The Green Zone

Posted by mauer

Posted: January 29, 2007 - 6:51 am

BAGHDAD, Jan. 29 — Sometimes my day job as a temporary correspondent in the McClatchy Baghdad bureau leaks into a night job too. We start at 9 a.m. with a staff meeting. The Iraqi staff translates the day’s headlines from the independent, religious and party newspapers and report what the TV is saying. My favorite part is listening to the drumbeats of their neighborhoods.

Even in the Green Zone, bureau chief Leila Fadel doesn't go uncovered in public.

The other day, one of the staff, a woman with streaked red hair and nearly perfect English, told how she had just lost a neighbor. In the days of Saddam, her block was separated from the next by a strip of common ground planted in a garden — a small park. Now the strip is covered with trash and weeds. Her neighbor inexplicably decided to cross to the next block. A rooftop sniper there saw him and killed him, assuming him to be a terrorist. Both blocks erupted in gunfire, the neighborhood watch on each street shooting at the other across the small divide. They got tired and stopped, no one else apparently hurt. Someone retrieved the body from the former garden.

Today, the same woman came in late for the 9 a.m. meeting. Leila Fadel, the bureau chief, spoke to her in a normal voice across the room, but she had trouble hearing. She apologized: on her way to the office, an IED detonated against a police convoy just a few dozen yards from her car. Her ears were still ringing — and her hands still shaking. She had no idea what happened to the police. Around here, when a bomb goes off, you move the other way, and fast — even if you’re a reporter.

We report to the McClatchy bureau in Washington, where it is 1 a.m. when we start our meeting (and it is 9 p.m. in Anchorage, halfway around the globe). When they want our stories, by about 3 p.m. in D.C.,, it’s 11 p.m. here.

Blogger Rich Mauer sporting his new Combined Press Information Center badge — the CPIC ID. In the background is Saddam's Monument to the Unknown Soldier.

That’s my lame excuse for not keeping up with my blog as often as I’d like. This is a good time now, just after lunch. I’ve been unable to reach our correspondent in Karbala, who’s been trying to unravel the circumstances surrounding the brazen attack last week that killed four Fort Richardson soldiers. Karbala now is preoccupied by the Ashura, the holy commemoration of the martyrdom of the Third Imam in the year 680. More than a million Shiite pilgrims are expected there tomorrow. I’m thinking the cell phone network is overwhelmed.

I made my first trip to the Green Zone on Thursday. I needed to get my military press ID. Leila agreed to let me tag along on an interview for a profile she was planning on the prime minister.

Our car crossed the Tigris on the 14th of July Bridge, which, as it happens, is painted a bright green, and entered a series of checkpoints. At the pre-arranged meeting place, Leila and I got out of our car and into a heavily armored BMW. Kevin, our own security guy, watched nervously as we sped away. He’d much rather cluck around us, not see us off with a stranger.

Iraqi parliament member Mithal al-Alusi in the living room of his home in Baghdad's Green Zone.

The BMW belonged to Mithal al-Alusi, a member of the Majlis an-Nuwwab, or Council of Representatives. Al-Alusi’s driver took us down a boulevard and into a neighborhood.

Even though this was the safest place in Baghdad, armed guards stood at every house we passed. (I’ll probably get a comment from the NRA saying that’s why it’s so safe.) Many government officials make their homes in the Green Zone, protected from assassination and intimidation.

Until now, Leila was having a rough time finding anyone willing to be candid about Nouri al-Maliki. Al-Alusi would be a breath of fresh air.

The driver let us into the house, a modest, suburban style ranch home, and directed us into the living room. Paintings of Iraqi artists filled the walls. The floor was carpeted, the polished, dark wood furniture draped with cloth coverings. Not an inch of space was empty. It looked like a much bigger home had been crammed into this one.

Al-Alusi walked strongly into the room, but his eyes looked impossibly sad. He offered us cigarettes from a flip-top box of Parliaments, appropriately enough. When was the last time that happened, I thought. We declined.

Though Leila speaks Arabic, she’s uncomfortable using it in these settings. She learned the language attending high school in Lebanon, possibly the most socially liberated country in the Arab world, and worries she will inadvertently say something deeply offensive.

In the early days of the U.S. occupation, al-Alusi was director of the Debaathification Commission, said up by the United States to curb any lingering influence of Saddam’s former party. A terrorist cell returned the favor Feb. 8, 2005, by killing his two sons, Ayman, 30, and Gamal, 22. Al-Alusi afterward read the insurgents’ boasts on a website.

Mithal al-Alusi shows a picture of his murdered sons to McClatchy Iraq bureau chief Leila Fadel.

In the 275-member parliament, al-Alusi is the sole member from his Democratic Umma Party. His party list received 32,245 of 12.3 million votes cast in the Dec. 15, 2005, election, but you wonder if he thinks he’s the only liberal democrat in Iraq.

“No,” he said strongly. He remains hopeful. “Really, we have to fight to create a new system, a new way. It’s not easy.”

The question of Iranian influence is as hot a topic here as it is in Washington. He knows about that first hand, he said. For readers in Alaska, you should know, they’re no Veco. The Iranians are highly sophisticated, he said. They take the long view — they were just as happy to make nice to him, a liberal who believes in the separation of mosque and state, as they would to an Islamist party.

“Iranian intelligence is making huge investments in politicians. They are very, very professional. They say, ‘You need money? You’ll have the money. You need support? You’ll have the support.’”

He declined the offer, he said.

How did al-Alusi take such a different path from so many of his countrymen? His father was a university professor, he said. As a young man, al-Alusi was an active Baath Party member, but became disillusioned in the early 1970s. With a death sentence on his head, he exiled himself to Germany, where he lived for 26 years until the U.S. invasion in 2003.

While his father taught him tolerance and liberal social theory, he saw it in practice in Europe. “In Germany, a long time ago, my children played with Jewish children,” he said. After he moved to Iraq, he made two well publicized trips to Israel, for which he was nearly prosecuted.

The interview was over. In the gated driveway, I opened the BMW door and almost strained my arm, remembering too late the weight of the passenger door. As was drove back to the meeting point, the distortion from the thick, bullet-proof windshield glass made it hard to focus on objects in front of us.

I thought, al-Alusi’s ideas could now only live inside this thick shell.

login or register to post comments