Ahmad Hadi is from the south, from the region of the mystic Shia cities of Najaf and Kerbala. He invites me to his house — Iraqis always do this, when they scarcely know you, something that reminds me of Latin American hospitality — so that I can visit this beautiful part of the country. But he is not thinking about Shia mysticism or the sacred emanations of the place, but rather of more material things: ‘Between Najaf and Kerbala they produce the best rice in the whole of the Middle East,’ he effuses. ‘Do come and I’ll prepare you a treat that you won’t forget for the rest of your life.’ Guffaws well up from inside that enormous body every now and then, like one of those cries that warriors make to give themselves confidence before going into battle. ‘Of course things are better in Iraq,’ he exclaims. ‘Before I had to drink that poisonous alcohol that they sell loose, and now I am drinking malt whisky.’
It is good to talk to someone like the journalist and playwright Ahmad Hadi, who is convinced that, even in this problematic, destroyed country of Iraq, life is worth living. I leave the newspaper and take a walk around the centre of Baghdad. I feel that I am walking in a world that has been conquered by the surrounding desert: the façades of the buildings, the squares, the trees, the public monuments and even the faces and the clothes of the people are all stained an earthen colour. Dry sand is floating in the air and gets into your mouth and nose. In the Al Ferdaws (Paradise) Square, where the titanic statue of Saddam Hussein had been that television viewers all over the world saw toppled the day the coalition forces entered the city, there is now an inscription in black paint, addressed to the Americans in idiosyncratic English: ‘All done/Go home.’
In my rather intermittent readings during these past weeks, as I tried to get some sort of idea about the country that I was coming to, Al Rachid Street was always mentioned, for in the forties and fifties it had been the great commercial artery at the centre of Baghdad. With its luxurious shops and jewellery stores, this was the place that the most prosperous families of the Middle East dreamed about and came to on shopping expeditions. My heart sinks when I walk along it, skirting round the foul-smelling rubbish, the scraps that scrawny dogs are scavenging, and the rubble. It takes imagination to make out the former mansions of the rich and powerful, and the elegant shops of what was Baghdad half a century earlier in these crumbling, shaky, windowless, lopsided, looted and burned-out constructions, many of them about to collapse on top of the residents who sit on benches or on the floor under the portals and columns, impervious to the impending disaster, talking and sipping at their glass of hot tea balanced on a small plate.
One street off Al Rachid is Al Mutanabbi Street, and on Friday mornings there is always a second-hand book market. I’ve visited it twice, and each time I’ve felt happy and stimulated in among the motley crowd browsing, buying and selling, or asking questions about the books and magazines that are so old that the pages come apart in your hands when you leaf through them. It is a narrow, rubble-strewn, earthen street, but it has a warm and friendly atmosphere and does good business. There are a lot of readers in this city, that’s clear. Some of them must be middle-class, but the majority are very poor, and of all ages. They eagerly thumb the old religious folio volumes, they look in astonishment at the magazines with semi-naked dancers on the cover and point at the headlines of old newspapers. There are large photos, of ayatollahs and imams who were killed or exiled, and also of politicians and revolutionaries, communist leaflets, and many books of poetry. In one of the stalls I find the memoirs of Pablo Neruda, I Confess I Have Lived, translated into Persian and published in Tehran.
I end the day in one of the few restaurants still open in Baghdad, The White Palace, where I hope to get away from that wretched fried chicken dish to which I have gained a completely unjustified aversion. The speciality of this place is Cusi, lamb seasoned with spices and served with white rice. A real feast, I am assured. But I can’t accompany it with the appropriate glass of ice-cold beer because the place does not serve alcoholic drinks. The friends I am eating with are surprised: they drank beer here a few days ago. The explanation is that religious fanatics have threatened to kill restaurant owners if they do not enforce a non-alcohol rule. It doesn’t matter, even with water — as Ahmad Hadi might exclaim, licking his fingers — the Cusi is really delicious.
5 June–6 July 2003
7. The Kurds
Travelling north out of Baghdad towards Iraqi Kurdistan, we move into a different landscape, language and culture, and also, over the days, the towns and cities look different. After four hours’ drive by car, through a flat, scorched desert, with Bedouin villages and burned-out personnel carriers and scattered army lorries, there are the mountains, which we begin to climb an hour later, in the middle of the oilfields, up to the city of Kirkuk. Leaving that city and heading for Suleymaniya, the road gets steeper and the roadside is covered in green, in pine forests and slopes covered by cultivated areas where a few weather-beaten labourers with timeless faces are working. No one would say that there had been a war in these parts.
Still less in Suleymaniya, an attractive city with broad, clean, tree-lined streets, traffic control officers on street corners, women dressed in Western styles, Internet cafés everywhere, McDonald’s and a forest of satellite dishes on the roofs of the houses. I knew that the war had scarcely touched the place, but I was not expecting to find a scene of such normality. I was also not expecting to find posters thanking President Bush for ‘The liberation of Iraq’ and greeting Paul Bremer, the proconsul, who had just been here to visit the members of one of the two Kurdish governments that have divided Iraqi Kurdistan. The government in Suleymaniya is run by Jala Talabani’s Patriotic Union Party of Kurdistan; the other government, whose capital is Irbil to the north, is the domain of Masud Barzani’s Democratic Party of Kurdistan. The fierce rivalry between the two parties, and the fratricidal violence — in the 1994 conflict between the two communities there were more than three thousand casualties — has merely increased the misfortunes of the Kurds, who represent twenty per cent of the Iraqi population (somewhat under four million). They were systematic victims of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, which attacked them viciously, especially during the attempted rebellions of 1975, 1988 and 1991, when they sought greater autonomy and resisted the enforced ‘arabisation’ of Kurdish villages that the regime was implementing, massacring the native population and replacing it with Sunni Arabs. In 1988, entire Kurdish communities — including children, women and old people — disappeared, an extermination programme that culminated in the massacre at Halabja, in March of that year, in which more than four thousand Kurds were killed with chemical weapons.
But walking through the streets of Suleymaniya, one would say that all this belonged to the far-distant past. There are no American soldiers to be seen (‘They are dressed in civilian clothing, in the cafés and restaurants, fraternising with the locals,’ Shalaw Askari, Jalal Talabini’s Minister of Information would later tell me), and the only soldiers visible are the local peshmergas (fighters) dressed in their baggy trousers, their baroque turbans that seem like something of a Rembrandt self-portrait, and the long lengths of printed fabrics that they roll around their bodies like belts.