Baghdad Burning II: More Girl Blog from Iraq
240
Baghdad Burning II: More Girl Blog from Iraq
240eBook
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Overview
Riverbend, the pseudonymous recipient of a Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Literary Reportage, continues her chronicle of daily life in occupied Baghdad. Drawn from her popular blog, this volume spans from October 2004 through March 2006.
In her distinctively wry yet urgent prose Riverbend, now 27, tells of life in a middle-class, secular, mixed Shia-Sunni family. She describes the attacks she sees on TV, raids in her neighborhood, fuel shortages, rolling blackouts, and water shortages, all while offering insightful critiques of the Iraqi draft constitution and American Media. Riverbend reveals how, for the first time in her life, she feels lesser due to her gender.
Dispelling reductive, media-driven stereotypes, she explains that most Iraqis are tolerant people, prefer secular to religious government, oppose a civil war, and desperately want the occupation to end.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781558616349 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Feminist Press at CUNY, The |
| Publication date: | 01/11/2019 |
| Series: | Women Writing the Middle East |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
October Through December 2004
A year and a half after George W. Bush declares the war over and "mission accomplished," the casualty counts in Iraq, both civilians and military, are rising.
As October begins, Coalition and Iraqi soldiers launch a "pacification drive"— a major offensive — on the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad in the so-called Sunni Triangle. U.S. officials say that insurgents and "foreign fighters" have seized control in the city. Some suggest that the attack has been timed to precede the U.S. presidential election. More than 100 insurgents are killed in the offensive. Meanwhile, in Fallujah the running siege continues.
It will be a bloody month in Baghdad, as well. On September 30, explosions kill more than 40 people, most of them children. On October 4, the supposedly secure American-controlled "Green Zone" is hit; six are killed, including four American civilians. The attack is attributed to the network of Jordanian extremist Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, which has recently renamed itself Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
What is broadly referred to as the "insurgency," initially composed mostly of former Ba'athists, has become larger and more complicated in its composition, as various factions take action against the U.S. occupation. These include "foreign fighters" with international terrorist ties, like AlZarqawi, as well as homegrown groups like the Badr Corps (also known as "Badir's Brigade" or "Faylaq Badir"), the Shiite militiaassociated with the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which formed decades earlier to oppose Saddam.
There are also car bomb attacks on one of the capital's main streets and on an elementary school in Mosul; 21 die, and 90 are injured. Two days later, 16 are killed in a car bomb attack on a National Guard building in what heretofore had been a relatively calm area near the Syrian border. On October 14, insurgents again breach the Green Zone, setting off bombs in a market and café. There are more car bombings, with 13 people killed in Baghdad and Mosul.
British hostage Kenneth Bigley is confirmed dead, the third in a group of three beheaded, reportedly by Al-Zarqawi's group, which had demanded the release of Iraqi woman prisoners. On October 19, the humanitarian agency CARE announces that Margaret Hassan, the group's highly respected head of Iraq operations, has been kidnapped. She is shown on TV pleading for her life. Four weeks later, CARE says that on the basis of a video, they believe Hassan to be dead.
On October 20, 2004, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick is sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He admits to having taken part in a faked threat of execution, in which a prisoner had wires attached to his hands and was told that he would be electrocuted if he stepped or fell off the box he was forced to stand on. Other charges include hitting prisoners, making a group of nude prisoners form a human pyramid, and forcing prisoners to masturbate and simulate oral sex. Although Frederick is among the enlisted soldiers who say they received orders from higher up, no commanding officers are ever court-martialed.
On October 25, Al-Zarqawi's group takes credit for killing 50 National Guardsmen in the east of the country.
In the final month before the U.S. presidential election, proof that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs remains elusive. The Bush Administration had hoped it could convince people they were for real when it found some suspicious-looking trailers, and promptly presented them as evidence that Saddam was making biological weapons. But on inspection, the Iraq Survey Group reports that the trailers were not "part of any BW [biological weapons] program."
Even though Bush's rationale for going to war looks less and less plausible, the president's reelection campaign is managing to convince many voters that Saddam's military program posed real danger. Although there is absolutely no evidence of any link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda and no evidence at all connecting Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, many American voters still believe the campaign rhetoric. A national Harris poll shows 63 percent of those polled "believe that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was a serious threat to U.S. security," and 38 percent say that Iraq had WMDs at the time of the U.S. invasion. A surprising 62 percent think Saddam Hussein "had strong links to Al-Qaeda," and 41 percent say that Saddam "helped plan and support" the 9/11 hijackers' attack.
Some voters, especially among right-wing Christians, are determined to stick with Bush because of his position on domestic social issues, especially his opposition to giving gay people the right to marry. But many others are convinced that he is the man who will keep the nation more secure. To achieve this image, the Bush campaign manages to overcome not only the harsh truths about the war in Iraq, but also the realities of the administration's conduct before and during the 9/11 attacks. (Having ignored growing warnings of an attack, the president is shuffled around the country on Air Force One while the nation is left in the hands of Vice President Dick Cheney, who, secreted with political aides in the bunker beneath the White House, calls in strikes against aircraft that have already crashed.)
The Bush campaign also profits from a vicious smear campaign against John Kerry, in which the Vietnam veteran is pictured as a coward and wishy-washy liberal. It is aided by Kerry's own unwillingness to take strong positions on the war and other key issues.
On November 2, 2004, George W. Bush defeats John Kerry. Six days after Bush gets his "mandate" for a second term, the United States opens an all-out assault on Fallujah in the biggest military action since the invasion. Much of the city is badly damaged, and an estimated one-third of the population flees before or during the fighting. A U.S. Marine corporal is caught on video shooting a wounded, unarmed Iraqi inside a mosque. He says he thought the man was pretending to be dead and was concealing a weapon; the military will conclude that the soldier was acting in self-defense.
November turns into the worst month so far for U.S. casualties, with 137 troops killed. As of December 7, 1,275 U.S. military personnel have been killed, and 9,765 have been wounded. Deaths of Iraqi police and security forces number over 2,000. More than 50 Iraqis serving as interpreters for U.S. forces have been killed. Iraqi civilian deaths, by the cross-verified (and generally conservative) numbers at Iraq Body Count (http://www.iraqbodycount.net/) run between 14,000 and 17,000; other estimates are much higher.
On December 8, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld speaks to troops in Kuwait. He cites Franklin Roosevelt's speech on the day after Pearl Harbor, and speaks of making "certain this form of treachery shall never again endanger us" — presumably suggesting that the "preemptive" war in Iraq may have prevented another attack like Pearl Harbor.
The gathering is called a "Kuwait town meeting," and soldiers are given permission to question Rumsfeld. One receives applause when he asks Rumsfeld, "We've had troops in Iraq for coming up on three years and we've always staged here out of Kuwait. Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?"
After asking him to repeat the question, Rumsfeld replies that the Army is working to produce armor as fast as it can. He tells the forces, "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time. Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe — it's a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment."
In mid-December, at least 60 Iraqis are killed in bombings in the Shia holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Bush blandly states he expects "hundreds of innocent" civilians will be killed as the country prepares for elections. The violence continues as the month goes on, and the largest Sunni political party pulls out of the approaching elections, saying the country is too unsafe for there to be a fair vote.
On December 21, insurgents set off a bomb in a crowded mess tent, killing 19 soldiers and injuring scores more. On Christmas Eve, Rumsfeld turns up in Baghdad, and assures the troops the insurgency can be put down.
— James Ridgeway
Sunday, October 03, 2004
SAMARRA BURNING ...
The last few days have been tense and stressful. Watching the military attacks on Samarra and hearing the stories from displaced families or people from around the area is like reliving the frustration and anger of the war. It's like a nightmare within a nightmare, seeing the corpses pile up and watching people drag their loved ones from under the bricks and steel of what was once a home.
To top it off, we have to watch American military spokespersons and our new Iraqi politicians justify the attacks and talk about "insurgents" and "terrorists" like they actually believe what they are saying ... like hundreds of civilians aren't being massacred on a daily basis by the world's most advanced military technology.
As if Allawi's gloating and Bush's inane debates aren't enough, we have to listen to people like Powell and Rumsfeld talk about "precision attacks." What exactly are precision attacks?! How can you be precise in a city like Samarra or in the slums of Sadir City on the outskirts of Baghdad? Many of the areas under attack are small, heavily populated, with shabby homes several decades old. In Sadir City, many of the houses are close together and the streets are narrow. Just how precise can you be with missiles and tanks? We got a first-hand view of America's "smart weapons." They were smart enough to kill over 10,000 Iraqis in the first few months of the occupation.
The explosions in Baghdad aren't any better. A few days ago, some 40 children were blown to pieces while they were gathering candy from American soldiers at the opening of a sewage treatment plant. (Side note: That's how bad things have gotten — we have to celebrate the reconstruction of our sewage treatment plants.) I don't know who to be more angry with — the idiots and PR people who thought it would be a good idea to have children running around during a celebration involving troops or the parents for letting their children attend. I hope the people who arranged the explosions burn within the far reaches of hell.
One wonders who is behind the explosions and the car bombs. Bin Laden? Zarqawi? Possibly ... but it's just too easy. It's too perfect. Bin Laden hit the WTC and Afghanistan was attacked. Iraq was occupied. At first, any explosion or attack on troops was quickly blamed on "loyalists" and "Ba'athists" and EVERYTHING was being coordinated by Saddam. As soon as he was caught, it became the work of "Islamic extremists" and Al-Qaeda and Zarqawi suddenly made his debut. One wonders who it will be after it is discovered that Zarqawi has been dead for several months or that he never even existed. Whoever it is, you can bet his name will be three syllables or less because that is Bush's limit.
A week ago, four men were caught by Iraqi security in the area of A'adhamiya in Baghdad. No one covered this on television or on the Internet, as far as I know — we heard it from a friend involved in the whole thing. The four men were caught trying to set up some explosives in a residential area by some of the residents themselves. One of the four men got away, one of them was killed on the spot and two were detained and interrogated. They turned out to be a part of Badir's Brigade (Faylaq Badir) [more widely known as the Badr Corps], the militia belonging to the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Should the culprits never have been caught, and should the explosives have gone off, would Zarqawi have been blamed? Of course.
I'm very relieved the Italian hostages have been set free ... and I hope the other innocent people are also freed. Thousands of Iraqis are being abducted and some are killed, while others are returned ... but it is distressing to see so many foreigners being abducted. It's like having a guest attacked in your own home by the neighbor's pit bull — you feel a sense of responsibility even though you know there was no way you could have prevented it.
I wasn't very sympathetic though, when that Islamic group came down from London to negotiate releasing Kenneth Bigley. I do hope he is returned alive, but where are all these Islamic groups while Fallujah, Samarra, Sadir City and other places are being bombed? Why are they so concerned with a single British citizen when hundreds of Iraqis are dying by the month? Why is it "terrorism" when foreigners set off bombs in London or Washington or New York and it's a "liberation" or "operation" when foreigners bomb whole cities in Iraq? Are we that much less important?
Wednesday, October 13, 2004
VALIUM ...
Apparently, some topic that came up during a recent Oprah show has caught a lot of attention. Before I continue, let me first say — yes — we do know who Oprah is. MBC Channel 2 has been showing Oprah for the last few months — but the shows are a few weeks old. It's a popular show in Iraq because Iraqis find it amusing to watch some of the more absurd problems being discussed on the show — like how to find a good plastic surgeon, or what to purchase on a shopping spree on Fifth Avenue, etc. I'm not a huge fan of Oprah, but I used to watch the show when there was an interesting topic being discussed. I more or less stopped watching after she brought on Condi Rice and tried to make a compassionate hero out of her — that was disgusting, to be quite frank.
Anyway, I got an email from "Will" (and I answered it, Will, but it bounced right back at me). Will was asking me whether it was true or not that people in Iraq were becoming addicted to valium and whether valium was easily available over the counter. (See http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/10/6/17810/0170.)
Valium has always been available over the counter. Iraq is one of those countries where you can get almost any medication "over the counter." It actually depends on the pharmacy, but generally speaking,everything from sedatives to antibiotics are sold over the counter. Medication is also really cheap here. I mean *really* cheap. We had, prior to the blockade, one of the best pharmaceutical companies in the region —"Samarra Drugs," which made everything from amoxicillin to flu medicine.
Will asked if valium had become addictive after the war. Of course it has. Valium is a staple during wars. I remember when we were preparing for the war, we would make list after list of "necessities." One list was for pharmaceutical necessities. It included such basics as cotton, Band-Aids, alcohol, gauze and an ordinary painkiller. It also included medicines such as ampicloxine, codeine and valium. No one in the family takes valium, but it was one of those "just in case" medications — the kind you buy and hope you never have to use.
We had to use it during the first week of April [2003], as the tanks started rolling into Baghdad. We had an older aunt staying at our house (she had been evacuated from her area) and along with my cousin, his wife, his two daughters, and an uncle, the house was crowded and — at bizarre moments — almost festive.
The bombing had gotten very heavy and our eating and sleeping schedules were thrown off balance. Everything seemed to revolve around the attack on Baghdad — we'd hastily cook and eat during the lulls in bombing and we'd get snatches of sleep in between the "shock and awe." There were a few nights where we didn't sleep at all — we'd just stay up and sit around, staring at each other in the dark, listening to the explosions and feeling the earth tremble beneath.
So imagine this. It's a chilly night in Baghdad and the black of the sky suddenly lights up with flashes of white — as if the stars were exploding in the distance. The bombing was so heavy, we could hear the windows rattling, the ground shaking and the whiz of missiles ominously close. We were all gathered in the windowless hallway — adults and children. My cousin's daughters were wrapped in blankets and they sat huddled up close to their mother. They were so silent, they might have been asleep — but I knew they weren't because I could vaguely see the whites of their eyes, open wide, across the lamp-lit hallway.
Now, during the more lively hours of a shock and awe bombing storm, there's no way you can have a normal conversation. You might be able to blurt out a few hasty sentences, but eventually, there's bound to be an explosion that makes you stop, duck your head and wonder how the house didn't fall down around you.
Throughout this, we sit around, mumbling silent prayers, reviewing our lives and making vague promises about what we'd do if we got out of this one alive. Sometimes, one of us would turn to the kids and crack some lame joke or ask how they were doing. Often, the answer would be in the form of a wan smile or silence.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Baghdad Burning II"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Riverbend.
Excerpted by permission of Feminist Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction,
Editor's Note,
October Through December 2004,
January Through March 2005,
April Through June 2005,
July Through September 2005,
October Through December 2005,
January Through March 2006,