We drove back to the neighborhood where Saddam’s sons had been killed. While Kevin and I were standing near the car, making calls on our satellite phones, someone tapped my shoulder.
“Are you a journalist?” he asked in Arabic. “If so, why don’t you write about the boy Anas who was killed by U.S. soldiers yesterday?”
I thought I’d misheard him. “What are you talking about? What boy Anas? The only ones killed yesterday were Uday and Qusay. How do you know about this?”
“Anas was my brother.”
Kevin and I followed the man to his house, where his family was in mourning. The father was very kind, but the oldest brother was livid, especially when he saw Kevin. “You’re American!” he yelled. “Why did you kill my brother? He was just a boy.”
“I’m so sorry, but I didn’t kill your brother,” Kevin said, taken aback. “We want to write about it.”
The family told us that American soldiers had closed down some streets in the neighborhood during the raid to get Uday and Qusay. That afternoon, Anas, a twenty-one-year-old student, learned that he’d done well in his classes. He wanted to go to the mosque and give thanks, but the soldiers had blocked the road, and a crowd had begun protesting at the barricade. When some Iraqis started throwing rocks, the soldiers got nervous and a few of them fired on the demonstrators. A bullet struck Anas in the head.
We had the story, but it would be hard to prove. The army denied that any civilians had been killed. We talked to doctors who had treated the wounded, and who described their injuries as being specific to machine-gun fire. We found other victims and interviewed them again and again. “You think we made all this up?” a man who had been shot in the leg asked me incredulously. “Do you think we shot ourselves?” We convinced the doctors to show us the bullets they’d removed from people’s bodies, then went back to the neighborhood and got bullets out of the walls to see if they matched. Kevin took the ammunition to the army for confirmation, but the Americans continued to deny what dozens of witnesses had seen.
One moment from those days will always stay with me. When we were talking to Anas’s family, his oldest brother, the one who had accused Kevin of killing him, pulled me aside. “If you’re Palestinian, go and fight against these Americans and Jews,” he said.
“I’m Moroccan.”
“You should fight,” he told me, looking straight into my eyes.
His father overheard and apologized. “My son was very close to his brother,” he said.
I told him I understood. “You lost your son, but we didn’t kill your son. Every American is not bad,” I said.
But I couldn’t help remembering Maureen Fanning’s question: Why do they hate us so much?
*
IN AUGUST, AFTER more than three months in Iraq, I flew back to Germany, but I kept thinking about Baghdad. Maybe because I spoke Arabic, I felt that I understood the place more fully than others. Like many reporters, I felt responsible to the Iraqis, as if, by staying away, I was letting them down.
I went back to the university, but it felt stupid to be sitting in class when there was a war going on. My classmates talked about the rest of the world with typical Western arrogance, but they’d never seen the suffering or complexity of war up close. What had been tolerable to me before was now unbearable. Once you’ve wept with someone who’s lost a family member because of another country’s political decisions, it’s hard to view international relations with detachment. At home, I monitored news from Iraq obsessively, constantly flipping on CNN in case I’d missed something. My parents said I seemed nervous, but I didn’t notice.
After three weeks, to my parents’ dismay, I went back. The land route from Jordan had become too dangerous, so Peter and I, along with Guy Raz, an NPR reporter, flew to Turkey and drove across Iraq’s northern border. This time, my working arrangement was a bit different. Guy had asked me to work for him, and Peter had agreed, as long as I could report on breaking news for the Post. I also got approval to work on occasional small pieces for German newspapers and to do interviews with German radio in case of breaking news.
The NPR correspondents stayed at a small hotel in central Baghdad. It was quieter than the Washington Post house, and my work with Guy moved at a slower pace and allowed me to explore communities that often didn’t make the news. Our main translator, Abu Aara, was an Armenian Christian, a community that had for decades lived freely in Iraq. He invited us into his home, and we attended the baptism of one of his relatives’ sons. The guests I met there spoke of a different Iraq.
The families of these Armenians had fled the massacres of the Ottoman Empire ninety years before. Under Saddam, they said, they’d lived and worshipped freely. “What people in the West don’t seem to understand is that the Ba’ath Party was the force trying to separate religion as much as possible from politics,” Abu Aara’s pastor told me. “Saddam was fighting the ayatollahs in Iran because they wanted to brainwash Shia in Iraq and fight secularism, but it would be wrong to say that whoever was Shia was deprived of rights.” Minorities weren’t automatically subject to discrimination, he said. I thought of Tariq Aziz, a Christian who had been Saddam Hussein’s longtime foreign minister.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the pastor’s words. Our politicians and advisers hadn’t done their due diligence. They had come with the perspective that our system—democracy—would work for everyone, and they didn’t consider the consequences that adopting an entirely new system might have for people living elsewhere. I wondered, not for the first time, whether the West was unintentionally opening the door to a more religious and sectarian Middle East.
*
SINCE MY ARRIVAL in Iraq, I’d seen neighborhoods changing. In some cases, Shia militias had forced Sunni families to move to other areas. Shia women living in areas that were controlled by militias told me that they had to wear a full body covering known as a chador or abaya when leaving the house. “It wasn’t like that before,” a woman named Hannan, who had been in the Iraqi army, told me. “I just wore my uniform; I never put on a veil.” But since the fall of Saddam Hussein, things had changed dramatically. “It’s increasingly the mullahs and militias who are running the show,” she told me. “I can’t leave the house uncovered or without my mother anymore.”