The Way to Baghdad: Day 18 of the War

By Zaid Mahir

The story begins in the historical city of Samarra, where Zaid Mahir, the narrator, says goodbye to his 83-year-old father and heads to Baghdad, where he left his wife and daughter of 15 months. The familiar route inspires the narrators reminiscences and verse comforts he was used to in his constant travel between the two cities. But the succession of memories, cast against the backdrop of serene countryside, is interrupted, and the peace and safety of Zaid and his driver are challenged, when an American marine force intercepts and occupies the highway. Baghdad is still twenty kilometers away. Nearly taken captive by the new arrivals, he manages to communicate well enough in English to convince the soldiers he should be allowed to continue his journey. Though danger looms, the memory of his daughters recent birthday party, and her favorite teddy bear, gives him the drive he needs to keep trying to get home. By the time he is re-united with his family, Baghdad has turned into a ghostly city waiting for redemption in the dark.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: May 25, 2011
• ISBN: 9781426964695

Zaid Mahir

Born in Damascus, Syria, Zaid Mahir learned early on in life that diversity is a virtue. He graduated with a Masters in English from the College of Arts, University of Baghdad, and went on to teach at the university level. His translations and writings have appeared in Iraqi, Arab, and eventually American journals and periodicals. He lives in Columbia, Missouri, with his wife, Shehla, and their daughters, Maha, Ghada, and Layla.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Praise for the Book

Prologue

Part One

One

Morning Tea with my Father

Two

Departure

Three

The Journey Begins

Four

Al-Boqcha

Five

Timely Epiphany

Six

Al-Dojeil & Beyond

Seven

Al-Taji under Attack

Eight

A Desperate Attempt

Nine

A Temporary Break

Ten

Lasting Memories

Part Two

Eleven

A Chance for a Conversation

Twelve

An Attempt to Break Through

Thirteen

Against All Odds

Fourteen

A Peaceful Conversation

Fifteen

We have a situation here!

Sixteen

Rapid Developments

Seventeen

A New Company

Eighteen

Maha

Nineteen

Deployment Completed

Twenty

Departure Arrangements

Twenty-One

Just Before We Left: Translator’s Predicament

Part Three

Twenty-Two

The Report

Twenty-Three

Back to Point Zero

Twenty-Four

Another Way to Baghdad

Twenty-Five

An Untimely Surprise

Twenty-Six

The Bag Episode

Twenty-Seven

Al-Tarmiyah Floating Bridge

Twenty-Eight

Crossing, at Last!

Twenty-Nine

One More Obstacle

Thirty

Nightfall

Postscript: On Samarra and the Mahirs

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

This memoir benefited from the creative and critical insights of friends and colleagues, and would not have been possible without the love and support of many men and women, who made me feel at home in Columbia, Missouri.

A complete list would be impossible and would, further, do injustice to people who, as they expressed their love and solidarity, insisted on remaining anonymous. Mention should be made, though, of the following:

Manuel Leon, who graciously listened as I read to him parts of my then raw and rough draft and who, in winter 2006/7, generously provided what he described as a friend’s grant, at a time of financial difficulties for both.

Rihab Sawah and Anthony Clark, whose love and support, and the love and support of their respective families and friends, is unique. Their insistence that I had an important story to tell and a voice unheard before was and continues to be reassuring.

Maureen Stanton, whose Advanced Creative Nonfiction course, at the University of Missouri-Columbia, benefited my manuscript tremendously. The feedback I received from Professor Stanton and peers then, and Maureen’s continued feedback after that, scaffolded my narrative and made me enjoy the act of writing even more.

Nina Furstenau, my editor, who gave my narrative utmost attention, in terms of voice, perspective, and detail. She rigorously, professionally, but warmly revised my work as though it were hers, but never at the expense of the narrative and narrator.

Karen Piper, Anthony Clark, and an anonymous critic for feedback and challenging questions in discussions of the work-in-progress.

Praise for the Book

The Way to Baghdad: Day 18 of the War, by Zaid N. Mahir, should be required reading for every American. These memories, stories we tell our children, of a land we called home are so richly described, replete with history, authentic personality, and integrity that one feels transported from the sad world of ideologies into a precious universe of traditions, culture, and daily life. We might find ourselves asking the essential question that has too often been overlooked, WHY? What has really justified the sacrifice of so many civilians? The bewildering chaos and loss? The diaspora of a million people or more? Mahir has, with gracious and elegant style, in a tone of humility and deep honesty, woven his own pain and puzzlement into a wise memoir worthy of widest attention and respect. From the first pages, when he describes his father drinking a cup of tea, we are pulled in, and riveted.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Poet and Novelist

Author of Different Ways to Pray

Zaid Mahir has written a deeply moving witness account of a day in the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, a single day that, nevertheless, reveals through Mahir’s lyrical, keenly observed, and penetrating narrative the larger ramifications of the destruction wrought upon the Iraqi people by the United States’ ill-conceived and self-serving pre-emptive attack. Along the journey from Samarra to Baghdad, as Mahir attempts to reunite with his wife and daughter amid active bombing outside the city, as he translates and negotiates between U.S. soldiers and detained Iraqi citizens in a moment fraught with fear and tension, readers get a glimpse inside Iraq’s rich culture, its politics, the country’s long and illustrious history and honored traditions, and, most poignantly, inside the daily lives of its citizens— mothers, fathers, sons, daughters. Mahir is quietly and unceremoniously courageous in his actions on day eighteen, and in this unflinching retelling of that experience.

Maureen Stanton

Assistant Professor of English

University of Missouri-Columbia

Prologue

Samarra is the tribal seat of my family. It is where we, the House of Mahir, come from. It is where we have been ruling over our clan, Albu-Kan‘aan, for a century now. It is where The Way to Baghdad begins.

Part One

One

Morning Tea with my Father

On the sixth day of April, 2003, day 18 of the invasion, a few minutes past 9:00 on a Sunday morning, I woke up feeling slack and grimaced at the roily weather. Little did I know then that the morning was the beginning of a long occupation of Baghdad and the herald of a new age of darkness in the modern history of Iraq.

As my father and I sat at the low tea table facing each other, my father held a glass teacup, an istikaan, with his right-hand fingers and let the plate rest in the palm of his left hand. He would keep that attitude for the rest of the conversation or until he finished his tea. He did not usually drink hot beverages as fast as most Iraqis do. Instead, he enjoyed every sip, from the hottest to the least hot. And holding the istikaan with his fingers and not putting it down was his way of enjoying the act itself. Eating and drinking were never an end in themselves for my father, regardless of the meal or time of day. And that morning was no exception.

I was in Samarra on a two-day visit to see my father in his hometown house. My father, who had been in Baghdad by the time the invasion began, initially refused to leave for Samarra, where he could have a perfect haven. Mild pleas and tender solicitation from his children failed to persuade him that the capital would not be safe once the war on Iraq started. Not until almost every member of the extended family intervened, exercising one kind of pressure or another, that he eventually yielded. Reluctantly, on a dark night in March, just 24 hours before the United States began pounding Baghdad in a military campaign dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom, my father left Baghdad in a convoy of five cars led by my eldest brother, Safwaan. Many members of my extended family did the same, leaving their homes in Baghdad in the care of neighbors or in-laws who remained to protect their own homes or who, for better or worse, had no place else to go. I stayed. And between the first day of the invasion and this day, April 6th, I had not spent the night out of Baghdad except to visit my father in Samarra. My second visit was after he had an episode of mild hypertension.

I had arrived at my father’s house in Hay al-Sikak in the eastern part of Samarra Friday afternoon, April 4th. He was quite happy to see me and spent a large portion of the evening briefing me on developments in his health, on how he received competent medical attention during his ailment, and how he was keeping to the dietary restrictions he had obliged himself to follow for years. In turn, I briefed him on everyone he knew in Baghdad and he was pleased to learn that life went on relatively smoothly for those of us who did not leave. We had no major complaints, I said, except that electricity was out most of the time, after power plants had been struck by long-range missiles on the first day of the war. With the lack of electricity, water supplies were seriously short. Telephone services, relatively dependable in the first two weeks of the invasion, were becoming increasingly unpredictable. In some residential and industrial areas of Baghdad land phones were still functioning, though not any more in al-Waziriyah, I explained, where my father’s house and mine are located. We lost phone service there by degrees during the second week of the war. By April, we had none. The main switchboard building and tower of al-A‘dhamiyah had been struck twice in three days, terminating communication. The last phone call I received was from my cousin, Amal, who broke the news of my father’s hypertension.

My father and I spent most of Saturday indoors, receiving family members, next of kin, and clansmen. I learned about a couple of missile attacks against civilian facilities around the town of Samarra, resulting in deaths and injuries. I heard people complain of deteriorating services— the kind of complaint people make when the war feels close to them but is not actually in their neighborhood. Long chats on the situation generally revealed a sense of dissatisfaction with the way the crisis had been handled by the Iraqi political leadership; the dissatisfaction was made poignant by people’s growing fatigue of wars and fear of the unknown. Visitors often lamented the technological incompatibility between Iraq and the invaders, and the fact that the American army outnumbered the Iraqi army both in weapons and communication systems. They said that Iraqi defensive fighting was futile. My father and I were more optimistic than our fellow clansmen, perhaps unrealistically so.

Sunday came and I prepared to return to Baghdad. My father had just made the morning tea as I joined him in his study. Having had dinner late the night before, I did not feel like eating breakfast, certainly not the kind we Suwaamrah often have: eggs scrambled in thick ghee, black olives, and cheese, accompanied by freshly baked pita bread, butter, homemade marmalade, and milk. Instead, I had tea without milk, and ate nothing. My father brewed tea in a conventional Iraqi kettle and poured the beverage into glass istikaans for both of us. The glass cups, a favorite in Iraq, keep beverages hot longer than other tea cups do. After pouring, my father insisted that I have sustenance for the road, so I reluctantly ate some baqssam, or plain wheat rusk, and two small pieces of white cheese he had cut for me. We revisited the crisis that led to the invasion.

It was pointless— all the diplomacy, the delegations, the cooperation, he said. There was a sense of disappointment in my father’s voice, as we remembered how time and again the Americans sought to bring about change in Iraq. The government of Iraq, they claimed, was not complying with the UN resolutions. Instead, the Bush administration alleged, Iraq continued to develop weapons of mass destruction and showed no respect for the international community. And although every effort had been made to prove that we’d destroyed our facilities and capabilities in the early 1990s, the embargo continued. It continued under the eyes of the whole world that, unfortunately, seemed to have authorized the United States to be the policeman of the globe.

My father took a sip of tea, and mused for a minute before he gave a sigh and, in a calm and serene 84-year-old voice, said: We’ve been undeniably patient, but patience did not pay off.

You’re right, I murmured. I thought of the numerous factories, laboratories, and sites, the machines, instruments, and equipment, which were destroyed or dismantled during the embargo. Most of them had been used for civilian purposes and could have been preserved intact to help in the reconstruction of a viable state after the Kuwait war. In the name of disarming Iraq, the entire country was dismantled.

It was done by the United Nations Special Committee (UNSCOM) and its executive director, Richard Butler. Before he took over, everything had gone smoothly and the Special Committee was about to finish work in Iraq in 1993 and turn in a favorable final report about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Then Butler and his American inspectors appeared on stage to create a crisis and they did. The crisis was given new momentum every time we got close to an end. And the embargo went on forever. By the mid-90s Iraq had already fulfilled the requirements of the UN resolution 687, paragraphs 8, 9, and 10, which were within the competence of UNSCOM, and paragraphs 11, 12, and 13, which were about our nuclear program and fell within the competence of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The irony was, the more responsive and cooperative we were the more evasive and aggressive the Americans grew. Back in 1993, my father remembered, Reuters published a report that had an interview with Ralph Ekeus, the UN ambassador to Iraq.

My father finished his tea and put the istikaan and plate down on the tea table. He looked sideways slowly in both directions, his eyes searching for something. On his left side was his bed— old, simple, and cozy. On his right stood a small, brown, wooden bookcase, which had three shelves stacked with a few books and manuscripts—literary, historical, and religious— he consulted every now and then. He was not close enough to reach the bookcase, so he leaned forward, pressing his forearm against the right arm of the wooden chair, willed himself to straighten his back and stood upright. Old age has its dictates, I thought, but my father still had a lot of his old spirit. I thought to offer help as pulling out something from the low bookcase might be difficult. As if he had read my thoughts, my father turned to me suddenly before stepping toward the case and, in a tone tinged with some discontent, said: I’m not too old to take a couple of steps by myself, son, and pick something from the shelves!

No, you’re not, I said, baffled at my own misjudgment. My father then turned right and, carefully and with determination, walked to the bookcase. Bending halfway, he soon was browsing with his right hand the items on the first shelf, his fingers delicately staying for a second or two on an item, before moving to the next one. From my seat, I could see his eyes perusing the shelves from right to left before they found a group of diaries and notebooks in different sizes that had been shelved in chronological order. Now he stood by his chair and, positioning his feet between the tea table and the chair, he carefully but happily sat himself down without appealing to the chair’s wooden arms for help. As he did, a smile glittered on his face, a delicate, faint, but knowing smile of an old, resilient knight.

This is a diary, he said, but it’s a special one. In it I have written down many important things… things of general significance. It covers the first few years of the last decade. I watched as my father sifted through the pages of his register. Half way through he stopped, his thumbs each pressing against an open page and holding the diary wide open. Raising his head, he looked me in the eye, his face now smiling more triumphantly, and said rather loudly, "Here it is! Listen, son, and correct me if I am wrong. Entry [January 14, 1993]:

On the radio, Reuters reports an interview with Ekeus, broadcast by the Swedish Radio yesterday. Ekeus says, Iraq’s compliance has been a success so far. It would be tragic if the remaining five percent of implementation could not be carried out.

In effect, Ekeus’s announcement meant that in less than two years after the Kuwait war, Iraq had substantially implemented the UN resolutions and destroyed most of its nuclear potential.

I wondered, How long did it take to destroy the rest, the five percent?! A month? Two months? Five?

That is not all that there is to it, son, my father corrected. He sifted through the pages of the diary and stopped at an earlier entry. "Ekeus was not even telling the whole truth. Listen to this. Entry [September 2, 1992]:

On the radio, France Press reports Leader of the Action Team at the IAEA, Professor Maurizio Zifferero, stated today in Baghdad, ‘Iraq’s nuclear program stands at zero point now."’

In other words, my father went on, the American allegations about Iraq developing WMDs in the last ten or so years were ill-founded. Still, the American administrations, Bush and Clinton alike, managed to make the UN Security Council believe that Iraq was brushing aside the International Community’s wish to see peace and stability in the region.

My father winked knowingly. They manipulated the Security Council with English help, of course, exercising pressure and blackmail inside the United Nations. He continued, Americans are fond of creating crises here and there in the world, particularly in the Third World, where there is a fertile ground for conflicts.

Divide to rule, the old expansionist motto of Great Britain, I said. But there was another reason, my father noticed. The United States had serious economic problems. The White House realized the need to take the American citizen’s attention away from internal issues by faking external threats against the United States’ ideals of ‘freedom and democracy.’ As my father talked, I remembered a film I had seen several years ago, Wag the Dog, starring Dustin Hoffman as a producer ccommissioned by the White House to create a story of terror allegedly taking place in socialist Albania. Weapons of mass destruction were a Hollywood make-believe concept in the service of American politics, I thought.

The Americans realized that the monitoring system, established through resolution 687, had been functioning effectively since 1994, and that there would come a day when it would put the lie to their allegations. So, given UNSCOM’s repetitive emphasis, from 1995 on, that Iraq had been dispossessed of its potential ability to produce chemical weapons and ballistic missiles, the White House turned to the theory of concealment.

Richard Butler played a key role by understating Iraq’s collaboration with inspection teams. He claimed that he and his team had been denied access to certain Iraqi areas and facilities that had nuclear weapons. Butler’s lies enabled the United States and Britain to craft the Security Council resolution 1134 in 1997, which cancelled the regular sixty-day review of the sanctions already imposed under the UN umbrella. This is why we had to prevent the Special Committee from continuing to work in January 1998, my father said confidently, We could no longer tolerate the insult and injustice. Indeed, the committee was biased. Of the sixteen members that made up the inspection team under Butler, nine were Americans and five British.

My father fumbled into the diary. He said: "Butler gave a statement for the New York Times in which he claimed that Iraq had bacteriological weapons in sufficient quantities to destroy Tel Aviv. I replied that that statement was not received well by some permanent members of the Security Council. At this, my father looked me in the eye and corrected: Do you mean France, Russia, and China? Oh, yes… They sure did not. They rejected Butler’s allegations and ruled out his statement as irresponsible. He paused for a few seconds before adding, That was all they did!" To my mind, these countries’ passive stand was an act of political prostitution in every sense of the word. As if reading my thoughts, my father nodded in agreement. Then sinking smoothly into his armchair and stretching his legs under the tea table, he closed the diary and