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IRAQ
NOTEBOOK
All according to the
notebook
By Paul Belden
BAGHDAD - Before Iraq, I'd never been in a
situation as a reporter where so many people took such
an abiding interest in exactly what I wrote down in my
notebook. In post-battle Baghdad, they don't trust your
memory, and they don't trust you, either. Before they'll
even talk to you, they demand to see your press pass,
and then, while they're telling their story - often with
a death-grip on your shirtsleeve to make sure you don't
wander off - they want to watch you write it down, too.
Sometimes even that isn't enough. When Haider
Abbas Farhan, a man in his late 30s whom I buttonholed
on the Karada Dakhl on the east bank of the Tigris, grew
suspicious of my note-taking diligence, he simply
grabbed my pad out of my hands started writing in it
himself. He didn't write much - just the number two,
twice, the figures traced side by side in my notebook in
a wavering see-Jane-run learner's scrawl that took up a
quarter of the page. But he got over the gist of his
tale.
"Here," he said, locking eyes with mine
and pointing at his own. "I look. With my eye, I look."
He grabbed my shirtsleeve. "Twenty-two person. Four
children. And the mother." He let go and began acting
out the scene of a convoy being strafed by a machine
gun, playing all the roles himself. He kept looking over
to make sure I was writing it down. "All dead. Three
days ago. In Adhamyia. I look. With my eye, I look."
There happened to be an armored US Marine patrol
parked with engines rumbling half a block away, and
suddenly Haider pivoted toward them and thrust his arm
out in their direction like a power-tripping traffic
cop. "Amrikee soldier," he said, raising his voice. "No
good!" And now he was starting to get worked up. In a
quick role switch, he pantomimed the re-loading of a
magazine - cha-chingk, cha-chingk - and this time he
aimed his imaginary Kalashnikov or whatever it was
straight at those soldiers' heads. "Powpowpowpowpow!" he
said.
Jesus Christ - I nearly hit the pavement.
A couple of those soldiers' heads happened to be poking
out of the hatch of a steel green amphibious
killer-turtle tank thing with a prow like a ship
sporting twin .50 caliber machine guns, which was
considerably more firepower than Haider was even
pretending to unload. And the whole point of his story
had been how quick on the trigger they were with those
guns. It didn't stop him one bit: "One week, two weeks,
wait, wait," he said. "Powpowpowpowpow." He noticed my
somewhat distracted state and started dancing up and
down in frustration while unleashing a torrent of
abusive Arabic for which I didn't need a translator:
"Write this down, you fucking moron!" he was obviously
screaming.
So I wrote it down. Yeah, the media
have been accused of being gullible in the matter of
civilian casualties, and sure, he could have been
bullshitting me. But I did what I could to check his
story out. I went to the US Army public information
office in the Palestine hotel to ask about any recent
firefight in Adhamyia, but they didn't know anything -
when anybody was even home. I asked some soldiers on a
checkpoint, but they knew even less than I did. There'd
been lots of firefights, they shrugged.
So I
hired a driver and went over to Adhamyia myself. Sure
enough, there was a convoy of burned-out cars sitting in
a row of crumpled black heaps in the street across from
a mosque that had also been shot to pieces. Certainly
something lethal had gone down in this place; there were
bullet holes and smashed glass everywhere. The mosque's
clock tower had a hole in it halfway up where a tank
shell had gone clean through. A line of glass-fronted
pharmacy stores and mom-and-pop shops along the street
had been utterly devastated. The entire neighborhood had
been shot to pieces.
When the locals got wind
that there was a journalist on the scene, they of course
began crowding around to make sure he was earning his
pay. It turned out that the story making the rounds was
this: The mosque, called Abu Hanifa, a beautiful one of
yellow and blue mosaic tiles, had been the place in
which Saddam Hussein had made his stand against the
invaders. When an American tank column had come through
this neighborhood on its way to the city center, about
two miles away, there had been a fierce battle. Many
jihadis had been killed, along with not a few civilians.
They ushered me into and through the mosque, and I
counted 11 new graves in the courtyard.
Somewhere along the way, a heavyset middle-aged
woman in a blue hijab (scarf) shouldered her way
to the front and began speaking her piece. I quote her
here not because what she had to say was extraordinary,
but precisely because it wasn't. That is to say, as
nearly as I could tell, this woman summed up the
prevailing sentiment of many people in Baghdad who lived
through the destruction in their city and who aren't
trying to curry favor with the government to come.
She said: "I say that America - Bush - George
Bush - is the enemy of the gods. He say the gods sent
him to save the Iraqi people, but he killed the Iraqi
people. He destroyed everything of the Iraqi people."
In one variation or another, I've written that
sentence down many times over the past four days - and
nearly every time, I've had somebody looking over my
shoulder to make sure I was getting it down right.
Earlier
articles in this series:
 Suddenly,
a war without a border (Apr 17, '03)
A lady
with real attitude (Apr 17, '03)
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