I raised my camera to shoot and framed the smoldering tank and the soldiers standing guard, including the same three soldiers who had watched me clear access with their commanding officer and had escorted me across the street. They suddenly looked at me as if they had never seen me before. Then they raised their guns and lowered their eyes to the scope. They were aiming at me. At me? I held my viewfinder to my eye, my entire body shaking. Would they really kill me, my own countrymen? Would they kill me because I was photographing a place where one of their men had been injured in an IED attack—one of our men? I held my eye to the frame and paused. Was this a game of chicken? I pressed the button three times.
“YOU FUCKING BITCH!”
One of the soldiers began screaming at me, waving frantically, with his gun dangling from one arm.
“Get the fuck out of here, you fucking bitch,” he said again. He had an M16 automatic rifle, and he waved it in the air. The other soldiers still had their guns pointed at me. They could have shot me in that moment and made up some excuse, that they didn’t know I was a journalist. And I knew it. I went back to the car. The Americans wanted to bring democracy to Iraq, but a convenient form of democracy that allowed them to censor the media. Iraqi insurgents had begun attacking Americans. And American journalists—who had every right to take pictures of these public scenes—were beginning to face censorship. We were allowed to cover only what the people with guns wanted us to see.
? ? ?
I STAYED IN IRAQ for most of the summer of 2003, as the tenuous peace following the fall of Saddam continued to unravel. Bombings became more and more commonplace, and I grew inured to the violence. That November, the morning after I celebrated my thirtieth birthday, I was back in Istanbul, lying in a hangover slumber in Uxval’s arms. The familiar sound of a bomb jolted me awake. It was a sound I had grown used to in Iraq. But I didn’t believe it.
Uxval shook me. “That was a bomb!”
“Are you crazy?” I was annoyed. As if he knows what a bomb sounds like. “We are in Istanbul.” I had finished my last glass of wine only a few hours ago.
He jumped out of bed, ran to the front room, and craned his neck in search of smoke.
“There is debris in the air. That was a bomb. Get your cameras.”
Within minutes we were out the door. It was the fastest I had ever arrived at a bomb scene, because it was only a few streets over from mine. The tiny street was normally dark, shadowed by the grand nineteenth-century buildings of the old city, but today it was bathed in dusty shafts of light. The faces of the buildings had been torn off. Bloodied, motionless bodies lay contorted and half-naked in the rubble. Broken pipes spewed water in every direction; black soot and ash charred the road and the other buildings. Metal poles and pieces of wood fell across the street curbs. Crowds of Turkish men started to gather. I photographed.
A body lay across the sidewalk. I didn’t realize it was a body at first, because it was missing a head. Another body, a man, looked as if he had been blown out the front door of a shop. His shirt was on, intact, and his shoes were on his feet, but his pants were gone. He was wearing blue plaid boxers.
I worked quickly, before the Turkish police came to remove us all from the scene. Men rushed past me carrying a man on a makeshift stretcher. He was barely conscious, his face pale and green, blood streaming from a hole in his leg. The police arrived, and they came right for me—the woman. In the Middle East I was always the first one removed among my male colleagues. I rushed home to file.
Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the bomb. The target near our home was a synagogue.
A few days later the headquarters of HSBC, the British bank, was bombed in a neighborhood about twenty minutes away. Uxval and I again grabbed our cameras, which were ready this time, and ran toward a taxi stand down the street. As we were running, there was a massive explosion only a few hundred yards to our right, and we pulled out our cameras to shoot. A fresh plume of smoke and debris rose up to cloud the pristine blue sky.
Traumatized pedestrians who had just narrowly escaped death were fleeing the scene toward us, many with blood trickling down their faces. Uxval said that the explosion had come from the British Consulate.
Some people were still in the same position they had been in when the bomb went off. One man in a suit stood on a second-story windowsill of a now-faceless shop building. Dismembered bodies lay everywhere, under layers of bricks, broken sidewalk, dust, and ash. Survivors checked them for pulses. The outer wall of the British Consulate had collapsed on top of a car, and dozens of men frantically tried to dig it out from under the rubble.
I tried to dodge the police as I continued documenting the scene. They pushed me away again. I tried a different angle. I knew I had to shoot as much as I could—this was terrorism on a world scale. They zeroed in on me again, the woman. I watched a handful of Turkish male photographers shoot freely inside. Uxval was inside.
And then, suddenly, I desperately wanted to call my mother. I reached into my camera bag in search of my cell. It was gone. Someone had stolen my phone amid this death and horror. While bodies lay bleeding on the cement. The very thought broke me down. I felt sick to my stomach. I walked over to a telephone booth and shut myself inside. I couldn’t stop crying. Istanbul, my haven that wasn’t. The fence I had halfheartedly slung up between my work and my home had finally collapsed.