Baghdad Journal

Welcome to Baghdad

Our mission is to get press credentials. In front of the Iraq Forum Conference Center, U.S. soldiers stand beneath a thirsty-looking tree checking people's papers and identification. We stand in line and watch some soldiers give an Iraqi man a hard time. They yell at him, push him a little. The other Iraqis behind him shift on their feet. They are waiting to get in, most likely looking for work with the Coalition Provisional Authority inside.

After waiting a couple of minutes, I by-pass the line to ask another soldier where to go to get my press credentials. "If you don't have them already, you aren't getting in here," he says without looking at me, his hands on the gun hung from his shoulder. He doesn't say anything else. He's not in charge.

There's a shorter and older man talking with a kind of easy authority to a woman trying to get in without the proper papers. He's full of energy, but looks weighted down by his large helmet, his thick vest and gear. She wants an answer from him. He's a captain, and he's giving her a story, an anecdote which leads to the reason why he can't give her what she wants.

When I approach the captain, "Where's your I.D.?" is the first thing he wants to know. Brandon is behind me, distracted by the rough treatment of the Iraqis. Our driver and guide, Abu Abdullah, a well-established businessman in Baghdad, is watching from a distance. When I get their attention, the three of us stand before the captain for judgement.

In the 120 degree heat, sweat pours from underneath the captian's big silver sunglasses. We hand him our passports. "You from Mississippi?" he asks. "Well, you must be a good ol' boy then! I just might let you right in." He wants to know where I went to school. When I tell him he shakes his head and says, "Massachusetts! Man. I might have to change my mind about lettin' you in." He wonders why I didn't go to Ole Miss. When he was in school there he used to drink at Roosters, used to sit at the bar with a fat bartender, "but I won't hold that against him," named Jimmy. I tell him I used to live in Oxford, but never drank at Roosters. I didn't have the heart to tell him it didn't exist any more. We both agreed the town was great for saucing your brains out. I ask him where he's from. "Well, I got some land just outside Brookhaven, in Mississippi," he says. "You know where that is?" I tell him it's not far from where I grew up. His home is in Louisiana. I tell him I go fishing with my family down in Cocodrie. "Well, that's right in my backyard. I've got property that runs through Cocodrie."

While I'm having the "hometown" talk with the Louisiana captain, the Iraqis aren't getting anywhere with the other troops. They're getting plenty of reprimands and admonishments.

Brandon asks the captain if Abu Abdullah can come in with us. Sweat drips from the corners of the captain's otherwise dry, cracked lips. He wants to know if he has his papers. He's using some Arabic, the word for "my papers," when he means to say, "your papers." He asks a number of times, slowing his English and ununciating, then using the wrong word in Arabic. "Do you have my papers? Do you have my papers?" Abu Abdullah doesn't have either. He tells the captain in near-perfect English, No, he didn't bring them. "You have to stay here," he says, still articulating, and then ushers Brandon and I through. "Enjoy your stay," the captain says.

Abu Abdullah watches us go into the maze of sandbags, concrete bricks and razor-wire , then stands back near a large metal sign and watches the other men continue to try to gain entry. He tells us later he had to leave the area, to get away from the troops, because he was getting sick watching how the Iraqis were being treated. He left to sit and talk with his people further away from the Conference Center, under withered trees pitiful for shade, where vendors were selling lukewarm sodas from duck-taped coolers. "I saw them. They pull people from here [from their shoulders] and they tell them, 'Go out! Go out!' They didn't do anything these people," Abu Abdullah says. "There was a problem with their papers, that's all. They are not treated with dignity. Even Saddam's regime, those powerful men, they didn't do like that to the people in public. Even the biggest dictator in the world didn't do that to the people." He raises his finger in the air, and his round, brown eyes seem too sad and tired to be too angry. "So I respect myself, so I go to my people, because I didn't want to see or hear that, what they were doing to the Iraqi people."

While Abu Abdullah sweats in the half-shade and chats with the vendors, Brandon and I register in the U.S. Consul, something all Americans are supposed to do when they come to Iraq. There are portraits of Bush, Cheney and Powell on the wall behind the front desk man. We fill out our forms with some real and feigned confusion. There's an interesting conversation happening in the corner of the room.

The head of the U.S. consul is talking with two military officers. Crime is going to prevent economic growth in Iraq, she says. All it will take is for one foreign businessman to be kidnapped for randsom to scare people from investing here, to seriously stunt economic development and reconstruction. Kidnapping has been a problem in Iraq since the end of the war.

The woman and the two officers are agreeing that their offices aren't coordinated well enough, and that the soldiers in the field seeing and hearing about the crimes need to be reporting better. "They focus on the stupid stuff," she says. The head of the consul says she's worked in Kuwait, Israel and Rwanda. The officers tell her they're headed out tomorrow for Tanzania, their next assignment. "Really," she said, leaning over her desk. "I was actually checking out Tanzania as a potential onward assignment." She tells them she's in Iraq working for a year. She tells them it's been great talking, communicating with them, a relief really. "We need this kind of continuity," she says. "A lot more of it." One of the men asks her who exactly she answers to at the end of the day, "I work for Bremer, who works for Rumsfeld, who works for Bush." Brandon and I half-finish our forms. The man behind the desk asks to make a copy of the business card of our apartment building. "Great, now we know where to find you when we need to," he says. Somehow his words don't sound so reassuring.

Now that we are the 100th and 101st U.S. citizens to register with the government in Iraq, we make our way to the media registration desk, to the man in charge of media inquiries, U.S. Army Officer Ingham. He's an Oklahoma man with a kind of clean southern articulation. Leaning back in his chair he smiles and tells us he's here to help. He hands us a form. "Just fill out this form right here," the Oklahoma officer says. "It's that easy."

A man in a blue jumpsuit approaches him and says something in Arabic. "You come to vacuum?" the Oklahoma officer says. The man points to a door behind the officer and says something else in Arabic. (A posted sign on the door reads, Authorized Personnel Only. People like General Sanchez and spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority meet in the room with other officials and officers before press conferences.) The Oklahoma officer doesn't try to understand. He slows down his English, sticks out his hands and makes some mechanical gestures. They talk over one another. The officer then proceeds to have a conversation with himself:

"You want to get back there to vacuum?"
"Well, right now is not a very good time."
"Uh, there's still a couple of people back there right now. Not many, but a few."
"Yeah, it's lunch time. Why don't you come back after one o'clock. What time is it now?" He checks his own watch.
"Well, yeah, that's too soon. Why don't you come back around two? Fine. Great."

The man walks away clearly confused. The Oklahoma officer seems as sure of himself as ever. Another problem solved, he gives us his attention again.

"So now, where were we...yes, that's right, during the interviews with press officers, No means No," he says. "Now I'm well aware that journalists have a hard time taking No for an answer, but that's how it is." He leans back again, relaxes. He has said all this a hundred times, even wrote it down, the words in the copied memo for journalists on his desk. "Some things are private. That's just the way they are. I don't go asking about your gay brother or you're mother with ovarian cancer, and you don't go asking about mine. Some things we got to keep to ourselves. Understand?" He rocks in his chair the way he probably has for weeks, months--a quiet assignment, but boring as all hell.

We fill out another registration form, something that shows we're in the country working as journalists. The Oklahona officer tells us there's no official press badge. "If you got into the building today, then you're fine," he says. "You can come to as many briefings as you'd like." He tells us to come back tomorrow. A CPA spokesperson and General Sanchez will brief the media. If we want we can stick around for the president of the World Bank. Maybe we could get a loan, he jokes. Other than that, there's not much more he has to say. By that time we were wondering why we'd just spent a couple of hours going through a lot of empty formalities. Remember, you attract more bees with honey (and money) than vinegar, the memo from the press desk says. Not too sure what it means, but it sounds like the Oklahoma officer's words. As we step away from his desk, he gives us a good smile and a half-wave and adds, "Welcome to Baghdad."

Al Maahmoon Communications Center

Phones haven't worked in some areas since the U.S. bombed the communications center during the war.

Enter Abu Abdullah

Luckily for us we have an alternative to Two-Buck Farid (see last entry). Abu Abdullah, a business associate of Jameel's, offers his services for the month. The business will run fine without him, he says. Unlike Farid, this man has no reason to try to scam us. He chainsmokes strawberry flavored cigarettes, drives a black BMW525i with tinted windows and lives in the upper class Zayoona District. Abu Abdullah comes to the Mosafer Tuesday morning to take us to al Rabiya tourist apartments on Karrada Kharij, closer to the center of Baghdad. On our way down a busy dual carriageway, a humvee bounces over the median and pulls out directly in front of us.

The soldier in the passenger seat of the humvee holds out his right hand to say stop and holds the M16 in his left to say "stop or else." I feel a chill watching the guns pointed at us. Adam wants to take a photo -- the humvee is within 10 feet of our car -- but he too is frozen in place, not wanting to provoke the soldiers. For a second it seems so surreal, like these men -- boys really -- in their sunglasses and stone cold glares are impersonating Keanu Reeves in the Matrices or Will Smith in the MIBs. Abu Abdullah rolls his eyes in a look of utter exhaustion, as if to say, this is how they always treat us. Two more hummers and a truck move into our lane directly in front of us and rumble off. We are allowed to move again but I think Adam and I leave something there on that road for good. The remainder of our innocence, perhaps.

After we drop our stuff at the apartment -- it is indeed nicer than the Mosafer -- and go out for a quick tour of the city. The skyline is punctured by four huge chimneys belching fire and smoke from the Baghdad Refinery. We pass a large number of men and boys in dishdashas selling containers of gasoline on the road. "There are so many days that there is no gas at all," says Abu Abdullah. Gasoline is 20 dinars a liter at the gas stations but the wait is eight or so hours. On the black market it is 150 dinars per liter, but the quality is poor. "Listen to that," Abu Abdulllah says while we are idling in traffic. His BMW is shuttering from the low grade fuel in his engine. Frustration runs high. More than 70 percent of the gas is imported from Saudi Arabia, a painful irony not lost on Iraqis.

We drive over al Jadreeah, one of five bridges spanning the Tigris River, into the posh Qadseeyah District of southern Baghdad. The road is lined with palms. We pass Al Abed Palace, destroyed by the coalition. We pass al Maahmoon communications center, destroyed by the coalition. We pass into the Mansour, a district named after Baghdad's founder, the Abbasid Caliph Mansour, who built the city from the ground up in the 8th century A.D. We drive by the city block that was wiped out when the Coaltion tried to target Saddam with a missile strike on April 7. More than 14 civilians died in the blast, which left nothing but a rubble-filled crater. Now it is nothing but a dirt lot.
We drive under an arch which used to have the painted image of a smiling kaffiyah'ed Saddam on it. Someone covered Saddam's face with green spraypaint and wrote "al Jaban," over it. The Coward.

There is another huge landmark smackdab in the middle of the Mansour: the shell of a half-built mosque called Grand Saddam Mosque, started in 1995 in the midst of a humanitarian crisis in Iraq which is still not over. The mosque, which was projected to cost more than $1 billion, was to be Saddam's greatest achievement, built on the site of the Muthena Airfield, destroyed by the Allies in first Gulf War. Its minarets would rise 280 meters in the sky, so that the mosque would be the "closest to god." The mosque once built, would cast the illusion of floating on water, on a large manmade lake whose outline would take the shape, if viewed from far above, of the Arab World. "The Saddam Jama'a Kabir was supposed to be a symbol for these days, of Saddam's rule in Iraq," says Abu Abdullah as we drive by the structure whose construction has been now permanently suspended. "He wanted his name to last forever and I believe it will, but on the black list of history."

First morning

At Al Mosafer "The Traveler." A Hotel featuring Fully Furnished Apartments and Edible Ant Colonies.

I wake up early, before the sun rises. The supersized generator from the Australian embassy next door is a constant roaring rattle. We are at the Mosafer, just south of the Tigris River and around the corner from Al Hamra, a 10-story muddy orange-colored hive of journalistic types, which has no vacancies even though it charges $130 a night. We were led to the Mosafer by Farid Esmail, a wild eyed hairy browed Sunni man who says he's a translator but who spends most of his time on the front steps of the Hamra telling people about the merits of the Mosafer. "Much cheaper place. $45. Safe. Large area. Kitchen. AC. Very nice."

The evening before we watched the scene below from the our balcony at the Mosafer: Australian guards in camoflage gear wave their M16s and usher some VIPs -- looking more like middle aged golfers in their sunglasses and shorts -- out of a BMW with an orange square ductaped to the hood and into the embassy. A moment later an Iraqi lad on a cart carrying what looks like a bed of reeds rolls by, whipping and cursing his donkey, the lowest of all accursed beasts in the Islamic hierarchy next to dogs and pigs.

The rattling generator might have kept us awake last night were we not totally exhausted from the trip from Amman to Baghdad.

Now, in the early morning, it's an oven in here -- the electricty must have gone out hours ago and taking the AC along with it. Driven by hunger pangs, I clamber out of bed and stumble into the living room of our shabby shaghq, or apartment, feeling in the dark for the bag of digestive biscuits I bought at the Safeway in Amman and left open on the top of the refrigerator the night before.

Very satisfying to bite into a digestive biscuit especially for the gastro-nostalgia it congers of my days in London ... but then, in my mouth and on my fingers and down my arm, the biscuit comes to life in the form of many tiny, overexcited things. I finally realize it: they are ants, hundreds of them, panicking, trying to flee the great gaping maw which swallowed their comrades.
After several tries, I cough up enough to fill an ant farm.

Then I try to flush the toilet. The chain -- more of a knotted string really -- on top of the toilet tank breaks off in my hand. I take off the faux porcelain lid off the tank and lean it against the wall. No water inside. As I walk back into the bedroom where Adam is sleeping twisted uncomfortably in bed, there is a thundering crash behind me and Adam jumps up, certain that our saghq has been hit by a SCUD. But it is only the toilet lid sliding to the floor and breaking in umpteen pieces.

Around 10 a.m. I call down to the reception. Farid is there and offers to come up and take a look at my mooshkila, my problem. He looks at the broken tank lid. "No problem. Maybe $5 to fix," he shrugs.
What he wants to tell me really is that he canceled all his appointments to be with us today. He offers to set up an interview with one of the resistance fighters. Through hand gestures, he pantomimes an angry bearded fanatic holding a bazooka and chuckles. We tell him thanks but we have a friend of a friend who has offered to help us with our stories. I give him a Ben Franklin and tell him to keep $10 for his trouble along with the $45 for the room and the $5 for the toilet. After we tell him that we are not staying another night, he disappears and returns, his brow deeply furrowed. "I talked to the management. They say they need to replace the whole tank. Maybe $20."
He counts back my change -- it's a couple dollars short. We look at Farid perplexed. "I keep $12 for me, yes?" We don't argue. Just pick up our bags and head out of the Mosafer.

The Bombed Road

Just a few kilometers into Iraq we see a burned bus on the side of the highway. This was the bus carrying Syrian workers returning from Iraq at the end of March. Coalition forces bombed it, killing five people and injuring ten. We saw the destoryed bridge just before we slowed down to avoid the crater left in the road from the bombing of the bus.

Crossing the border

"The rules have changed!" bellows the portly Jordanian guard, and now, it seems, we are not getting through the first checkpoint at the border. Our vehicle's papers are good for transit to Saudi Arabia, but not Baghdad. The rules changed today, and the guard can't believe how many people have arrived at the border without a clue. He gesticulates angerly, his bright green eyes flashing, as our driver, in supplication, follows him around and around our GMC Suburban. The guard is having none of it. He takes a look at us, foreigners sitting wide eyed in the back seat. Our driver tells him we are Germans, which doesn't make him any happier. He storms off, back to his kiosk.

Adam and I have the sinking feeling that we will have to go back to Amman. Ramem, our driver, gets on his cell phone to the office. The papers arrived today, but too late to take with him. This explanation further upsets the guard. But Ahmed, the other passenger in the GMC with us, has an idea. He asks for our passports. We oblige. As we discovered during the ride from Amman to the border, Ahmed used to play center for the Iraqi national basketball team and now, as an Iraqi exile in Lebanon, coaches for a regional team. Nearly 7 feet tall with massive shoulders, Ahmed approaches the green-eyed guard. And after a moment of discussion, the guard, Ahmed, the driver Ramem and a score of others, march back to the GMC. The guard then hands our passports back to us with a long, heated explanation in Arabic, which we duly record on Minidisc. All the while, we nod and say our Shokrans at the end even though we only understand a word or two. But we are very surprised to hear afterwards from Ahmed that our vehicle has been cleared to travel to Baghdad.
The guard apparently was telling us -- I'm not sure if he saw me holding the microphone or not -- that it was the driver's fault and not the Jordanian government's for the delay and that we should be sure and write about the fact it was the Jordanian Government that solved the matter forthwith.
What did you tell him? we ask Ahmed.
I said that first, you are in fact Americans and, it not need be said, allies to the Kingdom of Jordan. Not only that, but I told him you are important sahifien, journalists, who would hate to have to report that the Jordanian government obstructed you from doing your very critical work in Iraq.
Ahmed, who is also a devout Muslim as well as a basketball coach, tells us earlier that the laws of man are flawed. You have a man who makes the laws and he injects all his personality, character into it, Ahmed says from the front seat toying with his black worry beads. And then in 20 years another man comes and does the same again and again and again, all the way from the days of Hammurabi. This is why you must follow the laws of god, for they never change, because, unlike man, the personality of god is perfection.

Highway 10 Through Jordanian Desert

It's about 320 kilometers or so of barren wasteland between Amman and the Iraqi border. Our driver, Ramem, didn't want to lose any time getting there, just in case there were any hassles from passport control.

To Baghdad in the Morning

It's arranged, Brandon and I leave for Baghdad tomorrow. A driver will pick us up just before sunrise. We'll stop on the Jordan-Iraq border, then race at 150 km for 12 hours non-stop.

"Don't worry, I will take care of anything you want," Jameel, a friend of Lamis's, told us in the lobby of the Lotus. "Don't worry." He is a Jordanian businessman. He has had an office in Baghdad for 25 years. Before the U.S. invasion he traveled back and forth weekly. "I like Baghdad much more than Amman," he said. "Even during the war."

We'll leave most of our money with Lamis. We'll leave equipment we don't need for the first week. There is a slight chance we might be robbed, so better to take less. Jameel can bring us what we need later when he comes from Jordan. Much safer that way.

He has been to Baghdad five times in the last couple of months. He said he only had a problem on one of those trips. He was traveling with a convoy when the car in front of him was shot at--bandits tried to pull the car over without success. "Don't worry," he said. "Everything will be fine."

Jameel has found us a good place to stay, the Al Arabia, for a good price, and is working on helping us find a driver/translator for Baghdad.

Jameel said when he first visited Baghdad after the end of major combat troops were smiling, milling about, drinking pepsi's and eating ice cream with Iraqi children. Now, he said, they are much more tense, holding guns out in front when Iraqis approach. The soldiers don't commingle as much. (Four soldiers were killed yesterday and another killed today.) "They will not last too much longer," he said of the U.S. occupation forces. Especially if the Shia rise up, he said, the U.S. troops will be gone in two months.

No more cyber tunnels for us. From here on out we'll have to rely on our satellite modem, which we connected for the first time last night in Aqaba.
The satellite is in the southern sky, so a room facing the south is a must. We'll blog via the stars--thuruya--next time, perhaps in a day or two.

Here we go.

On the Road to Baghdad Soon

When Brandon and I got off the bus from Aqaba a man approached us to offer his services. Ebrahim Jamel, a tour guide and driver, said he'd been to Baghdad twice in the last month. He drove in an American photographer who went to photograph for a week. "I make my own films also," he said. "I take pictures for myself." He photographed the remnants of Saddam's palace. The U.S. annihilated it during the invasion, hoping to kill Saddam. "The bomb blew everything away," he said. "There is nothing. It made a crater of 20 meters." He said he could also take us on a tour of Syria, or guide us to Petra. "I take you on a camel tour," he said. "Whatever you like."

Ebrahim handed me his business card. "You need a driver," he said. "I drive you." Brandon borrowed his cell phone for one dinar to call Lamis. She told us to return to the Lotus.

I slept for the next four hours. Can't seem to get enough. There's so much noise everywhere--the horns honking at all hours of the night, the muzzein from the minarets, the hotel neighbors who blast televisions refusing to sleep, the loud music on the four hour bus ride to and from Aqaba. "Do you think there's any peace in Iraq?" I ask Brandon, hoping that even in a country at war I'll be able to sleep regularly.

Leave for Iraq soon--in the next day or two. Still working out the details of how we'll travel. A twelve hour journey to Baghdad. "It's not like the states, where you have rest-stops every few miles," Lamis said. "You want to be well when you travel." In bed with an upset stomach this afternoon. Lamis calls the hotel and asks the manager to send up tea with sage. "This will help you." It did.

Ps and Qs in Aqaba

Really a shame that we had to go to Aqaba to interview "Q" (not his real name), an important figure from the Iran-Iraq war and Gulf War I days. Aqaba lies on the Red Sea coast. The King has a palace here. It's beautiful and about 40 degrees C on the beach. (we are cooking but it's not as hot as Baghdad will be)
On Friday afternoon, after a 4-hour busride through mostly barren desert, I meet "P" -- a close relative of Q -- at the bar of the Movenpick, currently the only five-star hotel in town. The Saudis have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the tourist industry here. Soon the town will be extended deep into the desert valley beyond.

P says that Q is under the weather and needs to rest today. Then we talk casually for an hour or so. P tells me about meeting Uday Hussein before the first Gulf War. Uday was a truly dim-witted man whose head became so full of blandishments and praise from those around him that he started thinking he was invincible. "In Iraq he was but put him in a bar room brawl anywhere else and he'd be on the floor in a second, begging for mercy."
Halfway through our conversation, P waves to a man in a dark blue suit and sunglasses who has just entered the hotel. "Palace security," he says. "Someone from the palace must be here. Either that or this guy's on vacation." I was told by the barkeep -- Issa or "Jesus" -- that about 20 percent of those staying in the hotel were secret police.
After awhile P has to go, but not before he's told me enough stories about his visits to Iraq with Q to make my head spin.
"Call tonight. Perhaps you can see Q tomorrow," he says. That's OK. We need to catch up on sleep. Only we have checked into the Radisson Sas which is hosting a huge techno-dance party on the beach below which shakes the building until the wee hours. Q's driver comes for us at 10 a.m. Saturday and takes us to a newly built apartment complex, built for the engineers in Q's new business. Q looks tired but welcomes us warmly from his chair. P is there too. We talk about !@#$ and ##!$# and #!@#% and other things not blogable -- Q has lived many lifetimes in one -- and then he orders shwarmas. He tells us he knows where the Weapons of Mass Destruction are in Iraq. "He had them alright, but they were all destroyed in this place @#@ kilometers @#$# of Baghdad." We ask where exactly, in which place. "Ohh," he signs. "You journalists, always wanting something, always using this." He taps his nose. Soon he is fast asleep in his chair, like Old Brown the wise owl in Squirrel Nutkin. So we watch Larry King Live with P. Larry is interviewing Victoria Gotti, in her first interview since her father's death. We leave titilated but with nothing solid, except for the shwarmas swirling in our maadooteht.
We've missed the last bus to Amman. Another night in Aqaba. That means it's beach time. The water has a weighty silkiness to it that feels like a thermal bath treatment. It lulls me into a happy stupor as I bob in the water. Then I look up to see huge cargo ships and oil tankers which loom in the harbor not more than 150 yards away. Then I wonder if the water has something extra in it to give it such silky body... Jordan, by the way, had been 100% dependant on Saddam for its oil supply before the war -- in April the Saudis and Kuwaitis offered to supply the Kingdom with enough oil for three months and the port of Aqaba became much busier, since all the Iraqi oil had been trucked in. At night we can see the not-so-distant lights of Eilat, the Israeli port. And in the morning the streets are lined with unusually cheerful soldiers toting submachine guns -- supposedly because a palace VIP is due to drive by. We catch the earliest bus back to Amman.

Cab Driver From Al-Huwara

Tahsin once worked for a Japanese company as an electrician laying telephone and fiber optic cable in Kuwait and Africa. He has three daughters, two of which are married. "I work hard for my family," he said.

Feasting at al-Huwara

Wherein Adam and I feast like Romans and encounter "Thursday Night Fever"
We make a slow start Thursday as the jet-lag really sets in. We have breakfast at around 3 p.m. and make calls in the hotel room until Lamis arrives via taxi to pick us up in the evening. She says Thursday nights here are like Saturday nights in the U.S. -- people are in their best clothes (our best clothes could use some ironing, Adam says) and there is a party vibe in the air as we drive down Shmeisani's Sharia el Teqehfa, or Culture Avenue. Lamis is taking us out but first we go to a birthday party for her friend, Lena, who she went to high school with and who now runs a chocolate factory. There are several generations of her family and friends out on the patio sitting around a huge spread of food, which is dominated by a mountain-shaped chocolate mousse. I'm in big trouble.

We then go to al-Huwara, a fancy Lebanese restaurant, on the outskirts of town. We are greeted by the maitre d', another old friend of Lamis'. (she knows everyone in town). Al Huwara is set in a split level stone patio on the edge of what looks like a cyprus grove. There is a beautiful evening breeze. Most diners puff from exquisite-looking nargile, which liken to freestanding lamps with glowing tobacco ash where the light bulb should be. First come the mazzahs or starters. We get eggplant pure, spinach stuffed pastries and hummus. I notice they have lamb brains but after stuffing myself with fingerfood and to-die-for mousse, I play it safe. Then Lamis' cell rings. It's her friend who has a business in Baghdad. He tells her his company can drive us there on Monday. As we will be in Aqaba to do some interviewing for a couple days, that sounds perfect. We are so lucky to have Lamis looking after us, I think, and she's buying us dinner to boot. We order an assortment of kebabs and a round of Arak, the strong aniseed liquor which, like ouzo, turns white when you add water. Totally stuffed, we return to the Lotus Hotel.

Death of Saddam's Sons and Iraqi Exiles in Amman

Mohamed tells me Iraq is much better off without Saddam's sons.

At the Ofrich Cafe in downtown Amman four to five men sit around card tables playing poker. They are exiled Iraqis, Chaldeans and Jordanians, some of which sit outside on the balcony and drink hot tea with mint and smoke tobacco from long free-standing pipes called nargile. Brandon and I walk with Shak Hannish [see prior entry] through the open doors of the balcony and sit and order hot tea and a cold, bottled Pepsi. The cars move along the busy streets below. The men smoke. Every now and then a man with a shallow pail and tongs comes from the kitchen with burning chunks of tobacco and sets it gently on the screen on top of the pipes. The man sitting next to me has a fresh one and inhales and looks out over the street, seemingly at nothing.

Al Jeezera is on the TV hanging in the corner of the room. There are images of Bush giving a statement about the deaths of Uday and Qusay. He says the Saddam regime is no longer a threat, that it was a great day for the Iraqi people. Some of the men playing cards look up for a second, but then nod their attention back into their hands. I ask some of these men if I can photograph them, but they wave me away. Some men in a table in the corner near the balcony agree, but they're impatient with me. "You finished?" a man asks in English, holding his cards close to his face, his hair slicked back, streaked with silver, his face whiter than mine. Feeling defensive, I only snapped a few shots. No time to get over my own feeling and see anything other than Men Playing Cards. I'm not very interested in the shot. I'm seeing something else--their connection to one another, a depth in their dark eyes--but there's no time. I thank them, and walk away with only a soft-focused photograph of a man holding his cards, looking at me through the lens with some hard (possibly bitter) feeling.

It is early evening, and the light is going. The sky saturated with a deep blue and darkening. On the balcony there is a cool breeze. Brandon sits between Shak and another Iraqi, a Shiite who had been a captain in Saddam's army. He tells Brandon he knows where the weapons of mass destruction are, even though he left the country nine years ago.

There is a large Jordanian leaning on the rail, hovering, eaves-dropping. His name is Mohamed and he asks me who I work for. He looks tired, but alert, perhaps too much tobacco. "You here to cover the things happening in Iraq?" he asks. Mohamed says he studied in Egypt for a while. He spits as he talks. I ask him what Jordanians think of the death of Saddam's sons. "You mean Uday and Qusay? I cannot speak for all Jordanians," he says, bringing his fat hand to his big chest. "I can only speak for myself. It is a good thing, yes. They committed many crimes. They were bad people. They are no good for Iraq."

(Just an hour before we entered the cafe, Shak told me about a conversation he had with a Jordanian cabdriver who still favored Saddam, a view, he said, that represents lots of Jordanians. When we leave the cafe, another cab driver asks Shak if he thinks Uday and Qusay are really dead. Yes, he tells him. How do they know? the driver asks. Because they have scientific evidence and they were able to identify their faces, he tells him. They have photographs. The cab driver said he wouldn't believe they were dead until he saw pictures.)

Mohamed asks me my name. "An Arabic name. Are you an Arab?" he asks. I tell him it is a common Christian name. He asks me my religion. I lie and tell him I'm Catholic. Oh, he says, but looks confused. "Bush," he says, when the clip comes up on Al Jeezera again. He asks me if I go to the movies, if I like football (soccer). "I like Sylvester Stallone," he says. "Do you like Indian movies?" he asks. "Do you get Indian movies in America?" He is full of questions. "How come Americans don't like football? Every body in the world likes football, except the Americans."

When we leave the Ofrich cafe, we take a taxi up the hill to a theatre staging a popular play called Us, Shock and Saddam. The play is a satire about the relationship of the Arab world--the politicians and the common people--to Saddam, to the U.S. attack on Iraq and the reactions among their political leaders. The play was set in cafes in various Middle Eastern countries. The men on one side of the room represeting the people who easily digest the propaganda being transmitted to them, the other side representing a more critical view.

One actor appears in a box--the television prop--in the back of the stage, the commentator for Al Jeezera bringing the latest news. The main actor for the play is a boisterous turtled-faced man who plays retired U.S. General Jay Garner, Yassar Arafat, Hosni Mabarek and Saddam Hussein perfectly. No government or interest was spared criticism in this play. One scene that brought much laughter, but was difficult to watch, depicted an ignorant Iraqi interogater with three captured American soldiers who didn't understand his English. The Iraqi carried a fake gun. He hit the American soldiers on the back of the head and the players acted terrified. "I don't know, I don't understand," one said. "Next time, before they send you back here, your army should train you to speak English," the Iraqi interogator said. The audience roared at the punch-line.

Our first day here was more full than I could've imagined, despite feeling tired and jet-lagged. We talked a number of Iraqi exiles about the latest news, what they hoped for their country. In just a day, from the the poker cafe to the theater to an Iraqi restuarant in a smoky alleyway at midnight, I've heard many different viewpoints, many opinions, many stories about who people are, and how they've been affected watching their country destroyed, by Saddam, by all the war. Some want to forget and start over, some don't have a place to return to and want to immigrate to America where there's opportunity. But so many Iraqis--like the Babylonian who spoke so passionately with his friends hanging off his shoulders supporting him outside the Iraqi restuarant where we ate a plate full of charred chicken and grilled vegetables close to midnight as kittens meowed around our feet--just want to return home.

Tomorrow we head for Aqaba on the coast.

From the Safeway Cyber Tunnel

On our way to terminal A in Frankfurt Airport, Adam and I catch the news on an airport bar television: Saddam's sons have been slain. My first reaction is joy. I don't think I've ever been so lightheadedly happy upon hearing that someone has gone to meet his maker. But it is a huge comfort knowing those two playboy psychopaths won't be there when we get there, as silly as that sounds. The passengers -- who are mostly secular Arabs, as well as some Europeans and a couple of Americans planning to drive from Amman to Ramallah -- are discussing the killings. They don't share my enthusiasm. The Jordanian woman in the row behind us tells her German seat mate that Iraq is decidedly an American problem and nowhere near from being solved. He answers with a dour "Yah."
We head towards the dying light on the horizon, a beautiful band of orange and red dissolving into the indigo sky beyond. Banks of clouds roll past looking like immense waves that freeze solid the moment they crest. There is a lot of turbulence and some worry about the "slide armed" light going on next to the emergency exit window. I have an image of a huge orange slide self-inflating and getting tangled up with the wing, but a co-pilot soon comes, opens the panel on the exit door, plays with the emergency exit lever as our eyes widen, and then bangs the panel shut. The "slide armed" light goes off. Then after a second, the "slide armed" light comes back on. We all turn to the co-pilot nervously. He shrugs and with a fatalistic, what-can-you-do "Yah," walks off.
But, as usual, nothing happens. We are soon fast asleep and when I wake up, I look through our emergency exit window and see Amman rising from the murky night. A brilliant crescent moon above is the only other thing visible outside.

With all its serpentine streets and boulevards, the city looks like a nest of asps that has been set on fire. It is a beautiful, exciting vision. We land and queue up at the cambio for some Jordanian Dinar. The American dollar is weak everywhere it seems. It's .70 Dinars to the dollar and 10 JOD for a visa into Jordan. We are asked no questions at passport control. The nicely coiffed guard is more intent on stamping our passports with the right amount of desk rattling force, it seems, than knowing our business in Jordan. At the baggage claim, we are met by an army of red-jacketed boys who offer to get our luggage. I tell them no. They all agree but then one -- Mohammed -- shows up behind me with a cart and so much swaggering cheeriness that I break down. We end up giving him 6 JOD for getting us through customs ("The guard is my uncle," Mohammed says as we roll past) and arranging a taxi ride to the Shmeisani district where Lamis Andoni, my professor and mentor from UC Berkeley, arranged a hotel for us. The Lotus Hotel, it's called, and it is conveniently located across from the Shmeisani Safeway Shopping Center, complete with Internet cafes. As we finally lie down in our beds, we hear the cry of the muezzin. It must be 3:30 in the morning but again, I can't sleep. After so much planning and waiting, we are here at last.

Expectations and Assumptions, Oakland-NYC-Frankfurt

We left Oakland airport yesterday, early morning. I met Feiwen at Kennedy Airport in New York, where we caught our flight to Frankfurt. She waited for Brandon and I as we checked in at the Lufthansa counter where we encountered a ticket agent who wasn't very happy that we were given 'e-tickets' through United Airlines. Jordan doesn't accept e-tickets and neither would her computer. She was pissed off. She yelled at us a little without meaning to, then directed her frustration at the computer screen below her. 'Schisse United,' she said. Shit United! She kept jumping on and off her stool. It didn't look very good for Brandon and I for a second there. Feiwen was happy though, thinking we might have to spend the night in New York. Our disgruntled ticket agent ran off to fix things. She came back with our tickets, and asked us where we wanted to sit. I told her in an exit row. 'Are you prepared to save the world?' Brandon asked. 'Sure,' I said, anything for the leg-room. The blonde agent muttered something about it being unlikely I'd save the world from the exit row. Afterwards we ate tasteless, oil-heavy Chinese food. Then difficult saying good-bye to Feiwen.

Slept heavy on the plane. When I wasn't sleeping I thought a lot about what Brandon and I were going to.

And so here I am in Frankfurt in a smokey internet cafe, just a few hours from Amman, Jordon, our entry point into Iraq. And I'm battling my assumptions. What am I going to? What will it look like? I'm imagining the incredible heat. I'm imagining a country in chaos, Iraqis tired, weary of war. American soldiers feeling like aliens, tired of the heat, tired of fighting, guarding, securing, tired of the fear of attack. And I'm imagining the burned car and tank chassis' along the roads and highways. I'm imaging a country ruined, but strong people trying to sew it back together. I'm wondering who I will trust. I'm wondering how I will be able to photograph and report, stay open, when so many of my defenses will working to keep me closed, protected.

To be honest I didn't imagine I'd be going to Iraq in war. It wasn't my initial plan when I first began talking to Brandon about going. I visualized traveling to Iraq after the U.S. invasion had toppled Saddam, had occupied and secured the country. I had imagined going to a more secure place. It was a naive assumption, perhaps formed partly by the pre-war confidence of the U.S. administration. I now I am thinking of what Abbas Kadhim--an Arabic studies professor at Berkeley--said in the Iraqi dialect class I sat in on in June: You may love your neighbor, and may invite him into your house for a little while, but you do not want your neighbor living in YOUR house. If the Americans could tell the Iraqi people how long they will be there, then they would accept this. But they keep changing their story: one month, three months, one year, five years. How long? They want to know.

Pre-trip insomnia

It's 2 a.m. the morning before we fly to Amman. Of course, we won't reach Amman until Wednesday at 2 a.m., two whole days from now, but the anticipation of being there is keeping me wide awake.
"Don't leave without me," Adam just said as he slowly ascended the stairs to get a few hours kip. We are at my folks' house in Hayward. My pop will be driving us to the Oakland Airport at 6:30 a.m. Imran will be there, he said, to see us off and maybe get a parting shot. Today was a blur of last minute shopping -- chino pants, long sleeve shirts, books (Christopher Hitchens' The Long Short War), 50 sun block, Lever wipes (10 packs thereof), Marlboros and candy. You know, for the kids. We are trying to fit everything into six bags, but even after we threw out some light reading (Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code was too heavy at .7 of a pound), we still will be straining to lift it all. Next stop, JFK. Then Frankfurt, then Amman. By Friday, we hope to be in Iraq.

Conversation with Thuraya

I spoke with Thuraya Saraf yesterday. She's visiting one of her daughters in Los Angeles. She and her husband live in Baghdad. Their house is on the Tigris river in the northern part of the city, near one of Saddam's former palaces and the big houses of some of his administration. The windows of their home were blown out during the U.S. attack in April. They weren't there at the time. They were staying with her husband's sister in a safer part of the city. She spoke with her husband, Nu'man, last week on the phone. (At the time she was still in Falls Church, Virginia at her sister Neeran's, where I first met her--see entry about Falls Church.) Her husband owns a sock factory in Baghdad. Nu'man told Thuraya he drove to the southern part of the city recently, even though it was very dangerous, to buy glass panes and aluminum to repair the windows in their house. She said he took a bunch of young boys, "like body-guards, but they were not body-guards -- I don't know who they were," for protection. She said her husband, like many Iraqis, is very upset about the lack of security and the inconsistent electricity. "It is very hot there, right now," Thuraya said. "This is Baghdad during the summer. People go crazy." Then she added, "But we are happy Saddam is gone. Anything is better than Saddam."

Brandon and I leave in three days.

Neeran Saraf & Farewell Dinner for Hind Makiya, Falls Church, Virginia, July 9

Hopped a train from New York to meet up with Imran in D.C. We were scheduled to interview and photograph Neeran Saraf, an Iraqi-American who owns a computer software company in Falls Church, Virginia. Neeran has plans to visit Iraq in August or early September. It will be her first time there since 1990, just before the first Gulf War.

"I personally feel the U.S. is home for me now," Neeran told us at her office, just a couple miles from her home.

For a couple decades she floated around Europe and the Middle East, before she finally settled here, close to her mother, a brother and two sisters. Her family left Iraq in 1970, after her father's bank was taken away from him as the Iraqi government begin to seize control of all of Iraq's money. He was arrested for a few days. The family was terrified. Soon after he was released, the family moved to Beirut.

After spending a few hours with Neeran, we let her get back to work. Imran and I then grabbed some Thai food across the street from Neeran's bricky office complex. Afterwards we drove into D.C., and because we had time to kill before took Imran to the airport, we walked around the Mall and up to the Lincoln Memorial.

It was a muggy day, the tourists around us looking weighed down, heavy in the heat.

At the end of the path below the memorial there were military advocates sitting in booths. "These people are scary," Imran said. You could buy buttons and bumper stickers if you wanted to show your support for the troops in Iraq, if you wanted to show you were behind Bush.

We walked past the booths onto the concrete platform overlooking the Mall, the Washington monument in the distance. There was grass growing through the cracked pavement of the platform.

I imagined a hijacked airplane dive-bombing the monument -- part of a kind of 9/11 syndrome, I guess, my mind occasionally exploding planes when I see them.

Looking out over the Mall, Imran and I both thought of the television footage and photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s historic speech here. In my mind I could hear is voice, 'I have a dream...,' and it rang louder than, 'Four score and seven...,' the voice whispering from within the memorial behind me.

We walked up the steps and into the Lincoln memorial. The air was stagnant. People sweat through shirts. Families posed for pictures in front of the colossal statue of Lincoln. A man with a southern accent explained to his six or seven year old son how Lincoln liberated the slaves. His son wanted to know what slaves were. The father told him they were blacks who at one time had to work without pay.

Imran and I sat on the steps outside the memorial. We spoke to Brandon via cell phone. Brandon asked Imran if he would go with him to El Cajon, California, to attend a celebration of Iraq's independence day, July 14, 1958, when Iraqis wrestled their country back from the British. Soon after I took Imran to the airport. He and Brandon would leave the next morning for southern California.

I was staying in the D.C. area a few more hours. Neeran invited me to a traditional Iraqi dinner at her mother's home in a condo back in Falls Church. They were preparing a farewell dinner for their family friend Hind Makiya, who was leaving for Baghdad the next day.

I arrived in the rain, and the gigantic condo complex seemed out-of-place in the flat surroundings typical of suburban sprawl. I met Neeran in the lobby. When we walked into the large condo three of Neeran's eight sisters, Venus, Laheeb, and Thuraya were sitting in the livingroom with their mother, Shukria, and Hind. They stood up to greet us. Neeran left immediately to go home, which was just across the parking lot, because she wanted to change our of her work clothes. I sat in the livingroom, and listened as the women talked about their families, about Iraq. Much of it was in Arabic, so I didn't follow much of the conversation. They watched Al Jeezera on a muted television. News from Iraq and Israel. Images of Bush in Africa, shaking the hands of African dignitaries. Images of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and retired General Tommy R. Franks in front of the Senate reviewing military operations in Iraq.

"Was that today?" Laheeb, 44, asked. She has lived in Falls Church since 1998.
"Yes, in Washington," Venus, 55, said. She lives in Potomac, Maryland.
"What were they doing?"
"Briefing the Senate on the military."
"Didn't Tommy Franks retire?"
"He's looking like he gained some weight." The women laughed.
"Yes, he's getting soft, I think." There was more laughter.

Shukria smiled, sitting in a Lazy Boy in a white nightgown. Thuraya tells me her mother's health isn't so great.

"Do you mind if we put my mother's feet up?" the eldest sister, Thuraya asked. She's in town visiting from Baghdad, where she lives with her husband. He owns a sock factory. "My mother needs the blood to flow back out of her feet," she said. "Elevating her feet will help this."

No, no, go ahead I said, a little confused about why they were asking me.

"Because in Arab society you normally wouldn't do this, it's considered not to be polite, to put your feet up when you have visitors over," Thuraya explained.

Thuraya showed me around the kitchen, introduced me to their Eritrean housekeeper, Aba Nagash, then lifted the lids of pots to show what we'll be eating. The kitchen was filled with the smell of onion, mint and dill.

At dinner Neeran and her sister's insist I put down my camera. They want me to eat. They fill my plate with traditional Iraqi food: tashreeb, a stew of meat, onion, potato, and chickpeas poured over hard toasted bread; kuba, a boiled meat pressed between two wheat pancakes; pickled vegetables; and a dill-green rice served with homemade yogurt with mint. Everything is delicious. When my plate is empty, they insist on filling it again.

Two of Neeran's nephews, Sheer and Hedeer El-Showk have also come for dinner. Their mother lives in Morocco. Sheer, 24, a Berkeley graduate, told me that if I let them, his aunts will feed me until it hurts. But his jubilant aunts insisted. "You can lie down on the couch afterwards," Laheeb said. Everyone laughed.

Aba walked into the dining room from the kitchen. She chewed on a small piece of bread. She sat down behind Venus. She has a toothpick thin body and sunken cheeks. She is quiet, though a strong presence in the room.

"Aba, come come, eat something," Laheeb tells her. Aba has worked for the family for a long time. She helped the Saraf's when their father was ill and dying.
"She's fasting," Venus says. "She's a Christian."
"She's always fasting," Laheeb says. "Easter is over."
"She's begging Jesus to give her something, so she's fasting," Thuraya says. "For one month. She wishes something, so she fasts."
"How long has she been fasting?" Hind asks.
"Every time I see her she's fasting," Laheeb says. "I have no idea."

Close to 9 o'clock at night. I had to leave soon. The table was covered with platters of fruit and baklava and Iraqi desserts I didn't know the names of. The women were debating Iraqi politics, debating the details of what is happening in their country -- who is still fighting, who is still attacking American forces, who will have power -- debating their own memories. I didn't want to leave, but my train departed from Union Station at ten.

Before I left Neeran told me I should travel south of Baghdad to see other parts of the country. Her sisters agreed. Thuraya told me that I must see the place where the Tigris meets the Euphrates. They told me I should visit some of the mosques in Najaf. As long as I wear traditional Iraqi clothing, they said, I will blend in. They told me how beautiful their country is, and how beautiful it was. They want me to see it, experience it, to have some experience of Iraq other than war, than Saddam. "Iraq is not Saddam," Laheeb said. For Neeran and Laheeb -- she left after the first Gulf War -- they are still trying to negotiate their memories of the past with the reality of the present. And Neeran, like Hind, is anxious to return.

Sheer El-Showk, 24, Neeran's Nephew

'58 Revolution fete

Friday night in El Cajon, a suburb east of San Diego which boasts an Iraqi population of 20,000 -- most of which are Chaldean Christians who were persecuted and run out of Iraq by the Ba'ath regime. There are 200 or so exiles at the Crystal Ball Hall in downtown El Cajon, a town whose growth is hampered by the immediacy of the looming Cuyamaca Mountains to the south.
Imran and I arrived to the Hall late, having been stuck for hours in I-5 traffic all the way through Los Angeles, 130 miles to the north.

We enter thorugh the back and emerge at the wet bar, where younger Iraqi men look up at us from their bottles of Amstel Lights with curiosity. We obviously have crashed the party. The men direct us to the front entrance where we are informed about the $25 donation to the Iraqi Democratic Forum, the organization hosting the event. By chance, I run into Mazin Yusif, an Iraqi exile living in Orange County who I've interviewed several times -- mostly about the Iraqi National Congress. Mazin, who is the West Coast spokesperson for the INC invites Imran and I to sit at his table and orders us some Amstel Lights. We feel more at home now. Mazin explains that this celebration is to honor ´Abd al-Karim Qasim, the Iraqi general who lead the revolution in 1958 which lead to the death of the royal family in 1958. Qasim seems like the only leader Iraqis can agree on, and, for some, Qasim was too kind. He pardoned those who made attempts on his life, one of whom was a young Ba´athist by the name of Saddam Hussein. Unfortunately his would-be killers did not return the favor. When Qasim was finally overthrown in 1963, his bullet-ridden body was shown on national television for all to see. Mazin explains that most of the people present at the fete are communists or were at least condemned as communists by the former regime. Mazin says that the celebration for the ´58 revolution in Baghdad will be the biggest ever this year, since its celebration was banned under the Ba´athist regime. Why did Qasim have such universal appeal among the Iraqis? Because he brushed aside this notion of pan-Arabism and embraced all of Iraq´s minorities as equals, many at the fete answer.

Shaq Hanish, El Cajon, California, July 12

photo by Imran Vittachi

Shaq Hanish, a Christian Chaldean, hopes to return this summer to his village in northern Iraq. He's now in Jordan, where he'll soon decide whether to cross into Iraq and drive to Baghdad along risk-frought Highway 10.

Salam Felejeh at San Jose Airport, June 19

Salam stands outside the airport smoking a cigarette
an hour before his plane leaves for Iraq. His wife, son,
step-daughter and mother-in-law wait anxiously inside.
After 12 years in exile, Salam is returning home to help
assess the damage to Iraq's schools.

Salinas, California, May 29

Salam waits for his food at a Mexican restuarant, near
the used-car lot he co-owns with a Palestinian-American.