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M A N H AT TA N TO BAGHDAD
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M A N H AT TA N TO BAGHDAD
PAUL McGEOUGH
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First published in 2003 Copyright © Paul McGeough 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email:
[email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: McGeough, Paul, 1954– . Manhattan to Baghdad : despatches from the frontline in the War on Terror ISBN 1 74114 025 0. 1. McGeough, Paul, 1954– . 2. War on Terror, 2001 – Personal narratives, Australian. 3. Journalists – Australia – Anecdotes. I. Title. 973.931 Set in 12/14 pt Adobe Garamond by Midland Typesetters Printed by Griffin Press, South Australia 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For Pam and Peggie, two great women.
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CONTENTS MAPS ix PROLOGUE: PEOPLE ARE CRYING IN THE STREETS 1 Part I: Afghanistan and the US, July–October 2001 11 12 13 14 15 16
IN THE NAME OF WHICH GOD? 7 STICKS ON HUMAN BONES 19 THE LION AND THE DARKNESS 33 THE DEVIL’S HAND 40 A FAIR WARNING 47 RUDY THE ROCK 53
Part II: Eyewitness to the war in Afghanistan, October–November 2001 17 18 19 10 11
AN UZBEK CROOK IS GEORGE’S NEW FRIEND A WAR OF CONTRADICTIONS 85 THE DEATH OF THREE COLLEAGUES 96 TALIBAN PINNED DOWN 113 A SCUNGY LITTLE PACKAGE 127
75
Part III: Trouble on the road to Baghdad, March–April 2002 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
BY THE WATERS OF JORDAN 133 THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES 150 THE MATZA BOMB 157 MARKED MEN 163 DEFIANT GAZA 168 A FAMILY’S DISTRESS 177 GUIDED MISSILES 179 WAR CRIMES AT JENIN 194
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Part IV: The US and Iraq prepare for war, August–September 2002 20 SANCTION CITY 213 21 WEAPONS OF MASS PROPAGANDA 231 22 THE ROAD TO BASRA 246 23 SEPTEMBER 11, 2002 259 EPILOGUE: MANHATTAN TO BAGHDAD 280 NOTES 284 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 287
RUSSIAN
A
IA
EN
GI
M
AR
OR
AZ
IJA
er
ARABIA
BA
P
SAUDI
KUWAIT
ER
a
N
n
G
f
U.A.E.
ul
U
Aral Sea
Z EK IS N
Termez
Kabul
AFGHANISTAN
Arabian Sea
Karachi
PA K I S TA N
Kandahar
KYRGYZSTAN
0
The Khyber Pass
Islamabad
Peshawar
Kalakata Hills
Kokcha R
Khoja Bahauddin Dashte Qala
Dushanbe TAJIKISTAN
Tashkent
Mazar-e -Sharif Kunduz Taloqan
TA
K A Z A K H S TA N
Herat
B
TUR K M ENIS TA N
OMAN.
IRAN
Tehran
Sea
IRAQ
Baghdad
GE
n
TUR
pia Cas
KEY
FEDERATION
NE
KILOMETRES
INDIA
Delhi
PA
L
1000
CHINA
CENTRAL ASIA
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si
Haifa
Sea of Galilee
Beirut
n
ON
Golan Heights
Damascus
ISR
EG 0
JORDAN
Dead Sea
AEL
YPT KILOMETRES
ARABIA
SAUDI
Al Qaim
Euphra
te
Falluja
Tikrit
500
IRAQ
R
Masada
Trebil
SYRIA
T U R K E Y
Nablus Tel Aviv WEST Jordan R RamallahB A N K Amman Jericho Jerusalem Bethlehem Gaza
Jenin Tulkarm
i
ed
s
M
Se a
ea n
ra
te r
R
AN
Ti s g r i
LE B
Baghdad
Basra
IRAN
MIDDLE EAST
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W KU AI T
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M A N H AT TA N TO BAGHDAD
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Prologue PEOPLE ARE CRYING IN THE STREETS Manhattan, USA
September 11, 2001
Six blocks from what is left of the World Trade Center, the streets are full of crying people. The city is totally shocked. Hundreds of emergency vehicles and paramedics are massing on street corners. Jet-fighters circle the city. The entire lower end of Manhattan is gridlocked. Crying people crowd the pavements. A massive mushroom cloud hangs overhead. People are on rooftops. Car radios are at full blast. Papers that a few minutes ago were on people’s desks now litter the streets and float in the air like a blinding white snowstorm. It is 10.30 am. The second tower has collapsed. Smoke and zero visibility, even six blocks away. Smoke and dust. The streets are more eerie and tenser than the wildest depictions Hollywood could dream up. It is like in the movies when the building collapses and all you see is a cloud of dust in the shape of the building. But the building itself isn’t there. A massive cloud of smoke, dust, building contents and materials belts up Church Street—driven by the force of the explosion. There are more explosions from within the cloud of smoke. Hundreds of police and firemen are charging uptown after the collapse, racing ahead of the explosion as the smoke and dust cloud punches its way after them. I’m running with them—I can feel it behind me. Mothers with children holding bandanas to their faces are trying to get away. They are evacuating apartment buildings. All businesses have 1
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closed. People are leaving with overnight bags. Every vehicle in the area is covered in a thick layer of dust. Dazed and injured firemen wander the streets aimlessly. I wipe the blood off the dusty, stunned face of one of them and take him to a temporary medical post. Dozens of these posts have been set up on street corners. Hundreds of paramedical vehicles have come into the area. I get closer, to within two blocks. Literally, it is like a moonscape; the dust on the ground is so thick, so heavy. It is almost impossible to breathe—all the emergency services personnel are wearing face masks because of the dust. Now there are more explosions. I presume it is the buildings around me. The whole of Manhattan is enveloped in a ghostly cloud of dust. And another explosion goes off—I don’t know what it is. Cars in the street are exploding now. Have they been booby-trapped? The smoke from the car explosions is black. Everyone walking around this side of town looks like a ghost—covered from head to foot in grey dust. Kenny Johannsenn, who works in the World Trade Center, is almost in tears: ‘I was in the number one tower. I was waiting for the elevator in the basement. This is the time of day when the building is most crowded. There are thousands of people because it is shift-change time, and also the subway under the building is pushing peak crowds. The lift door exploded open. There was a man inside half burnt. His skin was hanging off. I dragged him out of the lift and somebody helped me get him out of the building. The explosion hit the building at about level 80. I counted at least 17 people jumping from that height. What choice did they have? It was either be burnt alive or jump.’ Mike Derby, 30, was attending an economics conference in the Marriott Hotel, which is part of the World Trade Center. His hands shake as he describes what he saw. ‘A man was giving a boring speech about securities when it happened,’ he tells me. ‘The building shook. I didn’t think much of it, but all the economists in their grey suits started running. They knew it was a terrorist attack. I got out into the street. I watched maybe 30 people jump. It was surreal. The people who jumped didn’t just flop. They were carried, spread-eagled on the wind. I was surprised when the bodies did hit the pavement. I didn’t think
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they would make so loud a noise. I was looking up at the second tower when the jet came in like a black flash.’ Now it is more than two hours after the first explosions and—very disturbingly—no injured people are coming out. The ambulances are all lined up but no one is being put into them. Literally thousands of emergency personnel have arrived. All the streets from the World Trade Center up to 17th Street, more than 36 blocks, are bumper to bumper with emergency services vehicles. And a team of about 400 surgeons, doctors, nurses and volunteers is mustering at the Chelsea Piers on 17th Street, setting up an emergency field hospital. It is still impossible to see anything. The whole site remains blanketed in a cloud of dust. And smoke. The emergency teams have been told to expect tens of thousands of injured people. But a doctor I speak to says he doesn’t expect many survivors to come out of that mountain of wreckage. The Air Force continues to circle the city. They are pushing us back uptown. There is another explosion. It doesn’t look good.
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PART I
AFGHANISTAN AND THE US July–October 2001
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IN THE NAME OF WHICH GOD? 1 Herat, Afghanistan July 2001
It was early evening in the Kokcha valley and a silvery, slivery crescent moon hung in a rosewater sky. Teenagers played volleyball; a family threshed grain in the fields; and, alone on a rock in the river, a wizened old man knelt to face Mecca for his evening prayers. Their country was wrecked and withered, yet there were always rare snatches of time such as these when you could forget that Afghanistan might be the worst place on God’s earth in which to live. These were glimpses of a rural idyll that had been engulfed by a tumultuous combination of war and drought that had started more than 20 years before. In the north a mean wind whipped through the mud-brick emptiness of ghost villages. Entire communities—from ancient Herat in the far west to Asadabad, which is tucked into the creases of the mighty Hindu Kush away over to the east—had vanished as first fighting and then famine stalked a land of subsistence farmers who could subsist no longer. In the first year of the drought they had sold their sheep and cattle; last year they had bartered their tools and donkeys; finally, as they confronted the failure of this year’s rains, they had eaten the seed that was to ripen as the next crop. Only then did they take to the roads. And still they were walking away, united in their poverty and misery. But there was worse, much worse, in the warm land where the 7
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pistachio and the pomegranate grew. As I pieced together the tales from the battlefields, it became clear that the Taliban regime was bent on its own version of Slobodan Milosovic’s ethnic cleansing. Religious bigotry was the fire in the belly of many of the Taliban fighters as they cleared swathes of country, chucking out minority Hazara, Uzbek and Tajik communities in a campaign of fear and terror. Civilians were being burned alive, whipped with lengths of electric cable and mutilated with knives and bayonets. Mountain farmers and their families were being strafed from hand-me-down Soviet helicopter-gunships. And tanks were lined up on hilltops, lobbing endless shells among civilian farmers in the hope that they would abandon their pastures. In some hideous cases, victims of the Taliban were being skinned and their bodies put on public display as a warning to others not to resist. Witnesses told how Taliban fighters sometimes daubed themselves in the blood of their victims before turning to Mecca to pray. These shockingly detailed accounts were provided to me in the office of an earnest UN official who, like virtually all the Afghans and expatriates I interviewed, insisted that he could not be named because he feared Taliban retribution. When he saw disbelief on my face, he produced from a briefcase a small bundle of Polaroid photographs— what appeared to be scenes from a butcher’s shop turned out to be an Afghan home and the victim of what he claimed was the Taliban’s knifework was hardly recognisable as a human. ‘They want all Afghans to know that when they walk down the street any Talib they pass is capable of turning on them and inflicting severe pain. Unfortunately, the shock of what is happening here is being masked in the rest of the world by the sense that “this is all that Afghans are good for”, and “aren’t they just a bunch of warring factions?”. No one has seriously confronted the Taliban about what they are doing.’ Weeks later I was in Herat, in the dustbowls of the far west of Afghanistan. The city squats in the shadow of the tall, elegant minarets of the Musalla, its university district. The great towers were crumbling, echoing an emptiness in the heart of Herat. This was once an ancient centre of art and learning, but today’s intellectuals and middle class have
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long since fled—they were way ahead of the farmers on the road to refuge. Peculiar, grey-black trees glistened in the sun as I approached the city. When I got closer I realised that they marked the Taliban’s roadside checkpoints—it turned out that these ‘trees’ were posts festooned with thousands of metres of audiotape that had been ripped from the cassette players of motorists who dared to ignore the regime’s ban on music. Still, I was told that by Taliban standards, Mullah Khairullah, the governor of Herat, was a reasonable man. ‘He is educated and he understands our logic,’ a senior UN man told me and I kept this in mind each day as I walked the pine-flanked avenue to the governor’s office. A lot of bearded young men lounged about and the hospitality was wonderful—they served wrapped sweets with green tea—but the access was lousy. The governor would not see me and neither would his colleague who ran the local branch of the much despised Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue (PVPV), the Taliban agency that enforced its strict religious, moral and social code. There was a list of things I wanted to interview the governor about—the arrest of women teachers for the crime of educating young girls; the deportation of an aid worker for the sin of playing CDs in his office; and the death of a woman on the operating table because the PVPV ruffians ordered a doctor to abandon her during one of their regular raids on the local hospital to check that men were not talking to women. And there was one more issue—the body in the circle. It was a balmy evening in the rambling gardens at the UN compound in Herat and, as we sipped illegal homemade wine, the senior UN man was quite blasé as he told me: ‘Last week I went down to that first roundabout and there was the body of a man hanging from the lamppost. A sign said that he was an opposition commander who had been captured by the Taliban. But I don’t believe that—he was in his twenties and that’s too young to be a commander. I heard that he had clashed with Taliban officials over the rights of people in his village.’ This was not an isolated case. When the Taliban first came to power it banned all recreation, but in 1997 it lifted its ban on football, prompting
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aid agencies to rebuild Kandahar’s war-ravaged football stadium to encourage public entertainment in the Taliban’s soulless, joyless southern headquarters. But when it came time to inaugurate the refurbished stadium, the Taliban had other ideas. The first scheduled event was a sharia-style public execution between the goalposts on a Thursday afternoon. A capacity crowd of 10 000 men and boys watched as Abdullah Afghan, in his early twenties, was shot six times by an uncle of the man he was accused of murdering during a village theft. Towards midnight, as the UN man packed away the jam jars in which he bottled his wine, he spoke lightly enough about his daily dealings with the Taliban authorities: ‘You cannot predict which way a tick will jump—it is random and it is illogical.’ The expatriate aid workers lived on a knife-edge—fighting for the rights of ordinary Afghans, women and children in particular, while trying not to offend Taliban sensibilities. It was a wearying round of bluff and compromise, a tense game in which there were many more snakes than ladders and in which the urge to help people in need clashed with the greed of local power-brokers and their followers. The head of one of the aid agencies in Herat explained to me: ‘If you don’t make the move to bring the Taliban on side, they will bring you on side— and that’s far less comfortable. So I refuse to ask for the governor’s permission to do anything . . . but at the same time, I keep him informed of the things I’m doing. And it works some of the time. How were we to convince the Taliban to surrender a warehouse they’re using as an ammunition dump when we want it for a food store? We did it . . .’ But when the heads of three UN agencies protested over a Taliban demand that a woman lawyer representing the UN High Commission for Refugees speak to its representatives from behind a curtain so that they would not see her face, all three were drummed out of the country. And the Save the Children Fund was forced to close down several of its programs when the Taliban barred women from classes intended to save them from death, by teaching them how to avoid the carpet of landand anti-personnel mines left across the country by the Soviets and the local warring factions.
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Maslak—it means slaughterhouse—was the name that had been given to the sprawling refugee camp west of Herat, because the only structure to be seen for miles on the stony wasteland was an abandoned abattoir. Here there was constant conflict with the authorities on just how many people lived on this patch of dirt, which was bigger than New York’s Central Park. The aid agencies said maybe 200 000 people, but the Taliban’s Ministry for Martyrs and Repatriation insisted that there were 300 000, a number that would require the aid agencies to provide 50 per cent more food than was needed, which the authorities would then skim off to sell elsewhere. The Taliban authorities stood by their figure and thwarted every effort to count the refugees, but an enterprising Argentinian aid worker thought that he could outsmart them with a plan to count the structures in the camp—huts, lean-tos, tents and hovels. As we stood on a windswept ridge behind the camp, he told me: ‘We got a team of volunteers together and we started the count early in the morning. But within 30 minutes the Taliban were there with guns— the count was off.’ Explaining how the camp was divided into blocks and how the food was distributed through a network of block leaders, he said: ‘Food distribution cards are the latest currency and the block leaders are the rortmeisters. We want to break their grip so that we can get the food direct to all families. Everyone is miserable, but they have been learning how to milk the system for 20 years. The only thing that works is trucking—and that’s because it’s vital for the smugglers.’ There was a rhythm in the life of the aid workers, most of whom lived in the high-walled UN compound, which was a bit like a boarding school, with a good-natured Afghan chef demanding to know each morning who would be back for lunch and who would be in for dinner. But that rhythm went awry the day before I was to leave Herat. The Taliban had reduced Afghanistan to a technical and social wasteland for Afghans, but the UN has a satellite communications system that fed the BBC World Service into the common room in the Herat compound. And that day the news was that the PVPV in Kabul had just arrested 24 aid workers, eight of them expatriates working for the German-based
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Shelter Now International, on charges that they were attempting to convert Afghans to Christianity. Stabs of fear and anger ran through the Herat aid workers. They already lived on a UN Stage IV security alert—all families and nonessential staff had been evacuated—and only one grade of alert remained on the chart before they would have to pack up and go too. As it was, there was enough tension in their lives—they had to be indoors by 9 pm; they were discouraged from going out alone; if they left urban areas they had to travel in a convoy of at least two radio-equipped vehicles; and the men were denied any contact, professional or otherwise, with Afghan women. They were never sure when the bullying PVPV squads would strike. A few weeks earlier a new Italian-funded hospital in Kabul had been mothballed because the PVPV claimed that male and female staff were lunching together in the hospital cafeteria, even though a curtain separated them. Increasingly, the Taliban was making life difficult for the aid agencies by delaying visa approvals, making some staff wait a month or more for permission to enter Afghanistan to help the local people. Worse, it blocked the aid agencies from minority population areas and its prohibition on foreigners meeting women, and on local women working for aid agencies, was making it incredibly difficult for the UN and NGOs to provide care to more than half the population—the women of Afghanistan. So the arrest of the Shelter Now International (SNI) staff was a powerful reminder that all 350 foreign aid workers in Afghanistan literally diced with death in their daily efforts. They had all been pulled out of the country when an Italian UN official was murdered in the wake of the 1998 US missile attacks on suspected terrorist training camps operated by Osama bin Laden. Now one of the officers in Herat told me: ‘Listen, if they touch one of those people, we’re all out of here.’ But anger was directed at the arrested aid workers too—among them, Diana Thomas and Peter Bunch of Perth in Western Australia. Their group, SNI, had a reputation in the aid community as ‘holy rollers’ whom the Taliban, as well as other humanitarian agencies, had warned several times to back off on the proselytising. An angry and edgy Herat
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aid worker exploded: ‘God, they’re arseholes. Messing with Christianity is a death sentence for the local staff, so their lives are at risk; if some aid workers are into this, then we all are at risk. And what do you think the donor nations to Afghanistan will do with their money when they hear that aid workers are being arrested here? They’ll say “fuck you” to the Taliban and give their money to a cause somewhere else in the world.’ In the evening there were loud groans from the crowd around the TV as the Taliban elaborated its case against the SNI Christians. Deputy Minister for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue, Salim Haqqani, claimed that 6000–7000 video and audiotapes of Christian teaching had been uncovered in addition to an earlier haul of material, Bibles and the like, that might have been explained away as ‘for personal use’. He said to the camera: ‘Why would SNI need to print Bibles in Dari or Pashtun [the main languages in Afghanistan] and have all these tapes in local languages? The findings are indicative of the fact that [the aid workers] were deviating Afghans.’ The BBC followed Haqqani with a clip of SNI’s international director, Esteban Witzemann, who seemed to be admitting to some of the Taliban charges with a plea that the seized Christian material was ‘for personal use’. Anger erupted among the aid workers in Herat. A few wanted to reserve judgment but others warned that they would be ganging up on SNI if it was confirmed that the SNI team had taken even a single local-language Bible into Afghanistan. One of the aid workers told me: ‘That is just so bloody stupid. How can a foreigner bring in a local-language Bible and claim that it was for personal use?’ I was torn. A part of me wanted to stay and watch this drama unfold and another part of me said that the real story was in Kabul, and that I should get there as fast as I could. But Afghanistan was not like that. There were no flights to Kabul and public transport or hitchhiking could take up to a week—20 years of war have destroyed just about every road in the country. Also, I was booked on the next day’s UN flight to Islamabad and if I didn’t go it might be weeks before another seat became available. I flew to Islamabad and observed events in Kabul through the diplomatic and media lenses of the steamy Pakistani capital. As tense and
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frustrated diplomats from the US, Germany and Australia beat a path to the Afghan Embassy, pleading for the release of the arrested aid workers, the Taliban tormented them, the families of those arrested and the whole aid community: ‘maybe we’ll execute them’, ‘visa applications for diplomats to visit them must be processed in an orderly fashion’, ‘they are locked up, but we are feeding them’. It soon became brutally clear that the arrest of the SNI staff was not an isolated incident—the Taliban was sending orchestrated signals to the world. Another was a brutal display in front of the presidential palace in Kabul, where four dead Afghans were strung up on the same traffic control tower from which they had hanged the bloated and broken body of former president Najibullah. The Taliban had celebrated the ‘liberation’ of Kabul in 1996 by beating Najibullah senseless, mutilating him and then dragging his body around the city behind one of their beloved pick-up trucks. Now, with the SNI staff in custody and aware that they had the full attention of the world, the Taliban wanted to show what it did to lawbreakers. When the accused Afghans were brought to the city centre, trussed up on the back of a pick-up, there was not enough room for all to hang from the well-used traffic control tower, so a couple of mechanical cranes were brought in to provide more hanging space in a macabre demonstration of justice—Kabul-style. The authorities claimed that the offenders had admitted their role in a series of bomb explosions which in the previous year had killed one man and injured dozens in Kabul. A big crowd stood in the hot morning sun as the bodies were strung up. The police continued to direct traffic through the square. The onlookers were held back, but as the Taliban left the scene the crowd surged forward, the words of the leader of the execution squad ringing in their ears: ‘They are the enemies of Islam and Afghanistan—hanging their bodies here is a good lesson to others.’ Execution by hanging or a spray of gunfire and the public amputation of criminals’ hands or feet were regular spectator sports around Talibancontrolled Afghanistan. And with eight foreigners, including two Australians, among the arrested aid workers, it was hard not to conclude that the Taliban must have enjoyed the disquiet this gruesome spectacle
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would have caused in Canberra, Berlin and Washington—the capitals whose nationals were now in a Taliban jail. The Taliban had arrived at a point of no return. Mullah Mohammed Omar, the reclusive leader of the Taliban whose formal title was Leader of the Faithful, no longer believed he could win international recognition for his Koran-and-Kalashnikov regime. They had been so demonised in the West that he now allowed hardline elements within the Taliban to have a freer hand as they buffed their reputation as a rogue state. That was why they had thumbed their noses at the world in June 2001 when they destroyed the awe-inspiring statues of Buddha in Bamiyan, a region in central Afghanistan. These colossal rock carvings had stood for almost 2000 years, long before the prophet Mohammed or the Taliban came along. Standing at heights of 50 metres and 35 metres, they were among the true wonders of the ancient world, yet the Taliban had talked about the need to destroy them because they were ‘pagan idols’. First they took the odd potshot at the statues, biding their time as an indignant international campaign reached fever pitch; then they laid explosives, ensuring total destruction. And the same thinking was behind the increasing harassment of the expatriate aid community. The hardliners in the Taliban wanted to throw out all foreigners because they feared that their Western or Christian influence would undermine the Taliban’s attempt to re-create a contemporary version of the 15th-century society of the prophet Mohammed. A rearguard effort by moderates who had tried to look after the aid workers failed. They were the ones who could see that, as far as services to their people were concerned, the Islamabad-based UN and NGO aid network had become a much needed government in exile. All power in Afghanistan had been seized by a band of barely educated schoolyard bullies who had read only one book—the Koran. The Taliban had been described by Afghanistan scholar Dr William Maley as ‘perhaps the most fiercely anti-modernist movement in any Asian country since the Boxer Rebellion’. Another regional expert, Ahmed Rashid, attributed the cruelty of the regime to the barren life experiences of the Taliban leadership, whom
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he described as ‘the orphans, the rootless, the lumpen proletariat from the [Afghan wars] and the refugee camps’. Those who now ran Afghanistan had grown up in the refugee camps of neighbouring Pakistan with limited learning about life, either in the male-dominated madrassa Islamic schools that had taught them about the ideal Islamic society of Mohammed’s day, or in the brutal trenches of the civil war that had erupted in Afghanistan upon the retreat of the Russian occupation forces in 1989. The young Talibs—the word means ‘students’— were an all-male brotherhood, many of them orphans who had grown up without the company of women. The madrassa mullahs had taught them by rote that women were a temptation to be avoided, a distraction from their service to Allah. Mr Rashid argued that the Taliban took power in Afghanistan feeling utterly threatened by the mothers and sisters they had never known. So it was easy to banish them. The country had been in grave crisis when the Taliban took control in 1996. And in mid 2001 it was a humanitarian disaster zone. Education was skewed to fundamentalism and twisted to block half of the population—its women. The health system favoured the other half of the population, the men, and it could not function without the unstinting intervention of UN agencies and NGOs from across the world. The Afghans were victims of the Taliban’s sharia legal code, the world’s harshest version of the ‘kill it or chop it off ’ Islamic creed. There were few basic rights and little forensic skill. Instead, the law functioned on kneejerk findings of guilt and the irreversible punishments of stoning, flogging, amputation and execution. Political opponents disappeared; adulterers were lashed in public or stoned to death; homosexuals were executed by having a wall topple on them; and those who could not recite their prayers or who trimmed their beards to less than fist-length were beaten by the thuggish foot soldiers of the PVPV. The law was a swirling sea of formal edicts and verbal warnings, none of which translated precisely into English, few of which addressed the extent to which they contradicted each other and all of which were applied depending on the personalities and places involved. One of the aid workers at Herat gave me a classic example of the confusion when
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he pleaded with the authorities on behalf of a young man convicted of breaking into the aid worker’s vehicle. He said: ‘I told them that in accordance with Islam I forgave the thief and therefore he should not have his hand amputated. But the Taliban official said that I might forgive under Islam but they would be taking off his hand under sharia. They did—and the thief comes to my clinic to have the stump treated.’ Earlier in 2001 the Taliban and the UN became locked in a protracted game of brinkmanship over a disturbing push by Kabul to have expatriate aid workers formally accept that they were covered by the sharia code. However, out of the blue a few weeks before the arrest of the SNI staff had come an edict by Mullah Omar that appeared to abandon the attempt to lock in foreigners. The new edict was said to translate to less than a single page. It forbade drugs, talking to Afghan women, photographing living creatures, wearing immoral clothing, music, eating pork and disseminating magazines, books and newspapers likely to offend the Taliban’s keyhole view of the world and morality. The edict also outlawed any attempt to convert Afghans to Christianity and any sexual liaisons with Afghan women. But there was no mention of the death penalty. Instead, the edict spoke of imprisonment for 10–30 days for foreign offenders and subsequent deportation. All of this left the humanitarian community fretting on two accounts. The SNI expatriates might well be deported, but what of the 16 Afghan nationals rounded up with them? Did they still face the death penalty? And what was to become of the significant humanitarian workload that SNI was undertaking on behalf of the UN? Their jobs included part of a multimillion-dollar project to build 12 000 mud-brick shelters for displaced Afghans in the Maslak camp near Herat, and this work needed to be done before the onset of winter. Antonio Donini, deputy UN coordinator in Islamabad, told me: ‘Afghanistan now is one of the most volatile places for us to work. On the one hand we have a job to do and we want to continue working where our standards and principles are not compromised. But in education and in areas of interest to women, this is becoming increasingly difficult. Our operating environment is shrinking.’
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In the days when the Taliban took time to explain itself, Mullah Wakil, an aide to Mullah Omar, gave Ahmed Rashid the regime’s justification for the near total clampdown on all the rights and privileges taken for granted in societies in so much of the world: ‘The sharia does not allow politics or political parties. That is why we give no salaries to officials or soldiers, just food, clothes, shoes and weapons. We want to re-create the time of the Prophet and we are only carrying out what the Afghan people have wanted for the past 14 years.’ The clever young Argentinian who thought he could outsmart the Taliban by counting the structures in the Maslak refugee camp thought about that for a while. And then he told me: ‘Look, there is a gulf between us. Women’s rights? They say it’s their culture not to have any. Education? Not a priority. Religious leadership? For them it’s an obligation. So there is no dialogue, it’s like talking to the deaf. They find all their answers in the Koran and their only concessions to modernity are weapons, vehicles, clunky watches and plastic sandals. You have to put yourself back in time 1000 years to get to the Taliban mindset.’
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STICKS ON HUMAN BONES 2 The Khyber Pass, Pakistan August 2001
Officially the border was closed, but thousands of Afghans pushed at the fence, willing themselves over the frontier and into Pakistan. They were four and five deep—their sweaty faces a mix of wonder and fear. The Pakistani border guards were angry. In the blistering sun they took it out on the refugees who had evaded Taliban checkpoints on the other side of the border for the dubious pleasure of arriving on Pakistan’s doorstep. In the swirling dust and truck fumes, old men, boys, women and girls were all pushing at the gates, at times forcing their way over the line and into Pakistan—but only to be beaten back with batons and whips fashioned from lengths of engine fan-belts. Incredibly, they showed no pain as they were walloped again and again. And despite the raw aggression of the guards there was a disturbing, almost sullen acceptance that this was how it had to be for the Afghans. They would go back, regroup and try again. Sometimes, within only minutes, the same faces were pushing through the gaps. Having come this far a little more indignity just didn’t seem to matter. The solid steel gates opened from time to time to allow trucks through, and with each such opening the push was on again. Handcarts were squeezed through with possessions and grandfathers and grandmothers strapped on. But it was the same story. Those wheeling the carts were hurled back into Afghanistan, sometimes without their carts. The air was 19
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filled with the crack of the whips and the ugly thud of sticks on human bones. This was Torkham, at the imposing western end of the Khyber Pass on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. The Afghans were eager to press on to the east, in the steps of Alexander the Great and Rudyard Kipling, who so romanticised the Pass. But the endless signposts of welcome, scattered among the sentinel eucalypts that have been planted through the Khyber Pass, definitely did not apply to Afghans. Just as Iran on Afghanistan’s western border had turned on the refugees, so too had Pakistan. So, on both sides of this line, the refugees ran the gauntlet of border guards who harassed them for their money and their possessions. Some families had been nailed by different guards on both sides of the line as many as six times. And more rough treatment awaited them if they could make it through the Pass and down to the refugee camps on the plains around Peshawar. A few weeks ago an old Afghan man had been thrown to his death from a police car when his captors found he had no money for them to steal. Thousands of others were being picked up by Pakistani police and dumped back across the border unless they could pay a bribe. After 20 years of shouldering the Afghan refugee burden, Pakistan and Iran had had enough. They were pushing the refugees back into Taliban territory in greater numbers and they were demanding that the UN High Commission for Refugees be tougher in its screening of the unwanted arrivals. At a meeting in his Peshawar office, Tariq Ahmad Khan, provincial coordinator of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, was dismissive of Islamabad’s new insistence that Afghanistan was safe enough for refugees to be returned. He told me: ‘All of a sudden Pakistan has discovered peace in Afghanistan but this is rubbish. The only peace in Afghanistan is the peace of the graveyard.’ But that graveyard was expected to become even more restless in the coming months, increasing the numbers likely to spill over the border into Iran and Pakistan. More people would be on the move, confronting beleaguered humanitarian agencies with a vexing Catch-22. If the Afghan drought did not break before winter, then tens, maybe hundreds of thousands more Afghans would quit their towns and villages. So did the UN and other agencies now start to build the shelters
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that would be needed before the winter chill that was only weeks away? And what sort of shelter and provisioning should they offer? Agency staff on the ground in Afghanistan were acutely aware that if the shelter was too comfortable and if the provisions were too generous, they would never get the IDPs—internally displaced people—to return to their villages. But as they sat in planning meetings they were haunted by reports from colleagues who had gone to the IDP camps to assess needs. In the winter of 2000 one of them had reported as follows from a camp near Mazar-e-Sharif in the north of Afghanistan: ‘I ask why is the old man crying? He has lost his two grandsons that morning and preparations are being made for their burial. A strong smell fills the building, a smell of bodies and human secretion. The place is so dark one can hardly see—there is no light, no electricity, no fire and no candles. The dead children are lying in the middle of the room, women and children sitting around them. In another room five children sit near a wall, their hands on their chests. They are shaking and they look very strange; for seconds I cannot tell why they look so strange. Then, gradually, it dawns on me— this is the very first time in my life I have seen navy-blue children. I have seen black children, white children, yellow children, coffee-coloured children. But never navy-blue. When I asked why, my Afghan translator looked at me in disbelief. “They are blue because it is cold,” he tells me.’ The decision by Afghans to cut and run was painful, a desperate lunge elsewhere in an uncertain and uncaring world. There was virtually no work in Afghanistan that did not have a criminal edge, and the currency was so shot that the moneychangers hauled their notes to the bazaar by donkey, each animal carrying about four sacks, each of which held about eight wads of notes, each the size of a cinder-block. The Afghans who could get up and leave their villages were called IDPs until they crossed the border—then they became refugees. But so grim, so burdened, was life in Afghanistan that UN staff had come up with a new acronym— ISP. These were the ‘internally stuck people’ who were completely without resources and so couldn’t even get up and go. These were the people who had nothing. If they were lucky, they would be able to straggle to nearby cities and towns where they would live in the open or cram into scarce
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buildings, often living eight to ten families in a single room. A UN refugee worker was almost in tears as she told me: ‘Our people know what has to be done, but the scale is mind-boggling. The Buddhas were just rock, but we are dealing with people here. There’s all this talk of coping mechanisms, but they are failing and what was a sharing culture is breaking down because people simply have less to share. Now too many people are falling below the line and too many who were above the line are now on the line.’ The Qom Qashlaq camp for IDPs felt like one of the backblocks in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The mercury climbed to 50 degrees Celsius on the day I was there, but the intense heat eased as dusk settled on the camp which was on a sweeping curve in the River Panj, in the far northeast of Afghanistan. However, the respite might have been too late for Marcuarh, whose six-month-old daughter seemed to be dying before our eyes. The child lay limp on a ragged pillow, her only comfort a tiny mosquito net. Only the faintest breathing moved her weary lungs and her matchstick limbs seemed useless. The young mother was distraught and, at the same time, resigned to what seems to be inevitable: ‘She is dying and what can I do? It’s better that way. We have no food for her and I have no breast milk because I have not eaten for days.’ I was brought to the Qom Qashlaq camp by Jeahon Shorhatangis, a 26-year-old whose dreams of study had been shattered by the crisis that had dogged Afghanistan since he was a toddler, making it a social and economic wasteland devoid of the institutions we take so much for granted in a first world democracy. Anger gripped Shorhatangis. He screamed in frustration as we went through the makeshift camp at Khoja Bahauddin: ‘People are dying every day from disease. There is not enough food, there is not enough medicine, not enough sanitation.’ The camp was set up in August 2000, when the first of about 8000 families now living here began to abandon villages to the south, beyond what has subsequently become the frontline. The early arrivals suffered last winter, with its bitter temperatures and several falls of snow. Now all of them were bracing for another winter of hunger and exposure. Everything was rudimentary—plastic or canvas was stretched on
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forked branches cut from trees and sods of earth were used to secure the edges of the sheeting on the ground. Most of the tents were devoid of any possessions—though aid agencies had distributed some quilts and cooking equipment. But there were some who didn’t even have a tent. A man had spread a blanket on the dirt and had opened a shop. His entire stock consisted of a few packets of cigarettes, some matches and a box of biscuits. An old woman huddled by an open fireplace, trying to coax a fire back to life as a train of haughty camels ambled past. Some of the refugees had brought chickens, cattle and donkeys. And Abdul Qader, who was blind and 75 years old, had erected a memorial at the front of his tent to the memory of his son, Cham Soudin, who had died the previous month fighting for the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. The French group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) had put a water tank and latrines in the camp, but nothing could make this mess of plastic and canvas habitable. Local aid workers conceded that not enough food got through, but there was no money to buy more before the World Food Program’s next scheduled distribution of flour, sugar and cooking oil, which was to be sometime ‘soon’. Day after day, 90-year-old Bidy Mohamad lay under a stretched sheet of plastic, his only home since the Taliban ran him out of the village of Khwagaghar early in 2001. He told me that they broke his bones when they beat him and he showed me his only supply of food—a pile of grass gathered on the nearby flood plains and stored in a corner of his tent. Qar Bambee said that she was 55 years old, but she looked about eighty. She had been lying on the ground, just as I found her, for the previous three months and her story was as simple and as appalling as the rest: ‘I have eaten nothing except grass today. My husband is dead and I don’t know where my only daughter is.’ Most of the refugees said that they had eaten only once—and meagrely—during the day. As we arrived in the camp some of the children were getting their only rations for the day—a handful of ground grain and stale bread, served to them dry in the colourful little skullcaps that they wore. Or they were given something that looked like a burnt Anzac biscuit: a lot of ground grass mixed with a small amount of flour which was then cooked in a drop of oil. I ate one. It was revolting.
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Hatam Big, 60, tugged at the front of his grey tunic before running a shaky finger around the edge of the palm of his hand to indicate the size of the piece of bread which was all that he had eaten for the day. Angrily waving his hands in the air, he said: ‘Now we are talking about going back to the village, into the arms of the Taliban. All they can do is kill us . . . and that would be better than life here. We have nothing to lose.’ But when Big and some of the other men in the camp told the stories of the Taliban attacks on the villages around Khwagaghar, it was pretty clear that no one was going back. When the attack was imminent, the villagers decided that the young men should flee rather than be conscripted as frontline cannon fodder for the Taliban. So they were ordered to take to the hills and all the town’s weapons were hidden. The story was taken up by Hussein Charl, a 75-year-old farm labourer clad in a multicoloured chapan, the dressing-gown-like overcoat worn by the men of Central Asia in winter, and flip-flops. He told me through an interpreter: ‘They demanded to know where were our young men and our weapons. We said we had neither. Then I watched from my house as they took Khoji Kathahan and a woman about the same age—I think he was 85—and they pushed both of them head-first into the fire in the baker’s oven. The dogs were pulling at what was left of their bodies, so we buried them and then we walked out of the town with just the clothes we were wearing.’ Weeks later I returned to the camp. There was an air of excitement as the French humanitarian organisation ACTED distributed emergency bundles—a big plastic groundsheet, bedding and cooking kits. Such excitement over those small mercies was a measure of how debased life had become. I went in search of Hussein Charl and when I found him he was acutely embarrassed by my request to see where he lived in the camp. His family was spread in three decrepit structures. He and his wife Tuti shared a humpy made of bent boughs covered with hay and plastic. The end walls consisted of clods of earth and the whole structure was inexpertly bound together with rope twined from hay. Their three sons,
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their wives and their children were squashed into an old canvas tent that was pinned to the earth with piles of clay. And perhaps the most substantial of the three structures was the kitchen hut. It was built of earth clods on all sides and had a roof of stretched plastic and hay. Shorhatangis, who made a few dollars translating for the rare foreign visitors to this forgotten corner of the world, looked over the camp: ‘Look at it . . . The world reacted in Zaire and the UN helped the people of Kosovo and East Timor. Why will they not do more for these people?’ It was hard not to agree with him. Governments around the world had hardened their hearts against millions of refugees from war and famine. Probably the most bloody-minded of all was Australia, where there was an election in the offing. Prime Minister John Howard was shamelessly stirring the baser instincts of Australian voters—there would be no welcome mat for Afghans who arrived illegally. When the captain of the MS Tampa, a Norwegian feighter, attempted to land 438 refugees he had rescued as their boat sank in Australian waters near remote Christmas Island, a team from the Australian Special Air Service boarded and took control of his ship. But when the drama of the Tampa was seen from the squalor of the camps for refugees and IDPs, and the listless existence of the ISPs, it was clear that Australia did not understand, simply did not have a clue about the appalling conditions here, the horror of the camps in Pakistan and Iran and the unstoppable desperation of people to do something for themselves and for their families. In the overall scheme of things, only a tiny handful of the millions who have fled from Afghanistan into the neighbouring countries want to get to destinations like Australia or Europe. And despite Australia’s claims of a ‘tidal wave’ of illegal immigration, the rate of arrivals was no more than a trickle. Canberra expected the refugees to quietly take their place in a queue for a refugee lottery that in the year 2000 approved a mere 3000 places for Afghans in eight countries elsewhere in the world. But that was a raffle not worth entering when you were one of a refugee population of millions. Howard said that he was sending a message to the people smugglers in his attempts to block the boats going to Australia—but it would fall
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on deaf ears. The refugees were driven by feelings that drowned out his bureaucratic sensibility. In Australia ‘people smuggler’ was a loaded term but in the refugee camps it merely equated with the Australian concept of ‘travel agent’; and as far as the administrations of Islamabad and Tehran were concerned, people smuggling was a victimless crime that was way, way down on the list of priorities in a part of the world where ‘desperation’ was about something a lot more serious than which team would win the footy on the weekend. What was happening on the ground in Afghanistan and in the hearts of these people also made a mockery of Australian Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock’s attempt to separate out supposedly ‘genuine’ refugees from ‘economic’ refugees. The 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees states: ‘A refugee is a person who has fled his or her country and is unable or unwilling to return because of a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion . . .’ The war that the Afghans were fleeing was an ethnic war. The majority Pashtuns (onethird of the population) were pitted against the minority Tajiks (a quarter), Hazaras (one-tenth) and Uzbeks (one-tenth) and the prize was the land, homes and assets of the minorities. Atrocities were widespread and it was not unreasonable to expect that they might create doubt in the minds of all the minorities about a safe future in Afghanistan, therefore qualifying them for refugee status under the 1951 Convention. It was difficult for them to believe they could be safe under the Taliban after their homes and villages had been torched; after their Shiite cleric had been beaten or killed; after they had watched their Shiite mosque being destroyed and then been ordered to practise Sunni rituals; or after they had found that the community they trusted was riddled with planted Taliban informers. You could argue that that covered the entire minority populations of Afghanistan—Hazaras, Tajiks and Uzbeks. Perhaps Charles Norchi, director of the New York-based International Center for Humanitarian Reporting, had the closed-door policies of countries like Australia in mind when he said of the Afghan crisis: ‘The international human rights system has . . . perhaps failed the
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Afghans more than any other population. In the last 20 years they have experienced assaults upon the body and the spirit, on their culture and society. These human rights abuses have left open and irreparable wounds . . . every human rights standard codified by the international community has been violated.’ After a day in one of the border camps a harried UN worker, who did little to conceal her contempt for John Howard’s closed-door policy, told me: ‘If I was an Afghan, I wouldn’t want to live in Afghanistan. I’d pull every illegal trick I could to get my family out of this awful place.’ There was a perception in Australia that the Afghan refugees were wealthy beyond reason. But this was just wrong. Those who were making money from the crisis that was tearing Afghanistan apart happily stayed there—to make more. But those who had fallen into the clutches of people smugglers had scrimped and saved on pathetic incomes for years, often raising enough to send just one member of their extended family abroad, who was then expected to work long and hard to provide money to pay for other family members to leave the country. In Feyzabad, in opposition-controlled northeastern Afghanistan, 24-year-old Habib was packing his bags for London. Illegally. As we sat cross-legged on floor mats for a lunch of rice and mutton at his family home, he told me that last year his brother made it to Holland— illegally—and this week the news came that he had paved the way for Habib to join him. In the next week Habib would travel overland from Feyzabad to Dushanbe, capital of neighbouring Tajikistan. There he would be able to draw $US7000 which his brother had carefully saved and wire-transferred to a bank account in his name. He would pay the money to a smuggler who had undertaken to get him to London—by air to Moscow and then by road to Britain. I wasn’t sure whether he understood that this would be a hair-raising trip because England too had pulled up the drawbridge and refugees trying to get from France to the UK through the Channel tunnel these days were turned back. After a life in which he had known only crisis, Habib was leaving with little affection for Afghanistan, a country already robbed of its brains and now losing its brawn.
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At the Feyzabad hospital, where the lights glowed so dimly they cast almost no light in corridors crowded with visitors who had to bring bedding and food for their sick relatives, Dr Nafisa Khadija told me that every professional or educated person she knew thought of safety as being somewhere else in the world, anywhere but Afghanistan. Of the 150 students in her 1980s graduation year from medical studies at Kabul University, more than 90 per cent had fled overseas. Her face wide open, her smile charming, she painted a portrait of her own family in exile: ‘I’m the eldest and I’m here in Feyzabad; my next brother is an aircraft engineer and he is in London; my younger sister is a teacher here in Feyzabad; my next brother is unemployed in Dushanbe in Tajikistan; my youngest sister is a teacher, also in Dushanbe; my next brother is a hotel worker in Feyzabad; and my youngest brother is a biologist in Dushanbe. And of my extended family, more than 20 uncles, aunts and cousins are in Australia, Germany, the US and the UK. They stayed here through the Russian years but then they fled in the civil war. All say they will come back when the fighting stops.’ The few with an education who remained in Afghanistan saw the destruction of the education system as one of their worst fates and they were deeply troubled by the spectre of future generations growing up ignorant and illiterate. An engineer whose plans to disappear from Afghanistan were well advanced told me: ‘There is a total loss of hope. Two years ago many of the Afghan middle class thought there might be some sort of future for them, even with the Taliban in control. But what they want most desperately is to be able to educate their children. Now they see that it will be ten or twenty years before there is substantial change—they can’t wait that long.’ The risks confronting Afghan children were appalling. The males faced conscription by the Taliban, either to fight on the frontline, where often they were ordered to fire on their own ethnic brothers, or to be bussed to the front for the sexual pleasure of Taliban fighters deemed to be in need of a morale boost. The girls faced life as chattels. They were bought and sold, even if the drought had wrecked the market for brides. Prices had plummeted, from up to $US1750 to as low as
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$US100; and girls who used to be offered for sale when they were 15 or 16 were being put on the market at ages as low as nine, in the hope that their prospective husband’s family would cover the cost of feeding them. A UNICEF study of children in Kabul found that most had been confronted by so much violence few had any expectation of survival. Two-thirds of them had seen people die, or the scattering of body parts that follows a rocket attack; 90 per cent suffered from nightmares and acute anxiety; and more than 70 per cent had lost a family member and no longer trusted adults. They and their parents had become a nation of hard-nosed beggars. In the market at Rostaq in the far north, I gave some money—10 000 Afghanis, the equivalent of small change—to a beggar child who raced off to fetch a friend so that I might give her some money too. But as the accomplice approached I was revving the car engine and she took fright before she could collect. But she could not run as fast as the first child, who caught her up and belted her until she fell to the ground—her punishment for losing her nerve in the face of an opportunity to get a few cents. Likewise, when I had lunch in a second floor restaurant in Feyzabad with Habib and one of his brothers, who spoke just enough English to interpret for me, three street urchins clambered up the outside of the building, came through a window and scooped up what was left on our plates even before we had finished eating. A few of the refugees did have money and the people smugglers to whom they turned ran efficient operations—a group of Afghans who had bought their way to Abu Dhabi, and had been arrested and deported back to Afghanistan from there, later turned up again in the United Arab Emirates. But a more revealing picture of limited refugee resources was presented in a study by the French agency Médecins Sans Frontières in the refugee camps on the Iranian border. It found that nearly all families were in debt, most of them to people smugglers who were holding members of their family as hostages until the money was paid. The cost for them just to get to Iran was usually several hundred dollars, compared with the thousands needed to get to Australia or to Europe. But getting the money to pay just these small—by our standards—
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debts run up on cross-border efforts was not easy. In Iran the refugees were paid only 40 cents a day to shell pistachios and about $US1 a day to weave carpets. Some had the luxury of time to sell their meagre possessions before fleeing their home villages and, in many cases, they were so desperate that they sold even the window and door frames to their mud-brick homes. Others were driven out with nothing because of the split-second timing of war. The journey often started with weeks or months spent hiding in snow-wrapped mountains, living in caves and eating off the land. Most of those who headed for Iran first found their way to Herat, in the far west of Afghanistan, where they made contact with the smugglers. The Médecins Sans Frontières study says: Nearly all the families had to cross the border with a smuggler. The smugglers accompany the families on the way, facilitating check-post crossings and sometimes passing them to another guide after a certain distance. When the families have no money their debt to the smuggler is sold to another guide— with added value . . . Once they cross, they might stay hidden for several days in houses inside or near the Iranian city of Zabul . . . there they gather with other newcomers, waiting several days to be transported in trucks or buses towards the main cities of Iran. Families can be separated in different vehicles. There are numerous cases of people being arrested on this leg of the journey by the Iranian police, and deported back to Afghanistan. They are separated from the rest of their family and have to cross the border again. Some have crossed the border two or three times, accumulating even larger debts by the time they arrive back in Iran. The average sum asked per person is $US100, but the price appears to have gone up (early this year) to $US200. Some large families pay up to $US1750. As most families could not pay the full price, the smugglers keep one or several persons, sometimes women and children, as a guarantee of future payment. One-third of the families are in this case.
There were no signs to hell—you just have to know or be told how to get there. I turned right off the main Peshawar–Islamabad road, through dustdrenched bazaars, rich green fields and cemeteries where the graves were decked in tinsel, before landing in Jalozai. This refugee camp was home
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for more than 60 000 Afghan refugees and there was word that thousands more were straggling towards the border from Afghanistan. It was unbelievably hot and the camp’s open drains stank. The refugees had divided themselves according to the villages from which they came. For a people who normally were self-sufficient in food and customarily chose to live behind high mud-brick walls, waiting for food hand-outs under a stretched plastic sheet—or, if they were lucky, in a tent—was an uncomfortable and undignified existence. There was little to do. Only the children stole fleeting pleasure as they splashed each other at the water tanks. Small stores had opened for business in wooden lean-tos and those who were bakers in Afghanistan had built new earth ovens. Some of the refugees made a few rupees spinning wool for the local carpet weavers. Abdullah was a minority Uzbek farmer who said he was 40 years old, although his bony body looked like a 60-year-old’s. He explained that he had come to Jalozai about seven months earlier, after being ordered by the Taliban to leave his small farm in the village of Shamarg Tadon in the northern province of Tahkar: ‘They told me to get out and they burnt down my house . . . first there were air strikes and then they burnt the entire village. Many people died in the attacks—more than one hundred. We were not involved in the fighting—we just got in the way when the Taliban came through. More than a thousand families fled the area. Not even a dog would live there now. They asked us to hand over our weapons and when we said that we didn’t have any, they beat us up.’ He took off his multicoloured hat to reveal the scars on his scalp, adding: ‘Some people were beaten to death.’ He was coming to terms with his new surroundings. There were no fences around the camps in Pakistan, as there are in Australia; and here the refugees were not criminalised, as they are in Australia. They were allowed to go to and from the nearby towns and villages, taking work or setting up businesses. Even here, though, they were not safe from a Taliban campaign of terror that reached into the refugee camps, threatening and maiming those who spoke against them. For five years the clean-shaven Abdul Rashid Waziri had been a minister in Afghanistan’s Najibullah government, but he too was reduced to walking over the
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mountains to Pakistan. To counter the boredom of life in the camps he and a friend started a business. Leaning out of his chair, hands buried in the folds of his traditional shalwa kameez, he told me: ‘They assassinated my friend and sent me a message that I should leave the job. They want to kill us—they are religious bullies.’ Many of the refugees, especially the recent arrivals, were traumatised and frightened. They were so desperate that the sight of a lone Western male with a notebook and pen—me—caused them to stampede. When I wandered into Jalozai camp at dusk on a Wednesday afternoon, a few children quickly formed a curious circle, giggling. But then, and with frightening speed, a crowd of thousands pushed the kids aside as they yelled and pleaded in their different tongues—Uzbek, Tajik, Hazara. They grabbed, they pushed and they pulled as they tried desperately to make claims to someone who they presumed must be able to do something for them. As the mob pressed in threateningly, three men, their beards flapping in the wind, materialised by my side and intimated in sign language that they would get me to safety. They summoned a dozen others armed with sticks and we set out, at snail’s pace, for the perimeter of the camp, a good kilometre away. The crowd maintained its angry, confused and pleading circle around us, but the men with sticks swung wildly at any who came too close, pushing away those who grabbed or pushed and yelling vainly the whole time for a semblance of order. Even in the relative freedom of Pakistan these people were still being whipped and beaten. And it was a moment of extreme discomfort to find myself— unwittingly and, perhaps, stupidly—the cause of this particular bout of anguish, punishment and dashed hope. But trapped in the wild circle of pleading, my escorts too had a special cause of their own: they had a list of about 50 names of refugees from the opposition-controlled Panjshir Valley, the territory of the much revered guerilla leader Ahmad Shah Masoud. These people could never go back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan because of their role in the fighting. Weeks earlier they had sent the list to embassies in Islamabad— Australia, the US and India. But the only response had been a resounding silence. Please, they begged, could I help?
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THE LION AND THE DARKNESS 3 Khoja Bahauddin, Afghanistan August 2001
I had needed a visa to enter Afghanistan but the Taliban was notoriously dismissive of the Western press and there was a gruff reception when I arrived at their ramshackle embassy in Islamabad. Each day I queued at the men’s visa window—a low wall separating it from the billowing burkas at the women’s window—but always there was an excuse for why I was not going to Afghanistan: ‘the visa officer is sick’, ‘he has been called to Kabul urgently’, ‘it is a holy day’ . . . Despairing, I had waited a few days and, after killing time in Peshawar, I headed back to the visa queue on one of the hundreds of gaudily decorated buses that race between towns in Pakistan. A fine looking gentleman sat next to me on the bus—he was too tall for the space he occupied, but his robes and his beard flowed, his head tightly wrapped in a Taliban-black turban. He clutched a ripened watermelon in his lap for the entire journey. For a couple of hours he remained silent, but as the road skirted Rawalpindi he demanded answers in perfect English: who was I, where was I from and what was I doing here? I told him. And I asked the same questions of him. Despite his lowly passage on this rattling bus, he was an oil industry adviser to the Taliban and when I explained my visa difficulties he lectured me on the Taliban’s poor press. But he asked for my card and a website on which he could 33
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check my work. The next day he e-mailed me four words—‘your visa is ready’. So I was on my way to the frontline, on a bumpy UN supply flight, high over the craggy, icy heights of the Hindu Kush and into the mudbrick mountain oasis of Feyzabad, way up in the northeast corner of Afghanistan and even further back in time. I was in the oppositioncontrolled territory of Afghanistan here, and still there were burkas and guns. This medieval town, just a few minutes flying time from northwest China, was bursting with refugees, runny-nosed kids and many more pack animals than vehicles. However, while the Taliban was burning books elsewhere in Afghanistan, printer Said Ahmed Reha was desperately seeking spare parts for his Gestetner printer so that he could resume printing his daily newspaper—circulation 200. We sipped green tea and he told me of his days as the editor of a Kabul daily, but that had all come to an abrupt halt when a Taliban rocket smashed his presses. The Taliban’s crude repression stoked his contempt for the new rulers: ‘They say they don’t need a newspaper; and they say they don’t need education and they say they don’t need culture . . .’ And he arrived at a point of speechless anger. On a hilltop on the edge of the town, Mohamed Khwahany had cobbled together Afghanistan’s only free TV station, using a tiny collection of donated equipment and some bits and pieces that the Russians had left lying around. He beamed a three-hour program nightly to those few homes within 15 kilometres of town that had the luxury of electricity and a TV. I engaged a young driver called Abdul who had charge of the only vehicle for hire in Feyzabad—a broken-down Russian four-wheel drive. It was old and held together with wire, but he swore it could survive the drive to Khoja Bahauddin, about 70 kilometres to the west. It was a 15-hour slog through molasses mud and stony rivers but I needed to get there because, I was told, that was where I was most likely to find Ahmad Shah Masoud, the man who stood between the Taliban and control of all Afghanistan. We drove down a valley flanked by sheer walls of rock and balding
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brown slopes that directed the flow of the Kokcha River as it surged through the spectacular highlands of the border country of central Asia. Then it sprawled, wrung out, on the huge flood plains that surround Khoja Bahauddin—a grand name for a dreary fuel dump and a flyblown bazaar where the food could kill. Signs of war were everywhere. The Feyzabad airstrip was littered with fractured aircraft parts and the track from Feyzabad to Khoja Bahauddin was punctuated with the broken remains of Russian tanks, armoured personnel carriers and trucks. Some were abandoned by the side of the track where they had been attacked; others had tumbled into valleys and gorges. Abdul manoeuvred the four-wheel drive with the agility of a mountain goat, and along the rutted track men on camels, donkeys and horses shimmered in and out of a haze of heat and dust in a landscape drama that demanded the backing of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade. But no one crossed the Kokcha River—it was the critical last front in a stalemated war by a mishmash tribal army, the Northern Alliance. It was up against what seemed to be one of the more formidable forces assembled in modern warfare: the Taliban of Afghanistan. In Khoja Bahauddin I made contact with Jeahon Shorhatangis, the lean and angry guide who had previously taken me to the refugee camps. Now I wanted to go to the frontline. He agreed to accompany me, although not before registering his disgust at having to ride in our dilapidated jeep: ‘Why don’t you get a Toyota Hilux?’ he sneered. But he set to, taking me downstream on a fragile raft made of truck tyre inner tubes that had been lashed together with spindly sticks and ropes. The craft was steered by a small boy who wrestled the torrent with a wooden paddle for what was a surreal white-water ride—arcing overhead were the outgoing Russian-built Katyusha rockets fired by the Northern Alliance and the incoming tank shells and mortars fired by the Taliban. We completed the last few kilometres of the journey on horseback. And on a flat-topped range called the Kalakata Hills, across the river from the village of Dashte Qala, about a dozen men hunkered in a network of dusty trenches and tents that they had dug into the sun-scorched earth. This was the frontline.
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They guarded the valley below and, as rocket and artillery percussion reverberated off the mountains, they watched Taliban movements on the next line of hills. The Alliance’s mobile rocket launchers and 122 mm cannons were down on the flat, on the other side of the river. Up here it was all small arms—mortars, Kalashnikovs and shoulderlaunched grenades—and small talk. There was much radio chatter, often with the enemy as each side tried to unsettle the other. The day was punctuated by an indolent exchange of artillery, but the Taliban raised a ruckus when they landed a mortar shell 50 metres from an Alliance ammunition dump. And another buried itself deep in a paddy field only 20 metres from where Abdul was waiting for me in his four-wheel drive, back on the other side of the river. A few of the Alliance men sported articles of clothing from armies around the world, but this was a ragtag operation—many were barefooted and most dressed traditionally, in the colours of the desert. All that was uniform was the stress etched in their faces and the rolled-up woollen pakul hats, which had become known as ‘Masoud hats’ since their revered leader took to wearing one regularly. Headgear in this part of the world was a political, military and fashion statement—the men of the Northern Alliance wore the pakul; the men of the Taliban covered their heads with a signature black turban tied tightly in the Tuareg style. Masoud. He was the man I had come all this way to see. His full name was Ahmad Shah Masoud and he was locked in one of history’s ugly back alleys. In a war that the world had forgotten, Masoud’s predicament looked hopeless. But he had been in tight spots before and escaped, if only to another, and sometimes tighter, corner of war or intrigue. He was a wily soldier and a brilliant military strategist. They said he looked like Bob Marley with shades of Bob Dylan, and some likened him to Che Guevara. And because he was pitted against the tyrannical Taliban, he enjoyed a generous press that too often ignored the less attractive side of his own history, such as the massacre of members of the Hazara minority by his men in Kabul in 1995; and the destruction of Kabul because of his stubborn refusal to abandon the capital during the Mujahideen wars in the early nineties.
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The Masoud legend was built on the gritty defence of his home ground, the grand Panjshir valley, during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The valley runs along the northern flank of the Hindu Kush and Masoud still gloried in the title of ‘the Lion of Panjshir’. He infuriated the Soviets. Every time they attacked the valley, always backed by Moscow’s huge artillery and air power, Masoud managed to clear his men to the high ground, making a shooting gallery of the valley in which he then subjected the Soviet forces to almost a dozen humiliating defeats. Now Masoud was boxed in against the Hindu Kush. He controlled only postage-stamp sized areas—a province called Badakhshan and about two-thirds of neighbouring Takhar province, which took in his beloved Panjshir. He had booby-trapped key river crossings and mountain passes so that a single detonation could block any Taliban advance into his meagre territory. His men had come together in what essentially was a homegrown army. He had cobbled together the fractious Mujahideen battalions which had trashed what was left of Afghanistan in a civil war that filled the gap between the departure of the Soviet occupying forces in 1989 and the emergence of the Taliban in 1994. When I joined Masoud’s men on the shoulder of the Kalakata Hills, their immediate objective was to recapture villages in an area called Khwagaghar, slightly to the southwest, which had been home to about 7000 minority Tajik farmers, most of whom had fled with tales of terrible atrocities in the face of the advancing Taliban. A lot of people sat around waiting for the peripatetic Masoud, myself included. For now he was ensconced behind the high mud-brick walls of the home compound of one of his regional commanders, down by the river at Khoja Bahauddin, about 30 kilometres back from the front. I camped under a mosquito net on the verandah of a nearby building that had become the Northern Alliance’s ‘Foreign Ministry’. This was a world without women, but vanity was rife. The men from the ministry queued three and four at a time to inspect themselves in a mirror that hung in the open. But when I headed out of town to take a bath and wash my clothes in an irrigation channel—the only water available—they looked
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at me with deep suspicion. The head of the ‘Foreign Ministry’ went barefooted and invariably was cooling himself with a cane fan. The information minister, War Astaa, slept just around the corner from me, on a patch of gravel where he had pitched his own mosquito net. But notwithstanding his title, he referred most questions to Masoud. Masoud’s detractors claimed that he was a part of the Afghanistan problem. They said he had fought too many battles and that, despite his grand aspirations, he was a minority Tajik and so could not be a national leader. That prompted one observer to dub him the ‘tragic Tajik’. At best, they said, he could keep fighting and so never be declared a loser; equally, he could never win unless he got massive outside help. But in the tradition of the best guerilla fighters, he just had to keep punching. Masoud had denied the Russians control of Afghanistan and he still jabbed at the Taliban, denying the men in the black turbans the international recognition they craved as the legitimate rulers of the nation. Back in the 1980s, Masoud armed his men by stealing weapons from dead Russians; now he went after the Taliban with guns sent from a Moscow regime that was so hostile to the Islamic fundamentalism of the Taliban that it was prepared to arm its old nemesis. A well-placed observer told me: ‘Masoud’s historical role in opposing the Taliban will be the same as it was with the Russians—he’ll block them till some other organisation, not his, comes along to fill the vacuum.’ The information minister begged to differ: ‘Without Masoud this problem cannot be resolved.’ Masoud didn’t often grant interviews so, like the visa officer in Islamabad, he kept me waiting for days, during which I ate and slept with the men from the ministry and the endless stragglers for whom the ministry seemed to be an open house. All appeared lost when suddenly, after waiting and idling for four days, a roar of vehicles and a cloud of dust passed the ministry at about 11 o’clock at night. Minutes later a runner announced that the commander would see me. In the darkness I was escorted down a winding track to Masoud’s compound and into a poorly guarded building that was a hive of activity despite the approach of midnight. Aides said that their leader slept for as little as four hours a night.
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When he had strategy sessions, Masoud preferred to sit on a carpeted floor, scattered with cushions, ashtrays and glasses of green tea. But for me he sat in a formal high-backed armchair draped in a white sheet. The walls of the room were white, the floor was covered with a red carpet and a single, dim light globe dangled from a wire near the centre of the ceiling. Dressed in khaki shirt and trousers and leather sandals, he looked more like a Western golfer than a legendary Mujahideen warrior. At age 55 he was lean and fine-boned but he had a bad back and flecks of grey were finding their way through a wavy beard that was shorter than the fist-length demanded by the hardheads of the Taliban. He sat back, his pakul hat balanced on his knee. He fixed his slow, penetrating gaze on me and spoke in blunt terms through an interpreter: ‘It is up to the Taliban. We have said we will talk, so let us sit down and solve these problems by negotiation. We can have a short power-sharing arrangement, maybe six months or a year. But then we must let the people decide, and if they are happy then I will be happy. But the Taliban doesn’t want a settlement . . . they want to fight to the end. So we have to defend our country. Unlike the Taliban, we are fighting with men who are motivated, not with soldiers from abroad, or for an ideology.’ But in this midnight encounter, Masoud also railed bitterly against the US for its neglect of the Afghan conflict. ‘The Taliban acts on the advice of Osama bin Laden and they have maybe 35 000 fighters from Pakistan and the Arab countries,’ he said. ‘The way they are cleaning out the minority villages of the north is nothing less than ethnic cleansing. Where is the US? Why is the United Nations not investigating this? Why will the US not help us against these terrorists?’ He spoke of a decisive battle to come and, notwithstanding the near unanimity among observers to the contrary, he predicted that his Alliance would soon defeat the Taliban. Suddenly, with a shrug of his shoulders he signalled that my time was up. The man who fretted about his half-finished house in the Panjshir valley and a lifetime’s collection of books still in boxes dismissed me, saying: ‘I don’t want to spend all my life fighting.’ His words were chillingly prophetic.
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4
THE DEVIL’S HAND Manhattan, USA September 11, 2001
I collapsed on a couch in my sitting room, 34 floors above Ninth Avenue, and looked downtown to where a massive cloud of smoke and steam lounged triumphantly in the void where the towers had stood. What shocked me most was the stupefying brazenness, the stunning success and, most of all, the incomprehensible horror that one of the stories I had covered for years in the hellholes of the world had followed me home to what had seemed the unquestionable safety of Manhattan. So although my mind was filled with Manhattan, in the back there was a nagging thought about Masoud. I had been back from Afghanistan for a month and, though we didn’t understand it at the time, the littleknown guerilla leader I had interviewed only weeks before, and his war-ravaged homeland, would be the stuff of Starbucks café chatter for months to come as September 11 morphed into the War on Terror and Afghanistan became its first battlefield. Going to Central Asia had been a lucky break. The story of the Taliban of Afghanistan had tugged at me for years when suddenly, in the middle of 2001, rickety boatloads of Afghan refugees were running up against a naval blockade in a desperate bid to enter Australia. My editors at The Sydney Morning Herald were debating how bad life could be in Afghanistan to justify such terrible risks for people who had never been to sea. ‘It’s a hard country in which to travel,’ I warned, as 40
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we worked it through in late-night phone calls. ‘Take all the time you need,’ they replied. It was a dream brief and, after several weeks of preparation, I flew out of New York’s JFK airport for Islamabad in Pakistan. I was away for a month. When I returned, I locked myself in my study to write 10 000 words, a four-part series which started publication in the Herald on September 3. The last part of the series—detailing the misery inflicted on the women of Afghanistan by the Taliban regime—was published on September 10 and that evening, fresh from completing the story, I went off to a media reception for the new Australian consul general to New York. But I was in two minds. I was relaxed because the Afghanistan project was done, but late that afternoon reports had started to trickle in from Khoja Bahauddin. They were confused and contradictory and would have caught the attention only of the Afghanistan cognoscenti, but it seemed there had been an attempt on the life of Masoud. There was nothing concrete on his fate, so I went to the new consul’s party and at midnight I was one of a small group of journalists still putting a dent in his generous supply of VB and fine Australian reds. September 11 dawned as a glorious autumn morning in Manhattan but I woke late, about 8.50 am, and I was still tired from the night before. My wife was at the gym, 32 floors below our high-rise apartment from which, on a clear day, we could see all the way to the Twin Towers and the Statue of Liberty. I made a coffee and toyed with ideas for my next project. But suddenly Pam ran through the door, her exercise program interrupted by a newsflash—a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I flicked the TV on to CNN to see an aircraft disappearing into the northern tower of the World Trade Center. And then I saw another. I thought it was a replay of the first. And I assumed, perhaps because I was watching a small TV, that it was a small aircraft. An accident, what we call in the trade a police-rounds story. But then I realised it was a second plane. A second plane had crashed into New York’s Twin Towers. There was no time to shower. I pulled on the previous day’s clothes and grabbed mobile telephones and notebooks and bolted for the subway.
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I raced one block along 60th Street to Columbus Circle, where the steely sheath of Trump International Tower rises above Central Park. I ran down the steel-railed stairs and jumped a No. 1 train that ordinarily would take me all the way down to the financial district, right into the belly of the World Trade Center. But there were immediate signs that this was an extraordinary day. New Yorkers usually travel in silence, heads down, ignoring each other. But that morning the carriage babbled and the train jerked through Times Square and Penn Station before grinding to a halt at West 14th Street, more than 30 blocks north of the complex. ‘Due to an emergency at the World Trade Center this service stops at this station,’ a distracted voice announced on the PA system. I leapt out, raced along the platform, up another flight of subway steps and into streets that, as I looked downtown, vanished into a huge cloud of dust. I had emerged into a city that had changed forever. While I was on the subway I had missed a critical event that would have completed the picture—only minutes before I re-emerged into daylight the south tower had skewed momentarily before collapsing in a horrifying shower of glass, steel and jet parts. But reality hit pretty quickly. In the dust cloud I could see the line of a sharp, angled shadow and for the first time it occurred to me that a section of one of the towers might have toppled. The Twin Towers stood so tall above Manhattan that they always seemed to be just around the corner, even from 40 or 60 blocks away. Now, in these first attempts to grapple with the enormity of what was happening, the tower in my mind simply might have twisted on its pedestal—I could not imagine that it had collapsed into the ghastly tangle which, that night, became a tomb for thousands. I started running, as fast as my legs could carry me, downtown in a city that was running uptown. The dust clagging my throat was a pulverised cocktail of office furniture and the glass, steel and concrete of the towers. As I cut from Varick Street across to Hudson Street, a frantic sea of workers and residents pushed against me—bewildered, dazed, distraught. Workers who an hour earlier had been dressed in their designer finery were now a mess of rags, dust and blood. Couples clung to each other, some with handkerchiefs over their faces; stricken women
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pushed strollers, others clutched pets. Some were in such a hurry that they skittered and fell. The tough town had snapped. ‘Holy Father, protect us,’ a woman sobbed, tears streaming down her face. And a dazed-looking man following close behind her murmured: ‘It’s about prayer. God is the only one.’ But after the first screams, most were silent—struck dumb. When I got to within a few blocks of the World Trade Center complex, enough light was filtering through the dust to reveal what looked like a nuclear winter. Every street and car, every dazed worker and grim-faced emergency crew member was layered with thick, throatrasping dust. The classic Manhattan streetscapes—held together by steel fire escapes and billboards—were littered with the shredded remains of the documents that had filled the offices of the collapsed tower and had driven the deals of the town. I pressed on through the chaos and had only two blocks to go when the second tower—the north tower—shuddered and dropped. The world seemed to roar in pain as the floors detonated in quick succession, debris sprayed into the streets and great spears of flying steel slashed at the surrounding buildings. Mesmerisingly, the huge communications mast on the top of the building remained vertical as all 110 floors collapsed in a horrific heap. I wanted to watch. And I did, but then I ran. It was horror in slow motion—unnerving. This massive cloud of shredded steel, crushed glass and powdered masonry had a life of its own, menacingly turning corners as it enveloped all before it. Behind me someone screamed as the force of it threw him to the ground. I tried to stay ahead of the cloud and as I sought shelter in an east–west cross-street, the side door of a bank building flew open and a quick-thinking security man yanked me to safety—just as another terrible darkness descended on lower Manhattan. Time passed. Ten minutes, I don’t know. I remember phoning Sydney from the bank and briefing a news conference on the loudspeaker phone. Back in the streets, people stumbled into the sunlight clutching at each other and at the fact that they were still alive. Their eyes haunt me still— filled with fear and demanding to know what was happening. ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God—why America?’ a man cried.
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I headed back into the debris. Finally I got to within one block of the rubble mountain. It was like a moonscape; the dust was so thick and heavy that a fireman gave me a mask and we broke into a kerb-side breakfast cart to purloin some bottled water. But no matter how I tried . . . and still tried that night . . . I could not connect the twisted, mangled remains of the towers with the bejewelled columns that had dazzled in the Manhattan skyline the previous night. The Herald presses would run through the Sydney night, pouring out multiple editions updating this horror story, and all the time I was on the run—interviewing, looking, talking, just coping. I phoned my story paragraph by paragraph, sometimes just a line, to Chris Henning on the Page One desk. But by early afternoon there were no more editions for which to write and so I hitched a ride with a paramedic team who took me through an ever-tightening security cordon to the emergency field hospital at the Chelsea Piers. I signed up as a volunteer and, as I gowned up, a senior surgeon gave us explicit instructions on the colour-coded tags we should find tied to the toes of the injured— black, red or yellow, depending on their chances of survival. He finished abruptly: ‘If it looks like they are going to die, let them. There will be a lot more coming in that you will be able to save. The ice-rink next door is the morgue.’ But such was the absolute devastation at the World Trade Center that no injured came to Chelsea Piers and only a few went to any other hospital. I came home in the late afternoon, about the same time as another implosion at Ground Zero, as it was being called, signalled the collapse of a third tower—the 47-floor 7 World Trade Center. Along the way I passed a police post where Officer Tyrone Dux was taking a break before he returned to the disaster zone. Tears streaming down his face, he said: ‘The city is crying. It’s like night-time down there—you can’t hear any screaming, just dead, dark silence . . . Dark and frightening.’ All day I had been confused about the order of events, but as I finally collapsed onto the couch that sorry night I was able to piece together the critical elements of one of the bloodiest days in American history. It had started at 8.46 am. I was sound asleep when United Airlines
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Flight 11, a Boeing 767, ploughed into the side of the north tower. When it came in from the north at just over 750 kph, its near-full fuel tanks exploded in a huge ball of flame which then evaporated to reveal a ragged black, triangular gouge about three-quarters of the way up the 110-floor tower. The tower convulsed in shock, a fierce fireball erupted from within and, in quick time, heavy black smoke was seeping through the windows on the upper floors and great chunks of the building’s façade were peeling away. Soon, desperate office workers could be seen smashing windows high in the building and hanging out so that they could breathe. The second attack came 18 minutes later—American Airlines Flight 175, also a 767, careened in from the west, slicing through the south tower like a knife through butter before sections of it punched through the other side of the building. An amateur video that ran on CNN that night picked up the roar of the 767’s engines and then the nearbloodcurdling cries of horror from terrified city crowds who watched as an explosive ball of fire enveloped the top of the south tower. On a busy day tens of thousands of people worked in the towers and passed through the subway stop beneath them. How many had been at their desks by 8.45 am? No one yet knew. It was a terrible thought. The building crumbled with a roar at 9.59 am, and a vast monument to capitalism and victory in the Cold War, which had taken eight years to build, disappeared in less than 10 seconds. In Washington, yet another jet ploughed into the Pentagon while a fourth crashed into the woodlands of Pennsylvania when its passengers decided they had nothing to lose in challenging the hijackers. The nation that walked tallest in the world was badly battered and bruised. New York was a fortress that night—bridges and tunnels were shut and all road, air and rail traffic was halted. Some of the most disturbing images shown on TV were of the thousands of city workers who left Manhattan on foot, weeping and clinging to each other, trudging across the bridges that anchor this island to the rest of America. Cardinal Roger Mahoney appealed to all Americans to light candles, so that their children might see a glimmer of hope in flames that were gentler and softer than
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the furnace that raged at the core of Ground Zero. And, in Washington, hundreds of members of Congress and the Senate, desperate to show that they could do something in the face of such an attack, gathered on the steps of the Capitol to sing ‘God Bless America’. The day had started as though made directly by the hand of God: Manhattan at its September best with not a cloud in a blue, blue sky. By nightfall it seemed the hand of the devil had the city by the throat. It was a black day, and that blackness spread all the way to Khoja Bahauddin in faraway Afghanistan, where panicked Northern Alliance officials were trying to suppress the news that their leader Masoud was dead. Two days earlier, Masoud had agreed to see two Tunisian journalists who had been hanging around asking for an interview. They had waited for days, as I had done, and they had applied pressure by sending a message the previous evening that they could wait no longer and would have to leave—again, something I had done. It seems Masoud believed that he might be able to use the two to change pro-Taliban sentiment in Arab Street. Too late, an aide realised that the journalists were imposters. As he warned his leader, the room exploded. Masoud was dead within seconds—two pieces of metal had pierced his heart. This too was the work of the devil, and in both Manhattan and in Khoja Bahauddin he went under the same name—Osama bin Laden.
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A FAIR WARNING 5 New York, USA October 2001
Grainy green explosions of light on CNN signalled the start of the US bombing in Afghanistan. In New York it was a long weekend—the Columbus Day holiday—and the Pentagon decided that the first war of the new millennium should start when downtown New York was deserted. George W. Bush was going into battle, the world was behind him and it was important to minimise the risk to Americans should the opening shots awaken any more of bin Laden’s sleeper cells in the US. ‘I gave them fair warning,’ Bush said to an aide as he readied himself to address the nation from the Treaty Room at the White House. It had been 26 days since the attacks on New York and Washington, and more than two weeks had passed since Bush’s last ultimatum to the Taliban to hand over the Saudi-born grand master of terror, Osama bin Laden. Now he was saying: ‘We’re a peaceful nation. Yet, as we have learned, so suddenly and so tragically, there can be no peace in a world of sudden terror. In the face of today’s new threat, the only way to pursue peace is to pursue those who threaten it . . . now the Taliban will pay a price.’ When Bush said he wanted to make the world a better place ‘for generations to come’ and to ‘spread goodwill around the world’, I wondered how all of this was going to unfold. Would this new attempt at a new world order be about anything more than daisy cutters and 47
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cluster bombs? Just for once, would the humanitarian budget come together with the same urgency and enthusiasm as the military one? Bread was so much cheaper than bombs, but it was the bombs that excited the imagination of governments and their generals, so they were quick to stump up the billion-dollar cost of missiles and they left it to humanitarian agencies to scratch around for the multimillion dollar cost of feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless. Only weeks earlier I had walked among the frightened refugee crowds in Afghanistan, tens of thousands of them huddled semi-permanently in the bleak Maslak refugee camp just a few kilometres from the scene of one of CNN’s first-day flashes from the war—a spectacular direct hit by US missiles on an airport fuel depot at Herat, in the far west of Afghanistan. I’d run for my life on the streets of Manhattan on September 11 and, on my last reporting assignment before the attacks on America, had driven for 15 hours up a rocky, rutted mountain track to meet the charismatic Masoud. His pleas for Western aid in his fight against the repressive Taliban regime had been ignored right up to his assassination, which was timed for two days before the terror attacks in the US as a sort of regional curtain-raiser to a pre-planned international crisis. In some ways it was the last of these incidents that frightened me most because, as we then knew only too well, Masoud had had a point. As the war started, New Yorkers feared the strikes on Afghanistan would make them ripe for more terrorist attacks. The terror was real— people across the city obsessively tested the fit of their new gas masks and read and reread the instructions that came with their new supplies of water purification tablets. Neighbours and friends debated endlessly the point at which the city’s vast network of subways and tunnels would become too dangerous to use. But these were not options for the displaced and hungry in the Maslak refugee camp near Herat, and other camps elsewhere in Afghanistan. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the US’s staunchest ally, declared that ‘on the humanitarian front we are assembling a coalition of support for refugees in and outside Afghanistan which is as vital as a military coalition’, I was assailed by a wearying sense of ‘here we go again’.
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Blair’s use of the word ‘coalition’, which since the Gulf Crisis a decade earlier had become a buzzword for the military, was positively Orwellian. If the world had paid attention earlier to the plight of the Afghan millions who for years had been fleeing from war and famine, it would have discovered the need to do something about Osama bin Laden before he was able to use this forgotten land for his terrorist training and planning. I had been here before, the point in an international crisis at which the leaders of the rich and powerful nations, hand on heart, promise the downtrodden that all is about to change—but, please, just let us get this war out of the way. I had wandered the deserts of Jordan during the Gulf Crisis, interviewing refugees fleeing Iraq before the start of the bombing, and I had since been back to Iraq to see the people who were punished by Saddam Hussein for responding to Western exhortations that they should revolt against him. They still suffered because of Saddam’s manipulation of the limited funds he got for the oil he sold under UN supervision. I was in Zaire when the Western-supported kleptocrat Mobuto Sese Seko was toppled, only to deliver his longsuffering people into the hands of another corrupt regime, and I had spent too much time in the Middle East. In September 1990, President George Bush, the father of today’s president, told Congress in the weeks after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait: ‘Out of these troubling times, our objective—a new world order— can emerge.’ The old man liked the idea and he refined it as he went from lectern to lectern: ‘. . . new ways of working with other nations . . . peaceful settlement of disputes, solidarity against aggression . . . and just treatment of all peoples.’ There was a little movement, in what was Yugoslavia and in East Timor, where the international community moved in after years of terrible war and oppression to sow the seeds of genuine peace and the promise of democracy. But that was not enough to stop the skeptics going on full alert when, only weeks after the New York and Washington attacks, Tony Blair told a Labour Party conference: ‘I believe this is a fight for freedom . . . not only in the narrow sense of personal liberty but in the broad sense of each individual having
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the economic and social freedom to develop their potential to the full . . . the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.’ The Afghans lucky enough to have snared one of the wind-up transistor radios included in US emergency food drops must have been overjoyed as they listened to this on the BBC and the Voice of America. Most of them did not have radios in the 1980s to hear similar promises—from the US—of economic recovery and democracy if they would fight the Russians. And the people of Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia and even the Palestinians must have felt certain that they too would be welcome in Blair’s Utopia. But if the British Prime Minister was leading the charge for the world to become a community that demonstrated compassion as well as force, where would it start? More than half of the poorest countries in the world were tied up in—or recovering from—armed conflicts in which the weapons had been sold to them by Britain and the US. If there was to be a new sense of moral responsibility, would decisions of the United Nations be observed? If poverty was the breeding ground for terrorism, narco-trafficking, massive illegal migration and the spread of infectious diseases, what would a more compassionate world community do for the 1.2 billion people who, according to the World Bank, lived on less than $US1 a day? Would they get a kinder ear when the rich nations manipulated the next round of trade talks? Would the big drug manufacturers give up the patent fights that make the cost of medicine prohibitive for poor countries facing epidemics? The first signs were not good. The United Nations was calling for a paltry $US584 million to feed and shelter up to two million refugees in Afghanistan. But when it made an urgent appeal for an immediate $US30 million to tackle the needs of those already coming over the mountains into refugee camps in neighbouring countries, only half that amount trickled in. Governments didn’t write blank cheques for the UN. Australia had given $US7 million to the UN High Commission
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for Refugees but, generous as it looked, it was stingy when compared to the millions Canberra had spent in just one year to keep desperate Afghanis from arriving in Australia on refugee boats, and with the inevitable huge cost of the Howard government’s enthusiasm to take part in the military side of the War on Terror. It was only after the Bush administration attempted to enlist the support of Arab governments for the coalition against terrorism that the spin-doctors began talking about the ‘bread and bombs’ campaign. It was a cynical exercise. Washington needed to convince Arab nations that it was not going to war against the followers of Islam, so it decided to throw morsels to the refugee hordes. Every night huge C-17 US Air Force cargo jets lumbered into the air from Ramstein, in Germany, for an impressive 15-hour round trip that had the unimpressive outcome of delivering about one per cent of the emergency food needs of the Afghan people. But the crisp images and mind-blowing logistics of the US food drops were irresistible to TV news editors who were tired of the endless night-vision shots that revealed so little of the fighting that was going on in Afghanistan. The food drops were not a complete waste of time—refugees were cutting the yellow plastic bags in which the food was dropped into squares that they painstakingly stitched together for another layer of protection against the winter. Provided they could get their hands on them, of course—invariably it was Northern Alliance trucks that got to the drop zone first and they would be clearing out, their trays piled high with yellow bags, by the time villagers arrived on foot. Aid agencies had been doing logistical pirouettes for years to feed Afghanistan, but they had won little attention. To get grain to the far northeast of the country, the World Food Program had to ship it to Riga on the Baltic Sea and then rail it more than 5000 kilometres to Dushanbe in Tajikistan, and then take it by truck into Afghanistan. Journalists were jumping up and down to get on board the American C-17s out of Ramstein, but few had ever wanted to take the train or truck ride through the backblocks of Eastern Europe. And there was even less media attention for the exploits of Hermione
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Youngs, a 58-year-old Yorkshire grandmother who, as the first bombers prepared for take-off, was already on the roof of the world. As the first snow of winter dusted the jagged peaks of the Hindu Kush, Youngs was leading a donkey caravan 10 kilometres long—800 animals, more than 1000 tribal herders and more than 200 tonnes of emergency food and educational supplies—through the treacherous Shah Saleem mountain pass on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was probably the biggest British-led expedition in the shadow of the 7708-metre Tirich Mir, the tallest peak in the Hindu Kush, since 1885, when Colonel James Kelly led 500 men and two mountain guns through snow-covered valleys to break the siege of Chitral, one of the last stand-offs of the British–Russian contest for supremacy in Central Asia which came to be known as the Great Game. As Bush demanded action by all in the War on Terror—‘you are with us or you are against us’—Blair kept up his dialogue with the poor and the dispossessed: ‘Out of the shadow of this evil should emerge lasting good: destruction of the machinery of terrorism wherever it is found, hope amongst all nations of a new beginning where we seek to resolve differences in a calm and ordered way, greater understanding between nations and between faiths, and, above all, justice and prosperity for the poor and the dispossessed.’ Some British commentators wondered whether it was all ‘vacuous blather’ from Blair. Where was the plan to make the vicious virtuous? Was this just more of the gab for vulnerable allies of convenience in parts of the world where the West had happily tolerated—and too often helped create—the injustices that the Osama bin Ladens and Saddam Husseins exploited for their own terrible ends? For now the people of Afghanistan were the lucky beneficiaries of a gross double standard. They had front-row seats for the ‘bread and bombs’ campaign—the bombs were for bin Laden and the Taliban, and the aerial food drops were for them, in the hope of convincing the Muslim world of the compassion of the coalition against terrorism and of its preparedness to address issues like the Middle East crisis as soon as the war was over.
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RUDY THE ROCK 6 Manhattan, USA October 2001
It was a Friday afternoon and Manhattan was jittery. I watched a frightened businessman push a pharmacist up against a wall in his crowded Ninth Avenue shop, yelling: ‘It says 300 tablets!’ Red-faced, the businessman kept poking his finger in the pharmacist’s chest and waving a doctor’s prescription, which he said was for five adult doses of Cipro. In the city of fear, Cipro was the new gold. It was the only drug sold as a guaranteed treatment for anthrax but one course of the little white tablets cost almost $US200. The Ninth Avenue pharmacist was within walking distance of the media houses that had been targets of the anthrax campaign, and he refused to budge from his ration regime: ‘I’m giving you sixty tablets—one dose—because we don’t have enough even for all the people who work in the businesses that have been hit. They’re rushing us too!’ The anthrax scare started in Florida. As the first death was reported early in October—the victim was a photo-editor at the tabloid Sun in Boca Raton—near hysteria gripped New York as its wounded and grieving people came to terms with another frontier of war: bioterrorism. At his army surplus store on Canal Street in lower Manhattan, Gary Hugo hauled more than 2000 gas masks up from his basement storehouse where they had sat for more than a decade. He hadn’t been able to move them during the Gulf War but now they were walking out the 53
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door for what Hugo reckoned was the price of a good dinner. He said: ‘People are panicked. They want to be ready and . . . as a way to calm down, it’s better than an Aspirin.’ September 11, or 9/11 as the day of infamy came to be known, pushed New York to the brink. One hundred and two harrowing minutes of brutality had fractured the gritty, aggressive, in-your-face confidence that made people love and hate the place. With its money, media and me obsessions, Manhattan was a foreign enclave in the otherwise down-home place that is the US. As cities went, it had one of the most combustible personalities in the world, but now it was reeling. A return to its obsessions with art, real estate, the social scene and gangsters seemed impossible. The stylish windows of the Bergdorf Goodman store on Fifth Avenue were blacked out except for the US flag; so too was the front cover of New Yorker magazine, except for the faintest black on black silhouette of the Twin Towers. Restaurants were deserted. Four Broadway shows were canned and when the biggest hit of the year, The Producers, reopened the stars led the audience in a tear-stained rendition of ‘God Bless America’. Fifth Avenue, the venue every other week for the hoopla of New York’s endless parades, came to a halt several times a day as NYPD and FDNY honour guards sent off their ‘fallen heroes’. Most of them were Catholic and in the Gothic silence of St Patrick’s Cathedral the mournful grating of the drums and the haunting drone of the pipes reduced city crowds to tears as each dead fireman and police officer was farewelled to the strains of ‘Amazing Grace’. The pain was more than mere disorientation. The towers had been there for 30 years and the tens of thousands who worked in them were the lifeblood of the city’s trophy architecture. Some spoke of the towers as the exclamation marks on the skyline; others would laughingly say they were New York’s front teeth. Now they were gone and commuters were adrift. All they ever had to do was raise their eyes, and where the towers were told them where they were as they went to and from the commercial furnace of the world. And now police and National Guardsmen were demanding IDs.
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The attacks and their aftermath were the most documented events in the history of the world and still people couldn’t get enough of it—TV was ad-free and wall-to-wall; the New York Times, always a feast for news junkies, performed a journalistic triumph with the depth and breadth of its coverage; and the New York Post, then selling 490 000 copies a day, started a circulation surge that didn’t stop until it had passed the 600 000 mark. Books on Osama bin Laden, biological and chemical warfare, and on the Taliban that had been gathering dust on the shelves at Barnes & Noble sold out within days. Sales of the Bible were up 27 per cent as heathens and hedonists in the Big Apple went back to the little church on the corner. Antidepressant sales went through the roof and New York outNew-Yorked itself with public therapy sessions on the NY1 News cable channel. A woman called Patricia rang in: ‘I feel so helpless. I lost my parents and I never felt like this . . .’ A Catholic counsellor in the studio assured Patricia that it was okay to cry and he suggested that she write letters to herself to talk through her fears. A rescue worker called in from Ground Zero, but he dissolved into uncontrollable sobbing before he could ask his question. And Melody articulated the fear that taunted many: ‘Every time I hear a plane, I’m so very, very afraid.’ New York was isolated. All three airports were closed for days and, when they finally reopened, there were horrendous security queues as new surveillance teams and machines discovered that women’s bras were made with underwires and that people still carried weapons like tweezers and nail-clippers in their carry-on baggage. Government buildings were shut; New Yorkers were afraid to use an old friend, the subway; and for days they weren’t allowed to use the tunnels and bridges in and out of Manhattan. When traffic did start to move again, there were delays of up to three hours as cars with lone occupants were turned back and National Guardsmen climbed all over trucks and vans coming from out of town. In one day alone more than 90 city buildings were evacuated as twitchy workers reported suspicious parcels and people; it was two weeks before the thousands of residents in apartment blocks around the Twin Towers were allowed to return to their homes; and much of lower Manhattan remained cordoned off.
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After a Herculean effort by communications and broking houses, the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, only three blocks from Ground Zero, reopened to one of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s rallying calls a week after September 11: ‘We’re the business capital of the world and just getting back to the business of the world is exceedingly important.’ Survivors among the staff of Twin Towers businesses and those that had mushroomed in their shadows started moving uptown and across town. The new chrome and glass towers of New Jersey beckoned—the Wall Street Journal made the crossing without losing a day’s publication and the homeless credit giant American Express found a string of city buildings in which to camp. People working high up in city skyscrapers reported a new variety of ‘high anxiety’ which was exacerbated by reports that fighter-jets were scrambled to escort an American Airlines flight into Chicago after an emotionally disturbed passenger had crashed into the cockpit. And down on the ground, the endless sirens and the rumble of fighter-jets overhead drained the colour from people’s faces. New York was strung out. Within minutes of the first attack, New Yorkers saw a harried and dust-covered Rudolph Giuliani striding purposefully through lower Manhattan, a gauze mask covering his mouth and nose. The mayor was on the job even before the second attack and he was there to watch, transfixed, the terrible sight of tower workers leaping to their death— some flailing, others in truly balletic pose. Giuliani emerged from the mayhem, took a radio microphone and started what was to become a near continuous dialogue with his people as he sought to reassure them. ‘People should remain calm. Stay where you are unless you are in south Manhattan—then you should walk out and stay calm,’ he told us. It was Giuliani, not Bush, the commander in chief, who demanded that the skies over New York be closed and that the US Air Force patrol them. It was Giuliani who urged people to ‘hold on, get on top of your fear’. Privately, he worried that the information he would have to give out would be too brutal. But when he spoke, Giuliani seemed always to tell the truth and to tell it right. With his shoulders in their characteristic hunch, he spoke with the compassion of a decent priest, the confidence
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of a good soldier and a touch of the gangster chutzpah of his father. He pleaded quietly for people to find inner strength: ‘Everyone in his own way should say a prayer and ask God for assistance to overcome this . . . we have to be an example to the country and the world, to show them that terrorism will not overcome us.’ The president had authorised the Pentagon to shoot down any other hijacked planes and for days F-16 fighter-jets were the only aircraft in the skies over Manhattan. Gunboats patrolled the Hudson and the East Rivers and the brooding hulks of the aircraft carriers USS Kennedy and USS George Washington stood off New York and Washington. The whitehulled USS Comfort, an American hospital ship, was docked on the Hudson River, just below my apartment, to provide lodging for the Ground Zero rescue crews. Units of the National Guard patrolled the streets of New York and they camped in their giant hummer jeeps on street corners and on the steps of key buildings. Suspects, most of them from the Middle East, were being rounded up at the rate of about 100 a week. Attorney General John Ashcroft warned: ‘Terrorism is a clear and present danger to Americans today’; and a senior cop told New Yorkers: ‘This is how it has to be—this is a police state now.’ The US was on a war footing and so was I—as the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist organisation emerged as the only targets, the sliding doors that had closed after my reports on the plight of the Afghan refugees now started to open again, making inevitable my return to Central Asia, this time to report on the rout of the refugees’ tormentors. In the chaos of New York, thousands searched for relatives and friends whom they hoped might have escaped from the towers. Their last hope was that their kin were injured or disoriented, perhaps still wandering city streets or languishing, unidentified, in hospital. Ros Theckradeen was in the crowd at the Bellevue Hospital, showing anyone and everyone a photograph of her sister-in-law, Gumi. ‘She works on the ninetyseventh floor of tower two. She rang my mother-in-law from her office and told her to look at what was going on on the TV. She said she’d call back, but she never did.’ However, within a week, the hospitals gently
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told them all to go away—it had identified all the injured, there was nothing to be gained by hanging around. The Italianate State Armory on Lexington Avenue became a Lost and Found office of tragic proportions. Thousands of numbed families and friends came to fill in 7-page questionnaires, bringing with them dental records and details that might help identify the missing—a tattoo, jewellery, distinguishing body marks like a missing finger. They also gave a sample of their own DNA in the form of a swab from their mouth, and in their pockets and bags they brought intimate bathroom items of the missing that would provide their DNA—a toothbrush, a hairbrush, a razor. Shrines to the missing sprang up everywhere. On lampposts, phone booths and street corners . . . wherever there was a flat surface on which people could stick their fliers. Some had been homemade with textas and photos from the family album; others were professionally done with computers and laser printers. All of them pleaded for help in the search for thousands who weren’t coming home. It was heartbreaking to watch people trying to hold together, only to become wracked with sobs as they told their stories to media crews from around the world. The message under a picture of 35-year-old Sean Brooke was simple: ‘We love you.’ But the flier for Lucy Fishman read like a police report: the platinum watch, a double-heart ring and the Tiffany heart necklace she wore when she set out for work on level 105 of the north tower on September 11 were described in minute detail. Union Square, where Broadway crosses Fourth Avenue, became a fairyland of memories and comfort. First there were just a few but, within days, there appeared a carpet of shrines to the memory of the missing and of gratitude to the searchers. Their warm glow spread between the statues of Washington, Lincoln and Lafayette and—perhaps the reason why this site was chosen—Gandhi. Self-appointed volunteers tended this sea of candles, flowers and flags, and crowds came at all hours to leave messages or just to ease their pain. The city that never slept couldn’t sleep. They came to the square with banners, crosses and teddy bears. A fireman’s helmet. One night, at another smaller memorial
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that was a hotchpotch of fliers, flags and flowers outside St Vincent’s Hospital, a van stopped, six uniformed policemen alighted, each with a bouquet of flowers to deposit—they cried, they prayed and they left. Giuliani was attending three or four funerals and five wakes a day and he sent other city officials to all that he could not attend. He never let up with his counselling of the bereaved: ‘Cry, but the tears have to make you stronger. Every time you cry you have to remember that we are right and they are wrong.’ It wasn’t just families that caved in. As fear rippled through the city and the nation, the economy took a hit too. The first price tag that analysts put on the attacks was, all up, about $US60 billion. But that did not include the $US650 billion that had been wiped from the value of the stock market. The spectre of recession loomed and jobs disappeared at the rate of 70 000 a week. As the multibillion dollar travel, tourism and convention business went into a tailspin, Boeing dumped 30 000 workers and United and American Airlines doled out the pink slips to another 20 000. There was a palpable fear of flying and in Las Vegas alone more than 50 000 holiday bookings were cancelled. An American friend told me that on a flight he needed to make to the west coast, he removed the belt from his trousers and sat with it in his hands for the entire flight, in case he needed to use it as a garrotte on the passenger sitting in the seat in front of him. His fellow traveller appeared to be of Middle Eastern extraction and that was enough to trouble my friend and, he understood from the many raised eyebrows, others sitting around him. The Big Apple was on its knees, but somehow stories of great pain and immense courage worked as a salve on the hearts and minds of millions who were coming to terms with real fear for the first time in their lives. Tales of heroism climbed from the pit at the bottom of town as rescuers, salvage crews and investigators pieced together the last minutes of so many ordinary lives that had ended in such extraordinary circumstances. Privacy went out the window as we bathed in the most intimate details of the lives of the rescuers, the rescued and the dead, all on a sea of personal and national emotion that at any other time would
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have seemed maudlin. But in the weeks after September 11 it felt right. Just as the images of the attacks played again and again on the neverending TV coverage, so too did the great American anthems, like ‘God Bless America’ and ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. It was difficult to hold it together—I wept when massed choirs sang ‘The Battle Hymn’ at a memorial service at Yankee Stadium two weeks after the attacks. And I blew it when I found myself alone in one of the subway tunnels under Grand Central station—just me and a ragged African American busker whose saxophone cried as he played ‘The Star Spangled Banner’. He played so slowly and so painfully it was as though he had wrapped each note in cotton wool. The city bound itself tightly in the stars and stripes and, for weeks, waves of emotion washed over my efforts to produce analytical reports that might make sense of it all for Australian readers. Ground Zero was a great mausoleum that became a magnet. Even as biting winds marked the onset of winter, crowds queued for hours just for a glimpse, drawn yet repelled. Three firemen hoisted the American flag on one of the rubble hills and overnight it became an iconic image. This was the worst attack on the US since Pearl Harbor and the flag-raising rekindled historic memories of the raising of Old Glory when US troops first landed at Iwo Jima. Rescue worker David Novak was a voice from carnage: ‘This is our flag and our flag is our freedom. It says that America is worth fighting for against any threat, any foe.’ At first Ground Zero was like a giant ant pile that had been stomped upon. There was chaos as about 3000 workers—first we talked of them as rescuers, then as salvage workers—pulled at the rubble with their bare hands and with buckets and spades. Watching them became an exercise in fascination—close in they seemed to be ordinary humans but, when you pulled back to take in the whole terrible site, they disappeared into its craters and creases. It was easier to watch at night, when darkness between the pools of emergency light somehow softened the scene’s ragged edges. In the middle were unstable mountains of mangled steel and broken concrete, and around the sides were buildings that still stood, but which had been mauled. In the twin explosions of the attacks and
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the subsequent collapses, huge shafts of steel became javelins that speared into the other buildings or drove themselves up to 10 metres into the hard ground around the towers. Smoke and steam oozed up to feed the angry cloud that hung above the site. As water from the fire hoses formed creeks, frightened engineers watched and waited as two further disasters threatened. The entire World Trade Center complex had been built in a giant, 7-storey-deep concrete ‘bathtub’ and with nothing to hold the sides out they feared that the waters of the Hudson River would rush in. Also, the New Jersey rail tunnels that fed into the site were old and brittle. If they were breached water would pour back into the station on the New Jersey side of the river, and from there into other tunnels that looped back to Manhattan, and much of the underground railway system on the West Side would be flooded. By the end of September Ground Zero had its own rhythm as a constant convoy of trucks gathered up the most sacred rubble ever created in the US and took it away to an endless procession of barges. The dogs used to sniff out the injured and the dead were working so hard that their sore feet had to be bandaged before they could return to the rubble. Fire officer Jeff Silver explained the emotion-charged moments following the sound of the klaxon horn that was used to signal the discovery of the remains of a fireman: ‘There is dead silence. All the machinery is cut off, and everybody takes their helmets off while a body bag is brought over and the brothers from his station come and carry him away.’ It was hard, grinding work. Dr Bill Chen explained how hopes rose and fell in the first days: ‘Sometimes they ask for an oxygen canister, which is encouraging. Now and then they ask for a stretcher, which gets everyone real excited. But most of the time they just ask for another body bag, and it’s back to reality.’ In the days after the attacks, Giuliani had ordered 30 000 body bags and, as each was called for, it started the process of identifying the remains, breaking the news to the families and the hope of closure that might come from funerals and memorials. For one family there was only a severed hand with a wedding ring; for another there was the body of
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an infant in a car from which the driver was missing; some of the families of passengers in the jets were told how their relatives had been found, still strapped into their seats; and the relations of one of the flight attendants had to cope with the news that when she was found her hands were bound. As each flag-draped body was removed from Ground Zero, workers formed a guard of honour, saluting as the procession passed up a long ramp to street level. It was not until a full week after September 11 that Giuliani started to bring down the expectations of families who still wanted a miracle. Almost 5500 people were listed as missing and only 218 bodies had been recovered. Exactly one week after the attacks, at 8.48 am on the Tuesday, the city stood still. Later the mayor told reporters: ‘We don’t have any substantial amount of hope we can offer anyone, that we will find anyone alive. We have to prepare people for that overwhelming reality.’ Hundreds of companies had offices in the towers, but there was one in particular where the loss was so devastating as to be truly incomprehensible. The specialist bond-trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald had 1000 staff in its New York offices, at the top of one of the towers. Six hundred and fifty of them were dead. The company’s chief executive Howard Lutnik had a reputation as one of the hardest of Wall Street’s hard men, but there he was on national TV, crying inconsolably as he undertook to look after the 1400 staff children who had lost a parent. As he talked about the newly widowed young mothers who were calling him about their mortgages, he said: ‘I have to do something for the 700 families. Seven hundred families—I can’t say it without crying. My view of business is different—[now] I need to be successful so that I can take care of them.’ Lutnik escaped death only because he was late to work— he had taken his own child to school that morning. But his colleagues in London had listened in anguish as the last minutes of life for their Manhattan workmates played down a line that was open for what was to have been their daily conference call on the markets. Three weeks after September 11, the frozen zone around the 16-acre site of the World Trade Center was reduced to about 40 city blocks— the Hudson River on the west, Broadway on the east, Rector Street to
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the south and Chambers Street to the north. Within its bounds dustdrenched horror remained snap-frozen—delivery bicycles still chained to a rack, shops with stock but devoid of staff and customers, the smooth metal roundedness of the Sphere sculpture that had stood in front of the towers, now all jagged and torn but, miraculously, still in one piece. And in the garages below the Twin Towers were lines of fried BMWs, Jaguars and the like. A clock in the Tourneau shop in the boutique shopping malls beneath the towers was frozen at 9.22, about 34 minutes after the first attack; and an opened Heineken beer sat on a counter in the Commuter Bar in a station on one of the railway lines that ran under the towers. In the abandoned Bankers Trust building, on the south side, there were signs of panic, control and opportunism in the minutes and days after the attacks. In an executive dining room, breakfast was left on the table just as it had been abandoned—a bowl of cereal ready to be eaten, probably that of the person who was doing the talking; a half-eaten omelette—the meal of the diner who was listening? It looked as though they had simply stepped out of the room, taking their briefcases with them. But there were obvious signs of panic in a nearby conference room—food was left, but so too were briefcases and overnight bags, some purses and keyrings. Neat marks in the dust on the tables showed where laptop computers had sat—now stolen; and all the bags had been opened—robbed of their valuables. Security staff from the Bank of Nova Scotia were stunned when they finally got access to their vaults in the basement of the tower complex—someone had been there before them, but had failed in their attempts to force the huge security doors. Behind them were hundreds of tonnes of gold and silver, enough to fill more than 120 security vehicles when they could finally cart it away. All the rubble was barged to the aptly named Fresh Kills—a disused waste site on Staten Island—where a white-overalled army sifted every cupful for evidence, looking for body parts and the thousands of personal items from workers’ desks and passengers’ baggage that would be precious to family and friends. Forensic and pathology experts from around the country descended on New York for what was to be the
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biggest identification exercise ever undertaken in the US. More than 100 dentists worked on dental records alone. Every body part and fragment taken from the rubble was to be bagged and barcoded and recorded in a giant database that in time would be cross-referenced with information provided by families of the missing. The figures released at the start of week three underscored the enormity of the task—the number of people reported to be missing had gone up to 6347; only 276 deaths had been confirmed and of those only 206 had been identified; families had provided more than 6000 DNA samples that could help to identify about 2100 of those who were missing, and at Fresh Kills about 17 000 body parts had been recovered from the first 300 000 tonnes of rubble. Whole wallets were found intact—cards, bills and family snaps. There was the entire torso of one of the victims. But for many families there would be absolutely nothing. Such was the force of the explosions when all the pent-up energy in the towers and the fuel in the jets ignited that much of the towers, aircrafts, passengers and workers simply vaporised to become part of the thick layers of dust that blanketed Manhattan and, across the East River, Brooklyn. A few weeks after September 11 Giuliani authorised the start of another chilling process—the legal declaration of the missing to be dead, so that their families could get the insurance, superannuation and the other payouts they needed to hold together financially. The city provided a team of 75 lawyers to concertina a process that normally took three years into a matter of weeks. And even as the fires still raged at the heart of the rubble mountain, Giuliani escorted the families of the bereaved through the site. Recovery work never stopped, but there was a brief pause when word went around on October 7 that the first American bombs had been dropped on Afghanistan. It was the same day that bin Laden had shown his face to the world and a full-throated cry came from all corners of Ground Zero: ‘USA! USA! USA!’ Since September 11 bin Laden and his Taliban hosts had denied any part in the attacks on New York and Washington. But in a taped message that went to air around the world within hours of the US president’s confirmation that the bombing
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had begun, the terrorist leader chose chilling words: ‘When the sword falls on the US, they cry for their children and they cry for their people. The least you can say about these people is that they are sinners. They have helped evil triumph over good. And this is America filled with fear from the north, south, east and west, thank God.’ All through those first weeks people clung to stories from Ground Zero, stories of survival and good luck when they were up, stories of death and misadventure when hope faltered. Genelle Guzman was a 31-year-old office manager on level 64 of the south tower and her boyfriend, Roger McMillan, 38, had watched the attacks from his workplace, 20 blocks away. She phoned him, telling him there had been a PA announcement that she should wait by her desk—even as her colleagues could see the bodies of workers who had jumped from high in the northern tower passing their windows. McMillan urged her to get out, to meet him across the road from the complex. He walked, he ran, but he couldn’t find her. He checked his voicemail—she had left a message, she was doing as she had been told and was staying at her desk. But then she was ordered to evacuate and, when she had only 13 floors to go, the building collapsed. Guzman’s head was snared between two columns and she lay in the dark and the dust for 26 interminable hours before she took her place in the history of September 11 as one of only five people who were brought out of the rubble alive. The story of Guzman and McMillan had a darker, mirror image among the staff of Fuji Bank, whose offices were about 20 floors above Guzman’s. Felipe Oyola, 24, was on level 81 and his wife Adianes, 23, worked on level 82. When the first tower was hit they rushed to the express elevators on level 78 but, like Guzman, they returned to their desks when the PA announcement assured them that they were safe. Minutes later the building was attacked—Felipe escaped, Adianes did not. Stories of love and courage hurt. Eight minutes before American Airlines Flight 175 powered into the south tower, flight attendant Brian Sweeney, 38, called his home, leaving an answer-machine message for his wife Julie: ‘Hey, Jules. It’s Brian. I’m on a plane that has been
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hijacked. It doesn’t look good. I just want to tell you how much I love you. I hope that I call you again. But, if not, I want you to have fun. I want you to live your life. I know I’ll see you some day.’ The family of Eric Steen, a bond trader who worked in the south tower, was waiting for the right time to read a 300-page novel he had been working on but had always refused to discuss. And Maureen Sullivan had a new diamond pendant necklace by which to remember her dead fiancé—equity salesman Derek Sword. Whenever she had admired her three-diamond platinum engagement ring in the weeks before September 11, Sword had teased her, telling her there was ‘more to come’. Six days after the attack Sullivan was seized by a memory of his teasing, so she called the jeweller who had sold them her engagement ring to see if Sword had bought anything else. Yes, there was the necklace. She found where he had hidden it—at the back of his sock drawer. John O’Neil, 49, had been described as America’s ‘pit bull on terrorism’. As head of the FBI’s national security wing in New York, he had headed the investigation of the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, both of which were attributed to bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network. But two weeks before September 11 he quit the FBI for a new job—head of security at the World Trade Center. After the first attack he made a few mobile telephone calls, telling those he called that he was on the pavement outside the north tower. But then O’Neil went back to help in the rescue effort. He has not been seen since then. New York wept for its firemen. In a high-rise city like this, these were brave professionals who were much admired. When you saw the words ‘finest’ and ‘bravest’ in tabloid headlines you would always know that the story was about a fireman and now more than 340 of them had died in less than two hours. A few blocks from my place on the Upper West Side, the firehouse that was home to the men of Engine 54/Ladder 4 was disappearing behind a mound of flowers and donated food. Like every other firehouse in the city, it was bedecked in black and purple mourning bunting and out on the pavement there were framed pictures of the dead—all fifteen of those who had rushed from Engine 54 to the
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Twin Towers. Left behind were 45 men who were drained by the impossible burden of holding themselves together and helping the families of their dead colleagues. Doctors and others who worked with the surviving firemen in those dark days told of the fireman who had to carry the decapitated remains of his captain from Ground Zero. Among the dead was the FDNY’s chief of special operations, Ray Downey. Only a few months earlier he had spoken of three dead colleagues: ‘You say to yourself, “not me”.’ And that, colleagues insisted, would have been Downey’s mindset as he marched into the second tower minutes before it collapsed. Father Mychal Judge was a man they described as half-priest, halffireman. He was the FDNY chaplain and as he rushed into the crisis zone he passed Mayor Giuliani emerging from that cloud of dust and fear. ‘Pray for us, Mychal,’ yelled the mayor as he usually did when he encountered Judge. And Judge called back, ‘I always do,’ as indeed he always did. But minutes later, as Judge took off his helmet to administer the last rites to a group of firemen who had died in the collapse of the first tower, the fire-priest was killed by debris flying from the second tower as it collapsed. Weeping firemen carried the priest’s body to a nearby church where they laid him on the altar. And, at his funeral, his friend Father Michael Duffy told mourners: ‘Mychal is on the other side of death; he’s there to greet the firefighters.’ The anger of the nation was embodied in Bush’s war cries. At a Day of Remembrance service at Washington National Cathedral, he warned: ‘This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.’ The US was laying down the law to the world: ‘You are with us or you are against us,’ the president repeatedly intoned. Secretary of State Colin Powell echoed the message in calls to leaders around the world: if he was not a friend of the US, then he would be considered an enemy. The national leaders were fixed on the security of the nation but, in New York, Giuliani also worked to ease the pain in their hearts and their heads. ‘In the days since this attack, we have met the worst of humanity
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with the best of humanity,’ he told a crowd of 25 000 at the memorial service at Yankee Stadium. At the end of September he appeared on the comedy show ‘Saturday Night Live’ to assure people that it was fine to laugh again. But it wasn’t a night for laughs. Paul Simon made sure that many still cried with a haunting version of ‘The Boxer’, his story of a fighter battling loneliness and alienation in New York, and Giuliani took the microphone after him to warn the world that New York would not bow to fear: ‘Our hearts are broken, but they are beating, and they are beating stronger than ever. We choose to live our lives in freedom.’ Giuliani held his numbed city together with rare leadership qualities. Within minutes of the attacks the president had virtually disappeared— the secret service kept him in the air on Air Force 1, leapfrogging from airport to airport around the country until evening, when they thought it was safe for him to return to the capital. But from the get-go, as Americans say, Giuliani was in complete control. To tell the truth, he was a leader on the verge of leaving office in a city in which many were grateful for the way he had cleaned it up, but were glad to see the back of his foul-tempered leadership style and a messy personal life that had become one long tabloid headline. When he went home late on the night of September 11, the mayor read about Churchill and the people of London during the 1940 Blitz. In the subsequent weeks, he found it in himself to manage an unmanageable crisis with a firmness that made people and institutions do as they were told, with an authority that made people believe in him, and with an air of compassion that comforted and consoled. Later, he told a reporter: ‘I started thinking that we were going to have to rebuild the spirit of the city and what better example than Churchill and the people of London . . . who had to keep up their spirits during this sustained bombing. It was a comforting thought.’ The mayor went to the United Nations, on the East Side, to give his very personal version of the Bush message to envoys from around the world: ‘You’re either with civilisation or you’re with terrorism. The evidence of terrorism, brutality and inhumanity is lying beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center, less than two miles from where
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we are today. Let those who say that we must understand the reasons for terrorism come with me to the thousands of funerals we’re having in New York City—thousands of them—and explain those insane, maniacal reasons to the children who will grow up without fathers and mothers and to the parents who have had their children ripped from them for no reason at all.’ Donations of more than $US2 billion poured into funds for the victims’ families. But when the Saudi Arabian prince Alwaleed bin Talal wrote a cheque for $US10 million at the same time as he urged the US to adopt a more balanced policy on the Palestinian crisis, Guiliani snapped: ‘There is no moral equivalence for this act,’ and he sent the cheque straight back to a stunned prince. The city genuinely fell in love with a man who had so often annoyed it. There was a drive to keep him in office for as long as the crisis demanded. Wherever he went in the city, he was greeted by chants of ‘Ru-dy! Ru-dy! Ru-dy!’ and French president Jacques Chirac declared him to be ‘Rudy the Rock’. Just as Giuliani’s past was being forgotten, mine was catching up with me. When the publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch decided in mid 2001 to give the New York Post a new lease of life, the man he tapped for the job was Col Allan who, at the time, was editor-in-chief of Murdoch’s Sydney tabloid, the Daily Telegraph. I knew just how competitive Allan was because I had been editor of The Sydney Morning Herald when he was running the Telegraph. In Sydney the contest was cutthroat, but in New York we could afford to be matey and as we sat in Reynolds’ pub near Columbus and 57th Street he quickly revealed that his ferocious urge to win had not suffered in the shift to the US. ‘We were rather pleased that we had been singled out by the terrorists [in the anthrax attacks] and that the Daily News had been deemed not worthy,’ he told me. It was a rare moment of humour at a bleak time. In our different jobs, each of us was thriving on the biggest story of his career, but neither of us could be immune to the leaden fear that haunted family, friends and colleagues. At the height of the anthrax scare, staff at three of the TV networks— ABC, NBC and CBS—became infected after handling mail laced with
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anthrax. The Post too had received a letter, addressed to the editor-inchief himself. Col Allan had three people down and a staff that was becoming increasingly edgy about staying in the Post’s midtown offices on Avenue of the Americas. He put his beer down and drove his thumb into the middle of his forehead as he explained to me where a black anthrax scab had appeared on the latest Post victim, editorial writer Mark Cunningham. The staff at the Post were still sizing up their new Aussie leader and, increasingly, their families were overcome by the anxiety that gripped the rest of the US—if the anthrax spores were in a workplace, they could so easily be brought home. Allan sweated as he waited for the results of the first tests and his big fear was that the staff would walk. ‘We had to publish a newspaper. The FBI was swarming over the joint and we had all these disease-control people in their funny uniforms. We had assured the staff they were safe. But Cunningham wanted a file and he went back into the offices that had been sealed off because of the anthrax letter. He touched a doorknob with his hand and then he scratched a pimple on his forehead. Well, f—k me, he came down with the disease and we couldn’t explain how he got it. It was a close-run thing. We got Rupert to walk the floor several times and Lachlan [Murdoch] addressed the staff—people were afraid and Rupert wanted them to see that the proprietor wasn’t hiding away in his uncontaminated office down on the third floor.’ People dealt with the crisis of living in New York in different ways. Some curled up inside and others got very drunk. Personal networks kicked in with new levels of caring—79 per cent of respondents to a Time magazine poll said they had told someone they loved them because of September 11, more than 60 per cent said that they had been crying, praying and keeping in closer contact with relatives because of the attacks. There were those who wandered aimlessly in the streets. Some of them found they could talk to each other with new levels of intimacy—Time called it the ‘trauma-into-passion phenomenon’. It seemed the attacks were something that vulnerable people could talk about with total strangers. Describing such encounters as ‘Armageddon sex’, a UN conflict-resolution worker said of her own experiences: ‘It answers that
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deep need, emotional and physical, to be as close as you possibly can to somebody.’ Others talked about leaving; some packed their cars, ready to leave, and others left. Downtown rents started to slide and realtors off Manhattan said refugees from the big smoke swamped them with inquiries. Couples like Brian Pew and his Hungarian-born fiancée abandoned their Queens apartment and fled to Budapest. And Dave Sellers, a New York native, complained to the Los Angeles Times that three of his friends—all in their twenties, all in the restaurant trade—had fled: ‘They’re contributing to the faceless enemy. Okay, if the other shoe drops, we’ll all look stupid and they’ll look smart. But until then, I’m in the foxhole, staying put.’ The anthrax scares pushed some to new levels of preparedness. Amanda Siegel packed her emergency kit in her car early in October. She told my Herald colleague Mark Riley: ‘I packed everything I thought I might need in an emergency. There’s a first aid kit, a torch, some rubber gloves, a pack of disposable face masks, some antibiotics my doctor prescribed, a spare toothbrush, toothpaste, two sets of clothes, a pair of sneakers, a clean change of underwear, two books and my hairdryer—a girl can’t go anywhere without her hairdryer. If there is a big anthrax attack, or whatever, then me and my friends are going to jump into our cars and drive in the opposite direction to the way the wind is blowing.’ And the FBI drove New Yorkers to new places on their post 9/11 emotional roller-coaster with all-points bulletins that were as vague as they were chilling: ‘Certain information, while not specific as to target, gives the government reason to believe that there may be additional terrorist attacks within the US and against US interests overseas in the next several days.’ By mid October city authorities had further refined the horrible statistics of September 11: now, there were 4415 officially missing; 473 bodies had been recovered and 422 of them had been identified. People still came in their thousands to look in wonder and anguish at a great hole filled with twisted steel and rubble called Ground Zero. It was an
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embrace of pained love—loss and defiance—and, as autumn seeped into winter, arrogance stoked by a presidential cheer squad insisting that the world would be bashed into shape and that only American bombs and bullets could do the job. Bush continued to sound the war drums. The manufacturer of Cipro could not keep up with demand—its factories worked round-the-clock and people were going over the borders, into Mexico and Canada, hoping to fill prescriptions. And as the US bombing of Afghanistan intensified I talked to my Herald editors, planning my return to Afghanistan to cover the coming ground war. My preparations included phoning my doctor to get a script to replenish the range of antibiotics I carry to deal with any infections while I am on the road. It was only as I emerged from the Duane Reade pharmacy on Broadway and 62nd that I examined my various bottles of pills and capsules to discover that in my hot hand I had a course of Manhattan gold. Just to be on the safe side my GP had thrown in a course of Cipro. But I was the one who was getting out of Manhattan, so for the first time in our marriage I was able to leave a farewell present for my wife that could be genuinely useful—a course of drugs for a killer disease. Late on the night of October 20, I flew Aeroflot to a snowed-in Moscow to pick up a connecting flight to Tashkent, the first stop on my return to Central Asia.
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PART II
EYEWITNESS TO THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN October–November 2001
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AN UZBEK CROOK IS GEORGE’S 7 NEW FRIEND Tashkent, Uzbekistan October 2001
This place was heady with romance. The legendary Silk Road cities of Samarkand, Khiva and Bukhara beckoned, but it was amongst the dilapidated Soviet architecture of Tashkent that the horror of life in modern Uzbekistan revealed itself. There, in the bosom of Washington’s newest ally in the War on Terror, Darmon Sultonova told human rights researchers of the night her family was accused of attempting to overthrow the government of President Islam Karimov. The police came to charge her grown sons, Oibek and Uigun Ruzmetov, but her husband Sobir was also dragged off to the cells. It was Ramadan and the police said that she could take food and clothing to her menfolk. But that was a trick—the Uzbek police have a habit of detaining, threatening and intimidating family members to make it easier to extract confessions from those they really want to lock up. This was Darmon Sultonova’s awful tale: ‘They held me for one night in solitary confinement. They hurled insults at me, as if I were a dog; they handcuffed me naked and gave me no water. They told me: “We will kill your whole family, even the new baby.” ‘I was still stripped naked when they showed me to Uigun. Twice they walked him by me. He looked so bad; he had been completely 75
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beaten up. I could only cry, I couldn’t talk to him. They told him: “Your parents and your wife are also in prison and your children are in an orphanage. If you don’t sign these documents we will do something very bad to your wife.” ‘Uigun said in court that he was told that his wife would be raped before his eyes if he did not confess.’ On July 29, 1999, the Tashkent Provincial Court sentenced Oibek and Uigun Ruzmetov to death—they are assumed to have been executed because they have not been heard of since. Their 65-year-old father was jailed for five years, on trumped-up drugs and weapons charges.
I was on the road again and Tashkent quickly revealed itself as a city of spivs, thugs and standover merchants. The blousy Uzbek sitting beside me on the flight from Moscow was not convincing when I asked what his line of business was. ‘Culture exchange,’ he said, deadpan. He now lived in New York and he promised that when we landed his girlfriend would drive us to a black-market currency trader who gave a generous rate, even if it meant walking away with a house-brick-sized wad of Uzbek soms for each $US100 I changed. He pointed to our in-flight meal: ‘The junior airline staff run a racket. They deliberately order extra meals for every flight and later they sell the ones that have not been served. Their bosses know they are doing this—they get a slice of the action.’ He warned me of the risk that perestroika had brought to the streets of Tashkent. Individual policemen would bid for ‘sweet corners’, intersections at which they could pull over as many cars as they liked and then invite motorists to bribe their way out of prosecution. ‘You see, prosecution leaves a paper trail, but bribes don’t and the cops can do it only for as long as they pay off the officers in ranks above them.’ So tutored, I soon saw it myself. When I enquired about flights I was told only first class was available—and later it was explained to me that the booking clerk and his crony bosses cream off the difference between the economy and first class fares. Likewise, when I proffered Uzbek soms
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to pay for an air ticket the money went into the cash register. US dollars went straight into a private purse produced from under the counter. It was the same in the shops. For lunch I indulged myself with a loaf of bread and a small jar of caviar, cheap in this former Soviet outpost. But as I sat in a park and opened the jar, I found that someone had been there before me—half the caviar was gone and the remainder had been smeared up against the sides of the jar to give it the appearance of being full. I was furious—I spoke no Uzbek and the shopkeeper no English when I returned to complain, but we understood each other clearly and I got my money back. I went shopping with a Western diplomat. As he bought a pirated copy of Microsoft’s new Windows XP software, a week before its $US1 billion gala launch in New York, he pondered: ‘I wonder if the Nigerians gave them technical assistance on corruption. Look at the pitiable bureaucratic salaries Uzbeks earn and then look at those luxury homes and cars.’
Tashkent sits on an oasis on the Chirchik River, where it is frowned upon by the imposing Tian Shan—the mountains of heaven. And as I walked its tree-lined boulevards it was hard not to dwell on the contradictions of the tight new alliance forged between Tashkent and Washington in the weeks since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Over the southern border in Afghanistan, Taliban thugs pulled men off the street to lecture and sometimes jail them for not growing their beards to the required ‘fist’ length. In Uzbekistan, they were pulled off the street for having the impertinence to grow a beard—and were compulsorily shaved. Further to the south and a bit to the west another stout ally of the US, Saudi Arabia, lives by the fundamentalist Wahhabi Islamic creed that also shaped the medieval regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But in Uzbekistan, Muslims are rounded up by the thousand, branded as terrorists and ‘Wahhabis’ and thrown into disease-ridden prisons without
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a proper trial for daring to pursue their religion outside the sanitised strictures of the mosques of the regime. Perhaps most confusing was the sense that the US had now gone full circle. Ten years ago the Cold War ended when the US trumped the authoritarian, undemocratic, discriminatory and corrupt Soviet Union with its burgeoning military complex and its paranoid security apparatus. Freed from the Moscow yoke the world might have hoped that Uzbekistan would be a poster boy for liberal democracy in the heart of Central Asia—after the Soviet years you would have thought it would turn its back on a controlled economy and a controlled society. Instead, the US’s newest strategic partner was authoritarian, undemocratic, discriminatory and corrupt. And, in keeping with its Soviet heritage, it too had a burgeoning military complex and a paranoid security apparatus. And now we had the truly remarkable development of US forces actually being based for the long term on what was Soviet territory, giving Washington a launch pad for attacks in the War on Terror, but also providing a vantage point from which to watch over the bonanza oil and gas fields of the region. For now, Moscow blessed all of this. But diplomats and analysts worried about the mixed messages being sent to the Muslim world. A human rights activist in Tashkent asked: ‘What will the US do when the Uzbek regime demands support to deal with what it sees as its internal threats? Washington needs to look at whom it is dealing with here. With the exception of Turkmenistan, where people have no civil or political rights, Uzbekistan is by far the Central Asian country with the worst record in human rights.’
It was a bitterly cold day as I drove south through endless cotton fields and layers of secrecy and subterfuge to Termez, a bleak and lonely dot on the map of Central Asia. It was being shaken alive with a new sense of urgency as publicity-shy CIA undercover agents and publicity-hungry scouts for humanitarian organisations investigated the huge supply route potential of the only river crossing on Uzbekistan’s 100-kilometre border with Afghanistan. The crossing was called the Friendship Bridge but it
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had been closed for years, the border sealed tight as a drum. It was a very unfriendly place, a far cry from its days as a crossroad on the Silk Road. The mile-wide Amu Darya is the ancient Oxus renamed. In the days of the old Soviet empire, it was the last line in Moscow’s fight to check the northward advance of Islam. The Uzbeks had reinforced Moscow’s electric fences and electronic surveillance and now they constantly patrolled the heavily mined border strip, terrified of any advance across these turbid waters by the Taliban, who had declared war on Uzbekistan in retaliation for the new warmth between Washington and Tashkent. I was chasing three stories within striking distance of Termez—the unrelenting battle just across the river for the strategic northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif; the international relief effort for the people of Afghanistan being put together in huge warehouses at the river port; and the Khadabad air force base, just north of the port, where more than 1000 US special forces troops were digging in as the US effort built for the war in Afghanistan. But I had little joy. I was not going to Mazare-Sharif—the nearest I could get to the bridge was about 2 kilometres and I managed that only by poking around Termez’s sad little zoological garden where staff permitted me to look towards the bridge through a hole in the back wall. Even the port was closed—at the ancient Hakik al-Termezi mausoleum, I insinuated myself among visiting pilgrims, but all I could observe through the duck-egg blue arches was the monotonous movement of the border guards—and they waved me away with weapons cocked. And on the road to Khadabad I could see lumbering US supply aircraft coming in and agile combat helicopters heading south to Afghanistan, but outsiders—and that included me—were not allowed within 6 kilometres of the base, the existence of which was given away by multiple checkpoints on all access roads even though the US refused to admit that its forces were there. The US played down its presence. Diplomats argued that the Green Berets had been going there quietly, in small numbers, since the mid nineties as part of a training arrangement for the Uzbek military. And President George W. Bush kept repeating that this US war was against
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terrorism, not Islam—but in Uzbekistan, the dictatorial President Karimov was waging war against Islam. The revolutionary Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which was associated with Osama bin Laden and operated with him in Afghanistan, had been mounting incursions into Uzbekistan since 1997. But, in another of the many contradictions in this war, Central Asia scholar Ahmed Rashid argued that the IMU was fuelled by Saudi cash, including big donations from Uzbeks who had settled in Saudi Arabia, and that it had ties to the former Saudi security chief Prince Turki alFaisal. Also, there had been reports that in the mid nineties Turki ran the ‘Afghanistan file’ for the Saudis and that he was very close to both the Taliban and bin Laden who, before his fall from grace, had been a Turki protégé. Another organisation outlawed by the Uzbeks was Hizb ut-Tahrir. It was running a grass-roots campaign for what it claimed should be a non-violent switch to an Islamic state. But by some accounts it preached violent jihad, and on its website it said that a state of war existed between the US and all Muslims. But in confronting subversion, the Karimov regime’s crackdown on human rights had created the classic social pressure cooker, prompting unheeded warnings from human rights groups that, as with the youngsters of the Middle East, the discontent of impoverished Uzbek youth would draw them to violence in the name of Islam. Tom Malinowski, advocacy director of the US-based Human Rights Watch, cautioned: ‘How long will it be before the sons and brothers of peaceful Muslim believers now in Uzbek prisons opt for violence? What if Uzbeks turn their resentment not only on their abusive regime, but also against the American forces now on their soil? And what if Uzbekistan and its equally repressive neighbours then turn to the US for help in putting down an escalating internal threat—real or perceived?’ It was hard to gauge public opinion in a controlled and repressed community, but leaflets critical of the US deployment in Uzbekistan had been circulating. And, with youth unemployment running at about 50 per cent, a European diplomat observed: ‘Seventeen-year-old kids
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are sitting out in the Fergana Valley—it’s cold and there’s no work to do. A guy comes along with a Kalashnikov and a Koran and offers them an opportunity—what do you think the kids will do?’ As a coffee percolator gurgled in the background, he continued: ‘A few years ago the Uzbek president went to the UN and spoke about his security problems and all the delegates said “thank you” and sent him away and, so far, Uzbekistan has had the good manners not to say “we told you so”. There has been a threat to this country for the last five years and what is happening over the border in Afghanistan is a very graphic example of the way this place could go.’ Uzbeks had a taste of freedom during former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s period of perestroika. A political opposition emerged and many of the 25 million people once again turned to Islam, which had been suppressed during the years of Soviet domination. Back then President Karimov was the first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. Now he was president and the party was still in there, running the government—it just had a different name. He was elected in 1991 with 86 per cent of the vote and confirmed in office last year with a staggering 91.1 per cent of the vote, all of which led democratic watchdogs like the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe to warn that those figures were more a measure of an ability to rig an election than of popular appeal. The farce of it all became abundantly clear on voting day when Karimov’s only opponent for the presidency emerged from the polling station to tell reporters that even he had voted for Karimov. Karimov quickly saw off the political opposition, most of whom went into exile. He made a sham of the parliament, which sat for only five or six days a year, and he made a lapdog of the press—nothing was published without being run past a government censor. The diplomat who was happy to buy the pirated Windows XP explained: ‘When the Russians put pencil to paper when they were carving up the USSR, they did not take account of ethnic distribution when they drew the borders—so there are factions in this country and the president has been very successful in balancing them.’ A wry grin gave his use of the word ‘balancing’ a meaning that was less than complimentary. ‘The country could have
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fragmented easily. It needed strong leadership . . . but sometimes it’s too strong.’ Another locally based observer told me: ‘When the government effectively did away with the parliament, it looked around for the next potential threat to the power elite—they saw it as Islam.’ Karimov started to shut down the mosques of popular mullahs and in 1999 he started rounding up Muslims in big numbers. More than 7000 political or religious prisoners were estimated to be in his jail, most of them serving sentences of 15 years or more for offences such as praying at home, studying the Koran privately or having listened to sermons by mullahs who had been struck off by the regime. As a lag from the Soviet era, it was not surprising that President Karimov had resorted to the boot on the neck to deal with what he saw as any threat to his authority. But he had also proved to be a wily diplomat, tap-dancing with Moscow and Washington to make Uzbekistan a substantive, if somewhat bedraggled, regional power. And notwithstanding his appalling record on human rights and his reluctance to reform the old Soviet command economy, he had managed to avoid serious threats from either the US or Europe to use their financial and material aid packages as a lever for the reform of a regime that was underpinned by torture and, in some cases, ‘disappearances’. Victims were tortured, beaten, burnt or abused with electric shocks; and often they were made to spend long periods handcuffed to a high bar, so that their toes barely touched the ground. Rape and sodomy and other sexual abuses were common. And because many people had been set up by policemen who put drugs, bullets or subversive material in their pockets so that they could then be charged with possession of the contraband, many men in the far northeast of the country were said to have taken to sewing up their pockets. Those who were roped in by Karimov’s anti-Islam drive were subjected to what were called ‘hate rallies’, some of which were televised nationally.
At the end of a taxi-ride deep into the suburbs of Tashkent I found 56-year-old Mahbubu Kasymova in a dimly lit, rundown apartment
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block. Kasymova, mother of six, was harassed and finally jailed for her campaigning for human rights reform as a member of the outlawed nationalist movement Birlik. With her black hair swept into a tight bun, with her weathered face and sturdy arms crossed on the table before her, she took little satisfaction from the fact that she was one of only two Uzbeks known to have been freed early in their sentence as a result of an international pressure campaign. With gaping holes in her gums because most of her teeth fell out as a result of the bad prison diet, she told me: ‘I was brought into this big meeting and some of the people were relatives of the victims of the 1999 bomb blasts. One of my neighbours was there and he started telling them all that I was a bad woman because, he said, I had allowed a terrorist to live in my home.’ She was branded a terrorist on national TV and she and her family were constantly harassed. She said: ‘They came knocking on my door, claiming to be “plumbers” when there was nothing wrong with my pipes. The police demanded to know who was staying in my house and they planted drugs in the pockets of one of my nephews and a grenade in the pocket of another.’ Some human rights investigators had to stay anonymous if they were to preserve their ability to help these people. One angrily told me: ‘It’s an exercise in cynicism. The Uzbeks now justify campaigns of religious discrimination as counter-terrorism and they are exploiting the tragedy of the World Trade Center to label religious prisoners as terrorists.’ But long before the destruction of the World Trade Center, this regime and its enforcers had refined the practice of oppression and terror in the name of the state.
This story ended where it started, with the plight of Darmon Sultonova whose sons are thought to have been executed and whose husband still languishes in prison. She again came to the attention of human rights investigators when she decided to appeal against her family’s convictions. She soon discovered that she would have to pay to go to court— the lawyers she asked to take the case explained to her the sliding scale
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of fees charged by judges to have a sentence reduced. She was determined to appeal, but first she had to scrimp and save. She said: ‘They [the lawyers] offered me a deal—if I would pay enough money they would alter the sentences of my sons to about ten years of imprisonment and they would let my husband come home. They wanted me to pay 3 000 000 soms [the equivalent of about $US6500] for such a deal. I’m selling everything I can . . . my gold teeth and the house.’
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A WAR OF CONTRADICTIONS 8 Kalakata Hills, Afghanistan October 2001
A dusty, tired-looking character hauled his bags through the dim light of a dreary corridor in Dushanbe’s Hotel Tajikistan. In the code of the road, his weariness and the layers of grime that coated his body and his baggage told me that this man had just come from where I was going—Afghanistan. He was just what I needed. Could we have a drink? A meal, perhaps? It was late October, the US had been dropping bombs for a few weeks now and the opposition Northern Alliance was threatening to punch its way out of the northeastern corner of Afghanistan, where for more than a year it had been pinned against the towering walls of the Hindu Kush. At this stage, it was hard to tell how long this war would last, but clearly the days of Taliban tyranny were numbered. I was in a hurry. I needed information about conditions in Afghanistan—where to go, what to take, who to look out for—good and bad. At home, journalism is a competitive, often bitchy business, but in distant war zones even the most hardened loners look out for each other with a camaraderie based on a simple truism—one day you’ll need a favour. The situation in Afghanistan, I knew, would be totally different and far more dangerous than the one I had encountered on my assignment there earlier in the year. The new arrival in the corridor was Dan Groshong, a Hong Kongbased freelance photographer just finishing an assignment in Afghanistan for the German magazine Stern. He had lots to tell, but he was also a 85
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bit of a tease. He described how he managed to sidestep the Northern Alliance’s mind-numbing bureaucracy and its extortionate range of car hire and interpreter fees after becoming the house guest of one of the Afghan warlords. He was not volunteering a name or an address, and the niceties of such encounters meant I couldn’t ask directly for such information. So, over a Russian beer and a Kiev cutlet we tap-danced around the unspoken—he told me how his warlord arranged to get him to the frontline, how he provided guides on patrol and just what a good story there was in the warlord himself. Groshong got my juices going, but he put only the vaguest clue on the table—the warlord was somewhere in the top corner of Afghanistan. The lobby of the Hotel Tajikistan was a giant transit lounge, a forest of cameras and satellite phones; a babble of English, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and more as the world’s media poured into the region. In this melee Groshong introduced me to a reporter whom he appeared to know quite well, a young man who worked for the Daily Telegraph in London, but I thought little of it at the time. That night I stuck a note on the noticeboard in the hotel lobby— did anyone planning to leave in the next 24 hours want to share costs for the muddy drive south to the Amu Darya, the river border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan? I was looking for strangers I could trust. By their nature these on-the-road relationships are fleeting. There are only three boxes and you have to tick them off quickly as you assess prospective companions: do they share your security worries, do they have a broad view of the story that is likely to keep you together on the road, and will they drive you mad? My note caught the attention of two others. One was Pawel (pronounced Pavel) Reszka, a jovial young reporter for the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita whose backpack was like a licensed Magic Pudding— after any crisis he could produce another half bottle of vodka. His excellent command of Russian would help us through a minefield of Tajik and Afghan roadblocks. The other was Argentinian Juan Etchebarne, a former military officer turned photographer who had a very useful knowledge of weapons and military life.
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The authorities in Dushanbe were milking the media. There was no story here, just a taxi queue, with all of us wanting to get on the road to northern Afghanistan. But it was not that simple. I had first applied for a visa at the Tajik mission to the United Nations in New York. There, a bureaucrat told me that he couldn’t issue the visa but he would ask the Russians to issue one on behalf of Tajikistan—and would I mind putting a cheque for $US100 for him in the mail? The Russians, on 91st Street in uptown Manhattan, were happy to oblige. Multiple entry? Did I want it issued that day? But when the clerk told me how much it would cost I thought he was trying to sell me an air ticket, not a visa—$US350 just for permission to pass through Moscow and Dushanbe. The visa issued by the Russians was accepted when I entered Tajikistan by road from neighbouring Uzbekistan. But you also had to have a government-issued press card in this part of the world, so my first stop in Dushanbe was the office of Sulieman Rashidov at the Foreign Ministry. ‘Visa?’ he queried as he leafed through my Irish passport. I pointed to the Russian document stapled to one of the pages but he gave me a practised look: ‘That’s not a valid visa—it allows you into this country, but it does not allow you to leave. How can you go to Afghanistan?’ Cutting to the chase, he wanted $US160 for a one-month visa which I didn’t need and $US40 for a press card that I didn’t want. He was unmoved by my anger: ‘If you feel badly about this, you should complain. The Foreign Ministry is a progressive organisation, and we’re trying to weed out people who work on bribes,’ he told me with a straight face. I was furious. But in the mad rush of last minute shopping for Afghanistan I had another Tajik encounter that lifted my spirits. When I was last in Afghanistan I found it impossible to clutch a plastic water bottle while riding a horse, which was the only way to get to parts of the frontline. So I drew up a crude design for a sock into which the drink bottle would fit, with a strap to sling over my shoulder. I went in search of a seamstress. It was a bleak and wet day but in a pocket of warmth above a bazaar in the west of the city I found 20 women huddled over sewing machines. I walked in and they ignored me. Faces bent to
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their machines, they worked away, stealing glances at the idiot foreigner clutching a drawing and a swatch of fabric purchased as he came through the bazaar. I had no Tajik, they had no English. Finally, a woman in the farthest corner from the door smiled and beckoned. She cleared her machine, pulled up a chair for me and went to work with my fabric. As she did, curiosity got the better of her colleagues; they started moving in. First, a woman in green wanted to stitch the edges of the cloth. A woman in red wanted to press the seams and a third woman seized on making the shoulder strap. The woman in blue insisted on bringing me a glass of green tea and a rounded loaf of bread. This wonderful encounter, all of it done with sign language, a drawing and, judging by the laughter, some raucous suggestions, took less than 30 minutes. My wife later insisted that I could have bought a nylon version at a camping store in New York, but I now had the bestdressed water bottle for Afghanistan. My new friends the seamstresses wouldn’t take any money, but after much haggling the woman who had smiled first agreed to accept the equivalent of $US10, but only if she could share it with her colleagues. The sun had yet to rise when our black Volga—the bulky sedan favoured by officials in the old Soviet world—set out for the border the next morning, its occupants determined to avoid any more of the excesses of the local authorities. The Tajik Foreign Ministry insisted that journalists travelled to the border in convoys that were permitted to go south only twice a week. But there were good reasons to ignore this edict. Whenever the police and military halted the convoys to demand bribes, it was like shooting fish in a barrel—no one could proceed until all in the convoy had paid; the whole convoy could only go as fast as the slowest vehicle; worse, it meant that everyone crossed the river at the same time, pushing up the price of hire cars for the next leg of the journey; and, inevitably, the convoy arrived in Khoja Bahauddin, the seat of Northern Alliance power, in darkness, which made it difficult to check what accommodation was available in a town with no electricity. So we bucked the convoy, leaving three hours earlier than the appointed time. It worked—the official status conjured by our polished black Volga
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meant we were waved through most checkpoints. When we were stopped Pawel was able to sweet-talk us through with his Russian. We got as far as Farkhar, 30 kilometres short of the river crossing, at which point the road turned to mud and we were forced to abandon the Volga for a local four-wheel drive—there was only one and because we were early we didn’t have to fight our convoy colleagues to get it. Finally, after travelling for 10 hours we reached Dashte Qala, where we crossed the border into Afghanistan on a decrepit pontoon pulled back and forth across the river by an old tractor engine hooked to a set of cables. Immediately we came face to face with the reality of Afghanistan’s wartime economy, a menacing system of mafia networks driven by a desperate greed and the power of the gun. As we landed, a spit-and-polished Northern Alliance commander leapt aboard the ferry, greeting us like long lost friends. He issued what we thought was an invitation to join him in his mud-brick office for tea. But he had business to transact and he backed it with all the authority of his post: he told us that we would be paying $US250 for his Russian-built military jeep to take us all of 40 kilometres to Khoja Bahauddin. As a special favour he threw in an armed guard—a sullen 14-year-old boy who, halfway through the trip, turned his Kalashnikov on us and demanded more money, claiming that the commander would not cut him in on the $US250 we had already paid. The three of us, like sardines on the back seat, stared him down, explaining in English that we didn’t understand a word he was saying. Khoja Bahauddin was a windswept madhouse. We found a room with not a stick of furniture but with enough space for the three of us to spread our swags on the bare floor. There was no electricity, no running water and, absurdly, it cost $US60 a night! We had our own supply of tinned greens, dried fruit and energy bars, but to flesh out our diet we still had to eat in the bazaar where restaurants swarmed with flies. After one particularly bad meal I had to urgently consult a doctor. I called my doctor of many years, Andrew Hardy, at Double Bay in Sydney. I was uncertain of what dose of antibiotic to take from my first aid box. A man of calm demeanour, he seemed to take it in his stride
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that his patient was calling by satellite phone from the backblocks of Afghanistan. His instructions resolved my stomach bug rapidly—and I still owe him for the consultation. A daily shower was out of the question and so at first we washed at a well in the compound where we lodged. But a keen-eyed colleague observed that the water level was about the same depth as the hole-inthe-ground latrine only metres away so we soon gave that up. Finally, to stop our scalps from itching, we shaved our heads. The international press saw Afghanistan as a story, but Afghans saw us as an easy touch for the only currency that held any value for them— the greenback. The Northern Alliance had printed so much of their own currency to pay burgeoning war debts that now the Afghani was worthless. So the Northern Alliance, effectively a government in exile, decreed that we would pay interpreters and drivers $US100 a day each—more than most of them had earned in their entire lives—and a hefty chunk of which they were forced to pay to the mafia types running the Alliance bureaucracy. It was thanks only to Juan’s skilful negotiation that we three were deemed to be one paying team and not three paying individuals. Hundreds of reporters had been cooped up in Khoja Bahauddin for weeks, waiting for something to happen—which all too often is what covering a war is about. They warned us that the Northern Alliance Foreign Ministry was keeping the press pack on a tight leash. Nothing happened without a piece of paper. You wanted to go to the front? You had to have handwritten permission, issued by the Ministry and valid for only a day at a time. This was a device to control our movements. The permits were issued from a chaotic office in Khoja Bahauddin. Going to the frontline started with a two-hour drive over rutted, bonebreaking roads back to Dashte Qala. There we had to get the permit endorsed by a senior officer before we were allowed to proceed to the front—with instructions that we must be home by dark. The bureaucracy was driving us mad. Clearly, we had to get out of town. We signed up Abdul, a driver who came with a Russian four-wheel drive, and Sadiq, a 17-year-old self-taught student of English. Heading to the frontline, Abdul took us into a parched, ancient land where the road was as wide
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as he wanted it to be—at one stage I looked out to see that we were ploughing through a trough of dust, abreast of three other Russian fourwheel drives, as Abdul, with a look of pure exhilaration on his face, tried to pull ahead of the rest of the media pack heading for the frontline. We were on the old Silk Road. A great balding bluff off to the southwest was Ay Khanum, which until about 200 BC had been the easternmost outpost of ancient Greece. The sheer, rock-faced mountains of Tajikistan glowered from the north, and to the south lay the Tagmalie Range, a geographic tiddler compared to the grand Hindu Kush rising up behind it. And on this first day we were blessed. Most days, so much dust swirled in the air that you could see little, but as we drove to the frontline we could see all the way to the glittering snow of the Hindu Kush. The mountains formed a perfect theatre for the noise of war. But while this war was being fought, all eyes were on the Kalakata Hills, a low massif a few kilometres across the Kokcha River from Dashte Qala. The Taliban had held the high side of the hills for about 14 months, boxing in the Alliance, which desperately needed to get through to key centres like Taloqan, Kunduz and Mazar-e-Sharif. We went to the frontline, crossing the Kokcha on sure-footed ponies that fought the torrent as they grappled for firm ground on a bottom of rattling stones. On the other side of the river our Northern Alliance guides urged us to keep moving, because at times we could be seen by Taliban snipers. When they pointed out a hill with a cemetery on top, which they said was the new frontline, I recognised it immediately. This was the same front as the one I had seen when I was here three months earlier, which meant that the Alliance had not moved a centimetre since the US entered the war. In fact, Alliance commanders attempting to breach a Taliban stronghold to the east of here—the city of Mazar-eSharif—admitted to reporters at the time that they were being pushed back. And the Taliban was making cocky predictions that it had 300 000 men who were ready to fight through the winter. That was just one of the contradictions in the war. Another was the gap between official statements and military reality. Off in Washington, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he was
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well pleased that his ferocious firepower was grinding down the Taliban. But out on the sloped shoulders of the Kalakata Hills, the conflict seemed casual, even lazy. The first B-52 bomber wheeled in from the southeast at 1.30 pm. Watching from the ground, it was a tiny dot, but its vapour trails carved great silver arcs in a cobalt-blue sky and it took so long to fix on its target that the Taliban fighters had a full 40-minute warning before it dropped the first of half a dozen bombs. A couple fell about 800 metres from the Northern Alliance trench in which I sheltered. There was a whoosh, a huge ball of fire and an earth-shaking series of explosions before a roiling cloud of dust and smoke ripped up to the heavens. The bombers mostly flew in pairs, some doing a couple of hit-andruns, others nipping in for a quick single strike before stealing back to base. Whomp, whomp, whomp . . . the bombing run went on and on until the separate mushroom cloud of each blast melded into a single dark and dangerous curtain pushed and pulled by a gentle breeze. It was a fearsome sight—but only while it lasted. Compared to the size of the mountain on which we were dug in, the crater left by each bomb was a relative pinprick. This was my first opportunity to observe the US bombers at work in Afghanistan and I took an odd comfort from the realisation that if the Taliban fighters were safe in the absence of a direct hit on their trenches, then so was I. The nearest Taliban units were dug in 1200–1500 metres to the east. They had about a dozen positions along the ridge and their fighters were clearly visible—after and before each of three US flyovers in which 20 or more bombs hammer-punched the hillside. The Taliban disappeared before each run but they always came back, and when they did their gait was just as casual as before . . . nothing urgent, nothing erratic. The US marked the start of the fifth week of bombing in the war in Afghanistan with what it said was its heaviest day of attacks—and the main target was the Kalakata Hills. But, for now, the Taliban was taking it in its stride. The Northern Alliance was laid-back too. If the Taliban used the generous US warning that bombing was imminent to race for the caves
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and tunnels that my Northern Alliance companions told me burrowed deep into the hills on the other side of the ridge, then Alliance fighters camping at the foot of the mountain did the opposite—they dropped everything and raced to the top for a front-row seat for the fireworks. They were beside themselves with excitement, almost gabbling as the B-52s dumped their munitions from a point way up in the blue that seemed to be directly over our heads. As we watched from a trench, Alliance Commander Mohammed Ijaq briefed me on the Taliban reinforcements. Crouching as we ran, he then took me through the trenches to a sandbagged bunker where he handed me a set of binoculars. I looked out and saw a bunch of Taliban fighters across no-man’s land, but as Ijaq panned down the line he gave a different account of this civil war: ‘Chechen, Punjabi, Chinese, Arab . . .’ Earlier, an Alliance Commander going by the single name of Zekrullah had overseen half a dozen men who were on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion. They had been peppering the Taliban with a heavy machine gun which they lugged from one Alliance post to the next, hoping to persuade the enemy that they were well-armed. The Kalakata Hills were vital. Control had changed from side to side during the years of war, but the Taliban had held them for the last 14 months. Zekrullah said: ‘If we breach this line we can capture Taloqan and Kunduz.’ These towns were astride supply routes that were essential if the Alliance was to break out of the northeast and get desperately needed Russian weapons it had stockpiled in neighbouring Tajikistan into the hands of supporters across the north. So what were they waiting for? Where was the Alliance advance they always talked about but never executed, I asked. Zekrullah replied: ‘If our defence ministry orders us to do so, we will. But it would be better and so much easier if the US bombers would blow them away for us.’ Every Alliance commander I spoke to said his men were ready to advance any day. But it didn’t happen. Instead, there was much grousing about the failure of the US to open the way for them. On the way to the front I stopped at the Boding Gek training camp, on the river flats north of Dashte Qala. There, Commander—they’re
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all commanders—Taj Mohammed pulled at his reddish beard and swore that morale was high, his weapons were good and his men were ready. However, the 200 men on the parade ground in their brand new Chinese uniforms looked like raw recruits. In a country in which almost every male child plays with rifles from birth, Taj Mohammed was trying to put the men through the most basic weapons training with only one rifle between them. And they were hopelessly distracted by the big guns—the B-52s—circling overhead. The Northern Alliance was so flaky it was hard not to think that talk about a halt to the fighting in the coming holy month of Ramadan might have more to do with resting war-weary bones than with religion. It was a problem. Washington had two taps in this war—its bombing missions and the supply of weapons and advisers. It turned them on and off as it attempted to control the movement of the Northern Alliance. If it wanted the Alliance to go forward, Washington tried to bomb the Taliban out of the way. And if it wanted to hold the Alliance back— and at that point it was leery of clearing the way for the Alliance to march on Kabul—then the US bombers left Taliban trenches and artillery in place. It was a risky strategy because, if the Alliance suddenly developed the gumption or energy to bolt for Kabul, Washington might not have been able to catch up. However, if the US didn’t get more weapons, ammunition and fuel to the Alliance fighters, they might well decide that the US could do all the heavy lifting. These men were still grieving for the loss of their sainted leader, Ahmad Shah Masoud, whose assassination had been orchestrated by Osama bin Laden two days before September 11. The Taliban and bin Laden had hoped that Masoud’s death would break their spirit, and the Taliban brought thousands of new fighters onto this front for a series of punishing attacks in the days after the guerilla leader’s death. But the Alliance fighters were in the dark—Masoud’s lieutenants made sure of that by hiding his body in a freezer across the border in Tajikistan while they tried to work out what to do. The Alliance held the line until the start of the US bombing that forced the Taliban back on the defensive. But in the absence of Masoud, little about the Alliance was believable.
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The wily Tajik commander was the glue that had held this fractious rabble together. The new man was the introverted General Mohammed Qasem Fahim, an insecure individual and former intelligence chief who seemed to contemplate the shoes into which he was stepping with dread. He was the leader, but the leader was dead—every soldier in his army carried a picture of Masoud; every tank and every APC was adorned with a portrait of Fahim’s dead predecessor. There was another reason for the Northern Alliance to hold the line on the Kalakata Hills, one that troubled analysts in bunkers from Moscow to Washington. This line blocked the Taliban, and bin Laden, from pushing northwards into the Muslim heart of the old Soviet republics, in pursuit of their grand design for a new religious state that would pull parts of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya and Xinjiang, a Muslim corner of China, into the Taliban’s fundamentalist armlock. So where was this war going? The US strikes were impressive, but the Alliance seemed to be going nowhere. If Afghanistan was seriously at war, there should have been more noise in the Kalakata Hills. The only intrusions were brief visits by the B-52s, the occasional pock-pock of small-arms fire and the clopping of our horses’ hooves as we came down from the Alliance trenches through the narrow, winding alleys of mud-brick villages that had emptied out months ago because of the war. Dawdling back, it struck me that the day was just like September 11 in New York—winter’s cold embrace was tightening but the bombs were falling from a sky so beautiful that autumn was telling us it had a few good days left—good days for a war in danger of going nowhere in a hurry.
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THE DEATH OF THREE COLLEAGUES Kalakata Hills November 2001
Afghan horsemen use a homemade wooden saddle, so soreness was setting in by the time we got back to Dashte Qala. Just before sunset we climbed back into the jeep. Abdul, our driver, was headed for Khoja Bahauddin when I decided to take a punt, to see if we could find our warlord. ‘Abdul, take us to a local warlord,’ I said, and sat back to see what might happen. He pressed on in the same direction, but just out of Dashte Qala he veered off down a track, through some trees, past an anti-aircraft battery and into an astonishing oasis—leafy greenery, rolling lawns and a rose garden; the music of running water; pheasants in a cage and geese and guinea fowl foraging at will. There was a rocket launcher at the bottom of the garden but before we even set eyes on Commander Mamur Hassan I had a feeling that we had discovered photographer Dan Groshong’s mysterious warlord, for sitting on the verandah of one of the outhouses was a cardboard box on which were scrawled two words: Daily Telegraph. This had to have been where Groshong had come to know the London reporter to whom he had introduced me back in Dushanbe. Hassan came to greet us—he had a woollen pakul hat pulled down on his ears, a distinguishing white streak through his short grey beard, and a hunter’s vest pulled over a lightweight sweater. His skin was swarthy but he had the gentle gait of the economics student he had been 96
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in his twenties rather than the bloodlusting swagger that might have been expected of the 50-something warlord he had become. We had a brief chat, but we had to pitch our request for some of his time in a way that might elicit an invitation to stay. I proposed that he be the subject of a profile that would require several interviews, to which he suggested that we be guests in his house. Moving into Hassan’s compound meant that we would travel about the district under his authority, not that of the bureaucrats at the ministry. That was a great advance. The Northern Alliance has always dreamt of national power in Afghanistan, but in that country all power came from the likes of Hassan and the armies they controlled. The power he wielded was handed down from his grandfather through his father, just as were the 60 hectares of lush family orchards. ‘I was born here . . . this land is the only money-making venture I have,’ he said. Hassan held court most mornings at the edge of his rose garden, dispensing favours and patronage to a patient queue of locals as a dozen edgy bodyguards looked on—the assassinated Ahmad Shah Masoud had been a dear friend and Hassan was taking no risks. And neither were the household staff. When Hassan called for his worry beads or a cotton skullcap that was cooler than his customary woollen pakul, retainers rushed to fetch them as though their lives depended on it. This warlord was proud of his quarter-century as a warrior and he boasted that he was one of only two survivors of about 30 local men who stood to fight the Soviet invasion in 1979. Last winter he and the other commanders in the region had lost 700 men repelling a determined Taliban attempt to advance across the Kokcha River. He had fought for and against all the big shooters in Afghanistan’s wars, spending years at a time operating from mountain caves. Pressed on his loyalties, he acknowledged that the Northern Alliance funded part of his army and he declared his allegiance to it. But then in the same breath he explained that it was he, not the Northern Alliance, who controlled his soldiers and the region and that his soldiers were loyal to him—not to the Alliance. Hassan had an eye on his place in history and, as we unpacked the next afternoon, it was obvious that he was well pleased that we were
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there. But off to one side was a haughty, brooding figure that, we were told later, was Volker Handloik, a freelance writer on assignment for Stern magazine. Handloik was a remarkable looking man, built like a god with thick golden curls that fell to his broad shoulders. With the onset of winter he had taken to strutting, peacock-like, through the foreign press pack in a green and brown chapan, a sort of quilted dressing gown favoured by the men of Central Asia as a barrier against the unremitting cold. He wore yellow-tinted glasses and more than one of our colleagues asked if he was a spy. Handloik cut us dead. He had been at Hassan’s compound for weeks, working the warlord and his lieutenants with a manly charm as he insinuated himself into their war plan. A couple of other journalists—from the Daily Telegraph and US News & World Report—had slipped in on his act, and now here to cramp his style further were The Sydney Morning Herald and Rzeczpospolita. Pawel and I put on our thick skins and got on with the job. Hassan spent most nights on his sat-phone, talking with warlords across the north. Then he would join us for breakfast, giving us his view of the war’s progress. He was well connected—he predicted with 24 hours notice the start of the US bombing on October 7 and now he was becoming firmer in his predictions that the ground war was imminent. One morning he entertained us by rating his enemies and his allies. The Taliban, he said, was a more difficult enemy than the Russians. His face creased with a smile as he recalled: ‘With the Russians it was like a picnic; we liked that—it was fun. They tried to take my area, but they failed— they could not cross the river.’ And what about the US? Before Hassan could answer, a white-haired old man sitting at his side cut in: ‘In the Russian war I had 5000 men under my command. The Russians were good soldiers. But these Americans? They’re not like normal soldiers, they just want to stay high in the sky; they won’t confront the Taliban on the ground.’ In Afghanistan there was a general contempt for foreign armies, even those who came to help, and Hassan didn’t hold back either: ‘The Americans are in too much of a hurry. At first they wouldn’t talk to us; now we are talking, but they won’t listen. And this
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bombing is too light to unsettle the enemy. The Taliban are strong because they have brought their foreign forces to this front—Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens who are not likely to succumb to our entreaties to defect. We know they are there because we hear their radio traffic.’ Volker Handloik, meanwhile, continued to ignore us. I probably didn’t help relations when I had a crisis of technology as I attempted to file my profile of Hassan to the Herald. Managing all the portable elements of an ‘office’ on the road in a country like Afghanistan is a complicated business at the best of times. I would write my stories on the laptop, powered by electricity when it was available or else using its built-in battery. Then I’d hook it to my satellite phone which, because it needed direct line of contact with the satellites, meant I had to stand for half an hour at a time in the open on freezing Afghan nights if I was to file stories and catch editors at a sensible time of the day in Australia. This crisis was a double whammy—the software that linked the laptop to the phone and the built-in battery in the laptop both failed. I could talk on the phone, but not send data; I could write on or read from the laptop, but only if I had electric power. The upshot was that I would have to file my report to a copy-taker, reading it over the telephone—a laborious process. And I had to have electric power so that I could read the story on my computer screen. However, because of the time difference, everyone in Australia was in bed during the hours when Hassan’s generator was running. So I rang Alec Russell, an old friend from the Yugoslav wars who was now foreign editor of the Daily Telegraph in London, where people were up and about. He offered to fax my report from London. He patched me through to a Telegraph copy-taker to take down my 2000-word file. I stood on a small patch of dirt in the open air where the phone could pick up a satellite in the starry Afghan sky, and read from the computer screen in a very loud voice, including spelling out dozens of local names several times. Unthinkingly, I sat right outside the open window to a room in which Handloik was trying to sleep. He said nothing the next day. On the daily horse treks across the Kokcha River we’d bump into him, on the trail or in the trenches. And after a couple of days he lightened
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up out of the blue with a reference to my computer woes: ‘You should have asked—I would have lent you my computer or the sat-phone.’ After that the ice melted quickly. We’d have long chats about Afghanistan and the war, during which he revealed an abiding interest in people and how they lived and behaved in extremes. He dismissed as ‘bean counters’ our colleagues who forever tallied explosions, vehicle and troop numbers. ‘Does it matter if there were ten or twelve bombs?’ he asked. The night of that particular discussion the US bombing was so intense that the bean counters would have ended up in a muddle as they tried to keep up with the blasts that rocked the night. And if Commander Hassan’s latest predictions were correct, and if the Northern Alliance was to embark on the long anticipated advance, then the tanks would start moving that night. They did. At about midnight the engines could be heard, 30 of them, maybe 40, heading across the river. They threw huge sheets of silver spray left and right as they went. Emboldened by stunning news—with US backing, the Northern Alliance had routed the Taliban in the trophy northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif—Hassan and his fellow commanders made a snap decision that they would attack along the full length of the northern front. At Dashte Qala troop trucks queued up on the banks of the Kokcha River, some needing to be push-started before they could chase after the tanks. Soldiers complained that they had been hauled from their beds and given little time to prepare for battle. Early the next morning there was as much excitement in the press corps as there had been among the troops the previous night. This was possibly a significant turning point in the story, and everyone wanted to be on top of it. We barrelled down to the river in our hired Russian four-wheel drives only to find a wall of Northern Alliance officers. Offers of cigarettes didn’t work; a fistful of cash was rebuffed. Weapons were cocked to make the message clear: ‘Today you may not go to the front.’ Frustrated, a big press pack assembled at Hassan’s but he gave a convincing display of helplessness. He sent most on their way, and even the handful of us who were staying at his compound were fooled into believing he could not get us around this edict, which some in the pack concluded must have come from Washington.
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We weighed our options over a lunch of boiled rice and mutton— again. The best seemed to be to drive a few kilometres south of the town and pay a villager to guide us through the uncertain depths of the river. Then we could hike the last few kilometres to the frontline. This was the story we had all been waiting for. Pawel Reszka and I stripped our gear down to the basics—food for a few days, a satellite phone, laptop and a toothbrush. We were heading for our vehicle when Hassan suddenly emerged again and ordered all of us to follow him. Our four jeeps—all emblazoned with the word ‘Press TV’—fell in behind Hassan’s and in a single cloud of dust we raced to the river. There he brushed aside the protestations of the men from the ministry and after a quick halt at the water’s edge—during which the Afghan drivers waterproofed the engine distributors with a dollop of grease—Hassan led us across the water and over the flood plains to Chagatai, a deserted village. The odd mortar shell whined harmlessly overhead as we climbed steps cut into the sheltered back end of the massif. A crowd dressed in military grunge-green was waiting for Hassan. With bravura, he and his field commander, Amir Bashir, wandered openly in the line of Taliban fire. It seemed not to trouble either of them that this was the spot where a Taliban bullet had grazed Hassan’s arm a year earlier. Ducking in the trenches we could hear the bullets singing on their way over our heads, but the warlord and his mate contemptuously refused to take cover. Hassan held a two-way radio at arm’s length, adopting the pose of a Greek orator as he barked orders for the movement of men and machines. Then, with all the solemnity he could muster, he declared: ‘I order the men to start fighting.’ They began pounding the Taliban lines with rockets and mortars, cannon fire and small arms. Except for the minutes during which the US bombers were overhead, the Taliban fighters could be seen on the ridge about 1.5 kilometres to the west, and now there was a sense of battle urgency. A mortar round clipped one of the Alliance tanks; another burrowed into the mound at the end of the trench in which we sheltered. As the US bombers whacked at the Taliban, great belts of percussion from missiles, rockets and shells bounced off the encircling
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mountains and at times the dust and smoke were so blinding they blocked the sun. Radio chatter was incessant—most of it in the Tajik and Uzbek of the Northern Alliance. But the Alliance could also listen in to the rising panic on enemy frequencies as the Taliban desperately counted heads after each US bombing run. The top of the Kalakata Hills was a perfect stage from which to watch the battle unfold—there were no trees to obscure my view across a hillside that seemed to roll gently up to the Taliban positions. But there were gullies out there big enough to swallow a tank. The Northern Alliance held the lower, eastern edge of the massif, its men and machines dug in at 200-metre intervals for about 3 kilometres. The Taliban was dug in in similar fashion on the higher, western ridge. US bombers prowled in from the south, circling twice or three times to get their bearings before dropping firepower that I could feel through my boots as the hills trembled. In the meantime, Northern Alliance rockets and cannon fire roared up and over our heads from launching positions on the flood plains behind us. Mortars to our left and right along the ridge zipped out like ‘whistling pheasants’, as the helpful Alec Russell had dubbed them during our days in the Balkans. Three old Soviet T55 tanks were splayed in a semicircle about 50 metres in front of our trench. They belched repeatedly, spitting fire as they disappeared in the smoke of their own discharge, and then we would hear the clank of spent shells tumbling noisily down the side of the hulking machines. After an opening barrage that lasted an hour or two, roaring engines and grinding gears signalled that the Alliance’s armoured personnel carriers were nosing into no-man’s land. At first they went alone, but then I could see squads of fearless men going in single file behind them, crouching as the APCs gave them cover until they arrived at a new line of trenches or a gully where they could take cover before zigzagging onwards up the slope. Hours later, as dusk settled over the hills, muzzle flashes and tracer shells lit up no-man’s land like a country fireworks night. In the middle of all this Commander Bashir stopped to pray. Borrowing a soldier’s scarf to use as a prayer mat, he carefully stepped out of
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his boots and knelt to face Mecca. It was the same direction in which his men were shooting and for several minutes he seemed quite oblivious to the chaos on the hillside. Finally the Alliance was showing that it had fire in its belly. And despite their reputation as fearsome fighters the Taliban seemed reluctant to venture into no-man’s land to challenge the Northern Alliance’s advance. Almost encircled by the Northern Alliance and psychologically and physically strung out from weeks of US bombing, their ammunition and morale seemed to be running low. Bashir rattled off orders to one of the tank crews: ‘There’s a Taliban tank on that hill—get it! Get it!’ In the excitement of it all, no less than 17 fighters stood around the tank, all screaming advice to the gunner. As the setting sun set fire to the vapour trail of US jets overhead, a lull in the fighting led the men of the Northern Alliance to speculate that the Taliban might have fled. The silence held for about an hour and now there was great excitement. Bashir and Hassan claimed they had control of the ridge and, amid much backslapping, planning started for the next day’s advance to Taloqan and Kunduz. Satisfied, Hassan went home, back across the river to his pheasants and his compound. We journalists stayed with Bashir until a damp mist settled on the hills at about 9 pm. We had been out there since early afternoon. Occasional but worrying bursts of small-arms fire came out of the darkness, but Bashir’s confidence held. Pawel Reszka and I came down off the mountain. We quickly decided that if we followed Hassan back over the Kokcha River we ran the risk of not being allowed to return the next morning, so we decided to stay—this was an important battle— and headed into the night, looking for somewhere to sleep. Abdul drove us into what we thought was an abandoned village and we waited by the well, confident that if anyone still lived there they would emerge to check on the strangers. After 10 minutes the glimmer of an oil light sketched the outline of a man rugged up against the winter cold as he edged along a wall to investigate the commotion of our arrival. Sadiq, our interpreter, explained our circumstances and in a trice we went from suspect interlopers to welcomed guests. Mohammed was the head of the only family that had refused to abandon the village as Taliban
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mortars rained down. With a tremendous show of generosity so common in the Afghan people, he ushered us to his compound. Despite poverty and the privations of war nothing was too much trouble. Women were woken from their beds to prepare a meal for which, in line with the local culture, they were not allowed to join us. With the men of the family we ate by paraffin light in a tight circle, sitting cross-legged on mats on the floor—rice, bully beef and thick sweetened milk which they instructed us to scoop up with chunks of delicious, freshly cooked flat bread. And over lots of sweet green tea Mohammed told us that his three wives had agreed to him taking a fourth wife. There was a gleam in his eye as he told us that he knew who she would be, but he could not approach her family until the war was over. However, he had bad news for me—no right-thinking woman in the village would become my wife because of the white streaks in my beard. When Mohammed snapped his fingers, bedrolls and a bucket of water were brought for us. It was not until dawn that I could see that only half of the building in which we slept was standing—the rest of it had been demolished in a direct mortar hit the previous week. Mohammed sent us on our way in the morning with a bag of freshly cooked bread, our water bottles topped up and an invitation to return any night we needed a place to sleep. Driving back to the Kalakata Hills we came across Volker, who was packing his kit after having camped the night on the side of the track. He was furious—his driver and interpreter were in revolt, demanding a doubling of their $US100 a day because, they claimed, this was a real war now. Sadiq quickly intimated to me that he was happy with his fee, but Abdul joined the uprising. After a lot of yelling we called their bluff. With much gesticulating and name-calling, Volker and I angrily pulled our gear from the back of the four-wheel drives, telling them we would walk. We got only 100 metres down the road before the strike collapsed. Sustained eruptions of mortar and tank fire during the night suggested that Bashir’s confidence about the outcome of the previous day’s fighting had been misplaced and we found him sitting cross-legged
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in his tent, crestfallen and bad-tempered because in the night the Taliban had retaken the ridge. The morning was quiet. There was no fighting so the tank crews spilled from the machines which had become their homes. They sheltered from wildcat enemy fire on the ground immediately behind them. Each crew was a little community—they made endless pots of green tea on small open fires, they prayed, and they dozed for hours on reed matting. A fighter removed the whip radio antenna from one of the tanks and used it as a rod to clean the machine’s barrel while the rest of his crew prepared a lunch that looked just appalling— tinned bully beef mushed with water to become a thin, fatty soup that they ate with circles of stale flat bread. Other reporters then started straggling up the hill to what we had come to think of as ‘our’ patch. In the same way that Volker at first had frozen us out, we in turn were not welcoming. Volker was particularly disgusted, suggesting that we move on to find unexplored territory elsewhere on the frontline. But we stayed. And as the afternoon shadows lengthened most of the newcomers cleared out—many wanting to cross back over the river in daylight. So when the last, decisive battle for the Kalakata Hills began late in the afternoon, there was just a handful of us—myself for The Sydney Morning Herald, Volker for Stern, Pawel for Rzeczpospolita and four new faces representing the Montreal Gazette and three French radio networks—Radio RTL, Radio France International and Radio France Culture. As the sun faded, Bashir cleaned his binoculars with the front tail of his shalwa kameez—the baggy shirt and pantaloons worn by Afghan men. He plastered his hair to his brow and passed around a tin of naswar, a finely ground mix of tobacco, spice and herbs that he and the rest of the Afghan male population savour in a glob which they hold between their lower lip and gum. He stroked his beard and argued against the advice of a group of his men who wanted to punch through the Taliban lines at a single point—Bashir wanted a broad offensive. He was agitated. Earlier, we had eavesdropped as he apologised by radio to the Northern Alliance leadership for failing to hold the ridge after the previous day’s battle. There were excited radio reports from places like Taloqan and
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Khojagar that the Taliban was in retreat, that the Alliance was breaking the enemy stranglehold on country to the south of us. Bashir cranked up the outgoing fire, yelling at his men. ‘That was good, that was the target,’ he called to a tank crew that had silenced the fire from a persistent Taliban trench. And to one of the mortar crews: ‘You have the right setting now, keep hitting them!’ Squatting on the earthen mound beside a trench, Bashir became almost airborne as he punched the air, yelling: ‘Those foreign Taliban fight like mad dogs! They try to hide in the smoke—but we are getting them.’ He called another 200 men to the fight as it became clear that in the Kalakata Hills Bashir was confronting one of the last, most determined Taliban holdouts in northern Afghanistan. The more the Taliban refused to buckle, the more ferocious the battle became. My notes from that night—scrawled in the dust and darkness in a personal cocktail of Pitman’s and English—are barely decipherable: ‘5.45: All is quiet and NA winning ridge for second time in 24 hours. Light of APCs climbing to the ridge . . . don’t stop . . . Keep moving to the next trench . . . They are at the trenches right now. They are cheering . . . lights on the hill.’ This hieroglyphic account of the battle ends abruptly—a blunt reminder that I recorded none of the horror that would soon unfold. Forty-five minutes after the Taliban guns had been silenced—during which time two of Bashir’s armoured personnel carriers had driven to the top of the Taliban ridge, turning to flash their headlights at us— Bashir decided to claim his reward. As he and a dozen or more of his men clambered onto an APC, he beckoned and we six reporters jumped up after them. I was the only one of my party of three to be on the machine—as we headed into no-man’s land Pawel was sitting away from the camp, filing a report to meet his Warsaw deadline; by this point Juan the photographer had peeled off from us. We careered off into the eerie night as the APC threw up clods of earth and a billowing cloud of sparks, smoke and dust. The driver tried to follow the tracks of vehicles that had gone before him, to avoid any anti-tank mines. As we approached the Taliban
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trenches, we overtook a column of Alliance fighters heading in the same direction, their casual stride leading me to think that the tenacious Taliban units that had taunted Bashir for more than a year had indeed been routed. I can still feel the cold evening breeze on my ears and Volker’s infectious excitement. As we arrived at the first line of abandoned Taliban trenches, he had to yell so that I could hear him over the engine’s roar. We pressed on, headlights blazing, and veered around a big bomb crater. But 100 metres further up the hill it became horribly clear that the Taliban had not quit the ridge. An explosion of fire came from three directions. It had taken us only minutes to power across the 1500-metre breadth of no-man’s land, but that was more than enough time for the Taliban to put this ambush in place and, presumably, they had allowed the first two Alliance APCs to scout their trenches in the hope of luring into their sights a prized target like Commander Bashir. Later, Bashir would describe the moment he realised he had made a fatal error: ‘I saw a rocket-propelled grenade launcher being pointed at us from a trench about 25 metres away.’ He doused the lights and ordered the driver to take off down a steep slope as the APC, with maybe 20 journalists and soldiers hanging on to its rooftop, was pelted with Russian-built PKA and Kalashnikov fire. Hundreds of bullets danced on the machine’s armour plating, but the rocket-propelled grenade that Bashir had seen came at us in the form of a ball of orange fire which ricocheted off the back end and exploded harmlessly. It was an anti-personnel device; an anti-tank grenade might have blown the whole APC to smithereens. Bashir’s order for a sudden change of direction required the driver to go through several gear changes, causing the APC to lurch violently. Some people fell off while others chose to jump, hoping to escape the hail of bullets. Handloik was sitting right beside me—our bodies were touching, his hand was on my shoulder. Suddenly I saw his body in full flight, going through what I took to be an expert soldier’s roll. I was aware that he had done three years military service and in the panic of the moment I presumed that he was attempting to land on his feet so
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that he could keep running to get out of the line of fire. Meanwhile, I clung desperately to the APC’s rooftop fittings, fighting a powerful momentum that urged my body weight to go faster than the machine itself as it pitched and bucked down an incredible slope. If I had lost my grip, I’d have gone over the front edge—either to be run over by the machine or to be hit by a hail of Taliban bullets. Decisions had to be instant. But looking back I feel as though time stopped, giving me hours to weigh my options. I remember fighting for control of my desperate breathing—it was so loud I could hardly hear what was happening around me. In a split second I thought of my family, my wife and my children, Patrick and Sophie. But most of all I thought about whether or not to stay on the APC. Wasn’t it a target? Should I jump and attempt to escape on foot? That way, I’d be a smaller target, but I’d be slow on my feet and I wasn’t sure of the way back through mine-infested territory to the Alliance lines. Then I looked up and saw the reassuring bulk of Bashir silhouetted against a sky of glorious starlight—the stars were a piercing blue—and my decision was made: I was sticking with Bashir, the professional soldier. If he jumped, I’d jump. As Taliban tracer fire arced overhead the APC charged into darkened and unfamiliar territory until the driver became lost. Whenever it was safe we paused in the hollows, calling out the names of those who were missing—Handloik, 38, and two of the French journalists—Pierre Billaud, 31, and Johanne Sutton, 35. Those who remained glued to the APC with me were the third French reporter, Veronique Rebeynotte, and Levon Sevunts of the Montreal Gazette. As we crouched in the safety of the first hollow, Bashir turned and grasped my hand. I was terrified and this simple gesture was unbelievably reassuring. In the absence of any common language, I took it as his promise to get us out of there alive. But then he almost gave me heart failure by several times ordering the APC back towards the Taliban lines. Twice we came under renewed fire and I was so scared I was on the verge of deciding that I too would jump and take my chances on foot. A few soldiers straggled out of the night, but no reporters. There was much yelling and screaming—Bashir
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let all the soldiers have a say—before there was agreement that indeed we were lost, and he called for volunteers to go ahead of us on foot to seek a route back to his camp. They found a rocky riverbed that cut through to a very deep gully that gave us protection. Walking in front of us with hand-held torches—to ensure we did not plunge into a ravine—they led us back to safety. The nightmare lasted 90 minutes. We were desperate about having left our colleagues behind but Bashir was insistent that his men would rescue them. The next entry in my notebook is some telephone numbers in Germany—the numbers for Stern’s foreign desk. Immediately the APC came to a halt, I had leapt to the ground to call my wife in New York to sound the call for a rescue mission. It was a Sunday afternoon in the US, but she located the magazine’s office and got the numbers for Germany. I called by satellite phone from the darkened hillside to tell Hans Herman Klare, the foreign editor, that one of his reporters was missing. I asked him, as I had asked my wife, to contact the US authorities to plead for a rescue mission. Finally, there was no one else to call and we retreated to Bashir’s tent, some of us picking at the bowls of mutton and rice that were brought by boys from the camp-kitchen. Then came the sound of an APC grinding in from the battlefield and, soon after, a runner announced that a body had been brought in. It was the bullet-torn body of Johanne Sutton. She had been shot in the chest and the leg. The soldiers who had retrieved her said there was another body nearby but more fighting along the ridge made its recovery impossible. Rebeynotte called the French radio stations. Hoping that at least one of our colleagues was still alive we got back on the phones, calling New York, Berlin and the National Alliance leadership, pleading for a US search and rescue mission. But the only US visit to our airspace that night was another bombing run along the ridge, making me sick with fear because of the possibility that either Volker or Pierre was out there and might still be alive. The renewed battle went on through the night and in bloody hand-to-hand fighting Bashir’s men finally took the last section of the front that had held for more than a year in the Afghan civil war.
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At about 3 am we went down off the hills to the village of Chagatai, looking for sleep that never came. First light was the palest of sunrises and I climbed to the top of the ridge. I found Bashir clearly distressed. He had grown very fond of Volker but now he was telling me in signlanguage that the flaxen-haired German and the other French reporter were dead. As Bashir prepared an APC to retrieve the two bodies, I stumbled down to the village and broke the news to the others, including Thomas Hegenbart, a photographer colleague of Volker’s who had rushed to Kalakata in the middle of the night after being roused by Stern. He had loaned me a sleeping bag when we tried to sleep that night. It had been Volker’s. Hundreds of Bashir’s men were now clearly visible in what had been the Taliban trenches, so there was no debate about the risk of getting back on the APC. Instead, there was a sense that we owed it to our dead colleagues to retrieve their bodies. When we found them they had been looted of most of their valuables—their pockets were empty and their clothing had been torn open so that their money belts could be removed. And it was obvious that what I had seen the night before wasn’t Handloik jumping from the machine, but his death roll. His body lay in grotesque repose exactly where the APC tracks stopped before the gear changes. He had been hit in the head, but another bullet that had entered his lower leg and exited through his thigh was probably what propelled him off the machine. I had been exposed to combat before. A cruise missile had exploded dangerously close to me in Baghdad 10 years earlier; I had been trapped for a day in an old Crusader fortress that came under constant Serbian tank fire in the hills above besieged Dubrovnik; and in the Slovenian war, a Serbian air force machine gunner had ploughed the ground around me for a few terrifying minutes. But this was the first time I had seen my colleagues die. I kept trying to tell myself that, dreadful as it was, this personal confrontation with war needed to be kept in perspective. It was horrifying but, unlike the fighting armies and terrified civilian population of Afghanistan, foreign journalists were there by choice. I didn’t really know any of the three journalists who died. I wasn’t
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even conscious of the presence of the French trio on the APC until the machine was careering down the hill as Commander Bashir attempted to get out of the line of Taliban fire. As we reached the bottom, I had felt a tug on my leg. I looked around and straight into the ashen face of Veronique Rebeynotte. She yelled: ‘What country are you from?’ Hearing her accent, I presumed that she needed a French speaker, so I yelled for help from the French-speaking Levon Sevunts, who was clutching the other side of the APC’s turret. Oddly, because of Volker’s death I found out more about him than many others I have met on the road, and there was more to this than the fact that I was starting to enjoy his company. I admired his energy and his enthusiasm for the story, and I had felt that in time he would be one of those on the road I could come to rely on. He was born in Rostock in the old East Germany, and his parents died when he was young. He’d had little formal education and some who knew him described him as an adventurer, a loner. On leaving junior school, Handloik drifted. He worked in a printing shop and then in a fish cannery. Later he shunted railway wagons. But between times he studied art history. Like many of us, he landed in journalism almost by accident. He wrote for, and then edited, a dissident literary periodical in what had still been communist East Berlin before he broke into mainstream magazines. The scent of good stories drew him to the old Soviet Union and to South America, where he focused on the underbelly of society—the offbeat, the criminal and the persecuted. The Russian underworld fascinated him and he confronted the most unsavoury characters for a memorable series on Moscow’s decadent nightlife, its drug trade and its prostitution rackets. As a Moscow correspondent for Berliner Zeitung he wrote vividly about the conflict in the former Soviet republics as they grappled with the challenges of democracy and free markets. And colleagues still talked of his evocative dispatch from the rubble of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, in which he wrote of a man playing a Tchaikovsky piano concerto from a bombed-out residential street. A German journalist who travelled to Dushanbe with Handloik—Gisbert Mrozek of Der Spiegel—wrote of him in the newspaper’s eulogy: ‘He didn’t
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travel in order to do straight frontline reporting. But rather to understand and to describe . . . he was mostly interested in the people.’ And Mrozek said of the diary that Volker filed for a German internet magazine until the day he died: ‘The sense of danger breathed through his words . . . along with his passion for people, situations and understanding.’ Only a few bodies were on the battlefield that morning. The Taliban had evaporated, melting into the night and the community just as they did across much of Afghanistan that weekend. The previous night Levon Sevunts had left with the Northern Alliance soldiers who took the body of Johanne Sutton back to Dashte Qala. I held Volker’s body to stop him falling from the APC as we made the bumpy return back across what had been no-man’s land. And then I found a spot in the warm sun amid the rubble of a nearby village where I sat writing, trying to make sense of what had happened in a report for the Herald. I was edgy, shorttempered. Usually, when I sat down to write, the locals would gather watching in wonderment as I click-clacked on the laptop and then hooked it up to the sat-phone. It was an interchange I enjoyed. But that morning as I wrote about the Taliban ambush I found myself shouting at the circle of dark-eyed, curious faces that crowded in. Thomas Hegenbart, Volker’s photographer colleague who had arrived the previous night, came to say goodbye before he left for Dashte Qala with the body. Another reporter told me that the only reaction of the Afghan official who examined Handloik’s passport when Hegenbart arrived at the border crossing was an impassive: ‘His visa’s expired.’
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TALIBAN PINNED DOWN 10 Northwest Afghanistan November 2001
Hours before the Taliban ambush I came upon a glassy-eyed Northern Alliance tank commander as he sloshed down the last of his Afghanistan whiskey—tea laced with opium—before charging off into the hills for another burst of killing. After years of war and far too much ‘whiskey’, he was more animal than human, a killer who had lost touch with humanity, a fighter who had no understanding of dignity—for himself or the enemy. For weeks he had been pounding the Taliban trenches. And just 24 hours after he had offered me a swig of his ‘whiskey’ and as the dust was settling, I checked out those trenches with his colleagues. They too were like animals. When they came upon a shallow grave in one of the abandoned foxholes, they leapt upon it, digging into it with their bare hands. As soon as they could grasp the limbs of the corpse, they dragged it free. The dead Taliban fighter was wrapped in lengths of cloth, which the Northern Alliance fighters ripped away. When the body was turned over, a cry went up: ‘Punjabi! Punjabi!’ That meant the man was one of the thousands of Pakistani volunteers who had poured over the border to fight for the Taliban and for Osama bin Laden. He was dead, but that wasn’t enough for the men of the Northern Alliance—they kicked the corpse, they spat on it and they mocked it with manic laughter. Mamur Hassan, the warlord of Dashte Qala, took it all in his stride, 113
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telling one of my colleagues: ‘I told them to bring the bodies to me because, you know, they buy back their dead people.’ Another tank commander, Farid, had bragged to one of my colleagues that he had killed 27 Taliban fighters. When he was asked for details of what was understood to have been a battle, Farid cheerfully volunteered a story of gross abuse of human rights and of the so-called rules of war. He said: ‘We injured them. So we pulled them out of the trenches and lined them up on the ground . . . and we drove the tank over them.’ These images have stayed with me. It seemed that while Afghanistan could be freed from the Taliban, it was still shackled by hatred and the quest for revenge. We drove back from the Kalakata Hills to Dashte Qala in despondent silence. Pawel Reszka was packing up to leave. After hearing of the death of our colleagues his editors had panicked and ordered him to quit the country immediately. I was still deciding whether to stay or go. As we approached the Kokcha River, the track became narrow and rutted, with high mud walls on either side. Heading east, we were forced to pull over by the sheer force of westbound military traffic as the Northern Alliance rushed supplies and reinforcements to the frontline that was now moving south faster than a summer bushfire. After waiting a while I wandered down to the river on foot. I was still there half an hour later, sitting on a grassy ledge, ruminating on the randomness of life and death, when my thoughts were broken by the sound of a four-wheel drive convoy sloshing through the mile-wide river. In the passenger seat of the first vehicle was Larry Doyle, a veteran CBS producer and a former US marine whom I had last seen during the US bombing of Baghdad. It had been 10 years earlier and he had helped me out of a hole then. CBS was evacuating, I was staying in Iraq, prices were going through the roof and I was running out of money. The Iraqis had herded all the press into the Al Rasheed Hotel and when I asked Larry for a loan, without a blink he retrieved a plastic supermarket carry-bag from under his desk. Pulling out wads of US cash, he asked me: ‘How much do you want?’ I replied: ‘$14 000,’ and without hesitating he counted out the money. Now I was in trouble and, to my astonishment, here he was again, materialising like a genie from
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the wild waters of the Kokcha River. With Reszka having been ordered back to Poland, I was uncomfortable at the thought of travelling alone, although I was keen to stay with the story. Doyle was planning to head south, to cover the impending liberation of Kabul, and he invited me to join the CBS convoy. They unpacked their gear by the river to interview me about the Taliban ambush and when the camera stopped rolling a CBS correspondent, Byron Pitts, wrapped me in a huge embrace, saying: ‘Brother, you need a hug.’ That evening CNN caught up with me—and when the interview played later in New York my wife said she barely recognised me. There were requests for interviews from around the world and very late that night, exhausted after Pawel Reszka and I had demolished half of a bottle of Johnny Walker presented to us by Doyle for ‘medicinal’ purposes, I did a long interview with Sally Loane on ABC Radio’s ‘Morning Show’ in Sydney. The best that can be said about the combined effect of the Johnny Walker, the weariness and the distortions of the sat-phone line was that I sounded tired and emotional. We had arranged to meet the CBS crew at their compound in Khoja Bahauddin later that night. The town was still crowded with journalists and there was only one room available, at the guesthouse where we had stayed on the first night after driving in from Tajikistan. It was free only because the previous occupants had been the group that included Pierre Billaud and Johanne Sutton, the journalists who died in the previous day’s ambush. We unrolled our sleeping bags on the cement floor of their room. Early the next morning Pawel Reszka left for the border ferry crossing. At about midday the CBS convoy—four four-wheel drives—set out for Kabul. The route would take us back to Dashte Qala, over the Kokcha River and into territory that had been held by the Taliban until only 48 hours ago. I was anxious, but I was reassured by Doyle’s security consciousness—all the vehicles were numbered and he ordered them to travel close to each other and stay in that order; all were linked by walkietalkie which allowed a running debate on safety issues; and we would not be driving in the dark.
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We had hardly crossed the river when one of the vehicles broke down, but the driver knew someone in a nearby village who produced another one. However, that took time and as we pressed on, making less progress than intended because of the appalling condition of the roads, darkness and nervousness wrapped our convoy in an uncertain Taliban night. We could hear shooting and see tracer fire but we didn’t know who was shooting at whom. And when another of the vehicles broke down, several passing Northern Alliance trucks slowed only for as long as it took their drivers to warn us that this was dangerous country. We had pulled up in a deep gully—a great high-ground advantage for any remnants of the Taliban who might decide to rough us up, I thought—and Doyle told the Afghan drivers that if they could not make repairs in 30 minutes we’d abandon the vehicle. It was a nerve-wracking time during which I appreciated the effort and planning that goes into putting a big network team on the road. As we stood about in the cold while the drivers dismantled and reassembled the gearbox, Byron Pitts, the CBS correspondent, gave each of us a packet of hand-warmers— small chemical sachets that produced hours of heat on contact with air—which we rolled in our cold fingers. The vehicle repairs worked and at about 11 pm we finally drove into Taloqan. The town was a Northern Alliance jewel—it became their provisional capital when the Taliban drove them from Kabul in 1996, but in 2000 they were further humiliated when the Taliban pushed them from there too, herding them right up into the northeastern border country. We were taken aback—the streets of Taloqan were deserted because of the lateness of the hour but there were electric lights and the road had a bitumen surface. The next morning Taloqan was humming with the gaiety of liberation—cheerful refugees poured back into their home town; barber shops were doing a great trade taking off beards; music blared from stalls in the bazaar; and posters of Ahmad Shah Masoud adorned shop fronts and traffic islands. The chaikhanas—traditional teahouses where men would sit for hours smoking, drinking tea and talking, talking, talking— were working overtime. All the Taliban taboos were being junked, except
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for one: none of us saw a woman who was game to abandon her burka in all the time we were there. Taloqan was to be an overnight stop but we soon found a lot of other reporters holed up in the town. The obvious route to Kabul, the hardtop road through the Salang Pass, was mined and too dangerous, and the Northern Alliance insisted on inspecting arduous alternative routes over the mountains, any of which would take several days to get to the capital, before they would authorise us to travel. I was happy to bide my time— I wanted to keep my head down because when Alliance officials got hold of Levon Sevunts, the Montreal Gazette reporter who had survived the Taliban ambush, they expelled him from the country without giving any reason. We found two small rooms in which the seven of us lived and worked—I slept under a table with a small plastic bowl wrapped in a towel as a pillow. Being stuck in Taloqan was not all bad news—we were able to buy fresh produce in a well-stocked bazaar, and we could wash properly for the first time in almost two weeks. When I arrived at the males-only bathhouse it was so crowded I figured I’d never get a shower. But after watching for a few minutes I came to understand the role of Walid Mamat who, it turned out, was one of the more powerful men in Taloqan. He wore a crimson fez and his grey shalwa kameez was soaked with steam and perspiration. As the master of ceremonies at the bathhouse all authority emanated from a blue-painted stick he carried. Hundreds were queuing to wash but there were only 16 cubicles and only so much hot water. It was a fine balancing act for Walid—Alliance soldiers were heroes and they had guns; reporters were foreign and they had money; and then there were the locals. Walid managed it all quite deftly: any soldier was allowed to leap the queue as cubicles became available; but for the foreign press who had money to burn, he set aside a single cubicle which we could use one after the other. And that stick? A firm rap on the cubicle door told you that your time was up—but soldiers could take as long as they liked and the time allowed for foreign reporters was directly proportional to the amount of money they slipped into Walid’s sweaty palm.
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After idling impatiently in Taloqan for a few days, waiting for permission to drive to Kabul, the news came through that the capital had been liberated on November 13 and the last of the Taliban had fled east to Pakistan and south to their spiritual home in Kandahar. It was a blow as we had all been very keen to witness this critical juncture in the war and, hopefully, in Afghanistan’s history. We were still coming to terms with the frustration when we heard a wonderful story of journalistic excess. The BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson, had gotten carried away with himself and claimed on-air that ‘the BBC had liberated’ Kabul because he had walked in ahead of the first Northern Alliance units. It entertained us enormously as we grappled with the question of how to get out of Taloqan. I paced myself, filing stories and cooking for the CBS crew—simple fare with provisions from the bazaar, like hot fried potatoes and a few greens that we thought were safe to eat after we drowned them in CBS radio correspondent Phil Ittner’s homemade tomato sauce and other provisions from the pantry lockers in the CBS convoy. But as the Taloqan days passed I started to feel uncomfortable, marooned even. The story we were trying to do was about the thousands of desperate Taliban who had fled before the advancing Northern Alliance and were now pinned down in Kunduz, a predominantly Pashtun town 60 kilometres to the west. And in the absence of surrender the rhetoric coming out of the Northern Alliance and from Washington promised a bloodbath. I worried because I had little faith in the ability of the Alliance to keep the Taliban at bay in Kunduz, and because the US was bombing Kunduz around the clock, giving the Taliban a very good reason to break out. News had come through of the murder of four foreign journalists, including the Australian cameraman Harry Burton, on the east–west road into Kabul from the Pakistani border. In the Taliban ambush the previous week my colleagues and I had been accidental targets. Now here was a group murdered in cold blood. I was anxious not to be caught between Taliban on the run and freedom. Most of the Taliban had fled to Kunduz from Mazar-e-Sharif, further to the west. My gut told me that if they did break out they would head towards Taloqan, because it
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would take them away from the shame of their defeat in Mazar-e-Sharif. This was such a letdown for them—when the Taliban emerged from nowhere early in the 1990s they had been welcomed in Afghanistan and by Washington as a force for stability. That was because they had quelled the madness of the warlords who were wrecking Afghanistan, but then they set about imposing their own draconian Islamic ways on the people. Now, seven years on, they were fighting for their lives. We were told that most of them were Taliban hotheads—Pakistanis, including the sons of some prominent mullahs, Uzbeks, and a smattering of Chechens, Chinese and Burmese. They were the toughest of the Taliban fighters, usually posted on the frontline for two reasons: to terrorise Northern Alliance soldiers and to prevent defections by the Afghan Taliban. These foreigners were in Afghanistan on a personal crusade, as believers in the combined calls of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and of Osama bin Laden for a holy war against the enemies of Islam in Afghanistan and across the world. The Alliance claimed it had 30 000 men around Kunduz and US jets prowled menacingly overhead, leaving the Taliban with two options—death or a deal. So the question became, what sort of deal? Ordinarily at this stage in Afghan combat, the Taliban would see that the game was up and they would nominate a price for the Alliance to pay them in return for their surrender. Then the Alliance would haggle, get the price down, hand over the money and lift the siege. But that was not an option for the hated foreign Taliban—they needed safe passage out of the country. At first hundreds, and then thousands of Afghan Taliban started defecting under the cover of darkness, bringing with them dire warnings of the anger and hatred of the foreign Taliban who wanted to fight to the end. On Saturday night, Alliance Commander Shah Shajan walked us around the prospective battlefield and one of his colleagues told me: ‘If there is a fight in Kunduz, it will be bloody because there are 3000 foreign fighters and they have nowhere to go.’ The figures differed wildly. The Alliance claimed there were up to 40 000 Taliban in Kunduz, but the US said there were only 3000. And I became even more jumpy when
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Commander Shajan explained the balance of power, acknowledging that the Taliban was a formidable force and his own men were hopelessly outgunned. The Taliban had 120 tanks, more than 500 anti-aircraft guns and almost 3000 of their favourite weapon—Toyota or Datsun pick-ups with machine guns mounted on the tray. A signature Taliban combat tactic was to run dozens of these pick-ups at speed into communities, with all guns blazing. Shajan could not speak for Alliance units west and southwest of Kunduz, but he said that his men had only 20 tanks, 200 pick-ups with mounted guns and 50 anti-aircraft guns. The advantage the Alliance did have was that the US bombers were on their side, though they complained bitterly that the US refused to consult on targeting and that misguided US missiles had already killed 150 civilians in the villages around Kunduz. Our daily mission was to drive west from Taloqan through the pink and grey hills on the cratered road to Kunduz. Frequently we had to slow to avoid farm children charged with drying their family’s rice crop in the last sun of autumn—they would spread the grain thinly on the road, constantly dragging their feet through it to expose new grain to the sun. The other hazard was land mines, the existence of which was sometimes marked by daubs of red paint on stones by the side of the road. We would stop at the Bangi River, spending much of the daylight hours in the shelter of some hills on the road to Kunduz. This was the last line of protection from the Taliban positions around Kunduz, where the civilian population of about 100 000 had become the Taliban’s human shield. At the river crossing we were able to talk to soldiers and refugees coming from Kunduz. As we pulled up on the first day a path was being cleared through the crowd of soldiers and journalists for a tragic little procession—the dead son of one of the local commanders being carried off the battlefield by eight of his mates. His body was covered with a light scattering of hay and they carried him at shoulder height on an old wooden-framed bed. The refugees said the foreign Taliban had taken control, hanging commanders they suspected might surrender. The bodies of at least five were said to be hanging from lampposts in the town
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and there had been mass executions of others. The foreigners had separated from the Afghan Taliban and were barricading themselves in key public buildings. Some were looting shops and restaurants while others hoped they could hide from the US bombers by smearing their vehicles with mud and concealing their tanks and APCs under piles of hay. The first surrender talks were by sat-phone, with Commander Mohammed Daoud Kahn negotiating for the Alliance. The Alliance’s confidence grew at the same rate as the Taliban defections—at one stage Kahn announced that already 30 commanders had come across with more than 3000 men. There were complications. Some of the foreign Taliban did give themselves up, but only to detonate grenades concealed in their clothing when they got close enough to their captors. This prompted one Alliance commander to order his men: ‘Kill them all.’ But when Jon Lee Anderson of the New Yorker made it his mission to find Mullah Shabir Ahmed, a high-profile Taliban commander from Kunduz, he was told that the warrior was in a ‘safe house’ that turned out to be the home of Commander Kahn and, to the reporter’s amazement, the Taliban leader still had his weapon. After weeks of battle most of the defectors badly needed to make Walid Mamat’s bathhouse their first stop, and several of them demanded money before they would be interviewed. Before clamming up because I refused to pay him, Commander Shansar Rahma told me: ‘I’m a simple man. We wanted to defect for days, but the foreign terrorists would not let us. All of the Arabs are al-Qaeda.’ The most frightening part of being out here was that it was difficult to tell the difference between the fighters. The Alliance men often wore the roll-sided pakul hat and the Talibs generally wore black turbans, but ‘often’ and ‘generally’ are words that do not guarantee your safety. I was reminded of the Balkan wars when I never knew—until I had established whether they were Serbs or Croats—how to answer questions from the soldiers who bailed me up. After days of defecting and haggling, a buzz came down the line that a surrender deal had been agreed. The Northern Alliance piled into their pick-ups and charged off in the direction of Kunduz behind Kahn’s
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souped-up four-wheel drive. But within minutes Kahn was charging back down the road again, with Taliban rockets outstripping him and his panicked men as they fell over each other and crashed their trucks and pick-ups in the race for safety. It was a trick. The foreign Taliban had no intention of allowing the Afghan Talibs to surrender and Kahn had been lured into a trap in which 30 of his men died. Another 100 were taken prisoner by foreigner Taliban who were lying in wait at a village on the outskirts of Kunduz. Then, when the Alliance revealed that the talks were canvassing the idea of safe passage for the foreigners to leave Afghanistan—either to neighbouring Pakistan or into the care of the United Nations or the Red Cross—the US stepped in. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seemed to opt for the bloodbath option to settle the siege of Kunduz. He declared: ‘My hope is that they will either be killed or taken prisoner. Any idea that these people . . . should end up in some sort of a negotiation which will allow them to leave the country and go off and destabilise other countries and engage in terrorist attacks on the United States is something that I will certainly do everything I can to prevent.’ A somewhat dishevelled Commander Kahn went back to the negotiations, face to face this time. But he came away very pessimistic following the Taliban’s insistent demand that the foreigners be evacuated. We went to talk to Commander Shah Shajan again, but we concluded that he must be overwrought because he was preoccupied and complaining about the movement of big aircraft in and out of Kunduz under cover of darkness. This seemed unlikely to us but he insisted: ‘I have information on two aircraft landing at Kunduz—two aircraft on two nights.’ And later the Alliance’s deputy defence minister, Atiqullah Baryalai, claimed there had been secret movements on at least five nights during the 12-day standoff. This was such a strange twist to the story that few of us reported it—I didn’t. And the story didn’t get legs even when Kahn claimed that the Pakistani air force had been attempting to extract its ‘military personnel’ from the town. And given that the US had full control of Afghanistan’s airspace, the journalists who did report the Alliance claims
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seemed to accept the Pentagon’s pat denials when it said it had no knowledge of any aircraft movements. When Donald Rumsfeld was asked about the flights, he snapped: ‘Well, if we see them, we’ll shoot them down.’ I thought these blanket, unambiguous denials were plausible and I went the other way in my reports—I speculated that Pakistan was the only country that would be disposed to rescuing the foreigners, but that the logistics of an airlift or a road convoy were too nightmarish to contemplate. The way it was put by Abdullah, the man who would become Foreign Minister in the post-Taliban government, made sense: the foreigners faced the choice of attempting to flee south through hostile territory and being picked off as they did by US aircraft, or of tackling the freezing cold of the Hindu Kush where the passes leading to Pakistan were snowed in for the rest of winter. As the US kept up its bombing, Commander Kahn said he had concluded a deal that formalised what already seemed to be happening—the Afghan Taliban were free to go, but the foreigners would be arrested. When the Afghan Taliban finally straggled in from Kunduz there were bizarre scenes as Alliance fighters fell upon them—to kiss and embrace them and to celebrate the end of the fighting. After a standoff that had lasted almost two weeks the Alliance took the city with what one of their security officers said was a ‘minimum of bloodshed’. What he meant was that about 100 Taliban died and maybe 10 Alliance fighters were killed in the last day of firefights. The Kunduz hospital had been trashed and bodies littered the streets. The Taloqan-based Alliance leaders were furious that their brothers from the west had been in and out of the town before them, hauling most of the Taliban booty off to Mazar-e-Sharif. But there was another reason for their fury. Where were the foreign fighters for the Taliban? Where were the Pakistanis, the Uzbeks and the Chechens? The numbers didn’t add up. The Alliance had a reliable account of numbers in the town because they had debriefed hundreds of defectors. They insisted that the defections did not account for the remarkable fall-off in the Taliban numbers. They wheeled out Mahkdumi Said
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Ramrandin, a Taliban commander who had surrendered with several hundred men. He claimed that about half of the 5000 foreign Taliban in Kunduz had simply disappeared. He said: ‘There are fewer and fewer. They were disappearing.’ We had been conned and we had missed a story. It seemed there had been a secret airlift out of Kunduz and that the US had been deeply involved in its organisation. Despite all the denials and notwithstanding President George W. Bush’s claim at the time that: ‘We’re smoking them out. They’re running, and now we’re going to bring them to justice,’ the real story was unearthed two months later by one of the doyens of US investigative journalism, Seymour Hersh. Writing in the New Yorker, he quoted US and Indian intelligence officials who said that the Bush administration had approved a Pakistani airlift in which ‘an unknown’ number of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters got away. And it had been organised at the highest levels—Pakistan’s dictator president Pervez Musharraf had pleaded for the US to allow him to extract the Pakistanis because he was desperate to prevent a backlash in his own country. Pakistan was deeply divided over his support for the US and he worried that the mass return of body bags from Afghanistan could spark an uprising against his dictatorship. One of Hersh’s sources told him that the White House had been involved in the planning, which required the US military to open a 300-kilometre air corridor through Afghan airspace for the Pakistani aircraft. As another insider told Hersh: ‘Dirt got through the screen.’
When I left Afghanistan a few days later it was with a sense of hopelessness for a people who seemed to be the perennial victims of horror. A series of media and academic attempts to establish the death toll in this latest war have concluded that at least 1000, and possibly more than 3000, Afghans died, along with a handful of US soldiers. I came away with a better understanding of Kipling, one of the earliest foreign correspondents who tried to make sense of the impossible events that contort Central Asia and who wrote:
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When you are wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Kipling was there a good century before me, but I left wondering how much had changed since his brief portrayal of the savagery of a society forced to exist only in the extremes. The Afghan people I had met in villages and small towns could not have been kinder or more welcoming, but the soldiers and their warlord leaders were another story. But the black-and-white world of the media and diplomacy requires clear winners and losers, so spin-doctors from Washington to London and from Tehran to Canberra were telling us that the Northern Alliance were the good guys. I said goodbye to Doyle and the CBS crew, exchanging phone numbers and promising to meet up in New York or in the next war. My journey home started with a day spent waiting by a Taloqan football field that doubled as a wartime helipad. The traffic was all military and all southbound—and I needed to go north, back to Dushanbe in Tajikistan. I waited until the light was fading, by which time the locals who had sat staring at me all day urged me to give up. But then came the sound of an old Russian-built chopper. The pilot was Iranian. Yes, he was going north, but he was reluctant to take me. I produced a $US100 note but his reluctance held until I had produced five such notes. On board I found august company—Sebastian Junger, whose work I had admired since reading The Perfect Storm; and Julian Manyon, ITN’s Asia correspondent who, it later transpired, was married to an old friend of my wife’s in London, although Manyon and I had never met. The flight to the border village of Dashte Qala—the ferry crossing at which I had entered Afghanistan—was a ground-hugging hop that took us over the Kalakata Hills. These rounded folds in the earth were awash with the seductive pinks and oranges of day’s end when a knot in my stomach told me that this was familiar territory.
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Only 50 metres below, high on a ridge, were the trenches from which the Taliban had set the ambush in which Volker Handloik and the two French journalists had died. The image was upside down because I was coming from the opposite direction, but I could see the track marks where Commander Bashir had ordered the APC to a halt and the churned earth marking our escape down the hill. On the ground where the APC’s track marks ended was a dark stain—Volker’s blood. It was only 240 kilometres from Taloqan to Dushanbe, but it took all of 56 hours to get there by chopper, truck and car. The Tajik capital is now a blur. After the endless rice and mutton in Afghanistan, I have fond memories of a languid lunch at The Diplomat restaurant with Manyon and the ITN crew. We avoided items that appeared on the menu as ‘Gordon Blue’, ‘Chicken under the fur coat’ and ‘Cutlet’s to home one’s liking’, but the caviar was good. We ordered it as an entrée— and again for dessert. I spent the afternoon arranging a car, a driver and a pre-dawn departure the next day to go over the mountains to Tashkent in neighbouring Uzbekistan, from where my flight home would start. Wandering aimlessly back to the Hotel Tajikistan I bumped into Thomas Hegenbart, the Stern photographer with whom I had brought Handloik’s body down from the Kalakata Hills. It was 3.30 on a wintry afternoon in late November but, faint as it was, there was enough warmth in the sun for us to sit briefly on the hotel steps. Thomas told me that Volker’s funeral service was about to begin in Berlin, so on impulse we retreated to the hotel and demanded that the bar be opened so that we might send Volker off from afar. A barman was found and a drab little bar next to the hotel restaurant was opened for this special occasion. Thomas drank vodka, I drank whiskey and a faltering sound system filled the sad corners of this bar in a sad corner of the world with the haunting threads of ‘The Flower Duet’ from Delibes’ Lakmé, another story of senseless death where East meets West.
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A SCUNGY LITTLE PACKAGE 11 Foladi to Washington and back 1999–2002
It was a scungy little package, but beneath the layers of black plastic there was a tight wad of burnt US currency. The notes were singed, their corners brittle. Despite the damage, though, each fine layer of ash was identifiably a $US50 note. The parcel had been sitting for months on the bookcase in my New York study—80 blocks uptown from the rubble of the World Trade Center, still a graveyard for thousands, and 16 000 kilometres from Afghanistan where a frightened and impoverished Chaman Ali and his family were on the run from the Taliban. The very fact that I had the package was a measure of Ali’s desperation. By the standards of Afghanistan’s trashed economy, Ali had been a success. He had a shop in the local bazaar and a truck in which he ran the gauntlet of Taliban roadblocks, hauling potatoes to nearby towns and villages. The package was the family nest egg. He had hidden it in a tin trunk that he buried in the earthen floor of his mud-brick home in the village of Foladi. This was in the Bamyian region, a part of Afghanistan that suffered repeatedly under the ‘scorched earth’ tactics of the Taliban. When the Taliban fighters attacked the village early in 1999, the houses blazed and then they collapsed. The Ali family fled to the Shah Foladi mountains with what bedding and utensils they could pack on a couple of donkeys. From up on the high ground, Ali watched helplessly as the smoke 127
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rose from his home and about 4000 others that the Taliban torched in Foladi and a string of surrounding villages. Ali waited until nightfall and then crept back to dig the money from under the smouldering embers. His truck was a charred wreck, but he got the cash and, with thousands of others, Ali then trekked over the snow- and ice-capped Baba mountains. He found his way to Kabul but none of the moneychangers—there were no banks in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan—would accept his burnt notes. So on a chance encounter Ali gave his wad of burnt money to a man who, like so many Afghans, had just the one name: Ghaffoori. He too was a refugee, but he had a job as liaison officer with the United Nations humanitarian network. Ali didn’t appreciate it then, but his money was going to Washington. Michael Semple, an Irishman who worked as a UN humanitarian coordinator with the displaced Afghanis, accepted a challenge from Ghaffoori to get new money for the old. Semple told me: ‘It was a bit different from the assistance we normally provided, but after all that Chaman Ali had suffered it seemed only right to enlist all support necessary to restore his hard-earned savings to him.’ Semple thought he would be able to do a simple exchange at a bank in Islamabad when next he visited the UN enclave in neighbouring Pakistan. But the banks in Pakistan would not touch the burnt offerings either. I became link number three in Ali’s money chain when I was on assignment in Central Asia in August 2001, almost two years after Ali’s home was torched. In my quest for information on developments in Afghanistan I went to see Semple who, because of the heightened conflict in Afghanistan, was then working from Islamabad. When he heard that I was based in New York he told me the story of the money’s odd journey and asked if I would take it home to New York to see if the Federal Reserve Board would swap it for good notes. We didn’t dare open the bundle— the notes were so brittle after the fire that we feared they might break if there was any attempt to unfold them but, going on what the farmer had said, Semple and I judged the bundle to be worth about $US3000. On my return to New York in August 2001, I headed off to the
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imposing Federal Reserve Board building in the financial district in lower Manhattan, only to be told that in this age of centralisation there was only one burnt money office for all of the US—and it was in Washington. I conducted an email correspondence with Michael Semple on what to do next. I rarely got to Washington and we were reluctant to risk losing the money by mailing it. And we figured there was no rush to get it back to Chaman Ali because the Taliban still had Afghanistan nailed down. So we agreed that I would take it to DC when business next took me to the capital. That email exchange took place late in the first week of September, only days before the terrorist attacks of September 11. I got pinned down, covering the aftermath of the attacks in New York and preparing myself to cover a war in Afghanistan. But before I went back to Central Asia in October, I gave Ali’s package to Luke Collins, a colleague who would be passing through Washington. He would pass it to yet another colleague who undertook to get it to the burnt money office. The chain between the Afghan villager and his money now extended to five people—four of whom he had never met. But it was not over yet. I returned to New York from Afghanistan early in December to find that the money was still sitting in my Washington colleague’s desk drawer. I retrieved it just after Christmas and took it to the Federal Reserve’s burnt money office myself. In the post September 11 world, the Federal Reserve on Washington’s D Street was a fortress, and on this day the only way into the building was through the loading dock. I stated my business, filled in the requisite paperwork and inquired how long it might take to have the burnt money replaced with crisp new notes. ‘Three or four months,’ a rather officious woman told me. This seemed absurd. It was late December and now that the Taliban had fallen I was anxious about the months that had elapsed. I knew that Chaman Ali would be desperate for his money so that he could start a new life and, doubtless, he was fearful that the Westerners had made off with his savings. I explained the circumstances and the officer at the Fed stared at me, perplexed. My storytelling had moved her, I could see. But it had done more than that. The next thing she said was: ‘You mean to tell me that
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you are not the legal owner of the money? We can’t accept it from you.’ But, but, but . . . I was getting nowhere fast, telling the woman and a colleague who had joined her about hardship and war in Afghanistan. Suddenly, in one of those bizarre moments that life throws up, her colleague broke into the conversation, wanting to know if she had seen me on TV. Yes, I replied, a few weeks earlier CBS and CNN had interviewed me from the frontline during their coverage of the Taliban ambush in which my three colleagues had died. The moment was transformed. In the eyes of these women my status had changed instantly—Ali’s money was as good as mine and it would be processed as a matter of urgency. Just over a month later a Federal Reserve cheque made out in my name arrived in the mail at my New York home. It was for much more than we had reckoned—$US5600. I paid it into my New York account and had it wire-transferred immediately to Michael Semple’s bank in Islamabad. I was so embarrassed by how long the whole process had taken that I picked up the cost of the transfer as a liberation present to Ali. Semple had moved back to Kabul after the war in 2001, but his wife was still in Islamabad. She withdrew the money and found someone to take it to Kabul—money-chain link number seven. Semple emailed me in the first week of August 2002, almost three years after Ali’s village was put to the torch: ‘It’s hard to describe the look of delight on Chaman Ali’s face. I took advice on how to make the handover in compliance with local custom. I asked him to come in with a couple of witnesses and he got back exactly what he said was in the package. We all sat on the floor cushions in the main UN office in Kabul while I counted out the money. He could hardly believe it. He was speechless. All he could do was thank me and smile profusely.’
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PART III
TROUBLE ON THE ROAD TO BAGHDAD March–April 2002
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BY THE WATERS OF JORDAN 12 Israel and the Occupied Territories March–April 2002
Seen from the lofty heights of Mt Nebo, from where Moses is said to have ascended into heaven, the Jordan River snakes southwards. The ghostly whites and olive greens of its course seep into the metallic blue of the Dead Sea, deep in a valley that is the lowest point on earth. When summer temperatures push through 50 degrees Celsius it’s like hell without a ceiling, a cauldron forged by convulsions of nature matched only by the ferocity of the wars fought here over centuries. Nestling in a green oasis beyond the river is ancient Jericho, oldest city in the world. In the silvery glow of the late afternoon sun the hills of Judea and Samaria are lost in a perennial haze. Masada, that most sacred place for Jews, is off to the southwest, and in the middle distance is Bethany, where the Jordanians say John baptised Jesus. If Moses could stand on Nebo today, he might observe that people here still inflict dreadful violence upon each other. But less obvious to him would be another tragedy that has been overshadowed by decades of violence and division. Today the Jordan is neither deep nor wide. The same forces that have battled for the land also fight for control of the water. And in the wrestling for the Jordan, the river has been overpumped and overpolluted by three different countries. What remains today is a shadow of the mighty waterway of biblical times. Early in the second Intifada, in March 2001, I decided to immerse 133
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myself in the story of the Jordan in the hope of better understanding the critical issues in a crisis that seemed always to bog down in the grind of the daily violence. The river was a precious resource that Arabs and Jews needed to share but it too had become a weapon in the relentless conflict. It was a full year before the Middle East crisis would be drawn into President George W. Bush’s wider War on Terror. A new cycle of violence was building, but it was six months before September 11 and the world was weary of the ceaseless, impenetrable story of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. I was looking for a new metaphor that might make sense for readers of The Sydney Morning Herald. Now, almost a year to the day after that visit, the violence was explosive and I was flying to Tel Aviv. I had run late for my flight out of JFK because on the way to the airport I had stopped in at Bemelman’s Bar in the Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side for a quick beer with the boss of my bosses, Fairfax’s chief executive, Fred Hilmer. I had been ticktacking for weeks with Geoff Kitney, the Herald’s international editor, on picking the right time to come back to the Middle East, and St Patrick’s Day was it—March 17. I flew into Ben Gurion International Airport and, for the first time in more than a decade, I got through immigration without the customary security grilling given to foreign journalists. A shuttle bus took me to Jerusalem and delivered me to the courtyarded tranquillity of the St George Cathedral guesthouse, a modest $US40-a-night lodging just a short walk from the imposing Damascus Gate into the Old City. The St George usually catered for Christian pilgrims but that trade had dried up with the crisis and the guesthouse was fast becoming a haven for cash-strapped reporters who could not afford the $US350-a-night luxury of the fabled American Colony Hotel, a block or two to the east. Things were moving at a frightening pace. The war in Afghanistan had not sated the US urge to lash out in the wake of the September 11 attacks. George W. Bush and his hawkish White House team were making it pretty clear that Saddam Hussein was to be the next target in the War on Terror, and elaborate plans for a full-scale assault by an army of as many as 200 000 on Iraq had been leaked to the New Yorker and
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the New York Times. Exiled members of the Iraqi opposition were running around Washington explaining how they would carve up the Iraqi oil fields among the nations that came in on the war plan, and it did not seem to matter that the US had failed to link Saddam to the September 11 attacks. There were a lot of good reasons to rid the world of the Iraqi dictator, but the Iraqi status quo had applied pretty well for five to 10 years without any world leader being filled with an urgent need to dispatch him. Now Bush’s advisers were telling him that he was the man. But there was a stumbling block on the road to Baghdad—the Israeli– Palestinian conflict was escalating out of control. The day after I arrived in Jerusalem a gum-chewing Palestinian suicide bomber had boarded a bus at Wadi Ara in the north of Israel. When he detonated the explosives concealed under his jacket, eight people died and thirty were wounded. ‘People were blown out of the windows,’ a stunned witness recounted. And in less than 24 hours there was more devastation—the bombs were coming now at the rate of one a week and the sixteenth for the year killed three people and wounded another sixty right in the heart of Jerusalem.
At its beginning, way up in the mountains that straddle the borders of Lebanon, Israel and Syria, the upper reaches of the Jordan still have an exuberance that sings out from the mingling of the creeks and springs in what is one of the most fiercely contested frontier regions in the world. This stretch of the river is pretty, even Franklinesque. As they tumble from the great snow and chalk slopes, three streams—the Hasbani, the Banias and the Dan—join forces to become the Jordan. One of the three, the Banias, makes a spectacular start to its life as a stream, literally bursting in full flow from the rocks at the foot of Mt Hermon, the grandfather of the mountains. The Banias is steeped in history—it was on its banks that the Greeks worshipped Pan and the Romans built the city of Caesaria, to which the Crusaders laid siege; and it was there that a young fugitive from Jewish hate revealed himself to his disciples as the
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son of God. But after only 30 kilometres, the river chokes. It has worked up a head of steam for the 120-kilometre push to the Dead Sea, during which it would drop a dramatic 800 metres. Instead, it is captured in a civil engineer’s straitjacket as Israel’s National Water Carrier forces it elsewhere. And if the upper Jordan has great historical and religious significance, then so too does the cistern in which the Israelis temporarily hold the waters of the Jordan—the Sea of Galilee. This is where Christ walked on the water; where he divided the loaves and fishes; where he gave the Sermon on the Mount. But huge steel gates on the southern edge of the Sea of Galilee stop the Jordan in its tracks. And in a remarkable feat of engineering, Israel pumps the water the length of the country, storing it in huge underground aquifers before routing it to Israeli cities and farms as far away as the Negev Desert. In reality, it is the strength and strategy of the armies of the region that decide who controls the water. Early in the 1960s the Arab world reacted angrily to an Israeli decision to harness the Jordan for itself by piping most of the water away from the valley and into Israel. The Arabs opted for direct action—they would block the Jordan’s headwaters before they flowed into Israel, with a 65-kilometre network of canals and tunnels that would divert two of the three streams that became the Jordan. Israel responded with its own typical brand of daring. It launched military strikes—and when the distances were too great for artillery, its air raids flew deep into Syrian territory to force a halt to the construction work. The issue festered, with others, until 1967 when the Six Day War erupted, with Israel launching a pre-emptive strike on its neighbours, who clearly were preparing an attack of their own. The outcome was unbelievably humiliating for the Arabs. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria, it took the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan and the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. In less than a week, Israel had won control of the water supplies without which it would have great difficulty existing today. But if Israel’s thirst had been quenched, the fires were being stoked for today’s hatred and bitterness. Essentially, the crisis was now about Palestinian attempts to reverse
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the outcome of the Six Day War. The Arabs want their land back—the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for the Palestinians; the Golan Heights for the Syrians. The Palestinians want to uproot dozens of controversial Jewish settlements that have been built on their land and they want East Jerusalem restored as an Arab city so that they can make it the capital of a new Palestine. The Israelis say that all of these issues can be discussed when the violence has stopped. But it doesn’t stop—the Israelis and the Palestinians have been shooting and bombing their way through the latest uprising since September 2000 and a region of vital strategic significance continues to fester as the nations of the world seem unable—or unwilling—to find the essential circuit breaker. Washington had wanted nothing to do with this crisis but Arab leaders whose diplomacy and military installations were essential to any move against Iraq were insisting that the only country in the world that had the right kind of muscle to impose peace in the Middle East should give it a shot. That was the US. Crisis fires were burning on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip because of Bush’s very deliberate decision when he became president early in 2001 to stay out of the region. As Hilmer and I had quaffed our Sam Adams beers at Bemelman’s Bar, Vice President Dick Cheney was in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, almost at the end of a whistle-stop tour of the region during which every leader he met rejected his Iraq push. In Bahrain, Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al Khalifa told him bluntly and publicly: ‘The [Palestinian people are not dying] as a result of any Iraqi action . . . they are dying as a result of Israeli action. And, likewise, the people in Israel are dying as a result of action in response to those actions . . .’ Suddenly, and cynically, Washington came to the Middle East. Special envoy Anthony Zinni shuttled vainly between the leaders’ bunkers in Ramallah and Jerusalem; Cheney came to Jerusalem and met Ariel Sharon but refused to see Yasser Arafat. Tense Arab leaders were heading to Beirut to sign off on a ground-breaking Saudi plan for all to recognise the state of Israel and to normalise relations if Israel would agree to withdraw behind its old, 1967 borders. Israeli tanks had moved back into the
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Occupied Territories, besieging Arafat in his Ramallah fortress. Pessimism and resignation blanketed Israel and the West Bank. Sharon had enunciated his policy of beating the Palestinians into submission and he had started to execute it. As the Palestinian broadcasting chief Radwan AbuAyyash eyed the bomb-gutted remains of his five-storey radio and TV centre at Ramallah, he said to me: ‘Things are not looking good.’
Back in 2001 I had been keen to hear stories from the early days and with this as my mission I joined members of the Ghezawi tribe at Tel al Arbain, on the eastern bank of the Jordan, for the feast of Eid al Adh, the tenth day of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca when families come together to celebrate the return of the white-robed pilgrims from the Muslim holy city. They were gathered at a rustic pavilion on their tribal land in the Jordan valley, meeting and greeting each new arrival with a firm shake of the hand and a kiss brushed on each cheek. The specially prepared feast was mensaf, mutton cooked deliciously with a warm, spicy yogurt sauce and served on a mountain of pine nut flavoured rice. It was piled high on metal trays around which the family crowded, eating with their hands. The Ghezawis spanned time and place. There was a convoy of BMWs and Mercedes Benzes out the front and the mobile phones went off like firecrackers; many members of the family wore finely cut Western suits and their degrees and PhDs were from as far away as the University of Tennessee. Yet their roots were deep in this dry land. In the days when the Turks ruled, the family patriarch—father to some at this celebration, grandfather to others and great-grandfather to the toddlers playing on the grass—was a prince of the Ottoman Empire. For centuries the family’s special duty was to protect Muslim pilgrims from the north as they travelled the ancient King’s Highway, which still runs down the valley to Mecca, in what is now Saudi Arabia. But in the 1930s and 1940s, when the first Zionists worked the other side of the river, buying land on which to settle Jews ahead of the creation of the state of Israel, the patriarch abandoned his customarily lucrative
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property deals in Amman and instead went head-to-head with the Zionists, buying up on the West Bank in a bid to keep the land in Arab hands. The family still holds the deeds to the land he bought in what later became Israel. As one of his grandchildren explained over the mensaf lunch: ‘It didn’t make us rich—but it made us proud. We still have the deed and the Israelis have a kibbutz.’ The imposing character in the family crowd was today’s patriarch— the chisel-featured Mamdouh Ghezawi. At 68 years he was the oldest and his full-length chocolate-coloured jellaba gave him a truly regal appearance. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and there was added gravitas from his Omar Sharif moustache. But there was anger in Mamdouh, even at this comfortable family gathering. As he told his story, darkskinned retainers—descendants of the black slaves brought to the valley by the Ottomans—served us small glasses of sweet black tea and, later, tiny china bowls of a very special coffee. Mamdouh could not sit still— he jumped up, left me, then returned. ‘We used to live in Bedouin tents and we ploughed the land with horses and cattle. We got lots of fish from the river and the valley was filled with birds, which we hunted. But that’s all gone now because our river is dead. I have a house in the village and I farm the land here, but I have not seen the river for thirty years—it makes me too sad [because] it is like sewage now.’ The same sentiment was pervasive at Wadi Abdoon, a sprawling cinder-block mishmash on the outskirts of Amman. It is one of the longest-standing refugee camps in the world. There I found the garrulous Ali Othman, 73 years old, still scowling with bitterness at having had to flee his West Bank home nearly 40 years earlier in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War. Othman wore a red and white headdress and his face was as creased as the floor of the Jordan valley. Playing with the lapels of his well-worn pinstripe suit, he declared: ‘It was the biggest disaster of my life to be kicked out of my home. What do you think— do you think I was singing? My children were strapped to a donkey for the journey—like stones. The Jews were already occupying the Allenby Bridge as we walked across—they gave the children some biscuits and told us to get out.’ And like Mamdouh Ghezawi, Othman too had
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turned his back on the Jordan. He said: ‘I will not go to the river again until it is an Arab river; I will go to the river only to go home.’ On the Israeli side of the Jordan, I found another story as my mission took me to one of the earliest kibbutzim, Maoz Hayim, just across the river from the meeting house where I had lunch with the Ghezawi family. Maoz Hayim was established in the late 1930s, before Israel existed, on land bought from Arab landowners in what was then British-controlled Palestine. It was one of the first kibbutzim intended by the Zionists as a stepping-stone to the state of Israel. Among its pioneers were Uri Yaffe—who, when I visited, was 85 years old—and his wife Tamar, then 83. They had met when she was 16 and, in their different ways, they were the stuff of the founding of a determined state in hostile territory. Uri—who now had difficulty talking after a series of strokes—was one of the Jewish underground fighters who had helped to land illegal boatloads of Jewish immigrants and who defended the fledgling Jewish settlements in the 1930s and 1940s. He and his colleagues had roamed the then British protectorate to undermine London’s control and to fend off rising Arab resistance to the insistent Jewish presence. In those early days conditions at the kibbutz had been primitive. On guard against the constant threat of attack, they had slept in the fields to protect their crops from arson, and even in their first year they had come to blows with their Arab neighbours over water. When the kibbutz needed cash, Tamar had washed laundry in the stifling heat of a potash mine on the Dead Sea. Later she had been a teacher in the kibbutz kindergarten where, for two years in the 1960s, the children had slept in bunkers every night in fear of Arab attacks. So much had changed . . . and so little had changed. Asked about their life, Tamar pondered: ‘Sometimes I still ask, “Is it true that we are still here after the hard life that we have had?” It’s another world now . . . it is not so pioneering now, but the younger generation are good workers and good soldiers.’ Soldiers? ‘Don’t you listen to the news? I don’t know what we’d have done without our good army. We still have to raise soldiers because we are in another independence war now.’ Outside their house, two fool cats stalked a coquettish peacock in
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the lush, well-watered gardens as Tamar insisted on giving me a tour of the kibbutz sculptures—on her three-wheeled motorised cart. That she dwelt on two particular works was telling. One incorporated a section of the pipeline that brought the first water to Maoz Hayim from the Jordan River—it had an angel reaching for a big stopcock; the other included a section of a bridge blown up by the Israelis in the 1948 war of independence that had spanned the river near the kibutz. The romance of kibbutz life stole the imagination of many young Westerners in the 1960s. That was before the Six Day War and there had been an infectious enthusiasm about building the new nation of Israel. But the same cannot be said of the 130 Jewish settlements that Israel has built across the confiscated acres of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since 1967. These places are military fortresses inhabited by fundamentalist Jews who claim that the Old Testament is their mortgage on the land. One of the most controversial is Netzarim. It and its security needs have effectively sliced the Gaza Strip in two, making it almost impossible for Palestinians to move freely. Huge swathes of land around the settlement have been cleared of Palestinian homes, factories and orchards to deny cover to Palestinian intruders. There are only 55 settler families behind Netzarim’s high security fences and they go to and from the settlement in bulletproof buses on roads that are lined with high concrete barriers to shield them from Palestinian sniper attacks. Settlement schools are sandbagged and, when I visited one of the Gaza settlements, children were jumping back and forth in front of a narrow gap in one of the fortress walls, singing: ‘Kill me, kill me not . . .’ It was on one of the Gaza settlements early in 2001 that I met 47year-old Efrat Badichi. She claimed that her family had been in the Holy Land for nine generations and she epitomised the absolute belief of some Jews in the rightness of their claim to the Occupied Territories. At the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Israel fought Syria and Egypt in a desperate sequel to the 1967 war, Badichi had moved her family to the scenic but blood-soaked Golan Heights. She had wanted to make a stand for the Jews and it became her home until shortly after the outbreak of the new Intifada. With the eruption of renewed violence
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late in 2000, she decided that she and her family were needed in the Gaza settlements. She had told me: ‘I came here because families were being killed . . . it was on the other edge of our map [from the Golan], but those Jewish deaths left a moral and social gap in our people [here] and we have come to fill it. You can say it’s a kind of madness. I have a strong belief that we belong here . . . morally, religiously and historically. This is a part of the historical Jewish homeland . . . one of the rooms is burning and we have to put out the fire. We want to make peace with our neighbours [but only] until God decides that we should have the whole of the Promised Land. The Palestinian Authority will disappear because there is room for only one state between the Jordan [River] and the Mediterranean.’ Despite undertakings by the Israeli leadership to stem the growth of the settlements, their population has almost doubled—to about 200 000—in the last decade. The settlements have powerful political support and a system of subsidised charges for land and borrowings and a range of tax breaks not available to other Israelis. Estimates of the cost of defending the settlements run as high as $US1 billion a year and government incentives are priced at about half as much again. And all these commitments have been bluntly underscored by Ariel Sharon who, in the 1970s, called for a settler population of two million in the Occupied Territories and who, as prime minister, said in 2001: ‘The fate of Netzarim is the fate of Tel Aviv.’ Jerusalem was a divided city until Israel’s victory in 1967. But since the Israelis declared it to be the unified capital of Israel, its historic beauty has been destroyed by the frightening reality that walking down the wrong street at the wrong time can kill you; and by the savage cheekby-jowl existence of Jewish affluence and Palestinian poverty. Rosemary and olives still abound, and perhaps all that has changed in the Old City since Christ carried his cross to Mount Calvary is the merchandise in the shops. But within its great walls and fortress gates beats the heart of the conflict that has burned for thousands of years over who controls Jerusalem. No other city on earth has meant so much to so many different
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people around the world. For Christians, it is where Jesus Christ was tried and executed. But today the pilgrims are too scared to come to walk the path to the cross or to visit what is said to be his tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. A stone’s throw away is the deep attachment for Muslims—the awe-inspiring Dome of the Rock, with its golden orb that utterly defines the Old City at sunrise and sunset. But, far more importantly, it housed the rock on which Abraham is said to have been willing to sacrifice his son, and from which the prophet Mohammed is said to have made his ascent to heaven. Muslims still come to pray—as and when the Israeli security forces allow them. The Jews have been exiled from Jerusalem a number of times but they are back, still anchoring their claim to the city in its capture by the Israelite King David in 997 BC. The ancient chapters of Jewish history in Jerusalem are named after their shrines—the First and the Second Temples. Many Jews dream of rebuilding them but they are thwarted by the existence of the Muslim Dome of the Rock, which now sits, more or less, where the Second Temple is said to have been located. It was the controversial visit to the dome late in 2000 by an aspiring Israeli leader, the warrior-like Ariel Sharon, who insisted that he must assert Jewish sovereignty over the site, that helped spark the violence of the second Intifada. The only remaining physical evidence of the Second Temple is the Western Wall, one of the huge retaining walls that buttress the high platform on which sits the Dome of the Rock. The plaza in front of the wall is a 24-hour-a-day synagogue that is forever under the watchful eyes of the men, women and weapons of the Israeli Defense Forces. In 2000 some believed, and with hindsight we can now say foolishly, that peace in the Middle East was possible. Then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak was prepared to give much of the contentious Golan Heights back to Damascus, but any hope of a deal fell through when Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad insisted that all the land taken from Syria in 1967 must be returned. Barak offered the Palestinians much of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and parts of East Jerusalem. Critically, in a move that resonates today, Yasser Arafat, the aging Palestinian leader and a contemporary of Sharon’s from bitter wars in the past, said no
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too. Barak had made the offer to Arafat at Camp David, under the watchful eye of Bill Clinton, who had hoped desperately that he could leave office not as the man who had invited Monica Lewinsky into the Oval Office, but as the president who had brought elusive peace to the Middle East. It was perhaps the wily Arafat’s single greatest miscalculation, because in the new round of conflict that followed, Ariel Sharon was swept to power in Israel. The new prime minister declared all bets were off and, as the violence intensified, he set out to crush Arafat with the biggest military campaign mounted by the Israeli Defense Forces in 20 years. In the uncertain environment between the Camp David failure and the Israeli election in February 2001, I headed up to the Golan Heights. I was struck by how incredibly small everything seemed. I was in Israel but, looking one way, I saw Lebanon; looking the other, I saw Syria with snow-capped Mt Hermon dominating the mountain strip that bristled with Israeli defence and listening posts. Some of the posts allowed a clear view of the night lights of Damascus, the Syrian capital, a mere 60 kilometres to the east. And when I looked south into Israel and the West Bank, the Sea of Galilee seemed like a puddle—only 20 kilometres long, 12 kilometres wide. Among the people I met on the Golan Heights, there was a palpable fear that the area could be returned to Syria. The disputed border was now up to 25 kilometres into Syrian territory, depriving the Syrians of access to the 1000-metre-high western face of the Golan, which in the past they had used as a shooting gallery from which to harass Israelis on the farms below. I trudged the Golan with Professor Dan Zaslafsky, talking about water and war. His credentials were good—at 70 years of age, he was a former head of Israel’s Water Commission and a former soldier. He had a good sense of humour and quoted regularly from his three volumes of Jewish jokes. We started where the Yarmuk River emptied into the Jordan, where Israel and Jordan stop and Syria starts. There, at the southern end of the Golan, the menace of the border zone revealed itself—a dangerous tangle of fences and electronic surveillance, of razor wire and land mines. The road along the border fence was ploughed
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daily, to make it easier for Israeli border guards to detect footprints or track marks that might reveal an incursion. The fence was there to keep Syria and Jordan out. But Zaslafsky, still the old soldier, ruthlessly proposed doing the same with the Palestinians: ‘Let them do what they like and not bother us. Israelis think they are doing the right thing economically by Jordan—but the Jordanians don’t see it that way. Let’s just lock them all out.’ Which, in the heightened crisis of 2002, is what Ariel Sharon decided to do. As spring became summer the devastating suicide bomb attacks by young Palestinians intensified and the prime minister started work on what became known as ‘Sharon’s Curtain’—a $US300 million high-tech, high-security fence around the West Bank that he hoped would keep Palestinians out of Israel proper. Zaslafsky continued the tour. It was the end of winter and the Yarmuk should have been at its best. But Syrian dams and weirs on its tributaries robbed the river of much of its flow. It was a dirty, sluggish waterway going nowhere in a hurry as it meandered past the twisted remains of a railway bridge that the Israelis had blasted in 1948—the one from which the sculptor at kibbutz Maoz Hayim had taken the sections of mangled steel for his tribute to the Jewish state. The roadside was littered with memorials of more recent conflict—the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973. One of the shrines included the helmet a young Israeli conscript wore to his death; a few hundred metres up the road another included the wreckage of the vehicle in which one of his colleagues rode to his death. And as we passed a third shrine, the professor inclined his head, observing: ‘I was his guide in the youth league.’ The professor’s own war story was instructive on the conditioning of minds from one generation to the next in a part of the world where, perhaps, there can be no peace. In the 1967 war, Zaslafsky led a unit of armoured cars up the face of the Golan Heights; in the 1973 conflict, his son was a tank commander; and on the weekend of my visit, Zaslafsky’s son-in-law was doing reservist duty with the Golan border patrols. Zaslafsky recalled: ‘The Six Day War was frightening. It was June 9, a Friday . . .’ He paused to laugh: ‘. . . but it was much easier than we
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thought it would be. We started on the Friday morning and by Saturday afternoon we were at the gates of Kuneitra [17 kilometres into Syrian territory]. That was when the Syrians ran away. But ’73 was much worse.’ From the edge of the Golan the view swept across the Sea of Galilee to the hills that embrace Nazareth, the boyhood home of Jesus, and, further south, the West Bank. And from up there, much of the strategic thinking underpinning the state of Israel revealed itself with startling clarity. The Heights were a perfect launch pad for a war on Israel, so why hand them back to an aggressive neighbour? And why remove the Israeli guns trained on the Syrian capital? Zaslafsky seemed to speak for many Israelis when he told me: ‘Barak was an idiot to suggest giving back the Golan. He wanted to go down in history but he was not worried about the price we would pay. It was madness.’ At Qatzrin, the centre of the Golan, we went to see Avi Zeira, an activist in a vocal local campaign to keep the Golan for Israel. Zeira was blunt: ‘This conflict will not be resolved, so it has to be managed. We should not accept the illusion of peace . . . We should look for ways to cooperate. But I can’t see any—Israel owns the Golan Heights. It’s written in Israeli law. Our new Prime Minister Sharon is a friend of the Golan.’ Without a hint of embarrassment, Zeira produced a map that showed the 57 ruined villages on the Golan that had been home to Syrian communities and the 18 new Israeli settlements that had been built since 1967. He said: ‘The Syrians want to bring half a million villagers back to the Golan. Their sewage and other waste would make the Sea of Galilee into a cesspool. The Barak agenda went with Barak!’
When Israel took the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, it created its own Catch-22. If it didn’t increase its Jewish population, Jews would become a minority between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. And there were Israeli voters who would punish any government that gave up the Occupied Territories, because it would be surrendering the dream of a greater Israel.
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It seems that Ariel Sharon believes he can deal with both issues. According to the New York Post columnist Robert Novak, Sharon left US senators slack-jawed when he briefed them privately on his plans for more than a million new Jewish immigrants to Israel and claimed that the ancient boundaries of the ‘Land of Israel’ were guaranteed to the Jewish people by holy scripture. He did not sound like a prime minister suing for peace. At the same time the Israeli National Security Council was warning that within 20 years Jews would be a minority between the river and the sea. The council’s chairman, Major General Uzi Dayan told the Israeli parliament that by the year 2020 Jews would represent only 45 per cent of a combined population of 15 million, as opposed to the 55 per cent Jewish representation in a combined population of 9 million in 2002. The choice then that confronts Israelis, for whom the Zionist enterprise requires a Jewish majority in their land, is either to give the Palestinians their independence or, as some Palestinians fear is the Sharon agenda, to allow a combination of expanding Jewish settlements and a ‘transfer’ program to reduce Palestinian numbers in the occupied territories. ‘Transfer’ is a policy option, favoured by some on the extreme right in Israeli politics, under which Palestinians would be encouraged or pushed into exile. The fears, deeply held on both sides of the conflict, shape its progress, and Sharon and Arafat are seen to embody the worst of them. Palestinians often insist that Sharon wants to kill their hoped-for nation, either by offering them a fragmented string of isolated communities or by hoping that if he can make their lives sufficiently intolerable they will drift away, into the neighbouring Arab countries. Israelis often voice the fear that Arafat will not be satisfied until they are driven into the sea to allow a new Palestine to run from the Mediterranean to the banks of the Jordan. All the likely elements of a peace have been pushed around the table, like vegetables on the plate of a child who refuses to eat them. But if there is to be a peace, some of them will have to be agreed and others will have to be traded off. Something has to give. But just as Sharon, at
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different times, has railed against every one of these claims, Arafat too has often danced around the edge of the diplomatic process rather than taking courage and going to the middle for a close look at what might be achieved. Back in the early 1990s, after the Oslo breakthrough, Arafat was seen to be seriously pursuing a negotiated settlement. But, as Time magazine put it: ‘Something flipped and . . . at the Camp David talks, the Israelis offered him their best deal yet on a state. By objective measure, the offer still wasn’t good enough, but Arafat didn’t merely reject it. He could have asked for more or [he might have put a counter-proposal]; instead he left the table, went home and fuelled a new uprising, which led to this war.’ Observers who have looked inside Arafat’s head put the Camp David walkout down to his age and his worries about how history would remember him. Perhaps the Camp David road meant too much of a compromise on the Palestinian dream. The Israelis had wanted Arafat to drop the Palestinian claim to all or most of East Jerusalem, they wanted to keep some of the West Bank settlements and they wouldn’t have a bar of refugees returning to Israel proper. All that was too much for the man who is the embodiment of the Palestinian cause, but also it was much more than will ever be put on the table by Ariel Sharon, who too often sounds as though he met only yesterday with the founders of the state of Israel and that it is their agenda and vision that he pursues. History will remember these two as the leaders who couldn’t do the deal, as the men who paid lip service to peace and security—but delivered neither because they knew only how to fight. Punch-drunk, they will keep trying to grind each other down and it will be their successors who will have to make reality of dreams, for Zionists and Palestinians alike. All those dreams are about land. As the Israeli commentator Herb Keinon put it: ‘Without agriculture there is no Jew, no return to the soil, no legendary Jaffa orange.’ But for millions of Palestinian refugees, the land on which the Jews want to grow oranges is their land. Those who languish in the refugee camps of Jordan and Lebanon have an emotional desperation about crossing back over the river to a home that
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is denied to them. And those who are crowded into the refugee camps on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are demanding freedom from Israel too. So that is how the time bomb of the Middle East is primed—victor and vanquished, oppressor and oppressed captured in an ugly embrace, each as much a prisoner as the other.
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THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES Tulkarm March 2002
The air on the Abdul Nasser roundabout filled with the aroma of shwarma lamb and chicken as the spiced meats twisted before gas burners outside a huddle of pavement cafés. It was early in the day and bleary-eyed customers were wandering in for coffee and gossip, or just to sit quietly, some burying themselves in a newspaper. I was in Tulkarm, in the far north of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, drinking a muddy Arabic coffee as I waited for Tacsin, my translator, who was coming by bus and taxi from Nablus. At the same time about 50 local Palestinian families were girding themselves for a level of Iraqi intervention in the Middle East crisis that we had not seen before. These were families who had lost a father, a brother or a son in the battle against Israeli occupation—because they were suicide bombers, because the Israelis had executed them, or because they had been caught in the crossfire. About 200 family members were climbing three flights of concrete stairs to the local Chamber of Commerce meeting hall. In Tulkarm, men usually dominate public gatherings, but on this occasion most of the men were dead and it was the widows, the mothers and the sisters who came with their hands out for Saddam Hussein’s money. It had taken me only a day of phone calls to arrange to attend this extraordinary ceremony and I went with mixed feelings—all death in 150
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this conflict was politicised, yet I felt like an intruder on private grief. But when I looked around and saw no other foreign reporters, the lure of an exclusive story propelled me to the front of the hall, with Tacsin by my side whispering his translation as the meeting unfolded. Iraq, like Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations, has long funded the Palestinian cause but, until this meeting Saddam’s bagmen had made only lowprofile visits to the homes of the victims and the perpetrators of the violence. However, the numbers were getting out of hand and this was the first time the families had been brought together in public. And, far more controversially, this was also the first time that Saddam had paid a special bonus of $US15 000 on top of his longstanding payment of $US10 000 to the relatives of those who had died as suicide bombers.The hall was packed and the intake of breath was audible after the announcement of this bonus. When I asked one of the organisers, a senior Arab Liberation Front (ALF) official by the name of Ma’amoon Tayeh, why the extra money, he told me it was to encourage more Palestinians to volunteer as suicide bombers to help, as Tacsin translated it, ‘to confirm the legitimacy of our national questions’. The families sat patiently enough through endless mantra speeches— Saddam is great, Israel and the US are evil, the war will be won, the US wants peace in the Middle East only so that it can then attack Iraq, and so on. And they joined in, in a subdued way, with an overly enthusiastic cheerleader as he prowled the aisle in loud praise of the Iraqi president: ‘We bare our souls and our blood for the sake of our youth and for you, Saddam.’ They had thimble-sized plastic cups of cardamom-flavoured coffee as the men at the top table opened Saddam’s cheque book. Working from a dais decorated with the flags of Palestine and Iraq and under the watchful gaze of posters of Saddam and Yasser Arafat, they called the names of the 47 martyrs, checked the identity of the family member who went forward to receive the cheque and had them sign a receipt or mark it with a thumb print. The family representative then shook the hand of a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and no one seemed at all put out by the currency in which the cheques were written—infidel US dollars.
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The grieving widows and mothers seemed comforted when one of Tayeh’s ALF colleagues told them: ‘Don’t think that the martyrs are dead—they are alive and in the heavens and they are close to God.’ Noura Ayesh al Jalab, 47, was crying for the loss of her nine-year-old boy Mohammed. She told me: ‘He was armed with only an ice cream and he was trying to say “hello” to the Israeli soldiers when they shot him. I’m not sad that he’s martyred, but I’m sad and angered by the behaviour of the Israeli soldier who shot him.’ Sixty-year-old Fatheyeh Abu Asala’s face was swathed in sorrow and a white scarf as she spoke of her 23-year-old suicide-bomber son Murad Abu al Asala, who went to meet the Israeli secret police as a collaborator, injuring two of them and killing himself when he detonated a small device concealed in his trousers. She said: ‘It is very expensive for us to get our homeland—we have to pay with our blood. We are grateful to Saddam because he helps us as though he was a Palestinian too.’ The wife of a Palestinian emergency medical worker killed when his ambulance came under Israeli fire quietly collected her cheque and left. Many threads of the unravelling tapestry of the Middle East could be seen at the meeting in Tulkarm. The crisis was the stage on which Saddam Hussein played to the so-called Arab Street, that body of seething sympathy for the Palestinians that frightens repressive regimes across the Muslim world—the regimes fear that the raw anger directed at Israel and the US could just as easily be turned on them, especially those who, like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordon, have little regard for democratic freedom and who are propped up by Washington. Saddam blames the US for the predicament of his people and that of the Palestinians and then makes grand gestures to ease the pain. Last year he proposed diverting hundreds of millions of dollars to the Palestinian people from the oil-for-food program under which Iraq is allowed to sell oil to buy food for its desperate population; and this year he actually halted oil production for 30 days in a bid to disrupt the international market and to punish the US. This tactic turned out to be ineffectual except for the lost sales to Iraq as sometime-allies of the US, like Saudi Arabia, lifted oil production to fill the gap. He flies hundreds
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of injured Palestinian fighters to hospitals in Iraq and warns his medical staff to ensure that they get the very best treatment; and he sends convoys of food and medical aid across the Jordanian desert to be given to the Palestinians. It all works—his name is chanted at demonstrations, his poster is everywhere, his money is in the bank and, in the days after the meeting in Tulkarm, thank-you advertisements appeared in the local Arab press bearing Saddam’s picture—not those of the martyrs. And while he can champion the Palestinian Intifada, other Arab countries have to temper any enthusiasm they might have for George W. Bush’s plans to go to war against Iraq. The half-million dollars doled out as I watched during one morning in Tulkarm meant that the besieged Iraqi leader had contributed more than $US10 million to Palestinian families since the new Intifada had begun 18 months earlier. But the timing of this clear signal that Saddam was stoking the Middle East conflict with his special bombers’ bonus to encourage even more suicide attacks would make it more difficult for the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, to manage his increasingly strained relationship with the US. The Palestinians and Israelis had been unable to agree to a ceasefire in US-brokered talks and there were growing signs that Washington was succumbing to an Israeli campaign to marginalise Arafat. For months the Israeli Defense Forces had kept Arafat under effective house arrest and Arab leaders were making little headway with their campaign for him to be allowed to attend the Arab summit in Beirut at the end of March to discuss the Saudi plan for peace. But the meeting in Tulkarm gave the US and Israel an opportunity to accuse Arafat of being in the embrace of two of President Bush’s three ‘axis of evil’ countries—Iraq and Iran. Arafat had denied any knowledge of a recent shipment of Iranian arms seized by the Israelis on its way to Palestine but, increasingly, the US suspected that the Palestinian leader had formed an alliance with Iran to smuggle weapons worth millions into the Occupied Territories. Now, Arafat would be hard pressed to deny knowledge of a public ceremony on his own territory, during which supporters of Saddam handed out cheques for half a million and encouraged others to become
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suicide bombers. And the US would gladly add this provocative intrusion into the Palestinian–Israeli conflict to the case it was building to justify a military strike against Saddam Hussein. The Palestinian organisers of the ceremony at Tulkarm, about 90 kilometres north of Jerusalem, were from the Arab Liberation Front, a small PLO faction closely aligned with Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party. The ALF official, Ma’amoon Tayeh, spoke to me before the meeting: ‘Saddam Hussein considers Palestine to be a governate of Iraq and he thinks the same of the Palestinian martyrs as he does of Iraqi martyrs— they are all martyrs for the whole Arab nation.’ The ALF, like the other PLO factions, was banished from Beirut in a US-brokered deal when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. The fighters sailed off to Tunis and many later ended up in Baghdad. And with the establishment under the Oslo Accords of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the mid nineties, many of them had come home. One of them was Rakad Salem, a silver-haired 58-year-old who was now secretary general of the ALF. These days he could be found in a spartan fifth-floor office in the teeming West Bank city of Ramallah, directions to which I came upon in an email from Mexico. In Jerusalem, I had expected to catch up with Hugh Dellios, a friend stationed there as Middle East correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. We had met years earlier, when we were the only passengers on a commercial flight into Kinshasa to cover the demise of the bad man of Africa, Mobuto Sese Seko. I knew that Dellios had done work on the ALF, but when I went looking for him I discovered that he had moved on and was now covering South America from Mexico City. Rakad Salem insisted that the ALF’s work was political and social— like handing out Saddam’s money. He looked at me as though I was an idiot when I asked how the Iraqi money got to Ramallah. He said: ‘It’s transferred by the banks—from the Iraqi banks to the banks in Palestine.’ And he confirmed that, since the start of the second Intifada in September 2000, more than 800 families had received martyr payments of $US10 000 and that $US1000 had been given to Palestinian fighters with serious injuries and $US500 to those with light injuries. But didn’t
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the hard-pressed people of Iraq need this money, I asked. He replied: ‘Despite the difficult conditions in Iraq, Saddam Hussein insists that he must stand side by side with the Palestinians.’ And asked if he saw himself as a terrorist or a freedom fighter, Salem rose from his desk and drew back the curtains to reveal the biblical landscape of the West Bank. He said: ‘In 1948 I was dismissed from my land here. Now I’m back and every day I look out that window at an Israeli settlement on our land. It is my duty to join the struggle.’ Dr Hassan Khraisheh, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council who told the crowd at Tulkarm that he had just returned from a solidarity conference in Baghdad, said some Palestinian families believed the money should be sent back to Iraq because of the hardships imposed on the Iraqi people by US-backed sanctions; and some used the money to ‘buy weapons to defend Palestine’. Praising Iraq as the only Arab country that officially gave money to the Palestinian cause, he explained: ‘The Saudis used to give $US4000 to the martyrs, but now it depends on public donations. Saddam Hussein’s money is a message to those who might offer themselves as martyrs that their families will be supported . . .’ On the day I visited the ALF office in Ramallah, Rakad Salem told me that the last family to receive Saddam’s dollars by way of an ALF delegation going to their home had been a household that had thrown up the latest hero of the cause—Wafa Edris, a 28-year-old ambulance volunteer who a few weeks earlier had become the first woman suicide bomber to detonate her backpack in Israel. Saddam Hussein had ordered a memorial in her honour on one of Baghdad’s main squares, and he proclaimed her to be a symbol who ‘raises the standing of Arab women and affects the enemy’s morale in favour of our nation’. Saddam’s party-controlled newspapers were honouring her with poetry: ‘You have sparked in us a craving for beautiful death; you made us passionately in love with the impossible.’ And the Iraqi leader won gratitude for all this. Wafa Edris’s brother, 36-year-old Khalil, whom I found in the family’s chaotic home in a refugee camp called Ama’aria near Ramallah, told me that he missed his
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only sister, but he was proud of her and he saw her death as justified revenge against the Israelis. And was he happy to accept the Iraqi blood money? ‘It is a good donation. We lost many things in our house because of the damage by the Israeli soldiers when they came through it. We have had no work for 12 months and we need to buy furniture,’ he said. The Edris family was rewarded by Saddam before he started paying the $US15 000 bonus to suicide bombers. But Khalil justified their acceptance of the Iraqi dollars like this: ‘Our people do not struggle against Israel to get money from Saddam Hussein. But it is good moral support at the time of our loss. The Baghdad memorial to my sister is a great thing, because they only have such monuments for high-ranking leaders. When we have stability and peace, the first country I want to visit is Iraq—so that I can thank Saddam for helping the Palestinians.’
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THE MATZA BOMB 14 Haifa and Jenin April 2002
Terrorism. It just walked in off the Haifa street, destroying lunch and lives. And in its wake there was an overpowering sense of helplessness— an awed, angry crowd gathering irresistibly around the cavern of death that until Sunday afternoon was the crowded Matza restaurant in the northern city of Haifa. I was back at the St George in East Jerusalem when the news flash came up on the Haaretz website. Though I had to drive more than 160 kilometres up the coastal freeway, the crowd was still there, screaming their anguish and their anger, much of it directed at Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Some were draped in the Israeli flag, many clutched mobile phones and a few were lighting votive candles. On the radio, police chief Shlomo Aharonishky stated the obvious: ‘We’re doing everything we humanly can—but it is impossible to be everywhere.’ The secretive arrival of the suicide bomber, the shocking deaths and the outrage that followed had become a well-practised ritual. It emerged that no one took much notice of the bomber as he slipped into Matza’s, because despite an unprecedented wave of bombings there was no security guard. One eyewitness said that the bomber had been talking on a mobile phone as he walked in at about 2.30 pm; another said that he wore a bulky black jacket to conceal more than a kilogram of explosive taped to his stomach. In hindsight all this sounds careless, but there 157
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were good reasons for the false sense of security—this was cosmopolitan Haifa, where Jews and Arabs got on better than they did in other towns and cities; the Matza was owned by a Jew and managed by an Israeli Arab; and the hummus was so damned good it lured its enthusiastic clientele from both sides of the community. When I arrived, special volunteers trained in forensics and strict Jewish burial rites were painstakingly gathering body parts from what was left of the rafters, the floors and walls of the restaurant. As a Chevrolet Savana wagon wheeled in to take away the bagged remains, dumpsters were being loaded with rubble and tradesmen were hard at work stabilising the wreckage. The building was a crumpled mess. The roof was peeled back and rubble was strewn around for 100 metres. The glass-fronted drinks cabinets were skewed and fractured and airconditioning units hung precariously from the neat wall cavities into which they had been built. The steel frames of tables and chairs were mangled and a spaghetti-like mess of wires and plumbing hung from where the ceiling had been. Off to one side, a media battalion had its cameras lined up on the apron of an adjacent service station, filing reports which, together with another suicide bombing near Jerusalem during the afternoon, would bookend the evening’s new threats from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. In a five-minute television address in which he used the word ‘terrorism’ 14 times, Sharon told Israelis: ‘We must fight this terrorism in an uncompromising war to uproot these savages.’ The Matza restaurant was on Rupin Street, a broad sweep of bitumen running through a deep gully on the slopes of Mt Carmel, a wooded limestone mountain that dominates the port city. A shell-shocked Miki Matza, the owner of the restaurant, said that about 30 people were having lunch when the bomber struck. I interviewed him as he sat on an upended plastic crate near the bowsers in the adjacent service station. He described the scene: ‘I was 10 metres away when it went up; I was just walking away. Terror doesn’t have eyes—it doesn’t look at Arabs or Jews.’ And propped up in his hospital bed, Ali Adawa, one of the Arab family that ran the restaurant, was incredulous when he spoke to a local TV station: ‘I am an Arab and I should get a guard? Believe me [these
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attackers] don’t make distinctions. There are five of us Arabs in the restaurant—my brothers, my relatives. We’re all one family there.’ The Matza had become a halfway house for Arabs and Jews. Miki Matza said: ‘Jews and Arabs have been coming here for years. They could have fun here; we had something like a brotherhood—Jews, Muslims and Christians from all levels of our society.’ Fifteen people died—14 Jews, one Arab. They included the husband and two teenage children of Rachel Koren, who attended the burial of her family on an ambulance stretcher so that she could hear a government minister ask for forgiveness for failing to protect them. And there was Moshe Levin, who had stopped at the Matza only to pick up some hummus to take home. His daughter, who chose to wait for him in the car, watched the restaurant erupt. There was 16-year-old Orly Ofir, who was a talented young woman soccer player, and another victim was the niece of Avraham Menchell, a big local soccer star. Suheil Adawi, a member of the family that ran the restaurant, died because he came in on his day off to fill in for one of his brothers. At the funeral of another of the victims there were heartbreaking exchanges as the sons of 67-year-old Dov Chernevroda continued an old family argument with their father—even as they put him in his grave. Chernevroda was a Jewish left-winger, a champion of the peace process. He helped out at a cultural centre, the charter of which was peaceful coexistence. He urged Israeli Arabs to contest municipal elections, he helped the Muslim community on planning matters and he had organised speaking engagements for his old friend, the Palestinian leader Faisal Husseini, who died in 2001. In a hillside cemetery that looks over the Mediterranean Sea, Chernevroda’s tearful son Shaul chastised his father’s naivety: ‘How could they kill you, especially you who tried for a Palestinian state even more than the Palestinians themselves? Father, do not say that I didn’t tell you so. Thanks for your values, which I took and then went in the opposite direction. You used to ask: “How did I produce such a monster?” And to laugh about it—because you loved me anyway.’ But a second son, Yaov, defended his father: ‘It is so wrong that you
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were killed by a cruel fanatic during a period in which this country has lost its way. You were a torch of hope. Everyone called you naive, but you showed that every human is created in God’s image. You showed us that there is one way, to believe in the worth of every human even in this difficult hour.’ Dozens were killed or wounded, but these are just statistics. It is the account of survivors like 17-year-old Yuhuda Aigzer that conveys the horror of this attack: ‘I was just about to go into the Matza when I was thrown to the ground by a massive boom. Everything was on fire. I saw one man with his hair on fire. A young boy with his face covered in blood. There was blood and glass everywhere.’ Shimon Sabag chanced to be driving past when he heard the explosion. He pulled over: ‘What I saw was horrible. I went into the gas station and I started to deal with the injured people. I couldn’t deal with the critical injuries so I tried to help those with lesser injuries. I saw a mother holding on to her daughter as I was putting out the flames . . . there were pieces of flesh everywhere.’ When I found Haifa’s new mayor Amran Mizna at the edge of the crowd, he was devastated: ‘Innocent people sitting in a restaurant, and this comes out of the blue—I don’t recall anything in the history of mankind that would make people send us suicide bombers.’ There was a lot of understandable hard talk and calls for revenge but, as darkness softened the jagged edges of what remained of the Matza, a lonely voice in the confusion that is life, war and politics in Israel struggled to be heard from a bed at the nearby Ramban Hospital. Twenty-seven-year-old Sinjana Wakid was being treated for minor injuries received in the blast. She said: ‘I came to this country seven years ago and I am Christian, Jewish and Muslim. My grandmother on my father’s side was Jewish, and her husband was a Muslim and my mother was Christian. The person who blew himself up was not crazy. They say the Arabs are crazy but it’s not true. It’s someone who saw the same pain that I saw today, and he did it out of what he saw. They also feel pain. Those who blow themselves up are not terrorists; they are soldiers. They come to take revenge. I don’t justify them. They make a lot of mistakes. I have all three religions in me and I don’t want to stay here. Sharon’s
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old and doesn’t care that young people are killed, and Arafat is the same—he doesn’t care if the young people commit suicide. It’s well known that what’s done to Muslims, like in Chechnya, brings revenge. And a Jewish boy who cries on his father’s grave will grow up with hatred and seek revenge.’ Some Israeli authorities accept Palestinian claims that Yasser Arafat does not have control over the bombing activities of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, both of which claimed responsibility for the Haifa bombing. But despite claims by the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade that they plan and execute their activities in isolation, their membership is drawn from Arafat’s own Fatah faction of the PLO. Sharon holds Arafat entirely responsible for all the bombings. He and US president George W. Bush have demanded that Arafat appear on the Arab TV networks again and make a more convincing appeal for a halt to the bombing than he has done in the past. As the Israeli emergency crews cleared the Matza rubble, calls of celebration went out from the mosque loudspeakers in the refugee camps at Jenin, an impoverished West Bank town about 50 kilometres southeast of Haifa. They announced that the suicide bomber was 18-year-old Shadi Tubasi, a resident of the town’s teeming camp who had acquired an Israeli identity card by marrying an Israeli Arab. On the night of the bombing I stayed in Haifa and rose early so that I could go on to Jenin and file both sides of the bombing story as a single report in the next day’s edition of the Herald. There was fierce tension in the camp as hundreds crowded into the local youth centre to celebrate the martyrdom of Shadi Tubasi. This was a ritual too. Driving to the youth centre I had to avoid mounds of earth on the road, which the locals told me had been mined in advance of an expected Israeli incursion; and overnight new graffiti had been drawn and special postcards printed to honour ‘the one who did the heroic Haifa explosion’. But 52-year-old Zakaria Tubasi, the father of the bomber, was feeling anything but heroic. He said: ‘I thank God that my son is a martyr, but I’m not happy that he is dead. No one thought he would do such a thing. I don’t know if he left a message, but he was not politically active and
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I did not see anything in his behaviour to tell me he might do this. His life was difficult because of the way we live—he had no job and he was depressed.’ And the dead in Haifa? Tubasi shrugged in resignation: ‘They are the same as us—they too are human beings.’ His son had been dead for less than 24 hours and the nearest Tubasi came to making a political statement was this: ‘If there is peace, everything is possible’.
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MARKED MEN 15 Nablus, the West Bank
April 2002
Suddenly, Palestinians were killing Palestinians. An orgy of death by mutilation and humiliation broke out across the West Bank as vigilantes pulled men off the street or from their prison cells and executed them before cheering, mocking crowds. This was not justice as we expect it; it was not humanity as we know it. But with the collapse of law and order and the weight of occupation, just the mere suspicion of collaborating with the Israelis meant a death sentence. And much of the killing was being done in the name of the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade which, as the second Intifada started late in 2000, issued a warning: ‘We promise that we are going to teach the spies a lesson in patriotism that they will never forget, which will lead them to think twice before doing such evil acts. Death to collaborators.’ The rain was pouring down and the streets of Nablus were deserted— except for my car, on which I had balanced the risk of going into a Palestinian town with yellow Israeli registration plates by using coloured tape to shape a big T and a V on all sides of it to tell any snipers that I was a foreign reporter. My instructions were to go to a particular street corner and wait. It turned out to be two blocks from a ragged pile of rubble that had been Yasser Arafat’s local residence until it was demolished in an Israeli missile attack. There was a tap on the window and Tacsin, my interpreter, got out to talk to a heavy-set man who had 163
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materialised by the car. They headed off, calling for me to follow— around the block, through a set of heavy security gates, around the back of an apartment block and into an office where I was ushered into the presence of Nassar Badawi. Eight months earlier he had stepped into his brother’s shoes as one of the leaders of the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an offshoot of Arafat’s Fatah faction of the PLO. Yasser Badawi died in a car bomb attack that Nassar Badawi said was part of an Israeli campaign to eliminate key Palestinian leaders. When I went to see him, he was justifying the killing of Palestinians by Palestinians. There were 12 executions on the day we met. At Tulkarm, in the north of the West Bank, two masked gunmen went to a building used as a temporary prison—the old prison had been demolished in an Israeli attack. The prison guards did nothing as the gunmen herded eight suspected collaborators into the street. As a crowd gathered, the prisoners were executed and their bodies left on the street as a lesson to others. Earlier in the day, in Qalqilyah, a few kilometres south of Tulkarm, the bodies of two young men jailed 12 months earlier for collaboration—Abu Ishab, 20, and Walid Radwan, 22—were found dumped in a side street riddled with bullets. Their deaths were said to be the handiwork of their prison guards. Another killing was reported from Beit Jala, a community near Bethlehem. The last killing of the day was loaded with symbolism and sinister intent. It took place in the heart of Bethlehem, near Manger Square, reputedly the birthplace of Jesus Christ. The killers, again members of Badawi’s al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, blindfolded and bound 21-year-old Mahmood Rahamie, whom they accused of using e-mail to send information to his Israeli operators. They were so pleased with themselves that they allowed a Reuters film crew to record the execution, but then they thought better of it. They demanded that the cameramen hand over the tape; they destroyed it on the spot and then threatened the journalists, warning them that they would be held personally responsible if any images of the incident were published. Nassar Badawi did not flinch as he told me: ‘These are not random killings. They are limited to just one kind of person—those who give
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the Israelis the information they need to assassinate our leaders. They have killed many of our people—like my brother. So this is our message to the Palestinian people—don’t talk to the Israelis. And also, we had to kill these people before the next Israeli assault on us—because we can’t have the Israelis rescuing them.’ The Israelis have exacted a heavy toll on the Palestinian leadership since beginning a program of systematic assassination late in 2000. Dozens have died in what the Israelis call ‘pre-emptive self-defence’ and what Amnesty International calls ‘extra-judicial execution’. The first such attack was on a deadly accurate Palestinian sniper, 37-year-old Hussein Abayat. As he drove through the hills near Bethlehem, three Apache attack helicopters circled in from the rear and four Hellfire missiles demolished Abayat’s Mitsubishi pick-up. Months later Abayat’s younger brother Nadji drove me along the route of his brother’s last journey—creating in me a feeling of great exposure as he explained that he had served time in an Israeli prison for attempting to blow up a bus and that now he was being hunted by the Israelis on suspicion that he had been behind the revenge death of an Israeli soldier on the day of his brother’s funeral. The Israelis admitted that they have an extensive network of informants and that they need detailed and timely information to mount operations such as the one that killed the older Abayat and, a few weeks after I met Nassar Badawi in Nablus, Marwan Zaloum. He was a fellow leader of the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Hebron whom the Israelis blamed for a suicide bombing that killed six and wounded 85 in Jerusalem. Zaloum died as Abayat did—a midnight missile attack on his Mitsubishi sedan as he drove through the heart of Hebron, the site of Abraham’s tomb. The call for revenge was immediate, brutal and misplaced. Within hours three men who were doing time in the local prison on charges of collaboration, and who presumably could not have helped the Israelis in the attack on Zaloum, were dragged to open ground close to a mosque and near where the charred wreck of Zaloum’s car still smouldered. They were given a show trial that lasted only minutes, declared guilty, stoned, beaten and then shot in the head. And in an appalling act of communal
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savagery, the bodies were then strung from lampposts and mocked and mutilated by a cheering, jeering crowd. One of the bodies hung upside down by one foot; another was almost decapitated and the third was dumped in a garbage truck. As women and young girls looked on, small boys stubbed cigarettes in wounds that older men had hacked in the bodies with knives. Assassination by missile strikes, helicopter-gunship attacks on homes and cars, and the placement of concealed bombs in phones that the targets were known to use—none of these could have happened without the likes of Munzer Hafnawi, a Nablus clothing merchant who Palestinian investigators say admitted to signalling to Israeli gunmen via a mobile telephone the precise moment that a Hamas activist could be gunned down as he left a mosque; or the collaborator who avoided suspicion by disguising himself as a melon vendor on the streets of Nablus to collect information on the movements of senior Palestinians. Talal Dwakat, the head of Palestinian intelligence in Nablus, was disturbingly pragmatic: ‘It’s an open war, and every side tries to get information in this battle.’ But it was hardly surprising when an Israeli intelligence officer observed that the Palestinian authorities were more efficient at arresting and punishing those accused of collaborating than they were at dealing with those blamed for the suicide bombings. The rate at which Palestinian collaborators were being killed was unprecedented. In the seven years of the first Intifada, which began in 1987, about 800 Palestinian collaborators died. In the 18 months since the start of second Intifada late in 2000, only 24 were executed, but ten of those were in March. And now they have hit a dozen in one day. As the crisis escalated, so did the volume of the message sent by vigilantes. In March 2002, Palestinian police prevented the street executioners from hanging a collaborator’s corpse above Manger Square in Bethlehem. But now it was okay to leave the remains of Raed Naem Odeh swinging by the ankles from a traffic circle in the centre of Ramallah. The informants’ network dates back to Israel’s seizure of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, when it took control of community records that told it who the petty criminals were and who might be
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susceptible. Usually they were blackmailed and the price was mostly cheap—drugs, sex, food or small amounts of money, or just the freedom to move within the straitjacket that Israel has imposed on Palestinians who want to move around the Occupied Territories and Israel. In 2001 a reporter asked Abu Sharif, an adviser to Yasser Arafat, about the execution of collaborators. Sharif candidly confirmed the deaths and explained them this way: ‘When [the Palestinian Authority was set up] in 1993, all these people who were collaborators—there were around 5000 in all—fled to Israeli security. Gradually, the Israelis forced them back to our areas so they could use them again . . . sometimes they were accompanied by Israeli Special Forces who speak good Arabic and who dress like us. They were promised protection in our areas.’ And to explain how the Israelis cultivated new informers, Sharif gave the example of a butcher in the town of Tulkarm. Israelis regularly bought lamb from Abu Mohamed. But then they complained about the quality—why didn’t he buy better meat that was available from Jordan, they wanted to know. The butcher said that to do that he needed a licence from the Israeli authorities. So in time the Israelis offered Abu Mohamed such a licence, and from the moment his hand closed on the piece of paper that would allow him to import meat, to move through the West Bank, to go to Israel or to travel abroad, he was capable of being suborned by the Israelis. To the outsider, the treatment of the collaborators is appalling and so destructive of Palestinian claims to decency and nationhood, but on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip paranoia, frustration, anger and helplessness gnaw at people who every day become a little less like people. The collaborators do not get justice and they are denied a Muslim burial, their families are shunned and their businesses are boycotted. A man watching the acts of butchery in Hebron told a reporter: ‘They are no longer Palestinians.’
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16
DEFIANT GAZA Gaza City
April 2002
The city was braced for the blunt force of another Israeli strike, but even before the tanks rolled down Highway 42 the hardline leaders of Hamas—the Islamic militants behind the most deadly suicide bombings in Israel—were talking about more death, more punishment, more revenge. The founder of the movement and its spiritual leader, the quadriplegic cleric Sheik Ahmed Yassin, always wears a gentle smile. But don’t be deceived—that wheelchair of his carries the embodiment of the defiance that is nurtured in this cauldron of refugee despair. He told me: ‘All Palestinians are convinced they are going to die, so they might as well die fighting. This is why all the youth and all their mothers are pushing to share in our martyrdom operations.’ When the world sees the Erez checkpoint it is usually in tumult. A razor-wire tangle that is blocked out with tonnes of concrete, the northern gateway to the Gaza Strip only gets on the TV as a backdrop to riots and killing. But the vice in which Israel holds the Occupied Territories is screwed so tightly that when I pulled up at the checkpoint—a media team of one looking very silly behind the wheel of a 14-seater bus—it was deserted and I was the suspect. What was a lone European doing out there in such a big vehicle? The Israeli border guards were reluctant to accept that the bus was the only replacement vehicle the rental firm had when my hire car broke down. They finally agreed 168
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to let me pass, but I knew that an Israeli-registered vehicle would be torched within minutes of arriving in Gaza so I backed up into an empty parking lot, hitched my bulletproof vest on one shoulder and my backpack on the other, and walked across into Gaza—past guard houses from which high-powered weapons cautiously followed my every move. The other side was just as deserted, but Khalid, a hotel clerk, and Raed, a taxi-driver, were waiting in the shade, ready to pounce as I straggled in. They worked as a team—translating and driving and being what we in the trade call ‘fixers’, which meant they would organise interviews, help to find leads for stories and generally provide the local knowledge that could be the difference between life and death. As we drove the 10 kilometres into Gaza City they went to great lengths to assure me that they would keep me safe, insisting they would look out for me just as they had for two French journalists they had chaperoned through Gaza the previous year, but who then went off to northern Afghanistan and died in a Taliban ambush. It was a bonding drive in to another hellhole. Graffiti and flags were everywhere. Every death and every protest rally spawned screeds of spray-painted eulogies to the martyrs and for Palestine. Streets and buildings were decked in the flags of battle—green for Hamas, black for Islamic Jihad and yellow for Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction of the PLO. And the white and blue Star of David flew on the Israeli bunkers and the Jewish settlements. Heavy trucks were dumping loads of earth at intersections in a futile bid to slow Israeli tanks. But later these earth mounds were made more menacing as dozens of cylinders of cooking gas were dug into them. A foxhole made of sandbags was being built on a street corner where a Ford sedan was ablaze because, Khalid said, it was a Ford, which is to say it was American. The smell of sewage was everywhere and garbage was piling up. School schedules were erratic and business had virtually shut down— most proprietors left only a chink in their steel-shuttered fronts, just in case a customer came along. Raed said that women were hiding their jewellery. People queued for hours for bread and there was a rush on banks as some prepared for another assault and another curfew. Raja
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Sourani, director of the Centre for Human Rights, thought he could see what was coming: ‘I think it’s going to be bleak, black and bloody and I can see that the blood will be Israeli as well as Palestinian. I never in my life felt our morale and determination to be as high as it is now. I’m very proud—and I’m scared to death.’ And in the teeming squalor of Jabalya, the biggest of all the refugee camps with more than 100 000 Palestinians living in abject poverty, it was the first young man we approached, not me, who raised the issue of his desire to be a suicide bomber. This 19-year-old was furious that in the last Israeli incursion, in which 20 Palestinians died in less than three hours, his family’s metal workshop had been demolished because the Israelis claimed it doubled as a bomb factory. And on the morning after the incursion, 16-year-old Mohammad was drawn to the martyrs’ ‘honour board’ outside a local mosque. Fatalistically, he said: ‘I want my name to be printed here with the others when I become a martyr.’ As we drove out of Jabalya, Khalid told me that the people of the camp were preparing a surprise for the Israelis. He said: ‘People obsess about fighting, food and jobs. They do not worry about security—they know they have none, so this time the resistance will be very hard, very special.’ Jabalya was the birthplace of the first, stone-throwing Intifada and, almost 20 years on, the fight is still in the people. A few weeks ago a preacher used Friday prayers to urge his people on: ‘Do not run away. Throw Molotov cocktails and stones at [the Israeli soldiers]—and even your shoes if you cannot find anything else.’ Gaza is home to such virulent Palestinian nationalism that it is hard to understand why Prime Minister Sharon has not launched a deliberate campaign to ‘root it out’ as he has been attempting in the West Bank. Hamas has shown that it has refined its bomb-making techniques and, after years of fractiousness, it and the other Palestinian factions now seem to accommodate one another. Even as reports came in that the Israelis were claiming to have killed Qais Adwan, a senior Hamas bombmaker who the Israelis say masterminded the Passover bombing that sparked Israel’s deadly push into the West Bank in April, the Hamas leadership in Gaza was unwavering. It was also confident that, in time,
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they would drive the Jews out of not just the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but out of Israel too. Gaza is also home to a large number of the most articulate and highly educated leaders of the terrorist movement. The physician Abdul Aziz Rantisi, one of the cleric Yassin’s deputies in Hamas, claims he can direct suicide strikes by Hamas’s shadowy military wing by using such phrases as ‘The gates of resistance are open totally’ in his media statements. When I visited him at his home, he scoffed at the Israelis: ‘They wanted to kill us without paying a price. But now they are finding that there is a price after all.’ Another in the Gaza-based leadership team, the surgeon Mahmoud al-Zahar, celebrated the success of the suicide bombers when I went to his Gaza City consulting rooms: ‘Since we cannot touch Israeli dignity without such operations, everyone is encouraging more such attacks. Yes, there should be more—what else can we do?’ And finally there is the engineer Ismail Abu Sanab, who talked about how Hamas measures success: ‘Look at the Israeli weapons and there is no balance of power in this war. But there is a balance of fear—when we destroy an Israeli tank, that is evidence of success; when we kill an Israeli soldier, it’s a success; when we cross the Israeli defences and borders, it’s a major success; and when we hurt inside Israel, that is indeed a major success.’ Finding the regional chief of Palestinian security was not easy—every building that was used by the security service had been demolished in missile attacks by Israeli F-16s or Apache helicopters. But I found General Saeb el Ajez in his new, makeshift office—sandbags under stretched canvas. On the plastic table in front of him were three mobile telephones and a pistol, and he too was infected with the bravura that seemed to have seized much of the population: ‘If Sharon enters this city he will be in big trouble. He’ll have military success for a few days, even for a few weeks. But it will disappear when just one of our people goes to Israel and explodes himself.’ And amidst his supervision of what he said was the voluntary city-wide preparation for a big Israeli assault, tit-for-tat killing continued. An Israeli soldier on guard duty at Netzarim, one of the most controversial Jewish settlements just out of the city, was
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killed and five of his colleagues injured when two Palestinian gunmen opened fire and hurled grenades at the entrance to the settlement. The Palestinian gunmen died in the fight—a less sophisticated suicide mission than those that use a bomb. And in a separate firefight at one of the refugee camps, two Palestinians died—one a six-year-old girl and the other a 21-year-old man. As Raed and Khalid whisked me through the dusty streets of Gaza for a round of interviews, they provided a running commentary. Raed, as we passed the mansionesque home of one of the fat cats in the Palestinian regime: ‘A small house, a poor home.’ And Khalid, as a gaggle of gorgeous teenage girls, all in denim, poured from a school in the Jabalya refugee camp: ‘Just look at them. Israel can never destroy us because every one of them will be a Palestinian mother. Just think— thousands of births!’ In Gaza 1.3 million Palestinians are fenced in on a narrow coastal strip that is only 40 kilometres long and maybe 6–8 kilometres wide. But among them, on the best spreads of land, is a handful of Jews—no more than 7000 of them, controlling some 40 per cent of the land— who bring with them a massive Israeli security operation and a system of roadblocks that imposes severe restrictions on the movement of the Palestinians, one of the single greatest causes of frustration and explosive anger in the Palestinian community. Since the start of the second Intifada in September 2000, the Palestinians have killed 20 Israeli civilians and 35 soldiers. Tempers flare but the Israeli officer in charge of the Gaza, Major General Doron Almog, said of the Palestinians: ‘They’re imprisoned. But there must be a balance between the factors that affect the Palestinian population and the security of the Israeli citizens.’ Sheik Yassin is a frail old man who gets worn out just from talking. But he still hectors the crowds, telling a demonstration of about 15 000 at the Jabalya refugee camp: ‘Resistance has turned from stones into human bombs and missiles.’ And of the US and Israeli insistence that the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat order a ceasefire and arrest Palestinian fighters, he told the protesters: ‘Arafat will not surrender to their demand.’ When I spoke to him a few days later at his home, he was just
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as uncompromising: ‘I declare that our people will not be broken, they will not kneel and give up. All of our nation, even those who believed in the peace process that started in Oslo, now know that resistance is the only way. Ten years of negotiations have failed us. We don’t have the weapons that the Israelis use to kill our women and children. So we use what we have—the martyrdom operations. We do not like to hurt people, but the Israelis are responsible for that because they kill our people. Martyrdom is an exceptional weapon. For a time we said that we would stop the suicide bombs, but the enemy did not respect that declaration and so we had to start fighting back again.’ The pause he talked about was after September 11, when there was a three-week respite in the suicide strikes. Hamas decided to lie low lest its work be confused with that of Osama bin Laden. But then several Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers and Hamas decided to strike back on October 3, when Palestinian gunmen attacked the Alei Sinai settlement, killing two Israelis and wounding fifteen. Hamas claimed responsibility for that attack just as, on the night of the Netanya horror in which the suicide-bomb death of 26 Israelis sparked the Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank, Dr al-Zahar put out a media statement saying that the Netanya mission was deliberately intended to derail the US-led search for peace. It was Hamas’s single greatest success but Dr Abu Sanab wanted to boast to me of an achievement that came out of the Netanya bombing that he believed was more fundamental: ‘We have changed the rules of the game. Israel’s military force is confronted by our determination—now that is the real success of the Palestinian resistance.’ Sitting in the suburban homes and offices of the Hamas leadership, seeing their families come and go from school and work, being served tasty Arabic coffee and iced drinks in their sitting-rooms made it difficult to comprehend their endorsement of such terrible violence. Seeing Dr al-Zahar, a specialist in thyroid diseases, in his spartan surgery (with Peter Arnett, the star of CNN’s coverage of Baghdad during the Gulf Crisis walking out as I walked in), or talking with Sanab and his engineering brothers-in-arms, and then hearing one of them take
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responsibility for the brutal death of a dozen or more people in Jerusalem was mind-boggling. When I asked Sanab how he felt on hearing the news from Netanya, he said: ‘First, ask me about how I feel when the Israelis kill Palestinians who live in poverty and oppression. Netanya? I thought, thank God that Palestinians can cause suffering for the Israelis like the Israelis cause for the Palestinians. Maybe the martyrdom bombings are primitive. But they are the only weapon we have and they are less harmful than F-16s with tonnes of explosives.’ But could the Palestinians win? ‘All the time in history, it has been the nations with determination that have defeated the nations with weapons. Look at the US in Vietnam, the French in Algeria and the Israelis in South Lebanon.’ At his surgery, Dr al-Zahar spelt out for me the impact of the bombing missions as he saw it: ‘The Israelis are feeling a deep sense of loss because we are destroying the integrity of their society. This is the first time the Israeli economy has been in recession since 1948; they are being deprived of tourism; and for the first time they are experiencing reverse immigration. So why should we go back to something like the Camp David peace process? It is madness. We negotiate, negotiate, negotiate, the Israelis implement nothing and once again our country is occupied by the Israeli military. What is the difference between this occupation and the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait that the world will not help us? So thank God that our resistance is the strongest it has been since 1948. Look at what is happening—in the 1967 war the Israelis defeated three countries—Egypt, Syria and Jordan—in five hours; now after three days they can’t even get into the camps and city of Jenin.’ The men from Hamas all accepted that they were Israeli targets. And despite the candid interviews, all were taking new precautions. Dr Rantisi had stopped using a mobile telephone and the apartment beneath his was given over to a squad of men with Kalashnikovs. Dr alZahar had taken to switching his car most days—explosives concealed in mobile phones and helicopter missile attacks on moving cars were two of the tactics favoured by the Israelis in their campaign of targeted assassinations of key Palestinians. And now the beleaguered Palestinian
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Authority was going through the motions of arresting Hamas operatives. After some of the worst suicide bombings in Jerusalem, the Authority said it was putting Sheik Yassin under house arrest—but it seems they forgot to tell him. Its security men also arrested 17 men in Gaza, but Rantisi said that most had been released. Would the Israelis strike in Gaza as they had in the West Bank? ‘Maybe.’ But, said Dr Rantisi, the man who so often told the world that the bombs were the work of Hamas: ‘If they do, they will pay a very high price—because we are waiting.’ However, when the time came for Sharon to execute his promise that the Israeli Defense Forces would destroy the Gaza militants, he did not send an invasion force. After a series of devastating suicide bombs in Israel, he ordered targeted assassination strikes against key members of Hamas. But as the ferocity of the strikes increased, their attempts at surgical accuracy seemed to go awry, serving to dig deeper wells of poison in the hearts of Palestinians as the rising toll of death and injury of innocent people became as much a propaganda tool in Arab hands as did the spectacular elimination of individual terrorists in Israeli hands. In the first of the strikes, which came at intervals of about 10 days, an Israeli helicopter attack killed six Palestinians in the southern Gaza town of Rafah. One of them was Hamas activist Yasser Rizik. Then a Gaza leader of the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and a senior Palestinian Authority security man died in a car bomb, an attack that Palestinians said was the work of the Israelis. Eight days later the suspected bombmaker Yusef Abdul Wahab fled his home in Khan Yunis as soon as he heard an approaching fighter-jet—it was an Israeli F-16 and the missiles it fired demolished the house and injured 10 people—but not Wahab. Eight days later again the Israelis struck, using an American-supplied F-16 fighter to drop a massive one-tonne laser-guided bomb into civilian homes near the Jabalya refugee camp. It backfired badly. The Israelis killed the one man they were after—Sheik Salah Shehada, a founder of Hamas and a leader in its military wing—but the collateral damage was shocking. Fourteen others died and more than 140 were injured when the sleeping neighbourhood erupted. The attack, which was condemned
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around the world, was a propaganda gift to Hamas. Worse, it revealed the cyclical hopelessness of the Middle East crisis, because the attack also killed what seemed to have been a move by the Palestinians towards ending their vicious attacks on Israeli civilians. It emerged that there had been some American involvement in negotiating a deal under which the radical Palestinian groups would confine their bombing missions to Israeli military targets. A US source involved in the talks was quoted: ‘As of 10 pm last night [about two hours before the Israeli attack], we almost had a deal—everybody had agreed in principle, including Hamas, to a declaration saying there would be a cessation of attacks on Israeli civilians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel, with no conditions.’ A deal like that would have been a remarkable achievement in this violent corner of the world. But amid Palestinian and Arab claims that the Israeli attack had been timed to wreck such a breakthrough, a spokesman for Ariel Sharon challenged the sincerity of the Palestinians, claiming: ‘What was under way were not talks, but more duplicity.’
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A FAMILY’S DISTRESS 17 Gaza City, the Occupied Territories
April 12, 2002
They lived amid the poverty and pain of Jabalya, the biggest Palestinian refugee camp in the Middle East, but the Ezedeens thought they were blessed. Surrounded by high unemployment, hunger and appalling living conditions, they had built up a substantial car repair business and they lived in a bright, well-furnished apartment on the outskirts of the camp rather than in its centre where life was dingy, dark and dangerous. The key to the Ezedeen business and the prosperous air of their big and noisy family home was the two repair shops—one in the camp for Palestinian clients and another for Jewish clients in the industrial zone on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip. Running that second repair shop meant special privileges from the Israeli authorities—in particular, it meant sufficient trust and security clearance for several family members to be issued permits to go anywhere near the tense border area. But all that counted for nought on a mid-March morning when the Israeli Defense Forces raided the Jabalya camp. In a matter of minutes, 60-year-old Abdul Roman Ezedeen and Walid, his 37-year-old son, were dead—one sniper, three minutes, five bullets, two corpses and, suddenly, 19 people aged from six months to 40 years were deprived of a parent. Nael, another of Abdul Roman’s 11 sons and daughters, sat cross-legged on a couch as he told the story: ‘When we heard the army coming my father went up to close the door on to the roof to keep the children in. 177
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When he did not come back I went to look for him—he was dead with three bullets in him. I tried to lift him up, but they shot at me too—a bullet parted my hair and I thought I was injured.’ It seemed that the Israelis had established a sniper post close by. Nael: ‘I went down to tell the family that our father was dead and Walid said that he would go up and bring our father down off the roof. But as he tried to bring our father in he was killed with one bullet in the upper chest.’ Despite the misfortune around them—16 others died in the March 12 raid—this family is numbed by its loss. Another son, Ziyed, is adamant: ‘My father was not a fighter—if he was he would not have had his Israeli permit. And we are not politically active—we are normal citizens who are not in a political movement.’ This seemed to be borne out by the lack of political rhetoric during interviews and the unusual absence of Palestinian resistance posters and banners in their home— with the exception of one copy of the standard martyr posters which featured pictures of the dead father and son. And it was high on a wall in a darkened lobby. Nael, clicking away at his prayer beads: ‘Our life is no different to the rest of the Palestinians, but it has destroyed our nerves. We called an ambulance, but it could not come because of the shooting. It is worst for the children. They see the violence on TV all the time and they are very afraid when they hear the shooting. Walid’s eldest son has become violent—and when he is angry he breaks things. Some weeks they only get to school for one or two days. This experience is becoming a part of their heritage and it will harden them and it will make them resistant when they grow up.’
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GUIDED MISSILES 18 Gaza City, the Occupied Territories
April 2002
The coffee was bitter. Intentionally. As hundreds of Palestinians poured in to give their condolences, Shadi Tubasi’s family formed a greeting line, handing each new guest a postcard celebrating the ‘hero of the Haifa explosion’, a reference to the Matza restaurant bombing. Off in a corner, 31-year-old Walid Fayad watched proceedings, unsmiling as he clutched an M-16 rifle. He explained to me the unusual absence of sugar in the cardamom coffee which was served in tiny china cups: ‘Today we drink it bitter, so that we can share the Tubasi family’s bitterness for the Israelis.’ Fayad waved away the revulsion and horror of young Tubasi’s Haifa outing. We were in a cinder-block youth centre in the fetid Palestinian refugee camp at Jenin, at the northern end of the West Bank. Fayad was more interested in talking about the violence to come. He spoke with disturbing relish of the terrible fighting he expected would soon engulf the camp. ‘It’ll be a massacre,’ he said. ‘But we’re ready to be martyrs. All of us await our fate . . . we want to go out with bombers’ belts strapped to our bodies, because that is better than sitting at home, waiting for them to kill us. So before they kill me, I have to do something—I must explode myself with some Israelis. We want our turn to die . . . it will be good to be with God.’ My exploration of the unprecedented wave of self-destruction in the Middle East in the spring of 2002 started with Shadi Tubasi’s April 1 179
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bombing in Haifa. It became a tour of what the Israelis called the terror towns of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip—Tulkarm, Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and Gaza City. It was a week of clandestine meetings, some to which I was whisked late at night, some at which those interviewed would allow no identifying information to be recorded. I came face to face with two bombers who had been trained and were awaiting instructions on their bomb missions; I spoke with the trainers of others and those who dispatched them, with the military and political leadership of the Palestinian factional cells that justified the carnage, and with the man whom they said lit the ideological fuse for this bout of brutal death—the ailing 61-year-old cleric who is the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. He told me: ‘The Jews attack and kill our civilians—we will kill theirs. When the first drop of the martyr’s blood spills on the ground, he goes to paradise. His victims, the Jews, go to hell.’ So for Sheik Yassin the suicide bomb was an ‘exceptional weapon’. Khalid, my fixer, spoke in awe of a martyr’s encounter at the gates of heaven, as though the new arrival would actually have his file checked: ‘There will be blessings for 70 of his family and friends. The 72 virgins are real—their skin is so pale and beautiful that you can see the blood in their veins . . . If one of these virgins spits in the ocean, the seawater becomes sweet . . . the martyr is so special he does not feel the pain of being in the grave and all that his family has to do to cleanse his file thoroughly is to repay his outstanding debts.’ Surely, I asked, this view of the Koran should be seen as philosophical? A parable, perhaps? But no, there was a chorus of disagreement from a gathering of Khalid’s friends—workers and students—in the Jabalya refugee camp near Gaza City. ‘No. This is real . . . this is as it will be,’ said Khalid, as much for himself as for the younger Palestinian generations who now talked endlessly of the benefits of death over life in a bombing campaign that was the focus of a war that had taken more than 1500 lives on both sides in 18 months. Until late 2001, the suicide business was monopolised by two organisations—the militant and hugely popular Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad. Both were vehemently opposed to the peace process and
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to the very existence of the state of Israel. But then they were overshadowed by a new group—the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which emerged from the impoverished Balata refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus late in 2001. The brigade was not a fringe militia—it sprang from Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction of the PLO in an effort to retain the allegiance of frustrated younger members who were switching to the more radical Hamas and Islamic Jihad. In the past, groups like Hamas had to work hard to cultivate candidates for suicide, but all three militia groups now said they were inundated with offers from eager teenagers, young women and fathers in their forties who were prepared to die. Instead of a calculated process of indoctrination, which the sponsors of suicide bombing used to outline as though it somehow legitimised their operations, they only had to give some of the volunteers a pat on the back and point them at their target. The Palestinians achieved a rare breakthrough—instead of operating from the fringe of society, as the IRA and so many other terrorist organisations have done, they were at the heart of it, swamped by volunteers who were ready to die, as opposed to merely agreeing with them. Even Dr Rabah Mohanna—whose Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed its own share of the violence, including the previous year’s assassination of a minister in the Israeli government—was confounded by this lunge for the grave. He told me: ‘Thousands of young men and women are ready to be blown up. It is a new phenomenon— you have no idea how big it is.’ For the Israelis, the twin cities of Nablus and Jenin are the fount of the terror that haunts their daily lives. The Israeli authorities say that the cities’ refugee camps, their slums and the aggressively hardline al-Najah University in Nablus are the chaperones of terror. By some accounts, the university has produced as many as 30 suicide bombers in the current crisis, and one of the targeted assassinations most celebrated by the Israelis was that of Qais Adwan who, at 25 years of age, was a member of the al-Najah student council and one of Hamas’s master bomb-makers.
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Political change at the university—where classrooms are adorned with signs that read ‘Israel has nuclear bombs, we have human bombs’— explains the imperative behind the decision by Arafat’s Fatah movement to set up the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Traditionally, Fatah had total control of the university’s student council and academic staff, but in 2001 Hamas and Islamic Jihad swept to power. But it is not just students who have been radicalised. Their parents are being pulled to Hamas and Islamic Jihad because of general distrust of the faltering peace process through the 1990s and disgust with rampant corruption and human rights abuses in Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. Opinion polls in recent months found that while Westerners might see the suicide bombings as grotesque, Palestinian support for the renewed violence ran as high as 80 per cent, a huge rise on support levels of about 20 per cent when Hamas mounted its first suicide bombing in the mid nineties. The bombings have become threads in the fabric of Palestinian life. Take the girls at the Ahmad Shawquin Secondary School in Gaza City. They are regularly drilled in emergency preparedness—rescuing the injured, fighting fires and administering first aid. And when the head of civil defence in Gaza, General Mahmoud M. Abu Marzourg, dropped in to give them a pep talk, he did not spare their innocence: ‘Surely you have heard of your sisters who blow themselves up to defend the dignity of Palestine? Anyone who kills and struggles for the sake of their land, and dies doing so . . . is alive with a new life, because as a martyr you will be alive in heaven.’ Some of the children can’t wait until they are old enough—the three smartest kids in their class at a Gaza school, all of them only 14 years of age, stole away from their homes one night in June 2002. They were armed with knives, a crude pipe bomb and a hoe to dig under the fence of a Jewish settlement. An Israeli patrol saw them—all three were shot dead. Recently, the Israelis arrested a 12-year-old boy who they insisted was planning a suicide mission; 11-year-old Palestinian children talk about the joys of martyrdom on TV chat shows; and in the playground, according to a distraught parent I interviewed, small children played a game called ‘being a martyr’. This was a local version of cowboys and
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Indians in which, she told me, the children used to fight to play the role of the Israelis because that was where they saw the strength, but these days they all wanted to be the Palestinians—no one wanted to be the Jew. Many of the bombers are instructed not to tell their parents that they have volunteered for death. And the families that do know say they are running out of arguments against their children. As 21-year-old Dareen Abu Aisheh planned her death in February 2002, she argued every which-way with her family: ‘Aren’t we being shot down like dogs? Do you feel like a human being when the Israelis control your every move? Do you believe we have a future? If I’m going to die at their hands anyway, why shouldn’t I take some of them with me?’ Her uncle, Jasser Khalili, said that finally he had to admit that he could not argue against his headstrong niece. She had been angry and depressed by the suicidebomb death of a cousin, and about being spurned by Hamas and Islamic Jihad when she had volunteered as a bomber—because she was a woman. But eight months after her first approach to Hamas, the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade strapped her up with explosives and pointed her at an Israeli military checkpoint. At about the same time, in Tulkarm, the parents of 15-year-old Noura Shalhoub were trying to lift her out of her depression—showing her where her new bedroom would be in the extensions to their home— when she took a kitchen knife and rushed a soldier at a checkpoint near her town. He shot her and she bled to death where she fell. When Izzedin Masri blew up a Jerusalem pizzeria in August 2001, the neighbours in Jenin celebrated. But his father Ahmed Masri was more circumspect: ‘If I’d known he belonged to Hamas, I would have pressed him to stop his activities.’ The young Masri had taken over the running of the family restaurant, but the old man lamented the hardheartedness of the younger generation: ‘Israelis used to come to the restaurant . . . now no one looks at them as human. [My family] is desperate only in the way that all Palestinians are—we have got to get rid of the Jews from around us.’ And eight months later he told Newsweek: ‘I lost my health. I wish I still had my son around . . .’
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But for those who plan the bombings, Mariam Farahat is the model terrorist mother. A video she made with her 19-year-old son Mohammed as he prepared for a shoot-out in which he killed five Israeli military students before he was gunned down has made her a celebrity across the Arab world. She has been dubbed Um Nidal—the mother of struggle— and she doesn’t seem to mind that her family is being torn apart, literally, by the Intifada. One son is dead; another blew three fingers off when he tried to throw a grenade at some Israeli soldiers; and her husband was fired from his job as a Palestinian policeman, presumably because of the family’s deep Hamas connections. Talking about the special lunch she made for her son the day before his attack—kebabs and cucumber salad—she said: ‘He was filled with hate for the Jews. He told me he wanted to carry out an operation against the Israelis. I told him it was a good idea and wished him luck. I knew that almost no one comes back alive from such operations, but I kept those thoughts to myself.’ In the 1990s the militias had difficulty finding volunteers for suicide bombing and often they were accused of seducing—or brainwashing— impressionable young men who hung around the mosques, faction meetings and checkpoint riots. But as Nassar Badawi, the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade commander I interviewed in Nablus, said: ‘Because the situation is so bad now, many people are ready to explode themselves. We do not have to pick them—they come to us, ready to die. After training by our martyrdom unit, they know what they are going to do and they are convinced that they are dying in defence of their country.’ We sat either side of a desk in his Nablus office. A copy of the Koran lay on the desk and a martyrdom poster of Badawi’s dead brother shoulder-to-shoulder with Yasser Arafat hung on the wall in a gilt-edged frame. Why attack Israeli civilians? ‘In Israel there are no civilians— they’re all soldiers and fighters. When the Israelis started the targeted assassination of our leaders, we decided that if any of our martyrs could get into Israel and reach a target where people were gathered in a restaurant or in a street, then that was where they should explode themselves. We are sending two messages: telling the Israeli security forces that we can still reach them, and that all their security is meaningless;
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and telling the Israeli public that this is the result of Sharon’s policies against us.’ When I enquired about the ruthless efficiency and expertise revealed in the brigade’s work, he said: ‘We draw on the warriors and fighters who have served in other Palestinian armies, like those who were deported from Lebanon in ’82 and who trained in the PLO camps in other Arab countries.’ Badawi is a chronic doodler, and even as he explained his wish for maximum civilian pain and damage in Israel the pen worked furiously: ‘The Israelis kill Palestinian women and children in our streets, so we try to maximise their losses because blood is for blood, violence is for violence and suppression is for suppression. We will do to them what they do to us . . . so no, we will not be throwing flowers at them.’ Before the onslaught of suicide bombs in the spring of 2002, the factions claimed that they had rigidly enforced rules. No suicide volunteers under the age of 18—but now 16-year-olds are sent out. Women were discouraged—now they are lionised. Married men with children and anyone who was a family’s sole breadwinner were rejected—not any more. The trainers said that normally a volunteer was subjected to a period of covert observation by the martyrdom units before being approved on grounds of religious observance, temperament and an ability to dress and act as a Jew. The head of Islamic Jihad in Jenin, Mahmoud Tawalbi, told how 24-year-old Rafat Abu Diyak cried tears of joy when he heard he had been selected to bomb a bus on which seven Israelis died. Tawalbi said: ‘He started crying like a child; he started kissing me, saying “thank you, thank you, thank God”. He said he wanted to make every Israeli cry like the Palestinians cried.’ The factions used to stress the seriousness of their undertakings with a lot of talk about the training of suicide bombers. But now there are missions in which freelancers seem to have taken over, and anything goes. They talked about the bombings being an act of faith, not revenge. But the families of dead bombers and a few bombers who have been caught before detonating their bombs often talk of revenge. A bomber who was trained and awaiting his mission told a reporter that he carried
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the deeds and keys to the Jaffa home from which his family was driven when Israel was established in 1948. Early reports that avenging the death of a relative was not allowed and that women were discouraged make the tale of 21-year-old Arien Ahmed disturbing reading. She balked on the way to her target late in May 2002 and ended up in Israeli detention. She told the New York Times’ James Bennett, who was allowed to interview her in prison, that she wanted to avenge the death of her fiancé, who she believed had been killed by the Israelis. Within five days of volunteering she was called out of a marketing lecture at Bethlehem University, shown a backpack and how to detonate the bomb inside it, and then driven to the area of her target dressed to look like an Israeli woman. The logistics of a suicide mission are a tightly held secret. About six or eight volunteer cells are involved—and each is kept ignorant of the identity and location of the others. They groom the bomber—religiously and tactically; they make the bomb; they transport it and the bomber; they select and monitor likely targets; and they organise accommodation and disguises. Where careful planning still holds, the bomber is instructed to quietly disappear from his or her home and work a few days before the mission. Some have gone off to visit families and relatives. Friends of Nabil Arir told of how he took them out for a lavish dinner—without saying that it was a farewell. All pay off any loans because the indebted may not enter paradise. Ahmed Ayam even set aside five shekels ($US1) that he owed his father before detonating a bomb in Netanya in March 2001. Then begins a period of immersion training, of intense periods spent with a father-figure minder. The bomber is coached into great psychological dependence, both to please the father figure and to follow his every instruction. One of the last acts is the recording of a celebratory video to be released after the bombing—a good propaganda tool but in some cases more important as an act of commitment that helps to lock in the bomber at a point when he or she might have second thoughts. The student is told to read the chapters of the Koran that deal with jihad, the birth of Islam, war, Allah’s favours and the importance of faith.
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Often, details of the target and the nature of the attack—whether it is to be a body bomb, grenades or firearms—are withheld from the bomber until only hours before the attack. And more often than not, the first that the family and friends of a bomber will hear of the mission is after the fact—a news bulletin, a message on the mosque loudspeakers or a volley of celebratory shots fired into the air outside their home. Some of the people I spoke to said a bombing mission could be set up for as little as $US150—gunpowder or a mix of readily available chemicals (sugar or fertilisers), a battery, a light switch, some wire, a belt to hold the bomb and transport to deliver the bomber close to the target. But a Hamas operative who insisted on anonymity said the price of a complete mission was more likely to be about $US4000. Israeli authorities say that after they demolished parts of Yasser Arafat’s Ramallah bunker in April 2002 they found a document which they call an ‘invoice of terror’ putting the cost of a tailored bomb belt at 700 shekels (about $US150).
Late on a Monday night a taxi came to my hotel, collected me, and raced by a circuitous route out of Gaza City and into the silent depths of the Jabalya refugee camp. Here I met a guide who took me up to an apartment. In the time that it took to make Arabic coffee there was a quiet knock on the door and two young men came in, accompanied by a silent minder. Nervously, they shook hands and said that they were from Islamic Jihad—but there would be no names. They apologised for breaching an understanding arrived at with the intermediary who had set up the meeting—that they would bring their bomb belts. ‘It’s too risky,’ the taller one said, ‘the drones are in the sky.’ This was a reference to the pilotless Israeli surveillance aircraft that were on constant patrol over the Occupied Territories. The young man wore a heavy navy jacket and a five o’clock shadow and he quickly revealed himself to be an agitated and excitable 29-yearold English teacher. His more relaxed associate, a 22-year-old student of Islamic studies, wore military fatigues and heavy boots. Even before
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a question was asked, the nervous one broke into a religious rant: ‘I trust in God and I am ready to sacrifice my life for the defence of my nation and my people.’ His colleague supported him: ‘Jihad is the highest form of Islam . . . I have seen the occupation and the massacres here and I know of Sharon’s massacre at Sabra and Shatila.’ The first one continued: ‘This highlights the depths of our faith. This is not terrorism . . . we are not murderers. My obligations are to my God and to my people.’ Asked what training they had been given to be suicide bombers, the older one again turned to religion: ‘We pray and we wake in the middle of the night for special prayers; we fast on Mondays and Tuesdays, we are at peace with our neighbours and we attend the mosque for all prayer sessions. After that we were delivered to Islamic Jihad’s military wing. We have been trained in how to use the bomb belt.’ He went through the motions of strapping it on and used his thumb to press an imaginary detonator. ‘But I have chosen that my mission will be with a machine gun on a settlement or a military post’—this is where the Palestinian assailant opens fire on his Israeli targets and keeps shooting until inevitable Israeli reinforcements kill him—‘so I have had weapons training at a farm. We also have been taught how to dress and walk so that we will not stand out among the people at our targets. We’ll either look like tourists or Israeli soldiers. We are ready—the military wing is assessing targets and they have told me to be ready. They will show me the target to make sure that I can do it—and we will practise, maybe many times, to make sure that we do it right.’ Asked about Western revulsion at the crude terrorism of becoming a human bomb, he said: ‘I will answer your Western question with another question—why do you look at us with just one eye?’ The younger, shorter man said that he had elected to die with a bomb belted to his waist. Both of these young men were married and had discussed their decisions to die with their wives—and had received their blessings. The short one added that, but for the fact that she was pregnant, his wife would also volunteer to be a suicide bomber. They spoke briefly—and, in a way, dismissively—of life before the Intifada. ‘We married and we wanted children, we’d go to the computer
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centre and play games, we’d watch television,’ said the taller one. And then, quickly and quietly, they disappeared into the night. The profile of the typical suicide bomber is constantly changing and observers of the crisis are frequently required to reposition their arguments. Labib Kamhawi, a political analyst in Amman, Jordan, who had studied the bombers, posed a question for reporters: ‘What prompts a 20-year-old to blow himself up and kill as many Israelis as possible in the process? It definitely takes more than belief in God to turn a boy into a martyr. It takes desperation, anger and loss of hope. It’s believing that your life is not worth living anymore.’ A Hamas military leader in Nablus, who gave the nom de guerre of Abu Saed, told me: ‘When someone asks to be a martyr, it’s because they can’t live in freedom or because their father or brother is dead, or in Israeli detention, or their family land has been taken. He knows that the Israelis are the cause of his suffering. And if, because of all that, he doesn’t know how to live, then he does know how to die. This is good.’ Sitting cross-legged on thin mattresses on the floor as a dark storm raged outside, he went on: ‘God imposed jihad on Muslims as a duty to fight the enemy. And if the martyr is absolutely convinced that life after death will be better than this life, there is no doubt that he will go to paradise and that he is doing what God has asked him to do. So when the bomber arrives at this conviction, death for him is better than this life.’ As I discovered in Tulkarm, there is a significant financial reward for the bomber’s family. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein sends a cheque for $US25 000 and the survivors of those who are sponsored by Hamas get either a lump sum of $US10 000 or a pension of $US150 to $US300 a month and the health and education costs for their family are usually taken care of. But many—including members of several families I interviewed after they had been presented with their Iraqi cheque—said it was the tension and suffering in their day-to-day existence that drove their sons and daughters to be suicide bombers, not the speeches of their political and religious leaders and not Saddam’s money. A typical suicide bomber used to be male, 17 to 22 years of age, single, footloose and uncertain, with few prospects and deeply religious.
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But in the past year they have come from upper middle-class families, from businesses and colleges, and now women were joining their ranks. Izzadin Masri abandoned a promising future in his father’s successful restaurant to kill himself and 15 Israelis at a Jerusalem pizzeria in August 2001; Daoud Abu Sway, an apolitical 47-year-old, walked out on his eight children to kill himself and injure two Israelis when he exploded a bomb outside a luxury Jerusalem hotel in December 2001; and 18-year-old Ayat Akhras, a straight-A student who was about to graduate and marry, killed herself and an Israeli girl of about the same age at the entrance to a Jerusalem supermarket in April 2002. Mahmoud Bakker Nasser resigned from the Palestinian prison service before signing up for death with Islamic Jihad—to avenge the death of Iyan Hardan, an Islamic Jihad militiaman he had befriended who, on his release from prison, became a victim of the Israelis’ targeted assassinations when a bomb exploded in a Jenin telephone booth as he made a call. Palestinian researchers say that they are discovering a generation of young people who don’t see a future. Rita Giacaman, who is examining the attitudes of students at Bir Zeit University, explained: ‘We found that our students generally have an inability to dream, or to visualise a better future than their miserable current life.’ Dr Eyad Sarraj, a Palestinian psychiatrist, knew the background of a young Palestinian who spoke only in terms of nationalist pride and his belief in God when a reporter asked why he had volunteered for suicide. But Sarraj filled in the blanks in the boy’s story: ‘What the young man did not say was that he was burning with a desire for revenge. He was a tearful witness, at the age of six, to his father’s beating by Israeli soldiers. He would never forget seeing his father taken away, bleeding from the nose. Ours is a nation of anger and defiance. The struggle today is how not to become a suicide bomber.’ For all that, Jerrold M. Post, a researcher at George Washington University who worked as a psychological profiler with the CIA for more than 20 years, argues: ‘It’s really important to emphasise that these are not crazed people. Nor are they unhinged loners or embittered outcasts. They are rational, logical, above average in intelligence, and suffer no
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major psychological problems. And they are just utterly convinced that they are right.’ Some moderate Islamic scholars have branded suicide bombings as illegitimate and anti-Islam. But given the anger and frustration in the Palestinian community, there has been little oxygen for any debate on the rights and wrongs of suicide bombs as a tactic. Dr Sarraj argues against the culture of glorification which he says draws young Palestinians to death. And almost lost in the fury of battle in June 2002 was a newspaper advertising campaign by 55 politicians and intellectuals attempting to force a debate on the effectiveness of suicide bombing. After running for several days in al Quds newspaper, it had 500 backers. But when Sheik Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, was asked how he reconciled the bombings with Islam’s teaching, he said: ‘First, these are not suicide operations. We do this to protect ourselves and you are talking from the situation of people who live normal, peaceful and convenient lives. You don’t understand our lives and our day-to-day suffering.’ Ironically, Yassin has been half-dead for most of his life. Paralysed from the neck down since a soccer accident at age 16, the head of the militant Hamas faction sits in a wheelchair, draped in an apricotcoloured shawl. Perhaps from lack of use, his skin has a death-in-life pallor about it. As we talked, he tired visibly just from the effort of raising his shrill voice to be heard above the incongruous shrieks and giggles of his grandchildren at play outside. His Hamas colleague Dr Abdul Aziz Rantisi seemed genuinely hopeful that the Israeli military would maintain a permanent presence in or around the Occupied Territories. He told me: ‘If they do that, they will be presenting us with thousands of targets.’ And he then proceeded to turn arguments of innocence on their heads, insisting that it was the 26 Israeli victims of the Passover massacre at Netanya in March 2002 who had committed suicide, ‘because they have accepted the word of their Zionist leaders who told them that our land was theirs.’ As I did the rounds in Gaza City, the only Hamas leader who ducked an invitation to openly endorse the Netanya bombing—the horror that
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snapped the hair-trigger for Israel’s reoccupation of the West Bank— was the surgeon Mamoud al-Zahar. Asked for his response, as a father and as a doctor committed to saving lives, to the death of 26 people, he said: ‘I’m not here to speak as a private person . . .’ Later in the interview he said: ‘They didn’t mind us throwing stones in the last Intifada or holding peaceful demonstrations. But now they are feeling a deep sense of loss because the methods we are using are destroying the integrity of Israeli society. They still think they can suppress us and stop the martyred bombings. But let’s wait and see if their big campaign stops the resistance.’ Small children excitedly collect pictures of the martyrs. And when the news of their deadly exploits gets back to their towns, villages and refugee camps, there are street parties and their families turn on spreads of coffee and lollies with all the festivity of a wedding. The young in particular invest great meaning and symbolism in the lore of the bombings, like the story of a bomber who had a change of heart at the last minute. Abu Saed, the Hamas commander in Nablus, told it to me: ‘When he was given his belt and details of the target, he said: “I don’t want to die”. Another man who was with us jumped in and said that he would take the bomb. He had had no training, but he did it, he exploded himself. And the man who said he couldn’t do it was killed by the Israelis a few days later.’ And they hang on the words of Salah Othman, who is called the ‘living martyr’, the man who ‘gave his life to Allah’ and whom ‘Allah brought back to life’. After a botched 1993 suicide mission during which he was shot in the head and the back by Israeli soldiers, Israeli doctors pronounced him brain-dead and sent his vegetable-like body home to Gaza. But he made a remarkable recovery. Today he has a wife and three children and, despite having been to the brink, he rhapsodised on the appeal of martyrdom: ‘The power of the spirit pulls us upward, while the power of material things pulls us downward. [As we prepared for the mission] we were floating, swimming in the feeling that we were about to enter eternity. We had no doubts. We made an oath on the Koran, in the presence of Allah—a pledge not to waver. This jihad pledge
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is called bayt al ridwan after the garden in paradise that is reserved for the prophets and the martyrs. I know that there are other ways to do jihad, but this one is sweet—the sweetest. All martyrdom operations, if done for Allah’s sake, hurt less than a gnat’s bite.’ Like Othman, the young Palestinians who were toting guns and marching out with bombs strapped to their bodies in this Intifada cut their teeth as the stone-throwers of the last Intifada. It is frightening to think of what they might do in the next one.
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19
WAR CRIMES AT JENIN Jenin Refugee Camp, the Occupied Territories
April 2002
As I stood in the desolation of the Jenin refugee camp not another soul could be seen. It was late afternoon and the smell of death hung over a disturbingly mundane jumble of clothing and household items. It all fluttered in a tangle of steel that used to reinforce the cinder-block homes in which thousands lived. Suddenly the silence was broken by a voice from just over a crest in the rubble mountain. He was American, a reporter who could not believe his own eyes as he briefed his foreign desk by mobile telephone. ‘It’s just like Hiroshima,’ he shouted of the frenzied destruction. Most of it had been wrought in just two days of Israeli revenge on the warren-like camp, in which an army of several hundred Palestinian militants subjected the Israelis to their worst battle casualties since the war in Lebanon. In the same week on the West Bank, more Palestinians died in the battle for the Nablus kasbah, but the heroism and pain of Jenin was how history on both sides would remember the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in the spring of 2002. In just about every war I have covered, the underdog has exaggerated his suffering and the victor has claimed his own conduct to be a textbook application of the Geneva Convention. At Jenin, the Palestinians claimed a ‘massacre’ that never happened; the Israelis stood accused of a list of war crimes they denied or insisted were justifiable 194
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actions in the heat of battle. But in the most detailed and considered investigation of what happened in Jenin, Human Rights Watch identified 22 civilian deaths that it said warranted investigation as ‘war crimes’. This respected US-based watchdog organisation also called for an investigation of Israel’s use of excessive, indiscriminate and disproportionate force. Many of the Israelis were reservists, part-time soldiers called in from civilian life to bolster a military that was spread too thinly across Israel and the Occupied Territories because of the sheer scope of Ariel Sharon’s Operation Defensive Shield. Some of these men were going into action for the first time, into a brutal burst of urban combat—the worst kind— in the dangerously narrow and crooked alleys of a refugee camp they rightly feared. The Jenin camp was home turf for the Palestinians and as they mustered at a nearby military base the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) units had rehearsed the advance for only a day. Jenin town and its surrounding villages had thrown up dozens of this Intifada’s suicide bombers and Palestinians boasted that Jenin was the ‘capital of the suicide attackers’. About 13 000 Palestinians lived in the camp, which had been built on the fertile slopes to which their families fled from the orange groves of Haifa when the Jewish state of Israel was set up in 1948. The camp was a higgledy-piggledy cinderblock mess in which the buildings and the passages between them connected at rakish angles as they went to heights of three and four storeys. It was a haven for all three Palestinian militias—al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But the Israelis had a powerful arsenal, they thought they had a good plan and there were confident predictions that they would have the whole thing wrapped up in two to three days. The roar of tanks at 2 am on Wednesday, April 3 signalled the start of a three-pronged Israeli advance—about 1000 men, Merkava tanks, Apache and Cobra helicopters, armoured personnel carriers and huge armoured Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers. And facing them was an army of about 200 guerillas armed with Kalashnikovs, pipe bombs and boobytraps. For days the Israeli prime minister had been stubbornly ignoring
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a demand by President George W. Bush that he withdraw from the West Bank, and in that time the Palestinians had been preparing. When I was in the camp 48 hours before the assault, street corners were being mined with hundreds of kilograms of homemade explosives, houses were being booby-trapped and tunnels dug between buildings that would be critical to the Palestinian defence. The Israelis knew all this—their surveillance drones were overhead. In the first minutes of battle a Palestinian sniper claimed the first victim—platoon leader Lieutenant Nissim Ben David went down with a bullet in the throat and a soldier who attempted to retrieve his body died too. Soldiers who went on foot patrols in Jenin described it as ‘nerve-wracking’. Dori Scheuer, who was evacuated after he was shot in the stomach, said from his hospital bed: ‘They booby-trapped every centimetre. In one metre you would find 20 small booby-traps or a big balloon attached by a wire.’ The first D-9 bulldozer that scraped through Jenin on its way to the refugee camp west of the town detonated 124 separate explosives planted on a 1200-metre stretch of road. By the third day nine Israeli soldiers were dead and about 90 per cent of residents had fled the camp. Some who stayed in their homes were stunned by the manner in which Israeli soldiers, their faces blackened with camouflage paint, arrived in their midst. The technique was called ‘mouse holing’—they would use explosives or a sledgehammer to bash a hole in masonry walls big enough for a man to squeeze through, rather than risk entering by a door or window that might have been boobytrapped or be in a sniper’s line of fire. As more Israelis died, the rules of engagement hardened. A reservist sergeant said that his unit had been ordered to ‘put a bullet in each window’, which meant attacking houses indiscriminately rather than waiting to see where the fire had come from, and he was troubled by what he said was insufficient opportunity for civilians to clear the camp and by the bulldozer demolition of homes after the fighting had stopped. The Israelis used loudspeakers to warn the Palestinians to get out of the camp or die in F-16 air strikes—although Sergeant Shlomi Lanyado told a reporter that he had complained that these announcements were
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made on only one street in the camp. The Palestinians used the mosque PA system to taunt the Israelis—‘Here they come! Defend yourselves! Go kill the Jews!’ and ‘Be careful—it’s going to be a graveyard. We have plenty of surprises for you!’ The Palestinian fighter who topped the Israeli ‘wanted’ list at Jenin was Mahmoud Tawalbi, a 23-year-old music store clerk and father of two who was head of the local cell of Islamic Jihad that took responsibility for most of the suicide bombers that came out of Jenin. On day seven he visited his mother, telling her: ‘Don’t worry about me—I feel strong.’ He died the next day. Apparently he and a colleague were hiding in a house as they tried to place explosives close to a tank or a bulldozer. The house collapsed in a barrage of Israeli fire. Their bodies were so mutilated that, when they were finally recovered, they could not be identified separately. They were buried together in Jenin’s martyrs’ cemetery. On April 9 the fighting was all but over. The Palestinians had made their last stand in the centre of the camp, but they were low on ammunition, food and water and the batteries in the mobile phones they used for communications were flat. But they still had one devastating ambush planned, and it was sprung when Major Oded Golomb led an Israeli patrol into a small high-walled courtyard in Hawashin, the densely packed centre of the camp. A suicide bomber leapt into the courtyard and detonated himself, setting off a string of concealed bombs, which was coordinated with a relentless sniper salvo. As a drone overhead relayed live video footage of the carnage to their brigade headquarters, 14 Israeli soldiers died in the IDF’s worst day of combat for years. Combat is a brutal, dehumanising process, but these were the ordinary fathers, sons and brothers of Israel whose belief in their fight ran as deep as that on the Palestinian side in Jenin. Major Golomb was a decorated soldier and a quiet leader. When friends asked why he volunteered for service, he gave them a soldier’s answer: ‘I have soldiers and I can’t let them go into battle without me.’ Those soldiers included Avner Yaskov whose wife Penina had telephoned him the day before the ambush to let him know that she was pregnant
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only four and a half months after the birth of their first daughter. Stricken with grief she denounced her God at her husband’s funeral: ‘Why did you take him from me? I don’t believe in you any more and I’m no longer going to pray to you.’ Others of Golomb’s men were 28-year-old Dror Bar who, at riotous Purim parties, always stayed sober to help get the drunks home; 33-year-old Tiran Erazi, who told his wife the night before the attack that he would be home within days; 23-year-old Menashe Hava, who two months later was to have been best man at his best friend’s wedding; and 22-year-old Eyal Zimmerman, whose father lashed out at Ariel Sharon, saying that he should have sent fighter-jets, not his boy, to deal with the Palestinians. On the night of the ambush reservist Rami Meir opened his prayer book to lead his company in memorial prayers, but when he saw that half of them were weeping, ‘someone else had to finish the prayer’ he later told an Israeli website. So the Israelis abandoned foot patrols. They said they had decided against using US-supplied F-16 fighter-jets at Jenin in the hope of denying the Palestinians the type of civilian damage that could be used for propaganda, but now they brought in a dozen colossal armoured D-9 bulldozers. Lieutenant Koni Benshabat explained: ‘It was a turning point for us to understand that if we did not use a different kind of force, this place was going to be a graveyard for us.’ These machines can be more intimidating than a battle tank—they are 7 metres high, they weigh more than 50 tonnes and they are as big as a house. As they demolished whole blocks in the heart of Jenin, with Israeli troops stationed on top of them, firing rocket-propelled grenades, Apache helicopter-gunships hovered overhead spraying machine-gun fire at the last Palestinian holdouts. The bulldozers flushed out more than 300 civilians from the camp and, two days later, the last 30 diehards gave up when one of them used a mobile phone to call an Israeli human rights organisation to broker surrender. The Palestinians had taken heart when they saw the first Israeli troops enter the camp on foot but, said Ali Damaj, whose home was on the eastern side of the camp: ‘The thing we didn’t count on was the bulldozers. It was a catastrophe. If the Israelis
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had only gone one by one inside the camp, they would never have succeeded in entering.’ As the battle died an equally hard-fought propaganda war started. Palestinian leaders insisted that hundreds had died in the helicopter, tank and bulldozer assaults that demolished so much of the camp— the word ‘massacre’ was used repeatedly, with some claims that 800 Palestinians were dead. The Israelis kept revising their figures, which caused great confusion and, in the minds of some, looked like obfuscation. First they talked of ‘scores’ and then there were ‘dozens’ dead. Four days after the fighting stopped, an IDF spokesman said the figure was likely to be ‘several hundred’ dead Palestinians. Another Israeli spokesman put the estimate at a precise 250 Palestinians dead, but then the Israeli estimate of the Palestinian toll was wound back dramatically to 45. In the end, it seemed that between 50 and 60 Palestinians died— about half of them militiamen—and, according to the local hospital, more than 200 were injured. The Israelis lost 23 men and 75 were wounded. They had won the fight but their information campaign was abysmal. After so many claims that there had been a massacre, they locked the camp down instead of opening it up. What did they have to hide? Then Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres speculated in public on how the Palestinians might present the battle as a massacre, and on the same day that I stood on a hill overlooking Jenin and watched three big refrigeration trucks drive away from the town, General Ron Kitry, a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces, said the bodies of ‘terrorists’ were being trucked to the Jordan valley for burial in unmarked graves in an ‘enemy cemetery’. The whole business was further complicated when the officer in charge of the IDF at Jenin, Brigadier-General Eyal Shlein, insisted to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that his was a ‘humane’ army. But in the same issue of Haaretz, some of his officers gave the newspaper background interviews in which they admitted extensive damage in the camp and shooting at ambulances to drive them away from recovering wounded Palestinians. And an Israeli soldier told the New York Times
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how the bulldozers would rumble up to a house: ‘It would give it a small blow to shake it, and wait for the people to come out before tearing it down.’ Did all the people come out? ‘Who knows? Can you know?’ the soldier asked. The campaign for an outside enquiry hit fever pitch, especially in Europe, and even the pro-Israeli Bush White House backed it. After hearing a report from his Tel Aviv defence attaché who had inspected the camp, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said: ‘There is a strong case for Israel to answer.’ When UN special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen got into the camp after the Israelis had made him cool his heels for days, he told an impromptu press conference that the ‘devastation was horrific beyond belief ’. The Norwegian diplomat then berated the Sharon government: ‘No civilised nation can allow itself to use such means, even to reach the most just objective. This is a sad and disgraceful chapter in the history of the state of Israel. It’s not only what you see; it’s what you smell. Israel has lost all moral ground in this conflict.’ Roed-Larsen said he had watched as the crushed body of a 12-yearold boy was recovered from the rubble and as two brothers digging in the ruins of their home had unearthed parts of their father’s body— some of his torso with the rib-cage exposed. They had told him that their father had been killed by a sniper’s bullet and they had fled, leaving his remains in the house as a bulldozer prepared to demolish the building. Roed-Larsen said of the dead: ‘They are not only fighters. We’ve seen kids. There was a 60-year-old woman . . . What is really shocking beyond belief is that the Israelis have not conducted a searchand-rescue operation in 11 days.’ In the meantime, the Israelis were shooting at journalists who attempted to go into the camp. The first day I tried it I was blocked by several bursts of machine-gun fire. Doubtless it was dangerous in the camp, but if it was safe enough for humanitarian workers and soldiers it was safe enough for reporters, and access and information are better than gunfire when it comes to getting a case across. In Jenin town I had picked up a resourceful young guide—a 13-year-old with the English words ‘success in life’ embroidered across the front of his jumper. His
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name was Khalid Tawalbi and he was the youngest brother of the No 1 terrorist whose death the Israelis had celebrated in the Jenin fight. This boy seemed fearless. Despite the Israeli lockdown of the camp and his own family’s loss, Khalid had been nipping in and out of the camp and he volunteered to take me in. But this was the first combat zone I’d been into since the Taliban ambush in which three of my colleagues had died in Afghanistan. There was sporadic small arms and artillery fire all over Jenin and I watched as a group of Israeli soldiers fired at two other foreign journalists who had approached the camp. I decided to come back another day. In leaving, however, I discovered that getting out of Jenin town was as much of a challenge as getting into the camp. A local taxi-driver took me as far as he could, and then I set out to hitchhike the last few kilometres over the Green Line into Israel proper, where I had parked the bus in which I had left all the gear I would need now that I knew that it might be days before I could get into the refugee camp. I was rounded up twice by Israeli APC crews, and once by a soldier who jumped menacingly from a truck, spat invective and demanded that I get off the road with my hands above my head—and that is how I was obliged to walk for more than 500 metres until a rise on the track broke the line of sight between us. Later, a team of soldiers on patrol on the Green Line detained me. Twice in the one afternoon I was ordered to unpack my backpack in the middle of the road with at least half a dozen weapons trained on me. The Israeli Defense Forces declared the whole area ‘closed’ but by travelling through olive groves and remote villages I got back to the outskirts of Jenin the next day. I was hiding out with a CNN crew in the village of Burkin and when we bedded down for the night our plan was to rise early the next morning to take a track through the fig and olive groves around a last line of hills to the camp. But we woke to find that Burkin was under an Israeli curfew and we were pinned down because the IDF had stationed a tank convoy right outside the home of a local family that had taken us in. It meant that we had to sit tight for 24 hours, but the next day we again set out for the camp.
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The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent were finally allowed in. They were so overwhelmed they were now demanding greater access to get food, water and rescue teams into the camp. In 48 hours the Israelis had allowed the two agencies’ emergency response teams to spend a total of only six and a half hours in the camp. And UNICEF was able to get food to only 20–30 per cent of the camp before the rubble mountain blocked its convoy. I was determined to get in now, to see the camp for myself. In the afternoon CNN dropped me near the northern boundary of the camp, from where I was able to observe the movement of Israeli tanks and armoured personnel carriers before choosing my moment. I had about 300 metres of open ground to cover and I ran so fast I fell over three times, but finally I was in the camp. The first decision I made was that I’d stay overnight rather than risk heading out through the Israeli lines as the light faded. Nothing could prepare you for the reality of the destruction or for the listless response of the inhabitants. The smell of decaying flesh came from buildings that still stood and from different sections of the rubble. Residents wandered in shock, crying a lot but saying little. Despite a curfew that said they were not allowed outdoors, 34-year-old Andira Harab insisted on taking me to the remains of her home which she said was demolished without warning by the Israeli bulldozers. ‘We just had to run out,’ she said. She took me down a swathe of gouged road—a tangle of wires and plumbing, on which every building had been peeled open by the bulldozers—to where the personal and private side of her life blew in the breeze—her bathroom with her cosmetics; the toilet; her dust-covered lounge suite and her curtains; a crockery cabinet and a framed reading from the Koran. Across the alleyway, a fridge miraculously stood on a ledge of floor that had once been part of her neighbour’s kitchen, and a dining suite hung precariously into the roadway. Nearby, artificial flowers dangled in the corner of a room that no longer existed and rows of jars of olives could be seen in a cupboard that used to back on to a wall—only now, the wall was gone. Across the camp, what had been a washing machine
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repair shop was a jumble of tumblers and wrecked masonry; chickens let loose had taken up in the bicycle shop; and the hairdresser’s had been blown to bits. An orange skirt was blowing in fractured masonry that dangled like a macabre mobile and a green check shirt was caught near where a window used to be. A stack of thin mattresses was splayed like a hand of cards in what was left of a bedroom. And on a cardboard box half buried in the rubble there was a label: ‘Save the Children’. Kids’ toys, women’s shoes, food . . . their lives were strewn in the rubble. Just down from where the leaves of a mulberry tree had been pulverised into a fine green dust by the force of a missile explosion, the Star of David had been sprayed on one of the few sets of steel shutters in the camp that was not already filled with Palestinian nationalist graffiti. And as Chivvas Moore, a freelance American aid worker, paused to make notes, a camp resident practised her English: ‘Do you keep a diary?’ she asked. ‘No,’ Moore said. ‘I keep a list of the dead—13 so far today.’ When I came upon another foreign aid worker, he was obviously distressed. All he could say was: ‘This is worse than I believed it would be. Can you imagine anything worse?’ When I attempted to guide his team to a building in which camp residents said there were five dead men, Israeli soldiers ordered us away at gunpoint. At the centre of the camp, now reminiscent of the classic pictures of the destruction of Dresden, two human feet protruded from the rubble. And as I spoke to another aid worker in a nearby alley, he drew my attention to the fact that on the ground between my feet was another human foot. He presumed it was from a nearby blob that he said was a corpse mangled beyond recognition after being run over by a tank or a bulldozer. All over the camp there were stories that were impossible to verify. Andira Harab, who had shown me her home that was now like an open sardine tin, told me how her brother had been made to strip to the waist and how other young men were stripped naked before they were bound and made to lie on the road, where Israeli soldiers tormented them by stepping on sensitive parts of their bodies before taking them away. Sixtyyear-old Subheia Abi Sabin thrust a crying one-year-old at me, saying
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that the Israeli Defense Forces had ordered the child and his mother to stay in the open without food and diapers for two days. Thahee Amran said that the dowry gold of several women she knew had been stolen during the occupation. But not hers—and she lifted her shirt to show it strapped around her midriff. Several residents complained that the Israeli forces had trashed the buildings they had commandeered as staging posts during the battle. They showed me crockery and kitchenware that had been smashed; bedroom cupboards that had been emptied out; and copies of the Koran that had been burnt or shredded. Interior walls seemed to have been needlessly sprayed with gunfire, although there was a pattern to it—the walls that had been sprayed were opposite the entrance to each room, suggesting that the soldiers may have entered with guns blazing. Mohamed Abu Heja told me of the family that had fled their home as a bulldozer prepared to move in. But in their haste they had left behind a 38-year-old son who was confined to a wheelchair. ‘They pleaded with the soldiers to be allowed to go back to get him, but the bulldozer just moved in on the building,’ he told me. Some months later, when I sat down to read Human Rights Watch’s report on the battle of Jenin, a section headed ‘The Bulldozing Death of Jamal Fayid, April 6’ leapt out at me. Human Rights Watch believed this should be investigated as a possible war crime. Fayid had been disabled from birth. He could not speak and he needed help just to eat and move. On April 5, a missile strike set the house on fire but, when the 17 family members tried to escape through the front door, one of Fayid’s aunts was shot in the shoulder. They escaped through a side window—but that meant abandoning Fayid. His sister Bassima recounted how some of the women of the house sneaked back the next day: ‘We tried to beg the soldiers that there was a paralysed man in there. We even showed them his identity card. The ones on the street told us to go away. So we ran to [soldiers in] a neighbouring house and said the same. We begged and begged. Eventually they let five women into the house to try to carry him out. [We heard the bulldozer approaching] and it began to destroy the house. We could
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hear people on the street shouting: “Stop! There are women inside the house! Stop!” The soldiers even knew we were in there, because they had said we could go in to get Jamal out.’ Human Rights Watch said that the women ran as the house swayed and crumbled around them, crushing the paralysed Fayid. And as the women fled for the second time in as many days, the bulldozer operator yelled after them: ‘Bitches.’ Another incident was told to me in such a garbled fashion that I did not report it at the time but in Human Rights Watch’s account the murder of Munthis al-Haj became a chilling tale. When al-Haj, a fighter, was wounded on the first day of battle, his colleagues dropped him on the steps near a hospital about 2 kilometres from the camp. Al-Haj’s shouts for help caught the ear of Hisham Samara, a hospital cook, who could also see that there was an Israeli tank nearby. He took up the story: ‘We took one of the nurses’ scarves and made a white flag. I wound the white flag onto a stick. I opened the door and put my arm with the stick and the scarf outside . . . while I had my arm out, there was the sound of a big explosion—so loud I could not hear anything.’ Fifteen minutes later Samara and some nurses again tried to rescue al-Haj. But there was more fire from the tank. Samara says: ‘As I stuck my hand out the tank began to fire in bursts of bullets, it was very heavy. Of course we tried to speak with the wounded man during all of this and tried to get him to crawl towards us. Sometimes he would say: “I can’t hear you”; other times he would say: “I can’t, I can’t”. Both of al-Haj’s hands were broken, he couldn’t move them. There was a lot of blood . . .’ In the next couple of hours the hospital staff made three failed attempts to get to the desperate al-Haj who, slowly, was dragging himself to safety. Two doctors in white and carrying a white flag drew more Israeli fire and then they threw a rope to al-Haj, but his broken hands could not hold it. They called the International Committee for the Red Cross and other humanitarian agencies pleading for intervention, but to no avail. Al-Haj was now lying on the steps, on his side, his head resting on his hands. Samara finished the story: ‘The tank fired at him and the bullets entered his back . . .’ Human Rights Watch concluded:
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‘The killing of al-Haj after he was wounded and no longer armed amounts to a case of wilful killing, a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions and, as such, a war crime.’ The death of Kamal Zghail, 57 and also wheelchair-bound, is distressing. He lived in a single room near a gas station and his daily habit was to trundle himself to a nearby warehouse to visit his friend, Durar Hussein. Remarkably, the fighting did not stop him but his life came to a bloody end on April 10 when the battle was virtually over. Hussein told what happened: ‘He came in the morning as he came every day. I cleaned his clothes and put them out to dry. At about 4.15 pm I pushed his wheelchair to the street, he continued to make his way to the gas station . . . I had put a white flag on his wheelchair to make sure that everyone could see him from far away . . . I heard tanks coming from the west. So I got worried about him because he was in the street. Then they started shooting from the tanks. I knew exactly where he was, and the shooting was there. At first I thought they were shooting to tell him to move out of the street. ‘The tanks came nearer and it was too dangerous to remain outside . . . the [tanks] remained there all night. [The next morning they lifted the curfew and] I found his wheelchair, crushed by the tanks. I . . . I ran to the gas station where he sleeps, yelling, “Kamal! Kamal!” I entered his room, but I could not find anyone. I went back to the wheelchair . . . looking here and there. [I remembered that from my place] I had seen something in the grass, so I went to check and in between the grass I found his body . . . His face was smashed and his legs were crushed. I only recognised him because of the socks that I had cleaned the day before.’ Human Rights Watch went to the scene of Zghail’s death—the remains of the wheelchair were still there and the white flag fluttered in the breeze. As the battle started, 27-year-old nurse Farwa Jemmal went to the hospital to stock up on emergency supplies. And when 19-year-old Hani Abu Rumaila was shot in the leg as he opened the gate to his family compound, which was near the nurse’s home, she put on her white uniform with its bold red crescent (the Muslim equivalent of the red
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cross) and went with her sister to assist some youths who were trying to help the wounded man. Her sister Rufaida told Human Rights Watch: ‘. . . the Israelis started shooting. I got hit with a bullet in my upper thigh. I fell down and broke my knee. My sister [the nurse Farwa] tried to come and help me. Then she was shot in the abdomen. I told her that I was wounded and she replied that she was also wounded. I repeated the Shahada [a declaration of faith by Muslims facing death] and then Farwa was shot in the heart . . . The Israeli soldiers were very near to us, and could see and hear us. We were clearly visible to them. They kept shooting at us and I got another bullet in the other leg.’ Each side in the battle of Jenin accused the other of using the civilian population as a human shield—the Palestinians by hiding among them, the Israelis by making them walk in front of them—sometimes using their shoulders as a rest for their weapons as they shot, and at other times making them enter buildings that might be booby-trapped. The latter experience happened to 42-year-old Faisal Abu Sariya, a schoolteacher I last saw in a bed at the Jenin hospital. He was recovering from a leg wound. On the second day, Israeli soldiers burst into his home at four in the morning and set up a guard position at a window. Sometime after dawn the soldiers moved on, but they ordered the schoolteacher to go with them. He told Human Rights Watch: ‘I asked: “Are you taking me to jail?” The soldier said that he just wanted me to go next door, and then they would release me. My wife and children were crying, begging them to release me.’ For two days the soldiers dragged Abu Sariya through the camp, making him walk in front of them at all times and forcing him to enter homes before they would. He said: ‘They pointed a house out to me. They said: “Go knock on the door, tell all the people to go into one room, and come back”. I knocked on the door and there was no answer. They put a small bomb the size of a pack of cigarettes on the door and opened it. They ordered me to go inside. I checked and found no one inside. Then they asked me to go out and they sent in the [bomb-sniffer] dog. Then, when the dog came back, they went inside . . . ‘Whenever they wanted to move, a [soldier] would grab me by the
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collar and put me in front . . . They used me like this between houses . . . [if ] there was shooting I’d die first. I asked them: “Please, release me, you promised me [to go to] just one house, let me go”. At least five times a day I would ask them. They always said that they would release me when they found a substitute.’ But on the third day, as Abu Sariya crossed a street on Israeli orders, another Israeli unit opened fire from a nearby rooftop, wounding him in the leg. The two Israeli units fell to arguing and before they marched off they threw Abu Sariya a bandage and ordered some Palestinian youngsters to carry him away. Using detailed maps on which individual buildings could be identified, Human Rights Watch said that it counted 140 that were completely destroyed in a ‘wholesale levelling’ of an entire district that went well beyond any conceivable purpose of gaining access to fighters and was vastly disproportional to the Israelis’ military objectives. Elsewhere more than 200 houses were badly damaged, leaving a total of up to 4000 people homeless. Human Rights Watch concluded: Establishing whether this extensive destruction so exceeded military necessity as to constitute wanton destruction—or a war crime—should be one of the highest priorities of a UN fact-finding mission. There is strong prima facie evidence that IDF personnel committed grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, or war crimes. Inadequate warning was given to civilian residents [and] many only learned of the risk as bulldozers began to crush their houses. The IDF blocked the passage of emergency medical vehicles and personnel . . . The Israeli military action in Jenin refugee camp included both indiscriminate and disproportional attacks. Some attacks were indiscriminate because Israeli forces, particularly the IDF helicopters, did not focus their firepower only towards legitimate military targets. Rather, they fired into the camp at random. This indiscriminate use of firepower added significantly to the civilian casualty toll of the fighting and the destruction of civilian homes. The Israeli offensive in the Jenin refugee camp was also disproportionate, because the incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects was excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.
After bumping into the American aid worker Chivvas Moore in the camp, I stuck with her. She had tapped into a refugee aid network and
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I figured that they would let me sleep somewhere. They did. Mohamed Abu Heja, the man who first told me of the death of the wheelchairbound Jamal Fayid, took us into his home, despite already having about 40 camp residents sprawled about in various rooms. And as night fell and the doors were closed against a sky that was periodically ablaze with brilliant Israeli search flares, Abu Heja’s family and neighbours gathered for a sparse meal. Afterwards, with only a small oil lamp to light a room that slowly filled with the sweet scent of the narghile water pipe, it emerged that the Israeli attack on Jenin had not caused political discourse to even skip a beat. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was still described in this household as the sadi (abnormal) man; those who died in the conflict still were shahid (martyrs); the camp would be rebuilt; it would take time, probably generations, but the Palestinians would win back their land; and, in the meantime, more suicide bombers were likely to go over the Green Line into Israel. ‘Welcome to Palestine—you know this is not Israel, don’t you?’ said the woman with the gold strapped to her stomach. Early the next morning Chivvas Moore guided me out of the camp along its desolate, rubble-strewn alleys until we came to the Jenin hospital, where I was allowed to use a telephone line to file a report on the camp to the Herald. Later, I hitched a ride to the edge of town with a municipal foreman who was assessing the worst of the war damage. My next lift was with a group of American reporters who delivered me back to my bus on the Israeli side of the Green Line. The clash at Jenin had proved to be a circuit breaker in the violence, and I headed back to the St George guesthouse, packed up and booked a flight to New York. I had 24 hours to pass before take-off, which is why I found myself being ordered to bring my vehicle to a halt at a military checkpoint in the wilds of the Judean desert. I was driving to Masada, to see for myself the site of the ancient suicidal defeat that Jews swear will never happen again, when the checkpoint loomed out of the haze. The soldiers get edgy, and care is needed as you approach. The drill is simple—stop about 100 metres back until you are called forward, have the window rolled down, hands empty and above the dashboard and passport and press
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credentials at the ready. The soldier grabbed my Irish passport and looked at me quizzically. ‘I’ve always wanted to meet an Irishman,’ he said in heavily accented English. I asked why this was, but he took his time. I could see him carefully marshalling his thoughts as he formed his answer: ‘All this violence,’ he said, ‘I just don’t get it.’
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PART IV
THE US AND IRAQ PREPARE FOR WAR August–September 2002
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August 2002
A heavy set of pliers crunched the lead seal into place and I thought I was being cut off from the world. It was the middle of the night and I was at the Trebil crossing on the border between Jordan and Iraq, where customs officials were threatening to confiscate my satellite phone. I took a commercial approach, putting first $US20 and then another $US50 on the table before the officials agreed to let me hold on to the phone. But they trussed it up in plastic and string, and then that lead seal, before ordering me to take my phone to the authorities when I arrived in Baghdad. One of them gave me a look but all he said was ‘Complex!’, a one-word acknowledgement of the difficulty in deciding which sat-phones might be allowed into the country, and the horrendous paperwork required to make it happen. Each of the three times I was ordered back to his office by others at the border crossing, to get him to endorse my travel documents correctly, he’d say it again, each time with a higher inflection in his voice. ‘Complex!’ Entering Iraq at Trebil, I was confronted by a new addition to the nation’s cultural heritage—a glistening statue of Saddam Hussein mounted on a fabulous horse. In fact, in the first 100 metres I drove in Iraq I came upon no less than five portraits and two statues of the man the tabloids love to call ‘the butcher of Baghdad’. A brilliant full moon made the statue and the desert glow as Suleiman, my driver, put 213
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his foot to the floor. His GMC four-wheel drive easily outpaced a near constant convoy of trucks along Saddam’s smart new six-lane highway to Baghdad. And when we pulled into a truck stop for a midnight coffee, I was again struck by the isolation in which Saddam keeps his people. We had hardly come to a halt before the hunger for news of the place that Iraqis refer to simply as ‘outside’ made Makhmoud Abid Kubasi vault the counter of his fruit stall so that he would be first in line for any newspapers we had in the GMC. We’d driven from Amman, the Jordanian capital, for half the day and half the night, and at 2.30 am Suleiman looked at me as we approached a security checkpoint on the outskirts of the city: ‘Welcome to Baghdad’. This was the Iraqi capital as I had not seen it since the hostage crisis of 1990—every street light burned in a celebration of excess in scarce times, every building and every portrait and every statue of the leader was floodlit. More fountains were splashing water in Baghdad than there had been in New York when I had left home. I checked into the Al Rasheed Hotel, where I had stayed during the bombing of Baghdad in 1991. It is a great box of tawdry rooms that sits on the western bank of the Tigris River, spying on its guests and serving them dreadful food as Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition goes around and around in the empty lobbies. Some of the windows are taped to stop them shattering in the event of bombing—but it’s hard to tell if it is from the last attacks or for the ones to come. All guests entering the lobby still walk across a mosaic of a broken-toothed George Bush Snr, which is crudely captioned: ‘Bush is criminal’. The circumstances of my checking-in were light years away from my check-out more than a decade earlier in January 1991. Apart from CNN, six of us were the last foreign journalists in the country and, as US bombs and missiles broke Iraq apart, we were ordered into a car and directed through the battlefield to the Jordanian border. It was for our safety, an official of the Foreign Ministry insisted, and as a show of faith he said that we should not pay our hotel bill or even collect our laundry, because we would be allowed back in a matter of days. It wasn’t to be and, instead, I hitchhiked across the desert to report on the liberation of
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Kuwait. As the six of us drove out of Baghdad the Doura Oil refinery, to the south, was ablaze. This time, as Suleiman drove me back into the city, the refinery had been stuck back together with industrial band-aids and its huge flare could be seen burning defiantly from any of the bridges that Saddam had rebuilt on the Tigris River. I fell into bed, but at 8 am there was an urgent knocking on my door. It was Firas al Samarai, whom Suleiman had tipped off about my arrival. Firas was desperate to lock himself in as my driver and fixer, at $US100 a day, before the transport mafia that hung around the entrance to the hotel could get their hands on me. When I asked him which other journalists he had worked for, he made me feel right at home as he rattled off the names of friends and acquaintances: ‘You know Mr Larry Doyle from CBS?’ he asked. ‘You know Mr Hugh Dellios of the Chicago Tribune ?’ As Firas drove me to the grey bunker of the Information Ministry I cradled the lead-sealed sat-phone and he gave me a quick update on the last year’s post-war rebuilding of Baghdad: ‘The blackouts are for only a couple of hours a week now. The Chinese have fixed the phones and there are fewer potholes in the roads.’ Because of past experience, I had little confidence in the phones—too often they didn’t work and you were never sure whether anyone was listening. I desperately wanted to get the sat-phone unsealed, but the first official I met at the ministry took it off me altogether, claiming it was ‘unacceptable’ technology, which was his diplomatic way of telling me that the Iraqis believed these pocket-sized phones were the sort that the US Special Forces had used to call in the bombers in Afghanistan. He placed the phone next to a familiar image wearing a black fur hat in a red frame on his desk: ‘It is better to keep it here—beside the president,’ he smiled. And when I returned a day later to seek its release, I was informed that the phone was now under lock and key and would be returned to me the day I left the country. The ministry assigns a limpet-like minder to all foreign reporters— and this time it was the same lean, cheerless soul I had been lumbered with when I had been in Baghdad early the previous year. He insisted
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that I not use his name, but he agreed that I could refer to him as X. There was little I could do in Iraq without X writing a letter requesting the permission of this ministry or that department; information was revealed only by accident and it was X’s job to ensure that I left the country knowing not much more than when I arrived. This is how the daily contest to extract information would unfold: on one occasion we were driving northwest out of Baghdad when I observed men in uniform installing new anti-aircraft guns on top of a nondescript building. Me: ‘What building is that?’ X: ‘I don’t know.’ A few kilometres later we passed a big high-walled compound with heavy-duty security towers along its entire perimeter. Me: ‘What’s that?’ X: ‘You can’t expect me to know what is outside Baghdad.’ And a little while later we came upon an industrial complex belching smoke and fumes into the desert air. Me: ‘What’s that?’ X: ‘I don’t know the factories outside the city.’ But when X did volunteer something, usually it was a gem. At one of the endless roadside checkpoints—a state tool for monitoring people’s movements—he explained offhandedly: ‘It’s not about being criminal. They just check people’s IDs—it’s routine.’ And this is how he tutored me on Saddam’s tolerance: ‘In Mosul, in the north, there is a sect that worships the devil! And the president gives them money for their temples.’ And he added on a note of ‘so-there’ triumph: ‘It wouldn’t be allowed in Saudi Arabia. This government has achieved religious tolerance—it is an excellent achievement.’ After two weeks in each other’s company, he did open up just a little: ‘I’m not a very happy person. But you don’t have to ask, do you? It is written in my features.’ Surprised, I thought this might be X making an oblique commentary on life in Iraq, but he went on: ‘Sometimes we Iraqis like to be unhappy. If you listen to the songs of the south, even the love songs which are so happy, they sound like a weeping lament.
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Sadness is a part of our culture. We are a complex people. But our history teaches us to be alert at all times—so we might have poverty and diseases, but we do not have the problem of addiction to drugs or alcohol.’ Explaining how centuries of occupation by the Ottomans, Persians and Mongols has instilled eternal vigilance in the Iraqis, he said: ‘We are alert, with hand on our swords and at all times we await the enemy. So we will drink just enough alcohol to relax without subjecting ourselves to it the way the Saudis, the Kuwaitis and the Egyptians do.’ I was in Iraq because of the lunge that US president George W. Bush had taken in the War on Terror. It had taken months to wangle a visa from the Iraqis—daily calls to a fixer in Amman and a deluge of faxes to the bureaucrats in Baghdad. I flew British Airways to London and then to Amman. And for reasons that were never explained, after crossing the border on the mesmerising desert drive to Iraq, I was the only foreign newspaper reporter in the country. Unable to track down Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, the White House had become consumed with the threat that it saw in Saddam Hussein, whose weapons programs had been hidden from the world since the 1998 departure from Iraq of United Nations weapons inspectors. Key officials in the Bush administration seemed bent on going to war rather than avoiding it. Saddam was locked in their sights because, in the Orwellian words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ‘the absence of evidence’ on Iraq’s weapons program did not mean that ‘the evidence was absent’. Bush and Saddam were dancing on the brink and I was in Baghdad to tap into the mood and spirit of the country as it stared at the prospect of its third war in 20 years. A good place to start was among the mechanical cannibals in the grease and grime of Baghdad’s Sheik Omar Street. Well away from the gaudy presidential palaces and with not even a billboard of Saddam Hussein to watch over them, hundreds of tiny workshops were grouped according to their specialty—engine blocks, air-conditioning, gasket cutters, windscreens, panels. In these cluttered, dirty workshops no car was allowed to die, no tractor was abandoned and every truck had another few thousand kilometres in it. Grease-stained men like Hisham
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Ahmed Mohammed were at the cutting edge of Saddam’s war against the world—when I visited his kerbside workshop, his mechanics were reworking a set of Peugeot pistons to make them fit a Nissan pick-up. Mohammed took great pride in prolonging the life of cars that should have died years ago for want of spare parts. The delivery of such supplies had been blocked for more than a decade by UN sanctions imposed on Iraq to force it to allow international inspections and the destruction of any weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical and biological. Mohammed said: ‘We can retool the pistons from a Toyota pick-up to work in a VW Passat. Sometimes we make the valves of a Toyota Crown small enough and short enough to fit the Passat. And we have worked out how to fit Russian crankshafts into Japanese models.’ A few doors up, Subhi Hassan was chopping up the radiator of a crashed truck to make several radiators that he said would fit Toyota Corollas. And across the way Amjad Abdul Ameer was using a set of surgical scissors to cut a head gasket to fit a Chevrolet Caprice from soft asbestos sheeting. But US Vice President Dick Cheney had just made the strongest pitch yet for the world to back an American military attack on Iraq and I was in Sheik Omar Street to talk about war, not car parts. Mohammed was indifferent: ‘Another war is normal for us. There is always another war, but we will just work through it—people will need their cars fixed.’ And Hassan the radiator man was pragmatic: ‘We have been in these circumstances before, so we are used to it. And we now have four factories that produce radiator parts, so it will not affect my business.’ I was directed to the motor workshops of Sheik Omar Street by Faris El-Hadi, a wealthy importer of home appliances who was chuffed by the inventiveness of street mechanics who had successfully fitted a Toyota fuel pump to his Oldsmobile sedan. And Ahmed Ezedien, the excitable young owner of a computer shop, also invoked the spirit of the motor cannibals when he said that Iraqis now approached their computer needs with the same mentality—get the bits and pieces and see if you can make it go. In an interview at his city office, the millionaire El-Hadi said: ‘The only household appliance I can’t get UN approval for these days is
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microwave ovens which they claim could be used in weapons programs.’ Asked if there was anything he couldn’t buy in Baghdad, El-Hadi thought long and hard before he answered: ‘No, nothing. You can get everything, with or without approval.’ When I told El-Hadi about the dozens of new Volvo trucks and Toyota sedans I had seen waiting to cross the border from Jordan, he said: ‘The Iraqi government also is importing Mercedes Benzes for government officials and senior military officers. But most people don’t have enough money for their needs.’ So much for sanctions that were intended to punish the leader, not his people. The pace of life in Baghdad had picked up noticeably in the 18 months since my last visit. There was energy and money that had not been so obvious in the past, and the two had become fused in the efforts of the sanction busters who were now bringing the best of the West to Baghdad. A BMW or a Mercedes Benz? On my first night in town I counted forty-five of them in just 10 minutes on the ritzy shopping strip on Arasat Street. And I was told that if I sat long enough I’d see Saddam’s thuggish older son Udai drive past in his red Rolls Royce. After pulling up, many of the imported cars left their engines idling and air-conditioning running as waiters raced out from ice-cream parlours and restaurants to get their takeaway orders. Scotch or Irish whiskey? Saddam has been tightening up on Muslim observance, but his faith campaign was not allowed to get in the way of a good drink behind closed doors. Cuban cigars? Which cigarettes— Benson & Hedges, Marlboro or Kent? The smugglers and scammerchants could get the computer parts the UN had banned or that bolt of cloth that didn’t qualify as a humanitarian need. Arasat Street was lined with ritzy glass, chrome and stone boutiques that would not look out of place in Milan or Madrid. Restaurants were crowded with people having lunches that would cost them as much as some government workers were paid in a month. Families strolled in the cool air around the city fountains and cultural imperialism did not stop at the border—ambling down the street in the 40°C evening heat was a man wearing a full Mickey Mouse outfit. The hot-dog vendor had
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six varieties of mustard. The markets were filled with competitively priced imported fax machines, printers, audiovisual equipment and computers. What didn’t come in on UN-sanctioned ships came over the water by smugglers’ launch from the United Arab Emirates or over the desert by truck from Jordan, Syria or Turkey. But like the new Chinese buses that worked the city streets, Iraq had become a double-decker society. After more than a decade of sanctions the tightknit mafia elites on the upper deck were doing well, but the country had racked up one of the bleakest suites of statistics on national well-being in the world. The elites and those who served them treated defeating the sanctions almost as a national sport, and those who suffered by them were so consumed by the struggle of their existence that they were grateful to Saddam for their monthly ration of food and they had neither the energy nor the brain space to think about a different life. UNICEF estimated that the mortality rate for Iraqi children under five years was more than 10 times that in strife-torn Rwanda and HIVdamaged South Africa. In a country in which clean, bottled water cost 10 times as much as petrol, UNICEF said that about 70 per cent of the children who died—and as many as 1.7 million had died since the Gulf War—did so from preventable sanitation-related diseases like diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections. Half a million tonnes of raw sewage were dumped into the fresh waterways of the country each day; supplies of safe drinking water had been halved; and such were the dietary and educational deficiencies that the children of Iraq were physically and intellectually stunted. To make ends meet, families pulled their children out of school and sent them into the streets—pushing carts, selling fruit, hawking fish— for the sake of a few dinars. They would make them stand on a street corner selling tissues or single cigarettes to passing motorists. War widows, shrouded in their black abayas, begged for money or food. Many in the middle class got their home, gas and electricity for a token cost and key government workers were being paid a few dollars more in a bid to boost morale and to keep them in the country. A Western diplomat told me: ‘People have to have several jobs to get by. A doctor
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earns $US25 a month, a teacher $US5 and a policeman gets $US3. If you go to the offices of any government ministry you will see that people are not at their desks—they are out doing their other jobs. As a people, they are exhausted. They are at a standstill and now they have to get over this new hurdle [of threatened war] to see what is going to happen to them.’ Those who could afford a car worked the streets of Baghdad as unofficial taxis, but a band of more determined souls had taken to driving just over the border into Jordan with a full tank of dirt-cheap Iraqi petrol which they would then siphon from the tank and sell on the roadside at a much higher price. The owner of a new Peugeot 406 said he had swapped his Chevy Caprice for the smaller, more fuel-efficient car because he was worried that Iraq’s oil refineries would be destroyed again. Those who could were hoarding food and cash. In 1990 the Iraqi dinar was worth $US3, but now $US1 bought almost 2000 dinars. When I exchanged $US1000 so that I could pay my hotel bill, I came away from the moneychanger with a cardboard box the size of 10 telephone directories that was filled with brick-sized bundles of notes. And for all the diplomatic talk about smart sanctions on Iraq, the oil-for-food program was not very smart. Iraq was allowed to sell billions of dollars worth of oil to buy food for the people, but the UN had stipulated that the money must be spent outside the country. That meant that Iraqi farmers could not sell their bumper 2002 crop at anything like a decent price and the teachers, doctors and sanitary specialists who tended the brains and health of the nation were paid a pittance and virtually nothing was spent on health and education. At Baghdad’s Al Mansour paediatric hospital, the medical staff were tearing their hair out over a shortage of imported cancer-treatment drugs that had also been blocked under the oil-for-food program because of their potential use in a weapons program. Their show-and-tell patient was Ali Asiyan, an emaciated nine-year-old who they said was likely to die because he had gone without the drugs for six months. But at least Ali was in hospital. When I went to the Maternity and Children’s Hospital in the southern city of Basra, the cancer ward was deserted.
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When I had visited the ward early in 2001, I had taken heart at the sight of one empty bed, only to be informed by Dr Janan Galib that its 15year-old occupant had died the previous day. However, on this visit the entire ward was empty—Dr Galib had sent all the patients home because she had no drugs to treat them. Iraqi specialists blame a frightening increase in child cancers and appalling birth deformities on the use of depleted uranium by the US in the weapons they used to destroy Iraqi military hardware at the end of the Gulf War. In 2001 Dr Galib anticipated that the rate of the diseases had peaked. However, this time she told me that there had been an 85 per cent increase in the incidence of leukaemia compared with the previous year. In her dimly lit office, she rattled off the names of a dozen imported drugs which she said were denied to Iraqi patients and she complained that supplies of the drugs that she was allowed to use had dried up. ‘The only children we can treat here now are those whose families can afford to buy the drugs in Jordan or in the United Arab Emirates and then find a way to bring them into the country. It is very distressing. I had parents bring in a child who was suffocating because the lump in her neck was so big she could not breath. The mother was crying and the father was angry that I did not have the necessary drugs.’
The cult of Saddam was even more pervasive than on my previous visits—his picture and statue were everywhere. The most prevalent was a black and white photo-portrait from the 1970s in which the leader’s skin was healthier and his hair more luxuriant than now. In it he had strong shoulders and his piercing eyes stared off to his left. But to an outsider the ever-present, gaudily painted billboard portraits of Saddam are ridiculous: Saddam on a horse, with missiles strapped to each leg; Saddam in bearskin hat, arms outstretched; Saddam looking like a London businessman setting out for the Tube wearing a bowler hat— except that he was brandishing a rifle; Saddam the Sandhurst graduate; Saddam astride a horse or a sofa, in full traditional Arab dress and wraparound sunglasses. His picture has even become the mandatory
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screen-saver on the computer terminals at the neighbourhood offices of the State Company for Internet Services which gives Iraqis limited access to email. But my favourite depiction of the dictator was in the southern city of Basra—Saddam holding the scales of justice. Nothing is too much for Saddam’s architects. The gatehouses at the entrances to his dozens of luxury palaces are highly decorated and as big as a block of flats. As we passed one such gatehouse, on which he had just built a scaled replica of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, I suggested to Firas that we drive in and request an interview with the president. Straight-faced, Firas said: ‘Oh, I think I take you direct to hospital’, and he proceeded to tell me the story of a German journalist who had come to Baghdad in 1998 with a brief to interview Saddam. Each day he had presented himself at the Information Ministry demanding an interview, and each day he had been sent away. After a month in which he refused to do any other story, the hotel he was staying in was bombed by the US. The journalist, unconscious, was taken to hospital and when he came to, standing by his bed was Saddam Hussein. So where was Saddam? He had not been seen in public for two years. Could I interview him? X told me no, because the president was wary of being misquoted. So was he in good spirit? Political scientist Wamidh Nadhmi told me he had heard rumours that Saddam no longer used a telephone—he was wary of electronic eavesdropping. The president’s health? Former ambassador Dr A. K. Al-Hashimi: ‘He is like the rest of the Iraqi people—he’s getting on with it. He doesn’t care about the shouting and screaming at him. He is in excellent health. You saw him at the big military parade on TV? Standing for six or seven hours, and firing about 100 shots from a rifle held in just one hand.’ The prospect of war made Saddam’s fate precarious, but for now the splitting of Iraqis into economic haves and have-nots seemed to have strengthened his grip on power domestically. But something was different—in the past few would have dared to criticise the leader or his actions. Now the Samsung millionaire El-Hadi was the first to reveal to me a new willingness to question the president’s stewardship of the
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country, if only to emphasise an argument against the US or to make their loyalty seem more certain. El-Hadi told me: ‘You will find people who don’t agree with all that the government is doing, but you will not find people who will cooperate with invaders. Do you think the Americans care about me? They just want our oil and our minerals. I tell you, as an Iraqi citizen who is not a party member, that I can disagree with the government on how it deals with agriculture or education or the economy, but I will defend myself and my country against any foreigner. Do the Americans really believe that the Iraqis will welcome them? It’s ridiculous. The price in casualties will be so high. These Americans are very intelligent and they are good achievers, but they lack wisdom. They are adventurers.’ As we looked at Iraq’s short-term future it was impossible not to dwell on the country’s medium-past—Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and its brutal aftermath. Mr El-Hadi said: ‘I can’t say it was a wise decision . . . and the results were very bad for the Iraqi people and for the region.’ The bloody conflict among Iraqi factions in the wake of Saddam’s expulsion from Kuwait is likely to be repeated if the US succeeds in toppling the dictator president. In the south the Shiite Muslims, who have always been oppressed despite being the majority in Iraq, will stake a claim on power that has been denied them—they did it in an orgy of killing, maiming and raping in 1991. And the US looked on from its perch in liberated Kuwait and did nothing as Saddam, humiliated in defeat, struck back at the Shiites with a vengeance. In the north the Kurds, at the urging of then US President Bush Snr, also revolted and they were punished by Saddam. This time the Kurds will want a new deal and in the post-Saddam chaos there might even be renewed calls for Kurdish independence. Asked about the US hope that the Kurds of the north would become the Northern Alliance of Iraq, El-Hadi said: ‘The Kurds know that the Iraqi leadership is not easy to deal with and if they are seen to be traitors it will be an excuse for everyone to take revenge on them. If the US ever did get to install a friendly government it will not be easy, and at some point it will be replaced by a govern-
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ment that is not friendly. And that government will be very cruel to the Kurds; it will be the end of the Kurdish dream.’ Members of Saddam’s government are hard to get to, but the Information Ministry wheeled out a gallery of former bureaucrats and ambassadors who were close to the regime and its thinking. You could tell just how close by the grandness of their government-provided offices and by the number of portraits of the leader on their desks. So when I discovered that the Moorish building that housed Dr Qais Al-Nouri had been the 1920s residence of King Faisal, and when I saw the commanding view he enjoyed over the Tigris River, I concluded that he was close. When I asked the former diplomat how close he was, he said: ‘My thinking reflects the thinking of the regime to the extent that the state is trying to defend our country. Maybe sometimes I’m critical of the conduct of the government, but that doesn’t mean that I’m separate from it when we face the foreign aggressors.’ Dr Al-Hashimi, who had gauged the president’s health by his ability to wield a rifle, was Iraq’s high-profile ambassador to Paris during the Gulf Crisis and his daily meetings were still reported in the Iraq Daily. Since we had last met he had taken over a grand suite of offices in which five portraits of his leader watch over his desk. The arguments in Baghdad were consistent and deeply held—the American push against Iraq was a trumped-up excuse to commandeer the country’s oil reserves; the drive for weapons inspections was nothing more than a cover to put American spies on the ground; the push against Saddam was a US–Israeli plot; and if there was to be a war, the Iraqi people would fight against any invaders before they would rise against their leader. I was struck by the passion in Mr El-Hadi, but what I got from Dr Al-Hashimi, who was one of Iraq’s key spokesmen to the world in 1990–91, was unbridled anger: ‘We listen to the language of the US with disgust. It is stupid! Ridiculous! Nonsense! As an Iraqi, when I know that the US and Israel are against my president, this for me is clear evidence that my president is right. Rumsfeld says that maybe we have weapons of mass destruction and maybe we will give them to terrorists who maybe will use them against the US. And on the basis of three
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maybes he will attack us. Can you believe that?’ And as he struck at the air again and again with a clenched fist, he snapped: ‘We are getting disgusted! Disgusted! Disgusted!’
Baghdad was a city of memories. A couple of shops were licensed to sell alcohol—a six-pack of Heineken cost $US10. But Saddam’s ‘faith campaign’ was rapidly drawing what had been a secular society to the mosques, as I discovered when I went looking for the Golden City, a nightclub I had visited hours before the opening fury of Operation Desert Storm. On that occasion I had come across a lone Egyptian man dancing to the reedy music of the region, and when I asked if that was not frivolous conduct, he cocked an eye and told me: ‘You live, you dance, you die.’ Now the club was closed. Firas drove me past the abandoned US embassy, where I recalled an evacuating American diplomat urging us to flee. ‘You’ll end up like a quarter-pound of ground round,’ he had said, suggesting that American bombing would reduce us to hamburger meat. We passed the old French embassy where I had attended a surreal party the night before the bombing in 1991—in one room there was a spread of wonderful French wines and in another a battery of shredders hard at work. Back then we had flocked to the open-air Masgoof barbecued fish restaurants on the banks of the Tigris—but now the pleasure of an iced beer on a balmy evening had been outlawed and the dumping of so much raw sewage in the river had reduced a local delicacy to a serious health hazard. For all that, El-Hadi, the Samsung man, claimed with justifiable pride: ‘This country is getting back on its feet. There was a total collapse after the Gulf War. You could see no one, no police, no military. Now you feel that there is a government there and that it’s trying its best to bring everything back to normal. The morale of the people is better and so is the standard of living.’ The appearance of normality in Baghdad was a veneer that masked huge infrastructural problems, especially in the endless grey of its rawcemented suburbs. But the veneer was very important to the regime and the image it wanted to project to the world. When I first came to Iraq
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in 1990, to report on the hostage drama that preceded the Gulf War, one of the earliest guided press tours arranged by the Information Ministry was to see progress on Iraq’s reconstruction on the Fao Peninsula, the scene of the worst fighting in the Iraq–Iran war that had finished only a couple of years earlier. Their intention was to show us that Iraq could withstand the punishment of a terrible war. As I waited to interview one of Saddam’s ministers late one night on my 2002 assignment, pride of place in his luxurious reception area was reserved for a small glass orb. In it a small Iraqi flag stood in about a cupful of flaky earth and the plaque read: ‘The earth of Fao mixed with the blood of Iraqi martyrs.’ Nowadays the authorities don’t even have to commandeer planes and buses to take the press to Fao. It was just a quick taxi ride across Baghdad to see one of the men charged by Saddam Hussein with sending his ‘you destroy, we rebuild’ message to the world in the wake of the Gulf War. Fifty-six-year-old Mustafa Aubiadi worked in an office decorated with pictures of Saddam hauling baskets of building rubble and others of swathes of new highway and great bridges spanning the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. He said: ‘Saddam supervised the lot. He drew up the plan and he insisted on the deadlines for completion. He visited every project. He worked hard, so we all had to work hard. I think he was working 18 hours a day because he followed even the smallest projects. He came to the projects I worked on.’ The engineer said Iraq’s pre-war capacity for water, power, communications and oil production had not been fully restored, but that most of it was functioning to give ‘adequate’ service. He said of the telephone network: ‘At the end of the war there was no communication in all of Iraq. They knocked down the Saddam Tower, but we rebuilt it—bigger.’ And of the oil industry: ‘They did to us what they said we did to Kuwait. But we have rebuilt the important storage facilities and we are producing again.’ However, Aubiadi’s first love was bridges. And when I arrived at his office, he called for Arabic coffee and an album of before-and-after photographs of what he said was bomb damage to more than 130 road
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and railway bridges, a devastating blow to a country that was carved into three very separate corridors by its two great rivers. ‘Everything was bombed. Even floating bridges that were used only by farmers to cross canals; even bridges that were under construction. But we have rebuilt all but three of them. Sometimes the bomb they dropped cost 10 times more than the bridge it destroyed. But we fixed it with Iraqi dinars, not US dollars. We did it with no outside help—our labour, our machines, and our power.’ He lingered over pictures of Baghdad’s Jumhuriya Bridge, with its decking submerged in the turbid Tigris. ‘This was the biggest challenge. It might have been easier to demolish it and start again, because all the bearers had shifted and each span was damaged in a different way. It took five months to do the work. But it took two years to do this one,’ he said as he pulled out a picture of the restoration work on Baghdad’s graceful suspension bridge. So how did the engineer feel about another war? ‘What are we to do if they want to destroy our country again? I’ll be very angry if I have to do it all again because our people and our country have suffered so much. I hope for peace, but we are ready for war—we have the power.’ I became intrigued by the refusal of so many Iraqis to accept the implications of their own military inferiority in the face of the superpower arsenal of the US. Instead, on a steamy night in his home on the banks of the Tigris, Wamidh Nadhmi, a high-profile political scientist, chose to taunt George W. Bush even as he outlined the terrible cost of another war: ‘He says he wants to topple Saddam. But what if he doesn’t find him? He can’t find Osama bin Laden and he doesn’t know where Mullah Omar is. What will he do if he just can’t find him? A military strike against us will be catastrophic. Saddam Hussein was very farsighted in 1990 and he had big stores of spare parts that allowed him to rebuild the country. Now those stores are exhausted so I don’t see how we could survive a repeat of the damage of 1991. We would have no electricity for years to come. People have been living under war and sanctions for more than 20 years and they need to see some light at the end of the tunnel. But do not believe that just because we live in this sanctions prison that the people will accept a US presence here.’
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I have to say that, on the day of Washington’s most forceful declaration of intent on going to war against Iraq, Baghdad hardly skipped a beat. There was no panic—no queuing for petrol, produce or money. The hotels were empty, but staff insisted that it was the furnace-like heat of summer, not the threat of war, that was keeping the foreigners away. The heat was indeed fierce. I watched a soldier on guard duty rotating gradually around a slender lamppost, trying to keep in its pencil-like shadow; women clad from head to toe in blistering black paused in the shade of what pavement trees there were; and the kerbside traders cowered beneath their umbrellas. Many of the shopping strips would not come to life until the cool of evening and it was then, in the thriving computer strip on Al Sina’a Street, that I came upon shopkeeper Ahmed Ezedien, who was mocking the US: ‘We are used to all this war talk and the sanctions make us stronger. Look around you—are people panicked? I will give you something to reflect on . . . In the last attacks in 1998, I was at the soccer when the anti-aircraft guns started shooting at US aircraft over us. I was watching a cameraman recording the game, which did not stop. The crowd stayed in the stadium and the camera went up, just briefly, to get a few seconds of the tracer fire before coming back to the game, just as your cameramen sometimes record the seagulls at the cricket. You tell the Americans that car accidents in this country kill more people than they do. So we are not frightened of them.’
The city traffic was chaotic—noisy, smelly and clapped out. It looked impossible, but from watching the locals I learnt that, if I simply plunged into this bumper-to-bumper madness, it would part for me. And when I jumped into the taxi I was transfixed by the inventiveness of the repairs that held its shattered windscreen in place. It had been fractured into a hundred pieces, with cracks rippling in every direction. But running along the key fault lines were dots of superglue, holding the cracks closed and stopping the screen from caving in on my lap. I didn’t even get to ask a question before the driver erupted in rage. We were swinging past a high-rise bunker that was home to one of
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Saddam’s security services, the anti-aircraft battery on its roof attesting to its importance, when he yelled in English: ‘This time it will be a big war. We have so much oil—but it is just a bomb to explode; it does not bring us money. I fought for Saddam for 12 years. Two wars—Iran and Kuwait. But this time I must take my family to Africa. I will not have another war.’ I had heard the Saddam cheer squad often enough. Was this the voice of a silent majority?
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WEAPONS OF MASS PROPAGANDA 21 Falluja and Al Qaim, Iraq
September 2002
Out in the great sandy waste, a line of women in black headed along a ridge, each balancing a large container of water on her head as they made for a village shimmering in the haze off to our right. Up the road a series of anti-aircraft batteries guarded a small hydroelectric dam on a canal that was part of the huge irrigation network that spilled the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates across Iraq. When I arrived in the country I was the only foreign newspaper reporter who had been granted a visa, but that morning as we mustered at the Information Ministry office for an 8.30 am departure, a team from CNN and another from a German radio station turned up. The rest of the convoy heading out into the desert consisted of six or eight cars loaded with Iraqi government officials and the local staff of the international wire services. Firas was behind the wheel in my car and my ever-present ministry minder sat unhappily on the back seat. It all started with a mad scramble—a press conference at which we were told little, first in Arabic and then in English. As we left the suburbs of Baghdad behind I was anxious to get a story that I could write and file on the day, so that the Herald’s foreign desk would have something to chew on when they came on duty late that night Baghdad time. Our destination was a factory at Falluja, about 80 kilometres northwest of Baghdad, and the Iraqi government wanted to show us what wasn’t there—any part of the chemical 231
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and biological weapons program which the US insisted Baghdad had resurrected in the four years since the last UN weapons inspection teams had left the country. We finally pulled up at the bedraggled perimeter fence of an industrial complex that had a grid of low sheds that reminded me of the Hollywood depiction of allied military camps in World War II. At the gate, a portrait of Saddam Hussein frowned at a humble little sign in Arabic script. My minder provided a bald translation: ‘Factory of Pesticides’. This was going to be an interesting visit. We were guests of two of the president’s most senior bureaucrats—the directors general of weapons monitoring and information—and it was to be another of Saddam’s propaganda exercises. We were told we would have access to all buildings and staff in the complex, that we would be allowed to go where we liked and to ask whatever questions we wanted to. But that’s not quite how it played out. There were three separate sets of buildings at Falluja and we only got into one of the three. When I asked, it was implied that we would be allowed to visit the heart of the complex, its laboratory. But that didn’t happen because the tour was brought to an abrupt halt after I questioned one of the resident scientists about his role in Saddam’s chemical weapons programs. His name was Dr Mohammed Frah, and he was introduced as the director of research and development at Falluja. Some in the US and European intelligence establishments had dubbed Falluja ‘the devil’s kitchen’, because of their suspicion that it was pivotal in the Iraqi leader’s attempt to recover his prowess in chemical and biological weapons. It was more out of mischief than anything else that I asked Dr Frah if in the past he had worked on any of the president’s chemical weapons programs. He played a straight bat: ‘In the early 1980s I worked for five years on the chemical and biological programs at Al Muthanna.’ Dr Frah had just invoked the name of what had been the central plant in Saddam’s weapons program before the Gulf Crisis. Al Muthanna was a huge pesticide complex that produced thousands of tonnes of the deadly chemical agents that were essential to weapons of mass destruction—including sarin, cyclosarin and mustard.
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Al Muthanna, 50 kilometres north of Falluja, had been partly demolished by US-led bombing in the Gulf War in 1991, but not before most of its stockpiles had been trucked out. United Nations inspection teams finished the demolition with a series of well-placed explosives in 1994, but doubt and uncertainty still shroud the whereabouts of some of the material that had been moved before the bombing. It quickly emerged that Dr Frah was not the only Al Muthanna alumnus at Falluja. Dr Jamal Hider Hassan, the manager of the Falluja Factory of Pesticides, said that he had spent much of his career at Al Muthanna and, when I enquired as to how many of his staff of 200 might also have served time at the killer plant, he too came straight to the point: ‘About eighty per cent.’ That’s the sort of morning it was at Falluja. I’m not a scientist and what I saw at Falluja was a spare, down-atheel operation that made me think more of Steptoe & Son than of Dr Strangelove, but it was perplexing that so many staff skilled in killing humans should be stationed at a factory for killing insects. This was particularly so given that the parts of Falluja that we saw didn’t seem to be producing much of anything—legitimate or otherwise. What little product there was lying around was dusty and aged, and the greenhouses that might have been used for trialling pesticides had long been abandoned. There seemed to be little stock of raw materials or of freshly produced and packaged pesticides. The tour started at the least interesting end of the complex. As we went from shed to shed, Dr Hassan pulled packets and bottles from the few stacks of cartons that I could see, declaring that each was part of a legitimate range of agricultural and domestic pesticides. ‘This is for rats,’ he said, holding up a plastic sachet of Chemoshan, and, sure enough, there was a black silhouette of a rodent on its yellow label. ‘And this is for termites,’ he said, and he held aloft a bottle labelled Chemoshan 48TC. But at this point curiosity drew me off to the side, where dusty blue drums produced by Bayer AG were stacked against a wall. They were labelled ‘Coumatetralyl’, which was described in brackets as a ‘tracking powder’. Intriguingly, another label claimed that the drums
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were the property of the Kuwaiti Health Ministry, but Dr Hassan quickly pointed to a 1989 expiry date and argued that they had to have been acquired legitimately because the date was pre-Gulf War. It was not war booty, he insisted. The complex reeked of chemical odours, but nothing I saw suggested high-tech equipment or sophisticated science. The workers—all men— wore soiled overalls, not white coats. Standing in a dusty work area where the roof paint was peeling and the production plant looked decrepit, Dr Hassan said: ‘This is where we formulate some of the pesticides— Malothine for general agriculture, Dorespan for termites, and Somusadin for insects.’ He explained that 90 per cent of the active ingredients used at the plant were acquired locally, but that 10 per cent came in from China, Holland and Switzerland, and all these imports had been approved by the United Nations under the oil-for-food program that made the UN the final arbiter on any goods that legally entered sanctions-bound Iraq. Dr Husan Mohammed Amin, Saddam’s director general of weapons monitoring, paused by one of the production lines to explain that he couldn’t understand where the US was coming from, because it knew so much about the plant already. UN monitoring teams had made more than 250 inspection visits and, until the US bombing that followed the inspectors’ departure from Iraq in 1998, a series of permanent cameras and sensors had relayed information on a daily basis back to the UN bunker in Baghdad. We could see the fingerprints of the UN teams— each of the big tanks that made up this production line bore UN barcodes. Dr Amin: ‘The US allegations about this plant are ridiculous. I want to reiterate that we have adhered to all the requirements of the UN Security Council. Falluja started conventional production in 1987; it was bombed in 1991 and we repaired it; and it was bombed in 1998 and we restored it again.’ Standing beside a tank on which a notice stipulated ‘EYE PROTECTION MUST BE WORN’ and near another marked ‘WEAR HAND PROTECTION’, the doctor wore no protection and none was offered to us as he continued: ‘You are here to see
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that there is no prohibited activity and that none of the staff is taking special precautions—there are no face masks and none of the buildings is sealed in the way that they would have to be if this was a WMD plant. Before 1998 the UN inspectors had no problems with this site; these new claims are for political purposes. We note that when they appear in the US media they are always attributed to the CIA.’ And then he cracked a great Iraqi chemo-political joke, which he insisted was an accident of translation. At a loss as he searched for the English word ‘weed’ to explain the purpose of a line of virulent herbicide produced at the plant, he said: ‘This is the plant for pesticides against bush . . . I mean, undesirable plants.’ As we progressed, there was much talk about Falluja’s castor oil plant and our tour continued in that direction, with Dr Amin claiming that, until their departure in 1998, the UN inspectors had not complained about the complex. But then it transpired that the UN teams had done more than just complain—in 1997 they had seized and destroyed laboratory equipment at Falluja. Again, when I asked what it was, the answer was disarmingly frank: ‘It was a small amount of laboratory equipment, the sort that you might find in a school laboratory. There was some larger equipment too and we accepted its destruction as well. It was equipment that we evacuated to this place from Al Muthanna before the American aggression in 1991, because we had to get it away from the bombing.’ We had arrived in a new section of the factory, which Dr Amin said he suspected was the reason for the renewed US interest in Falluja. Explaining how, a few months earlier, several big tanks had been trucked in to be assembled as a new plant—which he said was now producing a pesticide to protect Iraqi farmers’ crops from ‘white fly—he commented: ‘Maybe their satellites saw the trucks coming in and the work being done.’ What we were looking at was a series of tanks and a mess of piping, all of which appeared to be highly unscientific. And again I was lured away, this time to a far wall against which dozens of drums were stacked, a black skull and crossbones danger symbol beaming from each like a magnet. The labels stated that the drums
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contained Tetra Ethyl Lead BC, that they had been produced in France and had been imported into Iraq under UN permit number OC 830078. Dr Amin explained that the drums were empty, and they were at this part of the plant only to serve as containers in which to distribute the new line of ‘white fly’ pesticide. Dr Amin was remarkable for two reasons—his nose was a wonderful size and he was reluctant to remove his finely cut suit jacket, even in the 50-degree heat of the Iraqi summer. As we went from shed to shed I wondered how many journalists had heard this spiel, but as far as Dr Amin could recall we were the first to be brought to Falluja. He was an urbane yet humourless sort of fellow. But in this part of the world he could not have been just a scientist and held the job he held—he had to have been politicised, militarised and Saddamised. We came around a corner to where we should have found the infamous castor oil plant which was still generating so much interest in the US. But it was not there. If this was where the plant had been, it appeared to have been blown away by the US. All that remained was a vacant lot the size of a tennis court and the communications tower which had been used to transmit the UN’s monitoring data back to the inspectors’ Baghdad bunker. But the associated packing shed had been restored since the 1998 bombing, although no one could quite explain to us why it appeared to have a heavy-duty, reinforced concrete roof when all the other buildings in the complex had a roof of sheet metal. Dr Amin: ‘That depends on the philosophy of the building’s designer. Maybe it’s good for ventilation.’ None of that seemed to add up and there was a lameness in the claim by the plant manager, Dr Hassan: ‘It’s a standard design for an industrial building; it is not a dual purpose building.’ Most of the sanctions and the inspection process had been geared to block Iraq acquiring anything that might be ‘dual use’, which meant anything that might be used in harmless civilian industry but might just as easily be used in a weapons program. What was the castor oil plant for? The name invoked bad childhood memories, but Dr Amin said the oil was used to make brake fluid for cars and trucks. Why then would the US insist on bombing such a humble venture? Well, the castor oil
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seed husks could be treated to produce a biological toxin called ricin. At this point the plant manager Dr Hassan arrived by Dr Amin’s side, claiming: ‘But we have never produced ricin in Iraq. It’s very difficult to do.’ That was the start of the conversation that led to a discussion about the whereabouts of the factory laboratory and my introduction to the R&D director, Dr Frah. But within minutes of his acknowledgment of his background in chemical weapons, the tour was declared to be over; I was presented with a bottle of ice-cold Pepsi and pointed in the direction of Baghdad. I came away from Falluja with a good sense of what Scott Ritter meant when he had been asked a few weeks earlier what Saddam might be up to in weapons development. The former Marine Corps intelligence officer who had been an aggressive chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s said: ‘I’d be the first to admit I have no idea what has gone on inside Iraq since 1998. [But] if someone can demonstrate that Iraq has [weapons of mass destruction] and continues to develop them, then Iraq is a rogue nation and I would be the first to sign up for that war. But no one has made that case yet.’ I got back to Baghdad with hours to spare—courtesy of the abrupt halt to the Falluja tour, but also as a result of Firas’s urge to put his foot to the floor now that he no longer felt obliged to stay in a convoy. Writing a report for the Herald proved to be easy enough, but I was obliged to spend much of the afternoon doing a crash course in reducing the size of data files for transmission as an email attachment. Saddam had allowed Iraqis to have the internet, but strict limits had been imposed on what they could access and a limit had been imposed on what they could send—that limit was about two-thirds of the file size that I needed to send pictures that might be published in the Herald. This was challenging stuff—I was not much of a photographer and I was even less of a computer geek. By the time Dr Amin organised our next outing a couple of days later, a few more foreign journalists had turned up, including Sam Kiley, a shaven-headed Englishman whose wicked sense of humour entertained me greatly. We had shared beers and past assignments in Zaire, South
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Africa and Israel and the Occupied Territories, and now he was in Iraq doing a double act—news reports for London’s Evening Standard and a documentary for Channel 4. He had got into trouble on his first day in Baghdad—as a stony-faced official briefed him on Saddam’s Ba’ath Party, Kiley wanted to know if Iraq also had a Shower Party. Now Dr Amin was shepherding us all to a place called Al Qaim. It was a long way to go to see something that wasn’t there. And after three hours in a fleet of rattling Russian helicopters, the doctor was clambering through the bomb-flattened remains of what he said had been Iraq’s only uranium extraction plant, before declaring, almost in triumph: ‘See—we don’t do it any more.’ In the stifling desert heat, just a few kilometres short of where the legendary Euphrates River crosses into Iraq from Syria, Dr Amin relented and removed his everpresent suit coat as he walked us through a small part of the dusty Al Qaim industrial complex. This was the place that had emerged as a possible source of uranium for Saddam Hussein’s feared new nuclear weapons developments. US and European intelligence agencies were focusing on the plant, which was buried in a rambling fertilizer factory, because in the past it was a domestic supply of uranium, which meant that UN sanctions could not be presumed to be denying Saddam a vital ingredient. Once again we did not get access to the rest of the Al Qaim complex or a string of other locations that had been named as the likely components in a dispersed new Iraqi attempt to go nuclear. We were journalists, not scientists, and who knew what Iraq had hidden where. However, this much of what Dr Amin said seemed to be true: more than 70 US air raids on the Company of Phosphate complex at Al Qaim during the 1991 Gulf War had destroyed the Belgian-supplied uranium extraction plant which, in the seven years up until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, had produced 168 tonnes of yellow cake. Surprisingly, Iraq still held the yellow cake, but it was stored at the Tuweitha nuclear facility near Baghdad, where it was held in a doublelocked secure store—the Iraqis had one set of keys and the International Atomic Energy Agency had the other. Dr Amin claimed that Iraq had
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just received the report of an IAEA inspection of the Tuweitha facility and there were only three or four minor ‘procedural’ issues that needed to be addressed. ‘These are nothing,’ he said. ‘None of them goes to issues of disarmament.’ The doctor, a wily missiles expert who was the head of the Iraqi bureaucracy that was set up after the Gulf War to deal with the testy international inspection process, produced a folder of photographs of an imposing structure that existed before the attacks; more that were taken of the shambles in the aftermath of the bombing; and its transition to being a near-vacant lot as the result of an IAEA-supervised clean-up. The hawkish majority in the Bush administration was basing its push for a war against Iraq on claims that the US had to strike first because there was ‘no doubt’ that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and that he was prepared to use them against the US and its allies. In 2001 Germany’s federal intelligence service (BND) had raised its suspicion about work which it said was being done at Al Qaim, which was sometimes referred to as Akashat—the name of the phosphate mine 150 kilometres away which fed the fertilizer plant. The Germans predicted that Saddam would be able to make a nuclear strike on his neighbours within three years, and on targets in Europe within five years. And only weeks before our visit, the extraction of uranium in conjunction with the treatment of phosphate at the plant was raised at hearings by the US Senate’s foreign relations committee. Richard Butler, the Australian diplomat who formerly headed the UN weapons inspection program, quoted to senators from an IAEA estimation that Saddam could produce a nuclear weapon in two years; and Khidir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who defected to the US in 1994, told the hearings that Baghdad might be able to develop two or three nuclear warheads by 2005. But Butler’s former inspection staff were divided on Saddam’s nuclear capacity. In March, British Prime Minister Tony Blair promised a dossier that would prove that Iraq had gone beyond the stage of nuclear blueprints, but he had yet to release such a document; and when US Vice President Dick Cheney was pressed on the veracity of the available intel-
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ligence early in September, he admitted: ‘We can’t really judge.’ The defecting Hamza had recently spelt out the risks as he saw them: ‘Iraq already had a workable nuclear design when I left in 1994. A minor enrichment capability is all that was needed to provide the nuclear core for three weapons.’ But an IAEA ‘fact sheet’ released in April 2002 stated: ‘In the early 1990s, the IAEA removed 22.4 kilograms of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium from Iraq.’ The agency says it was convinced that the ‘intrusive’ inspections it was able to carry out until 1998 had uncovered all the weapons-grade uranium Iraq had at the time. The Vienna-based organisation had also destroyed what it described as several ‘sophisticated facilities’ where uranium could be enriched to make it ‘weapons-useable’. Now, the inspection process that was derailed in 1998 was being worked back to the centre of the Iraq crisis. Flying in over parched earth on which the only shade away from the green ribbon of the S-bend banks of the Euphrates was the fleeting shadow cast by our clunking ME-8 helicopter, Dr Amin revealed some of the detail of what seemed to be a tentative offer to accept a return to inspections by Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz when he had arrived in South Africa for a UN-hosted environmental summit. In recent weeks the US had argued that inspections were meaningless because of Iraqi deception, and Iraq had been just as adamant in its claims that more inspections were not an option because the US wanted to use the missions to get spies into the country to gather information on the whereabouts of Saddam and other targets for a new round of bombing attacks. Now Iraq was leaving the door open in this toing and froing. And as we wandered the remains of the uranium extraction plant, Dr Amin seemed to be putting flesh on the bones of an Iraqi bid to drag the standoff back to the UN and away from the battlefield. The site was a wreck. The only structures of any note were the concrete skeleton of a two-storey building and a big storage tank that had been ripped apart by missiles. Amid the remaining missile-gouged walls and tangled steel where the uranium extraction plant had stood, Dr Amin spread his hands to take in the total destruction: ‘To talk about
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this having been rehabilitated to produce uranium is a false pretext. No forbidden materials are produced here or anywhere else in Iraq.’ If ‘here’ meant the small trashed area in which Dr Amin spoke, I’d have to agree with him; but there was no way I could speak for the rest of the huge industrial complex, because I had seen only this tiny section of it. When I asked Dr Amin about this, he used the same argument that he had used at the Falluja pesticide plant—we were being shown the rubble that had been the uranium extraction plant because it was that that the Americans were claiming had been brought back into production. ‘The new allegation is that we are producing yellow cake here again,’ he said, stabbing a finger at the ground around him as he made his point. ‘The US knows this cannot be so because it has good surveillance information on this place—their last inspections here were just a few days before the inspectors left in 1998. We have invited Mr Blair and the US Congress to bring their experts to look. That invitation still stands—and they can go anywhere they like.’ Anywhere? Saddam’s palaces? I asked. Dr Amin: ‘I said anywhere, but I didn’t say the palaces. But let them produce quality evidence on why they want to go wherever they want to go; a satellite picture is not enough, they need to be able to demonstrate why they want to go to places. They can’t come in here and dig up a dairy farm to look for a bunker under it unless they can show some evidence that the bunker is there. If they were allowed to do that, the inspections would become a never-ending process. But they can’t expect to come here with nonsense stories like that one a few weeks ago in which they claimed there was a bioterrorism plant in Baghdad because they had a satellite picture of something or other on the right side of the Tigris. That’s not evidence.’ The Washington Post report of which he spoke was a classic of its kind—US intelligence sources had information from Iraqi defectors about a biological laboratory that was rumoured to be hidden underground. Called Tahhaddy, it was said to have a staff of 85 working in heavily secured test chambers on a viral strain that sounded a bit like the Ebola virus and which had been code-named Blue Nile. But the Post report concluded: ‘. . . confirming the lab’s presence from satellite photos
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has proved difficult, so the laboratory today remains a mere shadow in the US government’s intelligence assessment—an unknown threat in a landscape filled with others just like it’. Insisting that Iraq knew what the US was up to, Dr Amin said: ‘All these allegations are intended to mislead world opinion and to show us as violators of UN resolutions and to squash the voices of those who don’t want a war.’ A nagging question about the weapons programs that Saddam’s officials insisted had been abandoned was the fate of their specialist staff. I had been amazed to find so many former chemical weapons researchers on the premises of the suspect pesticide factory at Falluja, particularly when the plant did not seem to be in full production. But when I asked Dr Amin about the estimated 200 nuclear specialists known to have worked on Iraq’s nuclear weapons in the past, he said: ‘I don’t know if we had twenty-five or one hundred or ten nuclear scientists, but none of them is working here. They would now be working in state enterprises to help the people—industry, education, agriculture. I think the IAEA knows where they are.’ It was hard not to conclude that one of those experts was the affable Shaka Hamid, who headed the nuclear unit in Dr Amin’s monitoring agency and who had travelled to Al Qaim with us. He was a joker who clearly enjoyed the banter of the day as long as we were not taking notes. When we quizzed him for details of his career, he told us straight-faced that he had worked for the IAEA. We were riveted. ‘The International Atomic Energy Agency?’ a reporter asked. ‘No, no, no,’ he laughed. ‘The Iraqi Atomic Energy Agency.’ When we pressed him on his qualifications, he said: ‘I’m a health physician—working for the good health of the people. I am not a nuclear scientist.’ And when I challenged him on Iraq’s intentions for the yellow cake that it had in storage, he prevaricated: ‘It would take us fifty years and all the help the West might give us to process it even to a state short of enrichment.’ Kiley and I spoke to Hamid on a flattened area in the middle of what had been the Al Qaim uranium extraction plant, which appeared to have been sealed with a layer of new concrete. He assured us it was safe: ‘It’s just a little layer of concrete; there was not much contamination here.’
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And when Sam pitched an aggressive demand for information on where the weapons-grade uranium was being produced, Hamid didn’t miss a beat. ‘Los Alamos,’ he said, naming the huge US nuclear weapons laboratory in the deserts of New Mexico. When we had seen all that we were going to be shown we were herded onto our buses and driven back to the complex’s administrative centre where we were ushered into a big room that ordinarily was barren, but which on the day had a feast spread the length of a table that would have seated about 50 people. The senior staff of Al Qaim joined us for a lunch that was laced with the patter of jokes and propaganda. There were piles of chicken and Masgoof—a big, meaty river fish barbecued in a traditional Iraqi fashion. The truth was that Baghdad’s weapons of mass destruction were an unknown quantity. The UN knew that Saddam had something but was not sure what, and Saddam had stoked international suspicion by continually thwarting the thorough inspection process he had agreed to in the cease-fire talks that saved his skin at the end of the Gulf War. The question that had yet to be answered was this: was it worth going to war over? George W. Bush certainly thought so, and as he lobbied the countries of the world to endorse and join in an attack on Iraq, American terrorism experts became increasingly wary of the risks of renewed alQaeda-style attacks on the US while it set itself up to be distracted by another war in the Gulf region. Suggesting an opportune al-Qaeda strike, rather than Saddam lashing out, Kenneth Pollack, a former staff member at the US National Security Council, set out a nightmare military and political senario: ‘Imagine if a terrorist attack occurred [in America] while the US was focused on Iraq. People would crucify this administration and ask why it didn’t pay attention to the folks in al-Qaeda rather than the folks in Baghdad.’ But Graham Allison, of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, raised the spectre of Saddam taking the fight to the US mainland, asking: ‘Imagine, God forbid, that as the US builds up an invasion force in the Persian Gulf, Hussein sends a secret letter to President Bush informing him that he has placed biological weapons in New York, Washington and
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several other US cities. Where would the confrontation go from there?’ So the greatest uncertainty emerged as the greatest fear. Washington was building a case not on what Saddam had, but on what he might develop and what he might do with it and with whom he might share it. After the Gulf War, UN inspectors destroyed 38 500 chemical munitions, 625 tonnes of chemical agents, 2700 tonnes of precursor chemicals and almost 500 items of chemical production equipment. But the inspectors were dissatisfied with Iraq’s explanation on the fate of 100 000 chemical weapons it had produced during the Iraq–Iran War. There was doubt too on the fate of some of the biological agents Iraq had produced before the Gulf War—8400 litres of anthrax, 19 000 litres of botulinum and 2000 litres each of aflatoxin and clostridium. The inspectors did not believe the Iraqis when they said they had destroyed 3.9 tonnes of the killer nerve-poison VX, or the 500 tonnes of precursor chemicals it had for making more of the poison. Nor had more than 500 artillery shells filled with mustard gas been satisfactorily accounted for. Between the visits to Falluja and Al Qaim, I had been to see Wamidh Nadhmi, a professor of political science, in Baghdad. He had soberly made the point that the West had a very good idea about the Iraqi weapons programs because it had provided most of the training, the materials and the know-how. He told me: ‘Ninety per cent of the biological and chemical weapons we had came from the West—the US, Britain, Switzerland and Germany. We know for a fact that Iraq was shrewd enough to get these programs and Western intelligence knew what we were doing when they allowed Iraq to buy them. Just what sort of cynicism is at work here?’ Despite the absence of teams on the ground, the UN had continued its satellite surveillance of Iraq, collecting masses of photographs of reconstruction work at sites it knew were part of past weapons programs, sites like Falluja and Al Qaim. Hans Blix, the head of the UN monitoring program, told Time magazine: ‘You can see hundreds of new roofs in the photographs, but you don’t know what’s under them.’ Those photographs, said the Iraqis, were evidence of nothing. Washington
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disagreed. But in a sense all of this was academic because of persistent efforts by the US to undermine the credibility of any new inspection process. At this stage it seemed that war was the only option. After the lunch of fish and propaganda, Dr Amin’s party of about forty climbed back into the chopper fleet to be ferried back to Baghdad from Al Qaim. As always I was in a hurry to get back to the hotel, to write and file. But these helicopters flew low and several of the porthole windows were open in flight. I bagged one—I didn’t have a seat, but it was worth sitting on my haunches all the way back to Baghdad just for this magical bird’s-eye view of the changing colour and shape of the landscape as the Euphrates valley cut through the desert like a zipper. Late in the afternoon we put down at the huge Al Rasheed military complex on the outskirts of Baghdad. There on the tarmac, as our battered and war-weary old helicopters shuddered to a halt, were another three bedraggled looking aircraft that weren’t going anywhere in a hurry—they were the white-painted helicopters of the UN which had been sitting there since 1998, when the last international inspection teams had left Iraq.
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THE ROAD TO BASRA Baghdad, Iraq
September 2002
In the 50°C heat of summer, the Mother of All Battles Mosque was shrouded in a haze. But as I drove up to this confection of white, blue and gold in the city’s western suburbs, what seemed like distortions proved to be real. Ordinarily the minarets of a mosque are fine, delicate even, but here the four outer minarets were of a most peculiar design. They took the form of Scud missiles resting upon vertical launch ramps, and a firearms expert would have appreciated the Kalashnikov lines in the four inner minarets. The mosque itself was set in an ornamental lake the shape of the Arab world and a tiny island in the water bore a mosaic of the signature of Saddam Hussein. But there was more. I noticed a small pavilion set on an island in the lake. And when I asked the caretaker to show me around, our tour ended on a small causeway that brought us to the double-locked doors to the pavilion. Behind them he revealed the triumphant spectacle of a special edition of the Koran that was displayed page by page in 600 gilt-edged frames. Each was written in human blood. As he guided me from frame to frame, the caretaker informed me that over a period of time Saddam had actually drawn 24 litres of ‘ink’ from his own veins so that the best calligrapher in the land could write this unique version of the holy book. It was a bizarre and lurid indulgence that could only have come from the mind of a fanatic. 246
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Saddam had built the mosque to commemorate the Gulf Crisis, the conflict that began with his invasion of Kuwait twelve years earlier. He had named the mosque for his clash with the rest of the world—the mother of all battles. And as I arrived, thousands were pouring in for Friday prayers in its air-conditioned comfort. Thara Abu Abudullah, the imam, timed his sonorous chant, tapping the fingers of his right hand on his left, as the worshippers formed up in perfect lines in the carpeted halls of what was as much a temple of war, nationalism and ego as it was a house of God. Amid masses of cool white marble, columns of the darkest green Italian stone raced up to support the great dome, its pastel decoration glowing in the golden light of a giant chandelier. On the back wall the words ‘God makes Iraq victorious’ were inlaid in white marble on a map of Iraq made from more of the imported Italian stone. The imam stood on a marble staircase, looking to that map of Iraq. And from my vantage point high on a balcony, I could see Mohammed Ali Assad, a CNN cameraman. Earlier in the year Mohammed and I had been pinned down together by the Israeli Defense Forces near the West Bank town of Jenin, but now he stood alone in the middle of a congregation that was prone in prayer, his camera pointing back to the entrance of the mosque as though he expected a new arrival. There was a palpable sense that something was about to happen in this region. I had been in Baghdad for a week now, during which the US continued its fight with much of the world as it pushed an uncompromising agenda for war with Iraq. Publicly there was a great deal of gnashing of teeth, but behind the scenes Arab leaders seemed to have surrendered to the reality of another war in their backyard. For all their cataclysmic rhetoric, diplomats and officials were already conceding privately that the US would get its way. Even as one of their top spokesmen, the Arab League’s Amr Moussa, warned that a US strike on Iraq would ‘open the gates of hell’, the Arab leaders said nothing about the very obvious US military build-up in their own or in neighbouring countries—there was not even a suggestion yet that an ambassador might be recalled; not even a hint that they might resort to using the oil weapon. Stripped of
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domestic anxieties, this was the message they telegraphed to Washington: If you are going to do this, do it quickly; we accept that you will use the bases one way or another; we want Iraq’s borders to remain intact; and, please, be careful about how you thank us in public. One newspaper in the region, however, refused to submit. The English-language Iraq Daily was an odd little tabloid. Each morning as I went to breakfast in the café of the Al Rasheed Hotel, I’d grab a copy from a stack on the check-in desk. I would read it with my coffee, scanning its ad-free pages for reports that might shed light on Saddam’s state of mind as the world’s superpower massed on his doorstep. It was like a cryptic crossword. Instead of a daily ‘puff box’, the colourful strap that many newspapers run across the top of page one to sell their inside stories to casual readers, the government-run Daily operated from a loftier plane—each day it puffed a turgid quote from past speeches by the president. And if its offering on September 5 was lurid, it was timely: ‘Don’t provoke a snake before you make up your mind and muster up the ability to cut its head. It will be of no use to say that you have not started the attack, if it attacks you by surprise . . .’. There was only one story for the Daily—Saddam; there was only one picture—Saddam. And the language was either heavy going or a brilliant device to impart no information: ‘. . . the military industrialization minister expressed delectation to meet President Saddam Hussein while Iraqis are going on their struggle to meet all needs of steadfastness and capabilities to face evil aggressors.’ And it had to be said that the Daily took a measured approach to the news. When the Americans bombed the airport at Basra—the equivalent of an enemy attack on JFK—it was not the biggest story of the day. That news hole was reserved for a stunning report that Saddam had received a telegram from the president of Nigeria . . . to thank Saddam for a telegram Baghdad had sent to Lagos to mark the Nigerian independence day. And, unlike the US press which was awash with leaks on America’s war planning, the Daily reported nothing on Iraq’s preparations for a war that seemed imminent. When I had first presented my ‘program’—the list of issues on which I wanted to report—to the Information Ministry, I was rebuked for
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daring to list Iraq’s war readiness as my first subject. This sort of information was held deep in the bureaucracy. It was my curiosity on the subject that kept me at the open window on Dr Amin’s helicopter when he ferried us to and from the Syrian border the previous week to look at the old uranium plant that the US now claimed had been reactivated. The chopper gave me a bird’s eye view of the military landscape below. Saddam once had the biggest defence force in the region, but the Gulf War and more than a decade of heavy-duty sanctions had pared his numbers to the bone. He used to have more than one million men in uniform, now he had fewer than 400 000; he had lost more than half his tanks and artillery and half his combat aircraft were out of action, but somehow he had managed to hold on to all of his mobile rocket and missile launchers. And if the condition of the helicopters on which we flew was a reflection of the state of the 370 helicopters that Saddam still had, then he could be in trouble. They were Russian built and so much of the body webbing had peeled away that only the metal skeleton of the tail planes remained on the aircraft on which I flew with Dr Amin and about a dozen other journalists, bureaucrats and military men. A long bench ran the length of one side of the cabin and an internal fuel tank, maybe the size of four or five 44-gallon drums, took up the other side of the passenger cabin. During a refuelling stop I thought differently about the internal tank. The British reporter Sam Kiley alighted from the third helicopter in our convoy with the news that they had been forced to return to Baghdad, only minutes after takeoff, when fuel lines running through the cabin had ruptured, spraying liquid and vaporised fuel over half the passengers. If it could happen on Sam’s machine, then it could happen on mine, in which several of my Iraqi travelling companions insisted on smoking while we were in the air. I fully intended to make a protest on the next leg of the flight but, as we took off, the exhilaration of chopper flight kicked in and I let it go, settling down instead to look out over the helicopter’s empty missile bays at military preparation across the kitchen-table flatness of the Iraqi desert.
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None of the Iraqi minders or government officials would tell us the name of the remote, sprawling airbase at which we refuelled, about thirty minutes flying time from the Syrian border. But a dozen of the estimated 316 Iraqi combat aircraft still in service were parked in the baking sun or in hardened concrete shelters that looked like turtles lying amongst a huge network of concrete aprons and runways. And many more of the shelters were under construction. From my perch I could see extensive earthworks along highways and around vital facilities, the orientation of which would provide cover for any of Saddam’s 2200 tanks as they faced any force moving on Baghdad. And I could see where emergency fuel dumps and stores of military vehicles and supplies were being placed in extensive excavations that appeared to have been freshly dug on the outskirts of the capital and other towns. We returned to Baghdad and as I went through my notes that night I decided that my information was thin. I needed more. So after writing and filing a story on the bombed uranium extraction plant I spoke to Firas about driving south from Baghdad. He recommended driving on the old road because it allowed better sightings than did the new highway. We set out in the liquid light of the pre-dawn for a round trip of more than 1000 kilometres. Our destination was the southern city of Basra, a port on the banks of the Shat al Arab, the waterway through which the combined Tigris and Euphrates rivers pour into the Persian Gulf. The port is splayed in such a way that, as we approached, ships that were tied up looked as though they were stranded in the desert. The lingering cool of the night as we left Baghdad at 4.30 am was a blessed relief from the heat of the day. For this drive Firas had swapped his small Peugeot sedan for his brother’s Mercedes Benz. Truckers jostled on the highway, each thinking he was king of the road, but that was Firas’s title. There was only one car—Firas’s; there was only one speed—fast. Now, as we approached a truck stop called Sheik Saad, Firas insisted that we pull in for a breakfast of lentil soup and salty lamb kebabs. A sheep wandered aimlessly in the roadhouse kitchen, oblivious to a carcass that hung from a hook in the ceiling, two small boys systematically reducing it to the bite-sized portions on skewers on the plates in front of us.
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We were hardly back on the road after breakfast when we came upon two military convoys heading north—one in which 13 trucks towed cannons almost as big as themselves, and a second in which half a dozen low-loaders hauled T-72 tanks. A few kilometres further south a fourteenth truck and cannon had pulled over so that the driver and his mate could wrestle with a punctured tyre. And as we went deeper into the south, there was a new energy around the military posts set up by Baghdad in the wake of the 1981–88 Iraq–Iran war. When I had done this drive eighteen months earlier, most of these posts had been defended by little more than a man and a gun. Now several had a new Japanese pick-up with an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the back, others had multiple rocket launchers, and most had a light tank or an armoured personnel carrier and as many as thirty or forty uniformed men on duty. I used to insist on driving myself on assignments such as this, but I was cured of that during the Balkan wars in the early 1990s. A tiny Fiat that I had rented in Italy had been partly destroyed by a Serbian missile attack on a hotel in which I had stayed at Osiek, on the Danube River in northern Croatia. But it could still be driven and as I raced up through Hungary, hoping to get from the Croatian frontline to the Serbian front, I was in too much of a hurry. When I crested a hill I found six cars crawling bumper-to-bumper behind a horse and cart and I ploughed into the back of the last car, pushing it into the next one and so on halfway up the line. The Fiat was a wreck and I pushed it over a cliff to clear the road—prompting the local authorities to put me under hotel arrest as we worked through their demand that I pay an import tax because I was leaving the car in the country. I got out of it with a cash payment to each motorist whose car I had damaged, and it was not until about six years later that John Alexander, who at the time was editorin-chief of the Herald, revealed to me that it had cost him more than $US10 000 to settle with the Italian car-hire firm. In the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi forces surged south and over the border, where they dug in in Kuwait until they were driven back by a US-led coalition. Now, as Iraq and the US shaped up for another clash, the reverse would be the case—this time Saddam wanted his forces in
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Baghdad, to create what US security expert Kenneth Pollack described disturbingly as a ‘Mesopotamian Stalingrad’. The dictator president was hoping that possibly thousands of US deaths in street-by-street, doorto-door fighting among the tightly packed apartment towers of the city and its dense cinder-block and mud-brick suburbs would weaken the resolve of US and world opinion before he could be captured. Beneath his palaces and military camps Saddam had well-stocked bunkers in which hundreds could live for months. One of the Yugoslav engineers who helped build them had bragged that they were protected by a stone shield that was 30 metres thick and they could withstand the equivalent of a direct hit by 2000 kilograms of TNT. One of the engineers had told a reporter: ‘Conventional weapons can hardly reach him; I don’t believe the US can get rid of him that way.’ I saw little military activity in Baghdad, which was consistent with my sightings beyond the capital and reports attributed to US intelligence sources that Saddam had scattered his air defence and fighting units around the country to reduce their vulnerability to any surprise US attacks. Still, the Iraqi preoccupation was with the capital, where diplomats told me that members of the regime were stockpiling food, medicine and fuel and where anti-aircraft-gun stations on the top of dozens of high-rise buildings were being dusted off. Driving into the centre of Baghdad one morning, I lost my bearings as I espied an anti-aircraft battery on top of an office tower. And when I asked my government minder what building it was, I got a sheepish response. ‘The Information Ministry,’ he said. The tactical challenge for the US in this war would be to make sure that it went after Saddam with minimal risk to the civilian population and the infrastructure of the nation. But to go after the president meant punishing attacks on Baghdad, where he could be expected to be hiding out, and Tikrit, his hometown bunker where up to 50 000 people lived, about 160 kilometres north of the capital. Informed speculation from the US promised an opening bombing barrage, probably late in November or in December, the likes of which would not have been seen before. Hundreds of aircraft flying at about the speed of sound would
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drop satellite-guided bombs from an altitude of 10 000 metres in what was to be a tightly focused attack on the man and the institutions that propped him up. The target list would include the sprawling presidential palaces, Saddam’s bodyguards, military communications, secret security facilities and the barracks of the elite Republican and Special Republican Guards. Weapons systems and bunkers of any kind would be singled out for the destructive might of 1420-kilogram high-explosive burrowing bombs. Thousands of troops would flood in from Kuwait no later than early January, hoping that just an almighty show of US force would cause the regime to crumble, leaving Saddam exposed and abandoned. There would be leaflet drops and radio broadcasts telling Iraqis that the Saddam game was up. The historic comparisons held up by insiders as examples of how the US campaign might unfold were the attacks on Yugoslavia that brought down Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 and the US capture of the Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega in 1989. The Iraqi military had surrendered within days or weeks of previous American attacks and this time the US would hope to blast that notion into their minds even sooner. But all that was a war planner’s wish list. Some armchair generals looked elsewhere for comparisons, either the failed US assault on Mogadishu in 1993 (rendered so violently in the Hollywood blockbuster Blackhawk Down) or the controversial Israeli incursions into the West Bank earlier in 2002, which they nonetheless held up as strict military proof that it was possible to conduct urban warfare with minimal casualties. But if the Iraqis were to stand and fight, then the recent urban conflict that could be mirrored was the 1994 Russian assault on the Chechen capital, Groznyy—the city was destroyed, the Russians lost 200 tanks and an estimated 100 000 people were killed as diehard local resistance refused to buckle to an overwhelming outside force. The Americans were gearing up to confront Iraq, confident of their immense technological superiority. They would win, but there was bound to be a human cost and that could only be calculated after the
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battle. Was there a risk that Saddam Hussein would use the weapons of mass destruction that Washington claimed he might have acquired, and how would the US know that all those weapons had been destroyed before it put troops on the ground? If Saddam was boxed in, would he launch a strike on Israel? If so, could Israel be made to sit on its hands as had happened in the last Gulf War? If Saddam reached a point where he had nothing to lose, would he launch chemical or biological attacks on any of his neighbours for what he would see as their treacherous complicity in the US attacks on him—Kuwait? Qatar? Turkey or Saudi Arabia? How would the so-called Arab Street respond to any or all of this? I had observed the Arab Street through the Gulf War and the recent Afghan war and I was still waiting for an uprising that never seemed to happen. What would drive Saddam’s fighting men—their hatred of the US or of Saddam? However the war might unfold, the endless, flat 550-kilometre highway from Basra to Baghdad would play a critical role and the US occupation of Basra would be an essential early objective. The city’s huge port and the rich oilfields to the south made Basra Iraq’s most strategic pocket outside Baghdad. It was Saddam’s ocean gateway to the world and the source of much of his black gold—Iraq’s one-fifth share of the world’s known reserves of oil. In one way or another all versions of the US battle plan called for the city’s capture, either as a landing base for a fast and furious American drive up the highway in search of Saddam and his Baghdad command centres, or simply to sit there in the hope of avoiding the likely horror of street-by-street fighting in Baghdad. Saddam’s forces would need to be lured into open country where US air power could dispatch them in the same way it did in 1991 in the deserts of Kuwait and southern Iraq. Conceivably, it was all deliberate misinformation, but early drafts of the battle plan called for tens of thousands of marines and soldiers to swarm in on Baghdad from the south, west and north. That was the strategy that Saddam hoped, and some Western defence experts warned, would cause thousands of US deaths and as many again among the civilian population of Baghdad, where the Iraqis had anti-aircraft
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batteries atop maybe hundreds of apartment and office blocks. The other strategy being proposed was for the US, in conjunction with the Kurds of the north and the Shiite Muslims in the south, to take the northern and southern oilfields and wait to see how long Saddam could suffer the humiliation of being denied access to his oil wells before he sent his forces out from Baghdad to fight for them. This was a version of the model I had observed almost a year earlier in Afghanistan, and the experts were divided on its chances of success in Iraq. The Iraqi Opposition was so fractured and so much of it was in exile that it could not take on the role of the battle-hardened Northern Alliance of Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance had trusted Washington, but many in the Iraqi Opposition did not trust the US. They had suffered terribly after responding in the past to the urging of Washington to rise up against Saddam on the understanding that they would be protected if they did. The Taliban, like Iraq in 1991, were sitting ducks in Afghanistan because they had fought from trenches in open country. Saddam had already told the world he would not make the same mistake again. ‘We’ll fight them on the streets, from the rooftops, from house to house,’ he told a visiting British MP, George Galloway. So far the US had the formal support of none of the neighbouring countries in which it would need the use of military bases. But despite their anti-war rhetoric, Kuwait, because of its Ali Al Salam air base, and Qatar, because of its al-Udeid air base, were expected to be Washington’s front door to Iraq; and even Turkey, with its Incirlik base, would probably be pressured into becoming the back door. The US fleet in the Arabian Sea and in the Indian Ocean would also be significant launch pads, but Saudi Arabia had become too complex and inconsistent for Washington to expect to operate militarily from bases on its territory. The US already had a military infrastructure in the region—it had moved more than 600 military planners to Qatar, and it had about 50 000 troops based in Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait and elsewhere in the region. Oman had built a modern new air base for its fleet of F-16s, to which the US was likely to get access; and Qatar had already given the US effective control of a huge runway and warehouse complex. Many of the tanks and armoured
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vehicles that Washington expected to deploy in Iraq were already stored in Kuwait and Qatar and on board US ships at sea in the region. The US had also started chartering ships to move more ammunition, tanks, armoured vehicles and helicopters to augment existing stockpiles in the Gulf. All this was on the move while the Bush administration browbeat the US Congress and the UN to fall into line instead of playing cat and mouse with Saddam over weapons inspectors. The Herald wanted me back in New York for the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, so I prepared to leave Baghdad late on the evening of September 6 for the long drive to Amman in Jordan. I dawdled over lunch with a colleague from the Wall Street Journal and arranged with Firas to take me as far as he was allowed—to the Jordan garage, a pit stop on the western outskirts of the city for the GMC fleet that shuttled between Amman and Baghdad. There he delivered me to Isam, who had frightened the life out of me early in 2001 when he drove me to Baghdad in his new BMW sedan, sitting on 250 km/h for much of the drive. It had been a hectic few weeks in Iraq and I expected to sleep for much of the 13-hour journey to Jordan. I settled in the back of the big four-wheel drive, sipping a beer, while Isam played his favourite fleshy Arab hip-hop DVDs on a small television which he had mounted on the dashboard. As we drove out into the desert I knew I’d be back soon enough, almost certainly to report a war. A part of my brain was already slipping into planning mode. I had been in the region for three months at a time during the Gulf War and I wondered how long it would be this time. I’d need a new satellite phone, one that the Iraqis would allow me to use, in contrast to the one I had which had been rendered useless for all of this assignment by that silly little lead seal. New boots. One of those torches that you wear on your head for working hands-free when the lights go out. A better way to manage all the electrical elements of my office in a case. I’d chat endlessly with colleagues about how to travel lighter, but each time we caught up on the road there was always a new time-saving gadget on which to compare notes, and which took up more space. Most of us now had a corner of our hotel rooms set aside for all
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the equipment that had to be regularly recharged—the satellite phone, the sat-phone handset, the mobile phone, the digital camera, the Palm Pilot, the laptop and the shaver. In Baghdad in 1991 when the US and allied bombers started the Mother of All Battles to force the liberation of Kuwait, my room was on the same side of the Al Rasheed Hotel as the room that I had taken for this assignment. The hotel had been a great viewing platform to watch the US Cruise missiles as they tracked the highways before turning left or right, according to their preprogrammed directions. From my room I had watched missiles slicing through communications masts, oil refineries and power station smokestacks. I remembered the surreal journalistic moment when two BBC reporters, John Simpson and Bob Simpson, set up a bulky, early model, suitcase-sized satellite phone and dish in the hotel gardens. Whenever there was a break in the Simpsons’ reporting, they would allow the rest of us to take turns to read our reports on the first shots of the Gulf War to a tape recorder at Bush House in London. Our various newspaper offices then had to collect the tapes from the BBC and transmit them home. I never received a bill for the use of the phone. When I looked west from the same hotel in September 2002, it was apparent that Saddam had not let up in wasting scarce resources at a time of desperate need for his people. Workers were close to removing the scaffolding, for the third time in 10 years, from the imposing headquarters of his Ba’ath Party, a building that had been bombed by the US in 1991, 1993 and 1998. Silver arches celebrated the brutality of the 1980s Iraq–Iran war, with huge crossed swords that were adorned with thousands of helmets taken from dead Iranians on the desert battlefields. Directly in front of my fifth-floor window was one of Saddam’s grand new palaces, with a bronze bust of the president as big as a bulldozer at each corner of its domed roof. And rising from the gum trees on the river flats, at vast cost, were another two mosques—the many domed Arahman Mosque, which was to be finished in about two years, and the palatial Saddam Mosque, on which work would continue for much longer. These two would dwarf the Mother of All Battles Mosque,
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just as it seemed the war for which it was named would be dwarfed by the conflict to come. I don’t know how long I had been asleep on the back seat of Isam’s GMC when I felt my shoulder being jerked. ‘Mr Baul! Mr Baul!’ Isam could not pronounce the P in Paul but clearly he was very excited. ‘Mr Baul, you must see this!’ He had slowed the GMC to a crawl and the dashboard clock told me it was close to midnight, so we were more than halfway to the Jordanian border. Looming out of the darkness ahead of us was a convoy of four low-loaders, each hauling a block-like load which, on closer inspection, turned out to be one of Saddam’s feared mobile Scud missile launchers. They were headed in the same direction as us, to the western border zone where they would be within striking distance of Israel. This was rapidly becoming more than a war of words. The convoy was an incredible sight and for a moment I was tempted to get Isam to pull over so that I could shoot some pictures. But it was only a momentary thought because photographing equipment like this in that part of the world could be a death sentence. We pressed on across the desert, and shortly after midnight we arrived at the border where a surly official ceremoniously broke the seal on my satellite phone. I checked into the Intercontinental in Amman at five o’clock in the morning. I had 24 hours to kill—I slept, did some work and idled away the afternoon choosing jewellery and perfume for my wife. I flew Royal Jordanian from Amman’s Queen Alia Airport to London where I picked up a connection to JFK. As the plane took off I jotted down memories of the hustle and bustle of Baghdad—the women in their black shrouds in the teeming markets and the men with their endless cups of coffee and chai. What would happen to them? What price would they pay in the standoff between Saddam and Bush? Before leaving Iraq I had sorted out Firas for my next visit and I had set the ball rolling for a new visa. I knew that, before long, I’d be back on the road to Baghdad.
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September 11, 2002 23 Manhattan, USA
Today the view was of nothing. From the Empire State Building, once again New York’s tallest, it was hard to get a fix on just where the Twin Towers had been on the skyline. The noise of jets overhead, so much a part of New York, made people jumpy. On the Brooklyn Bridge, a few lycra-clad joggers ran towards the suburbs, a decidedly different scene to the dust-crusted crowds of a year ago, running from death in the city. And at ball games across the country, the electronic scoreboards flashed out a single message—‘We shall not forget’—and the crowds thundered in reply: ‘USA! USA!’ It was a day on which many New Yorkers wanted to draw a line in the sand, but inevitably that meant a long glance over their shoulder. I was up in the predawn of September 11, taking part in an ABC radio discussion on how much the world had changed. Afterwards, I climbed the stairs to the roof garden at the top of my apartment tower, to look at nothing. In the grey tail end of the night there was a void in which the surviving buildings around the World Trade Center looked like children out without their parents. Fingers of light oozed in from the east with the dawn, the same deep orange as the official ‘high’ terror warning flashing on the TV in my study. I was caught in the peculiar adrenaline mix of jetlag from a four Bloody Marys flight back from Baghdad and the excitement I always 259
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felt on my return to New York. But this time there was another shot in the glass—all the turbulent emotion of the 9/11 anniversary. As others were probably doing all over the city, I peered into the downtown haze, trying to remember what it had been like before. I’d been home for three days and would be off again within a week for Saudi Arabia and then, given the way events were unfolding, there was a very good chance I’d be heading back to Baghdad. The story had become a continuous loop. Out there in the five city boroughs of New York, five bagpipe bands had been marching since 1am, the gravel of their drums and the drone of the pipes bathing us in weepy solemnity as they converged on Ground Zero for memorial services that would start with a minute’s silence at 8.46 am—the time this day last year when the first of the hijacked aircraft jackhammered into the north tower. I was up on the roof at the time of day when America’s commuter army starts to descend on its airports, but a ghostly silence hung in most terminals this year as all but the defiant decided not to tempt their luck in skies that a year earlier had become the most dangerous in the world. The day was like a bad-luck charm. There were only 55 passengers on United Airlines Flight 81, the Newark–San Francisco service that had replaced the doomed Flight 93 that crashed in a paddock in Pennsylvania. Teary flight attendants served champagne in glass flutes and cake iced in red, white and blue as TV cameras followed them around. ‘We’re celebrating life,’ said one of the attendants as her silver bracelet bearing the name of a colleague who died on 9/11 clinked against the glasses. And passenger Nina Hinson Rassmussen explained why she was airborne: ‘I wanted to say, look, this is not going to stop me from living the life I want to live. I will not be reined by fear. I wanted to show the world that we’re okay.’ These two women were the face of New York a year later—teary, defiant and ready to get on with it, in a city adrift on a sea of media clichés, not quite believing that nothing had changed, but at the same time not sure of what had changed—in their lives and in the world. Almost half a million New Yorkers still suffered post-traumatic stress and one in five would burst into tears at the thought of the attacks—
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but that was an improvement on the days after 9/11. Therapists said they had patients who had been unable to leave their downtown apartments since last year, but they had more who had been so fearful their lives might end that they claimed to have found a sense of purpose that had apparently eluded them before. The people of the US had put their money where their hearts were—almost $US3 billion was donated to charities to look after the 3251 children who had lost a parent in the attacks. But now there was as much squabbling over who should get how much of the money as there was over the mix of commerce and memorial in the redevelopment of Ground Zero. The Statue of Liberty was still padlocked. Removalists and delivery boys were being urged to spy on householders, and nursing mothers were made to drink the milk they had expressed to prove it was not some lethal biological agent before they could carry it, bottled for their babies, onto flights. Last year the must-have drug was Cipro, for the anthrax scare; this year it was potassium iodine tablets, to treat radiation poisoning in the event of a dirty bomb attack or something worse. There was a sharp rise in applications for places in Arabic studies, the CIA and the Peace Corps, but the anticipated surge in gun ownership and army recruitment didn’t happen. There was no baby boom but, inexplicably, more people were queuing for plastic surgery, and church attendance was falling again. The markets survived 9/11 only to take a hammering in one of the worst bouts of executive greed in American history, the only issue that had interrupted the media’s gluttonous diet of the socalled War on Terror. A year after the attacks that demolished seven buildings and gouged a $US100 billion hole in the city economy, most New Yorkers believed that the city remained a terrorist target, but most also believed they would still be living there in four years time. The city’s new mayor, media magnate Michael Bloomberg, encouraged them, saying that cigarettes and car accidents were a greater threat than dirty bombs and bioterrorism. As he grappled with the enormity of the security challenge, Police Chief Raymond Kelly told how he had sat in the lobby of the World Trade Center after it had been bombed first, back in 1993, and how he
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had ridiculed the terrorists’ claim that they could actually bring the towers down. But how do you secure a city of eight million people? Kelly: ‘You could protect the place perfectly—and have no business here.’ By the time the skirling pipe bands had arrived at Ground Zero tens of thousands had crammed the pavements of lower Manhattan. Pride of place was given to 70 pipers from the Fire Department of New York’s own pipe band who, in the last year, had split into six small bands to play at as many as 15 funerals a day for their brother firemen. The crowds were pressing in for the start of the ceremony but, with his ruddy Irish features, retired Fire Lieutenant Jim McEnaney took time to explain how they had managed the toll on their numbers: ‘Sometimes we would go to a funeral, pipe the body into the church, then go to another church close by and pipe that body out of the church, and then run back to the first church in time to pipe that body out.’ The day that unfolded saw an outpouring of raw emotion. It was a day on which Americans looked for themselves in their past. They pulled out Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which was read at Ground Zero by Governor George Pataki. It was an apt reminder that events find their place in history: ‘The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.’ And as Yo Yo Ma played a soulful cello, the man who led New York through the trauma of the previous year, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, began the most poignant part of the day—the reading by a team of 197 readers of the names of the 2801 who died in the New York attacks. Shoulders bent as he always carried them, Giuliani started hesitantly—‘Gordon A . . . Aamoth’—before he found his rhythm: ‘Edelmiro Abad. Maria Rose Abad. Andrew Anthony Abate. Vincent Abate . . .’ and on it went for more than two-and-a-half hours until the last reader reached the last name: ‘Igor Zukelman.’ The only interruptions were for three more minutes of silence—marking the time of the second attack and the collapse of each of the towers. The speaking of each name was a cathartic moment for a knot of family and friends. It was easy to pick them in the crowd—the tearful
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sobbing, the sudden embraces, and sometimes a placard held aloft: ‘In loving memory of Nereida De Jesus—1970-2001—a daughter, mother, sister and friend.’ And as the litany of the lost continued, a procession of the grieving made its way down the long ramp to the floor of the pit, seven storeys below street level. Up on my roof, I had been struck by how the day started as a gentle reminder of 9/11 a year earlier—clear blue skies and the soft stillness of autumn. But minutes into the ceremony a biting wind blew up, showering the families in swirling dust. George Coppola, whose brother Gerard died in the towers, said: ‘It was like the flight of the souls. I saw it as the spirits making themselves known.’ Marie Anaya, whose deceased husband Calixto was a firefighter, seemed to sum up the mood of the city as she described her personal odyssey: ‘Since it happened, it’s like I’ve been waiting to exhale. When the wind came it was as if all of those spirits rose up and gave us a big hug; as if my husband was telling me I could breath again.’ The World Trade Center family, as some refer to those who were touched directly by the attacks, is huge. As many as 20 per cent of Americans claim they knew someone who died or was injured, and each of the estimated 60 000 who escaped from the complex on the morning of the attacks has his or her circle of family and friends that ‘knows someone who was there’. City officials thought that maybe 7000 family members and relatives might attend the formal anniversary ceremonies, but the turnout was more than 25 000. These were the people behind the now faded ‘missing’ fliers that still wallpapered the city. And the invitation for them to go down into the pit drew them out of the crowd, revealing them to the world as the massed living victims of the attacks. Deborah Garcia, still unable to come to terms with the death of her husband, came with six roses. ‘He used to give me these all the time,’ she said of the flowers. ‘So I came here today to give some back to him.’ They moved around the pit, hugging and holding each other; some went to the edges and ran their hands along the concrete wall. Some collected pebbles to take home. Others knelt on the ground and scooped handfuls of the earth into small containers which they pocketed. A distressed woman pleaded with a policeman: ‘Officer, you’ve got to help me. I need
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to know where the north tower would have stood.’ Taking her arm and leading her in the direction of the Hudson River, he said: ‘Right here, it once stood right here.’ The woman immediately fell to her knees, and with her bare fingers she dug a small hole in the compacted earth. In it she placed a photograph of her son, whose remains had not been recovered, and a letter she had written to him. She then filled in the hole and covered it with a bunch of roses that became a part of a floral carpet slowly rolling out on the floor of the pit. On the morning of 9/11 the previous year, newspaper deadlines and the pressure of international time zones dictated my movements. It was the same this year—the ABC had wanted me on air at 6 pm in Sydney, but that was 4 am in New York. By 9 am I pretty well had to have filed for the day. Little had happened, but I still had a whole day in front of me and I wanted to tap into what Americans were thinking about their place in the world a year after the attacks. So I decided to start at Times Square, that screaming, extravagant pagan heart of the city where Broadway slashes across Seventh Avenue. New Yorkers call it the Crossroads of the World. I emerged from the train to find the mad jumble that is the iconic image of New York—theatres and taxis, skyscrapers and squeegee men, hawkers and hoardings, all aglow in the arcing dazzle from acres of neon advertising, flashy screens and zipper-tapes that shriek the news of the minute and force-feed us the latest cars, drinks, stocks and shows. Disney. Virgin. Reuter. But on this day only the Toyota big screen was pushing cars. The square was muted—crowds were slower, the hucksters had absented themselves and there was none of the usual aggression in the barping taxi horns. The NASDAQ was running a list of the Ground Zero dead instead of a list of stock prices; on the Reuter screens there was only one story—the anniversary. The huge glass front of Toys ’R’ Us had been given over to a giant American flag; Old Glory flashed on and off on the Paramount Building; and the Wrigley’s big screen had been blacked out, but for a small US flag fluttering in the middle. A ConEdison maintenance worker materialised from a manhole in the middle of the square with miniature US flags fixed to each side of
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his hardhat and, like the rest of the city, all who came into the square this day were a part of the story unfolding on the big screens—the ceremony at Ground Zero, bells tolling and doves released, poems read and candles lit, and chunks of Twin Towers steel being placed as memorials around the country. At the police station in Times Square, children’s art and letters were pasted in the window—‘Dear policemen, I am very sorry about the tragic event.’ The cop behind the front desk didn’t want to be named, but he wanted to talk. And when he did, it was in the same tight oneliners that his president used, but his was a different song sheet. ‘Let’s solve this problem before we go to war in Iraq,’ he said, nodding his head at the big screens around the square. ‘There are no winners in wars. Why should we be the world cop? We’ll only lose by it.’ And in the gleam of the sheer glass-fronted Blue Fin Bar, 25-year-old Midas Verheijden was worrying about Washington’s insistence that it must impose ‘regime change’ on Iraq: ‘Iraq should be left to the Iraqis and to the UN. Where is the direct threat to us?’ My straw poll was showing little support for Washington’s war, so I headed across 44th Street on foot, making a right into Eighth Avenue where flowers and candles adorned the bronze statue of a kneeling fireman, bowed yet determined. Four blocks to the north I came to the Engine 54/Ladder 4 fire station. This was the firehouse from which all 15 men who rushed to the Twin Towers had perished. It had been on this corner for more than a century and, with more than 1000 call-outs a month, it was the busiest in the city. Local residents and businesses had rallied around and big names like Liz Taylor and John Travolta had dropped by to offer comfort, but the men were tired of their grief and they were tired of talking about it. Their memorial mass was for ‘family only’, but Captain Richard Parenty talked to me out on the pavement. He was ambivalent about the usefulness of the Bush campaign against Iraq: ‘Here we are just trying to get by day by day. I don’t feel confident about another war. It’s sobering, it’s uncertain and it’s frightening.’ On the morning of September 11, 2001, John and Georgette Gill heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center when their flight
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touched down in Los Angeles. They had been returning from a belated honeymoon in Hawaii, which had included an emotional visit to Pearl Harbor. They were desperate for information about John’s 34-year-old son Paul—a firefighter with Engine 54/Ladder 4. Now I found them standing in Eighth Avenue on the first anniversary of his death. In the break between the memorial service and a lunch that was being sent around as a gesture by the management of the Marriott Hotel, John was finding last year’s attacks and the prospect of a war a challenge to his Christian views. ‘Everyone is apprehensive about going after Saddam. Why are we doing it now?’ he asked. ‘Osama bin Laden is unfinished business. We shouldn’t start another war ’til we’ve finished this one.’ On Wall Street there was a late start to trading when the oldest active floor broker in the land, 93-year-old Michael Pascuma, rang the bell 10 times—once for each member of the stock exchange who had died a year earlier, including his own son. The markets finished ‘up’ and Cantor Fitzgerald, the brokerage house that had lost 658 of its staff, had bagged commissions worth $US4 million, all of which was donated to its family relief fund which now stood at $US32 million. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, a firm that lost a third of its staff when the south tower collapsed, was clawing its way out of the abyss, deal by deal. A year on, it was employing more people in its new midtown offices than it had employed at the World Trade Center on the day of the attacks. But downtown was suffering badly. The anniversary day crowd in lower Manhattan was huge, but that’s what it was—a crowd that visited for the day, a bit like Hollywood opening the ghost town to visitors. From the towers alone, fewer than 100 businesses had remained downtown. More than 350 went uptown or interstate and close to 100 simply folded. Most of the 150 000 New York jobs destroyed in the attacks had been downtown. Apartments were filling up again but, in a 12-storey building surveyed by the New York Times, more than two-thirds of the tenants had moved on and some of those who had taken their places readily admitted they were taking advantage of generous government rent subsidies that were being paid in the hope of keeping the district alive.
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St Paul’s Church, which became a resting place for weary rescue and recovery workers, was still a memorial in progress, with thousands of messages of strength, love and support hanging from its wrought iron railings—t-shirts, caps and cards from around the world; flowers, flags and candles that were added to every day. But one of the most haunting reminders of 9/11 was about to disappear from Broadway, one block back from Ground Zero. Lousy trading was forcing David Cohen to abandon his Chelsea Jeans store and the makeshift memorial just inside the door that he had left untouched since the day of the attacks—neat piles of shirts and jeans protected behind a Perspex screen and still layered with the thick grey-white dust that had exploded through the shop’s front window. It was the ultimate in performance art, but those who stopped to look did not pause to buy. A makeshift hoarding in a first-floor window on the corner of Church and Park declared bitterly: ‘Allah may forgive you, but we won’t’, and working the Ground Zero crowd during the memorial services was Mitch Mitchell, who had ridden his motorbike from South Carolina, towing a ghoulish shiny coffin in which he had placed an effigy of Osama bin Laden. Mitch was the American flipside of the anti-US protests in the Middle East, with all their angry burning of flags and kicking of effigies. A year after the attacks, grief and shock still tempered the extent to which many wanted to hear a reckoning on the first year of the War on Terror. Americans knew now that legendary US agencies charged with protecting them had not been up to the task. And they accepted the squeezing of civil rights in the name of the War on Terror. However, despite a short, sharp battle in faraway Central Asia in which 22 US servicemen and as many as 3000 Afghan civilians had died, and an intense, ongoing global investigation, they still knew relatively little about an enemy that was armed with not much more than box cutters and credit cards when it struck on a glorious autumn morning. They knew that the Saudi-born Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organisation had operated from the wilds of Afghanistan, and that they had a sophisticated network of cells around the world, especially in
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Germany. But the trail had become mired and murky after US-led forces broke the grip on Afghanistan of the Taliban tyrants who had sheltered bin Laden and his foreign fighters. US Special Forces were still mopping up in Afghanistan, but it seemed that, while two high-profile members of al-Qaeda had been arrested, none of its senior leaders was among the 600 Taliban fighters that the US had spirited off to a special purpose prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba late last year. At the end of the war the US had an estimated 1000 al-Qaeda fighters bailed up in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, but most had managed to escape; and the network and its associates or sympathisers were suspected of a hand in some, if not all, of almost a dozen attacks on Americans and Western interests across the Muslim world since the savage murder in Karachi in January of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Only one person, Zacarias Moussaoui, had been brought before a US court on charges linked to September 11. And though several new terrorist attacks had been foiled and investigators were on the verge of busting a suspected al-Qaeda cell in Buffalo, in upstate New York virtually all of more than 1600 terrorist suspects who were rounded up in more than 30 countries in the wake of September 11 had been released. Despite early success in a US campaign to freeze the assets of charities and other front organisations that funded the terrorists, a UN task force had concluded that money in the range of tens of millions of dollars was still getting through to al-Qaeda from its financial backers in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. All of this had diluted any comfort Americans might have taken from the dramatic collapse of the Taliban regime and the dispersal of the al-Qaeda hierarchy. Bin Laden and most of his key lieutenants were almost certainly alive; they were cashed up; they were geared for operating under what might appear to be a fractured command structure; and, according to some intelligence sources, they still had a sleeper cell in the US that was independent of the September 11 operation. They said it was underground, biding its time, and it had plans for another attack. Yet New York seemed to be taking all of this
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in its stride. The mayor said think of car accidents, not dirty bombs; and there was no apparent anxiety that, for the first time since the Cuban missile crisis, live missiles batteries had been stationed at key buildings in the capital. The bin Laden targets had been in New York and Washington, but the attacks had shaken the world. In the days after 9/11 NATO had put itself on alert to repel the next such strikes; the UN Security Council had condemned the attacks; offers of help had poured in to the White House; and a procession of national leaders had gone to Washington to give support to the president, and then to New York to see the most amazing buildings that weren’t there. Bush had demanded a response from nations—‘you’re with us, or you’re against us.’ But as the War on Terror unfolded, things were not always as they had seemed in the investigation or in the policy underpinning of the world’s lone superpower. Americans were on a runaway emotional roller-coaster, and their every lurch caused a hardening in the Bush team and in its view of the world and how it believed it should run in the aftermath of the attacks. Intelligence disclosures told Americans that John Walker Lindh was the treacherous homegrown face of the Taliban who had a hand in the murder of a CIA man in Mazar-e-Sharif in the north of Afghanistan. It was a headline story that stoked American outrage but, when the Lindh case got to court months later, this naïve young Californian was charged with nothing more than carrying a gun for the Taliban. When the socalled Dirty Bomber was arrested in Chicago, US Attorney General John Ashcroft cowed Americans with his live-cross warning from Moscow that a radioactive attack had been imminent. It was a beat-up. For months they were told that Mohammed Atta, the suspected ringleader of the September 11 hijackers, had met with Iraqi agents in Prague five months before the attacks and that, therefore, Saddam Hussein must have had a hand in September 11. But that theory has been scotched. And the anthrax mail-out that had killed five and rattled the nation in the weeks after September 11 was now starting to look like an unrelated homegrown American plot that had nothing to do with Muslim or Arab terrorism, Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein.
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So what were Americans to make of the decision by authorities to put the entire country on the highest terrorist alert it had been on since September 2001 as they prepared to mark the anniversary? Nothing happened. Apart from the missiles in Washington, fighter-jets patrolled the skies over all major cities and the machine-gun men of the NYPD were out in the streets of New York. This had been the fifteenth terror alert in 12 months. Before September 11, 2001, Washington and the new Bush presidency had caused a few brows to furrow in Europe and the rest of the world because of what some editorial writers were referring to as its ‘unilateralist’ tendencies. But much of that had been forgotten as governments around the world presumed that, in responding to the al-Qaeda strikes, Bush would use the family blueprint crafted by his father a decade earlier. That was a genuine coalition in which 28 nations stood shoulder to shoulder with Bush Snr, driving Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait and giving birth to the term ‘new World Order’. But ‘new World Order’ took on a drastically different meaning as the Bush Jnr White House tried to deny the UN any significant role in the War on Terror; as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s term ‘coalition of coalitions’ was revealed as the denial of any single forum in which others might attempt to stay the hand of the US; as the liaison staff from NATO were denied admission when they arrived at the US military command bunker in Tampa, Florida; and, as the Afghan war petered out, the US insisted that international peacekeepers would be confined to Kabul because it didn’t want anyone else’s army getting in the way of its pursuit of bin Laden and al-Qaeda. There were few complaints, and certainly not in public. America was the empire on its knees on September 11; the greatest military and economic superpower of all time had been scared and humiliated by a man with a straggly beard who wore robes and lived in a cave. In the US criticism was deemed unpatriotic and abroad it was seen to be insensitive. If Washington thought that it should control the counterattack, no one was going to argue. The Europeans might mutter about having lived with terrorism for decades, but none of them had had a September
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11. As far as Washington was concerned, only Americans truly understood the fear of another attack. Several accounts of the inner workings of the White House at the time portray George W. Bush as a president in full control of the issue that would define his administration. He told staff that he had found his ‘mission’ and he frequently urged them to be guided by the memory of how they felt on September 11. But he was haunted: haunted by what the terrorists might do next and the weapons they might use. There were two key speeches. On September 20, just over a week after the attacks, he spoke powerfully and, the world thought, inclusively, to a joint session of Congress: ‘Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen . . . What is at stake is not just America’s freedom. This is the world’s fight. This is civilisation’s fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.’ In the months before 9/11 there had been maybe 100 meetings of Bush’s senior national security advisers and only a couple of them had discussed terrorism. And in the days after the attacks there was no mention of Iraq. But in January 2002, as the Wall Street Journal reconstructed events, the president called for details of the weapons of mass destruction that terrorists might use and the countries that might provide them. So began the drafting of his ‘axis of evil’ State of the Union speech, in which he put Iraq, Iran and North Korea on notice. Between those speeches an environment grew in which key Pentagon officials and members of Dick Cheney’s staff, who were eager to target Iraq, could push to a susceptible commander-in-chief their case for a ‘small’ war against Iraq, just like they had fought in Afghanistan. The historic echo of the ‘axis of evil’ line caused disquiet in the capitals of Europe. But what really caused alarm was an outbreak of war— between factions in the Bush administration that came to be known as the ascendant ‘Jihadists’, those who wanted to march on Baghdad immediately; and the minority ‘pragmatists’, those who wanted time, allies and a mandate for a new military campaign. Their foot soldiers became the reporting staff of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the New
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Yorker as leaks and counter-leaks sketched earnest planning for a ground force of as many as 250 000 US troops being lined up for the battle of Baghdad. And depending on which side fed the story, they would go with or without the blessing of Congress; with or without a mandate from the UN Security Council; and with or without allies. The president made cute claims that there was no war plan ‘on my desk’—perhaps it was on a coffee table. Any pretence that the White House was playing out a Geoffrey Robertson Hypothetical was abandoned early in June 2002, when Bush set about acquiring the one weapon he didn’t have—a policy that would legitimise a US attack on Iraq. In simple terms, he was about to dump more than half a century of US military doctrine, which had been based on a speedy response to aggression without the US being the first to strike. He explained what became known as his ‘strike first’ policy: ‘If we wait for threats to fully materialise, we will have waited too long.’ And Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser, elaborated: ‘It really means early action of some kind. It means forestalling certain destructive acts against you by an adversary.’ And when it dawned on the White House that, since the Gulf Crisis, the whole Iraq debate had been about the right of the international community to dispatch inspectors to certify that Saddam Hussein was not developing weapons of mass destruction, and that therefore Saddam might thwart the coming war simply by agreeing to a new inspections regime, Donald Rumsfeld ran up a new argument, declaring that inspections were no longer the issue. The objective was getting Saddam before he got the US. Saddam Hussein had been consistent in his tyranny—aggression, war, murder, genocide. The inconsistency since September 11 was that of the US. The War on Terror had started, not against any one country but against terrorists and their supporters in 60 nations. Now, in a mighty shift, it was against one country that had not been directly implicated in any way in the 9/11 attacks. It was a twist that had an army of experts and commentators around the globe in fear that the War on Terror would be robbed of resources, direction and, in time, victory.
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There were other big questions. If this implacable unilateralism was the US response to September 11, how would nations deal with internal and external conflict if the forum that all had believed was central to any such process—the United Nations—had been so rudely sidelined? And if we were not to have muscular international forums, how would we deal with the consequence of Bush’s ‘strike first’ policy? If it was legitimate for the US to send an army halfway around the world to deal with a nation that it saw as a threat, what about regional crises? Did China have the right to strike pre-emptively at Taiwan? What about India and Pakistan? The Koreas? Israel and its Arab neighbours? What was to happen in the Middle East? When Arab nations, with the backing of much of Europe, had pleaded with Bush to deal with the Israeli–Palestinian crisis before he sent an army into the region to start a fight that had profound implications for them, the White House adopted a Middle East policy that made the Israeli–Palestinian crisis even more intractable but insisted on declaring its new tack to be a part of ‘the peace process’. What was to happen in Chechnya? And in Aceh? Since September 11, the Bush rhetoric had become the framework in which Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon spoke about the Palestinian Intifada and Russia’s President Vladamir Putin talked of the Chechen nationalists. The president of the US seemed unable or unwilling to restrain leaders elsewhere who would use his words to give respectability to the suppression of long-standing ethnic or nationalist grievances. In the era of the Bushies, as some US commentators describe today’s White House, Nelson Mandela would still be in jail, Gerry Adams would be made to join him, and the founders of the state of Israel would have their assets frozen. Single-handedly, Bush had turned a landscape of global unity in the days after September 11 into what he would see as one of carping anxiety, as friends in all corners of the world—with the singular exception of Australia—balked at his Iraq crusade. US diplomats were working feverishly to get international backing, but for now most of Europe and Asia and virtually the entire Arab world were calling on Bush to back off. Even Kuwait and Iran, which had been invaded by Iraq, were against a US attack on Baghdad. Bush’s staunchest supporter,
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British Prime Minister Tony Blair, faced a serious schism in public opinion as he struggled to remain at the president’s right hand.
I kept walking. At the Ranch 1 pavement café on 52nd Street, I came upon Brian and Alexander, two young venture capitalists cleaning up plates of burgers and fries. Brian was a staunch Bush supporter, but I had only managed to ask him a single question before his friend Alexander took over the interview, challenging Brian’s every certainty about the role of the US in the world. Brian: Yes to war on Iraq. It’s a risk, but if Iraq harbours networks that the world doesn’t want … Alexander: But the US hasn’t explained itself. We need to see a lot more information. Brian: The US does not have to explain itself. I’d be unhappy about a US attack on Iraq if there was no reason; but if Washington has a reason I don’t need to know about it because removing Saddam Hussein is a just cause. Alexander: But there will be someone else in line, just like him, to take his place. Brian: This is just the beginning. We have to have a long-term strategy for these unstable governments. The US is acting according to principle and Saddam does not deserve to live. Alexander: But what about the civilian population? Would you fight in this war? Brian: If there was a need, if there was a draft—which I hope not. Alexander: Why do you hope not? Brian: It’s difficult when you are twenty-four or twenty-five. Alexander: So you don’t think we should go to war? Brian: I wouldn’t choose to go to war, but I would if we had to. The new friends that Bush had co-opted in the War on Terror— countries like dictatorial Pakistan and autocratic Uzbekistan—had little respect for his brand of democracy and freedom. In lighter moments, Palestinians enjoyed the black humour of Washington’s efforts to enlist
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Saudi Arabia and Egypt in its campaign to bring them democracy, and Iraqis wanted to know why they were about to be attacked when fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers came from neighbouring Saudi Arabia. Both the Palestinians and Iraqis asked what it was about democracy that Washington believed it should be forced on them but not even suggested to the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Pakistanis and a whole lot of others. The US response to its isolation as it prepared to go to war was an evangelical claim by Rumsfeld that ‘leadership in the right direction finds followers and supporters’, and the US seemed to forget the cost of its past indulgence of old cronies who had caused much difficulty, like the Shah of Iran, Zia ul-Haq, General Suharto, Ferdinand Marcos and Mobuto Sese Seko. There was a reality that made Washington’s management of this crisis all the more difficult to understand, and it was that, in a sense, Rumsfeld was right: if the US did go to war against Iraq, most of the rest of the world would feel obliged or compelled to support it. So why was the White House making it so difficult for them? Why did it not embrace the UN and make a virtue of a global endorsement of the battle plan? This crisis was as much about the manner in which the decision to go to war was being made as it was about the merits of attacking and removing Saddam Hussein. Most nations wanted to go back to the UN, to draw up an unambiguous weapons inspection regime which, effectively, would be the line in the sand. Winning that debate would require ‘leadership in the right direction’ from Washington, but it would find ‘followers and supporters’ in better numbers than were backing Washington at the time. Washington needed to take the same case to the US Congress, which claimed to have a constitutional right to make the call on the US going to war. The weapons case against Saddam was a persuasive exercise in ‘what if ?’, but the ‘evil doer’ case made him only one among many in Amnesty International’s tally of repression around the globe: regular torture, 111 countries; prisoners of conscience, 65; arbitrary arrest, detention and disappearances, 54; extrajudicial executions, 47.
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A pre-emptive strike against a sovereign nation would require moral, human, tactical and strategic due diligence. To skirt this process would be, in Sir Humphrey-speak, a courageous act. But simply having the courage to do it was not, in itself, enough. The Washington case for ‘regime change’ needed to be a clear statement on why there should be a war, how it should be fought and what would happen when the fighting stopped. Already the US was trying to wriggle out of Afghanistan, even as the country remained two bullets away from civil war; and for all his many faults, the history of Iraq suggested that Saddam Hussein could be the Tito of the Middle East. Take him out of the equation and it could require years, billions of dollars and tens of thousands of troops to democratise the country and to stop the region from imploding as the neighbours moved in for the kill. And when all of these questions were asked, Americans were hurt again. The military historian Victor Hanson complained: ‘Our friends act as if they were enemies, our allies pose as neutrals, and our foes claim they are poor victims. In the present lull before the storm, pundits and experts advise us what we cannot do rather than what we can and should, and what we are told is so often not at all what we perceive.’ But in the US itself, public opinion had started to shift. Bush’s popularity had dropped from its stratospheric 90 per cent peak in the weeks after the attacks. It had held in the handsome 70s for much of the year, but with Republican infighting and international complaints over the drive for an attack on Iraq it had slipped back into the respectable 60s. As many as two-thirds of Americans backed a US invasion of Iraq— provided it had UN approval; only 20 per cent were prepared to see the US going it alone. And just over half of those polled by CBS News— 53 per cent—thought the US was on the wrong track, a point made by Gregory Panic, a gnarled cabbie who took me part of the way downtown on the September 11 anniversary: ‘We should mind our own business. The Iraqis haven’t attacked anyone. Bush seems to want to finish his father’s work and he thinks the people are backing him, but who gives us the right to do this?’
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As Bush attempted to stare down opposition in the US, the script was full of tragic parallels—a Texan transplant had ended up in the White House by an accident of democracy in the state of Florida, only to be met by the same challenge that had confronted his father in the job a decade before. There was none of Hamlet’s indecision, but the challenge for the son in his father’s unfinished business as he confronted the man who had plotted to assassinate his father was pure Sophocles. Remarkably, the Democrats had left the stage and it was the Republican establishment forcing the Republican president to have the debate that neither he nor his key advisers wanted. The father remained silent, but a Greek chorus of the best of the advisers he had had when he was in the job was urging the son to pull back. The strongest challenge had come from Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Bush Snr and still a close friend. Scowcroft, a revered member of the Republican foreign affairs cognoscenti, had demolished the pillars of the Bush Jnr case for war, arguing that an attack on Iraq could destroy the War on Terror, that there was not enough evidence that Saddam’s weapons posed a threat or that he would share them with terrorists, and that, if the president was still determined to confront Saddam, he should first win the support of the UN. James Baker, Secretary of State to the father and still a family friend, weighed in with similar cautions. And Norman Schwarzkopf, the man whose command of Operation Desert Storm made him an international giant, warned that it would be a hard war, especially because of the risk that it might prompt Saddam to use the very weapons that Bush wanted to deny him. Madeline Albright and Henry Kissinger were urging another round of inspections. And the loneliest figure in the Bush administration was Secretary of State Colin Powell. Only weeks before September 11, Powell had been arguing that a ‘smart sanctions’ regime could keep Saddam contained. Not a lot had changed in Baghdad since then; but like water on a stone, the sheer persistence of the powerful backers of a war against Iraq made it more likely than unlikely. We were caught in a frightening, triangular standoff. In one corner, the reckless brinkmanship of the Iraqi leader, who in more than a decade
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had denied his people development worth billions so that he could posture as the defender of the Muslim world; in another, the anger of a US president so bent on avenging the senseless death of thousands of his people, supposedly in the name of Allah, that he chased after anyone who might look like the killer, failing to recognise offers of genuine help and listening only to a tight circle that agreed with him; and in the third corner, without exaggeration, was the rest of an anxious world that wanted to have a say in its affairs instead of having to respond to notes sent out from the Oval Office. Those who were trying to avoid this war called for containment, a throwback to the strategies of the Cold War when much of the world divided into two camps and what was thought to go on within the borders of any country was tolerated in the belief that the East–West balance kept an effective lock on it. Those who wanted the war cried appeasement, harking back to a global lack of will that allowed Adolph Hitler to march into World War II, the clash from which we emerged into almost half a century of a manageable twilight that came to be known as the Cold War. Their equation was simple: Saddam Hussein equals Adolph Hitler.
The whole area around Ground Zero—for two blocks in every direction—was put in a security freeze hours before the president arrived. I could see sniper units moving on rooftops and, overhead, NYPD helicopters with mounted machine guns guarded this new holy ground. Two decontamination tents had been set up nearby in case of chemical or biological attacks and sniffer dogs went over my gear before I was allowed to take my seat in a press enclosure on the lip of Ground Zero. Bush had spent the day attending memorial services, first in Washington and then in Pennsylvania. Now it was late afternoon, and the approach of his helicopter briefly drowned out the flap and crack of the banners that draped buildings around Ground Zero. From the enclosure, I was able to observe the movement of a distant grey suit which, with the aid of binoculars, I identified as the president of the
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United States. Bush disappeared down the long ramp that had served as a road for the endless convoy of trucks hauling away 1.62 million tonnes of rubble from the World Trade Center, the 1300 squashed cars that were in its garages and what remains there were of the dead. He lingered among the crowd and later Debbie Lynch, whose husband had worked in one of the towers, told reporters: ‘He came over and shook our hands. He said: “God bless you,” and he had tears running down his face. It was very moving.’ This city is an infernal place. It would have been easy to switch off from the media-packaged grief for the anniversary. Still, listen to yet another interview with a grieving relative or catch a glimpse of a city firehouse and its memorials to 343 firemen who didn’t deserve to die, and emotion washes over you. Watch a rerun of the impact of the hijacked aircraft and see another clip of people jumping to their death from the highest floors of the flaming towers and you are tossed back in time, to a day when American complacency and certainty ended. There was a disturbing preoccupation with the past on this day; the choice of readings from Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence and Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’ speech seemed not to recognise the many dangers of the present. Twelve months on, the land of the free was not so free and the home of the brave was a little more scared. In the gap between remembering and forgetting, and against the backdrop of so much emotion, flags and flowers, the president was to go to the UN the next morning to urge a reluctant world to join him in a war it was not yet convinced had a lot to do with September 11. That was forgotten for a day. Instead, the bands played Amazing Grace and The Battle Hymn of the Republic and, when the balls popped on TV for the weekly lotto draw, the numbers, eerily, were 9-1-1.
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Epilogue
MANHATTAN TO BAGHDAD Tikrit, Iraq
October 2002
The pot was big, big enough to hold a stew made from 20 sheep and a sack of dried lemons. Hachem Al-Delaian, a crusty local chieftain, ladled rich gravy over the rice and handed me a leathery circle of flat Iraqi bread. And as we sat in the shade of a water-carter’s truck, he told me that he and his Bedouin tribesmen were well pleased with Saddam Hussein. ‘We give him our souls and we offer him our soldiers because it is he who has made us. He gave us our houses, our water and our electricity.’ But Saddam had also taken so much more for himself. Tikrit, on the banks of the Tigris, was normally closed to Westerners, but I was part of a special press tour allowed in to cover a referendum on Saddam’s leadership. There was only one candidate: Saddam. Tikrit was a dusty backwater about 160 kilometres northwest of Baghdad, and home to Iraq’s most pampered citizens—Saddam’s al-Takriti clan. As our bus approached the town, the road became an avenue on which every lamppost had a picture of Saddam. A lavish new mosque in blue and cream commemorated Saddam’s father and one of the most luxurious of the presidential palaces sat on the edge of the river. The Saddam paintings, statues and mosaics in Tikrit were more flattering and more elaborate than in the rest of the country, and more than one-third of all the buildings in town bore his name. But the Tikrit gravy train was not 280
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without risk. The town was a US target—it was bombed in 1991 and 1998—and, for all its heroic worship of Saddam, it was aware that it was in the cross-hairs again. The surrounding flatlands bristled with weapons—tanks, anti-aircraft radar systems and missiles the size of small aircraft. It was on a countdown to war. The day before I left Manhattan I went back to where it had all begun. I had pressed the downtown authorities to let me go and stand, alone, in the middle of Ground Zero. I wanted to go into the bowels of the ruins—the place where terror had reconstructed the American psyche. It was immensely sad. With the towers gone, there was more blue sky over the pit than almost anywhere else in Manhattan. The emptiness was all-powerful. I thought of the terrified workers in the towers a year earlier, looking up with only moments to live as the incredible bulk of a 767 filled their office windows. And I thought of the passengers on those planes, huddled pitifully at the back, counting the seconds. As I swivelled to take it all in, the buildings around me were like the war wounded, with their scaffolding splints and dustcover bandages. It would be five, maybe ten, years before reconstruction would close this window on the heavens and knit the gaping hole back into the fabric of New York. A tentative start had been made—I was standing on the roof of the new subway tunnel running through the site. But the Deutsche Bank building was shrouded in black netting and still might have to be demolished. The coal-black needle of the Millennium Hotel was shuttered. And the pinkish light of the setting sun washed over the art deco Verizon building, softening its still exposed 9/11 wounds. When a jet flew overhead, something inside me tightened. It was only days after the first anniversary of the attacks but, with the commemorations out of the way, George W. Bush and his administration were more determined, desperate even, to move the centre of terror to Iraq. So I was off again: first to Saudi Arabia, hoping to fathom a society that was still in denial over its role in the September 11 attacks, and then on to Iraq, to cover Saddam Hussein’s nonsense one-candidate presidential election—with war drums beating in the background. On my last night in Manhattan my wife Pam and I had dinner at a friendly
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Italian restaurant, three doors from where we lived, before making a mad taxi dash to catch the last elevator for the night to the top of the Empire State Building. Once again it was the city’s tallest. A big fat moon hung in a clear sky and, as midnight crept in, we had the viewing deck to ourselves. The lights of the city were like sequins scattered on the eiderdown of night, comforting a wounded city but doing nothing to temper the searing anger that now guided America in the world. We drank in the view and headed home, in a taxi driven by a turbaned Sikh, which greatly amused our doorman, Larry. ‘Must have been a great night—Osama bin Laden brought you home,’ he joked. Bin Laden? Larry remembered that it was bin Laden who had started all this. But somehow it had all moved—Afghanistan, bin Laden and New York had become Iraq, Saddam and America. The Iraqis had offered to take the media to a number of cities on voting day. I chose Tikrit just for the opportunity to glimpse the seat of power, the trough in which the clan kept its snout. The polling day energy of the Tikritis contrasted with the less certain mood back in Baghdad. Four weeks earlier people had seemed defiant enough, but now many seemed merely to be going through the motions of supporting Saddam. Maybe the greater certainty of war had cracked September’s cocky veneer; perhaps too much corruption and cruelty would have hollowed the system from within. For the first time in more than 12 years of coming to Iraq, I was starting to wonder if the right kind of jab in the chest would cause it all to collapse. Saddam would not win a war with the US so the question was, how badly would he lose? Once Iraqis saw a serious show of US force, they would probably walk away from their leader, just as so many had done in the Gulf War. But would they take the next step and fight against Saddam? Probably not—they had been burnt too often in the past, both by Saddam and by those who had promised to protect them from his brutality. But there was probably enough support for Saddam in the armed services to ensure fighting in which thousands would die. The escape of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan had robbed the US of a clear-cut victory, and failure to capture or kill Saddam would be a
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disaster for President Bush. But if it came to life on the run, Saddam would be less adaptable than bin Laden—he had fewer places to hide and fewer friends to hide him. If the US took Baghdad there would be calls to show the world his weapons of mass destruction. Alas, there would probably be nothing of real consequence—whatever Saddam had was likely to have been destroyed under the cover of his pre-war grandstanding as he offered to open the doors to UN inspectors. Wandering the streets of Saddam’s home town, it was hard not to conclude that Iraq was a senseless distraction for the US as it attempted to fight the War on Terror. Far away in Bali, the Indonesian island paradise where we had spent so many holidays, authorities were reeling in the aftermath of a devastating car bomb that had killed about 180 revellers at Kuta beach. Seventy-five of them were Australians. Most of them were young. All of them were innocent. Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was a key suspect in what was the worst act of terror in the world since the September 11 attacks. Countries like Indonesia seemed to warrant the attention and resources of the War on Terror much more than Iraq. And in the weeks after the first anniversary of the attacks on the US, others were drawing attention to themselves too. North Korea, one of the George W. Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ countries, re-ignited tensions on the Korean Peninsula by revealing its advanced nuclear weapons program. Meanwhile, the failure by the US to do anything about legitimate historic claims by oppressed minorities like the Palestinians and the Chechens ensured the continued festering of terrorist breeding grounds. In the Middle East the suicide bombers kept striking and, in Moscow, Chechen nationalists staged a hostage drama that ended with the deaths of more than 100 theatre-goers. But George W. Bush was determined to march on Baghdad. Somehow the president was in the wrong place, fighting the wrong war.
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NOTES
Part I: Afghanistan and the US, July–October 2001 Some of the people I interviewed during my first assignment in Afghanistan asked that their names not be revealed because of their concern about Taliban retribution. In writing ‘In the name of which God’ I drew on Dr William Maley’s Security, People-Smuggling and Australia’s New Afghan Refugees, and Afghanistan: Options for Peacebuilding by Barnett R. Rubin et al, 2001. The Médecins San Frontières study referred to in ‘Sticks on human bones’ is titled New Afghan refugees’ situation in Gulshartown, October 2000–January 2001. In ‘Rudy the Rock’ I drew on reports by my Herald colleague Mark Riley; Time magazine (‘Digging Out, Facing the End’, September 24, 2001; ‘Tending the Wounds’, October 1, 2002; ‘Mayor of the World’, December 31, 2002); Atlantic Monthly (‘American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center’ by William Langewiesche, July–August 2002); and a Los Angeles Times news report (October 2, 2002).
Part II: Eyewitness to the war in Afghanistan, October–November 2001 Some of the people I interviewed for ‘An Uzbek crook is George’s new friend’ asked that their names not be revealed. 284
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In ‘The death of three colleagues’ I drew on the New Yorker (‘The Warlord’ by Jon Lee Anderson, October 22, 2001), and reports in the Montreal Gazette (November 13, 2001), the Dallas Morning Herald (November 21, 2001), the Guardian (November 13, 2001) and the Times (November 21, 2001). In ‘Taliban pinned down’ I drew on reports in the Washington Post (November 14, 2001), Time magazine (December 3, 2001), National Post (December 11, 2001), the New Yorker (December 10, 2001) and the Guardian (May 20, 2002). The Kipling quote is taken from ‘The Young British Soldier’.
Part III: Trouble on the road to Baghdad, March–April 2002 In ‘Defiant Gaza’ I drew on an article by Robert Fisk (Independent, April 27, 2002); and news reports in the Daily Telegraph (April 8, 2002), the New York Times (April 4, 2002; June 12, 2002), Los Angeles Times (June 13, 2002; July 15, 2002) and the Washington Post (July 23, 2002). In ‘Guided missiles’ I drew on reports in the Toronto Star (January 29, 2002), the Washington Post (August 15, 2001; March 24, 2002; April 24, 2002; June 25, 2002), Los Angeles Times (June 10, 2002), Newsweek magazine (‘Inside Suicide Inc’, April 15, 2002), the Sunday Times (‘Inside the World of the Palestinian Suicide Bomber’, Hala Jaber, March 24, 2002), the New York Times (June 21, 2002), the Guardian (June 11, 2002), Knight Ridder Newspapers (April 8, 2002), Time (‘Viewpoint’ by Eyad Sarraj, April 8, 2002), Suntimes.com (September 23, 2001), the New Yorker (‘An Arsenal of Believers’, November 19, 2001). In ‘War crimes at Jenin’ I drew on reports in Time (‘The Battle of Jenin’, May 13, 2002), the Sunday Times magazine (‘Jenin: Massacre or Madness’, June 23, 2002), the Guardian (April 16, 2002), the Washington Post (April 26, 2002), Los Angeles Times (April 21, 2002), the Jerusalem Post (various funeral reports in April, 2002).
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Part IV: The US and Iraq prepare for war, August–September 2002 In ‘Weapons of mass propaganda’ I drew on reports in the Washington Post (July 31, 2002), Orlando Sentinel (October 3, 2002) and Time (September 16, 2002). In ‘The road to Basra’ I drew on reports in the Guardian (September 24, 2002), the Washington Post (September 22, 2002) and USA Today (September 27, 2002). In ‘September 11, 2002’ I drew on reports in the New York Times (September 11, 2002), Newsweek magazine (September 9, 2002), New York Post (September 12, 2002) and the Washington Post (September 12, 2002).
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Unknown to me, Manhattan to Baghdad had been a work in progress since The Sydney Morning Herald dispatched me to cover the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait—in my first week as a foreign correspondent. That leaves me with a small army of editors to acknowledge. But topping the list are Herald publisher and editor-in-chief Alan Revell and Herald editor Robert Whitehead—this book would not have been possible without their enthusiastic commitment and support for my endless travel and the stories it produces. I’m also indebted are Herald international editor Geoff Kitney for his friendship, wise counsel and shrewd analysis as I have grappled with the twists and turns of history on the run. Richard Walsh, of Allen & Unwin, was the first to see a book in it all—one of his biscuit-dry e-mails reached me late in 2001 in the backblocks of Afghanistan within days of the Taliban ambush in which three of my colleagues died. He and Karen Penning, my editor at A&U, have been champions. I am more than grateful for their ideas, patience and good sense as I fitted ‘their’ book around the more pressing daily needs of the Herald. Two things sustain my love for this kind of journalism. The first is telling stories that need to be told and being able to spend time with the ordinary people who suffer so much more in cataclysmic times than do the leaders, politicians and generals who call the shots from the comfort and safety of their distant offices, bunkers and palaces. The second is to share time on the road with colleagues. There is rare camaraderie among journalists in war zones, and in particular I want to thank Larry Doyle, Byron Pitts, Phil Ittner and Mark Laganga of the CBS network for being there when I needed them. I also feel privileged to have been a member of the foreign press corp at a time when so much was asked of us. Like most of my colleagues, I’m grateful to Ahmed Rashid for producing Taliban when we all needed a crash course on what was happening in Central Asia, and as a reporter I’m awed by the resources that newspapers like the New York Times devote
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to the War on Terror and the breadth and depth of the coverage it delivers. Pam Williams deserves very special thanks. She too was obliged to take the road from Manhattan to Baghdad. Wife, friend and colleague, she was quick to see pitfalls ahead, she was the editor of first resort and always, when I have the brains to be with her in our Manhattan home, she is an exceptional provider. I owe her so much. New York, November 2002
