Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (29 page)

“During the battle of Najaf, the correspondents wouldn’t go out in the streets. The Shia felt Al-Jazeera was against them,” recalled Amna Dhabi, her colleague. “But Atwar was very neutral. She’d say, ‘I’m for
Iraq, not for a specific sect.’ She got in her car and went to Najaf and went live on TV.”

The death threats pelted her for years. First she moved her widowed mother and younger sister to a new house in a safer neighborhood; a few months before she was killed, she took them to live in Amman. But it didn’t feel right. She couldn’t stay out of Iraq. She came home again.

“She believed fate had decided for her to stay in Iraq,” Atwar’s twenty-five-year-old sister, Itha, told me. “She would always say, ‘It’s better to stay in one’s country.’”

It was a deliberate choice. Atwar, unlike most of her stranded countrymen, had the talent and connections to get out of Iraq. But she wouldn’t go. She turned down jobs abroad, determined to tough out the violence. When Al-Jazeera was expelled by the Iraqi government, she went to work for the rival station, Al-Arabiya.

All the while, the threats kept coming.

This is not only the story of Atwar, but the story of Iraq. Her aspirations were the finest hopes of a broken country; her murder reeked of the hopelessness of a lost cause. Here is one woman, one soul among some 100,000 Iraqis who have been sacrificed, fed to appease the nihilistic blood thirst of a slow-motion national collapse. She was no more than the doctors, children, professors, street sweepers, goat vendors, soccer players, and other Iraqis who were snuffed in this war. But she lived on television when television was the national security blanket—the only glimmer of the outside world still allowed to penetrate an Iraqi home; a flashing, talking companion; an addictive succor. She had kept company with the country all down the darkest days. Her death matters because all of the deaths mattered, but most of them were anonymous, and she lived as a symbol of mad hope for an impossible, alternative Iraq: a place of liberated men and women, and the free exchange of ideas; a society that had moved beyond its sectarian differences. She died because that hope was indeed insane, a bold and audacious rejection of visible evil.

Life under Saddam meant existing in a very tight space, a land without horizon, discouraged from dreams. Then war comes and
absolute change washes in on tides of killing. Iraqis, who had pined for everything in the world, were glutted with everything, all at once. Every imagined possibility, the ones that were hidden in the shadows, suddenly shimmered and breathed in the air. Saddam was gone, the country would reinvent itself, anything could happen. But … every possibility was chained to its own weight in danger and death. The claustrophobic closets of dictatorship gave way to the wild and wide-open and deadly plains of war and foreign invaders. The people found themselves stranded with no constraints except rusty imagination and the violence that stalked the land. There came to them all things light, and all things dark.

So it was confusing, talking to Atwar. She kept saying it was better since the war—more freedoms. But under her words welled decay and downfall.

“My country is collapsing, and it’s my job to watch this collapse,” she told me. “The Iraqi people are waiting for their dream, and now they find it’s only a nightmare. People find out that nothing has been done. Many people who hated Saddam Hussein now wish he’d come back. They’re feeling they were fooled.”

Islamists gathered up power, and set about reestablishing the domination of men over women. They prowled the streets, threatening to kill women who bared their heads, encouraging men in the mosques to do the same. So that was one thing: Atwar was a woman on television at a time when rabid armies were trying to stuff women back into unseen rooms. Behind her elaborate and vague explanation of taking the
hijab
because she had seen death, I felt the big, unspoken truth of her fear, and believed she did not speak of this fear because she was too proud.

Then there was the ancient and relentless question of sect, tearing apart the Muslim people ever since Muhammad’s earliest descendents tried to shape the religion and move it forward. Like so many lingering tensions, this had been squashed by Saddam and his endless armies of spies, policemen, and torturers. The Sunnis were in charge under Saddam, and the Shiites and Kurds kept quiet. And then Saddam was gone, power and oil and money were all up for grabs, and Iran came rushing into Baghdad and the south—and the sectarian war began.

Atwar was a theological half-breed; she didn’t fit anywhere. Her mother was Shiite, her father Sunni. She told people she didn’t believe
in sect. Her country kept on breaking down, and Atwar kept on refusing to acknowledge it. She wore a gold pendant in the shape of Iraq to indicate her disdain for splitting people into categories: Shiite, Sunni, Kurd. That pendant was famous. Anonymous callers threatened to kill her for wearing it. She battled her editors about whether people in the stories should be identified as Sunni or Shiite. Atwar thought the sectarian identifications were immoral. The hatred was hot enough already, she told her bosses. She wanted to calm things down, not stoke the anger.

There was no place in Iraq for a woman like that.

At a time when Iraq was so blood-jaded and numb it seemed as if shock had abandoned the country for good, the bombing of the gold-domed shrine gripped the nation. Atwar must have been shocked, too, because she didn’t stop to ask permission. She rounded up the camera crew, piled into a van, and raced homeward. She thought she was safe in Samarra, surrounded by her own people. She called her younger sister and told her not to worry. “I’m among family,” she said. The crew found the roads into the city choked shut. Soldiers had surrounded and sealed the town, desperate to contain the violence. The entire country was clapped under curfew. Shiite gangs roved the streets, mad for vengeance, slaughtering Sunnis.

In the farmlands outside town, Atwar’s crew set up a shot with the rooftops of Samarra in the distance. Curious villagers gathered around. As the light faded from the wintry sky, Atwar picked up the microphone. She arranged her haggard features into a television face and spoke straight into millions of Arab living rooms, to the far corners of Iraq, the other Muslim countries, and the wide world beyond. She must have known that civil war was at hand. Her words were defiant, and scared.

“Whether you are Sunni or Shia, Arab or Kurd, there is no difference between Iraqis,” she said. “[We are] united in fear for this nation.”

When the live shot was over, Atwar called the Baghdad bureau. She talked with her colleague, Amna.

“Iraq is swinging on your chest,” Amna teased Atwar. She meant the pendant.

“Yes, Iraq is swinging between insurgents and these Iraqi politicians,” Bahjat said wryly. “It needs a warm chest to lie upon.”

By now the gunmen were coming for her. They had seen her on television, and they were hunting her down, peeling up the country road in their pickup truck. “Where’s the announcer?” they bellowed. They leapt to the ground and seized Atwar, along with the cameraman and engineer, and fired into the sky. Atwar screamed to the crowd for help, but the villagers backed away. Somebody called the police, but it was morning before anybody came to help. By then the bodies were laced with bullets, and dumped in the dirt.

In the days after Atwar’s death, we all watched her last standup dozens of times. The Iraqi channels looped the clip over and over for viewers who were caged indoors with nothing but television to stave off the anxiety of curfew. Death squads stole through the streets, the Shiite “black shirts” sacked Sunni mosques—and all the while, the image of Atwar flickered in corners. She wore a turtleneck and tied her head scarf in the jaunty sideways knot that had become her trademark. The face on the television screen was etched with the story of her homeland’s degeneration. Her skin had grayed, her eyes grown heavy, her face puffed with fatigue. She looked exhausted.

The decay I saw in Atwar’s face had eaten into the city, too. Baghdad faded and sank; Baghdad was lost. The swollen and thrumming streets where we’d met, dripping in heat and life and gaudy shouts of color, had vanished. The clatter of city life gave way to the scrape of machine-gun fire, the roar of car bombs, and the dull thud of mortars. Baghdad, with its tightly packed neighborhoods, sleepy gardens, and lazy river vistas, was swallowed by infinite reels of razor wire and blank-faced cement barriers.

Atwar looked sick, and so did Iraq. Atwar died, but Iraq just kept bleeding.

The day after the shrine bombing, we held a staff meeting. “The violence is getting worse,” Borzou, the bureau chief, told the Iraqi staff. “We need to prepare for what’s coming. We need to be ready for the fighting to get much heavier. We need to figure out how to work under curfew. I’m asking for any suggestions you have.”

“A bicycle,” said Suheil.

Everybody laughed like it was the funniest joke they’d ever heard. Nervous grumblings, too-quick jokes.

“No, really, I am thinking about getting a bicycle!” he protested. “Because I think we will face many more times like these.”

Everybody talked at once.

“I can’t believe we’re preparing for another war here.”

“Some of us can work from home.”

“Not all the time. In the mornings and afternoons we don’t have electricity.”

“Some of you are close enough to walk.”

“But the problem is, if there’s a curfew in your neighborhood and you leave, even by foot, everybody’s going to wonder, ‘Where’s this guy going?’ Even your family panics when there’s a curfew.”

“If something like this happens, we can’t freeze,” Borzou told them. “This is our calling. We can’t shut down. You deal with the shock later.”

I looked around me, at Raheem, Suheil, Salar, Caesar—at the drawn faces of Iraqis who risked their lives working for us. They have been here the entire time, I thought. When does later come?

It was just a short walk to the Arabiya offices, cutting back around the hotel where we lived, crossing a small gate, and traversing some parking lots.

“We will send somebody with you,” Salar said.

He means a bodyguard. With a gun. Like the one he sent to follow me through the supermarket.

“No, I don’t want it.”

“This is a bad time,” he said.

“Please, Salar, I really don’t want it. It’s just across the parking lot.”

“I’m sorry, but this is my responsibility. Today is a difficult day.”

So I shut up and walked along silently with my own private gunman, out into the wintry afternoon. In the Arabiya offices I found some of Atwar’s family members forgetting to drink their coffee on stiff couches. Raw silence stretched between their words. They spent a lot of time staring at the floor. On the walls gleamed pictures of prettier places: palm trees and beaches, golden sunlight brimming in leaves.

The aunt had hard eyes: “She’s an honor to her tribe, she’s a martyr, she’s better than ten men. She’s a martyr for Iraq.”

“How did this happen?” wailed Atwar’s sister, collapsing onto the aunt’s shoulder. “What did she see? She didn’t see anything.”

With curfew in place, they hadn’t been able to bring her broken body back from Samarra. All the roads were closed, the checkpoints tight. Nobody could move; nobody could get to work. Only militiamen, gun-toting gangs, and soldiers moved like spirits on the roads. It took days to get the bodies through the routine tests at a forensics laboratory. There would be no sunset burial.

“They were not treated like martyrs,” the Arabiya bureau chief, Jawad Hattab, told me in quiet indignation.

Somebody had already printed makeshift posters of Atwar’s face; she stared down from the walls, portrayed in cheap blurs of color, tacked up with Scotch tape. I ran my eyes over her features, thinking of the yellowing faces of suicide bombers that peeled from the walls of the West Bank and Beirut. They had made Atwar into a martyr.

Hattab related all the eyewitness details of the deaths, and he told me about the other deaths—eleven Arabiya employees had died in Iraq since the invasion. At that time, sixty-six journalists had been slaughtered. Of those, forty-seven were Iraqi. By now, those numbers have more than doubled. They have been shot by U.S. forces, gunned down by their countrymen, crushed by bombs. They were liberated to tell the story of their lifetime, to write their own national history, but only if they flirted with death. All things light, and all things dark.

“If I give up my position, if I am weak, who will be the substitute, who will carry this message?” Hattab said. His voice was oddly flat. “Every day we are exposed to many, many threats, killing or bombing or threats against our families. But Iraq deserves this from us, this sacrifice. If we are defeated, and we consider ourselves the educated segment of this country, what will the people in the street do? What will happen to our country?”

Looking at him, a fifty-year-old man, I wrote in my notebook:
Journalists in Iraq are hardened. They have scars and heavy eyes.
They believed more in journalism than any American reporter I knew. Clinging to it as if it would save them in the end.

We stood.

“We’re not telling the truth when we say we’re still strong,” he blurted. “Inside we are broken. Our aim was to give the message of truth and the only thing we got back was bullets.”

Even her burial had a death toll.

They laid Atwar’s body in a plain wooden box, and strapped it onto a flatbed truck. The men gathered around the casket, and the wind pushed back their hair as the truck began to roll. They had fastened a black banner to the grille—a promise from other reporters to continue Atwar’s work.
We will finish the message she was carrying
. Atwar, too, had spoken of her message. As if they traveled a one-way road, as if they would finally get to Athens from Marathon and then collapse. It sounded strange, perhaps because I thought of news not as something you could carry, but as a force that defined its own terms. I was still a part of the world that was not Iraq, and these journalists were marooned in the land that was Iraq, and they wanted desperately to be heard. American reporters of my generation vied to write the story of the wars—it was something we strove for, competed for fiercely, a privilege. And when we were done with it we simply went away again. Iraqis covered the war because it had landed on top of them, and they would have to keep on covering it until it killed them or went away altogether. It was their fate and their destiny and in many, many cases, the death of them.