I Was Told to Come Alone Read online

  “They are people from the most wanted list, very important, very big. I can’t tell you more now.”

  At first, I planned to go alone, but given the distance and the curfew, it became clear that I would have to spend the night in Mosul. Another Post reporter, Kevin Sullivan, joined me, along with an Iraqi stringer and driver.

  When we reached the affluent residential part of Mosul where the shooting had occurred, we saw that U.S. soldiers had closed down the area. A large villa had been destroyed. There was broken glass everywhere and bullets still lodged in the walls; helicopters circled overhead. Passersby told me that the Americans had just carried bodies out of the house.

  “Did you see who it was?” I asked.

  They nodded. “Uday and Qusay, the president’s sons,” a bearded Iraqi army veteran in a white ankle-length robe, or dishdasha, told me. “May God have mercy on their souls.”

  On the street nearby, three soldiers who looked to be nineteen or twenty years old stood in front of a tank, trying to keep people away from the ruined house. I wanted to talk to more people, so while Kevin sat in the car making calls, I approached the tank. When the soldiers heard I was from the Washington Post, they weren’t happy.

  “We hate the Washington Post, and the fucking New York Times,” one of them said. “You guys are always writing such shit about us.”

  I took out my satellite phone and made a call. One of the soldiers watched me closely.

  “Can you call the United States on that?” he asked when I got off.

  I told him you could call anywhere.

  “So can I call Texas?” He hadn’t spoken to his pregnant wife in several months. “I just want to tell her I’m okay.”

  “Take it,” I told him.

  He looked at the sergeant on top of the tank. “Can I?” The sergeant nodded. The soldier called his wife, and one of the other soldiers called his parents.

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry we weren’t polite to you in the beginning,” one of the soldiers said afterward. “We’re under so much pressure. It’s not what we expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “We thought people would love us here. We thought they’d offer us tea and be happy to see us. Instead, they attack us. We see our friends getting killed. People are angry with us.”

  The sergeant wouldn’t tell me who they’d killed in the villa, but I overheard one of the soldiers say, “There was Uday and then it was just boom, boom, boom.” We called the Post’s bureau chief back in Baghdad, who got confirmation from the army: Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, two of the most wanted men in Iraq, had been killed.

  By then it was getting dark, and we had to find a place to spend the night. Unfortunately, the only decent hotel in the city was already full, so we settled for a grimy motel with no name whose main clientele seemed to be Iraqi truck drivers. It wasn’t the kind of place where a respectable woman would stay—in fact, I didn’t see any other women on the premises—but it was our only option.

  The man at the reception desk told us to wait until his colleague arrived. That man was responsible for the rooms.

  Men in long robes occupied four chairs in the reception area. One of them was smoking, and I realized that he was staring at me. He turned to the man next to him and whispered something in his ear. The second man stood up and left the hall.

  The man who had been staring took out a pack of Marlboros and offered me one. He had dark skin, a mustache, and very dark eyes.

  “Thanks, but I don’t smoke,” I said in Arabic.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “Morocco. You?”

  “Deir Azzhor. I am the chief of a big tribe there.” He took another drag on his cigarette. “So you’re staying here, too?”

  I told him we weren’t sure. Kevin and our Iraqi stringer sat nearby in the lobby, but our driver was still out in the parking lot, and I was beginning to wonder what was taking him so long. I left the reception area and went out to look for him. Sure enough, the man who had been sitting with the tribal chief was talking to our driver. When he saw me, he went back into the motel.

  “What did he want from you?” I asked the driver.

  “He said he was working for this tribal chief from Deir Azzhor and asked me about you, if you were Muslim and if you were married.”

  “What did you tell him?” I asked.

  “I told him you were Muslim and not married.”

  “Why are you telling him private stuff about me?”

  The driver shrugged. “It’s normal.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said.

  When I went back into the reception hall, the men were still sitting there. The tribal chief followed my every movement with his eyes, still smoking. Once or twice, he smirked at me lasciviously.

  When the receptionist finally came, I gave him twenty dollars and asked him not to tell anyone which room I was in. He took the money and smiled. “Of course not. Don’t worry.”

  Our stringer, Naseer, was watching. He told me I shouldn’t trust the receptionist.

  “Did you see what kind of watch the tribal chief was wearing? They might look poor but the guy is rich. You gave the receptionist twenty dollars. That chief will give him two hundred dollars to get your room number and the extra key.”

  We had four rooms close to each other. The bedsheets were crumpled and dirty, and the toilet was a hole in the ground. It reminded me of the toilet my grandmother had in Meknes when I lived with her as a child, except that this one was filthy and stank. Brownish water trickled from the shower head.

  My room was on the same floor as the others, but while my three male colleagues had rooms next to each other, mine was at the far end of the corridor.

  I asked Naseer to switch rooms with me but not to tell anyone. I told him to come get me in the morning and gave him and Kevin a password: “apple pie.” If I didn’t hear those words, I told them, I wouldn’t open the door.

  Even though I was still a bit worried about the tribal chief and his men, I was exhausted. I put my windbreaker over the pillow and slept with my clothes on. In the middle of the night I heard loud voices and the noise of people running but realized it was happening somewhere else on the floor. I went back to sleep.

  The next morning I waited for Naseer to knock on my door and accompany me downstairs. “You know, you’re really lucky we switched rooms,” he said, laughing. “They came in the middle of the night. It seemed as if they were planning to kidnap you.” When they opened the door and saw Naseer, they shouted and ran away.

  “They left the hotel, but I told you that bastard receptionist must have given them the room number and key.”

  We passed the receptionist as we walked through the lobby to our car. His cheeks and left eye looked swollen, and he wasn’t smiling. “Instead of the two hundred dollars, he probably received two hundred slaps and punches for not delivering the bride,” Naseer said, giggling.

  We drove back to the neighborhood where Saddam’s sons had been killed. While Kevin and I were standing near the car, making calls on our satellite phones, someone tapped my shoulder.

  “Are you a journalist?” he asked in Arabic. “If so, why don’t you write about the boy Anas who was killed by U.S. soldiers yesterday?”

  I thought I’d misheard him. “What are you talking about? What boy Anas? The only ones killed yesterday were Uday and Qusay. How do you know about this?”

  “Anas was my brother.”

  Kevin and I followed the man to his house, where his family was in mourning. The father was very kind, but the oldest brother was livid, especially when he saw Kevin. “You’re American!” he yelled. “Why did you kill my brother? He was just a boy.”

  “I’m so sorry, but I didn’t kill your brother,” Kevin said, taken aback. “We want to write about it.”

  The family told us that American soldiers had closed down some streets in the neighborhood during the raid to get Uday and Qusay. That afternoon, Anas, a twenty-one-year-old student,
learned that he’d done well in his classes. He wanted to go to the mosque and give thanks, but the soldiers had blocked the road, and a crowd had begun protesting at the barricade. When some Iraqis started throwing rocks, the soldiers got nervous and a few of them fired on the demonstrators. A bullet struck Anas in the head.

  We had the story, but it would be hard to prove. The army denied that any civilians had been killed. We talked to doctors who had treated the wounded, and who described their injuries as being specific to machine-gun fire. We found other victims and interviewed them again and again. “You think we made all this up?” a man who had been shot in the leg asked me incredulously. “Do you think we shot ourselves?” We convinced the doctors to show us the bullets they’d removed from people’s bodies, then went back to the neighborhood and got bullets out of the walls to see if they matched. Kevin took the ammunition to the army for confirmation, but the Americans continued to deny what dozens of witnesses had seen.

  One moment from those days will always stay with me. When we were talking to Anas’s family, his oldest brother, the one who had accused Kevin of killing him, pulled me aside. “If you’re Palestinian, go and fight against these Americans and Jews,” he said.

  “I’m Moroccan.”

  “You should fight,” he told me, looking straight into my eyes.

  His father overheard and apologized. “My son was very close to his brother,” he said.

  I told him I understood. “You lost your son, but we didn’t kill your son. Every American is not bad,” I said.

  But I couldn’t help remembering Maureen Fanning’s question: Why do they hate us so much?

  * * *

  IN AUGUST, AFTER more than three months in Iraq, I flew back to Germany, but I kept thinking about Baghdad. Maybe because I spoke Arabic, I felt that I understood the place more fully than others. Like many reporters, I felt responsible to the Iraqis, as if, by staying away, I was letting them down.

  I went back to the university, but it felt stupid to be sitting in class when there was a war going on. My classmates talked about the rest of the world with typical Western arrogance, but they’d never seen the suffering or complexity of war up close. What had been tolerable to me before was now unbearable. Once you’ve wept with someone who’s lost a family member because of another country’s political decisions, it’s hard to view international relations with detachment. At home, I monitored news from Iraq obsessively, constantly flipping on CNN in case I’d missed something. My parents said I seemed nervous, but I didn’t notice.

  After three weeks, to my parents’ dismay, I went back. The land route from Jordan had become too dangerous, so Peter and I, along with Guy Raz, an NPR reporter, flew to Turkey and drove across Iraq’s northern border. This time, my working arrangement was a bit different. Guy had asked me to work for him, and Peter had agreed, as long as I could report on breaking news for the Post. I also got approval to work on occasional small pieces for German newspapers and to do interviews with German radio in case of breaking news.

  The NPR correspondents stayed at a small hotel in central Baghdad. It was quieter than the Washington Post house, and my work with Guy moved at a slower pace and allowed me to explore communities that often didn’t make the news. Our main translator, Abu Aara, was an Armenian Christian, a community that had for decades lived freely in Iraq. He invited us into his home, and we attended the baptism of one of his relatives’ sons. The guests I met there spoke of a different Iraq.

  The families of these Armenians had fled the massacres of the Ottoman Empire ninety years before. Under Saddam, they said, they’d lived and worshipped freely. “What people in the West don’t seem to understand is that the Ba’ath Party was the force trying to separate religion as much as possible from politics,” Abu Aara’s pastor told me. “Saddam was fighting the ayatollahs in Iran because they wanted to brainwash Shia in Iraq and fight secularism, but it would be wrong to say that whoever was Shia was deprived of rights.” Minorities weren’t automatically subject to discrimination, he said. I thought of Tariq Aziz, a Christian who had been Saddam Hussein’s longtime foreign minister.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the pastor’s words. Our politicians and advisers hadn’t done their due diligence. They had come with the perspective that our system—democracy—would work for everyone, and they didn’t consider the consequences that adopting an entirely new system might have for people living elsewhere. I wondered, not for the first time, whether the West was unintentionally opening the door to a more religious and sectarian Middle East.

  * * *

  SINCE MY ARRIVAL in Iraq, I’d seen neighborhoods changing. In some cases, Shia militias had forced Sunni families to move to other areas. Shia women living in areas that were controlled by militias told me that they had to wear a full body covering known as a chador or abaya when leaving the house. “It wasn’t like that before,” a woman named Hannan, who had been in the Iraqi army, told me. “I just wore my uniform; I never put on a veil.” But since the fall of Saddam Hussein, things had changed dramatically. “It’s increasingly the mullahs and militias who are running the show,” she told me. “I can’t leave the house uncovered or without my mother anymore.”

  Meanwhile, Al Qaeda had increased its attacks, striking U.S. soldiers as well as politicians cooperating with the United States and prominent Shia figures. The sectarian violence reached an apex with the assassination of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqr al-Hakim, the head of the group that is now called the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, who was killed along with 125 others when a car bomb exploded as he was leaving the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf in late August. The Islamic Supreme Council belonged to the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, and his role as a respected religious leader gave the U.S. occupation authority much-needed credibility. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his terrorist network later claimed responsibility for the attack.

  I realized that if I wanted to understand Iraq’s sectarian divide, I had to go to Najaf, one of the holiest places on earth for Shia, where Ali is buried, where Shia clerics revolted against British colonial forces in 1918, and where Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini prepared the Iranian revolution during his exile there in the 1970s. Najaf was where Khomeini wrote his anticolonial polemic Islamic Government, in which he explained the impiety of monarchies and the need for an Islamic republic. In 1978, Khomeini was expelled from Najaf by Saddam Hussein, who was being pressured by the shah of Iran, but he left many supporters behind. A highly symbolic place of Shia resistance and militancy—many members of the founding generation of Hezbollah had also studied there—Najaf was now the site of a major terrorist attack. Security was very tight following Hakim’s assassination. Shia militias had made it clear that they wanted to protect their own holy sites, and U.S. and British soldiers stood aside as the militias took over what had once been the job of the Iraqi army and police.

  Guy had talked to American and Iraqi officials, and they all said it would be best to visit one of the leading Shia groups before going to Najaf, to ensure that we wouldn’t run into problems with the militias there. Abu Aara, our stringer, said that Hizb ul’Dawaa was one of the most influential Shia political groups and that I should go there first. They had an office in Baghdad.

  There were metal detectors at the entrance, but women were winked through. Not good, I thought.

  Hizb ul’Dawaa was a religious party. Many of its members had spent years in Iran and saw no distinction between religion and politics. We were told that one of the leaders of the party was waiting for us. He had visitors but invited us in.

  He was in his late fifties or early sixties, with a neatly trimmed beard and striking light brown eyes. He wore an Iranian-style black turban that, along with his title, sayyid, indicated he was a descendant of the Prophet.

  I introduced Abu Aara and our driver, Abu Ali, who was Shia, and explained that I wanted to go to Najaf to report on the changing relationship between Sunni and Shia and to explore the question of whether there would be some kind of Su
nni-Shia war. I also wanted to know how much influence Iran had in that area, but I didn’t tell the sayyid that.

  He listened and smiled. “Where are you from?”

  I told him that my father was Moroccan but that I had been born in Germany.

  “And who are you?”

  I’d just introduced myself, I thought. Why was he asking again? “I am Souad Mekhennet. I am a journalist.”

  “No, no. I understand what your name is and who you are representing,” he said. “What I’m asking is, whose descendant are you?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think you and I share some of the same blood lineage.”

  “How do you know this? How could you know?”

  He said he felt it, that it was written in my eyes. He was not only a religious scholar but deeply spiritual. “I think you are a sayyida, or how do you say it in Morocco, sharifa?” he said with a smile.

  I felt unnerved but also intrigued. I suddenly wanted to talk to him about everything that was happening in Iraq, and to Islam in general. I couldn’t change who I was and saw no reason to conceal it. I told him about my parents, their intersectarian marriage, and how angry my grandparents had been when they found out. I wondered aloud if the Sunni-Shia divide would cause more bloodshed in Iraq.

  He agreed that trouble lay ahead. In his youth, he’d been active in some secular political movements, but he told me that his whole family had come under attack when one of his brothers opposed Saddam Hussein’s regime.

  “I had no choice but to go to Iran, live there in exile, and study religion.”

  I cut to the question that was foremost in my mind. “Why are Sunnis and Shia still accusing and killing each other over things that happened hundreds of years ago?” I asked.

  “Politics,” he whispered, and smiled. “But you must know that you cannot discuss such things with everybody. There are some who could misunderstand your critical and philosophical mind-set and take it personally.” He asked me when I planned to go to Najaf; I told him I was leaving in two days.