Farnaz Fassihi’s 2004 email
It was the email read around the world. Four years ago, in September 2004, Farnaz Fassihi, an Iranian American correspondent in Iraq for the Wall Street Journal, sent a private email to family and friends that described the situation in Iraq more sincerely than her published newspaper articles ever could.
She wrote, “One could argue that Iraq is already lost beyond salvation. For those of us on the ground it’s hard to imagine what if any thing could salvage it from its violent downward spiral. The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes and it can’t be put back into a bottle.”
She wrote a book called Waiting for an Ordinary Day: The Unraveling of Life in Iraq.
FARNAZ FASSIHI:
The spiral downward, in some sense, started right after the invasion, and it was partly because the Americans really didn’t have a good post-invasion plan in place, a good political plan in place, to bring all the different factions together—the Sunnis, the Shias and the Kurds. And, almost immediately, I remember right when Tikrit even fell, a few days after Baghdad fell, there was talks of insurgency, there was talks of jihad and of resisting the American occupiers, and slowly this turned into an organized movement.
And by early 2004, which was the first anniversary of the US-led invasion, we just saw things just slipping down and security falling apart, car bombs everywhere, attacking international organizations like the UN, like the Red Cross, hotels where journalists were staying, kidnappings, random violence and car bombs. And it was just impossible to contain. And that eventually led to civil war by 2006, because the cycle of violence just went on and on and on.
It really depended on the situation. Our security ebbed and flowed with the situation of Iraq. There were times where we just couldn’t go anywhere, and we got creative with reporting, asking our Iraqi staff to go and bring Iraqis to the office or do the reporting for us. And, you know, there were times where I wouldn’t be able to leave the office or the hotel for a few weeks at a time. And there were times where I could go out, but it was always very security-oriented. Everywhere we went, we had to stay for twenty minutes and then rush back and have, you know, travel in an armored car and have bodyguards with you. So it definitely wasn’t an ideal way of reporting, by any means.
Ordinary life was turned upside-down immediately after the invasion. For starters, there was the fallout of security, a security vacuum created by the toppling of the regime. There were no police officers, there were no—there was no army, no Iraqi Security Forces, and a lot of looting and mayhem. It was almost as if just crazy people had taken over the streets. So, people were terrified. They didn’t know where to go if their car got stolen or if their house items got looted. There was power outage. There was sewage problems, clean water problems. People were getting killed randomly. So, by no means of the imagination was anything normal.
The American role has really evolved in this war. It was first that they went in to topple the regime and bring, nation build, build a new nation and bring democracy and emplace a government. And slowly it evolved into what is now, the Americans basically acting as a buffer zone between the Sunnis and the Shias to prevent a civil war from happening. So the goals of this war and the responsibility of the troops really changed as security changed on the ground.
About whether life has returned, it’s definitely gotten better. But what we have to realize is that extreme measures have been taken for life to somewhat return to normal. There are blast wall barriers around neighborhoods in Baghdad separating the Sunnis and the Shias. There’s been natural population movements, where the city is ethnically divided along ethnic and sectarian lines.
I think that the fact that the violence came down is because of three reasons. It’s because of the surge, one reason. It’s also because of the Americans putting the Sunni insurgents on the payroll. They’re paying about $300 a month to former insurgents who were killing the troops a few years ago, because they’re now trying to get onboard with the American plan, and also because of the Shia ceasefire. But these things are very fragile. I mean, you could—one of you take one out of the question, and things could fall apart again. I think there was a report yesterday that assassination cells have returned to Baghdad, killing people, so…
I can give you an example and anecdotes of my book. There’s a chapter that I talk to this family whose mother is Shia and father is Sunni, and they were having a really hard time with their children, who were in elementary school. Their first-grader refused to go to school the first week, because he was afraid that if he goes to school, something bad would happen to his mother or that he would die. When they asked him, “What should we tell the teacher?” he said, “Tell him that the insurgents kidnapped me.”
So this is the mindset of a seven-year-old child, that kidnapping and murder and assassination is just part of the vocabulary. Kids were getting teased because they were Sunni or they were Shia. They were dealing with very difficult issues, like, friends’ parents getting killed or getting kidnapped. And I think it has really long-lasting effects. I mean, if you think that the next generation in Iraq lived and grown up in war and mayhem, it’s bound to have some deep psychological scars.
My memories of Iraq, my first time that I ever heard the word Iraq was when I was eight years old, and the war started with Iran and Iraq. And I was in Tehran, and they were bombing the city. And everyone said, these are Iraqi warplanes. So, for me to be on the other side of the border was, very personal, but it was also—it gave me some insight, because I knew the culture, I could relate to the people. And they kind of saw me as somebody who could maybe understand them better, because I was from the country next door and could kind of have a better understanding of their traditions.
I think that that’s something that needs to be paid attention to, because that’s where the al-Qaeda cells are located, and it’s unfortunate that, they couldn’t finish what they had started in Afghanistan and bring some sort of a stability before going to Iraq. And I think, as we see now, there may be a redeployment of troops back to Afghanistan. But things are definitely deteriorating very fast there, and it’s very, very dangerous.
– from www.democracynow.org
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