Mark MacKinnon, 20/03/08 at 10:14 AM EDT
Thursday, March 20 - Jerusalem
I'm out of Iraq now. I caught a plane yesterday morning from Irbil to Amman, then drove overland back to the bureau in Jerusalem. I can't say I'm sad to have left.
I woke up from a long sleep to read a long list of headlines highlighting George W. Bush's hailing America's "strategic victory" in Iraq. As you might be able to tell from what I've been writing here and in the newspaper, his triumphant assessment was wildly at odds with the sense I got on the streets of Baghdad and elsewhere.
For the record, I'm not the only one who has a different take than Mr. Bush. Here's how some of the Arab media reported on the fifth anniversary of the 2003 invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein:
Al-Ahram (Egypt): "(Thursday), it will be five years since the U.S. war on Iraq began. The war was waged on the pretext of disarming Iraq and bringing freedom and democracy to its people. Today, we ask: Were these aims really achieved on the ground? The answer is this: Iraq today is passing through the worst phase ever in its modern history. It is living under the most terrible and savage military occupation that is engaging in the ugliest forms of repression in history. Hundreds of people are killed each month. The lives of many more are threatened each day by poverty, power cuts, and water, food, and medicine shortages."
Dar al-Hayat (Saudi-owned, pan-Arab daily): "Five years after the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, the outcome boils down to nothing more than multidimensional catastrophes. The scary figures so far recorded reveal the impossibility of comparing the declared objectives of the invasion and the status quo: Tens of thousands dead, hundreds of thousands injured, millions displaced, and billions of dollars wasted on the country's infrastructure. This is not to mention the sectarian, ethnic, and tribal divisions unprecedented in the modern history of Mesopotamia. On top of this, the structure of the Iraqi state is in complete collapse; its former institutions have been transformed into partisan and confessional sectors that consume massive budgets and invest them in domestic conflicts and war over influence. The oil wealth, meanwhile, has been plundered and squandered through smuggling, whereas the agricultural and industrial sectors have melted down, leaving billions of dollars in losses..."
Blogger "Last of Iraqis" : "During these 5 years I have experienced everything, two of my relatives kidnapped, 6 of the people I know closely including relatives and close friends have been killed, I can't count the number of people that I know who were murdered, my niece who is 7 years old girl died in an explosion, most of my friends and relatives have left the country, I watched my teachers and college professors being killed or kidnapped one after the other, I have been near an explosion countless times, I have witnessed uncountable number of dead bodies and crying families taking their dead beloved from the forensic medicine building, I have seen 3 men at different times being shot to death in front of me, I have been through militias checkpoints several times, Me and my wife have been targeted by a national guard sniper for a reason I didn't know till this moment, I have seen dead bodies left on the side walk and no dares to bury them, my family have been threatened and forced to leave the country and I joined them and stayed in Jordan/Amman for about a year and then had to return back despite the horrible situation and the extra danger on me being threatened, but what can I do, I tried desperately to find a job there but like most of Iraqis, I couldn't. I'm just one Iraqi and I have such loses, imagine 28 million one like me, how much looses does the Iraqis have?"
Mark MacKinnon, 18/03/08 at 12:59 PM EDT
Tuesday, March 18 – Irbil
I’m writing you now from the most luxurious hotel in all of Iraq (you can imagine the kind of competition there is for that title) - the Irbil International Hotel. It’s seen as so fancy that locals refer to it as the “Sheraton.” It's separated from the rest of the city by a giant blast wall, so no insurgent-y types can enter.
There’s an Asian restaurant here. A fitness centre. A swimming pool. But for the last 15 minutes, no electricity.
Still, the Internet’s on, which allows me to do a little news analysis by flashlight for you.
Here’s what was big news yesterday, particularly on CNN and Fox News, the only English news stations I could watch in my hotel room.
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday declared the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq a "successful endeavour" in a visit to Iraq that was overshadowed by a suicide bombing that killed at least 25 people.
"If you look back on those five years it has been a difficult, challenging but nonetheless successful endeavour ... and it has been well worth the effort," Mr. Cheney told a news conference in Baghdad after meeting Iraqi leaders. - Reuters
===
"Withdrawal? What that means is that Al-Qaeda wins," Mr. McCain told CNN in an interview while on a visit to Baghdad.
(snip)
He defended a "surge" of an extra 30,000 American troops in Iraq from June last year, which US commanders say has been a key factor in reducing the levels of violence across Iraq by about 60 per cent.
"Large areas of Baghdad are safe," said Mr. McCain, who arrived in the Iraqi capital on Sunday. – AFP
===
Here’s what didn’t. As I mentioned in a previous posting, most of this stuff is just so ordinary in Iraq that it’s no longer considered “newsworthy.” Only the Kerbala bombing was reported internationally:
Inside Baghdad:
1) Just after 7 a.m. a roadside bomb detonated near a police patrol in the Baghdad neighbourhood of Mansour, killing one policeman and injuring another.
2) Around 9 a.m., just before Mr. Cheney arrived, a Katyusha rocket hit the fortified “Green Zone” in the centre of the city. No casualties were reported.
3) Around 11 a.m., a mortar shell was lobbed into the green zone.
4) Later in the day, a roadside bomb targeting a U.S. convoy exploded in the Zayouna neighbourhood of northeastern Baghdad (a place I visited just last week…), injuring four civilians. Other reports said three people had been killed.
5) Again in Mansour, another roadside bomb targeted a police patrol, but apparently missed its target, injuring a civilian.
6) Around 1 p.m., eight people were killed and 11 others were injured when a boobytrapped minibus exploded in the upscale Karada neighbourhood.
7) Two U.S. soldiers were killed when their Humvee hit a roadside bomb. The soldiers were clearing a road in northern Baghdad when they were killed, the military announced.
8) Around 2 p.m., a roadside bomb targeted an American patrol in east Baghdad. Iraqi police reported no casualties.
9) Around 5 p.m., Iraqi army and police found four dead bodies buried in a garden of a deserted house south of Baghdad.
10) Around 6:30 p.m., two mortar shells hit a soccer field near a school in east Baghdad. Five soccer players were killed and 7 were injured.
11) A mortar round killed six children when it landed on their home in the Sawmar district of northern Baghdad, the Iraqi military said.
12) Iraqi police patrols found seven unknown bodies on Monday that had been dumped in different parts of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, a police source said.
The rest of the country:
1) U.S. forces killed two al-Qaeda militants and detained four others on Sunday during operations in central Iraq, the U.S. military said.
2) 52 people are killed and 75 others are injured when a female suicide bomber blows herself up in the southern city of Kerbala, near the shrine of Imam Hussein, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam.
3) The U.S. consulate in the south-central area of Babel came was targeted by three Katyusha rockets. No injuries or damage were reported.
4) A policeman was shot dead by unidentified gunmen in central Basra on Monday morning.
5) The Basra morgue received the bullet-riddled body of a woman.
6) Three bodies of fighters belonging to the U.S.-backed neighbourhood police were found two days after they were kidnapped in the town of Udhaim, 100 km north of Baghdad, police said.
7) Two civilians were wounded when an improvised explosive device (IED) exploded near a convoy of trucks carrying construction materials.
8) A parked car bomb wounded five people, including a policeman, when it blew up near a police patrol in the northern city of Mosul, police said. Gunmen and police had reportedly clashed shortly before the explosion.
9) Five mortar bombs landed, wounding two people in central Mosul.
10) A policeman was killed when unidentified gunmen attacked an Iraqi police checkpoint in central Haditha city, 170 km west of Ramadi.
I’m not campaigning for the Democrats here, just wondering why the remarks of Mr. Cheney and Mr. McCain were reported so uncritically.
If this has been a successful endeavour, I'm terrified - for Iraq's sake - of what a failure looks like.
The good news is that the generators have kicked in and the power's back on at the Irbil International. Perhaps I'll try the Asian restaurant after all.
Mark MacKinnon, 18/03/08 at 11:11 AM EDT
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 – Sulaymaniyah-Irbil
I took a pleasant drive through the hills of Kurdistan today, taking in scenic Lake Dokan and marveling at how the Kurds have neatly divided their mini-state in half between Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party. (Sulaymaniyah is Talabani turf, Irbil belongs to Barzani. You can tell when you’ve passed from one side to the other by the posters at the military checkpoints along the way – no post ever has both leaders on display.)
As interesting as the two-and-a-half hour drive was, it wasn’t the trip I’d hoped to take.
The fastest of the two routes between Sulaymaniyah and Irbil is actually the southern road, via the ethnically mixed city of Kirkuk. Kirkuk is a city I’ve often written about, but only visited once, back in the summer of 2003, before the insurgency got into full-swing. The vehicle I was travelling in broke down, so I spent the better part of a day drinking tea with car mechanics who seemed more interested in finding about visas to Canada than in fixing my car.
This time, I wanted visit Kirkuk only long enough to perhaps meet with a contact of mine I knew was going to be in the city today.
Relatively quiet through early part of the war, violence in Kirkuk has shot up since in the past few years as debate over the city’s future has grown more heated. The Kurds want the oil-rich city and the surrounding Taamim province appended to their semi-autonomous region in the north of the country, while the central government in Baghdad is loathe to hand away all that black gold.
Kurds often refer to Kirkuk as their “Jerusalem” – arguing Kirkuk means as much to them as the city holy to Muslims, Jews and Christians alike. But these days, they avoid visiting it if they can.
“Ha! Not with an ajnabi (a foreigner)” my driver Miran laughed when I asked him if we could take the southern road. Kind and generous, Miran’s the kind of guy who prefers to say yes to whatever you’re asking him for. Kirkuk, for the record, is only about 110 kilometres south of Sulaymaniyah.
“It’s too dangerous for you. It’s not just the terrorists – anybody with a gun can kidnap you and ask your family for money.” This wasn't advice, it was a stern no.
So up north we drove, just like last year when I was in Kurdistan and again asked Miran to take me to his Jerusalem.
Next year in Kirkuk? Perhaps.
Mark MacKinnon, 17/03/08 at 6:47 AM EDT
Monday, March 17, Sulaymaniyah
One of the most inspiring developments I’ve witnessed over the past few years in the Middle East has been the quiet rise of civil society. Non-government organizations dedicated to quiet, but revolutionary change have sprung up in countries that were long ruled by authoritarian governments, and where the political opposition, where it existed, was either weak and ineffective or dominated by Islamists that scared Western governments into the short-sighted policy of backing the tyrants they knew and understood.
The breakthrough came three years ago in Lebanon, where a civil society organization known as Independence 05 brought hundreds of thousands of Lebanese into the streets of Beirut. To the astonishment of the old guard, they demanded, and got, an end to Syria’s 29-year military presence in Lebanon and an investigation into the assassination earlier that year of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri. The movement borrowed heavily from the “people power” revolutions that toppled quasi-authoritarian regimes in Ukraine, Georgia and Serbia in the previous five years.
That same summer, a group called Kifaya (Arabic for “enough”) took to the streets in Cairo, challenging President Hosni Mubarak’s quarter-century grip on power. It briefly felt as though an “Arab Spring” – something similar to the wave of change that washed over Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s – was blooming.
The bad news is that Lebanon’s so-called Cedar Revolution has come undone, destroyed by sectarian wrangling and outside interference. Similarly, Kifaya’s uprising fell short, and Mr. Mubarak’s regime survived the challenge.
The good news is that the Arab Spring continues to inspire copycat movements across the Middle East. In Lebanon, a group called Khalass (another word for “enough”) has been organizing demonstrations trying to keep the country from plunging back into civil war. In the Palestinian Territories, independent groups have sought to organize non-violent Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation. Kifaya is spreading out its struggle in Egypt, hoping to convince the country’s restive and frustrated labour unions to join forces with it.
There’s little to be hopeful about in Iraq these days – with the Kurdish north of the country being the obvious exception to that broad statement. But even here in the relative stability and prosperity of Kurdistan, change hasn’t come as fast as people hoped after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Four months ago, a coalition of Kurdish civil society groups came together and formed a group modelled on Kifaya called “Hawati,” which in Kurdish means “how long?” Namo Majeed, one of the founding members, told me this morning that the goal is convince Kurds that they can break the hold that the two main parties – the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan – have over the region’s economy and political scene.
To Majeed, corruption within those two parties is the reason most Kurds still live in poverty – with bad roads, flickering electricity and long lineups for gasoline – even as the region has seen a massive influx of foreign investment. The corruption is so deep, and reaches so high, that it puts the entire Kurdish national project in peril, he said.
“The corruption has come to a such level that it threatens everything in Kurdistan. People need it to end,” he said in an interview today at the office of his own NGO, the Civil Society Initiative. “The people of Kurdistan were the happiest to be liberated from the regime of Saddam Hussein. But they hoped the U.S. would also liberate them from the Kurdish political parties.”
That hasn’t happened, he said. In fact the war has solidified the dominance of the KDP and the PUK, two parties that fought a vicious civil war in the 1990s but that have maintained a united front since 2003, dividing up the spoils between them. KDP leader Massoud Barzani heads the Kurdish Regional Government while PUK chief Jalal Talabani holds the largely ceremonial post of President of Iraq.
Hawati is still in its infancy; its volunteers work out of a single office in Sulaymaniyah and their first, modest task is spreading the movement to the Irbil and Dohuk, the other two provinces of Iraqi Kurdistan. Majeed worries that taking on the political establishment could be physically dangerous for he and anyone else who joins Hawati. He believes that change, if it happens, will come slowly.
But sitting among the young volunteers in Majeed’s office, one gets the sense that if Iraq – any part of it – is ever going to see the “liberation” it was promised five years ago, it’ll be groups like Hawati that make the change happen.
Mark MacKinnon, 16/03/08 at 9:03 AM EDT
Saturday, March 15 – Baghdad-Sulaymaniyah
I took my first flight on Iraqi Airways today. I don’t know what year the Boeing 727 that took us on our bumpy ride from Baghdad to Sulaymaniyah was built, but the flaking paint on the right wing (can you guess which window I was staring out for 90 minutes?) had me convinced that it was assembled sometime around the twilight of the Ottoman Empire.
Much more impressive was arriving back in Kurdistan via Sulaymaniyah International Airport. Though the Kurds are officially taking a wait-and-see attitude towards the rest of Iraq (largely because Iraq’s president, foreign minister and one deputy prime minister are all Kurdish) – saying they’ll remain in so long as they’re granted broad autonomy in a federal Iraq, the reality is the Kurds are slowly but surely pulling away and setting up their own independent state.
For the first time in my traveling career – I’ve set foot in 52 countries and counting – I stepped off a domestic flight and had to go through passport control. The young woman who scanned my passport didn’t even look at my Iraqi visa as she punched my data into her computer and snapped a digital photograph of me. The message was clear: who the Iraqis let into Iraq was their business, who the Kurds let into Kurdistan was a different matter entirely.
The map I picked up at the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Ministry of Tourism desk at the airport is even more to the point. A thick red line marks the boundaries of Kurdistan, a light purple one represents the edges of Iraq. The borders between Kurdistan and neighbouring Syria, Turkey and Iran are red, not purple. Iraq ends somewhere south of Kirkuk.
It's hard to blame the map-makers. Kurdistan remains the lone success story to emerge out of the past five years - in part because a line of Kurdish peshmerga soldiers mark the effective border between Kurdistan and the rest of the country, warily inspecting every car that tries to enter the region from the madness of the south.
Sulaymaniyah, in particular, is safe enough that you can walk the streets at night. Maybe I'll finally get that dinner out tonight.
Mark MacKinnon, 16/03/08 at 8:59 AM EDT
Friday, March 14 - Baghdad
If you’re in Baghdad long enough, you’re bound to go stir crazy. For security reasons, foreigners – especially those of us who live outside the Green Zone – have to make careful calculations before we go anywhere. A five-minute drive often requires five hours of planning. There have been days in the past two weeks when I've never left my hotel and the walled-off neighbourhood around it. (I’ve heard the area has been dubbed the “pink zone” by the U.S. military, as in slightly safer than the rest of the city, which they refer to as the red zone.)
Today was one of those days. My translator had the day off, as did the security staff I’d been sharing with a colleague, and it wasn’t like I could just go for a walk or hail a taxi and ask to be taken to Sadr City.
(In another sign of how Iraq is really going, I asked my driver whether I could have lunch at the Chicken Inn, a restaurant on the edge of Firdaws Square – the spot where Saddam’s famous statue was yanked down five years ago – and he looked at me like I was crazy. Five years on, and even that square isn’t fully “liberated.”)
To kill time this week, my colleague Charles Levinson from USA Today and I have passed many an hour playing games on the X-Box video game console he wisely brought in with him. But when you do the same thing day in, day out, even beating an American at NHL 2007 starts to lose its edge.
Tonight Charles and I decided it was time to break out. Eating room service every night at our hotel had become tongue-numbing. Would-be kidnappers be damned, we wanted to spend our Friday evening eating dinner in a restaurant.
It was after dark, but together we were brave. We headed out of our hotel and walked to the end of the street where we’d heard another hotel was serving better food than ours could muster.
We ran into a concrete wall. The hotel and its restaurant had been taken over by American security contractors. Ink-stained wretches were no more welcome than an Iraqi off the street. Our plan appeared to be foiled.
Still we had come this far. One of the guards told us there was a decent restaurant just outside the pink zone. Heartened, we walked in the direction he pointed us.
The sight of two foreigners leaving the protective bubble, alone and on foot no less, caused induced shock among the Iraqis manning the last checkpoint between us and the rest of city.
“You’re going out?” a burly guard asked, a you-must-be-crazy grin spreading on his bearded face.
“Laish laa?” I responded. Why not. “We just want to go to the restaurant. It’s good, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s good. You can go.”
“Really?"
“Yes, but maybe some snipers will see two foreigners and then... bang-bang-bang,” he said pointing his own gun at the restaurant to demonstrate visually just how easily that might happen. Bang. Bang. Bang.
“Really?”
“Maybe.”
Charles and I huddled. Standing under a spotlight at the end of the pink zone, we felt like explorers who had walked off their map. “I feel like we’re at the edge of our universe,” Charles cracked with a nervous laugh.
In some ways, we were. Though the neon lights of the restaurant were only a few hundred metres away – albeit across four lanes of traffic – there may as well have been a mountain range between us and them. Dinner out simply wasn’t worth the risk of snipers and bang-bang-bang.
Disheartened, we returned to our hotel and ordered room service. Things went so badly tonight that I even lost the post-dinner hockey game.
Mark MacKinnon, 14/03/08 at 2:03 PM EDT
March 14, Baghdad
Late in the 8th Century, the founder of Baghdad, the Abbasid Caliph Abu Jafar al-Mansour, built his city inside a perfectly circular outer wall on the west bank of the Tigris. Knowing he was surrounded by enemies – the Ottomans to the west, the Persians to the east – Caliph Mansour was obsessed with security, and chose the location primarily for defence purposes. An army camp and a large prison were among the first things he built in the city he nonetheless dubbed Madinat al-Salaam, the City of Peace.
The round city Caliph Mansour had built was intended for he and his court, not for the ordinary people. Soon the circular fortress was an entity to itself surrounded by, and to a large extent cut off from, the rapidly expanding city around it.
More than 1,200 years later, it’s not hard to see the parallels between the original walled round city and the American “Green Zone” that has sprung up a short drive southeast from where Caliph Mansour held court. Iraq’s twin administrations – the new U.S. Embassy on the bank of the Tigris and the government of Mr. al-Maliki – are both based inside this new walled city, separated from the city around them by a dense network of fortifications and checkpoints manned by Peruvian security contractors.
When senior U.S. diplomats or members of Mr. al-Maliki’s cabinet do venture outside the perimeter, they do so either by helicopter or in heavily armed and armoured convoys. Even lower-down-the-ladder aid workers are generally forbidden from leaving their walled compounds. The only Iraqis they meet are those both willing and permitted to enter the Green Zone bubble.
Even outside the Green Zone, Baghdad has become a city of walls. The entire neighbourhood of Adhamiya is surrounded by four-metre-high concrete wall intended to separate the Sunni residents from the Shia communities all around them. Another wall separates the Sunni and Shia sides of Dora, a neighbourhood in the south of the city.
The entire “red zone” – the U.S. military’s term for everything outside the Green Zone – is a maze of concrete vehicle checkpoints and neighbourhoods that have walled themselves off from the rest of the Baghdad.
This city, once one of the most scenic spots in the Arab world because of the gently flowing Tigris and the palm trees and mosques that dominate the city’s skyline, has seen its former beauty buried in concrete.
Mark MacKinnon, 14/03/08 at 2:02 PM EDT
March 14, Baghdad
I had dinner tonight with some fellow Canucks (there are a few here, doing some surprising things) in the cafeteria of the British Embassy – which just might be the best restaurant in Iraq these days. It certainly has the best wine and the only cheese plate I’ve seen in the past two weeks.
Entering British territory in the Green Zone is a pleasure compared to any of the American compounds. No patdowns, no body searches, just a run-of-the-mill metal detector.
Even the system announcing incoming missiles is more polite. “Attention all staff. Take cover” the London-accented voice tells us over a wailing siren. The calm, firm voice reminds me of the woman on the London Underground who warns passengers to “Mind the gap” whilst exiting the train.
Thankfully, the cafeteria is fortified, so we don’t have to abandon our bottle of Lebanese red or the imported cheeses. To do anything but continue imbibing would have been letting the terrorists win, it seemed.
That said, we scampered home at 8 p.m., right after dinner, for fear that exiting the Green Zone at any later hour would be foolhardy of us. Let’s call it a draw with terror for the evening.
Mark MacKinnon, 14/03/08 at 2:01 PM EDT
March 12, Baghdad
I received an e-mail from the U.S. military today containing a PDF version of the military’s official Iraq newsletter “This Week in Iraq.”
A few of the headlines:
- Taji Qada Thunder Rolls Again (main story about a railway line north of Baghdad that is running again for the first time “since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.” Thrust of the heartwarming story: the Americans help the Iraqis get their railway working again. Downplayed is the fact that it was working just fine until the U.S. invasion.)
- Soldiers Show Iraqis Southern Hospitality (photo of fresh-faced U.S. soldier interacting with smiling women and children)
- Kickin’ it at the Youth Sports Club (feature on a reopened athletics centre which closed in 2005 because of the violence. “Life is returning to normal” one Iraqi is quoted as saying.
No mention anywhere in the newsletter of the fact that five U.S. soldiers and more than 400 Iraqis were killed in the week ending March 10, the date of publication. I wonder if the editors ponder at all how much their good-news-only coverage resembles what used to get printed in newspapers printed under the old Baath party regime.
Mark MacKinnon, 14/03/08 at 2:00 PM EDT
March 11, Baghdad
As I write this, the only light in my hotel room is the glow from my laptop screen. OK, nope, the generator kicked in and the lights are back on.
It’s easy to see why Iraqis are frustrated. Five years after they were “liberated,” it’s a rare day when the electricity is on for two whole hours. Sometimes they go days with no electricity at all. Drinking water is scarce in much of the country, and the hospitals lack qualified doctors, among other luxuries. (Most doctors who could leave the country during the past five years, did.)
If this were my country, I think I might join the anti-government insurgency. Or be looking for a visa the hell out of here.
