Iraq's Barbed Realities

A Reporter Reflects on How the U.S. Got Caught in a Trap of Its Own Making

In July 2003, when travel around Iraq didn't require armored cars and armed guards, my translator and I took a day trip to Fallujah. Unrest was on the rise there and we were curious about who was behind the violence. Was it indeed former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party? We wanted to get some truth on the ground. Even if the reporting foray was a bust, we planned to stuff ourselves at Haji Hussein, our favorite kebab restaurant.

At the mayor's office and the police station, my translator, Naseer, tried to find someone who would speak with candor. "They're all liars," he declared after a few interviews. Then, as we were about to give up, a mayoral aide told us to look up the city's senior tribal chief, Sheik Khamis Hassnawi. "He'll tell you what's really happening," the aide whispered.

In a city where residents often began conversations with diatribes against the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, Hassnawi was a refreshing exception. Although he appeared to come from central casting, with his prominent nose, weathered face and checkered headscarf, he talked for much of the afternoon -- over Dunhill cigarettes and takeout from Haji Hussein -- about how Fallujah could be saved with the help of the U.S. military. The Americans, he said, needed to find a way to employ the legions of former soldiers and other disaffected young men milling about the city. Unlike Shiites in the south, who had grown accustomed to unemployment and poverty, Sunnis in Fallujah had thrived on government contracts, smuggling and graft. Postwar joblessness was a new, embarrassing -- and dangerous -- phenomenon. "Either you put them to work," Hassnawi said, "or they will turn to the resistance."

Late last month, as I was packing my possessions and preparing to return to Washington after 18 months as The Post's bureau chief in Baghdad, Naseer came to my hotel room and tried to call Hassnawi so that I could say goodbye. As Naseer kept redialing, it became clear how much my life as a journalist in Iraq had changed over those months, and how much things had changed for Iraqis. The telephone had become the only way for me to contact Hassnawi, who was holed up at home, too afraid to venture out. Like Hassnawi, I too had become a prisoner in my home -- the inhospitable Ishtar Sheraton Hotel -- unable to roam a country I had grown to love, forced to call people I once used to visit.

My folding road map, dog-eared from repeated excursions last year, had grown dusty on my bookshelf. By this summer, every road leading out of Baghdad had become too dangerous to travel. North to Mosul, west to Ramadi, northeast to Baqubah, southeast to Kut, south to Hilla, Karbala, Najaf and Basra -- all had turned into "red routes" in the parlance of security specialists, meaning too dangerous to travel. The capital itself was a patchwork of red (no-go) and yellow (proceed with extreme caution) zones, surrounding the American-controlled Green Zone. Neighborhoods where I had visited Iraqi friends for lunch were now too insecure to enter. And even if I was willing to chance it, my Iraqi friends didn't want to risk being seen allowing a foreigner into their house.

It had not started out this way, and perhaps it did not need to have turned out this way. To understand this better, it helps to know a bit more about Hassnawi.

Lured by his willingness to speak freely, I periodically dropped in on the sheik after our first meeting to get his take on the deteriorating security situation in Fallujah. He knew the ringleaders and their lieutenants. He was among the first to warn of the arrival of foreign fighters. He represented the city council in early talks with the U.S. military. But in our discussions, he always returned to the same point: Commence reconstruction projects and create jobs. To his dismay, many of his unemployed tribesmen were joining the insurgency, lured by $500 payments to participate in attacks.

Over time, it became increasingly dangerous to meet with Hassnawi. Early this year, insurgents and their sympathizers began threatening reporters and chasing them out of town. When Naseer and I went to see the sheik in March at his farmhouse south of the city, a second vehicle accompanying us served as a scout, ready to alert us with a walkie-talkie of any problems ahead.

Two weeks later, four American security contractors were murdered and mutilated in front of Haji Hussein. From that moment on, Fallujah became a no-go area for us, the first in what has turned into a lengthy list of places in Iraq where it is too dangerous to operate as a foreign journalist.

A few days after the grisly murders, U.S. Marines laid siege to Fallujah. The long-simmering guerrilla war erupted into an all-out, us-vs.-them conflict, with most young men fighting along with the hard-core insurgents to defend their city. Hassnawi and others who had advocated engagement with the Americans either fled or hid in their homes.

The Marines eventually pulled out and handed over security responsibilities to a group of former Iraqi soldiers who were cowed and co-opted by resistance leaders. With the city still in the hands of insurgents, Hassnawi has received multiple death threats, some of which have been delivered by his own tribesmen. Although he would like to meet with Marine commanders, and they also want to see him, it's been impossible to arrange. He can't risk being seen traveling out of town toward the Marine base. The Marines can't drive up to his house.

As a Sunni Muslim, he had every reason to oppose the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government. He had never been tortured. None of his relatives wound up in mass graves. He had received regular payouts from Hussein's government, enough to buy a shiny new Mercedes. Even during my visits, I sometimes wondered whether he was telling us Americans what we wanted to hear, and what might pay off for him in the new Iraq.