Yaghdan and his colleagues besieged their American bosses for help, for special badges allowing them to drive into the Green Zone rather than wait in the dangerous checkpoint lines, for promises of emergency housing in case they were targeted by militias. Month after month, year after year, they asked for protection but received none. The Americans wore condolences on their faces while they said they were looking into things.
Yaghdan removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He wished the Americans would buy better computer monitors. These were too small, and the resolution strained his eyes after hours of poring through row after row of the database of USAID projects, which would someday become an unimportant digital artifact of history. On the wall of his cubicle hung a picture of Mashael, a young woman beloved by her Iraqi colleagues who had been killed one morning a few months earlier when she stepped out on the balcony after breakfast. A black stripe to signify mourning cut diagonally across the corner of her picture. Nobody ever found out if it was a stray or targeted round.
It had been only a few months since he ran from the white Opel. There was no point looking back now, he thought. The catalog of if-then considerations were exhausting and unsatisfying: in the end, he had made the decision to help the Americans based on what he knew at the time. In his mind, he defended himself against the lethal stigma clouding those who worked for the United States by stressing that he worked for a civilian agency, and not the military, which he felt bore the responsibility for many of the shameful parts of the occupation. But his civilian employer was losing funding and drifting into the margins of relevance.
Down the alleyway of cubicles from him sat Tona and Amina, two young women who worked in the human resources office. They were best friends; they had attended high school and college together and had worked at USAID since its earliest days. Whenever Iraqis were hired, it was Amina who helped them get their badges; her name was on the back of scores of USAID badges as the “signing authority.” Whenever Americans were hired, it was Tona who took their pictures with a digital camera and uploaded them into the badging system. American badges were blue; Iraqi badges were yellow.
When an Iraqi colleague was killed, Tona took an empty tissue box from a shelf in her cubicle and collected money for the victim’s family.
At the beginning of the month of Ramadan in 2005, Tona and Yaghdan and the other Iraqis working for the United States were invited to a luncheon at the embassy in their honor, hosted by the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. The executive officer called in the Iraqi staff for a meeting before the lunch. “Don’t say anything to him,” she warned. “Just eat and come back.” She knew that anytime the Iraqis were able to get in front of a powerful American, they asked for protection from the militias waiting for them on the other side of the Green Zone’s blast walls. “It’s not a good time to talk about this. He’s being nice to have you over for lunch.” So they went and stood quietly in a long line for a picture with a grinning Zal. None of them ever received a copy.
Not long afterward, Tona and Amina walked out of the Green Zone through the Qadisiyya checkpoint, which opens onto the airport road. They had just cleared the American gate when a young man in an Iraqi police uniform stepped toward them and pulled a cell phone from his pocket. As he took their picture, Amina sprinted at him and started to yell, asking him what he was doing. She snatched his phone and ran back to the American soldiers guarding the checkpoint. The cop boldly followed to retrieve his phone, which the Americans were now examining. In addition to a picture of Tona and Amina, they found a video clip of an insurgent attack on an American convoy. They arrested him, interrogated him, and then took him away, but it was no comfort. They had just gotten the cop arrested, but for how long? A day? A year? Surely he’d search for them when he was released.
As the sun climbed over the city of Samarra on the morning of February 22, 2006, seven heavily armed Sunni militants dressed in Iraqi Special Forces uniforms strode into the entrance of the golden-domed Al-Askari Shrine and tied up the security guards. Visited by Shi’a pilgrims since the year 944, the mosque was of irreducible importance to the Shi’ite community. They carried in a number of bombs, which were strewn throughout the building. Shortly before seven o’clock, the bombs went off, bringing down the golden dome and any delusions that Iraq was not hurtling toward a civil war.
The response was miasmic. Militias laid claim to neighborhood after neighborhood, hoisting their flags over seized checkpoints, at which they checked IDs for Sunni or Shi’a names. In this manner, the once-mixed Sunni-Shi’a neighborhoods of Baghdad and other major cities were ethnically cleansed. More than a thousand bodies a month piled up at the Baghdad morgue alone. Before long, more than fifty thousand Iraqis were fleeing into Syria, Jordan, and other countries each month.
It was a midterm election year in America, so the news from Iraq filtered in a little differently. The only metric that counted in public opinion polling was the casualty rate of US forces, and since fifty-five Americans were killed in February 2006, and only thirty-one killed in March, what were all the war critics talking about? The thirty-one killed were twenty fewer than the number killed in March 2004, and still four fewer than the number killed in March 2005. Yes, there were seventy-six Americans killed in April 2006, but that was a far sight better than the 135 that were killed in April 2004.
Meanwhile, the refugee crisis became the fastest growing in the world, as nearly one in eight Iraqis was running from the violence: the equivalent of 38 million Americans flooding across the Mexican and Canadian borders.
A couple days after the bombing of Samarra, Fox News ran a photograph of the destroyed Golden Dome with the caption “Upside to Civil War?” The subsequent caption: “All-out civil war in Iraq: could it be a good thing?” Later that year, the network’s Stuart Varney spelled out the thinking more clearly: “Let me put out something positive about Iraq, if I may, for a second. Look, we took the fight to the enemy. We divided the enemy. The enemy is now fighting itself. America’s interest is surely being well preserved and well protected. We are, in fact, in a way, winning and preserving our interests here, are we not?”
The Democrats also saw an opportunity to capitalize on the violence scorching through Iraq. A six-point plan was unveiled by the party, the first of which was entitled Real Security: Protecting America and Restoring Our Leadership in the World, which would “require the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own country.” They employed the same condescending language as the neoconservatives I knew back in Baghdad. “We did our part; it’s up to the Iraqis now to step up,” as if the civil war rending the country had nothing to do with us but, rather, resulted from a deficiency in the Iraqi character.
Several months after Samarra, with millions displaced, a controversy erupted when Brian Williams at NBC Nightly News declared a civil war under way in Iraq. Katie Couric of CBS Evening News could not bring herself to agree. The Bush administration’s spokesman at the White House, Tony Snow, laughed at Williams’s assertion. It was not a civil war, he claimed, because the “different forces” were not unified: “You have not yet had a situation where you have two clearly defined and opposing groups vying not only for power but for territory.” When pressed on the question at a later briefing on December 5, 2006, he continued:
I spent a lot of time thinking about this last week, and I’m not sure you get any two people to agree . . . if you have as your definition of a civil war as something that involves the entire landmass—north, south, east, and west—doesn’t apply. But some people think that the sectarian violence you’ve seen—centered largely around Baghdad, and you also have some terrorist activity in Anbar, a considerable amount—they think that is civil war. So it depends on which metrics you use for doing it. And frankly, I gave up on trying, because there are any number of people who have different measurements.
It was just another refugee problem, invisible to most Americans and journalists. Unlike other humanitarian crises, Iraqis who fled to Syria and Jordan in 2006 didn’t gather in tent communities or cluster in recognizable refugee camps. They crammed into cheap apartments in overcrowded neighborhoods and waited for the civil war to pass or for the international community to act.
But Yaghdan stayed, unwilling to leave his country and the home in which he was raised, confident in his ability to always keep a step ahead of the militants who hunted America’s Iraqis.