Just another day in Baghdad
Today is just another day in Baghdad. Like any other day. Every day you come to expect the same news. It's no surprise to hear that one of your neighbors moving to another province, running away, running for their life. Looking for security and safe work, because many professions have been targeted by gangs or fundamentalists or the resistance or insurgents.
Today I gave my small daughter a lift to her school because the school bus driver had moved to Karbala province. I am not sure why he left Baghdad, but I suspect he was threatened by anonymous groups -- groups that only know the language of threats and guns.
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Needed: Love for a Baghdad orphanage
Thirteen-year-old Marwa never cried even when I asked her to relive the night her parents were executed in their home. It surprised me. I wondered how she’d become so tough so quickly.
"Where were you when the gunmen came?" I asked Marwa as we sat together in a classroom in Baghdad's Alwiya Orphanage where she now lives with her two younger sisters Alliya, 10, and Sora, 6.
"I was asleep upstairs when I head the shots," Marwa said. "I ran downstairs and saw my mother. She was shot all over and was dead. My father was barely alive."
Her father died two days later of multiple gunshot wounds.
I swallowed hard and asked what happened after that. 
"We lived with my uncle for about a year, and then came here."
"Why? Why did you have to come here?" I asked. I hated asking the question, but it bothered me that her uncle would send the girls to live in an orphanage. I wanted to know how Marwa rationalized it. She was very matter of fact.
"He couldn't afford to keep us, so he brought us here."
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Troops' reaction to Bush-Blair meeting
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Covering the 'wider story' of the Middle East
NBC News' Richard Engel was interviewed by mediabistro.com's TVNewser about his new assignment as the bureau chief for NBC's new Middle East bureau in Beirut. Click here for a link to the full interview : "Q & A with Richard Engel: About Covering the 'Wider Story' of the Middle East."
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Iraq's new 'take-charge' leader
VIDEO: President Bush and Tony Blair call new Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki a "take-charge guy," but how ready is he to assume security control of his country? NBC's Richard Engel asks him in an interview.Discuss (1 comments) Email this | Link to this
The ‘normal’ in Baghdad shocks
I've been back "in country" for about two weeks, and that's enough time, when covering Iraq, to numb the brain's synapses.
It's plenty of time to begin to forget any "normal" human reaction to the overwhelming sights and smells of the daily "butcher shop" that has become Baghdad: the parents, crazed with grief, swooning at the funeral of their 12-year old boy, kidnapped, tortured, shot in the head and chest, dragged through streets tied to the back of a car, and dumped in an empty lot...because he was a Shiite.
Or not to pause at the stench of hot, rancid blood basting the floor and walls of a restaurant that had been a "local" for Iraqi police one minute and a wreck of twisted metal and burnt flesh the next...
The horror - no matter how bad - no longer surprises you after two weeks of reporting here.
But I WAS surprised this morning, and that was pleasant. Buried deep below the fold of the daily al-Mautamar newspaper, a small headline followed by a single paragraph caught our translator's attention today. It read:
"THE MINISTRY OF HEALTH WARNS AGAINST USING CONTACT LENS SOLUTION..."
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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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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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