News & Politics > On the Ground

WHAT'S HAPPENING (REALLY):
THE VIEW FROM IRAQ
By Lorna Tychostup

For full text of interview, please go to www.lornatychostup.com.

The photos for this article are part of a larger set of battlefield images, many of which were too graphic for publication provided by the family of a Marine Lance Corporal from NY state. The Lance Corporal’s family wishes these photos published as a way to help Americans see what we are asking of our children when we send them off to war. We invite readers to view other photos we chose not to publish, and to read the complete interviews from this month’s News and Politics section, at www.LornaTychostup.com.

March 22, 2003
Dear Friends, The massacre has begun. In the north, a B-52 has bombed the Muslim places in Kurdistan...30 were dead...the pictures on Al-Jazeera were horrible...half bodies, heads separated from their bodies, heads with no faces....It's a very clean war indeed. Baghdad was bombed heavily too, all throughout the night. Thank God our family are OK, as we called them this morning. Basra has suffered most. 50 civilians are dead and they have unfortunately lost their water and light. God help us all. I leave you in peace.
—Yasmin Alani

Yasmin Alani is a 35-year-old Iraqi-American who lives in New England with her husband and kids. In March, she began sending e-mails to friends informing them about how her family in Baghdad were faring and expressing outrage over, as she put it, “what is really happening in Iraq.” Soon requests began pouring in asking for permission to distribute these e-mails. Today, people all over the world are reading her real life accounts, gleaned from her viewing 10 Arabic-speaking satellite TV channels and phone calls with her family in Baghdad. Alani’s father-in-law died two weeks into the bombing. Her father, a much-beloved surgeon in Baghdad, died in late May.

Others feel it necessary to bring this message of “What is really happening in Iraq” to an American audience they feel is not getting a complete truth—even if it means risking their lives.

No stranger to war zones, filmmaker James Longley left Iraq last February only to return in late April. “Following the stories of different families and individuals in different places over a period of time,” Longley has been working in much the same vein as his last film, The Gaza Strip, which Variety described as “a chilling documentary showing everyday life in the Gaza Strip.”

Longley spoke via satellite phone from a platform at the Baghdad train station on July 8, as two US Humvees, mounted with 50-caliber machine guns, rolled first toward and then away from him. With no plans to leave in the near future, Longley says he feels safe, despite the fact that “people are getting executed...at close range. People will come up to soldiers and shoot them in the back of the head. People have had their equipment taken away at gunpoint. These things have happened, but then it’s not different from what’s happened to Iraqis.”

When asked if he thinks these attacks are part of an organized effort or simply random acts of violence, Longley replies, “It’s not random. People are blowing up Humvee vehicles with rocket propelled grenades (RPGs). It’s hard to do that without a group of people. Almost every day US soldiers are killed.” Longley believes the Iraqi armed resistance is “significantly Sunni. But I don’t think it is as simple as it’s being portrayed [by] the US military or media where they say it’s the Sunni Baathists. If you ask most people in Iraq, they certainly have some opposition to occupation. Many Shiite leaders, their groups are saying they will give the Americans a time limit, perhaps two years, to decide whether they can stay or will have to go. Others have already issued edicts that it is time for the US military to get out.”

In places like Fallujah, “a closed city, where there is a clan run by town elders, no strangers go and live. Everybody knows everybody. Even Saddam Hussein had to negotiate with city fathers in Fallujah to do anything there. The us military feel they don’t have to negotiate, they simply issue an order. In this place there is a lot of national pride. You can’t just come in. If you try to enter someone’s home without permission, they have the right to shoot you or kill you because your home is your castle, your fortress.”

After spending almost one year in Iran, freelance journalist Borzou Daragahi entered northern Iraq in September 2002. At times embedded, and at others not, he has been covering the war and posting letters home on a Topica Web page:

July 7, 2003
“As an embed, I'm given full access to the base and allowed to go on missions with the troops. After a while, you begin to understand the current troubles in Iraq from the perspective of the grunt on the ground. The US soldiers aren't being hailed as liberators and warmly embraced by the vast majority of the population. They're ordinary soldiers trained to kill cast into inordinately complex situations.
“‘Why don't we just shoot the f***ers?’ one soldier asks during a stakeout of a site used to ambush American soldiers.
“‘Well, there's a school nearby,’ the other responds. ‘Now, I don't think we'll hit the school, but the people of the village will think that we were trying to, and that'll make things difficult in the long run.’”

In the days before we spoke on July 18 (via satellite phone from a Baghdad rooftop), Daragahi had spent time with the Army’s now infamous 3rd Infantry Division doing a story on troop morale for AP.

“I think they’re burned out. I think they’re tired. I asked one soldier who he thought was behind the attacks on the troops and he said, ‘Sometimes I think it’s Saddam loyalists, sometimes I think it’s Islamic fundamentalists, but it ends up me thinking it’s the Iraqi people. The same people giving me the thumbs up during the day are shooting RPGs at me at night. I end up despising the people here.’”

Daragahi believes “there is obviously an escalating organized resistance developing against the US presence” which “shows an increasing level of organization and technological training.” But he adds, “It is definitely not a general uprising. There is absolutely no evidence to show that the vast majority of Iraqis are opposed to the US presence here. There is credible evidence that definitely some of the attacks are wayward 17- and 18-year-old kids paid a couple hundred bucks to launch RPGs at US forces.”

Daragahi does feel there has been a positive change in the American approach in Iraq. On an administrative level, “Paul Bremer came here full of bluster—we’re going to do this, take over, mold Iraq in our image—and then he started dealing with the day-to-day.” According to Daragahi, Bremer has now been “humbled” into taking a “lighter approach.”

Militarily, “there was a decisive decision to take a more kinder, gentler attitude toward using firepower,” says Daragahi. He shared a private conversation he had with an unnamed colonel in which he was told, “We look at what the Israelis are doing in the occupied territories. We can see that happening here. We are not going to go in and inflict collective punishment.” Daragahi added quickly, “You know, they’re not even kicking down doors anymore. They politely knock on the door and say, ‘We’re the US. We have suspicion there are weapons in here. May we come inside and search your house?’”

When asked, “So even though the tensions are increasing daily, the American troops are becoming more polite in their approach to Iraqis?” Daragahi replied, “I think they’ve been ordered to become less violent,” and laughed. “I don’t know about more polite.”

7/10/03
Dear Friends,
I hope you had the chance to watch the “Senate Armed Services Committee” questioning Rumsfeld. Don't worry, taxpayers. You are not paying for the war against Iraq. I recorded the questioning of Rumsfeld on a video, and watched it again and again to make sure that I was hearing it right, because he was trying to avoid answering Sen. Robert Byrd’s questions. Rumsfeld said that the monthly cost of keeping the forces in Iraq is $3.9 billion. He said:

— $1.7 Billion comes from frozen Iraqi assets, expandable by Sept.
— $0.8 billion comes from seized Iraqi money, expandable by Sept.

This money goes toward “Coalition” troop support. The cost of keeping them in Iraq. As you know, nothing has been rebuilt, but a new prison has been built in Baghdad airport to question Iraqi prisoners. Thieves, I tell you. But hey, look at the bright side taxpayers, you don't have to pay for this war. And we, lucky free Iraqis can rally all we want for not being paid our salaries.
—Yasmin Alani

Is there reconstruction actually occurring in Iraq? According to Daragahi, yes. “In terms of institution rebuilding, the more cerebral stuff,” says Daragahi, “they’re rebuilding the Iraqi police department. That is step one, to have Iraqis managing their own security.” At universities he has visited, despite the buildings’ having been “looted, gutted, and partially burned,” students are going to class with the main goal of finishing up finals.

“Reconstruction?” says Longley. “I don’t know exactly what you mean. They haven’t been rebuilding anything that I’ve seen. The only thing they’ve rebuilt is a few bridges they bombed during the war. If you ride the freeways in Iraq, south and north of Baghdad, you will see enormous convoys of containers coming from the north and south. You’ll see these sort of triple/quadruple-wide houses, prefab offices on the backs of trucks, all kinds of tanks and equipment, and long lines of military trucks going up and down the highways.”

When told of the CSPAN-aired tour of Iraq taken by USAID head Andrew Natsios the week before, which showed some 900 American and Australians taking up residence at Saddam’s Baghdad Palace as part of reconstruction efforts, Longley says, “Yeah, but what does that mean exactly? That’s the big question in the mind of the Iraqis: ‘What does it mean for us to have 900 Americans staying in the [palace]? Where do we see the benefit from this?’ They sit in the El Rashid Hotel and have meetings; it’s not going to be a significant change for people. The US is spending a lot of money on itself. It’s spending a lot of money supporting this occupation, the presence of all these troops. It’s not spending a lot of money rebuilding schools and hospitals that anyone can see. I’ve been in a lot of hospitals and schools; there’s no reconstruction going on that I am aware of being financed by the Americans. There have been a lot of hospitals destroyed which no one is rebuilding.”

7/18/03
Dear Friends,
I just ended a one-hour phone call with my mother and two sisters in Iraq. I wish I could say that things are OK, but I can't. My sister said that the security level in Baghdad is Zero. Services are nil, too. They have just had the electric power back after not having it for 24 hours. So many gangsters are getting into houses, killing the people and robbing the house. Some are kidnapping a person to get a ransom. A crime, so common now, that was never heard of in Iraq before “Bush's freedom.” All houses are armed now, ready to defend their home, but sometimes it doesn't work. The soldiers shoot randomly when they are afraid and gangsters are everywhere. They steal and kill in the day light and nobody says anything. So now, after my father's death, my mother locked her house yesterday and moved in with my eldest sister. It was not safe to be there anymore.

My mother, who fell a month ago and has a numb leg ever since, said it is impossible to go to hospitals these days, they are in total chaos. She is relying on pain killers. My sister said no one can drive a nice car…a 1990 Toyota is considered a new car! They will be slaughtered and the car stolen. My aunt, who has this car, is considering buying an even older car, so that she can drive it without being afraid for her life. My youngest sister said, “As unsafe as we are, believe it or not, we feel much safer than the US soldiers are feeling right now. They can't walk without looking to their backs all the time…the soldiers don't want to be there in the first place. Let them go home.”

Then my family said, “but not to worry, we are fine.”
—Yasmin Alani