“They are people from the most wanted list, very important, very big. I can’t tell you more now.”
At first, I planned to go alone, but given the distance and the curfew, it became clear that I would have to spend the night in Mosul. Another Post reporter, Kevin Sullivan, joined me, along with an Iraqi stringer and driver.
When we reached the affluent residential part of Mosul where the shooting had occurred, we saw that U.S. soldiers had closed down the area. A large villa had been destroyed. There was broken glass everywhere and bullets still lodged in the walls; helicopters circled overhead. Passersby told me that the Americans had just carried bodies out of the house.
“Did you see who it was?” I asked.
They nodded. “Uday and Qusay, the president’s sons,” a bearded Iraqi army veteran in a white ankle-length robe, or dishdasha, told me. “May God have mercy on their souls.”
On the street nearby, three soldiers who looked to be nineteen or twenty years old stood in front of a tank, trying to keep people away from the ruined house. I wanted to talk to more people, so while Kevin sat in the car making calls, I approached the tank. When the soldiers heard I was from the Washington Post, they weren’t happy.
“We hate the Washington Post, and the fucking New York Times,” one of them said. “You guys are always writing such shit about us.”
I took out my satellite phone and made a call. One of the soldiers watched me closely.
“Can you call the United States on that?” he asked when I got off.
I told him you could call anywhere.
“So can I call Texas?” He hadn’t spoken to his pregnant wife in several months. “I just want to tell her I’m okay.”
“Take it,” I told him.
He looked at the sergeant on top of the tank. “Can I?” The sergeant nodded. The soldier called his wife, and one of the other soldiers called his parents.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry we weren’t polite to you in the beginning,” one of the soldiers said afterward. “We’re under so much pressure. It’s not what we expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“We thought people would love us here. We thought they’d offer us tea and be happy to see us. Instead, they attack us. We see our friends getting killed. People are angry with us.”
The sergeant wouldn’t tell me who they’d killed in the villa, but I overheard one of the soldiers say, “There was Uday and then it was just boom, boom, boom.” We called the Post’s bureau chief back in Baghdad, who got confirmation from the army: Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, two of the most wanted men in Iraq, had been killed.
By then it was getting dark, and we had to find a place to spend the night. Unfortunately, the only decent hotel in the city was already full, so we settled for a grimy motel with no name whose main clientele seemed to be Iraqi truck drivers. It wasn’t the kind of place where a respectable woman would stay—in fact, I didn’t see any other women on the premises—but it was our only option.
The man at the reception desk told us to wait until his colleague arrived. That man was responsible for the rooms.
Men in long robes occupied four chairs in the reception area. One of them was smoking, and I realized that he was staring at me. He turned to the man next to him and whispered something in his ear. The second man stood up and left the hall.
The man who had been staring took out a pack of Marlboros and offered me one. He had dark skin, a mustache, and very dark eyes.
“Thanks, but I don’t smoke,” I said in Arabic.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Morocco. You?”
“Deir Azzhor. I am the chief of a big tribe there.” He took another drag on his cigarette. “So you’re staying here, too?”
I told him we weren’t sure. Kevin and our Iraqi stringer sat nearby in the lobby, but our driver was still out in the parking lot, and I was beginning to wonder what was taking him so long. I left the reception area and went out to look for him. Sure enough, the man who had been sitting with the tribal chief was talking to our driver. When he saw me, he went back into the motel.
“What did he want from you?” I asked the driver.
“He said he was working for this tribal chief from Deir Azzhor and asked me about you, if you were Muslim and if you were married.”
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“I told him you were Muslim and not married.”
“Why are you telling him private stuff about me?”
The driver shrugged. “It’s normal.”
“No, it’s not,” I said.
When I went back into the reception hall, the men were still sitting there. The tribal chief followed my every movement with his eyes, still smoking. Once or twice, he smirked at me lasciviously.
When the receptionist finally came, I gave him twenty dollars and asked him not to tell anyone which room I was in. He took the money and smiled. “Of course not. Don’t worry.”
Our stringer, Naseer, was watching. He told me I shouldn’t trust the receptionist.
“Did you see what kind of watch the tribal chief was wearing? They might look poor but the guy is rich. You gave the receptionist twenty dollars. That chief will give him two hundred dollars to get your room number and the extra key.”
We had four rooms close to each other. The bedsheets were crumpled and dirty, and the toilet was a hole in the ground. It reminded me of the toilet my grandmother had in Meknes when I lived with her as a child, except that this one was filthy and stank. Brownish water trickled from the shower head.
My room was on the same floor as the others, but while my three male colleagues had rooms next to each other, mine was at the far end of the corridor.
I asked Naseer to switch rooms with me but not to tell anyone. I told him to come get me in the morning and gave him and Kevin a password: “apple pie.” If I didn’t hear those words, I told them, I wouldn’t open the door.
Even though I was still a bit worried about the tribal chief and his men, I was exhausted. I put my windbreaker over the pillow and slept with my clothes on. In the middle of the night I heard loud voices and the noise of people running but realized it was happening somewhere else on the floor. I went back to sleep.
The next morning I waited for Naseer to knock on my door and accompany me downstairs. “You know, you’re really lucky we switched rooms,” he said, laughing. “They came in the middle of the night. It seemed as if they were planning to kidnap you.” When they opened the door and saw Naseer, they shouted and ran away.
“They left the hotel, but I told you that bastard receptionist must have given them the room number and key.”
We passed the receptionist as we walked through the lobby to our car. His cheeks and left eye looked swollen, and he wasn’t smiling. “Instead of the two hundred dollars, he probably received two hundred slaps and punches for not delivering the bride,” Naseer said, giggling.