Rageh Omaar's documentary Iraq by Numbers will be shown on ITV 1, March 17, at 10.30pm and al-Jazeera English, March 22 at 7pmThe descent into Baghdad International Airport feels like falling out of the sky. Having cruised quite normally for more than an hour like any other commercial flight from neighbouring Jordan, the aeroplane hovers above the Iraqi capital and then suddenly begins a steep and rapid descent. It is the only way to avoid being shot out of the sky. The flights are full of men, mostly journalists, Western mercenaries, private contractors and security guards or diplomats who have made the trip many times. For the uninitiated it is a useful and stark reminder that you are arriving in a city like no other on earth.
Journeys to reporting assignments are all about transitions. It requires time to adapt from the comfort, security and certainties of my home and family to the inherent anxiety and danger of the places I am sent to; but it takes less than two hours from boarding the plane at Amman airport to seeing the flat familiar contours of the suburbs of Baghdad. If there was ever a journey to an assignment that I needed time to prepare for, it was this one: my return to a city that I had not only grown to love over 10 years there as a television reporter, but which also changed my life. Chronicling the city's destruction brought me to prominence and the advantages that go with it. Five years on from the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I have returned to Baghdad to find people whose lives have been changed in ways that none of them could have forecast even at their most pessimistic moments.For us back home, Iraq has been a contradiction. The conflict has been the most reported and analysed war in recent times. There is nothing that has not been exposed and investigated: from the absence of weapons of mass destruction to the manipulation of intelligence; the staggering disregard for post-war planning; the absence of al-Qa'eda in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and its inexorable growth under American and British occupation. The list is depressingly long. Yet five years on, and millions of hours of news footage and front-page stories later, Iraq is still not only a bitterly divisive issue, it is also a conflict about which the most elemental questions have not been answered. In which ways has this war - in which our country's name will forever be tied - changed the lives of ordinary Iraqis? People like you and me - teachers, doctors, businessmen, journalists, civil servants. It is these personal stories and recollections (as opposed to the self-serving and often duplicitous dry analyses of Western policy and initiatives in Iraq) that I had come to hear.
Arriving in Baghdad is to enter a make-believe world where I have to convince myself that nothing is out of the ordinary. In the arrivals and immigration hall Iraqi officials are at pains to make sure that we have filled in the right colour-coded immigration form and that we all stand in orderly queues. The porters at the carousels eagerly try to carry my bags, saying it will be quicker to get ahead of the rush at customs - just as if we are arriving at Heathrow for the weekend. Only the returning Iraqi families who travel into the city without armour-plated cars or military escort betray any genuine sense of fear and trepidation.
Baghdad is a city where hiding from reality is both an art form and a way of staying alive. It begins the minute you start the 13-mile drive into the city. The Western military and security presence in Baghdad has given rise to a prolific renaming of places and districts. Virtually all the new names for locations in the city have a military connotation, regardless of what Iraqis call them. It is another reminder of how Western officials and Iraqis lead parallel lives. Thus the airport road is known as Route Irish after a battalion that guarded it. It is fenced in by mile upon mile of 20ft-high concrete blast wall that seems to go on for ever. The real Iraq on the other side of the wall is never visible; what you get in its place are paintings that have been commissioned to spruce up the otherwise dull grey of the concrete. It must have taken an army of artists to complete the thousands of images that evoke memories of an ancient Iraqi idyll, before the invasion, before Saddam. They show lush rural scenes of peasants bringing in plentiful harvests, flowing streams and rivers, beautiful girls with pale complexions and no headscarves, craftsmen working in an ancient bazaar.
The appearance of the first of many checkpoints into the city brings the real Iraq into sharp relief. Concrete barriers symbolise life in Baghdad today. They define the geography and state of mind of the city and they are everywhere, expressing everyone's fear of death in an instant, from a car bomb or suicide attack. They are particularly prominent in those places where people are most likely to congregate and which bombers are therefore most likely to target: busy road junctions and roundabouts, markets and shopping districts. Nowhere has more of these concrete blast walls than the Green Zone, the five square miles in the heart of Baghdad colonised by the largely American and British military, diplomatic and security presence in the city. It has been given a name makeover, so it is now officially called the International Zone. But its residents still call the rest of Baghdad the Red Zone. Five square miles is a huge area of someone else's city to commandeer but, even so, no Iraqi can get into it without a pass from the US or British authorities.
So difficult is it to meet Iraqis in normal circumstances that I have arranged to meet Faleh Kheiber, one of Iraq's best photojournalists, in a guesthouse inside the Green Zone. It can be a death sentence for an Iraqi to be seen with a Westerner. In fact, it is so dangerous even to be associated with anything to do with the West that when I telephoned an Iraqi colleague from the television station al-Jazeera the previous week, he spoke to me in Arabic, even though I had greeted him in English. He kept talking incomprehensibly about how he was just finishing his shopping and would be home soon. He explained later that he had been on the street when I called and to speak English would have been far too dangerous.Faleh was wounded when US forces shelled the Palestine Hotel, the base for most journalists reporting the bombing of Baghdad (the US army claimed snipers had been firing on troops from the hotel roof, but none of the journalists heard gunshots). It was just two days before the city fell and, like many, he thought he had already survived the worst of the conflict. Faleh was working for the Reuters news agency, and had just walked into the room from where Taras Protsyuk, a cameraman, was filming an American tank on the bridge across the Tigris when the tank fired, killing Taras immediately. A few minutes later I saw Faleh being carried on a makeshift stretcher, covered in blood and shrapnel, his clothes shredded. The picture of his bloodstained camera lying on the floor is a stark illustration of the cost of the war to Iraqi journalists. Of the 126 journalists killed in Iraq, 104 were Iraqis.
Reporting on the daily life of ordinary Iraqis in a meaningful way has become almost impossible for Western journalists in the past three years; you need armed security or to keep your visits on the streets to a maximum of 20 minutes. Westerners have had to rely heavily on Iraqi staff and colleagues. Faleh says that now it is extremely difficult for Iraqis to accurately and freely report on the tragedy in their own country. In the five years since he saw his camera stained with his own blood, Faleh has been detained by US forces and had his photos seized by them, and he has been threatened by insurgents and sectarian militia. 'Being a journalist has become more dangerous,' he says. 'You can't move around because of all the operations by militia against US troops. You don't know who your enemy is any more.'
It has been a hard transition for a man who was so certain about where to turn his lens to capture the images needed to tell the story of his country. The one thing that has made the past five years worse for him is that now it is not just him who is in the firing line, but like most middle-class Iraqis, his family has also become a target for criminal gangs tied to sectarian militia. He has joined the brain drain of millions of Iraqis into exile, returning occasionally to Baghdad to earn some money to support them. 'Before, life was easy and safe,' he says. 'We had a house, a car and a settled life. There was security. Now it's gone.'
The Palestine Hotel is now empty. It lies in the Red Zone across the river from Saddam's former Republican Palace, now the American Embassy. Around the corner is the commercial district of Saadoun Street. It is busier today than in the years before the conflict for one reason: Saadoun Street is a centre of pharmacies and medical practices, the place to go for anything from tranquillisers to plasters. At one end of Saadoun Street as it meets the Palestine Hotel is Firdoos Square, where the statue of Saddam was pulled down on April 9, signalling the collapse of the dictator's rule in the city. As US marines occupied Firdoos Square that day, Iraqis tentatively came out to see them. There was no sense of jubilation among the crowds, which initially numbered no more than a hundred or so. People were curious and wary of their new rulers. The tearing down of the statue was partly a constructed photo opportunity, and partly a cathartic release for Iraqis who believed the war was now over.
Khadim Jabouri, famous in Iraq as a weightlifter and bodybuilder, lived closed to Firdoos Square and led the attempts to bring the statue down. He had known Saddam's notorious elder son, Uday; Khadim repaired Harley-Davidson motorcycles, of which Uday was fond. Khadim made the mistake of asking to be paid for work he had done. Instead of payment, Khadim was sent to Abu Ghraib prison for nine years. Helping to bring down the statue of Saddam was his way of getting revenge. The photograph of his musclebound body smashing the plinth with a sledgehammer is one of the most iconic images of the fall of Baghdad. 'I just began to hit it without even thinking about it,' he says. 'The boys from the neighbourhood, many of them Kurds, watched my back because there were a lot of secret police and paramilitary forces loyal to Saddam still about.'
The tearing down of the statue was started by Iraqis but was taken over by Americans who used an armoured vehicle to complete the job. None of us realised that this would be a fitting metaphor for the next five years in Iraq, but today Khadim is full of regrets about what happened that day. 'Initially everyone was happy to have got rid of the tyrant of the past 30 years, an oppressive regime that had destroyed the Iraqi people by enslaving, killing, executing and imprisoning,' he says. 'But things have just got worse.'
For Khadim, now a mechanic, the turning point was the holding of elections and the rise of political parties, many dominated by clerics and politicians returning after decades in exile and still tied to notorious sectarian militia. 'The killings started and things got worse,' Khadim says. 'That's when I began to have regrets. It's true that Saddam was a tyrant, a killer and a criminal, but he provided security and opportunities for business and work. I am somewhere between sad and happy about what happened that day.'
Today there is a new sculpture symbolising hope and renewal in the place where Saddam's statue once stood. The omnipresent images of Saddam - such a defining feature of the city in the years before the war, gazing at you wherever you went - have all gone, but his ghost still hangs over Baghdad; the sense of fear and insecurity, the oppressive and crushing feeling of dread and powerlessness about the future.
Dr Mowaffak al-Rubbaie is the national security adviser to the Iraqi government, one of the longest-serving senior Iraqi officials. He spent decades in exile in the UK where he trained and practised as a neurologist, raising his family in west London (they still reside there). Like all senior Iraqi ministers, he lives in a heavily guarded compound inside the Green Zone. In the corner of his ornate dining-room, adjoining a reception room where he greets visitors and colleagues, is a large metal bust, a head and torso torn from a statue. It was one of the statues of Saddam from the centre of Baghdad that was ripped down the day the city fell. US officers tried to take it out of the country back to their regimental headquarters, but were stopped and told to return it.
There is something eerie about seeing the head of Saddam in al-Rubbaie's house, because he is the man widely believed to have recorded the infamous mobile phone video images of the execution of the dictator. He openly admits that he was a witness at the execution but is coy about whether or not he filmed it. Instead he gives a wry smile. He is utterly unapologetic, shockingly so. He believes that everything about the way Saddam was killed was proper and correct. 'That day was historic,' he says. 'I think we started a new chapter in Iraq. It was necessary. We tried to make sure [the execution] was as professional as we could make it. I'm the first to admit that there were mistakes. But it was a brave decision, it was the right decision, and I think it has helped a great deal in reversing and controlling the security situation in Iraq.' Barely a minute after he says these words, we hear the distant sound of a machine-gun being fired in bursts.
Many senior Iraqi politicians such as al-Rubbaie passed their best years in exile. During this time in isolation, family members and colleagues were murdered and tortured and Western governments turned a deaf ear to their campaigns against Saddam, who was an ally until he invaded Kuwait in 1990. Now they have been restored to power, their sense of vindication and revenge is never far from the surface.
The once-opulent al-Rasheed hotel is now effectively a meeting place and dormitory for Iraqi politicians and the businessmen who want to sell them projects. It is across from the parliament and the American military's main information and publicity buildings. It always used to be a seedy place full of secret police and assorted lounge lizards, and very little has changed. It is an awkward environment for Sadoun al-Zubeidi to walk into. A thin, wiry man who is shy and diffident by nature, he walks through the lobby trying to attract as little attention as possible. He looks at the ground as he walks up to greet me. Al-Zubeidi was Saddam's personal translator. He was the interpreter for the dictator during some of his most important meetings and negotiations with Western officials. Al-Zubeidi has been specifically targeted by numerous militia and al-Qa'eda affiliates. He lives in exile but pays occasional quick visits to Baghdad to see relatives and friends.
Like many of Iraq's educated elite he had studied in Britain, a country that Iraqis of his generation adored and had strong links with. One of the bitter ironies of the war is that Britain invaded and occupied the most anglophile country in the Middle East. Speak to any middle-class Iraqi in his fifties who studied in Britain and you will hear remarkable stories of how integrated they felt in Britain. Al-Zubeidi, for example, ran for election to the National Union of Students while studying in the UK. 'Yes,' he says with a broad smile, 'I actually ran and campaigned against the writer and journalist David Aaronovitch.' I mention that he now writes for The Times and that he was very pro-war. 'Well,' al-Zubeidi says, 'he never had the best judgement in the world even back then', and gives a warm, affectionate laugh. This quietly spoken and cerebral man, a specialist on Elizabethan England, may have been Saddam's translator, but like so many educated Iraqi professionals he had no choice but to serve once appointed. There was no alternative.
'As regards the welfare of Iraq today, I as a normal Iraqi citizen wonder who is to blame in this tragedy? I have a list of culprits,' he continues, in a clipped almost perfect English accent. 'It begins from the mistakes of the past regime, through to the machinations of the United States and Britain, down to the people who have inherited governance in Iraq.' He looks at the ground again as he thinks, and in a bitter and incredulous voice says, 'But the disappointing thing is that the biggest power on earth manufactured intelligence in order to attack a country that had not touched its borders. That is something that the Bush administration is guilty of and will remain guilty of, especially when it has failed over a period of five years to rectify any of the mistakes.'
And the victims? I ask. 'The victims are many, too many. But one thing that is different about this tragedy is the destruction of Iraq's middle classes, the intelligentsia, the people who would rebuild this country. They are all outside the country. Go to Syria,' al-Zubeidi says. 'Just last week I met up with two friends, former professors, and I remarked that between us we had nearly 100 years of academic experience and teaching yet we cannot afford the rent on our two-bedroom flats for our families. That is the unseen tragedy of this country.'
On the outskirts of the Syrian capital, Damascus, in a drab industrial zone hemmed in by motorways and flyovers, is a compound built by the UNHCR, the UN's refugee agency. It serves as a registration centre for the 1.5 million Iraqi refugees exiled in the country, virtually all of them fleeing the violence in their own country. By contrast, Britain has taken in just over 200 Iraqi refugees. Because Syria is an associate member of the so-called 'axis of evil', it has received scant financial assistance to cope with the crisis. The war in Iraq has seen the largest movement of peoples in the Arab world since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Today, nearly 20 per cent of Iraq's population have been forced to live outside the country's border. The UNHCR registration centre is the largest such centre in the world. On its busiest days, it processes up to 10,000 people a day.
Outwardly the people here look nothing like how you imagine a refugee to look. The war in Iraq has produced a uniquely middle-class refugee crisis: they are neatly dressed, educated, many of the women do not wear headscarves and you cannot tell who is a Sunni or a Shia - and nor does it matter. The refugees come to apply for the papers that give them refugee status, thus protecting them from being thrown out of Syria. But the centre performs another remarkable and unique role. As part of the process of registration, families are interviewed and debriefed to assess them for trauma. When their numbers are called they are taken to a long corridor with cubicles on either side. Behind closed curtains, a young Arabic UNHCR staff records the testimonies of what happened to each of them. It is the largest collection of eyewitness testimonies from ordinary Iraqis in the world.
The survey was supported by the US Centre for Disease Control based in Atlanta, as well as teams from Harvard and Johns Hopkins universities, and its overall findings are horrific: one in five refugees registered with the UNHCR since January 2007 is a victim of torture or violence; 77 per cent of those interviewed reported being affected by air bombardments and shelling or rocket attacks; 80 per cent reported witnessing a shooting; 72 per cent were eye witnesses to a car bombing; 75 per cent know someone who has been killed; 68 per cent said they had experienced interrogation or harassment by militias or other groups, including receiving death threats, while 16 per cent have been tortured. It is the statistic of the number of Iraqis who are tortured, overwhelmingly by the vast number of sectarian militia, that most often goes unreported.
Although sectarian violence has driven most of these middle-class refugees out of Iraq, their faith or sect has not divided them in exile. Remarkably, what one finds in the working-class districts of Damascus where many Iraqi refugees live are the mixed communities that one found in Iraq before the invasion. The working-class district of Sayedah Zeinab in the south-west of Damascus is home to one of the holiest Shia shrines in the region. Yet Iraqi Christian and Sunni families live here as well and co-exist quite happily. It is here that I met one of my oldest friends from Iraq, whose real name I cannot use. I will call him Ali. He had worked with other British journalists since the first Gulf War, and although I had never worked with him, I got to know him as a personal friend in the late 1990s. A big-hearted and dignified man, I always used to think of Ali as indestructible, the rock that held his huge extended family together. Wherever he went he was liked and respected. I knew that he had been kidnapped but had not heard the details of what he had been through. It was a reunion I longed for and also dreaded.
As soon as he opened the door to his apartment and I saw him, a bit greyer but otherwise himself, we were both overcome with emotion. Ali sat me down in his bare, tiny living-room which converts into a bedroom that he shares with his sons at night and told me his story. 'It's like a film inside my head. I cannot tell this story in bits or in parts: I have to recount it exactly how it replays in my head day after day after day.' For three hours I sat listening to his story. There is no way to do it justice in a brief article, and frankly most of it is too horrific to repeat.
The kidnappers were waiting for him as he went to work one day. They blocked off the road with cars, grabbed him and bundled him into one of the vehicles. They forced him to the floor, pushing his face down with their feet. 'They were excited, triumphant. I could hear them say on the mobile, "We have the big package". If they had simply wanted to kill me they would have done it straight away, so I knew what was coming and I tried to make myself strong.'
Ali was held for six days, beaten, tortured, four of his teeth knocked out with a rifle butt. When he needed to relieve himself, 'they told me that the toilet is for humans and that I was just an animal. So, I had to…' He still cannot say what he had to do. When he came to telling this part of the story he repeatedly broke down; this act of humiliation and the sense of shame he still feels about it has compounded his trauma.
Soon after he was kidnapped, he was bundled out into a yard. 'They uncovered my eyes. I could see an Iraqi, around 40 years old. One of them grabbed him by the head and the other two were holding his body even though he was tied up. There was a knife, but it was more like a sword. You could see blood everywhere. It seems they had just slaughtered someone else.' Occasionally, Ali would pause as the images flowing through his mind gave way to the emotional impact they still have on him. Then he would continue. 'They started slaughtering him and I tried to close my eyes and they punched me in my mouth hard and put a gun to my head and said, "If you don't open your eyes, I'll blow your brain out. You have to watch. If you don't watch, I'll kill you." I managed to control myself and open my eyes, but I wasn't watching. It was as if my eyes were blank. Then one of them actually pulled my eyelids open. My eyes were open but I wasn't watching the scene.
'They were slaughtering him. The man was crying, screaming, howling, begging, and then the breathing stopped. There was no voice. Then one of them said, "Cut his head off." It was horrendous. No religion under the sun could condone such a thing. God will judge them.'
Inevitably it is the Western hostages kidnapped and executed who receive press coverage, but thousands of Iraqis have experienced the same fate. It is indescribably different when it is one of your friends. Some of the hostages, both Western and Iraqi, are taken for ideological reasons, but it is essentially about money. Ali's family had to come up with the ransom. They managed to get the £30,000 the militia demanded. On the sixth day of his ordeal, where he was again forced to watch other executions, Ali was taken to the 'Emir', the local commander of the group who was unmasked. He simply shook Ali's hand and told him that since his family had made the 'contribution to the Jihad', as he described the ransom, he could go. His parting words to Ali were, 'You have now joined the Mujahideen.' He was driven to the outskirts of Baghdad and pushed out of the car.
However we all felt about the invasion, whether we supported it or not, after five years only the wilfully ignorant believe that Iraq is a better place than it was before the invasion. Ironically, it was the middle classes that argued the most over the invasion, and it has been the middle classes of Iraq that have been destroyed by it. The most consequential war of our times has merely forced us to relearn the oldest and most basic of lessons: that power does not give us legitimacy, that might does not confer wisdom and that ultimately a war based on untruths can never be won. It has been said of Saddam that his epitaph will be that he destroyed Iraq. It is being said of us by Iraqis that we have helped to destroy the new Iraq. However we try to deceive ourselves about our role in Iraq, as a country we cannot escape that judgement by those best placed to judge - ordinary Iraqis. As the old Iraqi saying goes, history has a filthy tongue.
Further reading: Iraq by numbers
