Evil Reporter Chick

Random thoughts in war and peace

Archive for the category “Iraq war”

19 Mar 2013
2 Comments

Catching up with Baby Noor

noorschool

I went to school with Noor (right) during my visit to Baghdad and had this photo taken with her and Hajar, her best friend, who lost the use of her legs in a mortar attack.

My friend Joe Duran just called me after many months. I’d last seen him in November in Istanbul. Now, he was calling from his native Mexico, where he’d gone on vacation and also to sort through boxes of old things he stored at his house there.

“Moni, guess what I found?” he said.

I have no idea what’s about to come next.

“You know when you asked me about the tapes of Baby Noor? The raw tapes are all here in a box,” he said, coughing from the dust he’d whipped up.

I’d called Joe back in January asking if he had access to the footage he shot of Noor, the infant with spina bifida who American soldiers helped save by shuttling her out of her home in Abu Ghraib and sending her to Atlanta for surgery. Without the operations, she would surely have died.

I was an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter embedded with the Georgia Army National Guard unit that came upon Noor during a routine raid. I wrote about her for the newspaper and several days later, Joe arrived with camera in hand to file a story for CNN.

Our friendship was sealed in the throes of war. When I reconnected with Noor’s family in Iraq earlier this year, I called Joe about the footage. Turns out most of it was in the CNN system and I didn’t need his tapes. But it was good to talk to him about the stories we did back then.

“I can’t believe it’s been seven years,” he said.

I can’t either.

Except that I saw Noor again a few weeks ago.

I was not prepared to see a little girl who could speak and read and write. A girl who fancied pretty dresses and demanded her hair be embellished with colorful clips. She had grown so much.

I returned to Iraq to find her and tell the story of how she was faring all these years later, long after everyone in America who had been involved had lost touch with her.

It was strange that Joe called me out of the blue on the day before the story published on CNN.com.

Here is the link to the story:

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/03/world/baby-noor/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

Posted by Moni Basu in Iraq, Iraq war, U.S. Army, War
14 Mar 2013

Iraq. Now and then

I stand inside the Al Warda supermarket in Baghdad’s Kerrada neighborhood staring at boxes of dates, but my mind races back to another time.

I used to shop here in 2003, when I shared a room at the nearby Al Hamra Hotel with photographer Bita Honarvar. We were tired of eating the canned beans and rice the hotel served in the restaurant and opted instead for chick peas, lavash bread, yogurt, Turkish biscuits and Iranian sour cherry juice at Al Warda.

Al Warda is still the luxury it was in 2003.

Back then, Iraqis felt a sense of euphoria at the fall of Saddam Hussein.

I wandered around Baghdad, writing about how satellite dishes were sprouting faster than weeds do in Atlanta — after years of darkness, Iraqis now had access to the outside world. Ra’ed Hameed told me how he’d secretly bought a satellite dish on the black market in 1999 and kept it well hidden in his house, waiting for the day he could set it up, the day when television stations beamed in from other countries would no longer be banned. He was ready, he said, to watch “those racy German movies” he’d heard about.

There were a host of new newspapers. And political parties. And real hope that a free and strong Iraq could rise from the bloodshed.

But as the U.S. occupation began, life in Baghdad deteriorated. IED — improvised explosive device — became a part of the vocabulary. Iraqis started dying every month as did American men and women in uniform. A Sunni insurgency against the Americans raged and eventually, sectarian strife between Sunni and Shiite gave rise to fears of a bloody civil war.

I last went to Iraq in 2008, as a newspaper reporter embedded with a 3rd Infantry Division battalion. Five long years later, it was emotional for me to be back in Baghdad.

There is no Hamra Hotel anymore. It closed for good after a second bombing on a January afternoon in 2010.

Electricity is still scarce — on every street I can see the jumble of wiring that connect homes to private generators when the power goes out.

Parts of Baghdad look just as shabby as they were the last time I was here. Tired from the neglect and damage that decades of conflict bring. in Kerrada, near Warda, life seemed to be springing back with new shops, restaurants and even the landscaping of public places. I see crews hard at work putting in place fresh concrete in one of Baghdad’s squares made famous by Mohammed Ghani Hikmet’s sculpture, Kahramana and the Forty Thieves.

I watch Waleed make fresh samoon bread at Zeitoon Ovens. My friend Mohammed buys six loaves for $1 and we sit at a nearby tea shop with our syrupy Iraqi chai and hot, doughy bread. Life seems normal. Almost.

I visit the Mansour Hotel, where a suicide bomber penetrated layers of security and blew himself up in the lobby in 2007. It’s all shiny and new now. I see women in pancake makeup sipping tea with their friends and overweight businessmen in suits who remind me of Saddam’s thugs who spied on people at the Al Rasheed Hotel. I take the hotel elevators all the way up to the top for a spectacular view of Baghdad rising along the banks of the Tigris. I’d seen Baghdad from a Black Hawk but never feasted on the scenery like this.

From high up, everything seems so serene, so peaceful. I can’t see the garbage and the rubble. I can’t see the sadness and suffering.

Of course, no American soldiers are left here but relics of the years of occupation are hard to miss. The U.S. military left behind a few Humvees and armored personnel carriers that are now painted in white and blue. Concrete blast walls surround the International Zone and other places with high security. In some places, Iraqis have painted tem in cheerful colors. They were no more softer to look at, really. The myriad checkpoints around Baghdad are all manned by Iraqi police now. They are a bottleneck for traffic but necessary in a city where bombings are still common. Perhaps at a checkpoint or a Shiite market or eatery. Or in the central city, as was the case Thursday when four massive explosions rocked an area not far from the fortified Green Zone.

I don’t have to wear a flak jacket or helmet anymore but the truth is that at any moment, things could go pear-shaped. That’s a term I remember former Aussie special forces guys uttering at a hostile environment training I attended in 2005.

I hope not to use that phrase on this trip to Iraq.

Posted by Moni Basu in Iraq, Iraq war, War | Leave a Comment
11 Mar 2013

Back to Baghdad

At the Roman ruins in Jerash, Jordan.

At the Roman ruins in Jerash, Jordan.

I felt small standing amid the Roman ruins in Jerash.

I marvel at the building accomplishments of people who lived so long ago; they intended to make structures last. How many slaves gave their lives in constructing magnificence not even an earthquake could fully take away?

I think of how I’d stood in this exact place more than a decade ago, when war seemed imminent in Iraq and I was in Jordan, waiting for a visa to fly into Baghdad. Just as I was now.

Time seems fleeting – and not.

Back in December of 2002, no one knew for sure what would become of Iraq. How George Bush would invade, drop bombs, send the world’s most powerful military in to destroy Saddam Hussein.

No one knew what would come next – a de-Bathification program that purged Iraq institutions of knowledge and expertise and left an occupying U.S. force with the daunting task of running a nation.

No one knew how American soldiers and Iraqi civilians would fall. One after another. In roadside bombings, firefights and attacks from an enemy that was often unseen. Or how Iraq would fall into chaos; Sunni fighting Shiite to the point that everyone assumed the worst of a civil war.

I stand under a cloudless sky in Jerash. It is late February but the chill that is normal for this time of air is gone. It is warm. The sun, bright. Like in Baghdad.

I will be there soon, 10 long years after the first time I visited.

saddam-hussein-picture-21Saddam’s face was everywhere then, a constant reminder of the consequences of stepping outside the boundaries of subservient Iraqi life. I remember clearly when I walked down the jetway from the Royal Jordanian plane at Saddam International Airport. “Down With the USA!,” it said. There was no mistaking where I had just arrived.

I was frightened and alone as I navigated my way through the maze of Iraqi controls for the foreign media. I was even afraid to close my eyes at night in my twin bed on a sixth-floor room at the Al Rashid Hotel. I knew someone was watching. Or listening. Or both.

On that trip, I met good people who had given up on life after years of conflict and punishing sanctions that robbed Iraq of material goods and normalcy of life.

A doctor who had no access to modern medicine, current journals or technology. A professor who sat under empty bookshelves – he had sold them all to feed his family. And a bookseller who hoped to make a living hawking outdated computer science books along with “the Great Gatsby” and “War and Peace” on the sidewalks of Al Mutanabi Street.

Where were they all now, I wondered? How their hopes must have risen an plunged like the tides of the oceans. I know I will probably not find them again now – after a decade of war, a decade of convulsion.

But I cannot wait to see Baghdad again. The way it was without American tanks and Humvees. I am anxious to see how the Iraqi capital is faring a decade after the war began and forever changed the course of Iraqi history.

I leave Jerash, my face pressed against the car window, all the way back to Amman. Soon I will be in Iraq, where I spent so many months of my life covering the war. In the midst of tragedy, I came to know a land that I loved in a way that is not always understandable. Perhaps it was because I saw the very best of humanity in conditions that were the worst.

Now I am eager to be there again.

Posted by Moni Basu in Iraq, Iraq war, Travel, U.S. Army, War and tagged , | Leave a Comment
12 Feb 2013
1 Comment

WAR & Fashion

Carnage: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria.

Catwalk: Armani, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent.

War is ugly. Fashion is beautiful. War projects the worst of humanity. Fashion displays sartorial splendor in its highest.

War is fraught with danger, even for journalists and especially for photographers who must get up close to their subjects to frame an image.

Fashion is far less perilous, though photographers must also get intimate with their subjects on and around the runways.
There are photographers who shoot both: battlefields and runways, guns and glamour. At first, photographing war and fashion appear as incongruous acts that are difficult to reconcile. Until, perhaps, you take a deeper look.

Check out this provocative project on CNN. It was our Director of Photography Simon Barnett’s idea. I got to interview some very cool people for the story.  http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/02/world/war-and-fashion/index.html

Posted by Moni Basu in CNN, Fashion, Iraq, Iraq war, Journalism, Syria, violence, War, Women
30 Apr 2012

Chaplain Turner’s War

Chaplain Darren Turner counsels a soldier at a combat outpost
in Arab Jabour, March, 2008. Photo by Curtis Compton/AJC
Four years ago, I spent time with an Army chaplain in Iraq because I wanted to write about how war affected American soldiers. His name is Darren Turner. He had only been a chaplain for a few months before he headed to Baghdad.
I discovered through him a world different than mine. In the midst of war, I learned about faith, specifically Christianity, and how it was vital to so many of Turner’s men in the 3rd Infantry Division.
Their battalion was part of the surge and had seen a lot of bad stuff in searing summer months and the rugged terrain of Arab Jabour. Turner had grown weary form memorializing so many of his men.
I met Turner at Fort Stewart, flew up with him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where Spc. David Battle was struggling for life. He had lost three limbs in a bombing and Turner recently told me he was the most injured soldier at the time.
A few weeks later, photographer Curtis Compton and I flew to Iraq. My plan was simply to follow Turner around and document everything he did. I did not know how the story would turn out. Every day brought a new tragedy, a new triumph.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published the story in June, 2008. Now it is out as a digital book. http://www.amazon.com/Chaplain-Turners-War-ebook/dp/B007XULHX4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335542515&sr=1-1

The publisher thought it was as relevant as it was when it was written, now that the Iraq war has come to a close for America and in many places, it was has been swept under the rug, almost as though it never happened.
But it did happen. For more than eight long years. It changed lives here – and there – in the most disturbing ways.
Nearly 4,500 American troops died in the Iraq war. More than 30,000 others were physically wounded. Countless others live with scars that can’t be seen.
I want people to read this story and think about the costs borne by their fellow citizens. I want them to know that life will never be the same again for so many of them.
Darren and Heather Turner in Clarkesville, Kentucky, 
Feb. 2012. Turner tried to help his soldiers save their marriages 
but ran into trouble in his own.
A big thanks to Jan Winburn, who edited this story for the AJC – with a broken left arm to boot.
To Valerie Boyd, who had the wisdom to get me on this project and push it as a digital book.
Of course, to Agate Publishers for taking this on.
And to Darren Turner. I was glad to see you again this year and even more glad to know that you are happy again.
Posted by monibasu in Iraq war, PTSD and tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment
26 Mar 2012

MRAP

I intended to write this for my blog Saturday. CNN decided to publish it as an opinion piece.  You can also read it on CNN.com.
The last of America’s mine resistant vehicles out of Iraq boarded a ship in Kuwait on Saturday, bound for Fort Hood, Texas. There, it will be displayed at the 1st Cavalry Division Museum, forever a symbol of the Iraq war.
The Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle – known simply by its acronym MRAP in typical military fashion – was in a long convoy of vehicles that crossed the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border December 18 when the last U.S. troops exited Iraq.
I remember when the MRAPs were newly introduced in Iraq. They were a fresh hope of survival for American men and women.
Photographer Curtis Compton and me
in the back of an MRAP. Arab Jabour, Iraq. 2008
Staff Sgt. Jamie Linen used to transport soldiers and run supplies every day from Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Falcon to nearby patrol bases where surge troops of the 3rd Infantry Division were based. Linen, like all other soldiers, thought about the risks of bombs hidden along the roads every time he rolled out the gate. They were, after all, the No. 1 killer of American troops in Iraq. The first MRAP arrived for Linen’s unit in November 2007, months after President Bush ordered a “surge” in troops to defeat a raging insurgency. The shiny trucks were the new stars of the military then.
The soldiers were glad to get out of the backs of hot, uncomfortable Bradley Fighting Vehicles or the less-protected Humvees and step up high into the cab of a sophisticated MRAP. Made by International, the $658,000 trucks sat high on the road – 36 inches off the ground – and came with a V-shaped hull that helped deflect the impact of an improvised explosive device.
The walls of the truck were thick. The design was state of the art. The only thing they were missing, a soldier joked, were cup holders.
The MRAPs were loaded with safety features, including a fire suppression system that protected every part of the truck and a pressurized cab built to withstand a nuclear or biological attack. The seats had shoulder harnesses, and the doors operated on a hydraulic system so that in a rollover, soldiers didn’t have to push their way out of armored doors that could weigh up to 1,000 pounds. That was always something that gave me pause when I rode around in an up-armored Humvee. How would I get that door open if something bad happened?
Linen had to take a weeklong course on MRAP operation and maintenance. He told me the trucks boosted his confidence to get the mission done. I could see why after riding with him a few times. I felt the kind of protection a frightened child feels in a mother’s arms.
Just weeks before, I had met Linen’s platoon leader, 1st Lt. Mark Little, who was recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. A bomb had blown both his legs off.
No one could say for sure, of course, but Linen thought that perhaps Little wouldn’t have to wear prosthetics had he been in an MRAP.
“Nothing is invincible here,” he said. “You got tanks with 3 feet of armor getting blown up. But the MRAPs give us a sense of security.”
Linen’s driver, Spc. Robert Nowlin, was sure the enemy feared the Americans more when they were riding in MRAPs.
Why would they not?
In late 2007, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told reporters that “these armored trucks … have been the military’s top acquisition priority for months now, and with good reason.”
The MRAPs had their drawbacks. They were not suited for narrow roads because of their size and weight and were susceptible to rollovers. They weren’t good for Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain. And American soldiers did die in MRAP incidents. But back then in Iraq, they were a godsend.
Apt, I thought, that one should find a home in a military museum, a testament to the American men and women who fought in the war.
Posted by monibasu in Iraq war, U.S. Army and tagged , , , | Leave a Comment
22 Oct 2011

A long, divisive war will soon be over

Georgia  soldiers patrolled western Baghdad in 2006

President Barack Obama made a stunning announcement Friday. The war in Iraq would be over in December when virtually all of the remaining 40,000 U.S. troops will pull out and come home
. 
After nine long, divisive years, the Iraq war is finally coming to an end.

I am glad for all those troops who will come home before the holidays to hug their friends and loved ones. 
I am concerned about the future security of Iraq — many of my friends in Baghdad still live in fear.


And, I feel strange that the war will no longer be a headline. It has been so much a part of my life — from my first trip in 2002 under the controlled environment of Saddam Hussein’s information ministry to my last journey there with so-called surge units in 2008.


The night that the United States began “shock and awe,” it was pouring in Atlanta. I rushed in the rain to the Woodruff Arts Center from the Atlanta Constitution newsroom to cover a ceremony honoring Jimmy Carter’s Nobel Peace Prize.


I lived in this tent for almost four months at Camp Striker in 2005.
I remember sitting there, amid nobly dressed ladies and gentlemen beaming with pride, taking in the pomp and ceremony of the evening.


But my mind was elsewhere.


I thought of my friends Salar Jaff and Hala Araim. Were they alright? Had they fled Baghdad? How many people were cowering in fear that night? How many suffered?


It was only a month later when I arrived in Iraq that I found the answers to my questions.


Less than a week after the U.S. bombing started, the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team from Fort Stewart was about 100 miles outside the Iraqi capital. They had raced through the harsh Iraqi desert and were eying Baghdad, once the crown jewel of the Middle East.


I met up with some of them in April. Little did they know then how things would transpire in Iraq. In the first weeks of American occupation, the soldiers traveled in soft-skinned Humvees without fear of being blown up.


I thought about the first days of euphoria after the fall of Saddam as I listened to Obama from the CNN newsroom today. In another country not far from Iraq, the same kind of jubilation was unfolding on the streets.


Will Libya succeed in enforcing security so it can get on with the task of building democracy? Or will it turn into terror as Iraq did?


No one can answer such questions with any certainty, of course. We will have to wait and see.


In the meantime, to all my Iraqi friends and the many soldiers and Marines I met over the course of nine years: I raise my glass to your courage. 


Posted by monibasu in Iraq war and tagged | Leave a Comment

Post Navigation

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 5,416 other followers

%d bloggers like this: