[This is an Australian magazine that as far as I
can tell
is not available in the US. This is an astonishing
and
harrowing look at Michael’s work in
Iraq.]
When a man is tortured because of you, something
inside slowly dies. An unanswerable, tumorous guilt
grows within. It feeds off the self-pitying shame
that it was him, and not you; off the feeling you
must, somehow, somewhere, atone for this, must
conjure the miracle that will repair the part of him
that has darkened and drawn away, forever lost. All
the while knowing you can't, and that what you feel
doesn't really matter.
But you know you'll carry these things with you for
the rest of your life. In the first days of February
last year, the US military captured a top insurgent
commander in north-west Baghdad, an emir, or prince.
A large chunk of the capital was his.
Though he worked for what's awkwardly described as an
Iraqi nationalist guerrilla organisation, comprised
of former military and intelligence officers tinged
with only a faint hint of Islamic militancy, he had,
through tribal and operational connections, close
ties to the al-Qaeda organisation of Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi. His arrest sent shivers through the
capital's insurgent infrastructure.
Clearly there had been a security breach. An informer
had somehow penetrated the ranks, or the Americans
had turned an insider. Either way, the wound had to
be cauterised. Al-Qaeda assumed responsibility for
what was about to become a vicious internal
investigation.
I had known this emir since the first months of the
invasion in 2003. He'd sat at home, disenfranchised
and dishonoured. It wasn't long before he turned to
small, ad hoc attacks on passing convoys. As the
insurgency lurched forward becoming ever more
organised, sophisticated and adept, he moved up the
chain. Having known him from the beginning, I moved
up with him.
So often he had agreed to meet me when he knew his
colleagues frowned upon it, even though I was never
allowed to know how to find him. So often he had
shielded me from the threats of feral terrorist cells
who wanted to kidnap me, or worse. I knew what he
did, how brutal a soldier he had become, but he,
among others, gave me a precious insight into the
inner workings of the insurgency. So when he was
taken down, the al-Qaeda interrogators' first
thoughts were to blame the journalist.
Luring my fixer who was my conduit to the emir to a
meeting with an unrelated group, they trapped and
delivered him to a waiting car of al-Qaeda hitmen. He
was bundled into their sedan and driven off.
Taken to a small house in obscure farmland outside
the city, for five days they tortured him; whipping
him with electrical cord, putting electrodes on his
genitals, beating him with pipes. At the end of the
fifth day they stopped, and he spent three more days
naked, chained to a water pipe. On the eighth
evening, Valentine's Day, they dressed him, tossed
him back in the car, and dumped him off at a busy
Baghdad intersection.
It took him an hour to reach my office. He was barely
audible and couldn't stop shaking. He couldn't look
me in the eye. His body curled in on itself as he
sat. In time I asked, "What did they want? What were
they asking you about?" His answer was simple: "You,
Mick. All the questions were about you. Is he a spy?
Is he really a journalist? How do you know who he
is?"
For those five days, it turned out, he'd stuck by me,
hoping the truth would save him. We later learned the
three days he was left waiting allowed the al-Qaeda
interrogators to check his story with the long list
of insurgent commanders he'd said would vouch for me.
Which, thankfully, they did. When my fixer was
released he was told, "Go back, keep working, but
tell Mick we're watching him."
My experiences in reporting the Iraq war are,
admittedly, a little unique. For better or for worse,
I have had more access to the insurgency than almost
any other Western journalist. That hasn't come
without cost. As far as we know, I'm the only
Westerner to have been grabbed by Zarqawi's people
and to have lived to tell the tale, having been saved
by an Iraqi Baathist commander just short of my
execution at the hands of Syrian jihadis. As
journalist John Martinkus, who was kidnapped minutes
after leaving my Baghdad house, would know, that's
not something you ever really recover from.
But much of what my staff and I have been through is
universal to all those trying desperately to make
sense of and report on this long-running insurgent
war.
In our first house, back in 2004, one of our senior
translators was assassinated by three gunmen with
Uzis as he drove around a corner four blocks from the
office. Later that year, another of my fixers was
arrested in Falluja by a Palestinian battle commander
for al-Qaeda; my staffer, sporting the Time i.d. I'd
given him, was suspected of knowing too much and
seized for investigation. He too was grilled
endlessly about me and our magazine while he was
beaten.
Through major Baathist insurgent leaders, some of
America's most wanted, I made contact with the
al-Qaeda command and pleaded for my fixer's release.
It couldn't be secured, but his execution was staved
off. In time, he was rescued by US Marines when they
overran the restive city in November 2004, though
they mistook him for an insurgent and threw him in
prison at first.
Our house has been pummelled, twice, by car bombs.
Another of our senior translators, whom al-Qaeda had
been stalking and visiting his house, once more
asking about the magazine, was blown up in his car
after refusing to proffer the information they
wanted. He barely survived; we flew him to Jordan
where his mangled arm was saved by last-ditch
surgery, and he has now been granted refugee status
in Australia. Most news bureaux in this war-plagued
capital could give similar accounts.
It comes as no surprise, at least not to those of us
here long enough, to hear the spokesman for the
Islamic Army in Iraq, one of the most robust
insurgent outfits, tell the al-Jazeera satellite
channel that his organisation keeps loose tabs on the
journalists, and keeps a passing eye on what we say
and write. It's not as if we didn't already know
this, but to have it announced, now, for some reason,
ratchets up the pressure in the back of our minds
just one more turn.
You live with lurking worries about kidnap, mortars,
car bombs, the safety of your staff, and how your
presence in the midst of this hideous war must eat
away at your family. Like a persistent white noise
you tune out as much of it as you can, but every now
and then it breaks into your daily transmission.
In 2003 we could drive the length and breadth of the
country, daytripping to Falluja or Tikrit or to
Najaf. By April 2004 we lost the highways as the US
military lost control. For much of the year that
followed, we spent parts of each week trapped in the
very country itself. Our only portal in and out was
Baghdad's airport and, several times a week, the
airport road was cut by the insurgents. Even if you
had a ticket for that day's flight there was no
guarantee you were going to be able to use it. And
there was no other way out.
By late 2004 we'd lost the capital as well; we
couldn't even move from one quarter to the next, we
couldn't visit sites or contacts or friends we'd
often been to see. Things have changed slightly since
then. The airport road is now secured by at least
three full battalions of American armour and Iraqi
troops.
Yet the city is, by and large, off limits to most
journalists. You travel it and visit at your peril,
and in nothing less than two-car, often armoured,
always armed, convoys. I manage by seeking permission
from the dominant insurgent groups before heading to
a district and putting myself in their hands. Either
way, it makes every venture outside your front gate a
matter of great calculation.
While reporting the Iraqi story is now done by what
one of my American counterparts dubbed the 'remote
control' of Iraqi stringers and makeshift journalists
we dispatch to bring us the raw materials of an
article, many Western journalists opt occasionally
for US military embeds as a way to see the country,
even if through a stage-managed prism. That, too, is
not without difficulty or risk, as the serious
wounding in January of the American ABC's anchorman
Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt reminded us.
As with the insurgents, I've been fortunate in my
access to the US military. I have been with frontline
units, deep in combat, in almost every major battle
in Iraq since the war began. I've been in firefights
with almost every type of unit the Americans have --
from SEALs, Delta and Green Berets, to airborne,
mechanised and armoured units. I've seen great things
in the process, and as a result of what I saw a lone
sergeant do in a darkened Falluja house one night was
asked to give a witness statement to the Pentagon for
a Congressional Medal of Honor nomination. Yet these
things, too, come at a premium, and not without their
scars.
All of these difficulties have seen the international
press corps whittled down to the hardiest bare bones.
Where once hundreds of journalists combed the
country, the entire journalistic community could now
fit in a single bus or tram.
It's far too dangerous and punitively expensive for
freelancers to operate here, leaving the field almost
solely to the large American organisations, most of
whom have pared back their staff to the barest
essentials. Journalists who 'parachute' in from time
to time are increasingly disconnected from a story
ever more complex and in need of constant attention,
often latching on to mere fragments of the truth.
It's the same with some conservative reporters who
jet in with the military and never leave its embrace
nor stray from its orchestrated vision.
Asserting the authority and expertise to comment on
this war is harder earned now than ever before, and
fewer than ever can lay claim to it. There's a price
to be paid for the insight, and it's not one easily
met.
Michael
Ware from Brisbane is Time magazine's Baghdad bureau
chief.