Everyday Chaos
News: Living in Baghdad means growing accustomed to the disturbingly mundane nature of unrelenting violence.
April 22, 2004
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On a warm Baghdad night, after a slow news day, I was relaxing in my hotel room and digesting a newspaper report declaring my adopted city the world's worst to live in. I was debating this dubious distinction with a friend when an immense blast sent the door flying open.
'That's a car bomb,' I thought, and ran to the balcony to see if any nearby buildings had collapsed. I sprinted downstairs to Saadoun Street, past Fardus Circle to Andalus Circle, where the Mount Lebanon Hotel -- which I had never heard of -- no longer existed. The visibility was close to nil, but a huge orange glow illuminated the smoke and dust.
Hundreds of Iraqis were emerging from the smoke, running away in every direction from the smoking ruin. Hundreds more were just standing in shock, crying, screaming. A woman walked past me, carrying the inert body of a child. American Humvees began arriving in twos and threes, as did Iraqi police cars, and a few dozen Iraqi police and American soldiers tried to take control of the chaos. Jumpy and confused U.S. soldiers tried to turn back the crowd of Iraqis rushing to help, or just to see. "There are many dead people," one Iraqi man shouted, running from the hotel's wreckage and asking for aid. The soldiers swung their guns from side to side, looking for an enemy, as Iraqi police with weapons drawn tried to push back the throng.
Two Ambulances arrived, by now well practiced in quick responses to bomb blasts. They carried away the lucky ones, the ones who survived, their clothes shredded, their bodies bloodied. Peering inside one, I caught a hellish glimpse; a family, all stained with red, all screaming, all holding a lifeless male body between them.
Everywhere on the street there were men shouting in anger -- at each other, at the police, at the soldiers, and at the journalists. Survivors attacked camera crews, seeking anyone to on whom to vent their fury on. Neighbors stood, crying in the street. Two adjoining homes had also been destroyed, and two fat Iraqi women in nightgowns screamed at an American soldier. Bewildered, unable to understand what they were saying, he told them that everything was 'gonna be alright.' From atop their Humvees, other U.S. soldiers swiveled their machine guns, cursing and screaming at the Iraqis and the journalists below them to "get the fuck back." An Iraqi policeman, his gun drawn, pushed me away. Eventually, journalists hustled or drifted away to file their stories in English, Turkish, Italian. Others stayed, filming or photographing the scene. At least we didn't have to go far. The Iraqi insurgents are considerate enough to strike close to the hotels and neighborhoods were the reporters and camera crews and photographers live. The team from Al Jazeera, always first on the scene, had the shortest trip -- their hotel was across the street, its windows blasted away.
Soon, as more dead Iraqis were carried from the wreckage, arguments began to break out in the crowd between those who wanted the journalists to stay and document the bloodshed and those who wanted the cameras to go. I returned to my hotel, the Andalus, a ten minute walk away, and found the staff huddled around a television. I assumed they were watching coverage of the bombing. But they were actually engrossed in a soccer match, and barely acknowledged the return of the foreigners who run to find explosions, the ambulance chasers with notebooks and cameras. Perhaps they've become so used to it -- American missiles, far more powerful and deadly than car bombs, had fallen on them before, after all, and this was just a car bomb, a tremor. They didn't seem to wonder, as I did, whether our hotel would be next. They just chuckled, and returned to watching the game. That night, I thought about sleeping fully clothed, so that when my turn came, I would not be carried from the rubble in my underwear.
In the hours after the devastation of the Mount Lebanon, the 'Iraqi Street' was blaming it on a missile -- meaning the Americans -- and everybody had a friend or a friend of a friend who swore he had seen the missile hit a car outside the hotel. That's the way it is in Baghdad these days. Sunnis and Shi'ites are united -- like never before -- in the belief that the Americans and the Jews are responsible for all the sectarian attacks. They reason that the Americans want to remain in Iraq and are trying to provoke a civil war to serve as a pretext for staying. The Jews are blamed simply because they're the Jews. In Iraq, 'the Jews' are everywhere -- feared and loathed. The Jewish hands are always working their evil, the Jewish fingers reaching into every nook and cranny, selling drugs and pornography, defiling Islam.
Such is the modern Iraqi mythology. And the Americans aren't immune. They cling, desperately to their own myths. The phantom-like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda's 'man in Iraq,' is blamed by American spokesmen for every attack, if only because Saddam can't be blamed anymore. And the attacks are everywhere in Baghdad. The violence is relentless. You will never hear about most of it, because the American reporters here don't hear about most of it. Baghdad is a huge sprawling city with a barely functional communications infrastructure, and it's impossible for the journalists or the occupying army to know what is happening everywhere. We only hear the distant thunder of the explosions.
All day and all night, Baghdad shakes with explosions; explosions from bombs, from rocket-propelled grenades, from artillery, from guns. But it's usually impossible to figure out just where the firing is taking place, even if you're foolish enough to search for the fighting after dark, when gangs and feral dogs own the streets. There are systematic assassinations of policemen, translators, local officials, and anybody associated with the American occupiers. In the Sunni neighborhood of Aadhamiya, the Americans come under attack on a nightly basis, and.the streets erupt in cheers and whistles at the sounds of the first explosions. Most of the time, the Americans stay behind their concrete walls and big guns. But the Iraqi police have only handguns and a few AK-47's to use against a foe armed with car bombs and heavy weaponry. So the new Iraqi police are hunted at all times in all places, and they are losing every day.
The pace of the violence has become so constant, it's almost normal, almost mundane. Unless an explosion is perceptibly close, it is just an echo, and nobody pauses in mid conversation or stops chewing his kabob. None of the Iraqis in Baghdad really seems to care much about the American soldiers dying on a daily basis. And it seems like few of the American officials care much about the far greater number of dead Iraqis.
Rubaei Street in Baghdad's Zayuna district is one of the city's unknown oases of normality, hidden away from the more famous, heavily-traveled avenues. On either side of the wide and brightly-lit boulevard, good restaurants stay open well into the night, and the sidewalks are crowded with families and even young couples. Youngsters in expensive cars slowly cruise up and down the street, gazing at the crowds of equally young Iraqis on foot. Recently at dusk, I found myself sitting with my Iraqi friend Rana in a fresh fruit juice and ice cream restaurant named Sandra. I sipped a strawberry smoothie while Rana, a cheerful young woman with a colorful headscarf, ate imported ice cream. She explained she didn't eat local ice cream, fearing the milk has been contaminated by the radioactive residue of allied ammunition. She noted that the scene before us reminded her of the days before the war, when she would go out at night with her sisters, unafraid of the dangers that now keep Iraqi women sequestered in their homes.
Rana was waxing nostalgic about the good old days. The days before Saddam's army broke and he ran. It's a refrain I have become accustomed to, and I was trying not to roll my eyes. Then two sharp shots cut through Rana's words. The were too close to ignore, too out of place in the bustling evening crowd. I saw two men walking hurriedly across the street, weaving through the traffic, arms raised and pistols in the air. "They killed a man!" someone shouted. I stood up, and saw a man in a suit collapsed on the curb, blood spreading from beneath his head. The two men had walked up to him, had shot him in the head, and taken his pistol. Then they walked away, laughing into a dark street.
A crowd grew, and traffic slowed as drivers stared at the body on the curb. Soon about fifty men had gathered. They glanced at the body and looked away, guilty and silent as they waited for help to come. One tried the police on his cell phone, but the call didn't go through, as usual. Two men ran a few hundred meters away to the nearest police checkpoint, but were told that the murder was somebody else's jurisdiction. Two armed Iraqis -- security guards from a building across the street -- returned, panting, having failed to locate the killers. They said they provided security for 'an official' nearby. People in the crowd explained the official was a judge. Someone from a nearby shop covered the body with a rug that failed to conceal the growing pool of blood, which started to coagulate and looked strangely like ripples in a pond. Half an hour after the shooting, Iraqi police officers arrived, just as the several men in the crowd had turned over the body and were looking through his pockets for identification or a phone. The dead man was a colonel in the Iraqi police, the seventh officer from his precinct to be assassinated.
When I returned to my hotel, I told a fellow journalist, a photographer, about what I had seen. He asked me if I had heard about the explosion in Fallujah. 'It's all small news, so you never hear of it,' he said. 'It's all small news but it's all bad news.'
Nir Rosen is a freelance writer and photographer now based in Baghdad.
Photo: Nir Rosen
