WAR CRIME Chapter 1
With photographs by the author
Chapter One
'Liberation'
"We feel helpless, you want to go crazy. We are educated. We feel helpless, we feel angry. What about the less educated ones who feel angry and helpless? If the Americans do what they plan to do, they will trigger a massive wave of terrorism. You will see a lot of suicide bombers."
- Jordanian businessman Labib Kamhawi, in Amman, March 15th 2003 - four days before the invasion of Iraq.
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The night receptionist at the al Manar hotel, Amman, Sufian Abu Mohammed asks me,
"Shall I wake you if bombing begin, Mister Hugh?"
Good idea, Abu Mohammed. Yes please.
I sleep. Bedside phone rings.
It's 4.42 am.
"Mister Hugh, Al Jazeera say bombing begin."
In the hotel lobby, in front of a two-bar electric fire, Abu Mohammed flips between CNN, BBC, al Jazeera, al Arabiya....
"I am sad for the people," he says, "I am sad for the people."
- 19th March 2003.
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Al Manar hotel bar. Two men drinking ice-cold beer - an anaesthetist and an orthopaedic surgeon. They attended medical schools in London.
They’re watching Al Jazeera on the TV. Images of war.
"This is not humanity, it is criminal. This is a bad thing."
"Is Saddam a good thing?" I ask.
"It should be the people who decide to remove their leader, not someone from thousands of miles away. This will only breed more fanatics."
- March 22nd 2003
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"There is freedom, but there is no security."
- a woman in Baghdad, after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
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Amman to Iraq, April 9th, 2003.
A moonless night in the desert. A dark road with no white lines. Little traffic.
We're a convoy of three white SUVs: reporters, cameramen, producers, satellite dish technicians, drivers - and a security adviser (ex-military).
Sixteen people heading for Baghdad.
After two hours driving through the desert in the dark, bright street lights.
This is Ruwaished, between the Jordanian capital Amman and the Iraq border.
Supper. Tables pushed together for us, in Ruwaished's only large restaurant. Marble floor, ceiling fans, a bulky old TV attached to the wall with a steel bracket.
After rice and kebab - and tea - we drive to a house with no furniture, rented by the BBC as somewhere to wait and sleep until the border crossing opens in the morning.
Bureau chief Andrew Steele has anticipated demand for red wine, & for Dutch Amstel lager (brewed under licence in Jordan).
The security adviser briefs us. Anxious faces.
"As you may have heard there has been some activity on the road to Baghdad today. The ITN 'soft skin' took twenty hits."
Are they all right?
"Nobody was hurt, luckily. CNN were waved through the first American checkpoint to the second - who then proceeded to open fire on them."
Are they all right?
"Yup. They jumped out and started shouting, "We're Americans."
A short night's sleep on rectangles of thick yellow foam on the floor, three or four of us to a room. Dogs barked in the distance. Alarms set for 4 am.
I slept well.
We head for the Iraq border, mostly in the dark. Green road signs count down the distance, fleetingly illuminated by our headlamps.
Iraq Border
50 kilometres
40
30
A faint strip of dawn emerges ahead of us.
20
The mobile phone signal reduces and disappears - no mobile phone network in Iraq, only landlines. We have satellite phones.
It's a cool April morning in the desert, with a vivid orange sun.
There's a dawn chorus of sparrows.
And there's a duty-free shop. It's open. At 5 am. Additional supplies of wine and beer
Jordanian police hand out 'personal declarations' which they insisted that we sign - absolving them of responsibility for us.
WE HAVE BEEN INFORMED BY THE CONCERNED AUTHORITIES
THAT THE HIGHWAY TO IRAQ IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.
THEREFORE, WE DO NOT ADVISE ANYONE TO USE THAT HIGHWAY.
I ________________________FROM_______________
PLEDGE TO LEAVE THE JORDANIAN TERRITORIES ON MY OWN PERSONAL ACCOUNT AND THAT THE GOVERNMENT WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR GUARANTEEING MY SAFETY.
SIGNATURE__________________
In the no man's land between the Jordanian and Iraqi border fences we fill up with cheap petrol, dispensed by hand pump from a road tanker. Cash. Two litres for a $1. Source unknown. We don't ask. It looks clean and smells ok.
No Iraqi border formalities, just a canvas-roofed US army Humvee and a relaxed American soldier in a soft hat and an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, in sandy camouflage for desert combat.
Imperious above us on a plinth there's a portrait of Saddam Hussein and a sign in Arabic & English:
Welcome To Iraq and The Great Leader S......
His name has been mostly obliterated with black spray-paint. But not his face.
We drive past it onto a empty four lane highway and head east in bright morning sunshine.
Desert Road.
There are picnic areas along the highway, with tiled tables and concrete parasols.
We come across a tour bus, empty and abandoned. The windscreen has been cracked and punctured by shrapnel from an explosion. Most of its windows have been blown in, black curtains are flapping in the gaps. There's a company name on one side of the bus, and its slogan: Happy Travel.
The front and rear doors are open. There's no obvious evidence of death or injury.
I learned later that it had been a civilian bus. Three passengers killed and several wounded by a bomb dropped seemingly in error from an American plane.
The Pentagon apologised.
The explosion had made a deep wide crater in the road nearby, leaving scorch marks around it and rough lumps of fractured asphalt. The viaduct carrying the road across a dry river bed had been partly collapsed by the bomb.
We drive on. Four vehicles, a few metres apart - at 160 kph (100 miles an hour). I worry that a tyre might blow. The GMC I'm in already has a cracked windscreen.
Sign: Baghdad: 530 kilometres (331 miles)
Relentless, monotonous desert with occasional rocky outcrops. Some of us sleep, others read the last newspaper we'll see for a while. Looters Run Amok In Baghdad & Basra is the headline on the front page of the English-language Daily News (published in Beirut, on sale in Amman).
On the highway near Rutbah, an oasis town in the western Iraqi desert with a population of about 30,000, there's a service area with fuel. We are filled up by a bearded middle-aged man holding a wad of Iraqi Dinars with Saddam Hussein's face on them. But he wants dollars.
It's about 9 am. It feels hot. A sleepy dog strolls over from its spot in the shade and sniffs at us. Near the fuel pumps there's a donkey tethered by a rope.
Towards the western suburbs of Baghdad, the road has been blocked by a yellow garbage truck and a red double-decker bus (the kind you might see in London).
Curious, friendly Iraqis approach us cautiously and explain that the bus and the lorry had been dragged across the road by American forces to create a barrier to stop people driving onto the highway to go into Baghdad to go looting.
They want us to help get the bus out of the way.
So that they can go looting.
We drive awkwardly past the obstacles over a high kerb.
Three American tanks rumble along the other side of the divided highway. They're followed by a Humvee armoured car which lurches towards us and stops abruptly. An American soldier jumps out, urgently shouting a warning:
"There's a detonation going off in less than a minute."
It was a lot less than a minute.
Loud explosion. (They were securing an ammunition dump).
My recording was partly eclipsed by one of my colleagues exclaiming "Fucking Hell!" This required deft editing before I could include the sound of the explosion in a radio report without annoying listeners who would more likely complain about bad language than about bombs.
We roll on into Baghdad. Our passports are checked at a rudimentary checkpoint, where piles of earth have been bulldozed to improvise a chicane of 'berms'.
Almost no traffic in the suburbs of the capital. A few cars and vans heading out of town, some of them stacked high with what looks like looted furniture. Shops are mostly closed, and secured with heavy steel doors and large padlocks. Abandoned sand-bagged machine-gun positions at some junctions.
We arrive in the city centre and park outside the Palestine Hotel - half of it has been commandeered by US forces, the rest mostly by journalists. The hotel is between the Tigris river and Firdaus Square (Firdaus means paradise), where a substantial statue of Saddam Hussein had famously been pulled down a few days earlier with the help of an American army crane, and then decapitated.
There's an unarmed but restless crowd in front of the hotel. Coils of razor wire separate them from a detachment of US marines, whose faces are strained with confusion and anxiety.
A middle-aged man wearing a helmet and a green Iraqi army uniform pushes to the front of the crowd, holding up a strip of white cloth in each hand. Shouting across the razor wire he offers to surrender to the Americans.
Men in the crowd shout "No! No!" They hit him in the face, on his head, on his back, on his chest. The blows are audible. One man wearing a striped shirt and a baseball cap punches him in the head and knocks him to the ground. The hapless victim's shirt and jacket are torn off. The man in the baseball cap kicks him as he screams "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!” in English.
A US marine intervenes; wearing thick gloves, he slides the razor wire to one side, grabs the Iraqi by the collar of his shirt, and pulls him to safety.
In ten days in Baghdad in April 2003, this intervention by US forces was the only law enforcement I saw. Looters, shooters and thieves did pretty much whatever they liked.
Disorder in Baghdad became routine.
Hot Weather, Hot Mood.
There were frequent angry anti-occupation demonstrations in Baghdad in April 2003, by people furious that the heavily armed Americans appeared to be doing nothing to stop the looting and the destruction of public buildings & institutions that was taking place in the capital.
Banners demanded safety and security, the restoration of civil society and the formation of a democratically elected government.
One banner complained: "They are protecting the oil and leaving the stores, universities and hospitals."
American soldiers watched, often with weapons drawn.
On white bed-sheets hanging from Baghdad apartment windows there were hand-written messages in English: "War Kills The Innocent", "Courage for Peace Not War" and "Life is Sacred."
The crowds of protesters included engineers, university professors and students.
One young man told me:
"I'm a civil engineer, graduated from university. We are happy because Saddam has gone, but what about the future? America gave these thieves and criminals the opportunity to destroy my city."
An assistant professor of modern history at the University of Baghdad complained:
"The Americans destroyed the system which was established here and didn't provide any substitute. The people want to live a normal life, they want to feel secure, they want to feel safe in their homes. The important thing is my safety, is my security, is my food, is my fuel. What is the use of liberation without security?"
A communications engineer asked me a rhetorical question:
"Why do you think we are such an angry people? It is in our nature to be angry. It is the hot weather, you know. Hot weather, hot mood."
Another man, heaving with emotion, almost wept as he told me:
"We dreamed of liberation from Saddam Hussein, we dreamed of celebrating by dancing in the street. But now the Americans have killed that dream, and they are killing our happiness."
One morning, as a crowd chanted Down, Down, Bush!, a woman complained to me about the seemingly endless disorder. When, rather lamely, I suggested that at least she was free to speak her mind to a foreign reporter, she replied:
"Yes, we have freedom. But we have no security. Freedom without security is not useful."
She taught me a telling phrase, in Iraqi Arabic; it transliterates approximately as Horrea aku, bis markou ammen. "There is freedom but there is no security."
This was to be true in Iraq for at least the next ten years.
There were also early indications of resistance by supporters of Saddam Hussein. In another demonstration in Baghdad a man spotted me and uttered a warning (again, in English) that there were military units being trained and paid to shoot at American troops, "for as long as they feel like it. This will never stop, this will never stop."
Before I could ask him who he was and how he knew this, he'd slipped back into the crowd. This was an early, persuasive sign that Saddam Hussein supporters were not admitting defeat.
Another source of growing anger was power cuts, which often lasted for hours. The first few nights that I spent in Baghdad (a city of about seven million people) it was so dark that I could see the moon and the stars clearly as I walked the streets. I have a photograph of the mosque in Firdaus square in which the only light is from a pair of vehicle headlamps and from a full moon. Most evenings there was no mains electricity, with the only power coming from diesel generators providing light for pharmacies and for a some apartments.
Few landline telephones worked, and those that did only managed local calls.
The only cell phone network in Iraq in 2003 was in the Kurdish north. Nationwide coverage wasn't fully developed until 2007. By 2019, there were nearly forty million cell-phone subscribers (the population then was about 35 million). The first internet cafe in Iraq opened in May 2003, but was able to connect to the worldwide web only via satellite.
At night Baghdadis had to endure startling sounds of gunfire and explosions. Some of the shooting was by American forces, some was aimed at them, the rest came from residents of Baghdad protecting their homes and their businesses. Neighbourhood Watch with Weapons.
Most mornings, as the sun rose, these menacing sounds would merge with an apocalyptic blend of terrified dogs, and chickens that seemed to be screaming.
US forces distributed single sheets of A4 around town. They were printed in Arabic on one side and English on the other:
Message to the Citizens of Baghdad
Coalition forces make the following appeal. In the interests of your safety, please avoid leaving your homes during the night hours after evening prayers and before the call to morning prayers. During this time, terrorist forces as well as various criminal elements are known to move through the area and to engage in hostile acts. Please approach Coalition military positions with extreme caution, making it as clear as possible to the forces manning those positions that you are not a threat.
This appeared a few days after an American tank had opened fire on the Palestine hotel, where many journalists were staying and where a hand written note pinned to a door warned that media personnel were not permitted to carry weapons.
The tank was crossing the Jumhuriya (Republic) Bridge across the Tigris. The crew mistook a Reuters TV camera on a hotel balcony for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. They fired a round at it.
This is part of the Reuters 'dope sheet' (summary) for their footage of the incident, in which one of the agency's employees was killed and several others were injured.
The numbers indicate minutes and seconds from the start of the tape.
Story Text: IRAQ: WAR ON SADDAM: JOURNALISTS / PRESS KILLED @ PALESTINE HOTEL: PRESS IN DANGER
00.02.44 TANKS FIRING FROM BRIDGE - SMOULDERING BUILDING
00.04.42 REUTERS OFFICE IN PALESTINE HOTEL DAMAGED BY TANK FIRE
00.04.56 WOUNDED REUTERS FEMALE SENIOR EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENT BEING CARRIED BY REUTERS COLLEAGUES TO A CAR - CAR LEAVING
00.06.54 REUTERS CAMERAMAN, TARAS PROSTYUK (UKRAINE) COVERED IN BLOOD, SEVERELY WOUNDED, BEING HELPED BY COLLEAGUES - PUTTING HIM INSIDE CAR.
00.07.22 WOUNDED SPANISH CAMERAMAN JOSE COUSO CARRIED TO CAR - LOT OF SHOUTS AND PANIC WITH LOTS OF PRESS
00.07.59 BODY OF REUTERS CAMERAMAN, TARAS PROSTYUK LYING IN HOSPITAL MORGUE
00.08.34 WOUNDED REUTERS FEMALE SENIOR EDITORIAL CORRESPONDENT IN WHEELCHAIR WITH BLOODY BANDAGES ON HEAD
00.08.50 REUTERS STILLS PHOTOGRAPHER WITH HEAVILY BANDAGED HEAD AND FACE.
Media attending hostile environment courses are now advised to consider what their equipment may look like from a distance, especially to nervous troops or insurgents.
The outline of a large TV camera on a shoulder may look like a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The pistol-grip of a stills camera may look like....a pistol.
How to win friends?
A Baghdad street, mid-April 2003.
A gum-chewing US Marine, armed with a knife, a side-arm and an automatic rifle, shouts at a middle-aged Iraqi man in English:
"Hey you! Stand back! Stand back!"
A few seconds later a man in a car with two small children on the back seats, gets the same treatment - again in English:
"Move the car! Back up now! Back up now!"
There's a simple word for saying 'get back' politely in Arabic - erja.
The US Marine who'd killed an entire Iraqi family at a checkpoint a few days earlier tried to justify what he’;d done with: "Everyone understands the word Stop."
No they don't.
Millions of Iraqis are poor and uneducated.
The Arabic for stop is keff.
One Friday in north Baghdad, the Marines didn't even seem to know it was Friday.
"We're trying to keep peace in their neighbourhood and they're getting aggressive," said one.
An Iraqi told him, in English:
"On Friday we have our holy time - for Allah. We don't like the American army coming here in our holy time, OK?"
On another occasion, the crowd dared the Americans to fire.
"I have the weapon. I'll shoot you," said the soldier.
"Shoot me!"
"I'll shoot you! I have the weapon, back up! Please!"
"Shoot me."
"I'll shoot you."
"Shoot me!"
The Americans backed up.
"Ok, we're leaving"
"Ok. Thank you! Tammam! (OK)"
The Americans seemed unprepared, out of their depth, culturally insensitive, and provocative. They were antagonizing peaceful crowds, failing to realise that although many of them had welcomed the defeat of Saddam Hussein they also wanted order and security.
One of the Geneva conventions (No. 4, Article 20) states that an occupying force has a duty of care towards civilians, and for the security of hospitals.
The Americans claimed they had too few personnel to guard hospitals. Or most museums.
But Colonel Eric Schwartz told reporters that he was proud that his unit had managed to protect the Iraq national museum - despite coming under attack from it, he said:
"When we went into the area, I was taking quite a bit of fire from the museum. And from the 21st of March when we crossed [into Iraq] from Kuwait, to the 7th of April when we occupied Baghdad, we've been taking fire from mosques and hospitals, and I had a guy step out of an ambulance with two AK-47s in his hands shooting at my soldiers. I've had firing from schools - every dirty trick in the book by the Iraqi army. They shot at us from the children's museum! You don't just bring tanks and Bradleys [small tanks] into downtown Baghdad if it's not a secure area. I know everybody wants a piece of the army but I can't do it all."
When I reported this apologia to a Baghdad woman protesting at the American occupation, she said,
"When you get rid of Saddam, you look for something better. I used to like the Americans. But now, after seeing what they've done, I can't stand them anymore. They are treating people like slaves, taking away our dignity."
"Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad."
Late one afternoon I received a call asking me to go to the Iraq National Museum. There were reports in British and American newspapers that it had been looted.
A BBC driver and an interpreter agreed to take me the five miles across town. As we drove through the centre of Baghdad, there was smoke rising from several districts, some of the streets were partly blocked by burned-out cars, buses and trucks, and a few people were walking briskly along in the fading light looking anxious and distressed.
Next to a mosque with a dusty blue dome, the museum grounds were full of rubble. The main door into the museum administration block was broken, with scorch marks around it.
There were signs on the main gate to the museum compound - in Arabic and English: Warning. Museum Under Protection. A passer-by explained that there were armed museum staff inside defending the building against looters, and advised us not try to enter by the front entrance as it was getting dark and we might be mistaken for thieves. And shot at.
We went round the back and into one of the offices. A desk had been mostly destroyed, its drawers ripped out. Books, papers, and partly burned files were on the floor covered in dust and broken glass. There was an acrid smell of fire that had been recently doused by water.
Unable to get inside the museum galleries to see if anything significant had been looted, we left.
As we drove away, we came across a tall young man with a bandana across his nose and mouth standing on a street corner with a loaded rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his shoulder pointing towards our car. He glanced briefly at us, swung the RPG away, and pointed it down the road. I have a recording of our driver saying, "Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad..." as we drove off.
The national museum had been only partly protected by indignant Colonel Schwartz. Before he secured the site, looters had made off with artefacts - though not as many as was at first feared; museum staff anticipated the looting and took many small items home with them for safekeeping.
But the two main universities in the Iraqi capital were not secured at all.
Looters helped themselves to most of the electrical wiring at Mustansiriya (founded in 1227, and one of the first universities in the world).
At the University of Baghdad, the library was set alight and its approximately six hundred thousand books, manuscripts, and maps were destroyed. The history of a nation.
Two years later, in an audit of this epidemic of looting and destruction, UNESCO estimated that more than eighty percent of Iraq's educational institutions had been destroyed or severely damaged.
Further startling details about this plague of looting emerged.
Food was frequently stolen from a warehouse run by the World Food Program.
Vehicles and equipment belonging to electrical technicians were stolen while they were carrying out repairs at a power station.
At a Baghdad sewage plant, so much equipment was looted that the plant broke down, and an estimated one million tons of raw sewage were discharged every day into the Tigris river and its Diyala river tributary.
Years later another arresting statistic was released. From the start of the US occupation in 2003 until their 'end of mission' nearly nine years on, more than three hundred academics at Iraq universities were murdered.
Wandering Around
To have relaxed encounters and spontaneous interviews with Iraqis, I mostly just wandered around - making eye contact, smiling, sitting down with people over glasses of sugary tea, or sharing nargile (hubble-bubble) water pipes.
Or I went shopping for gifts to take home. Iraqi dates, for instance. In Karada in central Baghdad - a mixed district where Sunni, Shia and secular Iraqis live, and a significant community of Christians too - there was a shop called King of Dates. Dates from Baghdad, Basra, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia. The manager assured me that dates from Medina were the best (they were the most expensive), followed by those from Basra. He leaned conspiratorially towards me, tapped his nose, and advised me that dates from Basra were famed for their benefits as 'Basra Viagra'.
Early one spring morning I wandered out in bright sunshine to visit the fallen statue of Saddam Hussein.
Two middle-aged, English-speaking brothers were there - Favid, a thin man with angular features, and his larger brother Sobar with spectacles attached to a cord around his neck.
They had come to Firdaus Square to see the husk of the statue of their president - now without its head.
"He's gone, he is gone, he is empty, he is empty."
I wondered if it was reasonable, in Saddam Hussein's defence, to acknowledge that he had done some good things for Iraq; roads, schools, compulsory English classes for young children, & the best universities in the middle east (with free tuition largely funded from oil revenues).
"He used some of Iraq's income for public services but the rest was for his own pleasures, and for the elite dignitaries around him. He was like a rich father who spends ninety percent of his income on his pleasures - whisky and cabarets - and ten percent on his children and wife."
I asked the two brothers if they were still afraid of Saddam & his supporters.
"To some extent, yes. It's possible that remnants of the old regime are still there. They still have their weapons with them. They could take vengeance," said Favid.
Sobar added: "They say that he has five people who look and act and speak like him - his 'doubles'. We are afraid that when you find him, you will get the wrong one."
"That's funny, but not funny," I suggested.
"We say they are things that make you laugh and cry at the same time," said Favid, "that make you laugh and cry."
Another evening during the same week in mid-April 2003, I wandered around Baghdad with my camera after dark and filmed from a street corner.
The only constant source of light was from a pharmacy with its own generator.
There was no power for the streetlights. The only other light came from car headlamps. The street was busy with people whose faces were fleetingly lit up by flames from kebabs cooking over charcoal - or even more faintly lit by the glow of coals on top of nargile water pipes.
For our first few days in Baghdad, my colleagues and I shared military-style MRE's - Meals Ready To Eat; you bend the pack until you hear a 'click' that triggers a chemical reaction which generates heat to warm the food. Ours were a civilian version called 'Self-Heating Meals'. One of the choices was meatballs and pasta in tomato sauce. We'd swallow these bland offerings with the help of cans of Heineken, available from enterprising street traders for a dollar a can. Iraq had not (yet) become an Islamic state.
I soon abandoned those dreary packets and headed across Firdaus Square into one of the unlit streets to sit on a plastic chair and dine on skewers of fresh lamb kebabs and a glass of cold Laban yoghurt drink, followed by a nargile water pipe. I was welcomed as if I were a local. My Arabic is limited, but I know enough to order basic food and to ask for my preferred tobacco flavour for the water pipe - double apple.
The Palestine hotel became a hub for three groups of people; American soldiers who were billeted there, journalists who had rooms in the hotel, and educated English-speaking Iraqis who gathered in the lobby every morning looking for work as interpreters for the American military or for the media. These Iraqi men (nearly always only men) were generally smartly turned out in perfectly ironed shirts and they mingled in the lobby with soldiers with rifles slung over their shoulders.
A small souvenir shop in the lobby sold carpets, key rings, copper coffee jugs and post cards. A young American soldier picked out tourist images of Iraq's pilgrimage cities Najaf and Kerbala, and of the archaeological sites at Nineveh and Babylon.
I asked him a silly question - did he really need to carry his rifle when he was shopping for souvenirs & postcards?
"Where would you like me to leave it?" he grinned.
And - guests were begged to hand in their room keys to reception before leaving the building:
The Palestine hotel had once been part of the international Meridien group. There were Persian carpets on the marble floors of the lobby - marble imported from Italy. There was a wood-panelled dining room mimicking carriages on the Orient Express. And there was a ballroom - its flat roof taken over as a media village and open-air studio overlooking the square where the Saddam Hussein statue had been torn down. The elegant blue-domed Firdaus mosque on the far side of the square became a familiar backdrop for live broadcasts by TV correspondents, and for interviews with American generals, foreign contractors, aspiring Iraqi politicians, clerics, priests, and citizens pleading for stability and good governance.
A delegation of clerics from the spiritual leader of Iraq’s Shia Muslims (60% of the population), Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, came onto the Palestine's roof one afternoon to appear on Arabic TV channels to reassure former supporters of Saddam Hussein (most of them, nominally at least, Sunni Muslims) that they had nothing to fear from the majority Shia population. The Ayatollah's spokesman Saeed al Khatib told me:
"We are working to serve this society - Sunnis, Shiites and Christians together, our hearts are united under one God. We want a new leader who will protect the rights of all Iraqis."
- Should Iraq's new leader be secular or religious?
"We want real Muslim leadership."
- The Americans won't like the sound of that.
"The Americans do not represent us."
An irony was emerging - that after liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein, the Americans and the British appeared to be helping to establish a second Islamic Republic with strong religious ties to its neighbour Iran.
Kahraba Makou
Kahraba makou is Iraqi Arabic for "There's no electricity." I first heard those words within a few days of arriving in the country, and it remained largely accurate during nearly thirty visits over the following fifteen years. The chronic absence of electrical power was a symptom of a feeble failure of planning. It added energy to the armed resistance. It was a significant factor in the loss of thousands of lives, and in the willingness of Iraqi families to give shelter to extremists.
Iraq is fiercely hot in summer. 45°C common (113°F), and often a lot higher. It can be cold in the winter. Liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein also liberated Iraqi businesses to import domestic appliances that required a reliable electricity supply; there was a boom in sales of air-conditioning units, refrigerators, freezers, TVs, and satellite decoders.
And of petrol generators.
"Within the next forty-eight hours in Baghdad we're going to be able to have rolling power throughout the city," Major Don Broton, a civic affairs officer with the US marines, told me. It didn't happen. Not within forty-eight hours, days, or weeks. Not even in forty-eight months.
I'd met Major Broton in the lobby of the Palestine hotel, where I’d asked him getting the city's power back on. He invited me to go with him to a meeting of senior managers and engineers from Iraq Electricity.
I sat in the back of an open-sided Humvee armoured car with a canvas roof as we sped down the boulevards of Baghdad towards some open ground next to an electricity sub-station. There, in bright spring sunshine, there were handshakes, kisses on both cheeks, smiles, hugs and tears. These colleagues were mostly seeing each other for the first time since the invasion a months earlier - also for the first time since the city's electricity had been severed. It wasn't the only thing that had been cut off - one of them told me they hadn't received their salaries for a month. As he spoke, there was sporadic rifle fire in the distance.
Their first task was to get a large generator running so that they could have a meeting in an office out of range of any small-arms fire. Their first obstacle was that the substantial shed that contained the generator had been commandeered as accommodation for a detachment of US marines and their amphibious assault vehicle.
From behind a locked gate the Americans were polite and amenable, and asked the Iraqis for identification. The senior grid manager for Baghdad, English-speaking Gabriel Tatian, pulled a crumpled makeshift ID from his pocket. A marine unlocked the gate and let the engineers in.
Problem. The generator needed an ignition key. The key had been left in the sub-station office. The office had been looted. After raking through debris on the floor, it was found.
Mr. Tatian tried to switch the generator on. Click. Silence. Despondent faces. The fuel tank was empty. I reckoned the assault vehicle at the far end of the shed probably ran on diesel, so I went and asked for some.
US Marine Scott Stuttler from Thousand Oaks, Ventura County, California said "Sure! How much do they need?" He filled a five gallon (25 litre) green jerrycan with diesel, carried it over, and poured it into the generator's fuel tank. Turn the key again. Generator roared into life.
In a city with no power, no telephones, no post, no newspapers, no TV and no radio, making this gathering of senior Iraq Electricity engineers happen at all was a logistical triumph. Most of the directors general of the Iraqi electrical commission and many of their staff were here. Major Broton told me it had taken him nearly four days to achieve this:
"I put the word out on the street that the senior management figures should please come to the Palestine Hotel. It was amazing how many of them came to offer their services; they were determined to get the power back on."
It was a daunting task. Demand was rapidly overtaking the capacity of Iraq's antique power stations to keep up. Supply had already been inadequate before the invasion, and the problem was compounded in its aftermath by a combination of looting, sabotage, security threats to staff, and delays by contractors who were spending only a tiny fraction of the millions of dollars that they’d been allocated for repairs.
The sabotage included transmission towers (pylons) pulled down in order to recover copper cables, which were then sold as lucrative scrap. In June 2003, the destruction of just one main transmission tower cut all power to Baghdad for four days.
Beyond the inconvenience and discomfort of living without a reliable electricity supply, the chronic shortage of power had other serious effects which added to the frustration of Iraqis; water pumping stations needed a reliable electricity supply, and pumps at fuel stations couldn’t work during powers cuts unless they had their own generators.
Pilgrimage
Flip-flops slapped onto dusty roads. Thousands of pilgrims headed towards the holy city of Kerbala. Apart from a few cars and vans, just the sound of people walking.
They came on their own, and in pairs, and in groups of families, neighbours and friends, many with green or black religious flags. This was the Arbaeen pilgrimage marking the fortieth day after the death in the Battle of Kerbala of the prophet Muhammad's grandson Imam Hussein in the year 680 (in the Christian calendar), and of his half-brother and flag-bearer at the battle Imam Abbas.
Fearful of the emotional strength (and number) of the Shia majority in Iraq - and of the political strength that might develop if they were able to gather in one place - Saddam Hussein suppressed the annual Arbaeen festival. The pilgrimage in April 2003 was the first time in more than twenty years that it had been permitted without severe restrictions.
The crowds on the roads to Kerbala looked like a mass migration. Some began their walk in Basra, nearly five hundred kilometres (300 miles) to the south, others set out from Baghdad - a hundred kilometres to the north. Most walked, while some of the infirm, the old and mothers with babies travelled in buses, cars or farm trailers towed by tractors.
Kerbala is a major destination for pilgrims and tourists. It is one of the holiest cities in Islam, home to a pair of substantial mosques with golden domes - shrines to Imam Hussein and Imam Abbas.
When the pilgrims arrived in Kerbala, ritual chanting filled the streets of the town. "We come on foot to visit you, Imam Hussein!", "We are with you, Oh Hussein!" repeated over and over again, accompanied by rhythmic chest-beating with both hands - and in one case by a smiling man beating his chest with his left hand and giving me a thumbs-up with the right (which my reflexes weren’t quite fast enough to photograph).
A small boy on his father's shoulders proudly copied the rhythm while not quite matching the beat. A woman in a black abaya cloak beat her chest with one hand and held her grand-daughter in the other. The wide-eyed little girl looked startled each time her grandma's hand came thumping down.
Outside the Imam Abbas shrine, a densely packed crowd of pilgrims gathered around two lines of men in bare feet moving in step to the bang of a large drum and a clash of cymbals, striking their backs with chains. The chains wore away patches of their shirts and reddened the skin beneath.
Street preachers told the story of the beheading of Imam Hussein at the Battle of Kerbala. Pilgrims wailed and wept.
But the mood was mostly of cheerful celebration.
One evening I walked along the ‘promenade’ between the two great mosques, their gilded domes floodlit in the dark. People looked at me quizzically, returned my smile, and shook my hand when I told them where I was from.
A man with an image of Imam Hussein strapped to his forehead urged me to take his photograph. About twenty others leaned in so that they could be in the picture too. Women under black abayas sat in small groups on the ground and smiled broadly as the light from my flash lit up their faces. And all along the palm-lined promenade and in the broad public spaces around the mosques pilgrims slept on the sandy ground - old men under blankets, young boys curled up together, mothers with babies deeply asleep. There were more smiles when I said, "Good night, baby!" in Arabic.
This commemoration of the life and death of one of the grandsons of the prophet Muhammad had another layer of meaning in the new Iraq of spring 2003 - celebrating its liberation from the cruel and oppressive rule of Saddam Hussein. Several pilgrims called out to me, "Thank you Bush! Thank you Blair!"
But some insisted that the Americans and the British should leave Iraq to Iraqis to decide their future themselves. "Freedom under occupation," said one man, "is not freedom."
One morning, as thousands of pilgrims continued to arrive in Kerbala, I walked out of town against the flow for about three kilometres so that I could walk back alongside them.
I stopped at a deep pool of water where a man had detached a donkey from a wooden cart loaded with cooking gas cylinders and was leading it into the pool to cool the animal and clean it. He cupped water over it with his hands.
Some young boys were swimming there too. A few of them smiled and waved, but others rushed out of the water and began shouting at me. They seemed unstable, troubled. A passer-by saw my discomfort and shooed them away. His name was Ahmed. He took me by the hand and led me along a footpath into an apple orchard, where he lived in a one-room cinder-block dwelling, white-washed inside and with bright rugs on the floor.
I sat cross-legged with Ahmed and his wife and children. The room was home to two families, with ten children between them. At night fifteen people slept in this space. Ahmed earned his living from the apples, and from selling dates from a single palm. I ate some of its dates from a glass bowl on the rug next to me. They were soft and sweet.
Ahmed explained that the children who had been mobbing me by the water hole were about twelve years old, and that their fathers had been killed by Saddam Hussein's forces during the Shia uprising in the south of Iraq in 1991- the popular uprising which was encouraged by President George H. W. Bush after the first Gulf War.
When they did rise up, Bush abandoned them. The rebels were rounded up by the Republican Guard and taken to a stadium, where they were tortured, subjected to punishment beatings, or executed. Despite a no-fly zone imposed by the United States which was still officially in place Saddam's forces were able to use helicopter gunships to slaughter fleeing rebels from the air. This massacre came to be known as the second Battle of Kerbala. Ahmed told me that his father’s punishment for being part of the uprising was to be disabled by gun shots to both of his knees. The father of one of Ahmed's friends was hanged.
Walking round Kerbala I'd noticed that the brickwork on most of the homes, shops and offices near the two great mosques was bright and new. In 1991, the centre of Kerbala was heavily bombarded with artillery. Buildings near the mosques were mostly destroyed, and the mosques themselves were severely damaged. Rebels who sought refuge inside them were murdered. Thousands were killed in the second Battle of Kerbala, and buried in mass graves. In 2005, a mass grave containing dozens of unidentified bodies was discovered a few hundred metres from the Imam Hussein shrine.
Murder and torture were not the only punishments meted out to the people of Kerbala for daring to challenge the might of their cruel president.They were also impoverished by neglect. As we sat on the rugs in his home sipping glasses of black tea, Ahmed hoped that the Americans and the British would address this other legacy of Saddam Hussein's tyranny and not abandon them to poverty for a second time. He said his family could only afford to eat meat once a week, and fish once a month.
I thanked him for his help and for his hospitality.
"Good-bye, and good life!" he replied, in English.
Ahmed is on the right in the photograph:
I walked back into Kerbala surrounded by pilgrims and the sound of their flip-flops on the road, picking up pace as they approached the golden domes of the shrines. Many walked barefoot on the tarmac. Two boys sitting on a brick wall flashed smiles and thumbs-up to my camera.
In town a group of men fighting over a few small loaves of bread reminded me of Ahmed's remarks about poverty.
That evening I met another victim of Saddam Hussein's sadism - Hussein al-Shahristani, a dissident who had been imprisoned and tortured in 1979 and held in Abu Ghraib gaol near Baghdad for nearly twelve years.
He is a nuclear physicist, and graduate of Imperial College in London. He was gaoled when he refused to help Saddam develop nuclear weapons. He spent eight of his Abu Ghraib years in solitary confinement. After eleven years and three months behind bars, Dr. Shahristani escaped. He fled to Iran, and later to Britain.
As he spoke to me on a Kerbala hotel rooftop overlooking the illuminated golden dome of the Imam Abbas mosque and with the sound of chanting pilgrims surging up from the street, Shahristani was in mostly buoyant mood. He was born in Kerbala in 1942, so this was an emotional homecoming for him - the first time he'd been in the city since before he was locked up in Abu Ghraib.
But he was already anxious that the Americans were making poor decisions. "The way they are handpicking their advisers," he told me, "reminds the people of the previous system. If they try to impose rulers on us, it will just revive their memories of the previous regime - this is exactly how Saddam controlled the country."
Hossein al-Shahristani was a well-known, level-headed, and widely respected opponent of Saddam Hussein, and yet - he told me - no American or any other Coalition member had ever sought his guidance and advice.
"A Hoax on the American People"
The Americans and British invaded Iraq in 2003 on the basis of the now notoriously inaccurate claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction - including missiles that could be loaded with poison gas and used to attack British troops stationed in Cyprus less than an hour's flying time away. Large numbers of British tourists visit Cyprus too, which served as another lever for mendacious manipulation by the British government.
Six months before the invasion, the American vice-president Dick Cheney announced, "Many of us are convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon. Just how soon we cannot gauge." He added, "Intelligence is an uncertain business."
In a damning report published in July 2004, the Senate intelligence committee found that it been very far from certain that Saddam Hussein possessed any weapons that could be an imminent danger to the United States or to its allies. This bi-partisan committee concluded that the Central Intelligence Agency had failed to share information, had analysed intercepts and satellite photographs incorrectly, and had placed too much reliance on claims by Iraqi dissidents and exiles.
The CIA was also criticised for using data selectively in order to confirm conclusions that they had already reached. The committee concluded this had happened because of 'collective group-think' in the intelligence world, or what has since come to be known as confirmation bias.
This had created an 'assumption train' which led them to presume that Iraq had active WMD programmes. Ambiguous evidence of WMDs was treated as conclusive, and doubts were not shared with President Bush or with the intelligence services of his British ally Tony Blair.
One of the principal contributors to this WMD ‘assumption train’ was a Baghdad-born mathematician and former teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ahmed Chalabi. He had based his own 'intelligence' largely on the unverifiable testimonies of embittered fellow-Iraqi exiles. And on circumstantial evidence. Saddam's forces had dropped fatal nerve gas onto the Kurdish town of Halabja during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, killing between 3,000 and 5,000 Kurds. Hundreds of Iranian troops who had captured the town also died. Therefore, Chalabi argued, if the Iraqi president had been capable of using nerve gas twenty years earlier he must still possess such weapons now.
Whether or not he was influenced by Mr. Chalabi, Britain's prime minister Tony Blair projected an air of messianic certainty that Saddam Hussein still possessed chemical weapons:
"The intelligence," said Blair, "has established beyond doubt that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons. I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current."
In what came to be known as the 'dodgy dossier', some of the intelligence that the British relied on to justify going to war was altered by omission. The removal of eight words made it appear more persuasive than it had been before it was edited.
In the final draft of the dossier - before it was published - there was a key paragraph:
"Saddam is prepared to use chemical and biological weapons if he believes his regime is under threat."
When the dossier was published, the crucial qualification at the end of that sentence had been slyly removed:
"Saddam is willing to use chemical and biological weapons."
On the other side of the Atlantic there was another dodgy claim seeking to justify an assault on Iraq. The United States claimed that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda. They presented it as fact to serve their own purposes; if it had been true it would have been evidence of a link between the Iraqi president and the September 11th attacks in 2001 and would have provided strong grounds for attacking Iraq. But there was no link.
In an example of what would now be called gas-lighting, Tony Blair also implied that Iraq and al Qaeda were connected; on the night that bombs began falling on Baghdad, he declared to the UK parliament (on March 18th, 2003), "Dictators like Saddam, terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda, threaten the very existence of such a world [of order and stability]."
The implied link was a fabrication.
It was also improbable - Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the psychopathic killer from Jordan, was associated with the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam which was regarded by Saddam Hussein as a threat to his regime, and was on a watch list. Zarqawi also had his own Sunni fundamentalist group in Jordan, Jamaat al-Tawhid. They were rivals to al Qaeda. Al Qaeda had no significant presence in Iraq before the invasion.
A banner at an anti-war march in London in February 2003 mocked the fanciful notion of an Iraqi link with al Qaeda - suggesting that the only thing that Iraq and the terrorist movement had in common were the letters 'a' and 'q'.
These deceptions and lies have cost hundreds of thousands of lives. After the 2003 invasion, thanks to the disorder that it enabled, Zarqawi’s Jamaat group pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and Zarqawi established al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
AQI eventually morphed into ISIS, the self-styled ‘Islamic state’ which declared its caliphate in Mosul in 2014.
The Pentagon’s Man
The lies that paved the path to war suited the purposes of the devious Ahmed Chalabi, for whom the George Bush and Tony Blair were useful idiots.
Chalabi’s ambition was to become Iraqi leader himself.
He had lived in exile since he was fourteen years old. In 1958, the army staged a coup against the Iraqi king, Faisal the Second. Chalabi's family fled the country. The coup paved the way for Iraq to be run for more than three decades by Saddam Hussein and the Baath party.
Now, two days after the Saddam Hussein statue was torn down and for the first time in forty-five years, Ahmed Chalabi was suddenly back in Baghdad. He invited reporters and camera crews to a news conference at the Iraqi Hunting Club in the prosperous Mansour district. He arrived smug and portly, escorted by members of his own newly formed militia. They had automatic rifles slung over shoulders and their crisp new uniforms bore the newly sewn badges of the 'FIF' (Free Iraqi Forces). There were three hundred FIF altogether, funded and trained by the Americans.
