thedrifter
07-25-08, 08:04 AM
July 24, 2008, 11:36 am
The Road to Anbar
By Alissa J. Rubin
BAGHDAD — This spring I needed to interview former detainees in American detention centers who had recently been released, so I went to Anbar Province, a vast western desert area of Iraq that lies between Baghdad and Jordan. It is best known for the turbulent town of Falluja, which became a headquarters for Al Qaeda in Iraq and where the Americans fought bloody battles in 2004. It then became something of a ghost town peopled almost exclusively by fighters. Eventually, the Marines completely controlled it and the violence migrated elsewhere. But many of those who had been detained there were locals, and eventually they returned to their homes.
We had to leave early and so I didn’t have much choice of a translator. Anwar was the only person who came in early, and although she was a Shiite and usually I would not have taken her a hardline Sunni area, I asked her to go. She is 30-years old and the mother of a little girl. A fine translator, she is also a thoughtful observer. Her sense of loss — on many levels— is finely tuned, but she can also laugh.
At first, she was scared to come with me to a place where the Sunnis are known for all but eating Shiites. But as our journey unfolded she became lost, as did I, in memories of an earlier time in Iraq. For her, childhood and the early days of her marriage; for me, the first year or two that I was reporting here in 2003 and 2004.
As we drove through the Baghdad outskirts, we each began to remember the last time we had been in Anbar. For Anwar it was the fall of 2005 when she fled to Syria. For me it was September of 2004, when I made it back to Baghdad from Ramadi through Falluja, when the city was in the grip of Al Qaeda in Iraq gunmen.
Anwar’s first memory was of early morning, 6 a.m. in the winter, and loading a suitcase into a mini-bus shared with other fleeing Shiites, with her infant daughter in her arms racing toward the border, praying that Sunnis would not stop the car and execute them. When she got to the border she was surprised to find that it was only 9 am; they had crossed Iraq’s western desert like the wind. She called her mother and said, “We are here, we can see Syria.” It was two years before she came back.
As we talked about these memories, we reached the western edge of Baghdad and were going by a neighborhood named Al Khadraa. Anwar pointed and said, ‘Right there behind that house is Adnan’s parent’s house,” Adnan is her husband.
“They had to leave it because extremists took over the neighborhood. So they let a Sunni woman, a widow, live there for free with her children so that it would not become a nest for terrorists.
“Look, can you see? It’s that one right there, where that palm tree is lying in the road.”
Iraqis chop down palm trees and use the trunks as makeshift road barriers. I looked at the house and it looked perfectly ordinary. A low, yellow brick house with a scruffy garden, grass that already in April, before the true heat of the year, looked brown. As if reading my mind, Anwar said. “It had a beatuiful garden with many kinds of palm trees inside. It is very neglected now. Just seeing it makes my heart beat so.” Her eyes were filled with tears.
At the time Anwar fled to Syria, masked fighters from Al Qaeda in Iraq still controlled many of the roads in the west, though not the main highway in Anbar (but sometimes that as well). Falluja and Ramadi were ‘no go’ zones for Western journalists unless they were embedded with the military.
My memory of Anbar dated from the fall of 2004, a couple of months before the American military offensive in Falluja. On that particular day, as it happened, there had been a suicide bomb attack on the marines on the highway between Ramadi and Falluja. I was at a marine base in Ramadi and needed to get back to Baghdad because we were short staffed in the LA Times office, where I was then working.
Instead of waiting until there was a helicopter to fly me back, I had two of our Iraqi drivers come out to get me. I dressed in a black abbaya and veil and black Iraqi shoes and climbed in the back of one of the cars. Ziad, the driver, who looked more Russian than Iraqi, told me that the marines had closed the highway and so we would have to take detours through Falluja.
I don’t think I allowed myself to think about how dangerous that would be. Because the Al Qaeda guys controlled the checkpoints, they might see that there was a westerner in the car — a prize; someone whose beheading they would want to video. We agreed I would lie down in the back of the car curled in a fetal position facing the seat, I would cover my head and most of my pale face with my black veil. Ziad would say I was pregnant and ill and he was taking me to my sister’s in Ameriya, a Sunni area of Baghdad. I tried to imagine being pregnant and fearing that I was going to lose the pregnancy.
Soon we were bumping along the unpaved roads that the marines had routed traffic to. It was very hot and uncomfortable on the seat and I wanted to sit up. ‘Safe?” I called to Ziad. “La” (”No” in Arabic) he said as we slowed down again. As I cast my eye upward for a second I saw leaning in the window a swarthy thin man with a Kalashnikov in one hand and a black and white checked scarf hiding his face. It was an insurgent checkpoint. He and Ziad spoke in Arabic for a few minutes before we proceeded. There were probably four checkpoints like this before we rejoined the main highway. At each one an armed man looked into the car and then waved us through.
I owed Ziad my life, literally. When we got back I could see how frightened he had been. If any one of them had asked to see our identification, we would have been kidnapped and eventually, perhaps, beheaded.
Four years later, the road is safe. By 10 a.m., we had passed the last Baghdad checkpoint—it used to take a mere 45 minutes to reach Falluja from Baghdad, but now it’s a nearly two hour journey because of the Iraqi Army checkpoints. We were approaching the town of Abu Ghraib, known best for its notorious detention facility where American soldiers had humiliated and intimidated Iraqi detainees. I had never thought about the town as anything other than a scruffy bedroom community of Baghdad.
We passed one of those strange mirage like desert ponds that lie low and flat, whether from some aquifer close to the land’s surface or a broken water pipe is hard to say. It is certainly not rainwater, especially this year, which has been parching dry even by Iraqi standards.
Anwar gazed out the window at the dry desert scrub, the patch of water and clumps of palm trees and then spoke as if in a dream. “There are lovely lands near here. My uncle used to have a farm. He planted it himself,” she said.
I was surprised since I did not think of the area as wet enough for farming. “He had vegetables and pomegranates and all kinds of trees. It was on a small river and we went there in the summer. He had a small stable with horses, and cows and chickens.
“When we visited, he put a table outdoors that he had gone outside Iraq to buy in Europe, and he bought big umbrellas to make it shady, and special chairs. That was in the time of Saddam Hussein when we were young.
“And he had another special garden for grapes. You entered long tunnels and the grapes grew over them, red and green. It was so beautiful. That was 20 years ago now. He had to leave there because he lived in the middle of the Zobaie tribe and they did not like strangers,’’ said Anwar, using the code word for Shiites.
We were quiet then and watched the desert slip by.
Ellie
The Road to Anbar
By Alissa J. Rubin
BAGHDAD — This spring I needed to interview former detainees in American detention centers who had recently been released, so I went to Anbar Province, a vast western desert area of Iraq that lies between Baghdad and Jordan. It is best known for the turbulent town of Falluja, which became a headquarters for Al Qaeda in Iraq and where the Americans fought bloody battles in 2004. It then became something of a ghost town peopled almost exclusively by fighters. Eventually, the Marines completely controlled it and the violence migrated elsewhere. But many of those who had been detained there were locals, and eventually they returned to their homes.
We had to leave early and so I didn’t have much choice of a translator. Anwar was the only person who came in early, and although she was a Shiite and usually I would not have taken her a hardline Sunni area, I asked her to go. She is 30-years old and the mother of a little girl. A fine translator, she is also a thoughtful observer. Her sense of loss — on many levels— is finely tuned, but she can also laugh.
At first, she was scared to come with me to a place where the Sunnis are known for all but eating Shiites. But as our journey unfolded she became lost, as did I, in memories of an earlier time in Iraq. For her, childhood and the early days of her marriage; for me, the first year or two that I was reporting here in 2003 and 2004.
As we drove through the Baghdad outskirts, we each began to remember the last time we had been in Anbar. For Anwar it was the fall of 2005 when she fled to Syria. For me it was September of 2004, when I made it back to Baghdad from Ramadi through Falluja, when the city was in the grip of Al Qaeda in Iraq gunmen.
Anwar’s first memory was of early morning, 6 a.m. in the winter, and loading a suitcase into a mini-bus shared with other fleeing Shiites, with her infant daughter in her arms racing toward the border, praying that Sunnis would not stop the car and execute them. When she got to the border she was surprised to find that it was only 9 am; they had crossed Iraq’s western desert like the wind. She called her mother and said, “We are here, we can see Syria.” It was two years before she came back.
As we talked about these memories, we reached the western edge of Baghdad and were going by a neighborhood named Al Khadraa. Anwar pointed and said, ‘Right there behind that house is Adnan’s parent’s house,” Adnan is her husband.
“They had to leave it because extremists took over the neighborhood. So they let a Sunni woman, a widow, live there for free with her children so that it would not become a nest for terrorists.
“Look, can you see? It’s that one right there, where that palm tree is lying in the road.”
Iraqis chop down palm trees and use the trunks as makeshift road barriers. I looked at the house and it looked perfectly ordinary. A low, yellow brick house with a scruffy garden, grass that already in April, before the true heat of the year, looked brown. As if reading my mind, Anwar said. “It had a beatuiful garden with many kinds of palm trees inside. It is very neglected now. Just seeing it makes my heart beat so.” Her eyes were filled with tears.
At the time Anwar fled to Syria, masked fighters from Al Qaeda in Iraq still controlled many of the roads in the west, though not the main highway in Anbar (but sometimes that as well). Falluja and Ramadi were ‘no go’ zones for Western journalists unless they were embedded with the military.
My memory of Anbar dated from the fall of 2004, a couple of months before the American military offensive in Falluja. On that particular day, as it happened, there had been a suicide bomb attack on the marines on the highway between Ramadi and Falluja. I was at a marine base in Ramadi and needed to get back to Baghdad because we were short staffed in the LA Times office, where I was then working.
Instead of waiting until there was a helicopter to fly me back, I had two of our Iraqi drivers come out to get me. I dressed in a black abbaya and veil and black Iraqi shoes and climbed in the back of one of the cars. Ziad, the driver, who looked more Russian than Iraqi, told me that the marines had closed the highway and so we would have to take detours through Falluja.
I don’t think I allowed myself to think about how dangerous that would be. Because the Al Qaeda guys controlled the checkpoints, they might see that there was a westerner in the car — a prize; someone whose beheading they would want to video. We agreed I would lie down in the back of the car curled in a fetal position facing the seat, I would cover my head and most of my pale face with my black veil. Ziad would say I was pregnant and ill and he was taking me to my sister’s in Ameriya, a Sunni area of Baghdad. I tried to imagine being pregnant and fearing that I was going to lose the pregnancy.
Soon we were bumping along the unpaved roads that the marines had routed traffic to. It was very hot and uncomfortable on the seat and I wanted to sit up. ‘Safe?” I called to Ziad. “La” (”No” in Arabic) he said as we slowed down again. As I cast my eye upward for a second I saw leaning in the window a swarthy thin man with a Kalashnikov in one hand and a black and white checked scarf hiding his face. It was an insurgent checkpoint. He and Ziad spoke in Arabic for a few minutes before we proceeded. There were probably four checkpoints like this before we rejoined the main highway. At each one an armed man looked into the car and then waved us through.
I owed Ziad my life, literally. When we got back I could see how frightened he had been. If any one of them had asked to see our identification, we would have been kidnapped and eventually, perhaps, beheaded.
Four years later, the road is safe. By 10 a.m., we had passed the last Baghdad checkpoint—it used to take a mere 45 minutes to reach Falluja from Baghdad, but now it’s a nearly two hour journey because of the Iraqi Army checkpoints. We were approaching the town of Abu Ghraib, known best for its notorious detention facility where American soldiers had humiliated and intimidated Iraqi detainees. I had never thought about the town as anything other than a scruffy bedroom community of Baghdad.
We passed one of those strange mirage like desert ponds that lie low and flat, whether from some aquifer close to the land’s surface or a broken water pipe is hard to say. It is certainly not rainwater, especially this year, which has been parching dry even by Iraqi standards.
Anwar gazed out the window at the dry desert scrub, the patch of water and clumps of palm trees and then spoke as if in a dream. “There are lovely lands near here. My uncle used to have a farm. He planted it himself,” she said.
I was surprised since I did not think of the area as wet enough for farming. “He had vegetables and pomegranates and all kinds of trees. It was on a small river and we went there in the summer. He had a small stable with horses, and cows and chickens.
“When we visited, he put a table outdoors that he had gone outside Iraq to buy in Europe, and he bought big umbrellas to make it shady, and special chairs. That was in the time of Saddam Hussein when we were young.
“And he had another special garden for grapes. You entered long tunnels and the grapes grew over them, red and green. It was so beautiful. That was 20 years ago now. He had to leave there because he lived in the middle of the Zobaie tribe and they did not like strangers,’’ said Anwar, using the code word for Shiites.
We were quiet then and watched the desert slip by.
Ellie