WAR CRIME Chapter 7
Wandering Around Again
My embeds with American and British military were enriching, rewarding, and revealing. But also limited. With notable exceptions - for example, visiting St. Elia’s church in east Baghdad, which was at my request - I could only go where the Humvees took me. By 2006, I wanted to return to the serendipity of a reporter’s life and get back on the streets of Iraq without having to wear body armour and a helmet.
For a fortnight or three weeks at a time over the next twelve years, I was one of the BBC's correspondents in Baghdad for news outlets on radio and TV.
The BBC's Iraq bureau was in a large central Baghdad house with high vaulted ceilings and a garden. But the birdsong and the cheerful sounds of the neighbours' children were often abruptly interrupted by the roar of a diesel generator the size of a bus which switched on automatically when city power went off.
Our security included stacks of sandbags on the window sills, and adhesive tape on the panes to stop shards of broken glass slicing across the room after an explosion.
The bureau was in Karrada, a mixed Sunni, Shia and Christian district of Baghdad. We were close to shops, businesses and hospitals, and to a park alongside the Tigris river. So we could walk 'real' streets and get around the city easily to do interviews.
I was always accompanied by a BBC security adviser. We were driven by our Iraqi staff in a van with no side windows. It was fitted with an internal bullet-proof steel cage. It was intended to provide some protection from gunfire - and from unwanted curiosity: from the outside it looked like any old battered Baghdad van. In summer it was sweltering.
Most importantly, we were not based in the isolated, heavily fortified Green Zone but we had permits which allowed us into the zone to meet politicians, military and diplomats.
The street outside the BBC office had checkpoints at each end, and became an unofficial media village. The New York Times bureau was nearby, and Reuters and Japan's NHK. We sometimes held joint barbeques. Our buildings were protected by high grey anti-blast walls, locally welded steel watchtowers, and a double layer of heavy steel doors with entry codes. Plus: CCTV cameras, and Iraqi armed guards who received regular training from our security advisers.
Like many in post-war Baghdad, the street was a claustrophobic canyon of concrete. The shops of Karrada were at one end, and and at the other there was Abu Nawas park next to the Tigris river. There was a four-lane highway between our street and the park but the road was closed in 2003, and became a dusty ghost of pre-war days; derelict fish restaurants overgrown with weeds, emaciated cats foraging for scraps, and skeletally thin dogs lying in the shade.
Before the war the park had been popular for weekend family excursions which would often include a meal of Mazguf - elaborate kebabs using freshwater carp. The fish are split open, gutted, spread out flat, and held on sticks around a wood fire.
The two high-rise Baghdad hotels the Palestine and the Sheraton were a short walk along the river bank - both barely functioning by 2006. Three years earlier, immediately after the invasion, they'd been busy with journalists, interpreters and American soldiers. Now the lobby of the Palestine was almost empty apart from workmen fixing some bomb damage.
In October 2005, a suicide bomber drove his car at the security barrier at the entrance to the hotel car parks, and detonated his device. A cement mixer full of explosives headed over the debris into the security compound between the two hotels. But the lorry's axles snagged on razor wire and its bomb exploded before it got close to either building. The explosion sent an expanding ball of smoke and flames into the air, breaking dozens of windows, flinging cement and brick shrapnel across the neighbourhood, and shaking buildings several hundred metres away. About twenty people were killed and dozens were injured.
Most of the dead were Iraqi soldiers, police and civilians. But the bomb hadn't achieved its presumed aim - mass murder of foreign contractors and journalists staying in the two hotels. Nevertheless the attack unnerved everyone and had effectively shut both hotels down. They'd once been important Baghdad venues for business meetings and conferences - and wedding parties; on Thursday evenings there was dancing and kebabs and shisha pipes, and swimming in a large rooftop pool.
The Palestine's swimming pool with palm trees around it was still open, its filter gurgling as the water rippled in the afternoon wind. But no one was using it.
The tourist souvenir shop where I'd bought postcards in 2003 was still there, but it was closed. At the side of the lobby a glum-faced man sitting alone on a chair stood up and greeted me in English and I asked How's Business? and he shook his head.
A smiling hotel manager appeared in the lobby. I told him he looked a lot happier than most people I'd met that day. He told me,
"I am smiling because I am meeting you. I like foreigners. Mostly we are not smiling because we are suffering. Electricity, water, unemployment. Most Iraqis are tired. Two days ago while I was driving there was an explosion, a roadside bomb. My car was damaged and I take the bus now. When I'm on the bus, I'm afraid the person sitting next to me has a suicide belt. Most Iraqis are afraid."
In the summer of 2006, American forces in Iraq achieved a significant victory over the mastermind of much of the violence. On the evening of June 7th, US Air Force F-16 jets dropped two 500 lb bombs on a remote house near the town of Bakubah north of Baghdad - a safe house used by a man with a $25 million bounty on his head, the leader and founder of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) Abu Musab al Zarqawi. To prove to a sceptical public that they really had killed him, the Americans provided Iraqi TV stations with a photograph of his bloodied and battered face.
America’s latest Public Enemy Number One was dead.
There was celebratory gunfire in Baghdad. AQI warned that they would stage revenge attacks.
Baghdad's security was stepped up, with extra checkpoints all over the city. Operation Forward Together included additional police patrols - pick-up trucks roamed the city with a policeman standing on the back gripping mounted automatic weapons.
But extra security of this kind can attract insurgents intent on suicide attacks - checkpoints and police patrols become easy targets. Car bombs duly targeted the checkpoints and the patrols.
Traffic jams were another effect that increased the risk of attacks on civilians. One of my Iraqi colleagues grumbled that it had taken him an hour and half to drive to work one morning, when it normally took him twenty minutes. At a checkpoint that I visited, most of the drivers were irritated by the considerable delays - but happy to be stopped. But one complained,
"They've done exactly the same before but it's never lasted. To have any effect it has to be sustained. If it isn't sustained, all the bombers need to do is wait and bring the bombs back into Baghdad when the checkpoints have gone." That's exactly what happened, for years.
Intelligence sources reported another unintended consequence - instead of trying to get bomb cars into Baghdad through checkpoints, insurgents were taking components for bombs into the city separately (explosives, timers, detonators and so on) and assembling them within the security cordon. A policeman I spoke to said he didn't have enough time to check each vehicle thoroughly enough to stop that.
Almost Civil War
Apart from the lull before the constitution referendum, violence in Iraq in 2005 and in the years that followed was startling. These are just a few (random) examples:
Musayyib south of Baghdad. A hundred Shi’ites were killed and a hundred and fifty were injured in a suicide attack on a market.
Hillah, southern Iraq. A car bomb killed a hundred and twenty-seven people.
Baghdad. More than a thousand Shi'ite pilgrims were killed in a stampede on a bridge across the Tigris river as a rumour spread that a suicide bomber was present among them.
Baghdad. A hundred and sixty people died and five hundred were injured on one day in multiple bombings.
Samarra, north of Baghdad. The al-Askari Shiite shrine was bombed and its golden dome destroyed by fundamentalist Sunni insurgents. It happened early in the morning; no one was killed or injured, but the shrine is sacred to Shia Muslims and the attack led to dozens of revenge killings. A hundred Sunnis were found murdered the next day, and a thousand or more were killed in the days that followed.
Mahmudiyah south of Baghdad. Five American soldiers shot an entire family dead - a mother and father and one of their daughters. They raped another daughter, Abeer al-Janabi. Abeer was fourteen years old. When they'd finished violating her they shot her in the head several times, poured petrol over her body, and set it alight. The principal perpetrator was sentenced to gaol for life without the possibility of parole. The incident was so deliberately planned - premeditated, slow, cruel, predatory and transgressive - that it was one of the worst atrocities in the entire Iraq tragedy. Seven years later the soldier who led this egregious assault killed himself in his goal cell in Arizona.
Sadr City, Baghdad. A suicide car bombing in a crowded market in the Shi’ite district killed about eighty people.
Sadr City, Baghdad. Six car bombs and two mortar shells killed more than two hundred people and injured more than a hundred.
Amirli A truck bomb killed 156.
Baghdad. 92 people in a market were killed by a suicide bomber.
This chart from the US Department of Defense shows that December 2006 was the worst month for fatal attacks on civilians in Iraq during the early post-war years: 3,000 dead in one month.
The total civilian deaths for 2006 was nearly thirty thousand.
Fear
With fear infecting normal life in Baghdad, I asked my Iraqi translator Laith to take me somewhere where I could get a sense of this. He suggested visiting a small Baghdad shopping centre.
There'd been a car bomb nearby, a roadside bomb, and attacks on a restaurant - killing fifteen people in all, and injuring more than sixty.
The shopping centre's entrance was decorated with brightly coloured tile work depicting Iraqi scenes - a rural tableau of a poet sitting with a beautiful woman, a parakeet in the branches of a tree.
The shopping mall was dusty and felt abandoned. A barber shop was open, but nearly all the businesses around it were closed, their windows broken by the blast of one of the bombs, torn curtains flapping inside.
Incongruously, the windows of a small commercial art gallery had been thickly painted over so that nobody could see inside. When I walked in, the gallery owner Ghaith al Gazairi was making a painted copy of a small colour photograph of a child. He told me he was struggling to keep his business going. Four months had passed since his last customer. He'd laid off both his assistants.
As he spoke, the air-conditioning cut out. Another Baghdad power cut. They had become ever more frequent - the average supply by this time was one hour on, five off. He had no generator. It was hot. I wondered how he managed to make ends meet if his last customer was four months ago. He said he had some savings, but they were running out.
Who did he blame?
"I blame the Americans and the British. They made a crucial mistake after the fall of Saddam - dissolving the army and the police."
He believed that decision led directly to the anarchic violence.
Many of the oil paintings and water colours on sale in Ghaith's gallery were of lyrical Iraqi landscapes with palm trees, blue skies and sunsets, of mosques with turquoise domes, of traders in markets selling fruit and vegetables. But one reflected a current challenge; it showed a young child with an anxious expression cupping water into his hands from a public tap in a Baghdad alleyway.
"This is not the sweet image of a little boy that it appears at first to be," Ghaith observed, "it's the artist's comment on the water shortage."
Ghaith himself looked stressed and exhausted.
"I could not be sadder than I am now," he said.
Near his gallery there was another business with its windows and glass door painted over for security. The door was ajar to let some light in during the power cut. A smiling woman - tailor and dress maker Sajdeh Hassan - was standing inside with a tape measure around her neck.
"How is your business?" I asked her.
"Thank God it's okay but before the war this used to be a vibrant shopping centre teeming with people."
Her business was mostly by appointment, so she didn't rely on passing trade.
At a flower shop nearby the florist with ribbon and scissors on a table was arranging a bunch of roses. She was willing to talk to me but didn't want me to use her name.
A caged bird was singing. It was 40°C outside (more than 100°F). Flowers must be kept cool so she had to use a generator for air conditioning - and buy expensive fuel for it on the black market. She said the power cuts were especially irksome because there was no scheduled ‘load shedding’; so it was one hour on and five off, or two on and four off, and sometimes twelve hours off with no idea when it was going to come back on again.
I asked her about security.
"It's terrible. When I come to work I always wonder if I'll ever get back home again."
There was something else she found irksome. She preferred wearing western clothes, but told me that growing 'public religiosity' meant that she went to work wearing a scarf and a long skirt, and changed into trousers and a smart blouse only when she was safely inside her shop.
I asked her, "How are you?"
"Exhausted, disappointed and hopeless. There is no hope for Iraq. Britain and America should understand how deeply distressing all this."
As she spoke, an unmarked convoy of unidentified militia in white pickup trucks drove along the street outside.
Other shops in the neighbourhood were open - a fruit seller, and a grocery store with a generator for a refrigerator stacked with cartons of milk.
At Yunus' kebab store (his name means dove, or peaceful being) he said he feared every parked car as a potential threat. A car bomb had exploded close to his store about a year earlier.
"If somebody stops and we don't know him we ask him to move on. But we also have a police car parked close to us a lot of the time."
I ask him if he trusted the police.
"I don't trust most of them, but I do trust these ones because I know them, they're from my neighbourhood."
I wondered if he feared that's some of the old Mukhabarat secret police were still active.
"Akeet! (for sure)," was his instant reply. He told me he felt nervous all day every day.
Even in Abdu Rahman's busy teahouse full of the smell of sweet smoke from nargile hubble-bubble pipes, there was anxiety. "There's not enough electricity, not enough water, not enough work." Until I asked him about security, he didn't even mention the suicide bomber who had come into this café earlier in the year and killed himself and two customers.
"Of course that made us afraid. People stayed away for a few weeks but they like to relax with their friends and we have to make a living, so we live from day to day."
Abu Rahman's anxiety was mocked with hearty laughter from young men in a dark hot room at the back; they said he shouldn’t have been talking to me so earnestly. "You're just a country bumpkin from down south!" they teased. They offered me a puff from their hubble-bubble. I inhaled deeply and, to more laughter, exhaled a great cloud of smoke.
As I left and said thank you, they gave me a round of applause. I was amazed. They could so easily have hated me and blamed me and my country for causing their insecurity. But I had often encountered this generosity of spirit in Iraq - an enviable capacity to accept hardships and make the best of their lives with astonishing good humour, while seldom expressing any personal bitterness towards a visitor from one of the nations that had so carelessly destabilised their homeland.
Depressed All The Time
On this visit to Baghdad, I got back in touch with Haithem and Ethar who I'd first met in the summer of 2003. Then, Haithem had been running IMRO, the Iraqi Mothers' Relief Organisation supporting bereaved widows and families of the wounded.
Now, Haithemwas working as an interpreter for US forces, but had to conceal the fact from his entire family and from his friends and neighbours. It was making his wife Ethar extremely anxious:
"All the time I dream that somebody wants to kill us. All the time."
What happens in the dream? I asked.
"I see somebody coming towards me with a beard like Osama bin Laden's and he kills my husband. I feel depressed all the time."
People had tried to kill Haithem:
"I was leaving the base in my car to drive home one day and somebody shot at us from behind and my friend collapsed bleeding in the passenger seat. I drove him to the hospital and he died."
Since I'd first met them, Haithem and Ethar had become parents, to a daughter - Farrah, now two years old. She was sitting with us looking at the illustrations in an Arabic edition of the fairy tale Puss in Boots.
"We can't let her go outside anymore to play with the neighbours' children," said Ethar. "She doesn't meet anyone. I'm afraid of kidnapping."
Haithem felt that his life was a lot worse than it had been in Saddam Hussein's time, when there had been basic security and you could generally stay out of trouble if you kept your head down:
"There were clear red lines and we were fine so long as we didn't cross them."
Like so many people I met he believed that most of the violence was coming from al Qaeda in Iraq with the active support of Baathists, former Fedayeen Saddam militia, and former members of the secret police. "It's just like in the Saddam days again," Haithem sighed, "there are informers everywhere."
He told me about a friend who was murdered after an informant discovered that he had joined the new Iraqi army.
Back home on leave for just one day, he was shot dead in front of his house.
"It's obvious to me," Haithem said, "that somebody in the neighbourhood had made a phone call and said Hey! Guess what! Ali is back."
And Ethar told me that some of her colleagues were openly saying they would prefer Saddam Hussein to return to power.
"My manager told us that we should kill the American army and everybody who works with them," she told me.
Haithem added, "Democracy is not delivering security. What were those elections for? Everyone is desperate here, there is no future there is no - as you say - light at the end of the tunnel. You just live by the day and you say thank God I'm still alive for another day. And that's it."
Haithem received so many death threats that he was granted a Green Card to live in the United States. Two years later I met him and Ethar and their daughter Farrah at their new home in Kentucky. Farrah was now four years old, and going to school in a classic yellow American school bus - which, to her delight, had a Palestinian driver who spoke Arabic.
One afternoon I was with Farrah on the balcony of their apartment when there was sudden clap of thunder. Her smile vanished and she ran to her mother in distress, asking:
"Is that a bomb?"
We need all the psychiatrists in the world
In Baghdad one morning I went with producer/translator Laith to Ibn Rashad hospital to meet a psychiatrist Dr. Twana Raheem to discuss the likely effects on mental health of witnessing the aftermath of extremely violent events like a suicide bombing.
Before we reached his consulting room door, Laith stopped to answer a call on his mobile phone. The latest news. Two more explosions. Two dead in the first, no figure yet for the second.
The aftermath of a suicide bombing usually consists of dismembered human bodies, scattered pieces of flesh, pools of blood, and often the severed head of the bomber lying in the street. I asked Dr. Twana what enduring effect it can have on a person if they have to look at that.
"It's a lot of trauma - trauma to the psychology of the person. Fear, avoidance of that situation - and vivid recall of what he or she saw. Especially for children - it's beyond their imagination. The problem is so big that we need all the psychiatrists in the world to solve it."
I'd brought a photograph with me to show Dr. Raheem - of Riath Hussein, the petrol station attendant I'd met who had been blinded in both eyes by American soldiers.
It showed Riath with his daughters, Nour aged four and Rana who was six. Nour looks sad and confused, and Rana is staring angrily at the lens.
"You must expect her to be angry at what happened to her father," said Dr. Raheem, "but she will also be depressed. And this is condition will stay with her probably until she's an adult, and even after that she could become depressed, she could become angry and violent, or both. She needs psychotherapy and I have to say to you that unfortunately we have no specialised centre for psychotherapy in Iraq."
In the emergency department of another hospital, patients with injuries caused by bomb blasts had become routine admissions, displacing almost all others.
There were two major explosions near the hospital one afternoon that week and surgeons operated until seven o'clock the next morning. One of the surgeons on duty was Dr. Mohammed Sami. Several of the victims were children in danger of suffocating after inhaling carbon monoxide (one of the poisonous gases released in explosions). Dr. Sami needed to get oxygen into their lungs quickly. But there was a shortage of appropriate equipment, and he sometimes had to intubate children with endotrachial tubes (plastic pipes) that were designed for adults.
"The tubes are too large for the children's throats," he told me, "but I have to try my best to fit it down the child's throat to get oxygen to their lungs as quickly as possible."
He also told me the hospital didn't have enough sutures, painkillers or antibiotics.
Some of Dr. Sami's patients were members of militias, with bodyguards who came into the operating theatre with them. "They just force their way in."
One time, he said, while he was doing a heart operation on a patient with his chest open, the man's brothers walked in and threatened him.
"They pointed a gun at me and said, If you don't get this operation right we're gonna kill you."
I asked Dr. Sami if he'd managed to stop his hands from shaking.
"My hands never shake."
I asked him if he'd ever call the police.
"I'd rather not actually. It doesn't even cross my mind. I don't trust them any more. There are militia gangs now who steal police uniforms and police cars, so if you see them how do you know if they're real police or militia?”
But Dr. Sami did not carry a firearm himself.
"I think I'm safer without a weapon."
And if he looks out of his window at home and sees someone trying to steal his car?
"I'd just let them take the car. Whatever happens here now, there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing anybody can do about it."
At this time, June 2006, there were approximately 180,000 US troops in Iraq, and much discussion about whether they should stay or leave - and in particular whether their presence was making any difference to the level of violence.
One Friday morning there was an attack that concentrated minds - a suicide bomber mingled with a crowd inside Baghdad's principal Shiite shrine in Khadimiya and blew himself up, killing six people.
That afternoon, I wandered along a busy shopping street gathering reaction from store keepers and customers in cafes.
"The violence is happening because the Americans are here," was one comment that I heard - reflecting the most common view: "Leave Iraq to the Iraqis."
Some were less sure.
"We don't believe in magic," said an information technology specialist Iyad, "It will take time. People said from the start that it would take ten years."
Kidnapped
Early one evening in late October 2006 an American soldier went missing in Baghdad, outside the Green Zone. This kind of thing might happen in movies like The Hurt Locker, in which an American soldier goes AWOL in the city one night - but in reality anybody who did that would be arrested, sent home, court-martialled, and dismissed from the army. I never saw an American soldier alone in Baghdad - they were always in Humvee convoys, on foot in groups, or at their bases.
But it turned out that the abducted soldier could have easily have walked the streets of the Iraqi capital in civilian clothes without anyone noticing h - because he spoke fluent Arabic. He was an Iraqi-American, staff sergeant Ahmed al-Taie. Three months earlier he had married an Iraqi woman. He was abducted while he was on an unauthorised trip to visit her.
He was Iraqi and American, but to his battalion he was above all a US soldier, and his disappearance added to American fury at the apparent inability of the Shi’ite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to get to grips with Shi’ite militias which were increasingly killing people with impunity.
The soldier's abduction became even more troublesome when it turned out that he had been taken by a Shi’ite group funded by Iran, and which had until recently been part of the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.
Baghdad was swamped with Americans looking for al-Taie. For about a week the skies were filled with the clatter of helicopters, the buzz of drones high overhead, and F16 jets screaming across the city.
I watched some of this intense security clampdown from Kahramana Square in central Baghdad, a landmark location with an elaborate fountain at its centre around a statue of Morgiana (in One Thousand and One Nights, Morgiana is the slave freed by Ali Baba after she saves him from the Forty Thieves).
There was an Iraqi police checkpoint in the square, American military vehicles on all the street corners, and two giant armoured fighting vehicles called Strykers. It was believed the soldier had been abducted from somewhere in this neighbourhood.
Main roads leading away from the square were blocked off and traffic was diverted - to be searched at US checkpoints in narrow side streets. Most of the Iraqis I spoke to as they crawled through the checks thought this was a disproportionate response to the kidnapping of one American soldier.
"Please stop doing this," one driver pleaded after the only thing found in his car was a spare tyre and a jack, "It's taking too much time to get around the city. I need to get back to my family. I've been waiting for three hours now to get home."
It was also irritating for nearby shops, cafés and other businesses that were losing passing trade. Standing in the doorway of his empty barbershop, Essam complained, "I have lost too many customers. They like to come by car and park in front of my salon."
Eventually the prime minister Mr. Maliki intervened and ordered all checkpoints to be lifted.
The Americans at the position that I was watching returned to their Humvees and Strykers, and drove away. They were immediately and brazenly replaced by members of the local Mahdi Army militia dressed in black.
There were intense negotiations to try to get the unfortunate staff sergeant al-Taie released - including offers of a reward - but to no avail.
It wasn't until his remains were handed over nearly two years later that it became clear that he had been beaten and murdered.
Please, Stay With Us.
The generally cautious Iraq Body Count website records more than twenty-six thousand civilian violent deaths in 2006. Other sources say more like thirty thousand. So, after all the suicide and car bomb attacks in Baghdad, it was surprising to find a new fast food restaurant in the centre of the city.
Bright lights, clean new tables, chicken and chips on the menu, soft drinks - and a babble of eager customers.
Sitting at one of the tables was Hajil Abbas. She spoke good English. She was with her silent four-year-old son Saif and affectionate two-year-old daughter Sara. Sara leaned on my knee gazing up at her mother as she spoke.
We discussed courage, and violence, and resilience, and whether American forces should stay or go. I told her that I thought it was quite brave to open a large restaurant with huge plate glass windows at a time when bombs and assassinations were routine.
"Yes," she agreed, "it's very difficult times. But we're alive. We have to live, we have children, we have to carry on. If you like life, you carry-on."
I asked if she felt safe.
"No, not safe. We have hope, just hope. We live in hope. I live for my children, I hope that they will have a safe life."
And the best way to make Iraq safe?
"America can do it, they have a good army, they can solve this problem."
(Pause)
"My husband has gone on. Dead."
Your husband is dead? (I had no idea of this, we'd never met before).
"Uh-huh. Killed. In the street."
By whom?
"I don't know."
How was he killed?
"A gun."
Your husband was shot dead?
"Uh-huh, shot dead. Uh-huh."
Why?
"I don't know."
So one morning your husband went out.
"And didn't come back."
She was telling me this just three weeks after it happened.
"I tell my two children that their father is dead. I say to them, you have no father - he is dead. I don't pretend that he's gone away travelling, they know he will not come back. They cry, they want him. I love my husband. I lost him now."
When she'd finished speaking, two-year-old Sara looked up at me and very quietly said something in Arabic.
Her mother translated.
Sara had said: "Please stay with us."
Café Arabia
Iraq is football-crazy - as I'd already discovered in Basra when ten-year-old Moatez corrected me about the club that David Beckham played for (I hadn't heard that he'd moved from Manchester United to Real Madrid three days earlier, but Moatez had).
Interest in football in Iraq is obsessive and informed.
In Baghdad, I visited Café Arabia. More a youth club than a café, it was bursting with exuberant boys eagerly following the 2006 World Cup. There was a poster on the wall of the Brazilian player Ronaldinho in his Barcelona strip.
The first remark I heard as I walked in was "Kahraba Makou" - no electricity for the small TV whose screen had gone blank in the middle of the Portugal-Mexico game. The café had a generator but it had run out of diesel, so the boys played snooker or went outside for games of table tennis at a table on the pavement.
I was taken to Café Arabiya by Alla, a Baghdad civil servant and life-long England fan. As a teenager in the early 1970s he'd watched what was then the First Division on TV, and became a Liverpool fan during the early days of Kevin Keegan. In this World Cup he was amazed by the England player Joe Cole's improbable goal from 35 yards out in the game against Sweden.
"Joe Cole was the best player in that game," said Alla, "even the Arabic commentator was astonished, and described his shot as a rocket."
Despite supporting Cole's team, Alla confided in me that it would be hard for England to beat Brazil: "They are not fit enough."
I asked the boys in Café Arabiya to line up and tell me, one by one, which country they supported in the World Cup.
"France, Argentina, Brazil, Brazil, England, Argentina, England, Brazil, Brazil, Brazil, Brazil."
"Small children play football in the street in Iraq," Allah remarked, "and in school playgrounds and town squares. Football is game number one in Iraq."
I'd witnessed that on election days in Baghdad the previous year: during the vehicle curfews imposed for security, the streets of the capital were packed with men and boys - and a few girls too - playing football.
Café Arabia got the generator going eventually - in time for Mexico's first goal against Portugal. In better days, the boys would watch a game in the café and then play in the street. I asked them if they still did that. Emphatically not.
"Never, we're afraid of explosions."
Near the café, in charge of a small rudimentary kiosk selling chocolates, cigarettes, washing powder, toothpaste and small cigarette lighters was Usam Daoud Salman, a ten-year-old boy in a football top printed with the name of the much admired French player Zinedine Zidane.
And when I asked him, "So, you like Zidane?" I was rewarded with the biggest grin of the day, and a reply in English,
"Yes!"
One Saturday afternoon I watched a football game in Abu Nawas park near the Tigris river. It was a cup final between two local teams, on a bare earth pitch with a few tufts of grass. About forty spectators turned out, among them a group of 15-year-old boys, supporters of different teams but sitting together.
I asked them the open question which I often asked in Iraq, "How is your life now?"
"We are tired, we are exhausted. We come here on our bikes and we're afraid of explosions on the way."
Had they witnessed explosions?
A chorus of "Of course, yes!" and then they were all talking at the same time. There was a bomb next to one boys house. It killed ten or eleven people, he said. He watched his father help to carry dead bodies away.
I walked along the touchline and met Faris, a Baghdad barber.
"Of course I'm worried about car bombs and suicide attacks, but we have to live and it's a nice game and I enjoy myself here." But even watching this game, he said, he didn't feel entirely safe; a mortar shell had killed several children playing football on a similar pitch on the far side of the river.
During the second half of the game a sandstorm struck, reducing visibility so much that the game had to be abandoned.
I could only just make out the spectators on the other side of the pitch. Soon everyone had gone, leaving behind an empty Coke can clattering across the dust in the wind.
These excursions to shops, cafés and football games - beyond the relative safety of the BBC bureau with its concrete anti-blast walls - were enabled by a team of British and Iraqi security advisers and by local drivers.
Sometimes I travelled in our reinforced van, sometimes I walked - with the security escort several steps behind in plain clothes, literally watching my back. We had a 'fifteen minute rule'; try to get each visit or interview finished within a quarter of an hour. The thinking was that we'd be gone before any kidnappers or killers could be tipped-off by mobile-phone in time to get to us. Although this urgency meant that some of my journalism was hurried and impressionistic, it allowed me to get out into the city, meet people, and ask focused questions informed by the latest news.
And getting out and about also provided essential first-hand material for the frequent 'two-way' interviews that we had to do with radio and TV presenters in London.
Sometimes it was good to be asked very basic questions like, "What's it actually like in Baghdad, Hugh?" and I'd be able to describe my conversations with Iraqis out shopping, and the back-drop to daily Baghdad life of low-flying American helicopters blending with a dawn chorus of doves, sparrows, crested hoopoes and occasional gunfire. Or the elegant houses with ornate balconies of Old Baghdad. Or the local shopping street packed with people buying food for Iftar, the Ramadan evening meal. Or the friendly children on the swings in Abu Nawas park by the river. And the heartening generosity of spirit and resilience and laughter of many, many Iraqis.
The American Colonel Brian Dosa had said to me, "I love it here. The people give me energy."
I felt the same.
But. My innate optimism often came crashing down. By the time I was back in Baghdad in October 2006, more than three thousand US and coalition troops had been killed, and more than three thousand Iraqis were killed in several single months in 2006.
In Washington, President Bush tried to defend himself against accusations that he'd lost the plot in Iraq, and that he was losing influence over the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. Amazingly, Bush used the language of war - as if Iraq, and not the insurgents, was still the enemy:
"Our goal is victory. What is changing is the tactics we use to achieve that goal."
This did not play well. Mr. Bush quickly issued a corrective. But even that sounded like a veiled threat:
"I do believe that Prime Minister Mr. Maliki is the right man to achieve the goal. I speak to him quite frequently and I remind him we are with him so long as he continues to make tough decisions. We are making it clear that America's patience is not unlimited, yet we also understand the difficult challenges Iraq's leaders face and we will not put more pressure on the Iraqi government than it can bear."
Iraq was not only beyond America's control, it was becoming a cockpit of autonomous competing Shi’ite militias: they were implicated in sectarian killings, were active in the resistance to US occupation, and were fighting each other.
The US secretary of state Colin Powell, who had so misled the United Nations about WMD, believed in what he called "the pottery barn principle. We break it, We fix it."
America was now saying "We broke it, you fix it."
To get some sense of (admittedly educated, middle class) public opinion about this, I went to one of Baghdad's new internet cafés.
The first man I spoke to was adamant that the Americans should stay, but struggled against the sound of American helicopters as he tried to explain why:
"They have to stay here because....
[Three loud, low-flying US helicopters]
...if they leave there will be civil war. I am quite sure that without the Americans it would be much worse."
Another man told me frankly that he didn't blame the Americans, he blamed Islam - "Sunni and Shia Muslims are murdering each other every day. Dead people, dead women, dead children. I am a Muslim but I am not Shia or Sunni. And I hate Islam, I hate Islam now."
Exodus
A doctor who, despite everything, was determined to stay in Iraq because - as he put it - "It's home", changed his mind soon after we spoke. He'd received a credible death threat. He left.
A broadband internet service provider told me he would leave soon too, for the same reason.
"Nothing to stay for. If anybody in Baghdad decides they don't like you they can shoot you." I wondered how he protected himself: "Always I change my way. Sometimes I take my car, sometimes I take a taxi, sometimes a bus, sometimes I walk. If you want to live you have to do that."
Not everybody could afford to leave the country, but in many cases they still had to abandon their homes because of car bombs, mortar attacks and gunfire. One Shi'ite friend told me that most Sunni Arabs in his neighbourhood had been intimidated and had left, after it had been made clear to them that they were no longer wanted as neighbours in the largely Shi’ite district.
"They come and knock on the door," he explained, "or simply put a sheet of paper through the letter box - telling you that you have to leave the area, and that you'll be killed if you don't."
Mohammed said he'd seen cars burned out in the driveways of houses that used to be occupied by Sunni families, and which were now empty. And he'd watched from his flat one morning as three armed men went into a radio repair shop, fired their weapons, and left a few seconds later.
They had shot the shopkeeper dead.
This menace was matched in some Sunni neighbourhoods, where Shia families had been threatened out of their homes or murdered.
Sometimes it was more complex. One Sunni man said he'd moved to a Shia area to get away from gang warfare in his own mostly Sunni neighbourhood. As he was telling me this there was a loud explosion nearby and we all flinched a little (and never did discover what had happened).
Few people felt safe in this febrile, tense atmosphere. There were even simultaneous bombardments of significant Shia and Sunni shrine districts on opposite sides of the Tigris river - explained as an attempt by Saddam 'remnants' in league with Al Qaeda in Iraq to provoke the two sides into fighting each other. They didn't succeed.
The Price of Bread
Request from an editor in London.
"Can you do something for us about the Iraqi economy?"
This report really would be impressionistic. There were few statistics.
I began at the stock exchange in Baghdad. It would soon switch to electronic trading, but for the time being still used paper contracts, and white-boards. It was like an old betting shop, with prices and company names written up in felt-tip pen. There was a marble floor and marble pillars in a modern brightly lit room divided by a long wooden counter with brokers on one side of it and buyers on the other - dozens of (mostly) men smartly dressed in jackets and ties, and many of them with prayer beads. At the back of this throng one woman peered at the stock prices through a small pair of binoculars.
In 2008/9, there were about a hundred companies listed in Baghdad - foods, agriculture, banks, hotels and industrials. As well as oil, industrial stocks included sulphur mining, paint manufacture, carpet making and white goods businesses making fridges and air-conditioners. Hotel stocks were doing well - mostly from religious pilgrims visiting shrines in Baghdad, Najaf and Kerbala - and in the belief that international companies winning contracts in Iraq would need places where their employees could stay.
But it was still a high-risk market for investors - for example, there was one Iraqi bank whose shares in 2005 cost sixty-five Iraqi Dinars. A year later they were trading at....six.
But the irrepressible and engaging CEO of the Iraq Stock Exchange Taha Abdulsalam was optimistic about the future, and said that some indicators suggested that the Iraqi economy was improving. A little. The Dinar was strengthening, inflation was down to 33% - from 70% in late 2003.
Mobile phone network providers were doing well. Four years earlier there had been no cell phone network at all; there were now seven million subscribers.
During the last months of the Saddam Hussein regime there were about eight thousand companies registered in Iraq, now there were thirty-four thousand.
But. Interest rates were up from 8% a year to 20%. And unemployment was estimated at between 30% and 50% - still fertile ground for recruiting young men into the militia and the insurgency.
Close to the stock exchange, on the shopping streets of Karrada, business was booming in many shops, especially those selling the one item which was essential to power everything else in this land of eternal power cuts - petrol generators.
The street had become an open-air market. Outside many stores there were cardboard boxes containing TVs, satellite decoders, satellite dishes, microwave ovens, fridges, air conditioning units, MP3 players, and CD players. While I was in Walid's shop in central Baghdad, a man handed over $125 in cash for a TV. Dollars or dinars, either would do.
One of the BBC drivers told me about petrol prices. In 2003, a litre cost fifty Dinars. Now it was five hundred for a litre - or nine hundred on the black market. Paying nearly double was the premium for not having to queue for hours at a petrol station. And this black market was conducted in plain sight - plastic containers of fuel by the roadside with a man (or often a child) sitting in the shade nearby ready for a transaction.
One of the few social safety nets in Iraq was monthly food parcels, delivered under the Public Distribution System (PDS). It was set up as part of the United Nations oil-for-food programme that began when sanctions were imposed after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The parcels contained rice, sugar, flour, beans, tomato paste, cooking oil, powdered milk, loose tea, soap, and detergents. Many Iraqi families relied on them entirely and had no other food.
When asked, for a survey in 2008, if they'd prefer cash or monthly food rations, 95% said they'd rather carry on receiving the rations. By 2018, the original ten items had been reduced to four: rice, flour, sugar and cooking oil.
My day of enquiries about the economy ended in the Baghdad kitchen of a Christian woman who had a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper hanging on the wall. Marlene (she didn't want me to use her family name) told me about the cost-of-living; tomatoes, potatoes and cooking gas - all soaring in price.
And bread? I asked in particular about the staple samoon (similar to white pitta bread, with pointed ends). As she began to answer the question there was a loud explosion. The building shook, the windows rattled.
Marlene and the interpreter Qais and I fell completely silent for several seconds. "Bismillah!" said Marlene ("In the name of God!") as she made the Sign of the Cross - quietly adding in English, "I'm sorry."
I then learned Iraqi Arabic for 'no good', "Mu zain mister, mu zain".
I said to her, "How ironic - I was about to suggest that your life must be very stressful!"
We all laughed.
And the price of samoon? Since 2003 it had quadrupled.
I love the transparency about how material is gathered - guards, protection, swift visits. It's honest. And that's part of what makes this account so riveting.