Return to Baghdad

Chapter One: Tribes [first ten pages]

Green Room, U.S. Embassy, Baghdad, 14 December 2003.

“What the hell’s goin’ on?” Captain Brinkley said, leaning back in his desk chair, grinning.

“No idea,” Fred Novak said, standing next to him. The two of them were staring up at the row of TV monitors above the busy hall.

“Jeez, Fred. Isn’t the embassy spokesman supposed to know?”

“I only know what the army tells me I’m supposed to know.”

Looking up at the screens, Brinkley was on the verge of laughing out loud. Watching at a desk nearby was Ali Faqar, an Iraqi BBA assigned to the Green Room. His expression was different: amazement, verging on shock.

All twenty monitors in the embassy’s large Public Affairs nerve center—what everyone called the Green Room for its pale green walls—were showing the same scene. One by one, the room’s forty staffers began looking up from their desks at the screens. Soon all were ready to laugh out loud.

A raspy shout from one of them, a tall woman with bright orange hair, burst the balloon. “They’re shaving him!” Rusty Weaver shouted as she looked up at a monitor near her, marked CNN. “They’re shaving him!” The room exploded with laughter, then cheers.

On all screens monitors, as if on twenty mirrors, an American soldier was gently applying an electric shaver to a dazed, disheveled Saddam Hussein. The soldier politely manipulated the dictator’s chin; Saddam looked up at him meekly, feebly. Everyone in the Green Room knew that after eight months on the run, the dictator had finally been caught the day before. These were the first images of the prize, sent out by the army this morning on a simultaneous feed to every important news outlet in the world.

Brinkley jumped up from his desk. “Hooah!” he shouted in his throaty voice, slamming fist against palm. Bald-shaven, stocky as a small bull, he flashed his grin around at everyone in the room, as if leading the cheers. He grabbed two cigars from his desk, one for himself, one for Sergeant Mike Mikulsky, his bald-shaven assistant at the desk in front of him.

The next scene brought more laughter, cheers. Up on the monitors, an army doctor wearing latex gloves inspected the dictator’s wild shock of hair. He probed Saddam’s mouth with a tongue depressor and small penlight. The wide-open mouth glowed like a tiny hearth. All forty Green Room staffers broke into applause.

It was lost on no one they were viewing the scene in the very hall the dictator had once used for formal receptions. Though dozens of partitioned cubicles now filled the room, a row of French doors along one wall, shrouded in tattered chiffon drapes, hinted at former opulence. The hall was in the heart of the sprawling Republican Palace, once the seat of the dictator’s government—now the embassy of the nation that, the day before, had captured him in a tiny underground hideout, “like a rat in a hole,” as one reporter put it.

Novak rushed over to the center of the hall. “OK, people,” he shouted, “we got a job to do.” Over half-rimmed glasses, his eyes darted around the room. “We’ll get the army to cough up details”—he looked over at Brinkley, who was in mid-puff on the cigar—“but meantime you all get to work”—he seemed to make eye-contact with each of the forty staff—“I want a news release out by”—he glanced over at the row of clocks on the wall, marked Baghdad, Washington and other capitals—“eighteen hundred, OK? And Ali”—he pointed to Ali Faqar at his desk—“a translation by 18:30, OK? So let’s go, people”—he clapped his hands—“we got a story to tell.” He bolted back to his cubicle in a far corner, deftly sidestepping thick cables snaking on the floor from desk to desk.

Brinkley sat down again at his desk near the hall’s high arched entrance, leaned back and took a few puffs, coolly panting out a few smoke rings. Taking Novak’s cue, he then began scrolling on his computer Rolodex through contacts at Camp Victory. As the new army psy-ops officer assigned to the Green Room, he was eager to be part of the telling. The visuals were brilliant. Sampson Hussein getting a shave! The Butcher of Baghdad with a stick up his mouth! He didn’t mind he hadn’t been part of the event itself; he might have been in his old posting at Victory, where he knew Saddam was being held. No, “it’s the story you tell that makes the event,” he’d told Mikulsky on one of their first days in the Green Room. It was one of his maxims. He liked to think he had one for every occasion.

Less than a month on the job here, Captain Brit Brinkley was already a familiar presence among the staffers, with his cigars, his strained kernels of wisdom, and a gravelly north Jersey accent clipping off r’s and final g’s. He had lobbied hard for the Green Room assignment. “I live on intel,” he’d told Mikulsky, and for intel, “this place is the fuckin’ Grand Central.” In one of his roles, as intel conduit between army and embassy, he quickly learned what each wanted to share with, and keep from, the other. “And you know what, Sergeant? We get it all—from both.”

Ready to make his first call to Victory, Brinkley glanced over at Ali Faqar at his desk nearby. He was about to offer him a cigar, but there were tears in the Iraqi’s eyes. Everyone the Green Room was fond of this slight, friendly man with neatly trimmed goatee, who had lost his father, a professor, to the tyrant’s regime. He’d escaped to America, and coached youth soccer teams in suburban Detroit.

“You OK, my brother?” Brinkley asked.

“Yes, Captain Brit.” Ali whispered, “Saqat al’shaitan. The devil has fallen.”

“The devil has fallen! There y’go. Great day for Iraq, right?”

“But Captain,” Ali said, “should we be showing this? Very strong.”

“Showing what?”

“This.” Ali pointed up to the nearest monitor—to what they’d just seen. “Being shaved,” he said in a voice hushed with shame.

Brinkley gave him a puzzled look.

“It is very strong,” Ali said again. “Is as if you take away his very will.”

“Aren’t you happy we did?”

“Yes, Captain Brit. But very strong—to show.”

“Well,” Brinkley said, pointing around to all the monitors—CNN, NBC, Fox, BBC, al-Arabiya—“Looks like it’s a done deal.”

“Captain Brit, showing it, you maybe give him a gift.”

“Gift? Saddam?” Brinkley said. He took a draw on his cigar. “Yeah. A nice clean shave.”

Ali said nothing for a moment, then spoke haltingly: “What I am saying, Captain Brit, is that before a story ends, one never knows where it is going, no? One is never sure.”

Captain Brit looked at him with widened eyes and a grin. “Exactly,” he said. “You never really know where you’re going ‘til you get there. Right?” He nodded approvingly.

Now Ali gave him a puzzled look.

Near Ramadi, Anbar Province, Iraq, 14 December 2003.

Sheik Omar ibn Mohammed al-Assafi, Grand Sheik of all the Dulaimi tribes in Anbar province, had always been of two minds about his “toy.”

On the one hand, slowly rising in this glass booth to the balcony above, Omar could admire his grand meeting hall from a better perspective. He had just adjourned this afternoon’s majlis of fifty sheiks and was returning up to the private rooms of his villa. Though he had installed this “lift” for one of his wives, whom some devil had crippled with arthritis at a young age, truth be told he enjoyed these slow ascents in the contraption himself. Always keen on working the controls, he had waved off Jamal, his majordomo, and now rose above the grand hall alone—“like an angel,” he once described it to fellow sheiks, “though one who likes to dally.” Thanks to his rising glass box, he had a better view of his huge, centuries-old scimitar hanging on the nearby wall. Next to it, his ten framed maxims from the Qur’an in wildly swirling Arabic were more easily read, the most prominent above the rest: “In the sight of God, only the honorable are righteous.” He could take in at a glance all the portraits on the walls around the great hall, of ancestors going back to the 1920’s. His great-grandfather, Sheik Rahman al-Assafi, the first Iraqi leader of the Dulaimi, had pride of place alone on the far wall. About the same age as Sheik Rahman when the photo was taken, Omar wore the same formal robe, the same red-checked headdress, the same thin, well-tended beard—and fancied he had the same sober, narrow-eyed gaze. From his slowly rising perch, he could look down on Rahman and all his ancestors with a sense of superiority, may he be forgiven.

On the other hand, this glass machine was another product of the infidel. Not that he resented it just for this. What worried him was that devices of Westerners eventually, insidiously, became as indispensable as they were convenient: he couldn’t remember the last time he bothered to climb his marble stairway up to his apartments. Gifts of the infidel, in fact, seemed designed to make one dependent, even for one’s life. He needed his five heavily armored Mercedes SUV’s to chauffeur him around in safety; two of his four cell phones he depended on solely for security. Should a man in his position allow himself to become so dependent?

As the lift came to a stop at the balcony overlooking the hall, he glanced down at Jamal below. Short and fat in a tight silk caftan, Jamal stood next to the small pit at the base of the lift, grinning up at him. From the Sheik’s point of view, Jamal’s girth seemed to encircle him like a tire. The Sheik smiled, almost laughed.

Then he gave a start. Sensing the lift’s glass door slowly opening behind him, he spun around to look. It was Ibrahim, pulling the door open from the balcony landing, silently greeting him with a slight bow. As always when they met, the first thing the Sheik noticed was Ibrahim’s wayward left eye, tilted in its impossible direction, upward to the left; then his dark stern face, rigid as a mask. Ibrahim was Omar’s advisor in all matters of security—including those the sheik would prefer not know about. The Sheik bowed stiffly toward him, stepped onto the balcony and, without a second look at him, strode down the corridor to his apartments.

Omar lived here on the upper floors with Aisha, the wife with arthritis, and their son Rahman. As he walked down the wide corridor, lined with photos of him with other sheiks and Baghdad officials, he could hear another dubious gift of the infidel. He had decided to take afternoon tea up here, but hated watching the new wall-sized television Aisha had insisted they buy. The television’s huge moving images—people with heads as big as the furniture—he found irritating, unnatural. Aisha was probably watching some Jordanian serial with Rahman. He would look in on them later.

Meantime, he stepped out onto the terrace nearby to enjoy the light December breeze. He took his seat behind the long parapet; a servant poured him tea from a silver service set on a low teakwood table. Ignoring the television voices murmuring within, he sat sipping tea in the shade of a long canvas awning. It was usually a pleasure for him to sit out here alone, quietly admiring his domain. Extending beyond the distant green line of reeds along the Euphrates, it stretched out toward the Anbar desert, far to the west. Yet after today’s meeting, the Sheik was troubled.

For months the Ameriki had been combing Anbar, searching for the madman Saddam, barging into homes, holding people at gunpoint. As the meeting’s main agenda item this afternoon, several sheiks demanded he take action. He very much shared their resentment, he told Jamal, whom he often trusted as a mustashar, a counselor. Not that he blamed the Americans for hunting down their enemy, who was, after all, no friend to the Dulaimi either; the Americans had their own interests, which the Sheik honored, just as he and the Dulaimi had theirs. But the Americans, now the biggest tribe in Iraq, refused to return the honor. Given their shameful behavior, could the Americans even understand what honor was? And even aside from the infidel, he had more than his share of enemies, may Allah protect him. So trust was as priceless as honor. Trust in clan, tribe—and family. He thought of Aisha, his preeminent wife. The trust he could place in her and her family’s clan was worth more than gold.

What’s more, she had given him Rahman, his only son, and was raising him well. The Sheik was proud of the boy’s steady bearing and serene smile, which seemed to show a wisdom beyond his years. Before long, young Rahman would be coming of age; the Sheik looked forward to introducing him formally to the majlis. He took a sip of tea and smiled—calling to mind his son’s imperturbable grin.

A loud scream pierced his calm—Aisha! Omar rushed inside and down the corridor. Jamal was right in front of him, Ibrahim behind.

“Look!” Aisha shouted the moment he burst into the sitting room.

On the screen filling the wall opposite, a woman in headscarf was reading the news; behind her were two photos of Saddam. The dictator had finally been captured, she explained; these were “before” and “after” photos—before and after “being shaved.”

“They’ve shaved him,” Aisha said, shaking her cane at the screen. Young Rahman was sitting beside her on the long white divan, his eyes wide and puzzled.

At first, Sheik Omar didn’t quite know what he was seeing, other than two photos of the deposed madman.

“They’ve shaved him!” she said again, now looking at her husband. “The Americans have shaved him!”

“That is Saddam now?” he said, pointing to one of the photos.

“Yes, my husband. Now. The Americans have shaved him!”

She and the woman on the screen kept saying this, but it wasn’t making sense. The thought of one man forcibly shaving another man—

Just then a moving image of Saddam appeared. An American soldier was applying a machine to Saddam’s face, to his wild, unkempt beard. Yes, they were shaving him! “La’ana!” the Sheik said—under his breath, a woman being present.

When they saw another soldier probing his mouth, Aisha gasped. The Sheik, once he realized what he was watching, became physically ill, the tea rising to his throat, harsh and bitter.

“Is this really occurring?” he said as if it were some electronic sleight of hand. “No, this is not happening,” he said, now as if he could will it into non-existence.

Grabbing a small antique oil lamp on the end table beside the divan, he was ready to hurl it at the images. As he told the story to Jamal later, some angel must have stopped him—reminding him what the new TV meant to his wife. He lobbed it at another wall instead, one fitted with a large gold-tinted mirror. A moment before the mirror shattered, he had a glimpse of himself—his face red, his teeth showing like a wolf’s.

He looked “a true devil,” he told Jamal.

Al-Mustansariyah University, Baghdad, 14 December 2003.

Zafirah bint Abdullah al-Assafi knew that no religious zealot would ever protest the new TV here in the student cafe. It would be like protesting electricity, or computers. These days, computers and the internet were as much a staple of religion as the loudspeakers calling the faithful to prayer at the ancient Abu-Hanifa Mosque. She had seen grand ayatollah Sistani’s home page, and Muqtada al-Sadr’s, the rising star among Shi’a extremists. Though the zealots’ bullying presence on campus was becoming a daily threat, a new TV would hardly be an issue. On the contrary, since the university had its own generators, they often came here to watch Lions of Mesopotamia matches, while the rest of the city endured endless outages.

For Zafirah, however, the new television perched over the counter was a source of resentment. This afternoon, as a break from her studies she was taking tea in the cafe, alone. Thanks to growing intimidation from the zealots, most of her friends had left the university; their lively teatime chats had become a thing of the past. A gang of young men dressed in black balaclavas sat up near the counter, watching a match from Damascus, cheering and jeering with the TV crowd. In a back corner, another group sat at a long table, many in red and white checked keffiyahs, but just as raucously intent on the match. The new television, blaring out football cheers and chatter, for her only completed the barbarizing of university life—at this once great university, with roots dating back to the thirteenth century.

Sitting at a table in the other back corner, Zafirah struggled to ignore both groups. She prided herself on being able to remain aloof from her surroundings—a valuable skill in Baghdad these days. The growing violence only added to the press of crowds scrounging for basic needs, rushing to beat the curfew. On buses, in markets, on the street, she learned to maintain her bubble of solitude by treating all she laid eyes on, things and people alike, as one vast redundancy, irrelevant to her thoughts. At the moment, this skill was being sorely tested. Even aside from the TV noise, she noticed the looks she was getting from the men in the room, which she found as nauseating as the sickly sweet fumes from their hookahs. Though “properly” attired with a green silk headscarf concealing her long black hair, she guessed some would take offense at a woman sitting alone in public. She tried to ignore their looks, their very existence, let alone what they thought of her.

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