Dredging up dark history
In perhaps the smartest testimony yet, today Saddam Hussein’s former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz dredged up a history Iraq’s current government would prefer to keep quiet.
Speaking in the witness dock wearing pajamas (a clear attempt by Aziz to show that he is as sick as his lawyers and family claim), Aziz suggested the trial of Saddam and his co-defendants is little more than victor’s justice. Without naming Iraq’s leading Dawa Party (Iraq’s new Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the former prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari are both long-time, senior Dawa Party leaders), Aziz referred to terrorist attacks blamed on the Dawa Party in the early 1980s.
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Hope mixed with fear
A security guard at Baghdad University put it to us plainly: "If you come back here, I’ll break your camera."
Our crew had been trying to talk to students and professors about the new government and take the pulse of Baghdad after this key political milestone; they found the city to be still quite sick.
The crew arrived on campus after obtaining permission from the dean’s office, but found no professor would go on camera or allow them to film in a classroom.
"The last time a TV crew was here about two weeks ago, they took pictures, then those people on camera were killed," the guard told us. He followed us around constantly. It might have been true. It might have been a rumor. But the guard believed it. He demanded that we give him the tape we had used so far. In an old trick, our cameraman switched the tape in the camera, and played innocent.
"You want to take it, here?" he said, feigning guilt and offering the guard a blank tape.
"Oh, forget it," he said, and then told us not to come back or he’d "break the camera."
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Beirut, here I come
I was alone, reading a copy of the Saturday Evening Post last week from January 1962, when I thought to myself, "Richard, you need a life."
Evidently, the management at NBC News agreed. They decided to give me the opportunity to open a Middle East bureau based in Beirut, Lebanon -- a dynamic city with enough high-life and low-life to keep things spicy. I can have a home there. Life in Baghdad has involved a lot of nights reading old magazines in a dingy, poorly lit, empty hotel room. Ah, the romantic life of a foreign correspondent!
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Baghdad and beyond
NBC News announced today that it will expand its coverage of the Middle East, Arab and Islamic nations by opening a Middle East Bureau based in Beirut, Lebanon with Richard Engel as the lead correspondent and Beirut Bureau chief.
Engel, a fluent Arabic speaker who has been NBC News' primary correspondent in Iraq for more than three years and an avid contributor to this blog, has lived in and covered the Middle East for more than a decade.
"This is my dream job. The war in Iraq has dramatically changed the entire region, which is undergoing historical shifts," said Engel. "The war has influenced not only borders, but concepts of nationhood, democracy, and ethnic and religious identities across the region. I am committed to tracking these important changes that affect Americans' daily lives and our nation's policies. Now we will have an opportunity to see the broader picture."
Engel will continue to cover Iraq on assignments and expand his reporting for "Blogging Baghdad" to include stories, anecdotes, analysis and personal reflections outside of Iraq.
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Facts of life in a war zone
Yesterday, one of our Iraqi soundmen lost a cousin in an explosion.
This morning, I asked his cameraman-partner how he was, and again expressed my sympathy for his loss. He shrugged: "Ah, it's a fact of life here. Yesterday it's him, tomorrow it may be me, or you."
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New government, huge challenges
It's been 4-and-a-half months since I left Baghdad after my last stint here. That time our compound was bombed a week after I got here, and Iraq held elections for its first democratically elected parliament. The mood was upbeat, despite the daily incidents of violence. People we talked to after they voted were full of hope that the government they elected in a democratic election would make a difference, would bring security and peace back on their streets, electricity to their homes and clean water flowing from their taps.
This week negotiations between various parties in the government continued well into the nights. And they are still continuing even though Prime Minister Maliki proposed a cabinet to the legislature on Saturday, and got it approved by the simple process of raised hands.
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Will the streets ever be safe?
People in Baghdad are afraid to leave their houses because of the killings, kidnappings and explosions.
It’s even dangerous to stand in front of your front door and talk to your neighbor because you don’t know what will happen in the next few minutes.
You may think it’s pessimistic, but yesterday after passing one dead body in the street and hearing gunshots kill my neighbor’s driver, the dangers are on the streets of Baghdad are so rampant, it makes me wonder if they will ever be safe again.
Simple errand takes a grim turn
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‘I hope he is still alive’
‘I hope he is still alive’
I was talking to one of our Iraqi cameramen who knows Sadr City very well and asking him to find a young imam I know. I gave him a name and an address, he told me he would try to find him, and then added: "I hope he is still alive."
A little while ago I was talking to Jim Maceda about a story that would involve a doctor that he interviewed in the past here in Baghdad. I said I would look for the doctor once he gave me a name and an address, then Jim added: "I hope he is still alive."
I rotate in and out of Baghdad often, and on many of those past rotations, I have found out that someone I know - or a relative of some one I know - is dead. And in all those cases, the cause of death is not natural.
After the fall of Saddam’s regime there was a lot of optimism in this country, the Iraqis I know were hopeful for a better future for their families and children, now they are doing their best to send them to live in neighboring Jordan or Syria.
One of those Iraqis recently said to me, "This war was called operation Iraqi Freedom, but all I want now is to make enough money so I can have the freedom to leave."
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Freedom for extremists only
It's not easy to enjoy freedom when the extremists are free to do whatever they want, but I'm not. Especially since they seem to believe they have the final say in what is right and what is wrong.
In earlier times, I was able to walk to the shop next-door; I used to get a shave at the barber's shop down the street, but not anymore.
Those "Taliban wannabe" extremists have shot people who walked around the streets in shorts. They even went further, about a mile from my house, they shot dead a barber in his shop who was shaving a customer's beard.
Why?
In their twisted minds wearing such clothing and removing facial hair is an imitation of the west and against sharia law.
They are taking lives, trying to deny my very basic freedoms, and hijacking my religion for their ideology.
* The names of NBC local journalists in Baghdad are not being used in order to protect their identity and security.
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Identifying corpses
I met a young man from Sadr City this week. Among the several tasks he performs out of loyalty to his religious leader, radical Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the most gruesome has to be collecting the unclaimed corpses from Baghdad's hospitals and morgues in order to bury them.
Often, he explained, the bodies are so badly mutilated the victims are impossible to identify. Despite the fact that neither of us spoke the other's language, there was no misinterpretation when he made the universal symbol of a head being decapitated.
Victims of ethnic violence
I read stories each day about bodies being discovered in Baghdad neighborhoods, in garbage dumps outside the city, or in remote Iraqi outposts. They're often found wrapped in plastic tarps, or disposed in mass graves.
Victims turn up showing signs of being tortured, such as having had their eyes gouged, or their bodies punctured by a drill. More victims of ethnic violence in a nation where it seems the scores will never be settled.
I take a clinical, matter-of-fact approach when I hear about Iraq's daily death tolls. With such an endless body count, one can almost be a little blasé when reading, or more likely for our purpose of news coverage, tabulating the latest figures.
More than numbers
But, meeting a person who collects the corpses, video tapes them in an effort to identify them, then washes and covers them in cloth to prepare them for the burial where people will pray for them, really gave me a reason to pause and reflect.
The statistics we report shouldn't be perceived as abstract or anonymous. As Iraqi President Jalal Talabani recently stated, behind every unidentified corpse is "an orphan, a starving father or a grieving wife."
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Slide Show
- Life beyond the violence
Suicide attacks and murders due to sectarian conflict continue around Iraq. See how residents live their lives amid the attacks.
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