I HAD BEEN ANTICIPATING arriving in Baghdad for many months, but by the time I pulled into the Hamra Hotel, where many of the foreign journalists were staying, I barely had the energy to familiarize myself with a new city. Baghdad was relatively prosperous in 2003. Under Saddam it had a proper infrastructure, with roads, electricity, and water; green spaces and private clubs; and riverside fish restaurants along the Tigris. Compared with Afghanistan’s, Iraq’s population was well educated. Arabs had traveled from across the Middle East to attend the university in Baghdad. Those first few weeks life went on in a surprisingly routine way. The city didn’t feel particularly dangerous. Civilians were out; shops were open; there were cars on the streets. Electricity and water functioned in select neighborhoods.
Elizabeth and I stayed at a rented apartment across from the Hamra, in a residential neighborhood named Al-Jadriya. In the beginning the social life of most journalists revolved around the Hamra pool, drinking beer and wine and watching the muscular correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, Scott Peterson, do pull-ups from the fire escape in a teeny-weeny black Speedo. A few times a month a vivacious, blond California native named Marla Ruzicka, the founder of an organization that counted civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, arranged salsa parties for all the journalists and aid workers who didn’t have security restrictions. The BBC radio correspondent Quil and I would dance for hours on end until it was time to return to our respective rooms.
During one of the first summer parties, a correspondent asked, “Who has gotten separated since the start of the war?” and almost everyone in the room raised their hand. There were so many divorces after the fall of the Taliban, many more after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Our partners got tired of waiting, and rightly so. Many accused us of cheating, but more often than not we were cheating with our work. No other period in our careers would ever compare with the importance of those post-9/11 years. But some were also taking advantage of the double lives we led as journalists, and Baghdad, especially, became a laboratory for reckless romance. Home was a sort of parallel existence: our ever-present real life versus this exhilarating temporary one.
When I got back to my room, I always called Uxval. I recounted scenes from the day and tried to keep him involved in my life from a distance. But while my heart missed him, my passion had shifted to Baghdad. I was too busy, too absorbed by the rapidly evolving news, too enthralled with Iraq to devote much time to something or someone beyond my immediate grasp.
In fact, the hardest part of those early days was deciding what to cover first. A dictatorship’s secrets had been spilled into the streets of Baghdad. We needed to document the truth.
At a mass grave called al-Mahawil, sixty miles south of Baghdad, men and women weaved aimlessly around the open ditches where dozens of bodies had been dug up. Laid neatly in rows were plastic bags containing the remnants of each body, its tattered clothes, its strands of hair. Some had identification cards, some did not. Women in black abayas, the floor-length, curtainlike scarves worn by conservative women all over the Middle East, shuffled from grave to grave weeping, screaming, arms thrust into the air. They were the widows and mothers of the disappeared men that Saddam’s loyalists executed during the Shiite uprising of 1991.
Soldiers with the Fourth Infantry Division, Third Brigade, from the First Batallion, 68th Armored Regiment, momentarily detain and search Iraqi men during a night patrol north of Baghdad near the Balad Air Base in Iraq, June 27, 2003. Minutes after this image was shot, an Iraqi civilian crossed over what was possibly a remotely detonated explosive device that had been set in a road and intended for the U.S. troops. The blast severely injured the man.
U.S. soldiers detain an Iraqi found on a compound near Balad during the early morning hours of June 29, 2003. American intelligence indicated that the man belonged to the Baathist party, whose members were supporters of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. U.S. troops across the Fourth Infantry Division acted as part of a massive series of night raids and patrols as a way of showing their force and retaliating against a spate of Iraqi attacks. The raids targeted the area north of Baghdad as far as Tikrit, along the Tigris, where there were presumed to be Baathist strongholds and deep-rooted support for Saddam.
An Iraqi man leans against the wall as he walks along rows of remains of bodies discovered in a mass grave south of Baghdad, May 29, 2003. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, thousands of bodies were pulled from mass grave sites around Iraq, evidence of the brutal, bloody regime of the former dictator.
I was unable to photograph. I had no idea where to start. I tried to imagine what they were feeling. The wailing women were dramatic but a cliché I had seen from mass graves before; as still images they could never convey the depth of what I was witnessing. Could the anguish of seeing a loved one after more than a decade—decayed in a plastic bag, with nothing more than strands of fabric for identification—ever translate into a single frame? My mentor Bebeto’s words rang in my ears: Observe, be patient. My dangling cameras beat against my stomach, and I walked clumsily through the dust, waiting for the right moment to capture the women’s grief. I had been shooting for almost ninety days without a break. This day proved it was worth it. All the doubts I had about the war were temporarily quelled. I suspected the American government was lying to us, but on that particular day I didn’t care.