CIR: Dispatch

Friday afternoon at the Shandabar

Shane Bauer — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:08:04 -0800

BAGHDAD—Hisham Mustafa lives for Habermas. In a corner of the Shandabar café, he is taken away by his love for the German philosopher. "I cannot say that I study him. Study is such a big word," the literary critic says modestly, looking at me with gentle eyes through coke bottle glasses. "I simply try to understand him and apply his criticisms to Arabic literature." He pauses to take a long puff on his water pipe, then waxes on: "You know? Things are always changing. Language is alive. Religion gives us a view of the past. Nothing is static. Nothing is absolute. This is what I have taken from Habermas." It's Friday, the Muslim day of rest and the day of gathering at the Shandabar café. During my visit, the only beverage being served is lemon tea, a distinctly Iraqi drink. Plumes of sweet nargilla smoke twirl into the air and pairs of elderly men are enraptured in animated conversations. The yellow brick walls are covered in ancient black and white portraits of old Iraqi sheikhs and prints of colorful landscapes. The café's patrons take pride in the fact that backgammon and cards aren't allowed. This isn't a place for idlers. It's a place of culture. Outside, people pick through stacks of books on Mutanabi Street. Great works of Arabic literature stand next to collections of Picasso, military books from Saddam, and tattered copies of Stephen King novels and Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down. At one end of the pedestrian avenue, an Iraqi hummer guards the entrance. At the other end, people sit on benches along the east bank of the Tigris. Here, the oldest part of Baghdad is just a replica of what it used to be. Blown to rubble throughout the war, it was recently rebuilt in its image. Today it's bustling. The fact that we had to wait to find a seat in the Shandabar café is symbolic of the fact that Iraq's intellectual scene is slowly coming back to life. The doors of the 92-year-old café—originally Baghdad's first steam-powered printing press—reopened a month and a half ago. It was rebuilt a year and a half after being devastated by a suicide bomber in a bomb-laden truck. Thirty people were killed. Portraits of its old managers hang on the wall under a sign that reads "café of martyrs." Hisham says Iraq is undergoing a new, slow renascence, coming to life after intense restriction on intellectual freedom by Saddam and violent repercussions by militias after the American invasion. He calls the new government a tribal one, where politicians answer to their kin and religious sects before anyone else. Several of his friends are bedridden, but he is clearly excited with the fact that he and his colleagues to sit together in one place. They even publish a philosophical newspaper. Before I get up to go, he asks if I would like to attend one of their twice-weekly discussions next week. They will be discussing Hegel.

Walking the streets of Falluja

Shane Bauer — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:38:59 -0800

The sparsely trafficked six-lane highway from Baghdad to Falluja is a welcome change to the clogged streets of Baghdad, where it can takes hours to cross the city. For most of the one-hour trip, I am lulled by the open road, staring out into the plastic bag littered desert and the flat horizon occasionally broken by villages of cement. Occasionally, we pass by stacks of crates, lined up four of five in a row, that are piled with oranges, bananas, and bottled water. Boys of about 10 years of age stand on the road and wave cars to pull over and buy their produce. Outside Falluja, we stop at a gas station to wait for out escorts, the so-called Awakening Councils, or Sahwa, the American allied militia-turned-police force that now runs the city. The weather is hot. As we sit in the car, I see a man approaching, his figure initially obscured by the orange, dusty air. His face is wrapped in a red checkered kafiyya and he's dressed all in black. My heart pounds and I brace myself as he nears our vehicle, looking in our direction. As he passes the front of the car, he turns and waves, continuing up to the highway to flag a ride toward Baghdad. We drive with our escorts through the countryside. Crumpled up car frames, the remains of exploded vehicles, lie amid the tall brown reeds that line the river. Families pick barley and wheat in the fields. Sparse cows nibble on grass. The dusk buzzes with the sound of generators. In the city, my colleague and I get out of the car. Next to me, people ride bikes across the bridge where American security contractors for the company Blackwater were burned and hung in 2004. A building across from it is crumbling over itself, bombed during the American siege of the city in 2006. We approach a group of people standing on the corner, our armed escorts standing guard across the street. We introduce ourselves as journalists, and someone steps forward from the crowd, "Journalists? Why haven't you come until now? Why weren't you here two years ago?" Our Sahwa escort steps forward, pulls him out of the crowd, and hands him to the nearest police officer, who puts him in a car. "I don't like that kind of talk," he tells me later. It is clear who controls Falluja now. Another man steps forward. "This is the city of martyrs, the city of the dead, the city of men that were patient and confronted what was put upon them." He shakes his finger in the air as he bellows. "This city was pounded a number of times because its people resisted the occupation. This building in front of you was bombed by the enemy. The Americans need to leave in a hurry. This is not their land, nor their country." Down the road, two carpenters walk us through the upper floor of their building, a hole in the ceiling and pulverized blocks of concrete on the floor. "About three quarters of the city was destroyed. Hardly anything here has been rebuilt. There is just an unfinished hospital. We get electricity for two hours during the day." His friend adds as we walk through the rubble: "The Americans are going to be gone and we are going to be left with problems. Everyone is putting money in their own pockets. The Sahwa, the contractors, the politicians. The only things that have been built in Falluja are a bridge and a hospital, and neither are finished." We go downtown, to talk to shopkeepers. Each person, one after the other, refuses to speak to us on the street. Our escort buys us a soda, and we leave the streets before sunset.

A day in the Green Zone

Shane Bauer — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 13:24:24 -0800

I walk down the street outside the Green Zone. Kebabs sizzle on grills and suited Iraqis move around the National Police, who tell everyone exactly where they are allowed to walk. As I enter the Green Zone, through the gap in the cement blast walls, I pop out my cell phone battery, a strongly enforced precaution against cellular activated bombs. At the entrance, I stand on a small wooden pedestal where I am patted for weapons. From there, I walk down a rocky path, walled on each side with cement, the other with a chain link fence and barbed wire. All I can see is the sky and a couple of lampposts. Then another checkpoint. An American soldier stares at a screen while I pass my bag through an x-ray machine. This isn’t the route I’m used to. Usually, I don’t see American soldiers here, just Peruvian and Senegalese Triple Canopy contractors who pat me down, search me, send me through metal detectors and instruct me where to put my hands in the full body x-ray machines. This time, I end up on a road thick with American military vehicles. A sign tells me that deadly force is authorized. I’m lost in the Green Zone. I stroll down a road, passing the suspicious and searching eyes of Iraqi soldiers. In one direction, apartment buildings cover the block. In another, I see the famous pairs of crossed swords standing over the road, next to an empty football stadium. A convoy of grey SUVs with tinted windows blast by, breaking up the light traffic. One blares a siren. Its white passengers in green berets scan the surrounds attentively. I’ve found my bearings. After passing through a checkpoint where parked cars are being checked by German shepards, I walk past the parliament building. Across the street, small jets stand in a parking lot. An American drives a busload of suited Iraqi men past. A parked SUV plays loud music lamenting the death of Hussein over heavy, steady beats. I find the Rasheed hotel. I enter the search room with the contents of my pocket in one hand, my passport, and press ID in the other. “American!” the Peruvian security contractor shouts. “Don’t search.” The metal detector beeps as I pass. The Iraqi guards step aside. I proceed through another checkpoint, where I’m signaled to a small wooden building. There, I’m told to put my bag on the floor along with ten others. A heavy white man twirls a role of tape in his hand, staring ahead blankly, waiting for us to leave so he can bring out the search dog. We wait for five minutes in a designated area outside, next to a “duck and cover” bunker, an inverted U-shaped piece of reinforced cement. I pass through several more checkpoints. At the last one, I put my belongings back in my pockets and notice a drawing etched in a wooden stand. It’s a skull, wearing an army helmet, with a sword for a neck. I make it to the military press office just in time for lunch, served free in a tent by a KBR employee tattooed with a red iron cross and skulls. I scoop macaroni and cheese and corn on the cob onto my plate. I grab a Coke from the fridge, sit down on a slab of cement in the designated eating area, and dig a plastic fork into my coleslaw.

Fishing by the Green Zone

Shane Bauer — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:33:46 -0800

His eyes only leave the end of his line to tell stories about the fish he's caught in the Tigris over the last year. "One time, I was here from the early morning until nine at night," the fisherman says, his friend silently listening. "I put the last piece of bait on the hook before going home. The line tugged. I reeled in a little. It tugged some more. Then I got up and fought the fish all the way to the shore. It was huge," he showed me with his hands—about 12 inches around and three feet long. He comes to this bank of the Tigris, at Baghdad's Zawra park, when he's not working as a low level employee at the Ministry of the Interior. "It passes the time," he says, picking through his plastic bag of bait. A year ago he couldn't do it, he says. The park was closed during the worst part of the war, but no one would fish in the river anyway, he tells me. There were too many floating bodies. By Iraqi standards, this fisherman is still somewhat of an adventurer. Many people still won't eat what comes out of the river—he and another man argue over whether all the bodies have actually been removed—but he says its fine. Even less worrisome for him is the pipe of sewage pouring into the water next to him. "It all runs downstream," he says, shrugging. So does two-thirds of the capital's raw sewage, to be piped back from the river into the city's drinking water. Purification plants filter much of it as it comes out, but they can only do so much. Two summers ago, a cholera outbreak spread across Baghdad. Over half of all Iraqis still don't have access to clean drinking water. Along the riverbank, couples and families walk up and down the 250 acre Zawra park. Here, people can forget briefly about their militarized lives. Teenage boys play soccer in a dirt field. A father pushes his children on an aging swing. Scattered families spread out on blankets and the patchy grass. Men drink Pepsis in one of the rundown pavilions. To get inside, visitors have to wind through a maze of concrete blast walls painted with Roman style murals. Iraqi security contractors search their cars for explosives. Across the river, the Green Zone sprawls as far as the eye can see. Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki's home is on the opposite bank, behind walls, razor wire, and soldiers, not far from where Saddam used to live. Barely downstream, the largest US embassy in the world—roughly the size of 80 football fields—enjoys constant electricity and its own water treatment plant. The fisherman I'm chatting with gets no more than seven hours of electricity a day. I ask him what he thinks when he looks across the river at the Green Zone. "I have nothing to do with them. As far as I'm concerned, those people are nothing." He tugs the line. "I hear they do like fishing though." He tilts his rod. "USA STIK," it reads, an American flag waving next to it. "Seahawk. Quality Fishing Tackle."

A quiet election day in Baghdad

Shane Bauer — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:08:14 -0800

On Iraq's first provincial elections since 2005, Baghdad is nearly car free. The government enforced a vehicle curfew for the entire day to prevent car bombs at the polls. For the first time, I can hear the birds singing in the palm trees that stand over the buildings, their chirps occasionally blocked by the sound of jets or low flying American helicopters. In Jadiriya, kids ride bicycles down the streets. Young men lounge on the medians. Boys chase soccer balls down major thoroughfares, moving bricks set as goal markers whenever government, media, or the occasional American military vehicles come through. Iraqi soldiers and National police sit idly in the sun on nearly every block. In Karada, people walk through outdoor metal detectors surrounded by police to enter a polling station and cast their votes. When I get there, at around 10 am, there are more journalists than voters. The Iraqi government has only permitted cameras in five polling stations in the city. In each polling room, cameramen cram into a corner and photographers slink along the floor to capture people casting their ballots. Some Iraqis, trained by the last elections how to grab the media's attention, raise their purple stained fingers to be mobbed by photographers, shutters ablaze. An old woman enters a cardboard voting booth with her ballot that unfolds to an unwieldy list of parties. Her son is by her side to do the reading. In Baghdad, a province of its own, people are choosing between 2,400 candidates to fill 57 seats. Skeptics say many of the candidates have no clue about local politics but are motivated by the spoils that corruption can bring. The hope for wealth in Iraqi politics isn't baseless—Transparency International says the country is the third most corrupt in the world after Somalia and Burma. I ask 23-year-old, Amir Hassan, a security worker, his thoughts on the elections. "We want more safety. The Iraqi people are tired and we want to rest." At dusk, I walk out of my hotel to enjoy the tranquil day and buy some fresh bread. I ask the baker whether the election means that Bush was successful with his mission in Iraq. "No, Bush has nothing to do with this," he says. "Seyyid al-Sistani told us to vote, so we voted," he said, referring to the powerful Shia Ayatollah in Iraq. "We do what he tells us to do." Shane Bauer is a freelance journalist and photographer based in the Middle East, where he has spent much of the past six years. He is a correspondent for New America Media and his writing and photography has been published in the US, UK, Middle East, and Canada.

A skeptical street in Karada before elections

Shane Bauer — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:49:23 -0800

Baghdad is splashed with color. Campaign posters blend together on the cement landscape as I creep through the stifling afternoon traffic. Paintings of palm trees or cascading waterfalls reminiscent of the Swiss Alps give a bright façade to the 12-foot blast walls that still separate many neighborhoods. Billboards abound: "Freedom is a responsibility. Use it wisely," reads one over a crowd of Iraqis stretching to the horizon. "Towards a peaceful spring," reads another, over an image of a little white girl blowing a dandelion under a blue sky. We park our car in Karada, near a blue and yellow domed Husseiniya—a Shia mosque— surrounded by blast walls. The slabs were erected after a car bomb blew up outside it over a year ago. When we get out of the car, a kid shoves a ticket in my fixer's hand. He laughs. "You can't park anywhere without a kid trying to get money from you in Baghdad." Here, election candidates compete with pictures of Hussein for wall space. One poster shows a suited man, Mathaal Alusi, in front of an image of a child drinking water out of a puddle. "His platform is fighting poverty and corruption, restoring basic services, and providing electricity," my fixer says to me. "It's the same platform as everyone else, but no politicians actually do it." The mostly Shia neighborhood used to be the site of regular car bombs, but today tarps covered in neatly arranged shoes and sandals sprawl across the sidewalk. An old man sells figs and nuts from a wooden cart, smiling when I ask to take his picture. Shops sell brass souvenirs and fake flowers. A table displays pirated copies of American films like "The Girl Next Door" and Leonardo DeCaprio's "Body of Lies." Iraqi police are on nearly every corner. We stop for tea. As I sip the strong and sweet drink, I ask the tea seller for his thoughts on the elections. "There are too many parties," he says, handing out tea to another customer. He pours the hot liquid onto a little plate to let it cool before sucking it down and moving on. "In America there are only two parties, why do we have so many? It's backwards." Today, 14,431 candidates from more than 400 parties are competing for over 444 seats in 14 of Iraq's eighteen provinces. He complained about corruption in parties' campaigning, claiming that he recently witnessed one candidate giving out $100 bills, a blanket, and a heater to anyone who would put their hand on the Quran and swear to vote for them. The rumor is widespread in Baghdad. If he votes for anyone, he says, he'll vote for Al Maliki, who he accredits for providing security. "There used to be explosions everywhere around here. There was one there and there and there," he pointed. He refuses to let us pay for our tea, shoving my fixer's hand back into his pocket. As we turn down a side street, a group of twenty-somethings, leaning idly against their bicycles, cower. "Oooooooh. Ooooooh," they boo softly. I look back and see a convoy of American Strykers and Humvees rolling slowly by. "Whenever we see them, we're afraid," one tells me. "They shoot easily. All it takes is someone to run out in front of them." I ask about the elections and the youngest of the group marks an "x" on his hand with his fingers. Over the last few days, many people have told me they will draw an "x" on their ballet to prevent anyone from forging it. "Why should we vote?" he says. "What are we going to get out of it? I might do it. I'll see what my dad says." At a checkpoint of the National Police, I ask the burly commander, Majid Hassim, for his thoughts. "Out of (the 2,400 candidates in Baghdad), not one deserves to be elected. In five years, this government hasn't done a thing for us. Why do we still have no electricity (Baghdad has about 7-8 hours of electricity per day)? Why isn't our water clean? Where is all of the money going?" Shane Bauer is a freelance journalist and photographer based in the Middle East, where he has spent much of the past six years. He is a correspondent for New America Media and his writing and photography has been published in the US, UK, Middle East, and Canada.

First day in Baghdad

Shane Bauer — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 16:47:54 -0800

Shane Bauer is a freelance journalist and photographer based in the Middle East. A fluent speaker of Arabic, his work has largely focused on the Middle East and North Africa, where he has spent much of the past six years. He is a Middle East correspondent for New America Media and his writing and photography has been published in the US, UK, Middle East, and Canada including outlets such as the L.A. Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, Slate.com, The Nation, Aljazeera.net, San Francisco Bay Guardian, E: The Environmental Magazine, and Black Entertainment Television. As we descend into Baghdad, the stewardess of the Iraqi airways flight reminds us to turn off all electronic devices and return our seatbacks and tray tables to their upright and locked positions. As we descend, the desert that stretches almost unbroken from Damascus to Baghdad gives way to small plots of farmland. Our plane takes a dip to the right and the sun glistens off a small river snaking through the brown earth. A fighter jet coasts between our passenger plane and the expanse of cement houses that grows beneath us. Southwestern Baghdad from the air. Photo by Shane Bauer. I wonder about the other passengers. I came by plane because I didn't want to be a lone American riding across a hostile country. Why were they flying? Two days ago, I went to the station where Iraqis board buses to Baghdad and they told me they were going back because they had to find money to live and they had nowhere else to go. Are these some of the high-class refugees who left because of death threats, but go back regularly to check on their estates? Maybe they are some of the 14,400-odd candidates running in the upcoming provincial elections, returning from a breather in calm Damascus. I look to the Iranian man behind me, sitting tall with a broad smile on his closely shaven face. At the ticket counter in the Damascus airport, I saw him step into the front of the line with authority, a stack of passports in his hand. "We're friends of Sistani," he told the man behind the desk, referring to the most powerful Shiite Ayatollah in Iraq. The agent looked up, staring him straight in the eyes. "Save that talk for over there," he said. "Here everything is official." The Iranian went to the end of the line. We land and head into Baghdad in my fixer's car. As we enter the city, I am struck by the combination of normalcy and clear signs of war. We drive past blast walls painted in pink, blue, yellow, and red, set up in an attempt to cut down on the sectarian violence that raged in 2006 and 2007. Campaign posters for this weekend's elections cover shop windows, light poles, and construction sights. In Karada, a mixed but mostly Shiite neighborhood that once saw regular car bombings, people shuffle in and out of shops covered in depictions of Hussein, the revered martyr of Shia Islam. Fruit and vegetable markets line the street. Iraqi soldiers look down from empty buildings with sand bagged windows. "On new years eve, people were out in this neighborhood until two in the morning," says my fixer, who I'll call Karim to protect his identity. "That was the first time that's happened since Saddam fell." "Baghdad isn't like it used to be. It used to be hell, but now things are ok," he tells me, snapping his seatbelt into place to avoid the $10 fine regularly doled out by traffic police. American brown armored vehicles topped with gunners who can turn 360 degrees, rumble ahead of us. Karim complains about how much traffic they cause. "Security is a lot better, but there are still a lot of people that want to kill Americans," he says. He tells me that from now on, I am a German citizen of Lebanese origin, and my name is Shamil, not Shane. "You're Arabic sounds Lebanese and you look it." Thank God for black hair die, styling gel, and leather shoes. On the way to buy a SIM card for my phone, we pass the home of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the most popular Shia party in the country. It is surrounded with cement walls, sand bags, barbed wire, and American issued Iraqi army Hummers. The palm trees inside the compound are thick. Across the road, a billboard reads, "For a green spring," over an image of a white girl blowing a dandelion—a vague sign of hope. Down the road, another reads "Freedom is a responsibility, treat it wisely." Karim parks the car on a small road lined with cell phone shops, kebab stands, and tea vendors. "You can come out with me, but don't say a word," he says. As we walk around, I search people's eyes to see whether they are fixating on me. No one does. Karim invites me to his home for dinner. When I enter, I am struck by a portrait on the wall, framed in fake flowers and twinkling Christmas lights. "My brother was martyred in 2007" he said. "He was killed in his sleep, shot by a stray bullet when a firefight broke out in our neighborhood between the Mehdi Army and the Badr Brigades. I was lying next to him and so was my mother, father, and children. He died in my arms." We pick through a spread of hummus, salads, chicken, and fresh baked diamond-shaped bread. They tell me all about his brother—the way he religiously listened to the Lebanese singer Feiruz in the mornings—and debate whether or not to vote in the upcoming elections. As we wind down, sipping tea, someone shouts outside. I tense up. The mother gets up to go out. "Don't go outside," Karim tells her. She doesn't listen. He goes back to his tea. A few minutes later, the sound of car sirens ring out nearby. It's the Minister of the Interior's envoy returning him to his nearby house for the night. We go out to leave and Karim's mom notices I'm tense. "It's ok," she says. "No one will bother you here." As they say goodbye to each other, I train my eyes on two young men sitting next to the house with their backs toward me. Could they be waiting for me? They look over and wave. "Ahlan wa Sahlan," welcome, they say, smiling. I exhale. It's my first day in Baghdad.

Baghdad is broken

Anna Badkhen — Thu, 22 May 2008 10:59:14 -0700

Baghdad is broken. Broken is the national power grid, which provides no more than four hours of electricity to the city's homes. Broken are the sewage pipes, which leak untreated waste into streets and squares. Broken is the water supply network, which leaves entire neighborhoods without running water for days on end. Garbage is everywhere, because the citywide system of trash pickup is broken, too. All of these services stopped working properly when the war began, so, on the surface, Baghdad looks a lot similar to the way it looked in 2006, during my previous trip here, except the garbage heaps now are more widespread and the pools of sewage are wider and deeper. But something that is much harder to repair than basic infrastructure is broken now, too. Mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods: vanished. Friendly public discussions about politics: no way, too dangerous. The neighborly trust that once allowed Sunnis and Shias share the same street is gone, flushed away in the wake of the vicious sectarian fighting that engulfed the city last year. Fear of reprisals is real: although there is little violence associated with Sunni insurgents in Baghdad, Shiite militias terrorize the population through extortion, kidnappings and extrajudicial killings. "That sectarian cleansing is almost done with, but there is still a taste," said Army Captain Sean Chase, a company commander in the 4-64 armor battalion of the Fourth Brigade, Third Infantry Division. Chase's Bravo company is stationed in Risala, a once-mixed southwestern Baghdad neighborhood that is now pretty much entirely Shia. "Sunnis don't really trust Shiites," he sums up, "Shiites don't really trust Sunnis." American civil affairs officers trying to figure out how to fix this broken city say rebuilding the infrastructure is key. Bring street lights to a neighborhood's main drag, they say, and next thing you know, the sense of security is back, shops stay open later, people are chatting over flavored hookahs in coffee shops, and reconciliation is underway. But so far, the only things that have visibly improved in Iraq seem to be located inside military installations. Camp Striker, the layover point for troops, diplomats, defense contractors and embedded journalists coming in and going from Iraq, has grown from a field of dusty tents and plastic porta-potties three years ago to a veritable city within a city. Now it has two chapels (one is under construction), air-conditioned living containers, real showers and flush-down toilets, Subway, Burger King, Pizza Hut and a 24-hour coffee shop that makes excellent lattes. New souvenir shops are peddling new souvenirs: the mugs inscribed with the words "Who's your Baghdaddy?" (that's so 2005!) are gone. The new popular mug reads, instead: "If you ain't Sunni, you ain't Shiite." I am waiting for a military flight to take me from Baghdad, where I spent the last two and a half weeks, to Amman, Jordan, from where I will go home. Outside the air-conditioned outbound passenger terminal, which in 2006 was a simple hangar and now occupies a vast pavilion with a comfortable sitting area, a VIP lounge, and a metal detector, I strike up a conversation with Eddie Bello, an Iraqi-born American who works in Iraq as a cultural advisor to US troops in Iraq. Bello, who left Iraq in 1976 and who has been working here for almost three years, offers a somber projection on how long it will take to heal the deep wounds caused by the sectarian violence. "Maybe by the end of the century they'll fix it," he says. "They may talk about reconciliation, but revenge is here, in their hearts," Bello says, placing a hand on his chest. "In Iraq, the tribes say that if someone killed one of their members, they can (exact) revenge on that person's tribe for forty years."

Keeping kosher in Iraq

Anna Badkhen — Wed, 21 May 2008 09:50:29 -0700

BAGHDAD—I met Army Captain Andrew Shulman last fall, when he was on leave in the States. At the time, he was the only Jewish chaplain deployed to Iraq, and we joked about the quirks of keeping kosher in Iraq, observing the Shabbat in a deployment where "every day is a Monday," and the excesses of life on sprawling military bases that serve Baskin-Robbins ice cream every day (some flavors are kosher) and Maine lobster on Fridays (decidedly not kosher, but still a great conversation topic). The war for him largely seemed to be a great adventure of a Jew from Beverly Hills to a Biblical land that, until recently, had wiping Israel off the map as one of its officially stated goals. The death and destruction that raged outside his military base appeared to have little effect on him. I am passing through the base where Shulman is stationed, Camp Striker, one of the several heavily guarded military installations that ring Baghdad International Airport, where roads have names and road signs (I notice "Red Sock Rd.," named, I guess, for an unnamed Red Sox player), souvenir shops peddle gold jewelry and bootleg DVDs, the dining facility serves made-to-order stir fry, among other things, and most soldiers have never had to put on their flak jackets. I shoot him an email, wondering if he's in town. Lo and behold, Shulman is here. We agree to meet by the chapel—the one with the "illegal cross" on the baptistery out front, Shulman remarks, wryly. Military chapels are supposed to be non-denominational; the chapel with the cross is where Shulman holds Shabbat services for a handful of Jews deployed here. We walk together to get lunch at the dining facility; Shulman gets fresh vegetables, pickles (kosher), mayo (kosher), and mustard (ditto). He is tanner than I remember him, and clean shaven. But something else has changed. If I were to interview him about his deployment today, Shulman tells me, our conversation wouldn't be as light-hearted as last fall. On Passover, he explains, two Jewish majors were killed. The families wanted some form of rabbinic oversight over the way the bodies were handled, and Shulman went to the morgue. "Blood on the floor," he recalls. "Lots of dust. They try to make it nice, but you know, it's Iraq." The trip to the morgue had a sobering effect on Shulman's thoughts about the war in Iraq. "If everyone saw that," Shulman says, "I think [we’d] all be out of here in a second."

Scars of war

Anna Badkhen — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:41:29 -0700

BAGHDAD—Thaab's friends are getting ready to play a game of soccer in a dusty field down the street, but Thaab, a skinny 17-year-old boy, will not be joining them. His right leg is in a cast and a metal rod is sticking out of his right elbow, held together by a stainless steel contraption that resembles a crane. He has been confined to a wheelchair for seven months, since a car bomb detonated several yards behind him when he was walking to a friend's party. Thaab lost a piece of his right arm, including a chunk of bone. His friends try to cheer him up by drawing pictures on his cast with their pens: a grinning skeleton, a girl reading a book. "There's more surgery I need to do," Thaab says. "I missed school this year because of this." All around the Baghdad Iraqis bear scars of war. Everyone knows someone who was killed or wounded. Hundreds of families have had their loved ones kidnapped, never to be seen again. Many, like Thaab, were hurt in bombings and shootings. Craters from car bombs deface many roads, and holes where shrapnel or bullets hit pockmark the walls on every street. Crooks are using the widespread fear of sectarian militias to get their way. Hoda al-Naim spends days sitting with a book on pillows on the tiled floor of her kitchen, her left leg in a cast. A doctor hit her with his car, and, before he left the scene of the accident, gave al-Naim his business card and promised to treat her. But when al-Naim's daughter called to make an appointment, the doctor told her not to call again, or else he would send fighters from the feared Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to the woman's house. Most likely, the doctor has no ties to the Mahdi Army whatsoever. But al-Naim is not taking chances. She went to a doctor in her neighborhood and paid $1,000 for surgery and the cast herself. At the gravel-strewn combat outpost in Baghdad's Risala neighborhood, U.S. Army Captain Sean Chase, who is serving in the 4-64 armor battalion of the Fourth Brigade, Third Infantry Division, contemplates the losses Iraqis have suffered during the war. This is his third deployment to Iraq since the war began, and he says the place has deteriorated since he first came here in 2003. "If you think about how we live here, we live pretty well," he says, swatting away flies. "We have plenty of food, and we get plenty of sleep for soldiers. After this deployment we will go home. It's the people in the streets who have been living with this for the last five years, who have to keep living with it."

Leaving tracks

Anna Badkhen — Fri, 16 May 2008 11:42:56 -0700

BAGHDAD—It is a familiar scene: Holding their M4 rifles at the ready, American soldiers push through the metal gate, swing open the front door and stomp into the house, stepping on shoes someone has left by the doorway and tracking dried mud onto the living room carpet, on which the family sits for dinner. They run into room after room, overturning chairs, tossing clothes out of closets as they search for weapons. The terrified family tries to huddle in the corner as the soldiers separate men from women and children. I follow them. I trip over someone's slipper in my dirty shoes. I track dirt onto the living room carpet. I look at the family's possessions being spilled out onto the floor, old black-and-white wedding pictures lying on top of dirty sweatpants. I hear the women say something in Arabic to the American soldiers before the Army translator has even entered the house. I don't understand a word. I say "Salaam aleikum" to the family, or simply nod, depending on the ferocity of the search. It's possible that these men have pissed off their neighbor, who told the Americans that they were the bad guys. Or they could be militants plotting to kill someone, maybe me. The women might be would-be suicide bombers. They may be directly responsible for the horrible deaths of other American soldiers from this unit, young men who left behind widows who are too young to be widows and whose children are too young to remember their fathers apart from the stories adults tell them. Anything is possible. I take detailed notes so that later I can write a story about it. This time, Americans found nothing incriminating in the house, and everyone's papers are in order. I take off my Kevlar helmet. The platoon leader is talking to the men politely, asking, through a translator, whether they have noticed any suspicious activity in the neighborhood. The men lie—at least in part—that they are happy that Americans patrol their streets. A child comes out, offering us some stale bread. Using the handful of Arabic words in my arsenal and a lot of body language, I ask for a glass of cold water. I introduce myself to the women and children. They say something back, but, again, I don't understand a word. Maybe they're telling me they are pleased to meet me. Maybe they are telling me to clean up before I leave. Everybody shakes hands. I say "Ma' salaama," goodbye, and follow the soldiers. We are going to track some mud through another house. Maybe we'll catch one of the bad guys, so that the streets of Baghdad become safer. Or maybe we'll get some more bread, and I'll get another glass of water.

Beyond the wall, the other Baghdad

Anna Badkhen — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

BAGHDAD—The humvee swiveled around the concrete barriers, drove past an Iraqi Army checkpoint, and left Saidiyah. At first the world outside the neighborhood did not look much different than Saidiyah, a section of Baghdad that US troops had surrounded by a 12-foot-high fence to keep militias out and entice former residents, who had fled sectarian fighting there last year, back in. Just like in Saidiyah, everything lay covered in dust. Like in Saidiyah, drivers pulled over and stared straight ahead warily as the American convoy drove by. Like in Saidiyah, ripped black, pink, blue and white plastic bags flew from concertino wire that stretched along many cement fences. But a minute later, this part of southwestern Baghdad did not look like Saidiyah at all. Vast fields of trash—every kind of trash, food, empty paint cans, remnants of broken cars, a blue-and-white bus without a cabin or wheels—stretched out to our left and right. Much of the trash was decomposed, compressed and covered a layer of dust so thick it was impossible to discern what it was. On top of the trash, in dwellings made of mud and empty oil canisters, people lived: barefoot children, women who stared through glassless windows at the humvees, old men who sat in the dirt, smoking cigarettes. A boy ran out of a hut with a roof made of sheets of plywood and tarpaulin that was held on top of the walls by tires and rocks. "Mister!" he yelled, running alongside the truck and waving. "I love you!" Dirty dogs lay, panting, in the refuse. Some of the people have always been living in the wasteland, and others have moved there to escape sectarian violence. But the trash is new. After the war began the area became a virtual landfill. In the middle of the wasteland, the convoy came to a stop. The soldiers wanted to check out one of the houses, and we got out of the humvees, cautiously finding our way amid piles of garbage. Soon, a group of men and a little barefoot boy hurried in our direction. As they were walking, a dog with matted fur the color of dirt ran toward them and pounced on the boy. The boy fell and began to cry. The men kicked the dog and laughed. The boy's elbows were bleeding. "Is this somebody's dog, because otherwise I'll shoot it?" yelled one of the soldiers. The military interpreter translated for the men and one of them replied: "It's my dog, but go ahead, shoot it. It doesn't like my wife, either." Several soldiers followed the dog behind the house, where trash lay in heaps. Two shots rang out. Then we got back into the humvees and drove off, leaving the dead dog behind – presumably, to rot amid the trash. "It was a public health concern," 2nd Lieutenant Chris Allen explained later. The American convoy drove out of the fields and into a side street. It was a little cleaner. Most of the storefronts were shuttered, and there were few people in the street. A sign that read, in Arabic, "I live for the Mahdi Army" – the Shiite militia of the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr – was spray-painted on a wall. Black Shiite flags flew from many houses. People stared at the convoy. Nobody waved. "They hate us down there," Allen explained. The Americans suspect that Shiite militias use the area to traffic weapons. The Americans made a U-turn near a field where teenagers were playing soccer in the dirt, and drove back to Saidiyah. Inside the walls, on the neighborhood's main street throngs of shoppers, sucking on fruit smoothies and eating ice cream, strolled down a dusty pavement. Not all the shops were open, and far from all of Saidiyah's residents who had fled sectarian violence have returned to the neighborhood. Piles of garbage lay here and there, concrete fences stood pockmarked with shrapnel, electricity was down in most of the neighborhood, and the concrete guts of a house damaged by a car bomb spilled onto the sidewalk. Even compared to my trip here in 2006, Saidiyah is a mess. But compared to the Baghdad that lies outside its walls, it is good. It is safe. It is prosperous. And that is depressing.

Looking for footprints

Anna Badkhen — Tue, 13 May 2008 10:34:59 -0700

BAGHDAD—It's 10 p.m., and much of Baghdad's neighborhood of Saidiyah has fallen into darkness. The city power is off, as it tends to be most of the time, and there are no street lights. Some houses are lit up, powered by neighborhood generators; others are either empty, their owners in self-imposed exile, or dark because it is expensive to keep the lights on. Baghdadis once were famous for long dinners that lasted until midnight, but now it is cheaper to go to bed early. Moving stealthily along crepuscular streets, American soldiers use night-vision goggles to pick out the houses they are going to search tonight. Before they left the base, US Army Lieutenant Rusty Mason instructed his soldiers how to decide whether to search a house: "If there's an abandoned building, no footprints, it's not an ideal candidate for checking out," he said. "But if it's an abandoned building and there's some footprints, like someone's been going in and out of it, then go and check it out." The soldiers knock on metal gates, and the rattle and the whirr of generators are the only sounds. In one house, the soldiers have roused a family. In another, a teenage girl fearfully hides behind her mother. "Are you shy?" one soldier asks, in English, trying to alleviate the discomfort. The soldiers, in their bulky body armor and with their M4 rifles, crowd the tiled yard illuminated by the soft light seeping through the windows of the house. "She is afraid," says the girl's mother, a school principal. "Why?" the soldier asks. Another soldier responds, sarcastically: "Why should I be afraid of everybody with their weapons coming to my house?" At another house, two brothers in their mid-20s are working on a car. They send their younger brother to fetch some bread for the Americans. Iraqis are famous for their hospitality. In a shadowy yard a block away, Dr. A.H. Kadhim, professor of philosophy at Baghdad University, and his son, Anis, who is studying to become a dentist, patiently answer the Americans' questions about their life in Saidiyah. It is safer now, they say, in slow but eloquent English. No fighting in the streets. In the kitchen, the remnants of their dinner—home-made pizza—are on the stove, and on the kitchen table sits a sewing machine with a bunched-up piece of pale green silky cloth. At one point, the father mentions that the Americans' Bradley fighting vehicle had ripped the wire the family used to get power from a community generator. Now the family has to use their own generator instead, which pumps noxious diesel fumes into the yard. The conversation has to be shouted, because the family's generator is loud. "I'm sorry," says Second Lieutenant Henry Mitchell. I wonder out loud if the Iraqis should be compensated—Americans often pay Iraqis for the property damage they cause. "It's okay, it's okay," Anis waves his hands. Then, to my amazement, he asks the big American soldiers with body armor and guns: "Is there anything we can do for you?"

A "country boy" at war

Anna Badkhen — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:48:54 -0700

BAGHDAD—Sergeant Herbert Smitley calls himself a country boy from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania. He also says that he's "25, but I feel like I'm 50," because of all he'd seen as a soldier. When terrorists crashed a plane into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Sergeant Smitley was serving in the Old Guard, which serves as a presidential escort and conducts ceremonial burials at Arlington Cemetery. He was dispatched to the Pentagon on a search-and-rescue mission for 15 days. "That was horrible," he recalls. "We were pulling out bodies. You see this old Army guy, he was working at the Pentagon, probably waiting the last couple of years before his retirement, and then…" Sgt. Smitley takes a respectful pause, drags on a cigarette. "You'd find his desk, with pictures of his wife and kids. It was really tough." In 2003, Smitley, a trained infantryman, asked to be deployed to Iraq. He volunteered three times and was denied. "They said: 'No, we need you here,'" he said. They needed him at Arlington Cemetery to help bury the troops killed during the invasion. "It was tough because I'm an infantryman, and I was burying fellow infantry men who were killed over here during the initial push." Another drag on a cigarette. "I thought I could do more over here." Finally, in 2005, he was deployed to Baghdad. "My wife wasn't happy [about] it but she understood that I wanted to be here," said Smitley, who has a three-year-old son. "She knew I was going to deploy." This is his second deployment. He arrived here in November, with the Apache Company of the 4-64 armor battalion of the Fourth Brigade, Third Infantry Division. He spent the first few months of his deployment in a predominantly Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad's southwest. There, on March 23, four of his buddies were killed by a rocket that pierced their Bradley fighting vehicle: Staff Sergeant Christopher Hake, Specialist Jose Rubio, Private First Class Andrew Habsieger and Private George Delgado. They were burned alive, pressed against the back hatch, which wouldn't open because it had melted to the body of the track during the explosion. Another one of the Apache Company's men was killed in January: Private James Goodrich. A rocket, designed by anti-American militias to pierce through the thick armor of Bradleys and tanks, hit his Bradley and sliced his body in half. After his death, the company adopted a pale-yellow mutt and named her in Goodrich's name, Goodie. They built her a doghouse out of plywood, perhaps the most elaborately built structure in the dusty combat outpost where they live, and fitted it with a mattress. Goodie likes to catch frogs, fetch, and bark at the front gate of the compound. The soldiers say it's because she doesn't like Iraqis. Some Apache soldiers like to talk about the men they had lost, get it all out. First Sergeant James Braet imitated for me the poses in which the four men who were burned to death were found. He also showed me pictures of the soldier who lost sight in both of his eyes when a piece of shrapnel pierced his forehead, cutting his retinal nerves. The pictures show a face of a young man covered in blood and breathing through an oxygen mask. Sergeant Smitley doesn't talk about his company's losses. He confesses that he doesn't really like reporters. Not because they have misrepresented his words, but because he considers them a liability in battle. "I don't want my guys to have to think about a reporter when they need to be thinking about the situation on the ground," he explains. "Just wouldn't want to have someone who is not a triggerman." He has seven or eight months left in Iraq before he can go home. He doesn't want to come back here. "I think I'll take a break after this one," he says about his deployment. "Maybe train soldiers or something."

An eye for an eye?

Anna Badkhen — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:00:07 -0700

BAGHDAD—At the meeting of the Saidiyah neighborhood council, created to foster reconciliation in the area devastated by months of sectarian bloodshed, council member Hussein al-Qaesi blurted out: "The people arrested in the killing of my brother and the shooting of Abu Marwan [another council member]. I want the Iraqi and American security forces to reveal their real names and tribes. That way we can do a traditional settlement with their tribes." For the uninitiated—American officers who attended the meeting—al-Qaesi clarified: "A traditional settlement is usually the life of the son or the brother," he said. "We understand that there will be a trial, too, but we need to solve this. This is a tribal community and we have to work on a tribal basis, too." Abu Marwan, whose formal name is Walid Khaled al-Bari, was shot in the face, stomach and right foot, and al-Qaesi's brother was killed last week by two assailants in al-Bari's real estate office. American troops arrested the assailants and three other people in a house in Saidiyah, where they also found vests fitted with explosives, the kind that suicide bombers use, and some ordnance. Now the victims' friends and relatives wanted revenge. An eye for an eye in the land of Hammurabi. This was not the first time al-Qaesi and other members of the council have brought up tribal justice. In a private meeting earlier this week, they asked Captain Andrew Betson, whose Alpha Company of the 4-64 armor battalion of the Fourth Brigade, Third Infantry Division operates in Saidiyah, to extradite the prisoners, or at least let the council members "interrogate them" for 24 hours. Betson, who has transferred the detainees to U.S. military intelligence, said at the time that he could do neither. Betson is taking the threat of tribal justice seriously. He said he will protect the tribal identity of the detainees from the council members, although if the names did become public, he said, "I hope their tribes just do a lot of talk and eat lamb together and it's forgotten." "I don't know," I said. "He's talking about killing sons and brothers." How do retaliatory killings figure into the concept of reconciliation, I asked Lieutenant Colonel Johnnie Johnson, the 4-64 commander, after the meeting was over. If every family whose member was killed during sectarian bloodshed that peaked in Iraq last year kills a family member from the killer's tribe, peace will never come. "We don't condone that kind of stuff," said Johnson. "We're trying to work against it." But at the same time, he acknowledged that there is little American troops can do to put an end to tribal justice. "They've been doing it that way for how many years? Thousands?" he said after the meeting was over. "I'm not sure we can change them, or that it's our job to change them. The rule of law is what we strive to facilitate: the court system, the justice system. Someone tries to get revenge like that and gets caught—the rule of law applies to them."

Detained—and disappeared

Anna Badkhen — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:00:00 -0700

BAGHDAD—There was word that American forces would release four detainees at 11 a.m. at the neighborhood council, and the woman in a black abaya thought it was a good time to ask about her husband. Her husband, an Iraqi Army commissioner, went north to Tikrit one day a year ago, and was detained by American troops on the way there. When the U.S. forces finally arrived, after 2 p.m., the woman in a black abaya was waiting quietly in the garden, watching her sons, a preteen boy and a toddler, play in the withered, dusty lawn. She waited while the troops smoked cigarettes with the council chairman. She waited while the detainees relatives came in and signed documents pledging that the detainees would not join anti-American militias. She waited some more while the detainees came in, tearfully embraced their loved ones and denounced violence. When they finally left, the woman approached the American captain, Andrew Betson. In her hands she held two photographs of her husband, and two paper stubs American troops had given her, attesting that her husband had been detained. "Can you tell me, please, where my husband is," the woman said quietly. "Which detention center is holding him?" She gave Captain Betson her husband's full name: Mohammed Hussein Alwan Jasem al-Ubaidi. "I don't know why he has been detained. I need to know which detention facility is holding him," she said. "Many of them are just guilty by association," muttered First Sergeant Jim Braet. It is his second deployment to Baghdad since 2003, and he's seen how detentions can go. The captain looked carefully at the picture she brought, depicting a middle-aged Iraqi man with a mustache. He looked at the paper stubs American forces gave her, indicating that her husband had been detained. He took down his name, and said he would try to find out. He made no promises. "Do you want his picture?" the woman asked. "I've been looking for him for one year. God, please look for him!" "I will try to find out," the captain replied. How would he find out? He does not even know how many residents of Saidiyah, the Baghdad neighborhood where he commands a U.S. Army company, have been detained over the years, or how many are still in detention. "You're talking years, and different units," he said. The woman walks away, holding her children's hands, and I wondered how many of such women there are in Iraq, their husbands taken by American forces and disappeared in the vast coalition detention system.

Report from Baghdad

Anna Badkhen — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:41:40 -0700

Anna Badkhen, 32, has covered wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Chechnya and Kashmir. She recently returned to Iraq—her 10th trip since 2003—and will report a series of journals for The Muckraker on Baghdad's attempt at reconciliation after the sectarian bloodshed of 2007, what American troops are doing, and how Iraqis live five years after President Bush delivered a victorious speech under the "Mission Accomplished" banner. BAGHDAD—The Black Hawk hovered low over the rapid Tigris River, turning this way and that as it followed the river's gentle curve. The war-ravaged city unfolded below us. A year after a wave of sectarian massacres swept through Baghdad, much of the city remains a ghost town. In a scene reminiscent of the movie I Am Legend, a shepherd rushed his flock through streets once packed with cars bumper to bumper. I recognized the neighborhood: Karrada, where five years ago I shopped for food and souvenirs to bring home. Back then, the driver of my taxi had to double-park his car to let me off. The city was full of hope then, and I would visit Iraqi friends for dinners that stretched into early morning hours. We would sit in their fragrant gardens and talk about the new Iraq without Saddam. There were occasional suicide bombings, roadside bombs targeting American troops, and unrest in Ramadi and Falluja, to the west of Baghdad, all harbingers of a widespread insurgency that was soon to engulf the country, but it was still safe for Western reporters to stroll, unaccompanied and undisguised, out of their hotels and grab some late-night chicken tikka and baba ghanoush in Baghdad's many bustling joints. At the time, it seemed to me that if the United States tried to better understand the roots of Sunni insurgency, quickly rebuilt the infrastructure and helped Iraqi security forces return to work, American troops could prevent the violence from spreading. I returned to Baghdad two years ago, a few months after the bombing of the Shiite Askariyah Mosque in Samarrah set off a deluge of sectarian killings. Iraqis were killing each other for being Sunni, Shiite, government employees, government critics, secular intellectuals and religious scholars, and simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mangled bodies of tortured teachers and shop owners turned up in the streets. Thousands of families were fleeing the city; thousands others were streaming in, to escape sectarian reprisals in farmlands that surround it. People huddled in abandoned hospitals, factories, others’ deserted homes; and built makeshift houses and lean-tos in the wasteland on Baghdad's outskirts. They had little electricity, little running water, little food, and little hope. Sectarian warfare has died down, and even as American troops battle with the Mahdi Army of the militant Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in the slums of Sadr City, violence is on the decline. Areas of the crippled city are returning to life, like the upscale southwestern neighborhood of Saidiyah, home to about 15,000 families and the site of some of the more violent fighting between Sunni and Shiite militias. More than half of Saidiyah's stood abandoned as recently as January this year, and now, the majority of the owners have returned. More than 800 shops have reopened here since February, a restaurant flung open its doors, and thigh-high concrete barriers that barricaded the streets are gone. A council of local representatives is made up of Sunnis and Shiites. "A lot has changed for the positive," said Lt. Col. Johnnie Johnson, commander of the 4th battalion, 64th armor regiment of the Fourth Bridage, Third Infantry Division, which operates in Saidiyah under the command of the Fourth Infantry Division's First Brigade. "We take a bit of pride in Saidiyah. There are signs of light all over the place." Compared to the devastation I saw on the pages of newspapers and on TV in 2007, I do see signs of light. There are no corpses left to decompose in the streets. Some stores are open, and women and children walk down the street in the afternoon eating ice cream. But I saw the same picture during my last visit, in 2006, when I last saw Iraqi women and children navigate garbage-strewn streets with ice cream cones in their hands. There are just more bullet holes in the walls, more windows shattered by explosions. To achieve the shaky peace in Saidiyah, the U.S. military has surrounded it with a 12-foot concrete wall to keep the bad guys out. Even so, Johnson pointed out, "crime still occurs." Last week, his battalion's Alpha Company and Iraqi forces in Saidiyah discovered a weapons cache that included 30 rocket-propelled grenades, 22 120-mm mortars and 200 pounds of C4 explosive. When Fourth Infantry Division's officers showed me pictures of the cache, I thought I was experiencing deja vu. Last time I was in Baghdad, the 10th Mountain Division unit I was embedded with, too, found large caches of weapons in an upscale neighborhood. The pictures on the Fourth Infantry Division's slides looked just like the photos the San Francisco Chronicle photographer Michael Macor took during that raid. In a wasteland just south of Saidiyah, poor Iraqis displaced from their homes still live in makeshift dwellings patched together with bricks made of mud, rusty oil canisters and bits of plastic still sit on the outskirts of town—except now the shacks are surrounded by impromptu landfills, where garbage is ankle-deep. Snowy white egrets still circle over putrid pools of stagnant water, which ranges in color from marsh brown to fluorescent green, depending on the algae that grows in it. Stray dogs pant in puddles of sewage. Compared to 2007, life in Saidiyah has certainly improved. But compared to 2006, it has not, and in the larger scheme of things, it seems that American forces have been running to stand still—losing troops and putting in a Herculean effort just to bring the city back to the level of life that was, in 2006, widely criticized as unsatisfactory. Except that the legacy of last year will not be forgotten easily. The memories of recent bloodshed will scar much deeper, and linger much longer, than the dints that bullets and shrapnel left on Baghdad's walls. The return of Saidiyah's residents poses its own challenges that, some American officers predict, the rest of Baghdad will have to confront as it attempts to resolve the city's deep-seated sectarian conflict. Many families return from self-imposed exile just to find their homes occupied by the families of a different sect who had moved here to find refuge from sectarian cleansing in their own parts of town. "It hasn't become the same kind of problem it was in Bosnia," said Maj. Mike Birmingham, the planner for the First Brigade of the Fourth Infantry Division. "But if it goes on longer, it can become different." Read more reports from Anna Badkhen on Truthdig.com.

Last ditch effort

Duane Moles — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0700

(China's Coal: Part 6) On my last reporting day in Shanxi our team has split up. I decide to try my luck at getting into a better-run state coal mine. As the option only came up in the morning, I no longer have a translator with me and head off with just a driver and one of the school's photo instructors who had come up to scope out the area. On our first drive-by, the situation appears to be a bust. The one man that we had a connection to is already down in the mine for his shift, so I decide to park it for an hour and wait for the shift change. I figure I can get a few photos of miners coming and going. We park by the office where the miners come to change into their work clothes. I ask the first miner I see if I can take his picture. He agrees and my driver chats with him a bit. Within a couple of minutes, word spreads that a Westerner is hanging around and I find myself surrounded by 20 to 30 people, my back to the taxi. Without a translator, I get a bit unnerved. At a loss, I reach into my bag and pull out the West Virginia mining photos that my family sent me before I left. This peaks everyone’s interest and loosens up the situation. Par for the course in China, an older man offers me a cigarette, and before long he is telling us how to get inside the mine office and down to the tracks for the shift change. The pics had set a few people at ease before, this time they seemed to part the seas. Coming from a family that has worked in mining, I am one of them and my interest is honest. The miners at the shift change smile and wave. The driver, Susan, and I mill around, walk up to the entrance to the mine shaft and check out the transit system. A group of dusty faces comes off shift and before the next heads in we are run off by a supervisor. We watch the rest of the change from outside a fence.

Feeling the environment

Duane Moles — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0700

(China's Coal: Part 5) Ahh … the joys of a sinus infection, or at least that's what it seems to be. One fellow reporter develops nosebleeds while my sinus clogs and my breathing is punctuated by coughing fits. I start taking some of the industrial strength antibiotics brought from the U.S., but am unsure whether they will do any good. Part of my daily routine: I note the color of the water that rinses from my body each morning as I shower. A light grey, or would you call that pewter? I try to take note each day, a mental color chip to compare for the next day. How can so much black come from a sky so white? The less said of ears and cotton swabs the better.

Escape attempt

Duane Moles — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0700

(China's Coal: Part 4) We decide to give the village a break and give ourselves a day to digest what we have seen, so our crew heads out early one morning for Pingyao, an ancient town-turned-tourist trap. We bring our still cameras, but my larger video camera is left tucked in the trunk. A mistake. Halfway to our vacation retreat, the horizon turns fuzzy. A coking plant -- where coal is baked before being used in smelting iron -- is spewing a sulfur dioxide cloud three stories high that snakes its way a mile downwind. As we cruise closer to the giant cloud, the air cuts through my nostrils like rotten eggs from the wrong side of the river Styx. Speechless, I fire my still camera as quickly as I can while digging out a tiny hand-sized digital video camera. Driving through the cloud, only the occasional “my god” breaks the silence. Born in the early 70s (with SO2 caps already in place in the U.S.), I had never seen pollution being pumped out so blatantly. This ancient walled town allows us the indulgences of being tourist for a day: American coffee, countless baubles and fake antiques, museums with spiked weapons and statues of calm buddahs, and a few fellow Western faces. I imagine most of these happy tourists never see pollution as blatant as we witnessed that day.

Know your energy

Duane Moles — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0700

(China's Coal: Part 3) There is an analogy that creeps around in the back of my mind. Walk through a Chinese market with carcasses hung across the stalls and there is little doubt that the Chinese know the source of their food. The same could be said for their energy—particularly in Shanxi. For many the coal that brings them electricity is mined from directly underneath the villages and towns of the countryside. Homes have piles of coal stacked along their front walls or stacked in courtyards. One reporting day, a young man and his father prepare a meal of homemade noodles for lunch while I observe. The small brick stove in the kitchen has a tiny metal portal on the top. After placing a crude metal pot atop the stove, the father grabs a small shovel and scoops a chunk of shiny black coal -- larger than a grapefruit -- from a bin under the counter, then crams it through the portal. The fire brightens and lights his face. A storage room off the courtyard holds a pile waist high and some five feet deep. In the bedroom area, a second brick stove abuts a low platform used for the family’s bed. An intricate flue system from the stove runs underneath the platform to fend off the cold Shanxi winters. The coal that keeps them warm and cooks their meals had been several hundred feet below their village streets just a year ago. Through the house, the lights are compact fluorescent bulbs. Considering that there is no running water, and the electric wiring strung along the walls had the distinct markings of improvisation, I ask whether the lights were provided by a government program. The young man says no. He bought them out of pocket to save on his electric bill. In the U.S. these energy efficient bulbs are the symbol of the ecofriendly consumer, touted as a way to put a dent in our electricity consumption -- on a per capita basis, some 12 times that of the Chinese. (California is even considering banning traditional incandescent bulbs.) But in the Chinese countryside, where saving a buck or two actually means something, the bulbs are simply a good investment.

Work comes quickly

Duane Moles — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0700

(China's Coal: Part 2) Outside of Beijing, the sight of a Westerner arouses interest. I am stared at constantly. Our team has traveled to Taiyuan, the capital of China’s Shanxi Province. I think of Shanxi as the West Virginia of China -- though it certainly does not feel like home. Along the miles from Beijing, factories increasingly dot the landscape, which seems to grow drier by the mile. A distinct twinge of sulfur hits me as I step out of the train and my nose tells me I am in coal country. Social and business connections appear and evaporate quickly in China. By the afternoon, one person leads to another, then quickly to a third. One connection goes by the Chinese equivalent of “John Doe.” The crevices of his teeth are stained from cigarettes, yet he dresses in a soft pastel sport jacket. He smokes with a caring underhand grip and looks at his cigarette lovingly. I need little more than my half-dozen words of Mandarin to realize two things about our John Doe: he’s very well connected, and he’s not completely trustworthy. A quick phone call and a couple of hours later I am filming in an illegal coal mine 50 miles out in the countryside. The mine owner, his fingers yellowed from years of filterless smokes, points out the basics of the mine. Despite the rapid-fire concerns of his second in command, the mine owner says that we are friends and I can film all I want to. Small-scale illegal mines in China are a current government bugaboo. Current edicts say the State is going to close down tens of thousands of them because they are unregulated and the source of thousands of deaths a year. The mine we visit is little more than a bricked hole in the ground. A power generator runs a winch that raises and lowers a bucket down a six-foot wide shaft. Below men pick away at the earth by hand and work a bucket at a time. The technology here lags decades behind mining in the U.S. Take away the generator and it’s more like a century. Living conditions would make most workers pine for the good ol’ days of the company town and coal baron. The hovels are simple holes cut in the hillside and lined with tarps. Neither the mine owner nor our connection allowed pictures of them taken. John Doe had planned to speak with us the next day about meeting some other mine bosses, but stopped answering our calls and we never heard from him again.

Seeing is believing

Duane Moles — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0700

(China's Coal: Part 1) This spring, CIR reporter Duane Moles traveled to China to report on the environmental effects of the coal mining industry in Shanxi Province. Moles, a native of West Virginia, is a graduate student at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Moles' reporting journal will appear on The Muckraker Blog through the next two weeks: After months of talking with my fellow student reporters about the slew of environmental crises in China, I confront the reality of China’s environment before my feet ever touch the country’s soil. Gliding down through what I thought were clouds, the true nature of environmental degradation materializes as suddenly as the appearance of the Beijing Airport landing strip outside my window. I'm surprised when I see gate and ground transit blurring alongside the plane -- because of the "clouds" I thought we were still some 10,000 feet in the air. A fellow reporter who had lived in Beijing for years was shocked at the thickness of the smog. Welcome to China.