April 8h - A Year Later
Modified: 06:26:14 AM
The kidnappings, the closures, the situation a year after the fall of Baghdad.
I expect everyone knows by now about the kidnapping of three Japanese civilians and the threat to burn them alive unless the Japanese government withdraws its troops from Iraq. Anxious, everyone huddled round the satellite TV in one of the apartments. The tape from the kidnappers showed them crouched, blindfolded, knives to their throats.
“It’s them!”
Nayoko used to bring food for the street kids and wash their clothes for them, the boys who later stayed in the shelter in Bab a Sherji and now live in the Kurdish House. She wasn’t with an NGO at all, just an individual who raised some money to come over and help the kids and did it, learnt some Arabic, quietly got on with it. As a result no one, no embassy, no organisation, knows anything about her. The Japanese embassy thought all three of them had just arrived.
And it makes no difference, of course it makes no difference, that I know them; it makes no difference to the terror on her face, the young woman who used to help the street kids on Abu Nawas, the man who was investigating depleted uranium contamination. It makes no difference that their faces are familiar, that I used to see them at the internet on Karrada Dakhil and wander down the street with them. But it feels horrible.
Because you know that the Japanese government won’t accede to the demand and you know that the kidnappers won’t go back on their ultimatum and you know there’s not much chance of them escaping and it’s no different from all the other violent deaths that people have suffered out here, a lot of them pre-planned in one way or another, contemplated by the pilot who fired the missile into the civilian area or the commander who sent the pilot, but to see them alive and to know what is coming is almost unbearable.
Karrada on Thursday evening was the usual pile of traffic, hooting at inanimate objects as if that might ease the gridlock, the smells of popcorn and petrol mingling around the weekend shoppers.
Most of the day’s plans were thwarted by closures. The schools in Sadr city and lots of other bits of town are closed. Those that are open are mostly empty because parents are keeping the kids at home where they can try to keep them safe. The colleges and universities are deserted, more or less. The Magreb youth centre was closed because it’s near to Adamiya where there have been battles.
Instead I went to look for Akael, the man I met in the hospital last year after the bombing of Palestine Street outside the Omar Al-Faroukh Mosque. He was 20 then, a piece of shrapnel embedded in his forehead, the doctors unsure, because the scanning equipment didn’t work any more, whether it had pierced his brain. I was kicked out of the country a couple of days later and never managed to find out what happened, but I did have their address.
We drove for ages looking for street 9, house 12 which, in theory, had to be close to a mosque. “The streets are all in a mess,” the lad by the side of the road explained, not referring to heaps of festering rubbish that you find on a lot of streets or even to the craterous holes in the road but to their order.
The streets have numbers rather than names, which ought to make it easier to find the one you want: street 9 might be expected to sit somewhere between 8 and 10. But no. “This one is Street 3 and that one is Street 43.” He gave us an apologetic look. What could you do when the world around you made no sense?
No one we asked knew where street 9 was. They could tell us what this one was and the one next to it. This is fourteen and that one is twenty six, they would say, with an apologetic gesture. The streets are all in a mess. Someone suggested we ask the responsible for the district, the Mukhtar. There’s one in each area, the senior gentleman of the district, a source of information and social authority. He came out from his siesta, pulled up the metal shutter of what looked like a garage next to his house to reveal a tiny shop but he, too, was unable to tell us where street nine was and didn’t know the family.
Since it was the mosque that was closest to the bombing, we went there and Dhafur went in to ask. Yes, they knew the attack we meant and the street where the houses had been damaged. A man who was leaving offered to lead us there in is car, but the way was blocked by tanks and armoured personnel carriers, a group of young men close by. The soldiers waved guns and Dhafur remarked that there was only one God but also only one death and with that he reversed up the street and we decided to find Akael’s family another day.
Raed ran up the stairs breathless. On the streets of Sadr city, Sadr’s people are telling everyone that if they get the chance they should kidnap a westerner and they’ll offer prisoner exchanges for their own people who have been seized by the americans. After we’d promised not to go anywhere for a couple of days, his eyes lit up. “This Boomchucka Bus, I think it is the best idea I’ve ever heard. The children need this.”
He can sort out the bus for us and a driver, will equip it with a microphone, music and speakers. “Music is my job.” He’s been dreaming of the bus tour, what size of bus we need, where the circus flag will look best, the sound of all the kids yelling Boomchucka again. He says he’ll go and spread the word in the places before the bus arrives that it’s coming and it’s on their side, so people won’t be nervous or suspicious. Raed misses the circus.
Then he nipped up to the roof to check on the security arrangements, pronounced himself satisfied with the three men with Kalashnikovs on the roof and the three more outside, shouted Boomchucka and darted next door to cook some pastry parcels.
We’re constantly reassessing. You ask yourself whether what you’re doing is worth what appears to be the level of risk on any given day. If there are a few days when it looks a bit dodgy then you sit it out in the apartment and see what happens. If things improve then you get on with it. If not then you try and work out a safe way to leave.
The last few months things have been intense at times but not too dangerous and I think what I and we have been doing has been worth the risks. If that changes, if I can’t do the stuff I’m trying to do, if it’s too dangerous to run the Boomchucka Bus Tour, if the schools and youth centres and universities don’t reopen so we can do the twinning and solidarity projects, then I’ll leave. I’m lucky enough to have that option.
My good friend Nada has been getting kidnap threats by telephone for about the last three weeks. They tell her they will kidnap her and beat her and kill her, or perhaps her kids, for five million dinars in ransom, about $3500. They, whoever they are, object to her being friends with foreigners and she refuses to give in to them, although it was only today that she told us and made us promise we wouldn’t give in to them either.
Al-Sadr is now in control of Najaf, Samawa and Kut, or parts of them. The good thing about travelling is that you get to meet loads of interesting people but, on the down side, then you have to worry about them when you hear their city is being fought over. I can’t get hold of any of the people I met in Samawa to find out if they’re ok.
The Italian NGO Un Ponte Per managed to get a truckload of relief supplies into Falluja today and a huge demonstration stormed through the US military checkpoint that was meant to keep people out of the city, bringing aid for the people there. They were Shia and Sunni, chanting their common interest in fighting the Americans.
A child was brought into the Red Cross hospital in Baghdad after his parents took him to his grandad in a safe area. His grandad took him out for a walk and an F-16 fired a missile into the people, killing 9, including his grandad. He’s lost both legs and one of his arms.
The bombers are roaring overhead tonight: even the moon is on fire, rising enormous and orange beyond Karrada Kharitj.
“It’s them!”
Nayoko used to bring food for the street kids and wash their clothes for them, the boys who later stayed in the shelter in Bab a Sherji and now live in the Kurdish House. She wasn’t with an NGO at all, just an individual who raised some money to come over and help the kids and did it, learnt some Arabic, quietly got on with it. As a result no one, no embassy, no organisation, knows anything about her. The Japanese embassy thought all three of them had just arrived.
And it makes no difference, of course it makes no difference, that I know them; it makes no difference to the terror on her face, the young woman who used to help the street kids on Abu Nawas, the man who was investigating depleted uranium contamination. It makes no difference that their faces are familiar, that I used to see them at the internet on Karrada Dakhil and wander down the street with them. But it feels horrible.
Because you know that the Japanese government won’t accede to the demand and you know that the kidnappers won’t go back on their ultimatum and you know there’s not much chance of them escaping and it’s no different from all the other violent deaths that people have suffered out here, a lot of them pre-planned in one way or another, contemplated by the pilot who fired the missile into the civilian area or the commander who sent the pilot, but to see them alive and to know what is coming is almost unbearable.
Karrada on Thursday evening was the usual pile of traffic, hooting at inanimate objects as if that might ease the gridlock, the smells of popcorn and petrol mingling around the weekend shoppers.
Most of the day’s plans were thwarted by closures. The schools in Sadr city and lots of other bits of town are closed. Those that are open are mostly empty because parents are keeping the kids at home where they can try to keep them safe. The colleges and universities are deserted, more or less. The Magreb youth centre was closed because it’s near to Adamiya where there have been battles.
Instead I went to look for Akael, the man I met in the hospital last year after the bombing of Palestine Street outside the Omar Al-Faroukh Mosque. He was 20 then, a piece of shrapnel embedded in his forehead, the doctors unsure, because the scanning equipment didn’t work any more, whether it had pierced his brain. I was kicked out of the country a couple of days later and never managed to find out what happened, but I did have their address.
We drove for ages looking for street 9, house 12 which, in theory, had to be close to a mosque. “The streets are all in a mess,” the lad by the side of the road explained, not referring to heaps of festering rubbish that you find on a lot of streets or even to the craterous holes in the road but to their order.
The streets have numbers rather than names, which ought to make it easier to find the one you want: street 9 might be expected to sit somewhere between 8 and 10. But no. “This one is Street 3 and that one is Street 43.” He gave us an apologetic look. What could you do when the world around you made no sense?
No one we asked knew where street 9 was. They could tell us what this one was and the one next to it. This is fourteen and that one is twenty six, they would say, with an apologetic gesture. The streets are all in a mess. Someone suggested we ask the responsible for the district, the Mukhtar. There’s one in each area, the senior gentleman of the district, a source of information and social authority. He came out from his siesta, pulled up the metal shutter of what looked like a garage next to his house to reveal a tiny shop but he, too, was unable to tell us where street nine was and didn’t know the family.
Since it was the mosque that was closest to the bombing, we went there and Dhafur went in to ask. Yes, they knew the attack we meant and the street where the houses had been damaged. A man who was leaving offered to lead us there in is car, but the way was blocked by tanks and armoured personnel carriers, a group of young men close by. The soldiers waved guns and Dhafur remarked that there was only one God but also only one death and with that he reversed up the street and we decided to find Akael’s family another day.
Raed ran up the stairs breathless. On the streets of Sadr city, Sadr’s people are telling everyone that if they get the chance they should kidnap a westerner and they’ll offer prisoner exchanges for their own people who have been seized by the americans. After we’d promised not to go anywhere for a couple of days, his eyes lit up. “This Boomchucka Bus, I think it is the best idea I’ve ever heard. The children need this.”
He can sort out the bus for us and a driver, will equip it with a microphone, music and speakers. “Music is my job.” He’s been dreaming of the bus tour, what size of bus we need, where the circus flag will look best, the sound of all the kids yelling Boomchucka again. He says he’ll go and spread the word in the places before the bus arrives that it’s coming and it’s on their side, so people won’t be nervous or suspicious. Raed misses the circus.
Then he nipped up to the roof to check on the security arrangements, pronounced himself satisfied with the three men with Kalashnikovs on the roof and the three more outside, shouted Boomchucka and darted next door to cook some pastry parcels.
We’re constantly reassessing. You ask yourself whether what you’re doing is worth what appears to be the level of risk on any given day. If there are a few days when it looks a bit dodgy then you sit it out in the apartment and see what happens. If things improve then you get on with it. If not then you try and work out a safe way to leave.
The last few months things have been intense at times but not too dangerous and I think what I and we have been doing has been worth the risks. If that changes, if I can’t do the stuff I’m trying to do, if it’s too dangerous to run the Boomchucka Bus Tour, if the schools and youth centres and universities don’t reopen so we can do the twinning and solidarity projects, then I’ll leave. I’m lucky enough to have that option.
My good friend Nada has been getting kidnap threats by telephone for about the last three weeks. They tell her they will kidnap her and beat her and kill her, or perhaps her kids, for five million dinars in ransom, about $3500. They, whoever they are, object to her being friends with foreigners and she refuses to give in to them, although it was only today that she told us and made us promise we wouldn’t give in to them either.
Al-Sadr is now in control of Najaf, Samawa and Kut, or parts of them. The good thing about travelling is that you get to meet loads of interesting people but, on the down side, then you have to worry about them when you hear their city is being fought over. I can’t get hold of any of the people I met in Samawa to find out if they’re ok.
The Italian NGO Un Ponte Per managed to get a truckload of relief supplies into Falluja today and a huge demonstration stormed through the US military checkpoint that was meant to keep people out of the city, bringing aid for the people there. They were Shia and Sunni, chanting their common interest in fighting the Americans.
A child was brought into the Red Cross hospital in Baghdad after his parents took him to his grandad in a safe area. His grandad took him out for a walk and an F-16 fired a missile into the people, killing 9, including his grandad. He’s lost both legs and one of his arms.
The bombers are roaring overhead tonight: even the moon is on fire, rising enormous and orange beyond Karrada Kharitj.