'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Dahr Jamail returns to Iraq

I'm sitting here in Beirut sifting a zillion things in my mind... One is regret that I haven't mustered the courage to do what I had hoped to do while I've been here, which was to go to Iraq... braving a certain degree of risk, it is true... and doing some firsthand reporting from there.

In the end the degree of risk looked just too great. Or, am I getting old and flabby? Did I lose my nerve? Well, I'm sure you don't want to hear me maundering on about my personal woes.

Anyway, I have good news for you. Dahr Jamail, a good reporter who looks from his pic to be 25 years younger than me, has just taken the plunge and gone back to Iraq. So now, the rest of us can all live out my earlier, fear-quashed hopes vicariously, through Dahr.

Here is an excerpt from the first post he put on his blog after getting back there, Friday:

... we go visit some friends of ours…a family whose father/husband was beaten into a coma while in US military custody. It is safer this way because as my trusted interpreter/fixer [Abu Talat] tells me, “Noone knows you are here yet-so this is the best and maybe only time to go places. Y’allah, we go now.”

We talk with the wife and daughters while the electricity cuts off again and again-they tell me how they just finished a stint of 72 hours straight with no electricity. One of the daughters tells of how while in school the other day she listened to rockets flying over her building. “This is a war here, we are living like animals,” she says wearily, “How long can this continue?”

We mustn’t stay long and are off to run errands before I go find a hotel. Every moment finds us watching to see if we are followed-the kidnapping has become out of control. [Abu Talat] explains that even people who give information about westerners to crime gangs can earn $500. In a place with 70% unemployment, this is the only lottery. Just like in any economically depressed area, more and more folks are becoming willing to take a shot at the jackpot.

The deep red sun peers through the pollution as the breaking of the fast approaches (it is Ramada). We go to a few stores to pick up supplies for me and Abu Talat tells me not ever to speak English in public…we are both on the lookout, ever careful…for the safety of both of us.

Iraq has again transformed into a different country…as had happened between my previous two trips. Between November ’03 and late January ’04, other journos and I were able to ride around together, walk the streets, even sometimes at night. We shared the same hotel without fear of kidnapping or car bombings.

My last trip [March - June 2004] this was transformed into one westerner with one interpreter, and rarely more than that. A rogue band of us stayed in a dive hotel off the map and kept our heads down, and didn’t do too much traveling around the city without an interpreter. Car bombs had become the norm, and the mood of Iraqis had grown sullen and bitter.

Now, today…it is yet another country. As I type this a gun battle of automatic weapons rattles down the street, Falluja has been sealed prior to imminent attack (as it was on the day I entered Iraq for my last trip, April 4th), and the mood in Baghdad is tense with gloomy expectation. The feeling is that of a war zone, people are downtrodden, tense and angry, chaos reigns and nobody is safe…anywhere.

All this against the backdrop of the recent news of another four years with Mr. Bush and his junta. Now the people of Iraq prepare to slide further into the hell that is occupied Iraq as the siege of Falluja looms over Baghdad as a heavy, damp night settles over this once magnificent capital city.