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IN THE MONTHS AFTER Saddam was deposed, Iraq fell apart. A population that had been silenced for decades was suddenly able to express itself any way it wanted. Throngs of Iraqis lined up for hours outside banks to withdraw their money, screaming with frustration as they struggled to get through the doors. American soldiers shot off their weapons above the crowds, sometimes punching the very men they were there to “liberate.” Fires raged as looters prowled the streets pirating electrical wires. Checkpoints began popping up around the city.
Nothing made sense. American troops allowed the looting of the National Museum but protected the caged lions at the house of Sad-dam’s son Uday. To the media, the troops proudly displayed the Hussein brothers’ sex dens—decorated with heart-shaped love seats and littered with pornography—while basic services like water, gas, and electricity failed to materialize. The superpower couldn’t provide for a basic quality of life. Then the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, disbanded the entire Iraqi army, leaving thousands of trained soldiers angry, jobless, and unable to feed their families.
One morning I came upon crowds of Iraqis agitating under the scalding sun, waiting to get their propane tanks filled for cooking. They had been in line for hours and were losing their patience. The American troops were gassing them with a strange, bright-green gas. I photographed the mayhem: ladies in black abayas shoving one another and clanging against American tanks; men in line, exasperated, behind barbed wire; American soldiers screaming at the crowds until the veins along their necks popped out.
Suddenly one of the Iraqi men jumped out of line. A group of American soldiers picked him up and threw him to the ground. One had his knee on the guy’s chest; another started punching him in the face. Iraqis screamed in protest.
I kneeled about eight feet from the scene and photographed, shocked by what I was witnessing. What happened to “liberating the Iraqis”? I was waiting for one of the soldiers to step in and stop the madness when I noticed an old woman in an abaya in the right corner of my frame. She was about sixty years old. She raised a propane tank over her head and smashed it on a crouching soldier’s neck. I kept shooting. No one even noticed me.
The Americans didn’t understand the value of honor and respect in an Arab culture. Young American soldiers, many of whom had never traveled abroad before, much less to a Muslim country, didn’t realize that a basic familiarity with Arab culture might help their cause. During night patrols, fresh-faced Americans in their late teens and early twenties would stop cars jam-packed with Iraqi family members—men, women, and children—shine their flashlights into the cars, and scream, “Get the fuck out of the car!” Armed to the teeth, they busted into private homes late in the night, pushing the men to the floor, screaming in their faces in English, and zip-tying their wrists while questioning them—often without interpreters and while the children stood, terrified, in the doorway. They would shine their flashlights on women in nightgowns, unveiled, track their dirty boots through people’s homes, soil their carpets and their dignity. For an Arab man, foreigners seeing his wife uncovered brought shame and dishonor to the family, and it merited revenge.
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BY MAY I was used to life on the front, and it was the world outside that had begun to feel unfamiliar. I received an e-mail from Vineta, my college roommate. She was still living in New York, like so many of my old friends. Her e-mail began: “I was sitting at the boat pond in Central Park today reading the paper . . .”
I stopped. People really did spend their days relaxing in a park, reading an actual copy of the newspaper. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a morning like that, where I didn’t wake up and run to the roof to look for smoke from that morning’s bombs, or wasn’t following some desperately sad woman looking through tethered plastic bags for the remains of her son. I couldn’t remember the last time I had even held or seen a real newspaper, for that matter.
A few days later I left Iraq. I needed a break, and I needed to see Uxval, who had been idling in Turkey, waiting for me to get back. I drove back up through Iraq, through Sulaymaniyah, and into eastern Turkey. Now going home felt like leaving home, too.