When Zaid Mahir says goodbye to his elderly father, he knows that the journey from Samarra to Baghdad will be difficult. Even so, staying put never enters Zaid's mind. He must get back to his wife and fifteen-month-old daughter. What should be a fairly quick journey, however, turns into an eight-hour ordeal fraught with danger; now, in this memoir, he shares the true story of that trip. As Zaid travels a familiar route, he reminisces about the history of Iraq and the comforts he normally enjoys. But his succession of memories, cast against the backdrop of a serene countryside, is interrupted when he's challenged by American troops that have occupied the highway. Baghdad is still twenty kilometers away. Now part of a group of stranded Iraqis, he manages to communicate well enough in English to convince the soldiers he should be allowed to continue his journey. Though danger looms, the memory of his daughter's recent birthday and a desire to see his wife drive him to leave the besieged area to find a path that will lead to a ghostly city waiting for redemption in the dark.

The Way to BAGHDAD

Day 18 of the WarBy ZAID MAHIR

Trafford Publishing

Copyright © 2011 Zaid Mahir
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4269-6461-9

Chapter One

Morning Tea with my Father

On the sixth day of April, 2003, day 18 of the invasion, a few minutespast 9:00 on a Sunday morning, I woke up feeling slack and grimacedat the roily weather. Little did I know then that the morning was thebeginning of a long occupation of Baghdad and the herald of a new age ofdarkness in the modern history of Iraq.

As my father and I sat at the low tea table facing each other, my fatherheld a glass teacup, an istikaan, with his right-hand fingers and let the platerest in the palm of his left hand. He would keep that attitude for the rest ofthe conversation or until he finished his tea. He did not usually drink hotbeverages as fast as most Iraqis do. Instead, he enjoyed every sip, from thehottest to the least hot. And holding the istikaan with his fingers and notputting it down was his way of enjoying the act itself. Eating and drinkingwere never an end in themselves for my father, regardless of the meal ortime of day. And that morning was no exception.

I was in Samarra on a two-day visit to see my father in his hometownhouse. My father, who had been in Baghdad by the time the invasionbegan, initially refused to leave for Samarra, where he could have aperfect haven. Mild pleas and tender solicitation from his children failedto persuade him that the capital would not be safe once the war on Iraqstarted. Not until almost every member of the extended family intervened,exercising one kind of pressure or another, that he eventually yielded.Reluctantly, on a dark night in March, just 24 hours before the UnitedStates began pounding Baghdad in a military campaign dubbed OperationIraqi Freedom, my father left Baghdad in a convoy of five cars led by myeldest brother, Safwaan. Many members of my extended family did thesame, leaving their homes in Baghdad in the care of neighbors or in-lawswho remained to protect their own homes or who, for better or worse,had no place else to go. I stayed. And between the first day of the invasionand this day, April 6th, I had not spent the night out of Baghdad except tovisit my father in Samarra. My second visit was after he had an episode ofmild hypertension.

I had arrived at my father's house in Hay al-Sikak in the eastern partof Samarra Friday afternoon, April 4th. He was quite happy to see meand spent a large portion of the evening briefing me on developmentsin his health, on how he received competent medical attention duringhis ailment, and how he was keeping to the dietary restrictions he hadobliged himself to follow for years. In turn, I briefed him on everyone heknew in Baghdad and he was pleased to learn that life went on relativelysmoothly for those of us who did not leave. We had no major complaints,I said, except that electricity was out most of the time, after power plantshad been struck by long-range missiles on the first day of the war. Withthe lack of electricity, water supplies were seriously short. Telephoneservices, relatively dependable in the first two weeks of the invasion, werebecoming increasingly unpredictable. In some residential and industrialareas of Baghdad land phones were still functioning, though not anymore in al-Waziriyah, I explained, where my father's house and mine arelocated. We lost phone service there by degrees during the second weekof the war. By April, we had none. The main switchboard building andtower of al-A'dhamiyah had been struck twice in three days, terminatingcommunication. The last phone call I received was from my cousin, Amal,who broke the news of my father's hypertension.

My father and I spent most of Saturday indoors, receiving familymembers, next of kin, and clansmen. I learned about a couple of missileattacks against civilian facilities around the town of Samarra, resulting indeaths and injuries. I heard people complain of deteriorating services—thekind of complaint people make when the war feels close to them but isnot actually in their neighborhood. Long chats on the situation generallyrevealed a sense of dissatisfaction with the way the crisis had been handledby the Iraqi political leadership; the dissatisfaction was made poignant bypeople's growing fatigue of wars and fear of the unknown. Visitors oftenlamented the technological incompatibility between Iraq and the invaders,and the fact that the American army outnumbered the Iraqi army bothin weapons and communication systems. They said that Iraqi defensivewas futile. My father and I were more optimistic than our fellowclansmen, perhaps unrealistically so.

Sunday came and I prepared to return to Baghdad. My father hadjust made the morning tea as I joined him in his study. Having haddinner late the night before, I did not feel like eating breakfast, certainlynot the kind we Suwaamrah often have: eggs scrambled in thick ghee,black olives, and cheese, accompanied by freshly baked pita bread, butter,homemade marmalade, and milk. Instead, I had tea without milk, and atenothing. My father brewed tea in a conventional Iraqi kettle and pouredthe beverage into glass istikaans for both of us. The glass cups, a favoritein Iraq, keep beverages hot longer than other tea cups do. After pouring,my father insisted that I have sustenance for the road, so I reluctantly atesome baqssam, or plain wheat rusk, and two small pieces of white cheesehe had cut for me. We revisited the crisis that led to the invasion.

"It was pointless—all the diplomacy, the delegations, the cooperation,"he said. There was a sense of disappointment in my father's voice, as weremembered how time and again the Americans sought to bring aboutchange in Iraq. The government of Iraq, they claimed, was not complyingwith the UN resolutions. Instead, the Bush administration alleged, Iraqcontinued to develop weapons of mass destruction and showed no respectfor the international community. And although every effort had been madeto prove that we'd destroyed our facilities and capabilities in the early1990s, the embargo continued. It continued under the eyes of the wholeworld that, unfortunately, seemed to have authorized the United States tobe the policeman of the globe.

My father took a sip of tea, and mused for a minute before he gavea sigh and, in a calm and serene 84-year-old voice, said: "We've beenundeniably patient, but patience did not pay off."

"You're right," I murmured. I thought of the numerous factories,laboratories, and sites, the machines, instruments, and equipment, whichwere destroyed or dismantled during the embargo. Most of them had beenused for civilian purposes and could have been preserved intact to help inthe reconstruction of a viable state after the Kuwait war. In the name ofdisarming Iraq, the entire country was dismantled.

It was done by the United Nations Special Committee (UNSCOM)and its executive director, Richard Butler. Before he took over, everythinghad gone smoothly and the Special Committee was about to finish workin Iraq in 1993 and turn in a favorable final report about Iraq's weaponsof mass destruction. Then Butler and his American inspectors appeared onstage to create a crisis and they did. The crisis was given new momentumevery time we got close to an end. And the embargo went on forever.By the mid-90s Iraq had already fulfilled the requirements of the UNresolution 687, paragraphs 8, 9, and 10, which were within the competenceof UNSCOM, and paragraphs 11, 12, and 13, which were about ournuclear program and fell within the competence of the InternationalAtomic Energy...