BAGHDAD, IRAQ – Fadia was crying when we arrived, but she quickly explained that it wasn’t serious. The teenager was hungry and had a stomachache. The pain would soon pass, she said, as tears welled up in her red and swollen eyes.
Her family’s home–in a tiny, poverty-stricken Christian ghetto in Baghdad–was one of my first stops after arriving in Iraq. Her uncle works in my apartment building in Chicago, and he had asked if I could check on his family. Being Christian in a predominantly Muslim country, they had long felt insecure. Now they wondered whether their situation had grown more precarious.
After reading a letter from her uncle, Fadia invited my driver and me to sit in the shade of her family’s front porch. Her parents were at the market, she said, and would return in a few hours. She served tea and cold water and eventually talked about her life in Baghdad.
These days Fadia and her two sisters, Wassan and Rasha, are rarely allowed to leave their small house. They are too afraid, she said. Rampant crime has imprisoned many Iraqi women within their own homes. The war has also led to a rapid rise in Islamic fundamentalism, which strongly discourages women from appearing in public without a male escort. Fadia and a lot of other women have been frightened into hiding. Understandably, Christian women, discriminated against for hundreds of years, are doubly scared.
“There is no security,” said Fadia, anxiously. “We cannot go out.” Instead, she and her sisters sit in their sweltering house, which boils for several hours each day when the electricity shuts down.
Nowadays security–or, rather, the lack of it–is all anyone wants to talk about in Iraq. Westerners and wealthy Iraqis cower inside five-star hotels, protected by razor-wire and American tanks, and warn each other not to walk alone–even up the block to buy a pack of cigarettes.
The American occupational government, the Coalition Provisional Authority, has barricaded itself behind layers of intense security, completely isolating itself from the Iraqi people and just about everyone else.
The U.S. military is so freaked out that it recently shut down a main thoroughfare in front of a hotel occupied by soldiers, forcing Iraqi motorists to take a detour through a narrow side street, jamming traffic for blocks.
There are no military patrols through Fadia’s neighborhood and there is no visible Iraqi police presence. The Americans have warned Iraqis not to carry weapons. If they do, they’ll be treated as combatants. Unfortunately neighborhoods cannot defend themselves against the armed bands of hoodlums who roam unchallenged throughout the sprawling city.
Many of the criminals now terrorizing Iraqi citizens were among the 40,000 convicts whom Saddam Hussein released from Iraqi prisons before the war. But the Americans have so far shown little interest in rounding up the worst of these bad guys, which has only increased the general state of anarchy and fear.
In the holy city of Najaf, two hours south of Baghdad, hundreds of mourners silently baked under the noontime sun and watched as workers sifted through the rubble of a car-bomb explosion that had killed Shia religious leader Mohammad Baqir al Hakim and almost one hundred others.
Iraqi police were barring reporters from entering the bomb site, claiming that the mourners were angry at the media for publishing photos of the victims. “They are shooting journalists,” a policeman warned. But one local man, a former Iraqi soldier, helped my driver and me slip past the barricades. I snapped a couple of quick photos before Safa, my driver, hustled me across the street. “I fear you are crazy,” he said.
Moments before he was assassinated, Hakim had delivered a sermon criticizing the Americans for not allowing Shias to protect themselves. And his message echoed in the crowd when I arrived two days later.
“The Americans cannot protect us,” said one mourner, who would not identify himself. “We must be allowed to protect ourselves against these criminals.” Others standing nearby forcefully voiced their agreement.
Several minutes later, on the opposite side of the mosque, an angry crowd gathered to threaten a thief who was being arrested by Iraqi police.
Despite widespread calls throughout Iraq and America to give Iraqis more control over their own security, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Hakim, along with a brother who sits on the Iraqi Governing Council, led “Badr’s Brigade,” a religious militia that disarmed under American pressure. Hakim’s final sermon demanded that the Americans allow his brigade to rearm. Two days after the bombing, members of Badr’s Brigade were spotted carrying AK-47 rifles, unchallenged by American soldiers.
But an armed Badr’s Brigade could easily spark a civil war.
A week before he was assassinated, Hakim’s militia clashed with ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq after local Shias–ethnic Turks–blamed the Kurds for the destruction of a newly built Shia shrine. The fight lasted for days, and at times threatened to bring the Turkish Army into the conflict. If Badr’s Brigade is allowed to rearm, the Kurds will undoubtedly pick up weapons.
Then there’s “Sadr’s Brigade,” also called “Army of the Mahdi,” a still-unarmed radical Shia organization led by Muqtada Sadr, a young, charismatic cleric who wields huge influence in Baghdad’s sprawling Shia slum, Sadr City.
The Sadr family and the Hakim family have feuded for years, and if Hakim’s brigade is armed Sadr will surely move to “defend” himself against his rival Shias. Sadr is also loudly anti-American, repeatedly denouncing Hakim and his brother for cooperating with the occupying powers.
And then there are the various Sunni Muslims, who would soon get into the act, followed by every other faction, tribe, sect, and political party.
It seems that almost everyone here believes we’re sitting on a precipice, leaning toward civil disaster. But it didn’t have to happen this way. A year ago, American General John Abizaid published an internal Defense Department book about urban warfare. Abizaid’s “Doctrine for Joint Urban Operations” was all but ignored by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, who ran the Iraq War and the initial occupation.
Abizaid wrote about the massive troop requirements for urban warfare; warned of the rapid burnout of soldiers and equipment assigned to urban battlegrounds; and time and again referenced catastrophic instances of over-confidence and under-preparedness among commanders and of disastrous misunderstandings of local cultures and their motivations. He also stressed how “essential” it is that “law enforcement” and other “routine activities” be “returned to civilian agencies as quickly as possible.”
Abizaid was brought in a month ago to clean up the mess created by Franks and Rumsfeld. But it may be too late.
Meanwhile, back in Baghdad, Fadia’s mother and father, Janan and Hermes, finally arrived home. After using my satellite phone to call her sister and brother-in-law in Chicago, Janan sat uncomfortably and talked about her life, citing the expected complaints about crime, the lack of electricity, the harsh treatment by Muslims, and the absence of jobs.
I asked Janan how she felt about her family’s future.
“I can only hope,” she said. “I can only pray it gets better.” Then she asked
if I would please take her daughters to America.
This article appears in Sep 11-17, 2003.
