Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Iraq

By Dahr Jamail, Haymarket Books. Posted November 1, 2007.

The following excerpt is from chapter 9 of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Iraq by Dahr Jamail (Haymarket, 2007).

Raiding Mosques, Torturing Iraqis

Having survived the hell of Fallujah, I returned to Baghdad to find that most of the remaining NGOs in Iraq were either pulling out completely or leaving behind a skeleton crew. There was even talk of a UN airlift to fly remaining members of international development organizations out of Iraq if necessary. Others spoke of the possibility of the Baghdad airport being closed down for security reasons. All of us were appalled when we found CNN on the satellite TV channels declaring that the cease-fire in Fallujah was "holding."

Other corporate media outlets like National Public Radio and the New York Times had their reporters happily embedded with the troops, obediently regurgitating the military press releases for U.S. audiences. In my gut, I was beginning to experience a feeling of being trapped. Conditions, particularly those related to mobility, were growing increasingly restrictive. Planes entering and exiting Iraq had to use corkscrew descent and ascent. The road to Amman was virtually impassable for any Westerner because of the threat of kidnapping. It was fear of being kidnapped that forced me to consider abandoning my mission and leaving Iraq.Most of us had decided to take it a day at a time. Our strategy was to stock up on provisions and sit tight in our apartment in the Karrada district of Baghdad.

Many of our Iraqi friends and interpreters had received death threats for working with us, more and more Iraqis were staying at home, and all of us were afraid.

That night, from the roof of our apartment, I watched soldiers and Humvees seal Firdos Square. In "liberated Iraq," U.S. soldiers announced on loudspeakers, from behind coils of concertina wire, that anyone approaching the square would be shot on sight.

In an April 13 prime-time press conference addressing the ongoing violence in Iraq, George W. Bush told reporters, "America's armed forces are performing brilliantly, with all the skill and honor we expect of them." He went on to say that he knew what the United States was doing in Iraq was right.When I read this in Baghdad, I wondered if Bush included the massacre of unarmed women, children, and elderly in Fallujah?

When he said he believed the soldiers in Iraq were performing brilliantly "with all the skill and honor..." did this include the snipers shooting ambulances with blaring sirens and flashing lights? Did this include dragging an entire country into a bloody chaos that was worsening by the hour? My sources from inside Fallujah, many of whom were doctors, said that by now more than six hundred bodies had been counted at area emergency facilities, although the local medical authorities in the city believed that a significant number of victims had been buried without any possibility of receiving care at a clinic or hospital.

Mass funerals were being conducted during brief lulls in the fighting. One of the two soccer fields in the town had been converted into a mass martyr cemetery. I tried hard to imagine a soccer field back in the United States being turned into a graveyard-headstones above ground and buried shrapnel-shredded bodies underneath, populating a dry field where children once laughed, ran, and kicked soccer balls-but my imagination failed me.

Alber was seething. "On April 11, at 3:30 a.m.,U.S. troops raided the mosque by using tanks to crash through the gate adjoining the food storage area that was being stocked for the besieged people of Fallujah.Another tank smashed through the gate next to the student dormitory and the martyrs' cemetery."

The spokesman for the Abu Hanifa mosque in the neighborhood of Adhamiyah, in Baghdad, slowly recounted the recent U.S. raid on his mosque. Rahul, Harb, and I sat listening in disbelief in a visiting room inside the mosque. Near us lay tattered plastic bags containing three tons of food meant as relief for Fallujah, now rendered useless by the crushing wheels of a Humvee. This and other aid material lay wasted inside a metal gate that had first been demolished by the same vehicle. "Forty soldiers entered the mosque while about sixty were guarding it from the outside," continued Alber as tea was served to us. "Those inside went first into the main area of the mosque where all of us were praying. Some Red Crescent volunteers from Kirkuk were also resting there before setting out with the supplies for the people of Fallujah."

The soldiers had entered with their weapons and with their footwear, strictly forbidden in a mosque, and then ordered everyone at gunpoint to lie on the ground. There was anger in his voice as he told us, "I speak good English. I pleaded with the Americans to let us open all the doors for them to avoid further damage to our mosque. I was afraid of how the people would react when they found out. But the Iraqi translator accompanying them yelled at me, 'Silence! Shut your mouth!'" While some soldiers held all the people at gunpoint, their colleagues broke in every locked and closed door in the mosque and some that were not even locked.

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Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who reports from Iraq.

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