Friendships form fast in war zones. At night, we gathered in someone’s hotel room at the more luxurious Palace Hotel. I knew Ivan Watson, the NPR correspondent, and Quil Lawrence, a BBC World Radio reporter, from Istanbul and Afghanistan. We bought bottles of wine from the Ashti with labels that dubiously read BOTTLED IN EUROPE. Quil sometimes put on salsa music, and we spun around the hotel room for hours. But the invasion was looming, so few of us got out of control. Anyone on assignment in northern Iraq represented a major news outlet, and the pressure to produce stories every day was enormous.
Elizabeth, I quickly learned, worked from morning until long after midnight—until our interpreter and driver cried for mercy. To Elizabeth, our fixers were extensions of us, a fundamental part of the team. We went through what seemed like a dozen drivers and interpreters in our first month in Kurdistan. An interpreter was good but he showed up late for work. A driver was good but his car was unreliable. An interpreter was good but he didn’t get along with the driver. One evening we were reporting in a remote village and got a flat tire on the way back to the city. Our driver didn’t know how to change the tire. We sat in pitch darkness on the side of a road weeks before the Americans first attacked Iraq, waiting for our driver to learn how to change a tire. We had to fire him.
Eventually we ended up with Dashti and Salim. Dashti, our interpreter, spoke Arabic, Kurdish, Persian, and English. He even learned some Spanish in a few weeks on the Internet because he would hear me talking to Uxval on the phone and was frustrated he didn’t understand the language. Salim was a funny Kurdish boy who wore a mischievous smile and talked incessantly about finding love. Elizabeth talked through the story with Dashti while I gave Salim advice on romance, and they made our jobs possible. I formed an attachment to them that would last for years.
Kurdish peshmerga fire rockets at Ansar al-Islam territory near Halabja, northern Iraq, March 30, 2003.
During the day we went looking for signs of U.S. military presence in northern Iraq. We kept our eyes out for Special Forces who might be wearing beards and local clothes, trying to fade into the background. I photographed the training of the peshmerga, Kurdish fighters ready to ally with the Americans. And we went in search of the Sunni fundamentalist group Ansar al-Islam that was hiding in villages across the mountains. The Bush administration alleged the group was linked to both Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, thus bolstering the case for war.
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THE INVASION began on March 19. American Special Operations troops parachuted in across northern Iraq in the dead of night. The U.S. military there wasn’t looking for WMDs or Saddam; it was looking for terrorists, specifically Ansar al-Islam. The Americans rained cruise missiles on many of the villages and military sites throughout the region, causing thousands of Kurdish families to flee the area. We traveled almost daily to the area around Halabja, where Ansar al-Islam was holed up.
I didn’t know the language of war. I didn’t know about cruise missiles (which could be fired on a precise target from a navy ship stationed within range) or mortars (bombs shot out of tubes propped up on the ground) or rocket-propelled grenades (small exploding rockets that can be shot from the shoulder). If the sound came from an RPG, that meant we journalists were being targeted; if a cruise missile was dropped, it was most likely from the Americans. I needed to know these things. I needed to know who had what weapons and how they were fired off, and where they were going to land.
One morning a group of about eight journalists woke early to investigate civilian casualties and collateral damage from the Americans’ attack the night before. Our massive white Land Cruisers—representing the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and several television and radio channels—snaked along the road that led through the lush green foothills of snowcapped mountains toward the hostile area. Our vehicles were clearly marked with the initials T.V., for “television.” The area was not pro-American. The road ahead into Khurmal, a conservative Islamic town infiltrated with Ansar al-Islam, was actually too dangerous for Westerners to traverse; the terrorists could easily target journalists from their perch in the mountains or on the roads. Dozens of civilians were fleeing in flatbed trucks, overstuffed cars, anything with wheels, their belongings strung flimsily to the roof, faces pinned to the windows as they zipped past us on the side of the road. I thought of Lucian Perkins’s 1995 prizewinning photo from Chechnya, which had been etched in my mind: the hands of a young refugee pinned against the rear window of a van as families fled the fighting.