Neo-Nazi in Tel Aviv

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

Tel Aviv, Israel.

Allepo’s castle burns

Monday, June 29, 2009

I was just cruising by, on my way to the airport, and as we turned the corner, the castle stood ablaze in front of me.

Fishing by the Green Zone

Monday, February 02, 2009

His eyes only leave the end of his line to tell stories about the fish he’s caught in the Tigris over the last year. “One time, I was here from the early morning until nine at night,” the fisherman says, his friend silently listening. “I put the last piece of bait on the hook before going home. The line tugged. I reeled in a little. It tugged some more. Then I got up and fought the fish all the way to the shore. It was huge,” he showed me with his hands—about 12 inches around and three feet long.

He comes to this bank of the Tigris, at Baghdad’s Zawra park, when he’s not working as a low level employee at the Ministry of the Interior. “It passes the time,” he says, picking through his plastic bag of bait. A year ago he couldn’t do it, he says. The park was closed during the worst part of the war, but no one would fish in the river anyway, he tells me. There were too many floating bodies.

By Iraqi standards, this fisherman is still somewhat of an adventurer. Many people still won’t eat what comes out of the river—he and another man argue over whether all the bodies have actually been removed—but he says its fine. Even less worrisome for him is the pipe of sewage pouring into the water next to him.

“It all runs downstream,” he says, shrugging. So does two-thirds of the capital’s raw sewage, to be piped back from the river into the city’s drinking water. Purification plants filter much of it as it comes out, but they can only do so much. Two summers ago, a cholera outbreak spread across Baghdad. Over half of all Iraqis still don’t have access to clean drinking water.

Along the riverbank, couples and families walk up and down Abu Nuwas park. Here, people can forget briefly about their militarized lives. Teenage boys play soccer in a dirt field. A father pushes his children on an aging swing. Scattered families spread out on blankets and the patchy grass. Men drink Pepsis in one of the rundown pavilions.

To get inside, visitors have to wind through a maze of concrete blast walls painted with Roman style murals. Iraqi security contractors search their cars for explosives.

Across the river, the Green Zone sprawls as far as the eye can see. Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s home is on the opposite bank, behind walls, razor wire, and soldiers, not far from where Saddam used to live. Barely downstream, the largest US embassy in the world—roughly the size of 80 football fields—enjoys constant electricity and its own water treatment plant. The fisherman I’m chatting with gets no more than seven hours of electricity a day.

I ask him what he thinks when he looks across the river at the Green Zone. “I have nothing to do with them. As far as I’m concerned, those people are nothing.” He tugs the line. “I hear they do like fishing though.” He tilts his rod. “USA STIK,” it reads, an American flag waving next to it. “Seahawk. Quality Fishing Tackle.”

A Quiet Election Day in Baghdad

Saturday, January 31, 2009

On Iraq’s first provincial elections since 2005, Baghdad is nearly car free. The government enforced a vehicle curfew for the entire day to prevent car bombs at the polls. For the first time, I can hear the birds singing in the palm trees that stand over the buildings, their chirps occasionally blocked by the sound of jets or low flying American helicopters. In Jadiriya, kids ride bicycles down the streets. Young men lounge on the medians. Boys chase soccer balls down major thoroughfares, moving bricks set as goal markers whenever government, media, or the occasional American military vehicles come through. Iraqi soldiers and National police sit idly in the sun on nearly every block.

In Karada, people walk through outdoor metal detectors surrounded by police to enter a polling station and cast their votes. When I get there, at around 10 am, there are more journalists than voters. The Iraqi government has only permitted cameras in five polling stations in the city. In each polling room, cameramen cram into a corner and photographers slink along the floor to capture people casting their ballots. Some Iraqis, trained by the last elections how to grab the media’s attention, raise their purple stained fingers to be mobbed by photographers, shutters ablaze.

An old woman enters a cardboard voting booth with her ballot that unfolds to an unwieldy list of parties. Her son is by her side to do the reading. In Baghdad, a province of its own, people are choosing between 2,400 candidates to fill 57 seats. Skeptics say many of the candidates have no clue about local politics but are motivated by the spoils that corruption can bring. The hope for wealth in Iraqi politics isn’t baseless—Transparency International says the country is the third most corrupt in the world after Somalia and Burma.

I ask 23-year-old, Amir Hassan, a security worker, his thoughts on the elections. “We want more safety. The Iraqi people are tired and we want to rest.”

At dusk, I walk out of my hotel to enjoy the tranquil day and buy some fresh bread. I ask the baker whether the election means that Bush was successful with his mission in Iraq. “No, Bush has nothing to do with this,” he says. “Seyyid al-Sistani told us to vote, so we voted,” he said, referring to the powerful Shia Ayatollah in Iraq. “We do what he tells us to do.”

First Day in Baghdad

Saturday, January 24, 2009

As we descend into Baghdad, the stewardess of the Iraqi airways flight reminds us to turn off all electronic devices and return our seatbacks and tray tables to their upright and locked positions.

As we descend, the desert that stretches almost unbroken from Damascus to Baghdad gives way to small plots of farmland. Our plane takes a dip to the right and the sun glistens off a small river snaking through the brown earth. A fighter jet coasts between our passenger plane and the expanse of cement houses that grows beneath us.

Southwestern Baghdad from the air. Photo by Shane Bauer.

I wonder about the other passengers. I came by plane because I didn’t want to be a lone American riding across a hostile country. Why were they flying? Two days ago, I went to the station where Iraqis board buses to Baghdad and they told me they were going back because they had to find money to live and they had nowhere else to go. Are these some of the high-class refugees who left because of death threats, but go back regularly to check on their estates? Maybe they are some of the 14,400-odd candidates running in the upcoming provincial elections, returning from a breather in calm Damascus.

I look to the Iranian man behind me, sitting tall with a broad smile on his closely shaven face. At the ticket counter in the Damascus airport, I saw him step into the front of the line with authority, a stack of passports in his hand. “We’re friends of Sistani,” he told the man behind the desk, referring to the most powerful Shiite Ayatollah in Iraq. The agent looked up, staring him straight in the eyes. “Save that talk for over there,” he said. “Here everything is official.” The Iranian went to the end of the line.

We land and head into Baghdad in my fixer’s car. As we enter the city, I am struck by the combination of normalcy and clear signs of war. We drive past blast walls painted in pink, blue, yellow, and red, set up in an attempt to cut down on the sectarian violence that raged in 2006 and 2007. Campaign posters for this weekend’s elections cover shop windows, light poles, and construction sights. In Karada, a mixed but mostly Shiite neighborhood that once saw regular car bombings, people shuffle in and out of shops covered in depictions of Hussein, the revered martyr of Shia Islam. Fruit and vegetable markets line the street. Iraqi soldiers look down from empty buildings with sand bagged windows. “On new years eve, people were out in this neighborhood until two in the morning,” says my fixer, who I’ll call Karim to protect his identity. “That was the first time that’s happened since Saddam fell.”

“Baghdad isn’t like it used to be. It used to be hell, but now things are ok,” he tells me, snapping his seatbelt into place to avoid the $10 fine regularly doled out by traffic police. American brown armored vehicles topped with gunners who can turn 360 degrees, rumble ahead of us. Karim complains about how much traffic they cause. “Security is a lot better, but there are still a lot of people that want to kill Americans,” he says. He tells me that from now on, I am a German citizen of Lebanese origin, and my name is Shamil, not Shane. “You’re Arabic sounds Lebanese and you look it.” Thank God for black hair die, styling gel, and leather shoes.

On the way to buy a SIM card for my phone, we pass the home of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, the most popular Shia party in the country. It is surrounded with cement walls, sand bags, barbed wire, and American issued Iraqi army Hummers. The palm trees inside the compound are thick. Across the road, a billboard reads, “For a green spring,” over an image of a white girl blowing a dandelion—a vague sign of hope. Down the road, another reads “Freedom is a responsibility, treat it wisely.”

Karim parks the car on a small road lined with cell phone shops, kebab stands, and tea vendors. “You can come out with me, but don’t say a word,” he says. As we walk around, I search people’s eyes to see whether they are fixating on me. No one does.

Karim invites me to his home for dinner. When I enter, I am struck by a portrait on the wall, framed in fake flowers and twinkling Christmas lights. “My brother was martyred in 2007” he said. “He was killed in his sleep, shot by a stray bullet when a firefight broke out in our neighborhood between the Mehdi Army and the Badr Brigades. I was lying next to him and so was my mother, father, and children. He died in my arms.”

We pick through a spread of hummus, salads, chicken, and fresh baked diamond-shaped bread. They tell me all about his brother—the way he religiously listened to the Lebanese singer Feiruz in the mornings—and debate whether or not to vote in the upcoming elections. As we wind down, sipping tea, someone shouts outside. I tense up. The mother gets up to go out. “Don’t go outside,” Karim tells her. She doesn’t listen. He goes back to his tea.

A few minutes later, the sound of car sirens ring out nearby. It’s the Minister of the Interior’s envoy returning him to his nearby house for the night.

We go out to leave and Karim’s mom notices I’m tense. “It’s ok,” she says. “No one will bother you here.” As they say goodbye to each other, I train my eyes on two young men sitting next to the house with their backs toward me. Could they be waiting for me? They look over and wave. “Ahlan wa Sahlan,” welcome, they say, smiling. I exhale. It’s my first day in Baghdad.