This unedited e-mail below, sent privately to
friends by Wall Street Journal correspondent
Farnaz Fassihi, was posted on pointer.org, a site
run by the Poynter Institute journalism school.
In an Oct. 4 note to Editor & Publisher magazine,
Fassihi said she never meant the e-mail to become
public. She is now on a vacation that she and her
employers say was planned long before the
controversial posting.
Subject: From Baghdad
9/29/04
Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under
virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a
chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away
lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference.
Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those
reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a
scheduled interview. I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the
streets.
I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike
a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in any
thing but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories,
can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road
trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be
curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling.
And can't and can't. There has been one too many close calls, including a
car bomb so near our house that it blew out all the windows. So now my most
pressing concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story but to stay
alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay alive. In Baghdad I am a
security personnel first, a reporter second.
It's hard to pinpoint when the "turning point' exactly began.
Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was
it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it
when Sadr City, home to 10 per cent of Iraq's population, became a nightly
battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading
from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq?
Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under
Saddam it was a "potential" threat, under the Americans it has been
transformed to "imminent and active threat," a foreign policy failure bound
to haunt the United States for decades to come.
Iraqis like to call this mess "the situation." When asked "how are thing?"
they reply: "the situation is very bad."
What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control
most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the
country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country's roads
are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of land mines and explosive
devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations,
kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging
barbaric guerrilla war.
In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The
numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health — which was attempting
an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers — has now
stopped disclosing them.
Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.
A friend drove thru the Shiite slum of Sadr City yesterday. He said young
men were openly placing improvised explosive devices into the ground. They
melt a shallow hole into the asphalt, dig the explosive, cover it with dirt
and put an old tire or plastic can over it to signal to the locals this is
booby-trapped.
He said on the main roads of Sadr City, there were a dozen land mines per
every ten yards. His car snaked and swirled to avoid driving over them.
Behind the walls sits an angry Iraqi ready to detonate them as soon as an
American convoy gets near. This is in Shiite land, the population that was
supposed to love America for liberating Iraq.
For journalists the significant turning point came with the wave of
abduction and kidnappings. Only two weeks ago we felt safe around Baghdad
because foreigners were being abducted on the roads and highways between
towns. Then came a frantic phone call from a journalist female friend at 11
p.m. telling me two Italian women had been abducted from their homes in
broad daylight. Then the two Americans, who got beheaded this week and the
Brit, were abducted from their homes in a residential neighborhood.
They were supplying the entire block with round the clock electricity from
their generator to win friends. The abductors grabbed one of them at 6 a.m.
when he came out to switch on the generator; his beheaded body was thrown
back near the neighborhoods.
The insurgency, we are told, is rampant with no signs of calming down. If
anything, it is growing stronger, organized and more sophisticated every
day. The various elements within it — Baathists, criminals, nationalists and
Al Qaeda — are cooperating and coordinating.
I went to an emergency meeting for foreign correspondents with the military
and embassy to discuss the kidnappings. We were somberly told our fate would
largely depend on where we were in the kidnapping chain once it was
determined we were missing.
Here is how it goes: criminal gangs grab you and sell you up to Baathists in
Fallujah, who will in turn sell you to Al Qaeda. In turn, cash and weapons
flow the other way from Al Qaeda to the Baathists to the criminals. My
friend Georges, the French journalist snatched on the road to Najaf, has
been missing for a month with no word on release or whether he is still
alive.
America's last hope for a quick exit? The Iraqi police and National Guard
units we are spending billions of dollars to train. The cops are being
murdered by the dozens every day — over 700 to date — and the insurgents are
infiltrating their ranks. The problem is so serious that the U.S. military
has allocated $6 million dollars to buy out 30,000 cops they just trained to
get rid of them quietly.
As for reconstruction: firstly it's so unsafe for foreigners to operate that
almost all projects have come to a halt. After two years, of the $18 billion
Congress appropriated for Iraq reconstruction only about $1 billion or so
has been spent and a chuck has now been reallocated for improving security,
a sign of just how bad things are going here.
Oil dreams? Insurgents disrupt oil flow routinely as a result of sabotage
and oil prices have hit record high of $49 a barrel. Who did this war
exactly benefit? Was it worth it? Are we safer because Saddam is holed up
and Al Qaeda is running around in Iraq?
Iraqis say that thanks to America they got freedom in exchange for
insecurity. Guess what? They say they'd take security over freedom any day,
even if it means having a dictator ruler.
I heard an educated Iraqi say today that if Saddam Hussein were allowed to
run for elections he would get the majority of the vote. This is truly sad.
Then I went to see an Iraqi scholar this week to talk to him about elections
here. He has been trying to educate the public on the importance of voting.
He said, "President Bush wanted to turn Iraq into a democracy that would be
an example for the Middle East. Forget about democracy, forget about being a
model for the region, we have to salvage Iraq before all is lost."
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.
The Iraqi government is talking about having elections in three months while
half of the country remains a "no go zone" — out of the hands of the
government and the Americans and out of reach of journalists. In the other
half, the disenchanted population is too terrified to show up at polling
stations.
The Sunnis have already said they'd boycott elections, leaving the stage
open for polarized government of Kurds and Shiites that will not be deemed
as legitimate and will most certainly lead to civil war.
I asked a 28-year-old engineer if he and his family would participate in the
Iraqi elections since it was the first time Iraqis could to some degree
elect a leadership. His response summed it all:
"Go and vote and risk being blown into pieces or followed by the insurgents
and murdered for cooperating with the Americans? For what? To practice
democracy? Are you joking?"
— Farnaz