January 31st - Another Day
01 Feb 2004
The death of Durayd, the arrest of Esam and the circus in Mahaweel
It was the last thing I heard before I slept, unfolding the spare mattress for Ahmed, sleeping off the alcohol he drowned his sorrows in, and the first thing I heard in the morning, when Hamsa opened the door and sat on the end of my bed.

He is dead. He is dead. Four bullets destroyed his skull on the road from Hilla back to Baghdad.

His name was Durayd. His four year old son is called Ibrahim and his wife is known as Umm Ibrahim.

She’s too young, Hamsa said. She can’t deal with it. They ask her does she want to see the body. She doesn’t know. How could she know? Hamsa says if she waits until the body is cleaned then she can’t hold him. If she holds his body it will have to be cleaned again before burial. But if she sees his body before it’s cleaned… Four bullets destroyed his skull on the road from Hilla back to Baghdad.

Durayd was a presenter on Shebab FM, the Voice of Youth radio station, before the war. That’s how Ahmed got to know him. Hamsa knew him from the College of Languages first and then they worked together at CNN, as translator – producers. A lot of the young people with good English got jobs with the western media after the war, supporting their whole families, English being one of the few skills that could get you employment in occupied Baghdad. She said he looked after her, helped her get her packages finished.

Who killed him? Whose was the finger or whose were the fingers that fired the bullets? Who determined that CNN should be the White House, so hated that they were targeted? Who decreed that there should be this chaos and destruction? And when you thought enough about it, tied enough knots, it made perfect sense to target the Iraqis who worked with the Americans, rather than the Americans themselves, because they’re less protected and the supply of Americans who will come is probably limitless but the number of iraqis prepared to risk their lives for US wages may be fewer and if no one co-operated with them, no one collaborated with them, no one worked for them, the occupation would be far harder to maintain.

Husni said Hamsa didn’t eat for two days, didn’t sleep, just cried and cried and cried. We dropped her at Durayd’s home and went to Premiere Urgence to meet Fadhil and the others and go to the camp at Rajdiya. Fadhil was on a downer, crushed under the weight of his everyday sadness, even before he knew.

“How are you?”

He shrugged. “You know, we are tired. We don’t go out and meet people. We lock our door. Even we don’t see our friends. I am depressed.”

Then came the knowledge that Durayd was dead, his skull destroyed by four bullets on the road from Hilla back to Baghdad. And he always tried to help everyone, had time for everyone, loved his son like there was no tomorrow and then there wasn’t.

Today the funeral process began, delayed from the traditional and important next-morning burial by various requirements and rigmarole.

Today we went to Mahaweel, a small town in Babylon governorate. I didn’t notice how dirty the stage was till I started sweeping, between dancing about with my magical music box, and the audience disappeared spluttering in a cloud of red dust. The kids seemed to come to life as the show began, like Bagpuss waking up and bursting into colour. In the middle of the first act, the lights went out. No one noticed, nor when it came back, part way through Peat and Luis’s juggling extravaganza. The downside was that the Iraqi TV crew’s very bright light suddenly dazzled the jugglers.

At the end, as we were leaving, one of the men came to Peat and me. “I want to thank you for coming. This is the first time since the war that I have seen the children laugh this way, from their insides.”

The youth centre hosts about 750 kids a day, mostly boys, for sports and games and drama. It reopened in June and the youth workers say the children are visibly scarred by the war. Explosions still shake them and their play is more violent, their concentration disrupted. “They are fearful,” Ali said with a shrug. They are full of fear.

Coming home, along the road from Hilla back to Baghdad, burnt tanks mark the kilometres, some tucked in among the palm trees, some stark at the roadside, for some reason not thrown into the tank cemetery at Al-Dora, a huge expanse of wasteground where burnt out tanks and vehicles are piled.

Aala goes there to cut bits of metal off the tanks to sell to the Kurdish men who come to buy from the people who scavenge a precarious living there. It’s divided into territories within which a particular group or family has the salvage rights. His mum died when he was still in nappies. He can’t remember anything about her. His dad’s left them now to marry a new wife and the older brothers and sisters take care of them.

Now sixteen, he’s fairly independent but, tiny and powerless, he’s only paid 1000 Dinar – about 40 pence, for a day’s worth of metal. His older brothers get a better rate. He mustered a small smile. The oldest brother provides food for them, so sometimes he has enough money to go and play billiards. He stays there till his money runs out and then he comes back to the wasteground. There are five families living in the houses immediately bordering the cemetery on their side.

I asked him if anyone had warned him it was dangerous to cut metal from burnt out tanks. No, he said. It used to be that a lot of people died from explosions there, but those are not so many now. A memory caught him: there were some journalists who came with a machine and they said there was a reading on it, that it was dangerous to climb on the tanks and take the metal, there was something, what was it called? Radiation. But he didn’t know anything about that.

Esam’s been arrested. He’s an independent Iraqi film maker. His house was raided at 3am on suspicion that he had video CDs of footage of the resistance. Nothing was found but Esam was taken. The Iraqi translator is well known in Adamiya, Mohammed Saddam. He gave the Americans the “information” and arrived with them to make the raid. He told Noor that he’d make sure her husband was released in half an hour if he could hold her hand.

All day Noor and Uzma and some others have been going to the CPA, the bases, the police stations. At the military-run police academy near Al-Shaab stadium Paola and Jodie were allowed in to enquire while Noor was barred. Still they don’t know where he is. I don’t know whether it needs saying that Noor is distraught. People disappear for months into that system. Younis, who he was working with, was arrested six months ago and his family haven’t seen him, haven’t received any information about him.

And so the early nights are filled with listening to bereaved friends and so are the morning lie-ins and so the days or hours off are filled with traipsing around the city looking for arrested friends and so the computers are destroyed by viruses

And one more is dead, after four bullets destroyed his skull on the road from Hilla back to Baghdad, and one more has disappeared after someone sold him to the Americans for a few dollars, buried in the system, and another couple of hundred children laughed as if it was bubbling up from their bellies and Aala cut some more sheets of metal off tanks contaminated with depleted uranium.