I Was Told to Come Alone Read online

  It was a cold, dark night in early winter. We chose a steak restaurant in the center of the city, a short walk from our hotel. I sat next to Peter and across from Fanning. Some of the reporters ordered beers, while I had my usual: apple juice and sparkling water. We ate and talked about the trial. After dinner, we ordered espresso, and Fanning began to open up. She said that while she blamed the terrorists for the attacks that had killed her husband, she also blamed the U.S. government, and even us, the press. “Nobody told us there were people out there who hated us so much,” she said. “Why didn’t we know this? Politicians didn’t tell us. You’re journalists, but you never told us.”

  Then she looked straight at me. She knew from our previous conversations that I was of Arab descent. “Why do they hate us so much?” she asked. I stammered something about Western foreign policy being unpopular in the Arab world. It was an imprecise answer, and I think she sensed that I felt terribly awkward, but the moment was also meaningful for me. She was questioning whether we were doing our jobs, and I found her criticism legitimate. Why aren’t we doing a better job of telling people like Maureen Fanning what the jihadis think of them? I wondered. Back at the hotel after dinner, I asked Peter what he thought of the terrorism coverage in the United States before September 11. Of course people had written about Afghanistan when the Russians were there in the 1980s, he told me. Some even reported from the country when it was under Taliban rule. But few Western reporters had talked to members of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups or understood their views.

  “But don’t you think it’s interesting?” I asked. “And isn’t it our job?”

  “Of course. But who has access to these people? It’s very hard to get them to talk to us.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking: Maybe we should try.

  In the coming days and months, Fanning’s question played over and over in my head. Even with my background, I had no idea why Mohamed Atta and his cohorts had felt the way they did. I hadn’t grown up hating the United States. The attacks had been a surprise to me, too. I felt compelled to learn what had driven those men and what drove others like them.

  We were already hearing about the possibility of an American war in Iraq. Through the fall of 2002 and into early 2003, I closely followed the coverage of the UN inspectors, who were searching for the weapons of mass destruction that U.S. officials said made Saddam Hussein a global threat. I was still a university student, but because I was of Arab descent and working part-time for the Post, a local radio station in Frankfurt asked me to join a debate about the war. The other panelists supported the invasion, but I couldn’t contain myself. The weapons inspectors should be allowed to finish their job, I told the audience. If the United States invaded Iraq and it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction, there would be more terrorism. My sister and a friend were in the audience and clapped, but this wasn’t what German intellectuals and diplomats wanted to hear. Afterward, some of the other panelists refused to shake my hand.

  Instead, people argued in op-ed pieces and on TV that even if Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, he was a bad person, a despot who was killing his own people, a monster who had gassed the Kurds. I couldn’t argue with any of this, but these things had been known for many years. But where was the evidence that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction or that he planned to use them? An important source for the Americans was Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, an Iraqi asylum seeker who came to Germany in 1999. He told the German intelligence agency that he had worked at an agricultural facility in Iraq that served as a cover for a secret biological weapons program. Al-Janabi’s alarming claims were shared with the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, and while the Germans later warned the Americans about the possible unreliability of the source (who was given the code name Curveball by U.S. intelligence agencies), the Bush administration ignored the warnings and treated the allegations as fact.

  At the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell argued that Saddam Hussein was linked to the September 11 attacks through his support of an Al Qaeda offshoot in Iraq. Powell spoke of the “sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder.” Hussein’s Iraq was now home, he said, to “a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” a Jordanian who had fought in Afghanistan more than a decade earlier and was a close collaborator of Osama bin Laden. According to Powell, Zarqawi had returned to Afghanistan in 2000 and had overseen a terrorist training camp there that specialized in poisons.

  Powell’s words, and their implications, were terrifying. Today we know that Saddam Hussein hated Al Qaeda as much as the Americans did and that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction. But at the time, public opinion was divided. Some of my professors said that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would violate international law, while others seemed eager for a war. “Saddam Hussein is a dangerous man,” one of my professors argued. “If he has these weapons, the world is in danger.”

  “Whatever happened to presenting evidence and proving someone’s guilt?” I responded.

  He didn’t want to hear it. He was certain Iraq would be a better place with Saddam gone. All this speculation made me angry. I felt that I needed to be in Iraq, to see with my own eyes what was happening there. I didn’t want to be like those foreign affairs “experts” who lived comfortably in Germany but went on TV day and night to talk about global hot spots they never dared to visit. I thought back to the famous foreign correspondent who spoke to my journalism school class about reporting on Iran by telephone.

  I asked Peter about the possibility of going to Iraq for the Post. “Are you really sure you want to go there now and end up in the war?” he asked. “What about your parents? What do they say?”

  “I haven’t told them yet.”

  After a few hours, Peter called back. “Okay,” he said. “If you can get a visa, there is one story we should try to do as soon as possible. We need to find the diplomat who allegedly met with Mohamed Atta in Prague. We need to find al-Ani.”

  Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani was an Iraqi intelligence officer who had been working as a diplomat in Prague in 2001, and who was accused of having met with Atta in April of that year, five months before the attacks on New York and Washington. A senior Czech official had mentioned the meeting at a press conference in October 2001, and it became a key piece of evidence tying Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein.

  I asked for a meeting at the Iraqi embassy in Berlin to request a visa. When I arrived, the consular official stared at me. “You want to go to Iraq? Now?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “You want to go there at a time when people are trying to find a way to leave?” he asked me. “To watch the war?”

  “No. I want to go there and see if the reasons for a possible war are true or not.”

  He looked at me, his dark brown eyes widening. “Who cares if the reasons are true?” he asked. “Do you think anyone cares about the truth? You are so naïve. You think the Americans care about Iraqi lives? About the fact that we had nothing to do with 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction?”

  “I want to go and find out what the truth is,” I told him. “My colleague and I are really interested in finding the truth.”

  He laughed out loud. “Let’s see what Baghdad thinks about this, and if they’ll give you a visa.” He stood up and reached out to shake my hand.

  “How will I know if I get the visa?”

  “You will be called.”

  I got ready to go. “Wait,” he told me. He was scribbling something on a piece of paper. “This is my number in Iraq. I’m sure the Germans will soon throw us out. In case you make it to Iraq, call.”

  I took his contact information and left.

  * * *

  EVEN THOUGH I was still living at home, my parents didn’t know about my plans. My bedroom doubled as my office, but I had my own phone line, and when I made phone calls about I
raq, I spoke in whispers. I didn’t think there was any point in telling them until I got a visa.

  And I was right. The call from the embassy never came. Instead, as the diplomat had predicted, he and his colleagues were asked to leave Germany. It was clear that the war was coming.

  None of this deterred me. I nagged Peter, asking him to help me get approval from the Post to look for al-Ani, even if I didn’t get an official visa. Maybe I could go in after the invasion, if the Americans or someone else took control.

  As it turned out, that was exactly what happened. A week after the fall of Baghdad, Peter sent a message telling me to book a flight to Jordan through the Post’s office in Berlin. I would stay overnight at the Four Seasons Hotel and then drive to Baghdad. “Call Ranya in Jordan,” he told me. “She will arrange everything.”

  I called Ranya, who was a stringer for the Post and the New York Times in Jordan. Glamorous, brassy, and descended from a well-educated and affluent Jordanian family, Ranya is the only Arab woman I know who dares to wear tight jeans and high heels to interview Islamists. We’ve become friends over the years, but on that day in 2003, I was a nervous twenty-five-year-old novice reporter heading into a war zone for the first time. “You’ll have a couple of hours’ honeymoon in a five-star hotel,” she told me, laughing, “before they send you on a drive to hell.”

  I told my parents over dinner that evening, leaving out the part about hell.

  “Of all places, you need to go there?” my father asked. “It is very dangerous. How will we know where you are?”

  My mother burst into tears. “Where will you sleep? Who will take care of your safety?” she asked, then shook her head. “If only I’d let you become an actress.”

  I explained that I was going for one specific story and that I would be staying at a house with other Washington Post journalists. I also promised that I would stay away from places where we knew there was fighting going on. Back then, few could have predicted how quickly the war would spread from traditional battlefields to city streets.

  Finally, my father asked what I needed for the trip. I’d learned my lesson about making sure to wear long shirts and clothes that didn’t show the shape of my body. My father had always helped me by going to Pakistani and Afghan import-export shops in Frankfurt and finding the largest, ugliest tunics. His choices guaranteed that I wouldn’t look feminine at all. I asked if he would help by getting me more clothes.

  I called Peter, who was already in Baghdad. He told me not to carry lots of cash and to try to blend in as much as possible on the road from Jordan.

  “There have been robberies between Amman and Baghdad,” he explained.

  I didn’t tell my parents that, either. The next day, I boarded a flight to Jordan.

  3

  A Country with a Divided Soul

  Iraq, 2003–4

  When I landed later that night, I called Ranya. She had arranged for a car to pick me up and take me to the hotel. We would leave early the next morning. “You have to be ready by three a.m. It’s safer for you to drive then,” Ranya said. If she was nervous, her voice didn’t betray it. She sounded as if she were reading a manual about how to turn on a TV. She also said there had been a change of plans: instead of traveling to Baghdad alone, I would now be sharing a car with a correspondent from the New York Times. This rattled me. How was I supposed to blend in if there was an American, who might have blue eyes and blond hair, in the car with me? And not just any American, but a guy from the Times? “Come on, darling, it’s not that difficult,” Ranya told me. “You’re sharing a car, not a bed.” After hanging up with her, I called Peter Finn in Baghdad. “It’s okay,” he said. “Just make him sit in back, and you sit in front.”

  At the hotel, I phoned my parents to let them know I’d arrived safely. “Everything is super,” I told them, trying to sound casual. I managed to sleep for a couple of hours, then showered and dressed. When I tipped the waiter who brought my croissant and coffee, he couldn’t stop grinning. I later realized I’d messed up the exchange rate and given him more than twice the cost of the breakfast.

  It turned out that the other reporter was also young and nervous. When I met him in the lobby, I informed him that I’d sit in the front seat. Ranya had also urged me to do this, saying it would lower our chances of being robbed. “Yes, sure,” he said. “Ranya knows best.”

  We climbed into a black SUV. It was nothing special—the kind of rugged car that Iraqis often used to travel back and forth across the Jordanian border. The driver, Munther, was a Jordanian of Palestinian descent and a real sweetheart. He’d brought along small, freshly baked pizzas, drinks, and cookies for the road, but neither the Times reporter nor I felt like eating much.

  The trip from Amman to the border took about four hours. Then, if nothing went wrong, it would be another six hours to Baghdad. Munther and I chatted in Arabic. In the backseat, my fellow reporter listened to music on his headphones. At one point, Munther offered to plug the music into the car stereo, and heavy metal blared. “If we listen to this the rest of the way, I’m going to need aspirin,” Munther told me in Arabic. “Tell him that if people hear it, they might know there’s a foreigner here.”

  I handed the music back to the Times reporter. “It’s a security thing,” I said. But he was smiling. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You don’t like my music.” I told him that ’80s pop was more my speed.

  At the border, we saw Jordanian soldiers but no Iraqis. I was the only woman there, but I couldn’t tell if the men were staring at me because I was female or because I was wearing one of the ugly long shirts my father had bought. Once across, we drove through the desert on a smooth, empty road. Iraq’s infrastructure was much more advanced than I’d expected. Judging by the roads and buildings, this wasn’t a Third World country. It looked civilized, even prosperous. There was pride in the way people walked, in the way they looked at each other, but I also saw anger and disappointment in their faces.

  After a while, Munther stopped the car. “Okay, look, guys, we are going to pass by a region where there are lots of robberies,” he told us. “If you’ve got money, give it to me and I will hide it for you.”

  I told Munther that I had three hundred dollars with me, but it was already in a safe place. I had taken my Moroccan grandmother’s long-ago advice and hidden it in my bra. “Child, the world is full of sons of sin,” she told me then. “If they stick their hands in my dress pockets, they will get some coins, but not the large notes.” I’d kept twenty dollars in my wallet, so that if thieves stopped us, they wouldn’t be suspicious.

  But the Times reporter had more money—a lot more. He hadn’t expected Munther to ask for it and wasn’t sure whether to hand it over. “The bureau will freak out,” he said.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Ten thousand dollars?”

  It was much more than that and in cash, he told me, strapped to his body in one of those money belts.

  When Munther saw the big stack of American dollars, he blanched. “This is very dangerous for all of us,” he said. “They might think we’re agents or spies for some foreign country.” He hid the money in a special compartment under the floor of the car.

  We started driving and soon passed through the first bad area, a nondescript little town in the middle of nowhere. About an hour and a half later, Munther turned to us. “The last problematic area is Fallujah,” he said. “They’ve been shooting Americans there lately.” Then he asked me in Arabic, “Can you tell your colleague it might be safer for us if he would stay away from the windows? It’s best if he stays out of sight as we pass through here.”

  The Times reporter understood and immediately got down on the floor in the back. I stayed where I was and looked straight ahead. In my black hijab, I could have passed for an Iraqi. “They have the best kebabs here,” Munther told me as we passed through Fallujah, “but these people feel their country was taken from them by the Americans and Iranians, so they are very aggressive. If you are in Fallujah, hold your br
eath and pray.”

  * * *

  I’D TOLD MY parents that I’d be gone for two weeks, but I ended up spending several months in Iraq. There was so much happening, and it felt vitally important to be there. My interest was also personal. The longer I stayed in Iraq, the more often people asked me whether I was Sunni or Shia. Sometimes the question came from people I was interviewing, sometimes from curious Iraqis who worked with us in the Washington Post bureau in Baghdad. My answers depended on the situation, but the real answer was: both.

  My mother is Shia and my father Sunni, both descendants of the Prophet’s family. The distinction had never been made in our house, but when I arrived in Iraq in the late spring of 2003, tension between the Sunni and Shia communities was building.

  The historic roots of the religious Sunni-Shia conflict lie in the question of the righteous succession of the Prophet Muhammad. His followers divided over the question of whether Ali, his son-in-law and cousin, or Abu Bakr, his father-in-law, should follow him as the leader of the Islamic ummah, or community. Abu Bakr prevailed and became the first caliph. The Shia, however, believe that only Ali had the right to succeed Muhammad. A minority in the worldwide Muslim community, the Shia developed their own religious practices and sources. And while the conflict between the sects has not always been violent, the Shia have suffered from oppression throughout their history. Some Iraqi Shia scholars had fled to Iran or Bahrain, where they could practice their religious traditions freely. In Saddam’s Iraq, anyone who opposed the Ba’ath Party became an enemy.