: Why am I here?
As I approached home on that third day back, a car bomb exploded on a bridge, shortly after I drove over it. Seven were killed and a dozen wounded, most of them civilians. It was a suicide bomber who had targeted a police patrol.
Three minutes earlier and I would have died. Something like this happens to everyone in Iraq these days. I have concluded that in the three months I have been away, there has been no improvement.
All I can see is disparate people trying to get through the horrible heat of another summer with the least means. My family looks at me as if I am crazy and a loser to have left America to return to this disaster.
Six days ago I arrived in London to collect the Amnesty International Gaby Rado award for human rights reporting, which I won for a story that I wrote from Fallujah shortly after the US assault on the city. I brought my wife and two kids with me this time. My wife, who like me is a doctor, had only ever been to Yemen.
(We fled there when we first got married because I had the bright idea in 2000, when I was 23, of setting up a business selling color photos, until we were visited by a member of the Mukhabarat, who reminded me that owning a color laser printer in Baghdad during Saddam’s time was punishable by death. I paid the bribe he demanded, and three days later we left the country for Yemen.)
On Monday (Sept. 19), in our hotel by the Thames, we watched the news about the trouble between the British troops and the police and militia in Basra. There was a huge fuss about it. I didn’t blame the British commander for rescuing his soldiers, but the thought struck me that, maybe now, they will understand the extent of the chaos. But I can’t agree that it is now time for British troops to be pulled out of Iraq. You cannot go immediately because the country will collapse — and it is you, after all, who brought the chaos. You destroyed Saddam, but you also destroyed a system that had worked for 50 years. You didn’t just take Saddam, you took the whole order: The police force, the way the police worked, the way security was kept and managed.
Withdrawal right now will mean the complete collapse of our society; if the British and US forces stay, the collapse will just be more gradual. I don’t want to be too pessimistic — I’ve thought about this for a long time — but I can’t see the answer. I’ve been all over Iraq in the past year, and been asked by many, many people what the best solution is. I don’t know.
What I do know is that the violence will increase before the constitution is voted on in December, and ultimately I believe my country will divide: The Shiites in the south turning toward Iran; the Kurds turning to themselves in their northern homeland, and in the middle — my broken country.
— After his award-winning reporting on the assault on Fallujah, Ali Fadhil went to study in America.
