One way babylon
Karim Ben Khelifa
FUJIFILM Young Reporter Award, 2004
From targeted bomb attacks to murders committed in total impunity, from the scandal of Abu Ghraib prison to the difficult introduction of Iraqi rule : ever since the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, the situation has been getting worse and worse. These ten months out in the field working for Newsweek magazine, there alongside the Arabs, show us just how difficult it has been for a major power to conduct a pre-emptive war and set up “its democracy” there.
The series of errors by the Coalition forces under US leadership out in the field and the lack of any clear strategy for the post-war period in Iraq have undermined all parts of Iraqi society. It has proven impossible to find any weapons of mass destruction, or any other proof of an immediate threat Iraq may have held for the West, these being the arguments invoked by the Coalition for embarking on the war. It has taken too long to rebuild infrastructures and with ever-increasing instability, the Iraqis have come to see the presence of foreign troops on their soil not as an army of liberation, but as a force of occupation, and therefore to be opposed.
Preview
No sign of any stabilization can be seen ; quite the opposite, as the different groups become radical with no prospects of things settling down peacefully, and with security in the worst situation ever. The country, divided along ethnic and religious lines from north to south and from east to west, has never been more unstable. Then there are the tribal militias, and various political and religious parties have set up their own armed forces. The fear of others is growing and becoming more threatening every day.
For a journalist in Iraq wishing to report on events, the exercise has therefore become extremely perilous; it is almost impossible to travel between the cities of Najaf, Kufa, Karbala, Fallujah, Samara and Ramadi, without running serious risks. Threats and executions have become common currency for Iraqi fixers who do what they can to help western correspondents report on hostilities and go out in the field. The Shiite uprising led by Moqtada Al Sadr in Najaf and Kufa, together with the Sunnite insurrection in the city of Fallujah, opened up two fronts at the same time which the Coalition forces had to deal with in April last year; the situation was even more explosive as the American occupation has now become more brutal than it was in the earlier months, and the only tangible result is that the Iraqis have united behind the American flag… as it goes up in flames. Iraq has been plunged into chaos
Something has changed since the fall of the former regime ; the climate of fear so cleverly nurtured by Saddam to keep himself in power, has disappeared, and now there is the fear of being taken hostage, of bomb attacks, of stray bullets or reprisals. The huge concrete walls around hotels and ministries, the barbed wire stopping access to hot spots, roads blocked, destroyed or diverted, and the piles of sand bags are the latest visible signs of change in the capital. Fear sets the pace for the people’s everyday existence and Iraq has become paranoid.
