One day to go

Posted by mauer

Posted: January 22, 2007 - 4:10 am

AMMAN, Jan. 22 — I finally met Nancy Youssef at breakfast at the Four Seasons, the magnificent hotel on Amman’s Fifth Circle. It’s the same place where President Bush was snubbed by Iraq Prime Minister al-Maliki last year, but those vibes were long gone. Nancy’s welcome was warm.

Nancy Youssef, former McClatchy Baghdad bureau chief, on leave in Jordan.

Until a couple weeks ago, Nancy was the chief of McClatchy’s Baghdad bureau, a tough job she held for nearly two years.

She had been the cops-and-courts reporter at the Detroit Free Press in 2003 as the American attack was brewing. The Free Press was a Knight Ridder paper, and the call came from the chain’s large Washington bureau for reporters who might want to cover the conflict.

Nancy, who grew up in a Washington, D.C., suburb of Egyptian-born parents, put up her hand. A young reporter then, her editor apparently didn’t take her seriously and didn’t submit her name. When she learned one of the Free Press senior editors was traveling to a company meeting, she asked again to be considered.

She was. She found herself in Amman as American troops crossed into Iraq, and she, a photographer, and a small team from the Denver Post followed them to Baghdad. Knight Ridder had a few other reporters in country, but they were all embedded with U.S. troops. She was the chain’s only “unilateral.“ There was no room in the hotels when she arrived. She slept on the floor of a museum.

About three weeks into the war, the U.S. military was essentially in control of the city. But to her, it seemed, America was already losing the war. With looters ransacking the city, ordinary Iraqis being killed by mistake at U.S. checkpoints and by U.S. bombs, and no apparent plan for the occupation, it looked grim.

Correspondent Rich Mauer in Jordan, a day before his flight to Baghdad.

Nancy recalled a conversation with one of her editors. “Rumsfeld is saying the reports of looting are grossly exaggerated,” he was telling her. Nancy described the looting and chaos unfolding before her eyes. It was Rumsfeld who was out of touch — or making something up. Her editor didn’t doubt her.

For the next four years, Nancy was in and out of the bureau, eventually taking it over. She worked to build a name for Knight Ridder. When McClatchy bought the much larger chain last year and for the first time found itself managing a string of far-flung foreign bureaus, Nancy was slow to adopt the new identity. It was hard enough dealing with Iraqis who thought she was saying “Night Rider.” Now when she said McClatchy, they heard “clauchy,” an Arabic term that carries a shady connotation. It would be up to the new bureau chief, Leila Fadel, to deal with that.

The hazy view to the west from Mount Nebo, looking across the Jordan Valley toward the West Bank and Israel.

When Nancy called me at home in Anchorage a month ago, there was a manic quality to her conversation. The four years were showing. But in Amman, she was calm and reassuring. I needed that. I am leaving for Baghdad tomorrow morning.

After breakfast, we hired a car and took a tour to Mount Nebo. Before smog was invented, Moses climbed that hill and looked out over the Land of Canaan to the West, the land promised to the children of Abraham. He would never see it, but his tribe would inherit the land. It was there he died, his body hidden forever, as the story in Deuteronomy goes.

Our guide was a man named Mohammed. He took us into the a Franciscan church at the point of the mountain, the site of an ancient Byzantine church. Most of the original mosaic floor was intact. Incredibly, the land was in private hands in the 1930s when the Franciscans bought it.
Mohammed, our guide. The huge influx of Iraqis into Jordan has caused prices to skyrocket, he says.

As we stood over the mosaics, I asked Mohammed what he thought of the Iraqis who had fled to Jordan. Officially, some 450,000 Iraqis are here, but the government acknowledges they probably number at least a million. Jordan’s own population is 5.3 million.

Jordan is a stable, comfortable kingdom, but not a very rich one. It has no oil to speak of. Mohammed said the Iraqis who make it to Jordan are the wealthy ones. They are doubling and tripling the prices of everything, from apartments to fresh tomatoes, while the income of Jordanians is unchanged. Not good, he said.

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