WAR CRIME Chapter 2
July 2003. Back in Baghdad.
Arrived on a Friday evening and checked into the high-rise Ishtar Sheraton hotel overlooking the Tigris river. The Sheraton had seen better days. Its carpets were musty and worn. But the cylindrical glass lifts still worked - gliding up and down with a clear view into a large lobby. I was given Room 1315, on the thirteenth floor.
Leaning over the edge of the balcony to get a decent signal on my sat-phone, I called an output editor in London. She wanted a report for her programme on Sunday morning. A bit tight starting on a Friday evening. Just one day to gather material and - I hoped - turn it into a radio report conveying a sense (and sound) of being on the ground in post-war Baghdad.
On Saturday morning I went for a walk along nearby Saadoun Street to see who and what I could find. Serendipity usually serves me well.
There was more traffic in the city centre than in April. A few traffic lights were functioning. And were mostly ignored.
It was hot: 45°C (112°F). I could feel intense dry heat on my face from two directions - from above, and reflecting from the road surface.
Most of the shops were shuttered, but a travel agent was open - and a stationery store, a tailor's shop, a couple of small restaurants, a money changer's, and a cinema. A few hawkers were selling fruit and soft drinks from stalls shaded by wide umbrellas.
In the window of the tailor's there was a classic tailor’s dummy dressed in a Tweed jacket and a smart shirt and silk tie. The owner Abu Ali and his two assistants were standing in the doorway of the shop.
They greeted me with friendly smiles and hand-shakes. When I asked if any of them spoke English they chorused, "Of course!"
"Before the war," Abu Ali told me, "my business was very good, very good money, lots of customers. But now very few people and I'm not making anything for anyone."
A muddy side street nearby was deserted and forlorn. A wrecked white VW Beetle was up on bricks with its wheels removed. A hot wind carried a putrid smell of rotting rubbish.
Farther along Saadoun Street, in the lobby of the Babel (Babylon) cinema, there were posters for Broken Arrow starring John Travolta, Critical Decision with Kurt Russell, Top Gun starring Tom Cruise, and Heat with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.
But the film that was showing the day I walked in was The Farm - billed as 'romantic.'
That's one word for it.
I peeked inside the air-conditioned auditorium to record some sound for my radio report. The light from the screen flickered across several rows of men in white dishdasha robes, watching attentively.
The music on the soundtrack was climaxing.
So were the naked cast.
"Did you show films like that before?" I asked the manager Rashid.
"Under Saddam's government? Ha! No, of course not! Ha, ha!"
He told me business was good now - with three different films showing every day, but a major new challenge was that there was mains electricity for only about five hours a day - so they'd had to buy a large generator.
Rashid told me his life was a lot better than it had been before the invasion, but that many of his friends with previously secure government jobs were unemployed.
But the main thing on his mind was crime. He and his staff had hand guns tucked into their belts. The previous day, five men armed with knives and guns barged into the auditorium intending to rob the customers - by walking along each row demanding money at gunpoint, covered from the cinema’s stage by one of the gang holding a pistol in his hand.
The cinema staff produced their own weapons, and the thieves ran off.
I asked Rashid about the continuing occupation of his country - attacks on US troops in Baghdad were becoming more frequent.
"The people who are doing that are crazy," he said.
I asked him if he thought Saddam Hussein was still alive and that his remaining loyalists were behind those attacks.
"Of course, of course! That's true. I know that."
"How do you know it?"
"Everybody knows it, all Iraqi people feel that Saddam is still alive and still active. They have many gangs working for Saddam now, many of them."
I'd heard that before, in April, from the man at the anti-American demonstration who vanished into the crowd after warning me that gangs had been armed and paid by Saddam Hussein supporters to attack Americans. "This will never stop," he’d said, "Believe me this will never stop."
Back on Saadoun Street, in one of the money changer's shops, I bought some Iraqi dinars - more than I needed so that I had some as souvenirs; the existing notes with Saddam Hussein's face on them were sure to be replaced and might become collectors items.
Money changer Sargeon Georgis agreed that it was crazy to be shooting at Americans:
"What are you doing when you shoot an American soldier? What you are doing it for, it's better to who? Nobody wants that - what do you achieve by doing that?"
On the wall behind him there was a grubby rectangle of dust left by a picture which had been there for a long time but had recently been removed. Mr. Georgis slid a framed portrait of President Saddam Hussein from under the counter. He was keeping it in reach in case he had to put it back up.
Almost everyone I met echoed the anxiety that I'd heard in April from the brothers Sobar and Favid alongside the decapitated statue of Saddam - that remnants of the old regime "could take vengeance." They were soon proved more correct than they could have known at the time.
Further along the street that Saturday, I met a man who did approve of vengeance attacks against American forces.
Sitting in the shade on a wooden crate outside a grocery shop he said,
"Frankly I feel happy. America are not keeping their promise, they don't take care of the people. If your country is occupied - colonised - that's a bad feeling."
Sitting with him was Abdullah, a former policeman now out of work. Handing me a glass of black tea with a heap of half-dissolved sugar at the bottom of it, he told me that the occupation needed to be benign:
"If the Americans provide work for people, if they can get us jobs, if people feel that they have gained something, peace can come."
I went back to my hotel room reflecting on something I'd never imagined - that an armed gang could hijack a cinema. It would make a compelling sequence….in a film. In the Babylon cinema on Saadoun Street, it had nearly happened.
I was also reflecting on something else - if the manager Rashid had thought of calling the police as he spotted those five armed strangers walking through the lobby past the Top Gun poster, there would have been no point. There were no police any more.
Under Saddam Hussein, Iraqi police were little more than a bureaucracy in uniform, with negligible powers beyond traffic duty and paperwork. They were paid accordingly. Serious crime detection was mostly done by the National Security Bureau, or Internal State Security (also known as the Directorate of General Security) - in other words, by the Mukhabarat secret police (mukhabarat means intelligence).
The secret police were supported by ubiquitous informers - ordinary citizens who would report suspected criminal or political activity, often motivated by an instinct for self preservation in case failure to report suspicious behaviour rebounded on them. The East German Stasi model.
The Iraqi secret police had a reputation for murder, rape, torture and kidnapping, and their methods for extracting confessions could be startlingly devious. If a man was suspected of dissident activity, his children might be visited at school by the Mukhabarat and asked questions like, "How does your Dad react when he sees the President on TV?"
The status of the Iraqi police was so low and their wages so meagre that most of them vanished when US forces reached Baghdad. Despite an amnesty, and offers of a stipend, few returned. The Americans had to create an entirely new police force from scratch. And what remained of the old force was purged of members of Saddam Hussein's Arab Socialist Baath Party. An estimated seven thousand police officers were sacked.
This purge was the first example of what were later regarded as idiotic acts of sabotage by a man who had become, in effect, America's governor-general in Iraq - Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The CPA replaced Jay Garner's ORHA (office of reconstruction and humanitarian assistance) and swiftly made two terrible errors of judgement that would cost thousands of lives.
Sabotage
Paul Bremer - often incongruously dressed in a smart suit and dusty desert boots - described himself as the 'administrator' and 'paramount authority figure'. He boasted that some newspapers had described him as "the American viceroy."
Bremer was the senior American in Baghdad, President George W. Bush's personal envoy. He had access to the president through the secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. Little could happen without one or all of the three men approving it. But Bremer was a civilian, and had no power over US Central Command. CENTCOM also received orders from Rumsfeld and the president.
The fatal errors of judgement - the unwitting sabotage - were Orders No 1 and 2 issued by Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority on May 16th and 23rd, 2003. Both orders destroyed the foundations of Iraqi society - its ruling political party and the country's armed forces - without any coherent plan for replacing them.
The title of Order No. 1 was De-Baathification of Iraqi Society.
All members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, from most senior to most subordinate, were to be "removed from their positions and banned from future employment in the public sector." Civil servants in all the ministries would be dismissed, and university professors, school teachers, doctors, judges and lawyers would be sacked.
Order Number 2 was entitled Dissolution of Entities.
That strange word embraced the ministry of defence, the ministry of information, the Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukhabarat secret police, the army, the air force, the navy, the Baath Party militia, and Saddam Hussein's personal Fedayeen Saddam paramilitaries. About five hundred thousand people were 'dissolved', and sent home.
They were not obliged to disarm.
The two CPA orders crippled Iraq's ministries, universities and schools, and opened the country's borders to jihadists who helped fuel years of violent insurgency.
The two orders also enabled and energised the activities of al Qaeda in Iraq, which years later merged with ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The country's arsenal of weapons, ammunition and equipment was not secured. The military personnel who were dismissed knew where they were. An unholy alliance was born.
A report by Amnesty International in 2015 found 'a close match between the types of weapons used by ISIS and the inventory of the disbanded Iraqi army - artillery, rifles, machine guns and ammunition.'
The same year, a former general and head of CENTCOM, Anthony Zinni, told Time magazine:
“Many of the Sunnis who were chased out [by Bremer disbanding the military] ended up on the other side and are probably ISIS fighters and leaders now.”
Paul Bremer did not agree that disbanding Saddam Hussein's army had been an error. He said it was "the single most important correct decision that we made."
However, it did eventually dawn on Bremer that membership of the Baath party had been a condition of employment for most Iraqis in the professions, and that de-Baathification had gone too deep and threatened the fabric of Iraqi society.
In his memoir My Year in Iraq, Bremer conceded that "tens of thousands of teachers, who had been forced to join the party in order to be eligible to teach, were now being denied their posts. This went well beyond the intent of our initial policy." He added, "Iraqi children were paying the price."
In 2016, the official British report into the Iraq war by Sir John Chilcot concluded that 'the driving forces' behind the policy of de-Baathification had been Paul Bremer himself and his immediate superior, the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. British policy was that only the very senior levels of the Baath party (about five thousand people) should be purged. Instead, thirty thousand party members were barred from public employment. This, the Chilcot Report observed, "was considered by the UK to be disproportionate and likely to deprive Iraqi institutions of much needed capacity."
Sir John found that the British intention had been "light touch de-Baathification", and said that the way it had been imposed by the Americans "made the task of reconstructing Iraq more difficult, both by reducing the pool of Iraqi administrators and by adding to the pool of the unemployed and the disaffected, which in turn fed insurgent activity.”
Bremer eventually got the message. A year after he'd promulgated them, he revoked all the CPA de-Baathification orders and directives. He also disbanded the Iraqi De-Baathification Council headed by the ambitious US protégé Ahmad Chalabi.
But it was too late. The seeds of resentment had been sown - Orders 1 and 2 had sabotaged any chance that Iraq would be able to move from war and occupation to democracy and peaceful reconstruction and development. The orders lit a fuse. No attempt had been made by to ensure that the Iraqi military were not only dissolved but also disarmed. Weapons began to be sold openly on the street.
If they had done their homework, the explosion of violence detonated by Bremer’s haughty decisions should not have come as a surprise. This has been slowly and grudgingly admitted - most damningly by a former UK ambassador to Iraq in the post-invasion era, John Jenkins. In 2021 he told the BBC, "We didn't know enough to be able to work the contours of the society. There was a depth of ignorance."
Give the Americans Two Years
The deadly revenge of the dispossessed Baathists and military, in unholy alliance with the violent jihadists of al Qaeda, took a few months to emerge.
During the summer of 2003, the quality of life for Iraqis steadily deteriorated.
All day every day, US attack helicopters roamed over Baghdad and the Tigris, skimming along the river at the same height as the palm trees on its banks.
The crew of one helicopter spotted me filming them from my hotel balcony. It stopped, executed a 180° turn, and hovered - facing me at the same height as the balcony and only 50 metres away.
I felt extremely threatened. As one of the pilots inspected me through binoculars, I held up my small camera with one hand, and traced the letters T and V in the air with the other. After a few moments, the helicopter dipped its nose, turned away and flew on down the river.
For some Baghdadis who were angry at the crime wave, those American helicopters were benign. A woman I met pointed up at one of them and smiled, "Good! Chasing Ali Baba!"
An Iraqi friend in London had asked me to deliver cash to his brother Mahmoud and his family in Baghdad. I had Mahmoud's phone number and address. But dialling the number from my hotel, there was silence on the line. So I took a cab. Or rather, I stood by the side of the road and held out my hand until a car stopped.
A middle-aged man in a white Toyota saloon reached over and opened the passenger door. I asked if he spoke English. Again, the reply was "Of course!" I told him I needed to go to Hay al Khadra - a suburb in west Baghdad, and asked how much that would cost. "Pay me what you like." Bus services in Baghdad had almost ceased to exist and hailing random private cars was now an trusted way of getting around.
But the driver was baffled by the address I gave him, and suggested we go to Hay al Khadra police station where I could ask for directions.
An American tank was parked alongside the police station, and there were concrete blocks in the road to stop suicide-bomb cars getting too close. Inside, officers were dressed in the blue uniform of the new Iraqi Police (Saddam's police wore green uniforms). The attempt to create a new Iraqi police force had begun, and more than thirty Baghdad police stations had re-opened.
At the counter, Sergeant Taher didn't seem surprised at an Englishman turning up out of the blue, and offered to call my friend's brother; he explained that it was still possible to call numbers within Baghdad telephone districts so long as the local exchange was still functioning. Twelve local exchange buildings and the city's central exchange had been destroyed by American bombing. Sergeant Taher dialled the number, got through immediately, and handed me the phone. Mahmoud said he’d come and collect me and take me to his home.
While I waited, I asked Sergeant Taher about the new Iraqi police force. He told me candidly that the only thing that was new about it - so far - was the uniform. He had also been a policeman under Saddam. I wondered if that might be a problem, that opponents of Saddam might take revenge on former members of the regime's security forces. He wasn't worried - he said everyone knew that the real power during Saddam's time lay with the Mukhabarat secret police and not with lowly uniformed police like him.
But there was another reason to be concerned for his safety - the American tank outside his office, and a proposal that American military police should train new recruits. A few days earlier, in Fallujah - a town west of Baghdad known for its loyalty to Saddam - seven members of the new Iraqi police force had been murdered after they'd been seen working with the Americans. Sergeant Taher wasn't alarmed by this - "The people out west," he assured me, were different; Baghdadis “are educated and they understand that the police are not the enemy, that we're here to fight crime."
There were two prisoners in the police station - two men in steel cages. They were suspected of looting. But they would would be released at the end of the day as there were no longer any courts in which they could be prosecuted.
The new police were not yet autonomous, and were supervised by US military police. I asked a local resident visiting the station on business - an economist and statistician, Ali Imad - how long he thought Iraqis would tolerate US occupation. His reply was honest and revealing:
"I think that we should wait until the Americans do what they have promised to do. They helped us to remove the nightmare of Saddam, so we should wait until they prove that they are good people or not. If we find that they are liars, we will fight them - everybody will fight them."
Ali told me that the local Imam was offering the same advice in his sermons at the mosque, "Give the Americans two years. It is wrong at the moment to attack Americans."
At the moment.
Simple Life Principles
Mahmoud's home was typical of suburban Baghdad - a two-storey brick building behind walls and a steel gate, and with a small garden. But with a new feature - a satellite dish. Satellite TV was illegal under Saddam Hussein and now was a novelty. In their living room, his wife and two sons and two daughters sat staring at the TV as Mahmoud flipped through more than two hundred channels.
I asked, "So you watch TV all the time now?"
They laughed.
"Yes, you are right we have nothing to do, just watching TV."
It was 38°C outside (100° F) but I was lucky - the electricity was on and the ceiling fans were turning. Mahmoud said, "We object to this occupation, we want freedom, and we want work. We want to return to our lost life."
Despite their radiant smiles this family showed clear signs of exhaustion and anxiety - and anger that the supposed liberation of their country had led to so much crime and insecurity. The eldest daughter Amira, a science graduate, added:
"There is no peace, we can't live. We are humans, we have some rights." Tearfully she added, "And I can't sleep at night because it's so hot and most of the time there's no electricity at night so the fans don't work. Life is so difficult and sometimes...sometimes I hate to continue. Believe me. I prefer to die instead of this life."
"But you wouldn't want Saddam to come back would you?" I asked her.
"Sometimes. He at least he offered us the simple life principles. And sometimes I hate him."
"Simple life principles like what?"
"Electricity and water and education. And safety."
This calm educated thoughtful English-speaking family were deeply suspicious of the Americans and the British. "Tony Blair we hate him, not a good man."
Under Saddam they had the simple life principle of electricity for about twenty-two hours a day. Now they had six hours at best.
Before I left, we watched a BBC World News report about an American soldier who had been shot while patrolling inside the campus of Baghdad University, where Mahmoud's son Faisal was studying. He told me he'd heard the shooting and had seen shell casings and blood on the ground. He was pleased that an American had been shot.
And now this family had their own weapons - to defend themselves against armed robbery. Neighbourhood watch, with guns. They worked shifts every night, from midnight to 6 am.
Blinded
In a crowded lift in the Sheraton hotel in Baghdad one morning there was a man wearing a badge on his jacket with the letters IMRO on it. He told me - in immaculate English - that it stood for a charity (non-profit) called the "Iraq Mothers Relief Organisation," and that his name was Haithem. He'd helped set up this charity to provide food and financial support to mothers widowed in the war. I asked if I could meet some of them. Sure. There were still no mobile phones, so we set up a rendezvous the old-fashioned way - we would meet in the hotel at 9 am on the same day the next week.
Haithem and his driver Mohammed drove me two hours south to Hillah, a predominantly Shia town near the holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala.
In a small home in a wide dusty backstreet the Murad family were in mourning. In the living room, as a ceiling fan chopped through the thick hot air, I was introduced to brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts, and the father and mother, of Amjed Ranem Murad - a 19-year-old student who wasn't even in combat when he died. His father Murad el Morshedi said his son had been intercepted by Baathists on his way to visit friends and forced to attend a parade by the president's Fedayeen Saddam militia. The parade was spotted by American aircraft, and bombed.
"Nobody can replace him," his father sobbed, "these are innocent people who die just for Saddam's regime."
Did he blame the Americans for his son's death? "No. I blame Saddam, I do not blame the American forces for attacking his Fedayeen militia."
Murad showed me a framed black and white photograph of his son - a serious looking young man with bright, intelligent eyes. Amjed’s mother Zahra told me that he'd hoped to qualify to be an engineer. She said she'd been crying for him every day. "I have kept his clothes to help me remember him."
In another small home in Hillah, another weeping mother - Hakema Mohammed, with a photograph of another dead son, Thama Neyma Sarhan. He was regular army officer, killed in an American bombing raid near Kirkuk in the north.
I asked Hakema, "Who do you blame for his death?" Before replying, she asked if it was safe for her to tell the truth. Reassured, she repeated the tyrant president's name in a tearful crescendo of grief, "Saddam Hussein! Saddam Hussein! Saddam Hussein!"
A larger home in another neighbourhood was full of subdued children - apart from lively little ones who didn't know the meaning of bullet holes in cars.
A silver Toyota Super Saloon was parked outside the house.
I counted thirteen bullet holes, five of them through the front windscreen. Two brothers, Faris and Riath Hussein, were driving home one night after a day's work as petrol station attendants.
In the dark, they came across an American military checkpoint.
The Americans shouted "Stop! Stop!" .
Iraqi Arabic for stop is Keff, it is not Stop.
They didn't stop.
The Americans opened fire. The driver Faris died. His brother Riath, sitting in the passenger seat, was blinded in both eyes.
Riath sat with me on a sofa in his front room. It was late afternoon, there was no electricity, and the daylight was fading. He told me angrily that he had been an opponent of the Saddam Hussein regime for thirty years, and that when American forces had arrived in Hillah he'd gone out onto the street to welcome them and cheer them on towards Baghdad. Now he was furious that he had celebrated the arrival of the people who blinded him a few days later.
Two young girls came quietly into the darkening room.
I put a hand on Riath's shoulder and asked, "Are these your daughters?"
"I don't know, I can't see them."
Rana aged six and Nour aged four sat silently next to their father, and he wept.
Sunday Lunch
Back in Baghdad, Haithem invited me to Sunday lunch with his wife Farah and her parents Mohammed and Amel. An invitation to Sunday lunch reminded me of home, and so did their house in north Baghdad. It was almost a shrine to Britain. English books on the shelves, a reproduction antique English dining table with elegant curved legs and brass castors, and tablemats decorated with images of 19th-century London (horse-drawn carriages on cobbled streets, Gentleman with stiff high collars, & Ladies in long dresses striking poses with parasols). On the wall there was a reproduction of The Haywain by John Constable. I was treated to a lavish meal of kebab and chicken and lamb and rice and salad.
Mohammed was a retired banker and his job had taken him and his family to Britain for three years in the 1970s as manager of his firm's London office. One of their daughters - Ethar - was born in a maternity hospital in Barnet near London. Her mother showed me a family album from their days in Britain; faded colour photographs of young parents with three small children smiling at the camera in front of the Eros fountain in Piccadilly Circus, and the children in Trafalgar Square nervously holding out birdseed for a cluster of flapping pigeons.
There were snaps of them at the seaside on weekend jaunts to Brighton and Southend, in a cream-coloured Sunbeam saloon.
"It was nearly always Southend," Amel said, looking reproachfully at her husband, "I preferred Brighton."
Thirty years on, in Baghdad in 2003, the power was off, the shade temperature was 45°C, and small hand-held straw fans didn't help much. Gesturing at the stationary ceiling fan, Mohammed complained,
"This is not correct, this is not good. The Americans and the British have done a wonderful thing for us - they've liberated us from Saddam Hussein. But they have cut our electricity and our telephones and our petrol supply, and the price of bottled gas for the cooker has gone up from 300 dinars to 3000. And they haven't even begun to deal with the evil elements of the old regime who still live among us. They say they are flushing out the Baath party people, but they're still here. I know exactly who they are and exactly where they live."
"Why don't you identify them, report them?"
"It's not that simple. Many of them are my friends, or my wife's friends, and their children are my children's friends. And it's often only one member of a family - usually the father - who is in the Party. The rest are innocent."
Mohammed's other daughter Areej told me there was a new fear - among women.
Areej was about 30 years old, was not a Baath Party member, and was back at work as a finance clerk. She said that on her way to work every day, and on her way home every evening, she was afraid.
Of what?
Of being abducted and raped. A friend had been sexually assaulted, she told me, and she had heard of others too.
Were these attacks common I wondered, or unusual but magnified by publicity?
"I don't know," she replied, "but in any case if I was raped my father would have to kill me.
Her father Mohammed was sitting at the head of the table.
I asked him, would he kill if Areej if she was raped?
A few seconds of silence passed.
"Probably not. No, no, I could not. But if this happened, we would have to move out of our home and away from the neighbourhood. We could not continue to live in the same community."
David Beckham in Basra
I took a taxi from Baghdad to Basra - just the driver and me, in a heavy old Chevrolet Malibu painted in the Iraqi taxi livery - orange wings and white body.
It took about six hours. It was a mostly uneventful journey. Some war wreckage, but not a lot: we took the eastern road south, through al Kut on the Tigris, with pleasant stops for roadside food and tea. But there was one hint of instability. Close to the road near Kumayt, there was a wrecked warehouse with smoke rising from what remained of its roof.
Parked nearby were two British army Land Rovers and a red fire-tender.
"Don't go too close," the soldiers warned me, "there's still stuff going off pop in there." It was an ammunition dump. I began filming, from what I thought was a safe distance. With no warning, a crowd emerged from behind the building, shouting and running towards me. Before others in the crowd could restrain him (and they did try), a man with a crazed look in his eyes and a metal cylinder in his hand flung it straight at me. I ducked out of its way, behind the fire engine.
The crowd ran away. I apologised to the British soldiers: "I'm off - this only happened because of me."
We drove on to Basra and I checked in to the Marbad Hotel in the city centre near the remains of a former Sheraton, which had been looted and gutted. I was invited inside to have a look around. Walk alone into the unlit shell of a looted building with no idea who might be inside? No thanks.
And I didn't feel entirely secure in my own hotel. If there'd been gunfire or an explosion outside, the incessant roar of the generator was so loud I doubt I would have heard it. There was no mains electricity for the hotel or its immediate neighbourhood for the entire three days that I was there. Some mornings there was no generator power either. The battery in my computer ran out and I had to write a four-minute script for the weekly BBC radio programme From Our Own Correspondent on both sides of a used A4 envelope and read it over a satellite link to be recorded in London - using a dish whose battery had not run out.
The main topic of that despatch was insecurity.
"What Basra needs is more police walking the streets instead of standing around guarding their own police stations," said a university professor in the city, adding that she was so alarmed by what she called "the lawlessness and anarchy" that she said she trembled with fear on her way to and from work every day.
Like the rest of Iraq, in the summer of 2003 Basra also had a violent crime wave. Muggings, kidnappings for ransom, armed robbery. When I asked people, "How is your life?", most told me they felt insecure. Many Basrawis were carrying weapons, and there was a rising number of patients arriving in hospital with bullet wounds - often from shooting in the air. What goes up must come down.
The British military began issuing weapons permits - with the holder's name, photograph and the serial number of the weapon.
A Basra schoolteacher I'd met, Khaled al Saadi, took me with him as he applied for a permit from A Company of the 1st Battalion of Queen's Lancashire regiment of the British army. They had requisitioned a palace belonging to one of Saddam Hussein's most violent henchmen, Ali al Majid. Known as 'Chemical Ali', he had been in charge of the gas attack on on Kurdish Iraqis in Halabja in 1988. The palace had been renamed Camp Stephen, in honour of a British soldier killed during the invasion.
[Camp Stephen later came to be associated with British malpractice, assault and cruelty. In a submission to the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in 2014, it was alleged that in September 2003 - barely two months after I visited the camp & under the same British regiment at the same location - there had been 'systematic detainee abuse'. One allegation was that 'at Camp Stephen a detainee was made to jump up and down until he collapsed from heat and exhaustion.' A soldier from the same regiment was accused of homoerotically assaulting an Iraqi detainee. And a Basra hotel receptionist Baha Moussa died in British custody two days after he had been detained at Camp Stephen on suspicion of being an insurgent. A post-mortem examination revealed 93 injuries to his body, and that he had suffered asphyxiation. A corporal who pleaded guilty to a charge of inhumane treatment of Mr. Moussa was jailed for a year & dismissed from the British army. Charges against six other soldiers were unproven or dropped.]
Khaled was director of a Basra youth club, and wanted weapons permits for him and his staff at the club, and for driving around town. Major Vernon Davis spelled out the policy:
"You can have a weapon at your place of work, and you can have a weapon at your home. As for carrying guns around in cars, my job is to get guns off the street & not to give permission for that. The more people there are on the street with guns, the harder it is for us to provide security."
Khaled was issued with a permit for guarding his club, not for his car.
The club was a popular local venue next to a mosque. There was a courtyard for netball, basketball and karate, and a boxing ring inside.
Cheerfully noisy with teenagers and younger boys, the club was in a neglected and impoverished Basra suburb where I had seen children paddling in stagnant canals that reeked of human waste.
As I left, a British army patrol arrived outside. Momentarily surprised to see a lone British reporter on his own on a Basra street, Lieutenant Craig Rodgers explained that he was on his way to set up a 'mobile VCP' (vehicle checkpoint) hoping to impound a few guns. "We did one for forty-eight-hours, and seized a vast amount of weapons," he told me, "but apart from them, most people are really happy to see us. There are a few who take pot shots at us at night - but no casualties so far, we've been really fortunate."
"Can I come along?"
"Hop in."
Six young soldiers from Blackpool, with strong Lancashire accents, welcomed me inside a Saxon armoured personnel carrier. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, there appeared to be more boxes of bottled water than crates of ammunition.
"Eight one-and-a-half-litre bottles of water a day, I reckon I get through," one of the men told me. Twelve litres a day. There was a thermometer in the Saxon. 65°C.
We drove off with the back doors open.
Covered by a colleague with a mounted machine gun (but wearing a soft hat) and with a civilian Iraqi translator alongside him, Lt. Rodgers (wearing a helmet) stopped vehicles, searched them, and checked that registration documents were genuine and that serial numbers on weapons matched the permits.
One of the drivers told me, "This is good. They should search all cars." Another - who had the required permit for his handgun - told me in immaculate English to "Fuck off!”
Lt. Rodgers told me that the British army had developed a network of informants among Iraqis who were angered by the crime wave and who yearned for safety and order. After a local tip-off, they'd captured four gunmen in a 'textbook' house-raid with no casualties on either side and not a shot fired. "We were pretty chuffed with that," one of the Lancashire men told me.
Watching the procedure at the checkpoint, about a dozen cheerful, exuberant children chanted "No Saddam! No Saddam! Yes Britannia! Yes Blair! Hey Hey Blair! Hey Hey Blair!"
They were briefly drowned out by the blaring horns of a wedding party - accompanied by two men with trumpets and a drum kit playing Dixieland jazz from the back seat of a battered old white Toyota.
The militias who would eventually drive the British out of Basra six years later had yet to emerge, and in 2003 the British had the upper hand. For the time being.
After mounting that checkpoint, one of the officers quietly complained to me that they were overstretched - about a thousand British soldiers in a potentially unstable city of a million people.
But Basra felt calm that evening. In Farid's coffee shop, there was the clack of dominos, dice clattering onto backgammon boards, and the gurgle and sweet odour of nargile water pipes.
I chose apple flavour - apple-and-molasses tobacco in a bowl on the summit of the water pipe, heated with small red-hot lumps of charcoal separated from the tobacco by a pierced strip of aluminium foil.
And I was met with genuine good will for the British. Two men came over to sit with me - Aboudi Jassem and Hamid. They were merchant seamen who wanted to say how happy they were that the British had come to Basra. They spoke English a lot better than my Arabic. They had warm words of thanks for George Bush and Tony Blair. Their payslips - from the Saddam days and from now - showed why. Before the invasion they were paid $150 a month, regardless of how much overtime they put in as they roamed the oceans of the globe scrubbing the decks of oil tankers. Now, with overtime, they could earn up to $500 a month.
"British very good, very good, I like! I like!" said Hamid. As proof, he showed me a photograph that he kept in his wallet - of the footballer David Beckham.
"I like too much."
"So you like Manchester United?" I asked.
"No! Real Madrid!" piped up a young voice behind me. This was Moatez, aged ten, son of one of the nargile customers. He was more up to date with Beckham's career than I was.
I thought Moatez might be impressed if I told him that I lived near Arsenal's old Highbury stadium in north London.
"Oh!" exclaimed Moatez, grinning with pleasure at this revelation, "Thierry Henri! Sol Campell! David Seaman!" And as he said the great goalkeeper's name, he mimed a goalie's save across the café floor.
But the coffee shop owner Farid was scowling at me. I went and sat with him.
"Those men are only thinking of themselves," he said. "Liberation has brought insecurity and crime to Basra - robbers, mugging, kidnappings for ransom. And you can't even provide us with reliable electricity. The British do not bring safety, they are here only for oil, not for the people. For oil."
I said my good-byes and left to find somewhere to eat. In the power-cut dark of a Basra evening, I could hear voices coming from a pool of bright light in the distance, next to a canal leading down to the great Shatt-al-Arab waterway that connects the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to the Persian Gulf.
I walked towards the light, wary of dark piles of rubbish, and broken glass, and circular manholes with their cast-iron covers missing (looted, I was told). There were gaps in the crumbling concrete barrier along the canal; despite the dark, I could make out that the water two metres below was foul with discarded engine oil, scum, rubble and empty cans. If I fell in, no one might notice.
I also took extra care crossing the road, as cars with no lights drove down the wrong side of streets with no street lamps.
The walk took me to a small group of shops & cafés lit with strip lights powered by chugging generators. There were sweet shops with cakes & biscuits piled in pyramids, and a choice of café meals; gas-grilled doner kebabs, or skewers of minced lamb cooked over charcoal.
There were communal tables under a string of bare light bulbs. I sat down next to a man busy with his food, and said "Masar al-kheir" - good evening.
"Masar al-nur", he replied politely, but unsmiling.
I told him my name and he told me his. Abbas.
I was served two shish kebabs on a bed of fresh mint, with a plate of rice, tomato and cucumber salad, and hot fresh bread - and with it a mug of iced Laban. The Laban - diluted yoghurt with added salt (like Indian lassi) - was deeply refreshing after a day of 50°C heat.
Even now, at 8pm it was 42°C. (I had a small digital thermometer with me).
We ate in silence.
Five more men sat down at the table, with warm smiles and a "Welcome! Welcome!" for me. "British very good, very good. Saddam very bad. We are happy, very happy."
Abbas looked up, still unsmiling. "No," he says, "Tony Blair and George Bush are Ali Baba, thieves. Saddam was good." This was an unexpected comment from someone in a city which was routinely poorly treated by Saddam Hussein.
Abbas was vehement and passionate, but not hostile. I plucked up courage and counted my companions round the table.
"Five against Saddam, happy with the British," I suggested. "One against the British and in favour of Saddam - that's democracy."
The others laughed and joked at that. Abbas stood up, said a stern goodbye, paid for his meal, and walked slowly away into the dark.
As I went back to my hotel along the unlit streets, I wondered if the merchant seamen and my enthusiastic dinner companions might be an unrepresentative fortunate few in a town where, in one of the richest oil-producing nations of the world, I'd counted a queue of a hundred and twenty-two cars waiting to fill up with fuel. Some of the drivers sat on the ground in the shade, and helped each other push their cars forward by hand as the queue crept forward.
Similarly, in Baghdad I'd counted two lines of thirty-one cars waiting for fuel. Sixty-two vehicles. As I filmed that scene, a driver shouted "Benzin makou!" "No Petrol!" The patience of the people waiting in the ferocious summer sun was remarkable. And didn’t last.
Marsh Arabs
One morning I escaped the heat and the dust - and the sewage odours - of Basra and was driven beyond the northern suburbs into what appeared to be barren desert; recently formed desert. This was where the famous marshes of Iraq had once been.
It had been marshland for centuries until Saddam Hussein ordered earth dams to be built to divert water in order to deprive the marsh Arabs of the source of their livelihood. Saddam accused them of supporting Iran during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and of taking part in a failed uprising against him in 1991. Saddam's revenge was catastrophic - an estimated ninety percent of the wetlands were lost.
Nearly four months on from the 2003 invasion, I was on my way into the former marshlands with the schoolteacher Khaled al Saadi (who I'd met applying for a weapons permit for his club). He warned me that the marshes were still potentially hostile to foreigners, and that he could take me there only if I paid for an armed escort.
I was surprised at how little this cost; $50 for an entire day's hire of a Toyota Hilux pickup - including fuel, driver, and two men with AK47s riding on the back.
As we drove along, the arid contours of drained marshland were all around us. Shimmering on the hot road ahead, there was what I assumed to be a watery mirage. But I was wrong. It was sunlight reflected by a strip of actual water returning to the marshes.
We turned off the tarmac onto a track along the top of one of the soil embankments that Saddam's engineers had built. A warm wind rustled the fronds of a date palm. Marsh frogs croaked loudly from the edge of a stream.
This was al Hammar marsh, close to where the great rivers of Mesopotamia merge and flow down the Shatt al Arab waterway. According to legend this was the Garden of Eden, and the Tree of Knowledge grew here.
Before the marshes were drained, its waterways, reed beds and lagoons were havens for fish, birds, mammals and frogs. Fishing provided both food and income. Sheep were reared for wool and meat, and water buffalo for milk and cheese. Water buffalo had a high milk yield and once supplied Iraq with an estimated 90% of its dairy products.
The traveller and author Wilfred Thesiger wrote lyrically and tenderly about the people here in his book, The Marsh Arabs:
"Canoes moving in procession down a waterway, the setting sun seen crimson through the smoke of burning reed beds, narrow waterways that wound still deeper into the Marshes ... reed houses built upon water, black dripping buffaloes ... stars reflected in dark water, the croaking of frogs, the stillness of a world that never knew an engine."
When Thesiger visited the marshes there were small villages on dozens of islands, some of them with what he described as 'reed cathedrals' - high, barrel-vaulted guest halls made of dried marsh reeds.
And in 2003, with Saddam defeated, some of the marsh Arabs had returned and were trying to restore their traditional way of life. But I detected no sentimental longing for life in the marshes before Saddam - people told me they also wanted electricity, better schools and telephones.
I was taken to a place where a farmer Hamid Abdul Razak had hired a mechanical digger to breach one of the long embankments to let water return to his parched farmland. It was flowing slowly through the gap, and some fish had already returned and were being caught and taken to market. Some of the reed beds were also reviving. "We are too happy," said Hamid, "this is the beginning of life."
Hamid's neighbour Matrud Aziz Abdullah invited us all to tea. He spread three carpets on the ground. The two farmers and their children and Khaled and my armed escorts - about twenty of us - sat in the shade of Matrud's date palm and drank sweet tea and ate dry biscuits.
I asked Matrud for some facts about his farm. I expected Khaled to have to translate, but Matrud could remember some basic English from his schooldays.
"Cows, five. Sheep, forty. One date palm. And vegetables."
I ate one of his cucumbers, freshly cut from the newly irrigated ground. "Life is very good, Mister. Yes, yes, life very good." But with one reservation: draining the marshes did such damage to the water table that Matrud's well was still dry.
Khaled al Saadi was certain that life was significantly better for these farmers now with the tyrant president removed:
"They thank our God," he told me,"for two things. First of all for the departure of the most wicked person in the history of life, Saddam Hussein. And the second thing is for the return of water and life for these poor people."
And farmer Hamid was grateful for another effect - the returning water was helping to cool the air in fiercely hot southern Iraq. "It is like an air conditioner, and thank God this helps us to sleep deeply."
Head Injury
Back in Baghdad on one of the main shopping streets I came across a small boy begging on the pavement. He was wearing a torn & grubby t-shirt, ragged shorts and no shoes.
Firas, a volunteer with a charity caring for street children, told me the child's name was Amer and that he was eleven years old. He was thin and small and looked no more than eight. He was a shoeshine boy. There was a long cut on his forehead which had recently stopped bleeding and was beginning to form a scab. Three days earlier, he told Firas, he'd had a "bad feeling" and got angry and found a piece of broken glass and had deliberately cut himself.
Amer had run out of polish and had spent his meagre earnings on a habit that he called 'hashish'. It was not hashish. He’d been inhaling fumes from the paint thinner that he used for cleaning his brushes. He usually worked outside the Palestine and Sheraton hotels, but stopped when American forces put a permanent check-point and a tank outside one of them. Amer shouted foul-mouthed abuse at me about the Americans, and complained that they'd kicked him.
I would have dismissed this as a solvent-sniffer's fantasy and thought no more about it until I had two unpleasant encounters of my own at US military checkpoints.
At one, I watched - and protested - as a soldier grabbed a young boy by the neck and shoved him away.
"It's the only way they learn. We've tried the nice ways and they don't work so if we have to put a little force on them to get out, then we do."
And for some of the children, the troops and their vehicles were a safe haven in an unpredictable and increasingly lawless city.
One soldier said to me, "There's 10 year-olds smoking already, and 12-year-olds having sex."
"That's two different things," I reacted. "What do you mean, 12-year-olds having sex? How do you know?"
"We chased one guy off. He was about thirty years old trying to catch a kid, a little girl. Some of the kids try to sell sex. You see that little girl with a bandage on her arm? There was a boy a lot bigger than her, she was screaming, laying down on the ground crying, and the boy was standing over her. She came right here screaming, saying that the boy was trying to rape her. She knows we are respectable people, she feels safe with us. She calls me Baba which is Iraqi for Pop, for Dad. I have two daughters myself so I feel protective of her and the other little girls. I see little boys trying to mess with them I'll go to their butt."
These children needed some protective kindness, but there were individual soldiers who seemed unable to handle them decently in this confusing anarchic atmosphere. Looking down from my thirteenth floor balcony one morning, I saw two small boys chucking rocks at the checkpoint tank. The rocks bounced off harmlessly. Obviously. It was a tank. But one soldier threw a rock back at the boys. It missed, but it came close.
Another day, as I was walking through the same checkpoint, a girl with a bleeding head was having the wound cleaned and dressed by American military police. I tried to find out how she'd been injured.
I was threatened by the military police just for asking.
This was the exchange I recorded:
"What happened to the kid?"
"Do you want me to destroy the tape? Do you want me to destroy the recording? We're not gonna make any comment in any direction about what may or may not have happened, okay. Do you understand that?"
- "Yes, but do you understand my point which is that all these kids are accusing...."
"My point supersedes your point."
- "How come? Because you got a gun?"
"Because I'm the authority at this fucking checkpoint. I'm asking you, and now I'm telling you, continue on with your day sir, please!"
- "Okay. You just said that if I didn't move on you'd smash my tape recorder."
"I said if you did not move on and leave us to our business I would smash your tape recorder, yes sir!"
- "Do you think that's a sophisticated form of law enforcement?"
"When you haven't complied with what I've asked you to do, sir, yes I do."
- "But I'm hearing children telling me that US troops are injuring them and I see a child with a bleeding head here at this checkpoint..."
"You need to go to Public Affairs, have a good day sir."
It took me nearly two weeks of emails and sat-phone calls to get a response from Public Affairs. They knew I had a recording of the conversation at the checkpoint, and that I'd not yet broadcast it. It would not look good if they didn't investigate the incident and explain it.
When eventually they did respond, I was surprised at their frankness. They called me on my sat-phone as I was walking out of the BBC's new bureau in Baghdad. The phone signal interfered so powerfully with my microphone that I couldn't record the call, so I sat on the front steps and wrote down what public affairs told me:
"We don't know what happened that morning, no report was filed. But our soldiers are not supposed to harass and threaten the media - this was inappropriate behaviour."
I told the press officer that I was still suspicious about the child with the bleeding head - especially as I had seen tank crew throwing a rock back at some children another day.
"You were right to be suspicious. Our soldiers are not supposed to be throwing rocks at children."
This was not an admission, but it was creatively ambiguous.
On foot from Iran
By July 2003, four months after the invasion, Iraq had a provisional government - the Iraqi governing council. It had 25 members: 13 were Shia Muslims, 11 were Sunni and one was a Christian. It was the first time that the Shia majority of the country had been represented by a Shia majority on a national governing body.
But the members of the governing council were not elected - they were chosen by, and subservient to, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). As a result, many Iraqis I met believed that their promised democracy was being undermined by the very people who claimed to have liberated them.
And, a few days before the interim governing council was formed, the CPA cancelled all scheduled local elections, and insisted on appointing mayors and councils directly - including many officials who had been in Saddam Hussein's armed forces.
A Baghdad lawyer, Ahmed al Juboori, complained to me,
"What use are promises of democracy if the very start of the process is an interim political council which is unelected? After suffering for thirty-five years under the regime of Saddam Hussein, we want to express our own opinions and feelings."
I asked him if he was still happy that Saddam was gone.
"Yes I'm very happy, and I want to thank Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair and all the European and American people for this gift to us. I do thank them. But now there is no difference between Saddam and Bush and Blair."
Equating Bush and Blair with Saddam wasn't as wild as it may have sounded, in the opinion of a veteran opponent of Saddam Hussein and campaigner for genuine democracy in Iraq Hussein al-Shahristani (the nuclear physicist who spent 12 years in Saddam’s gaols). I'd first met him in April during the Arbaeen pilgrimage to Kerbala, when hundreds of thousands of Shia pilgrims converged on the city on foot from towns and villages all over Iraq.
In July I met Shahristani in Kerbala again. He was conducting democracy seminars, and he was more vehement about the objections he’d shared with me about the unhelpful behaviour of the Americans. He told me that despite the official de-Baathification order, the Americans were trying to give former Baathist police in Kerbala their jobs back. He said they had also arrested members of the city council who were highly respected within their community. They were eventually released, but Shahristani said that these unexplained summary detentions had "raised a few eyebrows", reminding people of how Saddam's security forces use to arrest anybody they wanted without evidence or warrant, and never had to explain why.
He believed that the Americans were “listening to the wrong people" in Kerbala, "listening to people who are coming forward to volunteer their advice; most of them are former Baathists who used to be informers for the Saddam Hussein regime and who are now trying to destabilize society."
Shahristani complained that the Americans were trying to dictate membership of the local council, and added ominously, "I don't think the Americans realize that they are playing into the hands of remnants of the Saddam regime."
This suggested to me that while de-Baathification of Iraq continued in Baghdad and to the north, they were in effect re-Baathifying parts of the majority-Shia Muslim south in a misguided attempt to fend off the growing influence of Shia-Muslim Iran.
The historical context here is key. The American and British invasion of Iraq in 2003 took place fifty years after a defining moment in the history of relations between Iran, the USA and the UK - a coup in 1953 by the CIA and MI6 (Britain's secret intelligence service) which unseated the democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh and restored the supreme authority of the Shah.
The remaining reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi lasted more than a quarter of a century. But beneath its veneer of stability and literacy campaigns and economic progress, discontent simmered and grew. The Shah offended the Shia majority of his deeply religious nation by imposing an essentially secular policy of westernisation. Dissent was suppressed by the Shah's ubiquitous and brutal secret police the Savak (National Security & Intelligence), and opponents were summarily executed - or gaoled and tortured in Evin prison in north Teheran (a gaol still used for the same purposes by Iran's theocracy).
The Shah's position was bolstered and protected by financial support and military equipment from Washington and London. Iran was favoured not only as an essential source of oil, but also as a buffer against potential expansion by its northern neighbour the Soviet Union.
Most of the religious festivals dear to the hearts of devout Iranians were banned. Mosques became the only sanctuaries for dissidents, and the heart of Shia Islam in the city of Qom evolved into a bastion of religious resistance. The ingredients of rebellion coalesced to promote a cleric called Ruhollah Khomeini to the leadership of the Islamic Revolution that deposed the Shah in 1979. Ayatollah Khomeini had been in exile from Iran since 1964, thirteen years of it it spent in Iraq, in the holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala.
At breakfast in my Kerbala hotel one morning, I overheard some young men at the next table speaking Farsi, the language of Iran. I had lived in Iran for four years as a teenager and had remembered how to speak some Farsi. I asked how they'd reached Kerbala. They'd started from Ilam, in western Iran, had taken a bus to get them as close to the border as they could get, and walked through the mountains for thirteen hours until they they'd crossed the unmarked frontier into Iraq. Thirteen hours on foot. A Persian pilgrims progress. [The closest Iraq-Iran border crossing - at Mandali - is about 110km (74 miles) from Kerbala.]
In his office in Kerbala, Hussein al-Shahristani insisted that there was little danger that the Shia majority in Iraq would lean significantly towards Iran - and said there was no evidence of Iranian political interference in Iraq at that time. "In fact," he said, "there is a resentment among the population in southern Iraq of any Iranian influence."
One reason for that resentment was the memory of the futile war between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, in which at least half a million soldiers and a hundred thousand civilians were killed.
Another sign of wariness of Iranian influence was a declaration by the most influential figure in Najaf (the Shia 'capital' of Iraq), Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, that he did not want an Iranian-style theocracy to be established in the country; he instructed Shia clerics who had political ambitions to give up their mosque job first.
But if Shahristani was right - that the Americans were already undermining the confidence of Iraq's Shia majority by cultivating their former Baathist oppressors - it's no wonder Iran's influence in Iraq began to grow, despite sermons by senior clerics. And as the Iranian pilgrims in my hotel had demonstrated with their long journey on foot through the mountains, the religious and emotional bond between the two countries was strong.
When I first visited Kerbala in April 2003 it felt run-down and impoverished. Three months later it appeared to be thriving. Most public services were working, staff were receiving their wages, the new Iraqi police were driving smart new patrol cars, the streets were clean, refuse was being collected, white and orange taxis were vying for business in the city centre, and shops and markets were bulging with produce. There were clothes for sale, and sweets and halva and cakes, and freshly squeezed lemon juice and melon juice, and fresh popcorn, and satellite TV dishes and decoders, and DVD players - and the now-inevitable petrol generators to compensate for frequent power cuts.
Across the square from the Imam Hussein mosque a news vendor was walking through the covered souk calling out "Iraqi Life for sale! Iraqi Life!"- a new weekly publication with a local news section about Kerbala.
As he walked, lights in the vendors' stalls went out, the market went dark, overhead fans came slowly to a halt, rays of sunshine shafted from holes in the roof, cutting through the dust. The shopkeeper who was talking to me as the power failed - Abu Sahab Saffir, selling cigarettes and flavoured tobacco for nargile water pipes - sighed and said, "Weather very hot, no electricity, no water for drinking, no cooking gas."
"And," I added, "no Saddam."
"Yes! Saddam not useful. But also Americans not useful."
