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Fernando Ariza/The New York Times
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We'd have these conversations, usually over dinner.
What would happen, someone would say, if the bad guys got inside the compound? What would we do then? We'd knock that around a little. Then someone would say, What if they actually got inside the house? Would it be better, for instance, to use a pistol, which was more easily controlled, or a Kalashnikov, with its greater accuracy and power? A discussion would follow. All the Westerners in Baghdad were having the same conversations. Some of us had already been kidnapped. Some had been killed. There was a story going round about a reporter for the
Los Angeles Times who had ordered his Iraqi guards to shoot him if any kidnappers managed to pull him from his car. Just kill me, he said. I don't want to end up in an orange jumpsuit.
What if the compound were overrun? For a time, we had a trapdoor built into the brick wall at the back. It led to the outside world, toward the Palestine Hotel, only a few hundred yards away, which housed a company of American soldiers. Then one day the Americans departed. So we talked about what it might take to land a helicopter inside the compound -- not enough room for that. Then we started talking about Zodiac boats, inflatable rafts we could drag down to the Tigris, fifty yards away. Paddle them over to the Green Zone. There was a lot to consider. Assuming, for instance, that space in the boats was limited, which Iraqis were we going to take with us and which would we leave behind? And how were we going to make sure the Americans protecting the Green Zone wouldn't mistake us for insurgents, out there in the river?
The bureau became a fortress, a high-walled castle from another century. We blocked off Abu Nawas Street, one of the city's main thoroughfares, which ran along the front of the house. We brought in a crane to erect concrete blast walls, a foot thick and twenty feet high. We strung coils of razor wire across the top.
We hired armed guards, twenty of them, then thirty, then forty. After a time, armed guards became our single largest expense. We gave each of them a Kalashnikov, and some of them kept grenades in their lockers in the basement. We put searchlights on the roof, then machine-guns, 7.62 mm, belt-fed. The French Embassy was around the corner, and we determined at one point that the bullets from our machine guns intersected with the bullets of the French guns in the area behind our houses. We liked that, the interlocking fields of fire.
Muscle at $1,000 a dayWe hired a security adviser, a former soldier, for near $1,000 a day, making him the highest-paid member of our staff. We bought three armored cars, including a BMW once owned by the German diplomatic service, for $250,000. Not long afterward, the BMW stopped a Kalashnikov bullet fired into its roof. Then there was the life insurance the newspaper took out for us, about $14,000 per month each, an amount we figured indicated that the insurance company had determined that at least one of us was not going to live.
The electricity in Baghdad usually lasted for only about four hours, so we generated most of our own. For $60,000, we imported a generator the size of a toolshed from the United Kingdom. We trucked it overland across Europe and then through Turkey and across the Iraqi border. Some of the Iraqis working for us went up to the border to bring it down, and on the way south they were stopped by insurgents.
"For the Americans?" the masked men kept asking.
"No, no," our guys said. "Not for the Americans."
Then they waved them through.
I trusted the Iraqis who worked for us. And if I hadn't trusted them, they would have proved me wrong. The Iraqis who worked for us could have done us in so many times. They liked the money we paid them, of course, but it was more than that, I think. Living through all that together, we wanted to help each other survive. Waleed, whom I always drove with -- he pulled me out of the crowd that day. Jaff saved me I don't know how many times.
Plus, the Iraqis who worked with us were getting killed. We Americans might have been cowering behind the blast walls, but our Iraqi employees had to go home at night. Fakher Haider, our stringer in Basra, was a man of few words and a large mustache. He'd fought against Saddam in the uprising in 1991, and in Basra's murky byways he could still make out the good guys from the bad. One night, a group of armed men who said they were police officers came to his house and took him away. Fakher told his wife not to worry, that he'd be back soon. He was found a few hours later in a deserted area outside the city, with his hands bound behind him and a bag over his head. There were bruises on his body and a bullet in his head. Fakher had been reporting a story about the infiltration of Basra's security forces by sectarian militias. He was our first, but not our last.
I never asked about loyalties. In July 2004, when Saddam Hussein was arraigned, the Iraqis on our staff sat riveted in front of the television in the newsroom. On seeing Saddam in the dock -- reduced, haggard, dressed in a cheap suit -- one of our translators began to weep. Jaff, who'd fought against Saddam, laughed out loud at the sight of him. On hearing Jaff, one of our Sunni translators, Basim, stormed away. "How dare you make fun of our president that way!" he said.
Trust was all we hadIraq was so complex, its ways so labyrinthine, that trust, in the end, was all we had. If we had tried to understand what was really going on outside, if we had tried to understand the pressures the Iraqis were working under, we would have left the country. In November 2005, one of our drivers, Emad al-Samarrai, told us that he'd received a series of telephone calls from a man claiming to be an insurgent. Emad was one of several members of the Samarrai family who worked for
The New York Times: his father, Abu Ziad, and his brother, Uday, worked for us, too. They were Sunnis from Samarra, and I presumed they knew insurgents. Most of our Sunni employees did.
Emad was so petrified that, with the help of some of the other Iraqis on our staff, he made a transcript of the threatening calls. It was impossible to know where the truth began and where it ended, but Emad was a delicate, sensitive man, and the fear in his eyes seemed real when he told us the story. Assuming the record of the conversations was accurate, it opened a window onto the world we never saw.
Caller: Emad, for how long have you and your father and brother been walking in this dark way?
Emad: Which way do you mean?
Caller: Which way? You know which way I mean.
Emad: You mean journalism?
Caller: Journalism, Emad? Emad, listen to me carefully. We have accurate information from trusted sources regarding your work, and your location near the shtar Sheraton. We know all the Iraqi staff, and we will work on killing them one by one.
Emad: Why?
Caller: Because we know you are not press, we know what goes on with you ...
The next day, the anonymous caller dialed again.
Caller: We have someone who works with you, who supplies specific information about you, we are tracing you and we know the nature of your work. You are not press but CIA, and the one who sits behind you in the car is CIA.
Emad: The CIA?
Caller: Don't act surprised. The one who sits with you in the car, the one with the gray shirt, is a senior official with the CIA. He destroyed Iraq.
The caller went on to tell Emad that the only way he could save himself was to bring one of the Western reporters to him. That is, to the insurgents. If Emad refused, the caller said, he and his cohorts would kill him and his family. That's when Emad came to us. Should we have believed him? We didn't have much choice. We decided to give Emad and his family two months off, and they left the country. When they returned, the threat had evidently passed, but after a time Emad and his brother left Iraq and did not return.
Incidents like the one with Emad made me wonder: Why do the insurgents let us stay in Baghdad? Out there in the wide open, driving around? Some of them had started killing reporters, and, sure enough, over time, most of the Western reporters left the country. Those of us who stayed kept on working. Sure we were crazy, but it was also true that the insurgents knew where to find us. They knew who we were. If they had wanted us dead, then we would have been dead. So why did they let us live? I assumed they had decided that we were useful to them. That was not a comforting thought, even if it meant they would let us survive ...
Jaff was always a step in front of me. That day when we drove to the mosque in Ad-Dawr where Saddam had been praying, my jaw fell open as I saw all the masked insurgents standing on the rooftops. I muttered something to Jaff and then I looked: He had already pulled his Browning out and was pointing it at one of the insurgents through the car window, as if to say, Don't even think about it. Jaff was tall and goodlooking, with a taciturn air he picked up as a member of the peshmerga, fighting the Baathists. He looked like Clint Eastwood and carried himself like Harry Callaghan, Eastwood's famous cop. Jaff was shrewd and calm, and, like Dirty Harry, he gave off the hint that he was enjoying himself.
As an American -- as someone who could leave Iraq anytime I wanted -- I sometimes found myself taking cheap thrills from my brushes with death. Most of the Iraqis I worked with had had enough of those. At times, Jaff, too, seemed like he was living off his adrenaline, seeing Iraq not as his home but as a great adventure. During the battle of Najaf in August 2004, Jaff and I waded into a demonstration of Iraqi pilgrims who had come, they said, to protect the Shrine of Imam Ali from an American attack. The crowd surged, and the Iraqi police panicked and opened fire. With gunfire ringing out and demonstrators dropping around us, Jaff and I took off running.
Then, three hundred yards down the road, he stopped.
"I forgot my sunglasses," he said.
So Jaff ran back, against the massive human tide, into the gunfire. I hid behind a telephone pole. He came running up a few minutes later, his $200 Ray-Bans in hand. They were a gift.
"Christine would have killed me," he said, referring to the reporter who'd given him the glasses. We resumed our running.
We were laughing, too.
The stakes for Iraqi staffers
Yet for all of Jaff's coolness, he'd known hardship as well. He'd survived many close calls as a guerrilla fighter, including street-to-street fighting with the Baathists in Sulaimaniya after the first Gulf War. Jaff's father was a prince in his tribe, the largest in Kurdistan, and in the poison gas attack on the village of Halabja in 1988, Jaff lost thirty-four members of his family.
Jaff was always listening, even when I didn't realize. Once I told him I'd spent a summer working on a natural gas pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico, and that my coworkers had been mostly rednecks from Louisiana. Their not-very-playful nickname for me was "college boy," which, I hardly needed to explain to Jaff, was short for "sissy." I was taunted mercilessly, I told him.
Some weeks later, Jaff and some of his friends found themselves at an American checkpoint in Adamiyah, a dangerous Sunni neighborhood in northern Baghdad. They'd gone out for late-night kebabs. It was a spooky part of town, and probably not a good idea to be out at all. The American soldiers weren't quite sure what to make of Jaff. They checked his pistol and they checked his weapons permit, and they handed them back. The Americans were friendly but they were intimidating just the same. One of them spotted his Thuraya satellite phone, with which, courtesy of The New York Times, Jaff could call anywhere in the world.
"Hey, let me see that," one of the soldiers said. Jaff handed it over.
"You mind if I use this to call my mom?" the soldier asked in a cocky way.
"Forget it, college boy," Jaff said, and all the soldiers burst out laughing at their comrade.
"Where'd you learn that?" the embarrassed soldier demanded. "Where'd you learn that?"
This excerpt from Chapter 12 of "The Forever War" was reprinted with the publisher's permission.
