A Disappearance in Damascus (11 page)

Ahlam, with her husband at the wheel, drove with him through the post-invasion landscape. There was only one cassette in the car, Frank Sinatra, whose greatest hits played in a loop as smoke poured from burned-out buildings and looters roamed the lawless streets. This view of Baghdad was a reminder that the problems in the village were paltry compared to what was happening inside the city. On the sidewalk by a hospital, an X-ray machine had been claimed by somebody's grandmother. Street markets had turned into arms fairs—machine guns, RPGs, missiles, anti-tank mines pillaged from abandoned stockpiles. “American GIs were just standing around,” Luhnow would recall. “When I asked them, they'd say they had no orders to intervene. They only had orders to guard the Oil ministry.”

At a power plant where a pre-sanctions General Electric turbine, held together with spit and ingenuity, was the only thing keeping the lights on, they met a delegation of portly middle-aged executives from American power companies. The executives mooted bringing in three new turbines, but this would require congressional approval. Months it would take, perhaps years. “We don't need this fancy stuff,” one of the Iraqi employees protested. “We need hammers, wrenches, pliers. They've all been stolen. Is there a way you could tell them to bring those first?”

One day, on a street corner, they came across a magnificent white stallion. The stables of Uday Hussein had been looted, and this stunning creature had been hitched to an impoverished street vendor's rickety cart. Spooked by
gunfire, the horse bolted, launching itself into a barrier of razor wire the Americans had set up. The soldiers scrambled for a forklift while a crowd of Iraqis watched the horse bleed to death on the sidewalk.

Luhnow interviewed the American officials who were in the midst of disbanding the public service and firing the Iraqi Army, anointing this person enemy and that one friend. His reporting took him in and out of the Green Zone, the recently fortified administrative centre of Baghdad. The Coalition Provisional Authority had taken over Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace with its swimming pools, ornate ceilings and elaborate cupolas—gaudy excess of the sort Luhnow associated with nouveau riche bad taste. Security was tight but he had press credentials. In this way Ahlam, the village girl who had once been terrified of ever having a flat tire outside one of these palaces and disappearing from the face of the Earth, was free to “run around” (as Luhnow put it) the former dictator's residence. One ostentatious room had been turned into a barbershop where soldiers were taking turns getting shorn, but Ahlam couldn't shake the feeling that at any moment the ex-dictator would pop out from behind a polished marble wall.

As she gazed around her, a haggard-looking woman swanned through the palace dressed in the finest clothing: a gorgeous robe embroidered in gold thread, gold bracelets from wrist to elbow, on each hand at least three rings. “That's the maid of Samira al-Shahbandar,” an Iraqi woman working for the Americans told Ahlam—Saddam Hussein's second wife. “She's taken over her villa as well.”

In this upended world a boy rode a donkey past Ahlam's house with a brand-new laptop strapped to the donkey's
hindquarters. At the library in Kadhimiya where Ahlam had passed so many precious hours during her student years, an old woman carted out a wheelbarrow full of books, saying she would use the pages as wrapping to sell seeds.

Ahlam had seen enough. When a pair of teenaged boys pulled a horse and cart up to an Iraqi tank abandoned near the main road to scavenge for parts, she called together a group of the village children. “Each of you pick up a rock,” she instructed them. She and the children threw stones at the looters until they drove them off. The mothers of the children were furious with her. It was reckless. They could all have been killed.

All the traffic police had disappeared—the US Army had suspended the Iraqi traffic code because it had made exceptions for Baath Party members
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—and the streets had become anarchic and dangerous, filled with new cars, new drivers, and military vehicles that treated the roads as an obstacle course. Once, Ahlam got out of the car herself to direct traffic, frustrated that no one was left to do this most basic of jobs. And then one day, someone was. He appeared suddenly in the middle of the street, waving his hands and signalling to the cars, focused on the job, alone against a world gone mad. No one had ordered him back to work. He must have woken up that morning and decided to put on his old grey-and-white uniform and return of his own accord. Watching him go about this impossible task, risking his life to bring order to chaos, Ahlam felt tears in her eyes.

“It was the first time since the war began that I wept,” she told me. “That man represented a country that recognized its duties, its responsibilities, order. Before the war you
understood the rules: avoid the government and you will be safe. After the war there were no rules, only chaos. He symbolized a governing system. Without that we were lost.”

That month—it was June now—two other events stood out. The first was a protest outside the gates of the Green Zone. Several thousand Iraqi army officers had gathered to ask for the same fifty dollars the lower ranks received after Paul Bremer fired them. “It was a small amount of money but it was symbolic,” Ahlam said, “and they were starving.” Their military service had been mandatory, and the international sanctions that preceded the invasion had erased other forms of employment. “Now they were out in the street without hope, hunted from one place to another—on one side by Iraqis who wanted revenge, and on the other by Americans who wanted to arrest and interrogate them.”

Luhnow was in a hurry that day—he had an interview scheduled inside the Green Zone. Ahlam urged him to take a moment, to speak to the protestors, to listen to what they had to say. Surrounded by a throng of shouting men, he spoke to an ex–army captain. “You don't understand what a massive mistake this is,” the man told him, his voice almost pleading. “You are putting the army on the street. They will form the backbone of the resistance.” Luhnow, preoccupied and hardly able to pay attention, would later hear those words echo in his mind with the force of prophecy.

He went into the Green Zone. Ahlam waited for him outside on the outskirts of the crowd. While she was waiting, she saw American soldiers open fire on the protestors. In the uproar that followed, protestors began overturning cars and setting them on fire. Ahlam ran back to her car. She pulled the “Press” sign from the window, stuffed it under the seat,
then leapt in to move the car farther off. While she was parking, a woman stepped out of her home. “What are you doing here?” she asked, suspicion in her voice.

Ahlam thought fast. “I went to ask the Americans about my brother. He's missing.”

“Oh, you poor girl,” the woman said sympathetically. “This sort of thing is happening to everyone.”

Ahlam hurried back on foot to look for Luhnow. With his mop of light brown hair, his American style and bearing, the reporter was as much a symbol of foreignness as the press sign. She always kept a steel pipe under the seat of her car in case they were stopped, because in the back of her mind was a vision of her charge being pulled from the car and dragged away. The enraged protestors might kill him as soon as he emerged from the Green Zone, but she figured if they saw him with her, they might leave him alone. She searched for his face at the gates until she saw him. He was looking quite relaxed—he had no idea what had happened while he was inside. Together they pushed through the raging crowd and made it back to the car.

The second event, a short time later, was an explosion that blackened the sky across the river from her village. An army transport vehicle had driven over a roadside bomb. No one was hurt but it was a sign things had changed. When Captain Pape's unit was reassigned, the soldiers who took their place preferred to stay inside their tanks. “They were frightened,” Ahlam said, “and they were right to be.” But she saw where this left ordinary people: caught between the US military and the Iraqi resistance.

She had not asked the Americans to come to Iraq, but she knew that nothing could be accomplished without them. In sweeping away the state, they had become the state. And
though their ranks included some fine and decent people, and others whom she saw as simply desperate, she had enough experience of war to know that soldiers followed orders. She also knew that the Iraqi people had expected the Americans to swiftly organize elections, then leave. But a new realization was dawning: the war had just begun.

“I remember one of the nicest afternoons in Iraq was at her house.” David Luhnow was talking to me over Skype from his office in Mexico City, where he was now the Latin American bureau chief for the
Wall Street Journal
. I had contacted him to get his understanding of their work together, for the writing of this book. He seemed pleased by the prospect of talking about Ahlam. He was full of praise for her work, for how meticulous she was—her powers of observation and recall—and especially for what she had taught him about her country. Though he wondered if her open mind, her “can-do” attitude, the way she scorned the “Sunni–Shia–Kurd thing,” had made him more optimistic about the future than he ought to have been.

It was a lovely afternoon in May when Luhnow went to Ahlam's house. He sat in her garden drinking tea with the Americans who had “set up camp” in her home. They had yet to be reassigned, and their tanks were parked in her yard. “They were sort of based there. She had welcomed them and helped them reach out to the neighbourhood on projects and security. It was very encouraging to see that dynamic.”

Some of the guys had gone swimming in the Tigris. He remembered Ahlam shouting to warn them about the current. The atmosphere was warm and relaxed, but a part of him wondered what other Iraqis would think.

“She welcomed the Americans in terms of helping her own people,” he told me, “because they were the de facto authority. She was very much a community leader and tried to organize people immediately after the war and in the first months of the occupation. She was very smart about what needed doing. I think some of that ended up getting her into trouble.”

He had already begun to have his own doubts about the war. “If you're going to decapitate a government and try to run it from afar I'd think having the institutions intact to run it would be very important. There was none of that happening.” He remembered the protest outside the Green Zone, shortly after that visit to Ahlam's home, and how stupid he felt not to have paid more attention. “Those days were the critical turning point.” It would not be long before the first Iraqi civilian walked up to an American soldier and shot him in the face.

On that golden afternoon, such problems seemed far off. As they drank tea and talked and the soldiers dried off in the sun, Ahlam discussed ideas and plans that still seemed possible and Luhnow talked to Captain Pape's superior, a lieutenant who had joined them that day. They both agreed that there were good signs and bad—it was alarming that nobody in the occupation forces seemed to have a plan for post-war Iraq—but even so there were reasons for hope.

A year or so later the lieutenant wrote him an email. He wanted to know if there had been any word from Ahlam. “I remember he told me there were flyers and graffiti in her neighbourhood saying derogatory things about her. There was ill will because she was the main go-between for the Americans and the people.” By that time she was deputy director of the GIC set up by Civil–Military Affairs, and it
was clear that the problems she had seen with Luhnow were just the beginning; that Iraq was the white stallion they had watched bleed to death on the street.

“I went through my own journey in Iraq,” he added. “I had some hesitation about the war but I basically supported it. I guess I was one of those naive Americans who tend to believe what they're told, and I guess I had that beaten out of me, largely because of Iraq.”

Ahlam, he said, personified the sort of people they had let down. “Someone very much willing to build bridges and create a future.” He was quiet for a moment. “We left those people swinging in the wind.”

The situation in Baghdad continued to deteriorate after David Luhnow left. The reporter who replaced him didn't want Ahlam as his fixer—he preferred a man who could function as a bodyguard. Looking for work, Ahlam applied to be a translator at the GIC, newly opened in nearby Kadhimiya. Her job, she was told by one of the Americans who led her training seminar, was to be the “missing link” between Iraqi civilians and the US occupation authorities. Meanwhile bodies had begun appearing on streets or dumped in rivers, often so badly mutilated they could not be identified. She carried a pistol in her handbag for a while, but then gave it up, since people were usually either shot from a distance or blown up. From her new office she observed that the Americans were arresting people “right and left” and jailing them based on suspicions and anonymous reports. “That was enough,” she told me, “to keep you in Abu Ghraib or Bucca for a year.”

It was at Camp Bucca, through which a hundred thousand prisoners passed, that the future leaders of Islamic State met.
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Thrown together in numbers too large to supervise, their incarceration provided an ideal opportunity to forge bonds and spend time conspiring under the oblivious gaze of the Americans who had inadvertently brought them together. Indeed, without the American prisons in Iraq, Islamic State would not exist. Housed alongside the radicals were many more who were innocent of any crime. A neighbour with a grudge had only to make an anonymous report to have his enemy arrested. “And if you were wealthy,” said Ahlam, “forget it! You would be arrested for supporting terrorism. By the time you were released, everything you owned would be gone.” Even when the Americans had good reason to arrest someone, if they arrived when a neighbour had come to pay a visit, the neighbour would be arrested as well, as a matter of course. Detained without trial, without lawyers, without permission to phone their families, the prisoners appeared to have vanished. In her new office, their families besieged her, demanding to know their relatives' whereabouts.