Iraq, 10 Years Later : Living with No Future
By <
http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/dahr-jamail> Dahr Jamail
Global Research, March 27, 2013
Back then, everybody was writing about Iraq, but it's surprising how few
Americans, including reporters, paid much attention to the suffering of
Iraqis. Today, Iraq is in the news again. The words, the memorials, the
retrospectives are pouring out, and again the suffering of Iraqis isn't
what's on anyone's mind. This was why I returned to that country before the
recent 10th anniversary of the Bush administration's invasion and why I feel
compelled to write a few grim words about Iraqis today.
But let's start with then. It's April 8, 2004, to be exact, and I'm inside a
makeshift medical center in the heart of Fallujah while that predominantly
Sunni city is under siege by American forces. I'm alternating between
scribbling brief observations in my notebook and taking photographs of the
wounded and dying women and children being brought into the clinic.
A woman suddenly arrives, slapping her chest and face in grief, wailing
hysterically as her husband carries in the limp body of their little boy.
Blood is trickling down one of his dangling arms. In a few minutes, he'll be
dead. This sort of thing happens again and again
Over and over, I watch speeding cars hop the curb in front of this dirty
clinic with next to no medical resources and screech to a halt.
Grief-stricken family members pour out, carrying bloodied relatives - women
and children - gunned down by American snipers.
One of them, an 18-year-old girl has been shot through the neck by what her
family swears was an American sniper. All she can manage are gurgling noises
as doctors work frantically to save her from bleeding to death. Her younger
brother, an undersized child of 10 with a gunshot wound in his head, his
eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomits as doctors race to
keep him alive. He later dies while being transported to a hospital in
Baghdad.
According to the Bush administration at the time, the siege of Fallujah was
carried out in the name of fighting something called "terrorism" and yet,
from the point of view of the Iraqis I was observing at such close quarters,
the terror was strictly American. In fact, it was the Americans who first
began the spiraling cycle of violence in Fallujah when U.S. troops from the
82nd Airborne Division killed 17 unarmed demonstrators on April 28th of the
previous year outside a school they had occupied and turned into a combat
outpost. The protesters had simply wanted the school vacated by the
Americans, so their children could use it. But then, as now, those who
respond to government-sanctioned violence are regularly written off as
"terrorists." Governments are rarely referred to in the same terms.
10 Years Later
Jump to March 2013 and that looming 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion.
For me, that's meant
<
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1931859612/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> two
books and too many
<
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/2166/dahr_jamail_life_under_the_bombs> news
articles to count since I first traveled to that country as the world's
least "embedded" reporter to blog about a U.S. occupation already spiraling
out of control. Today, I work for the Human Rights Department of Al Jazeera
English, based out of Doha, Qatar. And once again, so many years later,
I've <
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/20/dahr_jamail_returns_to_iraq_to>
returned to the city where I saw all those bloodied and dying women and
children. All these years later, I'm back in Fallujah.
Today, not to put too fine a point on it, Iraq is a failed state, teetering
on the brink of another sectarian bloodbath, and beset by chronic political
deadlock and economic disaster. Its social fabric has been all but shredded
by nearly a decade of brutal occupation by the U.S. military and now by the
rule of an Iraqi government rife with sectarian infighting.
Every Friday, for 13 weeks now, hundreds of thousands have demonstrated and
prayed on the main highway linking Baghdad and Amman, Jordan, which runs
just past the outskirts of this city.
Sunnis in Fallujah and the rest of Iraq's vast Anbar Province are enraged at
the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki because his security
forces, still heavily staffed by members of various Shia militias,
<
http://www.aljazeera.com/humanrights/2013/03/201331883513244683.html> have
been killing or detaining their compatriots from this region, as well as
across much of Baghdad. Fallujah's residents now refer to that city as a
"big prison," just as they did when it was surrounded and strictly
controlled by the Americans.
Angry protesters have taken to the streets. "We demand an end to checkpoints
surrounding Fallujah. We demand they allow in the press. We demand they
end their unlawful home raids and detentions. We demand an end to
federalism and gangsters and secret prisons!" So Sheikh Khaled Hamoud
Al-Jumaili, a leader of the demonstrations, tells me just prior to one of
the daily protests. "Losing our history and dividing Iraqis is wrong, but
that, and kidnapping and conspiracies and displacing people, is what Maliki
is doing."
The sheikh went on to assure me that millions of people in Anbar province
had stopped demanding changes in the Maliki government because, after years
of waiting, no such demands were ever met. "Now, we demand a change in the
regime instead and a change in the constitution," he says. "We will not stop
these demonstrations. This one we have labeled 'last chance Friday' because
it is the government's last chance to listen to us."
"What comes next," I ask him, "if they don't listen to you?"
"Maybe armed struggle comes next," he replies without pause.
Predictably, given how the cycle of violence, corruption, injustice, and
desperation has become part of daily life in this country, that same day, a
Sunni demonstrator was gunned down by Iraqi security forces. Lieutenant
General Mardhi al-Mahlawi, commander of the Iraqi Army's Anbar Operations
Command, said the authorities would not hesitate to deploy troops around the
protest site again "if the protesters do not cooperate." The following day,
the Maliki government warned that the area was becoming "a haven for
terrorists," echoing the favorite term the Americans used during their
occupation of Fallujah.
Today's Iraq
In 2009, I was in Fallujah,
<
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175033/dahr_jamail_iraq_from_the_inside_of_
an_armored_bmw> riding around in the armored BMW of Sheikh Aifan, the head
of the then-U.S.-backed Sunni militias known as the Sahwa forces. The Sheikh
was an opportunistic, extremely wealthy "construction contractor" and
boasted that the car we rode in had been custom built for him at a cost of
nearly half a million dollars.
Two months ago, Sheikh Aifan was killed by a suicide bomber, just one more
victim of a relentless campaign by Sunni insurgents targeting those who once
collaborated with the Americans. Memories in Iraq are long these days and
revenge remains on many minds. The key figures in the Maliki regime know
that if it falls, as is likely one day, they may meet fates similar to
Sheikh Aifan's. It's a convincing argument for hanging onto power.
In this way, the Iraq of 2013 staggers onward in a climate of perpetual
crisis toward a future where the only givens are more chaos, more violence,
and yet more uncertainty. Much of this can be traced to Washington's long,
brutal, and destructive occupation, beginning with the installation of
former CIA asset Ayad Allawi as interim prime minister. His hold on power
quickly faltered, however, after he was used by the Americans to launch
their second siege of Fallujah in November 2004, which resulted in the
deaths of thousands more Iraqis, and set the stage for an
<
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/03/2013315171951838638.html>
ongoing health crisis in the city due to the types of weapons used by the
U.S. military.
In 2006, after Allawi lost political clout, then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq
neoconservative Zalmay Khalilzad tapped Maliki as Washington's new prime
minister. It was then widely believed that he was the only politician whom
both the U.S. and Iran could find acceptable. As one Iraqi official
sarcastically put it, Maliki was the product of an agreement between "the
Great Satan and the Axis of Evil."
In the years since, Maliki has become a de facto dictator. In Anbar Province
and parts of Baghdad, he is now bitterly referred to as a "Shia Saddam."
Pictures of his less-than-photogenic face in front of an Iraqi flag hang
above many of the countless checkpoints around the capital. When I see his
visage looming over us yet again as we sit in traffic, I comment to my
fixer, Ali, that his image is now everywhere, just as Saddam's used to be.
"Yes, they've simply changed the view for us," Ali replies, and we laugh.
Gallows humor has been a constant in Baghdad since the invasion a decade
ago.
It's been much the same all over Iraq. The U.S. forces that ousted Saddam
Hussein's regime immediately moved into his military bases and palaces. Now
that the U.S. has left Iraq, those same bases and palaces are manned and
controlled by the Maliki government.
Saddam Hussein's country was notoriously corrupt. Yet last year, Iraq
ranked 169th out of 174 countries surveyed, according to Transparency
International's <
http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2012/results/> Corruption
Perception Index. It is effectively a failed state, with the Maliki regime
incapable of controlling vast swaths of the country, including the Kurdish
north, despite his willingness to use the same tactics once employed by
Saddam Hussein and after him the Americans: widespread violence, secret
prisons, threats, detentions, and torture.
Almost 10 years after U.S. troops entered a Baghdad in flames and being
looted, Iraq remains one of the most dangerous places on Earth. There are
daily bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations. The sectarianism instilled
and endlessly stirred up by U.S. policy has become deeply, seemingly
irrevocably embedded in the political culture, which regularly threatens to
tip over into the sort of violence that typified 2006-2007, when upwards of
3,000 Iraqis were being slaughtered every month.
The death toll of March 11th was one of the worst of late and provides a
snapshot of the increasing levels of violence countrywide. Overall, 27
people were killed and many more injured in attacks across the country. A
suicide car bomb detonated in a town near Kirkuk, killing eight and wounding
166 (65 of whom were students at a Kurdish secondary school for girls). In
Baghdad, gunmen stormed a home where they murdered a man and woman. A shop
owner was shot dead and a policeman was killed in a drive-by shooting in
Ghazaliya. A civilian was killed in the Saidiya district, while a Sahwa
member was gunned down in Amil. Three government ministry employees in the
city were also killed.
In addition, gunmen killed two policemen in the town of Baaj, a dead body
turned up in Muqtadiyah, where a roadside bomb also wounded a policeman. In
the city of Baquba, northeast of Baghdad, gunmen killed a blacksmith, and in
the northern city of Mosul, a political candidate and a soldier were both
killed in separate incidents. A local political leader in the town of Rutba
in Anbar Province was shot and died of his injuries, and the body of a young
man whose skull was crushed was found in Kirkuk a day after he was
kidnapped. Gunmen also killed a civilian in Abu Saida.
And these are only the incidents reported in the media in a single day.
Others regularly don't make it into the news at all.
The next day, Awadh, the security chief for Al Jazeera in Baghdad, was in a
dark mood when he arrived at work. "Yesterday, two people were assassinated
in my neighborhood," he said. "Six were assassinated around Baghdad. I live
in a mixed neighborhood, and the threats of killing have returned. It feels
like it did just before the sectarian war of 2006. The militias are again
working to push people out of their homes if they are not Shia. Now, I worry
everyday when my daughter goes to school. I ask the taxi driver who takes
her to drop her close to the school, so that she is alright." Then he paused
a moment, held up his arms and added, "And I pray."
"This Is Our Life Now"
Iraqis who had enough money and connections to leave the country have long
since fled. Harb, another fixer and dear friend who worked with me
throughout much of my earlier reportage from Iraq, fled to Syria's capital,
Damascus, with his family for security reasons. When the uprising in Syria
turned violent and devolved into the bloodbath it is today, he fled Damascus
for Beirut. He is literally running from war.
Recent Iraqi government estimates put the total of "internally displaced
persons" in Iraq at 1.1 million. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis remain in
exile, but of course no one is counting. Even those who stay often live as
if they were refugees and act as if they are on the run. Most of those I
met on my most recent trip won't even allow me to use their real names when
I interview them.
My first day in the field this time around, I met with Isam, another fixer
I'd worked with nine years ago. His son narrowly escaped two kidnapping
attempts, and he has had to change homes four times for security reasons.
Once he was strongly opposed to leaving Iraq because, he always insisted,
"this is my country, and these are my people." Now, he is desperate to find
a way out. "There is no future here," he told me. "Sectarianism is
everywhere and killing has come back to Baghdad."
He takes me to interview refugees in his neighborhood of al-Adhamiyah. Most
of them fled their homes in mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods and towns during
the sectarian violence of 2006 and 2007. Inside his cobbled-together brick
house with a roof of tin sheeting held down with old tires, one refugee
echoes Isam's words: "There is no future for us Iraqis," he told me. "Day by
day our situation worsens, and now we expect a full sectarian war."
Elsewhere, I interviewed 20-year-old Marwa Ali, a mother of two. In a
country where electric blackouts are a regular event, water is often
polluted, and waste of every sort litters neighborhoods, the stench of
garbage and raw sewage wafted through the door of her home while flies
buzzed about. "We have scorpions and snakes also," she said while watching
me futilely swat at the swarm of insects that instantly surrounded me. And
she paused when she saw me looking at her children, a four-year-old son and
two-year-old daughter. "My children have no future," she said. "Neither do
I, and neither does Iraq."
Shortly afterward, I met with another refugee, 55-year-old Haifa Abdul
Majid. I held back tears when the first thing she said was how grateful she
was to have food. "We are finding some food and can eat, and I thank God for
this," she
<
http://www.aljazeera.com/humanrights/2013/03/201339112229227469.html> told
me in front of her makeshift shelter. "This is the main thing. In some
countries, some people can't even find food to eat."
She, too, had fled sectarian violence, and had lost loved ones and friends.
While she acknowledged the hardship she was experiencing and how difficult
it was to live under such difficult circumstances, she continued to express
her gratitude that her situation wasn't worse. After all, she said, she
wasn't living in the desert. Finally, she closed her eyes and shook her
head. "We know we are in this bad situation because of the American
occupation," she said wearily. "And now it is Iran having their revenge on
us by using Maliki, and getting back at Iraq for the [1980-1988] war with
Iran. As for our future, if things stay like they are now, it will only keep
getting worse. The politicians only fight, and they take Iraq down into a
hole. For 10 years what have these politicians done? Nothing! Saddam was
better than all of them."
I asked her about her grandson. "Always I wonder about him," she replied.
"I ask God to take me away before he grows up, because I don't want to see
it. I'm an old woman now and I don't care if I die, but what about these
young children?" She stopped speaking, looked off into the distance, then
stared at the ground. There was, for her, nothing else to say.
I heard the same fatalism even from Awadh, Al Jazeera's head of security.
"Baghdad is stressed," he told me. "These days you can't trust anyone. The
situation on the street is complicated, because militias are running
everything. You don't know who is who. All the militias are preparing for
more fighting, and all are expecting the worst."
As he said this, we passed under yet another poster of an angry looking
Maliki, speaking with a raised, clenched fist. "Last year's budget was $100
billion and we have no working sewage system and garbage is everywhere," he
added. "Maliki is trying to be a dictator, and is controlling all the money
now."
In the days that followed, my fixer Ali pointed out new sidewalks, and newly
planted trees and flowers, as well as the new street lights the government
has installed in Baghdad. "We called it first the sidewalks government,
because that was the only thing we could see that they accomplished." He
laughed sardonically. "Then it was the flowers government, and now it is the
government of the street lamps, and the lamps sometimes don't even work!"
Despite his brave face, kind heart, and upbeat disposition, even Ali
eventually shared his concerns with me. One morning, when we met for work,
I asked him about the latest news. "Same old, same old," he replied,
"Kidnappings, killings, rapes. Same old, same old. This is our life now,
everyday."
"The lack of hope for the future is our biggest problem today," he
explained. He went on to say something that also qualified eerily as
another version of the "same old, same old." I had heard similar words from
countless Iraqis back in the fall of 2003, as violence and chaos first began
to engulf the country. "All we want is to live in peace, and have security,
and have a normal life," he said, "to be able to enjoy the sweetness of
life." This time, however, there wasn't even a trace of his usual cheer,
and not even a hint of gallows humor.
"All Iraq has had these last 10 years is violence, chaos, and suffering. For
13 years before that we were starved and deprived by [U.N. and U.S.]
sanctions. Before that, the Kuwait War, and before that, the Iran War. At
least I experienced some of my childhood without knowing war. I've achieved
a job and have my family, but for my daughters, what will they have here in
this country? Will they ever get to live without war? I don't think so."
For so many Iraqis like Ali, a decade after Washington invaded their
country, this is the anniversary of nothing at all.
Dahr Jamail is a feature story staff writer and producer for the Human
Rights Department of Al Jazeera English. Currently based in Doha, Qatar,
Dahr has spent more than a year in Iraq, spread over a number of trips
between 2003 and 2013. His reportage from Iraq,
<
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/2166/dahr_jamail_life_under_the_bombs>
including for TomDispatch, has won him several awards, including the Martha
Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism. He is the author of
<
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1931859612/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> Beyond
the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq.
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Received on Wed Mar 27 2013 - 09:24:16 EDT
